Helena Crossfire [d3] - done

The world was cold for Helena Antoinette Crossfire. But that was fine; she liked the cold enough. It was seasons better than heat.

Summers suffocated her. Fireflies twinkled by her window and reminded her of a past she didn’t remember, a past she didn’t want to know. Scorched earth burned her feet before she even stepped outside, and she was scorned by an intense longing for something other.

Her mother was the sun. Energy reached the earth’s surface from that big, bright star at 1300 watts per meter, but Helena’s mother put off more energy faster. Nobody competed with the solar constant but Kimberlee Crossfire. No one else would want to try. But she was always on, go-get-em and ready to roll. She fought with shop clerks, and she fought with baristas, and she fought with other people waiting in the same lines as herself. She put off so much pure, uninterrupted heat that winters were spent in tee shirts and shorts in the Crossfire home.

Helena was an alien in that home. Drifting through space, the vast and empty coldness of the indefinite swallowed her and spit her out again and again and again. She had never felt tied to anything, never had a tether to her world, something to ground her in reality. She was a stranger to herself. She was a stranger to her surroundings.

Even in her extraterrestrial society, she was an outcast among outcasts. Joining the silent theater troupe was an outlet, a way to express the things she’d always locked away in her icebox heart, but after a performance the rest would laugh and light hand-rolled cigarettes and stroll away to one of their homes to chips and dips and wines and whatever else they did without her. Without thinking of her. Helena would walk home, as soundless as her performance, feeling more than before and more than she wanted and more and more and more.

The more she felt, the more she recoiled inside herself.

The more she recoiled, the less she was.

Most of the time Helena buried herself in what little bit of her remained, a puddle where a snowman once stood, a moth curling back into its cocoon. The world was great and expansive and scary, and she was too afraid of her own wings to break free. Anywhere beyond her bedroom was daunting, and she often caught herself holding her breath and counting the steps home. Three-hundred and sixty-eight from the corner of the square where her troupe met, where her troupe left her to her own devices, to her own minefield of thoughts. A short one-hundred-seventy-six steps from Aunty M’s Bakery, where Kimberlee ranted about her burnt coffee daily and Helena slid an extra bill to the fabled Aunty M in humiliation and apology. Only twelve steps away. Only ten steps away.

She walked up the stairs, past the furnace of a parent that disagreed with everything at Helena’s core, past the hanging pictures of that furnace smiling cooly next to a man she assumed was her father, a man Kimberlee refused to discuss, and into her bedroom. She closed the door, twisted the lock, and a slightly metallic voice said, “HELENA, hello. How was your day?”

“It was fine, Sis. Thanks.” She sighed and threw her body face down onto her bed. Going out was exhausting. Being out was exhausting. Frankly, being in and of itself was exhausting, and Helena grew weary of its weight.


A small antique doll, slumped against the wall, turned its head toward her. Her first real invention, and her most faithful and successful, too. A series of wires and batteries rigged inside of its hollow porcelain body rendered it a good conversationalist, especially for someone with little to say. Sis, or Self Investment Sally, began again. “Today, I will tell you about BOBSLEDDING. When the first person took sled to ice, she --”

Helena settled back and listened, and learned, alone.






At night she dreamed in black and white. Her colors were spent in the waking world that sucked her dry, and she blended into the backdrop of her mother running through fields of trees, the likes of which Helena’d only seen on the Games. She ran faster, and faster, and stopped only when her body was scooped into the air, floating on the powerful arms of that man. The trusted arms of that man. Of Helena’s father. She dreamed of him every night, embracing the unshakably happy woman that seemed entirely other. A doppleganger replacement. An alien in her own home. Every night, it hurt more. Every night, she woke sweating and breathless. Every night, she grew colder.

Helena Crossfire was a blizzard before she could stop it, before she knew to stop it. Her atmosphere rained down on the couple, smothering them, suffocating them under her weight.

In the morning, Sis would ask her how she slept. “Fine, Sis. Thanks.” There was no need to worry her only companion. Sentience wasn’t the goal, anyway; Sis was for comfort. Sis was for her. Sis was the friend she needed, who understood without question and who spouted knowledge for her to accumulate. There was a hole in Helena’s life, a spot burned through her core, that Sis attempted to fill; that void was distinctly human-shaped. No human alive could fill it, though. No human wanted close enough to the frost. She rolled out of bed.

There was something else out there, something in the galaxy, that she needed. Someone she needed. But no one needed her, and no one ever would, and so she started her day as she started every day before: sliding on her bunny slippers, standing up to stretch her muscles, and accepting that she would be entirely and irreversibly alone for the remainder of her days.

ooc: WONDERFUL TABLE MADE BY RYAN WOW 
oh and she is sixteen in d3, and the codeword is MUTTATION