Her hands still hurt. 

It had been days since she had last felt her fist make contact with the skin of another, and yet she could still feel her fingers aching, their open wounds throbbing with a certain vigor that only a hiatus could cause. Jessica Knight had been ripped from the fight for far too long now, having been trapped as a prisoner to mundane normalcy since James had found her with the rest of the undergrounds in the tunnels beneath the island of misfits. Her body acted as a canvas for a plethora of beautiful bruises, each one painting its pale, freckled complexion with a different shade of blue or purple with the occasional black thrown in to spice things up. It was almost as the mutant were a term paper that a teacher had marked up, ruthlessly scribbling alongside the content with their multicolored pens and highlighting the surplus of errors with mustard markers—for it was no secret that Jessica was more flawed than anything else. If she were a paper, the mutant would be considered a B at best, with a little comment from the grader regarding how much potential there was at the start, and of course, how it fell flat in the end. 

She always did, after all. 

Crack. 

The sound of knuckles popping could be heard from the other side of the empty bedroom as Jess pushed her battered fist against her jaw, feeling her neck tilt to the side with a little creek of its own. For a young adult, her body sounded like that of a rusty machine—nosy, and desperately in need of maintenance; but, like the owner of a poorly cared for machine, Jessica considered such things unnecessary considering she would only wind up broken again sooner or later. 

Crick. 

A soft groan escaped a pair of chapped lips as her back played out its own percussion solo, letting her arms flop back to her sides while she rolled her shoulders backwards. Her hands itched to be used, burning with the heat of her healing injuries as she sat idly on the borrowed bed. Occasionally, her gaze would trail over to the practically barred window and cause her eyes to slit in distaste; while Jessica might have been a puppet for the cause she fought for, she never worked well while in a cage, which, in a sense, was what the room was. While she might not have been confined to the guest room alone, the thought of exploring the rest of the somewhat familiar manor repulsed her hot-headed nature, and whatever interest she might have had in leaving her confines was canceled out by her horrid stubbornness. 

Jessica had been instructed by members of the Resistance to brainstorm over possible next moves, yet they clearly did not understand that surrounding herself in chaos was a fundamental part of her process. In their minds, she was some sort of hero and potential scapegoat with an unruly habit of breaking the law—and while they might have been right to an extent, Jessica Knight could attest to the fact that she was no hero—something that caged walls and puppet strings would did not have the power to change. 

Slender, yet worn fingers trailed down the skin of her exposed leg before they rested on a particularly nasty bruise. A spark of intrigue danced within the mutant’ eyes as she gentled pressed it, her features remaining fixed in a stoic bliss as she pretended that her digits were another’s knuckles.

No one could quite understand the feeling of elation that came with losing themselves in the violence of combat unless they had experienced themselves. As for Jess, she had experienced it more times than any teenager probably should have, most of it resulting as a result of her own seeking out. 

While others perhaps saw pain as a burden or unwelcome visitor, the mutant begged to disagree. Pain helped remind the girl that she was still alive, and was used to calculate her endurance and personal strength. Most of the time, the results to this test tended to be to her liking. 

“Shit,” she whispered, her eyes rolling back so that the veiny whites were almost all that was visible as heat began to pool into her hand. The tamed fire within her longed to grow wild again, to succumb to the temptation to escape from its cage and burn down the world around it. She could feel the colorful bruise begin to burn as she let the guard of her mutation down, a glitch in her system allowing it to hurt for just one moment before the damage was numb, and once again she was impervious to her own flames.