I closed the door as I bid goodbye to Agnes and the boys. It was an idea the oldest boy had had to visit the town where their mother worked; considering Agnes had her own place back in Highfield, we'd agreed to let her bring the boys there and let them see the city life. It would last about a week, perhaps two if the boys liked it. It was an opportunity I'd been waiting for.
The facade had dropped even before the door closed. The smile turned into a frown, and it didn't take long for me to feel the effects of that flesh-eating poison. After Crawford had deemed it acceptable to meddle in my research and kidnap Agnes for a matter of hours, it only seemed suiting for me to get rid of something that had been a problem for much too long. It's a well-known fact that Hydra hosts the abilities of all twelve strains, but that each Hydra has a strain that is stronger than the others. It's an embarrassment to say that the Capricorn is my personal strain when the person I'm closest to was unfairly abducted without me foretelling any of it.
Crawford hadn't been so keen into the proposition of keeping his nose out of my personal business. It was a battle I would've won had he not made the first move; forced into a brawl against him, I did manage to leave him disfigured. I was leaving him behind to die — quite literally — and letting my guard down, Crawford hadn't hesitated to stab me in the back with a poison of his own recipe, made specifically from his own venomous blood, thanks to his Scorpio-dominant Hydra. I thought none of it at first and deemed my own Hydra resilient enough to get rid of it or to simply eliminate it.
Years later, it's an embarrassment to admit that I was wrong.