the gift

She sits as she does every night, on top of one of the office blocks closest to her flat. She knows that if she slips once, it’s game over. Every morning, she tells herself she won’t go out again. Every night, she finds herself climbing out of her window and jumping from roof to roof. Every night, she’s just that bit closer to falling, finds it just that bit harder to make the jumps.

The first time she does it, she’s six.

One of her friends had fallen and scraped his knee. It was an accident, really. Before she knew what she was doing, she had her hand on the scrape. A sharp sting shot through her knee, before quickly subsiding. By the time the pain had gone, she pulled her hand away from smooth, unbroken skin.

About an hour into the night, she hears it. A scream. Now that she has a destination in sight, she runs and jumps over to where the sound came from. A year of doing this almost every night means she’s grown confident up here, comfortable even. She ignores the pain that bursts through her legs as she lands, how and why her body protests her doing things that used to be so easy only a year ago. (Except she can’t ignore it, not really.)

By the time she was eight, she had figured out how her gift worked, and how to do it every time. It was quite simple, really. She could touch a wound, and temporarily transfer all the pain to her. Then, once the pain went away, the wound would be fully healed. Of course, the bigger the damage, the longer to heal, but that seemed like a small price to pay, if it meant helping people or even saving lives.

It seemed obvious in hindsight, that there would be more to it than that.

When she can see where the scream came from, she takes a moment to survey the scene from above. Two girls, only a couple of years older than herself – she would guess around eighteen – are backed up against a wall. A third is slumped over and covered in blood, though she can’t guess where from. It’s obvious that the two want to help, but the man wearing black and holding a bloody knife stops them from moving towards her as they empty out their bags.

She’s seen enough. She moves so that she’s coming from his blind spot, before scaling down the building.

She was nine when she decided she wanted to help people, like the superheroes she saw in those movies! Although, in the movies, the heroes always knew how to beat up the bad guys, so even if it went against every instinct in her body, she asked if she could take a fighting class. For self-defence reasons.

She was nine when she first joined a ju-jitsu class.

Attacking a grown man is always dangerous, especially when he has a knife. But she has the element of surprise. She grabs the knife and throws it somewhere on the ground away from them, before doing a takedown. She’s lucky; he wasn’t expecting her, and the shock made him sloppy. That doesn’t last long though. Besides, she has to make this quick, or the girl might not make it.

She breaks his arm. She always hates hurting people, but its him or her, and she doesn’t see another way to subdue him, short of killing him, that also enables her to help the girl. Then she does just that, leaving him alone. There’s still a good chance he’ll find the knife and stab her in the back, but it’s a chance she’ll have to take.

She threw herself completely into ju-jitsu training, though she told no-one the truth about why. If she was being honest, she hated every second of it. She hated hurting people, even if they only walked out with bruises at the most. Still, she kept at it. By the time her fifteenth birthday was approaching, she felt confident enough in her abilities to try and actually help people.

She was going to be like one of those heroes she saw in the movies.

There’s a lot of blood. She knew that before, but it’s different now that she’s seeing it up close. She almost can’t see the darker stain surrounding torn fabric on her stomach. The girl had obviously tried to put pressure on it, but her strength is failing. She’s almost afraid she’s too late. But, no, the soft rise and fall of her chest means there’s still hope, at least for now.

She hated it, at first. She was running on very little sleep, with exams coming up later that year, and it wasn’t exactly easy or rewarding. She had to learn the layout of the city like a map, had to get really good at parkour, and she wasn’t getting out of many fights unscathed, so she also had to come up with excuses for how injuries kept coming up overnight. Still, she told herself that she couldn’t stop, that people needed her.

She hated it at first, and it never really got better.

As she goes to heal the girl, she can tell that it’s going to be one of the worst ones yet. She’s right. It’s all she can do to keep herself from screaming, and it’s a full minute before it dies down – not that she can tell.

The girls stare at her in shock, before one of them pulls the previously-injured girl to her feet, and they all run off. Just in time.

The thing about her “gift”, the thing that she didn’t know when she started, was that the more she used it, the weaker she got, and the more pain she was in. It was unnoticeable, at first. She told herself it was the late nights. She told herself it was just an off-day, that it would fade soon.

It didn’t.

Immediately, she collapses. The energy required to stand, to move, is too great. She’s shaking. How much longer can she go on?

Even after she realised, she kept doing it. She hated every moment, she was in so much pain, but still she kept on doing it.

Even now, lying on the ground, she knows she’s going out the next night. She wonders when this will kill her.

Still, she gets up.