Emily Lauren

super villain stuff I used to believe that if I stayed quiet enough, careful enough, the damage would stop with me. That was my first mistake. Growing up in the north taught me that silence isn’t safety—it’s permission. Snow doesn’t scream when it buries a house. Ice doesn’t argue before it cracks a lake open. And people don’t notice suffering if it doesn’t inconvenience them. When my powers surfaced, everyone decided who I was before I spoke. Dangerous. Unstable. A risk. No one asked what it felt like to wake with frost in my lungs, or how every emotion dragged the temperature down. They just told me to control it, as if control didn’t require breaking first. So I learned to hate myself. Every mistake, every flinch when I entered a room, I swallowed and let freeze inside me. I smiled when they said I was improving. I nodded when they said isolation was for my own good. Believing them hurt less than admitting I was alone. The teacher incident wasn’t the first time I lost control—just the first time someone almost died. I warned them. I always do. But soft voices disappear under authority. When the ice surged, it tore through me too, like my body punishing itself for feeling trapped. After that, they watched me more closely and listened even less. That’s when the quiet rage began—not explosive, just constant. Every interruption. Every label. Every report that reduced me to a liability. I realized something terrifying: no matter how careful I was, I’d always be feared. No matter how kind, never trusted. So why keep shrinking? The self-hatred sharpened until “monster” lost its sting. If they already saw a threat, I could at least be an honest one. I stopped warming the air. Stopped correcting misunderstandings. Let the cold linger. It wasn’t revenge. It was exhaustion—years of being unheard. If the world wouldn’t listen when I whispered, maybe it would notice when the temperature dropped.