Øverturning the lies (a twenty one pilots fanfiction)

~Mari~

 Why can't I just get comfortable? Mari wonders. Why can't I just sleep?

She tosses and turns for what seems like hours.

Pulls her blanket around her body as snugly as she can, as if having soft, comfortable surroundings will somehow negate all the terrible, terrible thoughts spinning around and around her head.

Of course, it doesn't, and the longer she lays there in the darkness, the more thoughts attack her defenseless mind, like knives-

Like...

Oh, no, no, no, she thinks. We-no. We can't do that. No.

No.

But the thoughts don't go away, even as Mari sends a desperate, silent plea to anyone or anything that might be listening.

Help me, she thinks. I can't do this alone.

Eventually her exhaustion overtakes her and she falls asleep anyway.

But when someone shakes her awake hours and hours later and she can no longer hide under the cover of sleep-she knows the truth of what she couldn't stop herself from thinking.

Was she just not strong enough?

She finds herself agonizing over it during every waking moment.

It's like a huge, crushing weight is pushing down on her, keeping her head heavy, too heavy to even care about what's going on around her.

In fact as she tries to go about the motions, her limbs feel unresponsive, her mind foggy.

And every piece of innocent conversation and chatter around her hits in a still-sensitive place, or she's completely closed off, deaf to it.

It doesn't matter, Mari thinks. Nothing I do really matters. And how could it?

From a very young age, she'd been isolated from everything.

The goings-on in the rest of the city, her family, who she honestly and truly barely knew, even when she was with them...the rest of the world...

Even though she bishops were responsible for that-and she knows it-she still carries around some of that old bitterness for not being able to join in, not belonging.

"Nobody is missing you," Keons told her once. "No one needs you."

That day she'd sat in stunned silence, refusing, at first, to believe it.

Surely everyone belonged somewhere, didn't they?

After all, hadn't she spent so long dreaming up scenes where people loved and accepted her?

Hadn't she spent hours and hours imagining perfect, perfect scenarios where everything was okay?

"No one needs you," Keons had told her, and when days and days passed by with no one and nothing to prove his words wrong, she started to believe it.

Eventually all her disappointment and anger at the world formed a kind of shield around her.

Fine, she eventually told herself. Maybe no one needs me, but I don't need anyone, either.

The rest of her uncooperative emotions, loneliness and sadness and the feeling that she wasn't where she was supposed to be, that...that she would never be so long as she was still alive, still trapped with all these doubts-those she poured into trying, trying so hard to do what she was told, to leave her mark on the world around her.

But that doesn't matter. Though she had tried, and had, to some degree, succeeded, that hadn't stopped..well, any of this.

She had gone along with everything she had been told, as far back as she can remember.