For the first time in her life, she canceled an appointment.

Stretched out on her bed, Elaine lay in darkness, a strange music lingering in the back of her head as it had since she had first heard it.

“I’m not going to,” she whispered, defiant to some unknown listener that might have been herself. “******** right off.”

But Elaine was a person who did not like lying, not even to herself. Even as she said it she felt the crumbling truth of the words, already thin, giving way entirely. Whatever had happened to her was stronger even than her resolve - something that in her youthful arrogance she had always, in her way, thought would outlast anything that besieged it.

The worst part was the feeling of autopilot: of some compulsion in her that she had no sway over. She had once, years ago, attempted to will herself out of a flu, only to find that no amount of stubborn refusal to cough could keep her from succumbing to the fever. It had felt like a betrayal of her own body against her - one which she had never forgiven it for. This, worse, felt like a betrayal of her heart, and now she found that pined for the simple failure of the flesh. She had been running in a sense, true, but it was the soul that had given out from exhaustion.

That red ribbon sat in her thoughts in all its bright and cheerful beauty, and it seemed to have tied itself somewhere beneath her ribs, and whoever was pulling on the other end was doing so with hateful persistence.

She would not beg. Begging was beneath her - had always been beneath her. The very idea of craven simpering to anything was so completely anathema to her that there was a sort of relief in its sturdiness. But the wish to beg was there nonetheless, disgusting and pressing. She was not unaware of the cosmic irony of the fact that she had been visited with this catastrophe while longing to be someone else, but as has been the case for many human beings who have found themselves unexpectedly granted a thoughtless wish, she found herself crying out inwardly: I didn’t mean like this.

It would have been easier to tell herself that she was going mad. And maybe her certainty that she wasn’t going mad was a red flag that she was. But no: this was Destiny City’s horrible little teeth hooking into her, and she knew it on some profound level that could not be denied.

She expected to cry, but found that she did not. Instead, bitterness welled up yet again in tearless defiance. She felt the words perched in her lungs struggling to speak themselves even though she did not know what they were, hammering on her throat, demanding their freedom. It felt like a dozen birds fighting to escape her brain at once.

She stood up, and she moved with an exhausted, dreamlike submission towards the bathroom mirror. The red ribbon was wound around her fingers - she did not know where it had come from - and she looked at the pale ghost of herself, who did not look like herself, in the darkness. Bloody Mary, she thought with bitter amusement.

“Fine,” she said aloud, and again, she did not know who she spoke to - perhaps to herself. Bloody Mary might have been preferable, she thought. She closed her eyes, succumbing, and the beating wings in her head and her lungs seemed to still in sudden expectation of the cage opening for them.

The words, as she knew they would, came unbidden, forming themselves in her mouth like things eager to make themselves alive, and Elaine - who felt the sound of her new name blooming on her tongue and recognized it as her own - stopped running.