Heart of The Wraith

Ch. 17 - Control

You woke up late the next day, still feeling drowsy and panicked from the night's events. There was no doubt that something was affecting you, so you did your best to avoid running into anyone. There was only one way to do that: by going to the surface. 

Silently, you made your way up the staircase. You tried to look as normal as possible, slipping on a hoodie to provide some sort of comfort - keeping the hood on despite the nice weather. 
You kept your hands in the front pocket as you moved down the sidewalk, trying to avoid any sort of eye contact with strangers. 

You didn't know the plan with coming to the surface considering you didn't have any money to do anything. The only thing you had was your phone but Chisaki didn't bother to pay for any type of suitable service. You were lucky to get any sort of second of Internet to load or for a single text to send through.
Eventually, you were able to find a small square where you were able to sit on a bench and watch the world go by. You were at least shaded from the sun, the dark cool enough to keep your hoodie on and dim enough to not need glasses while staring up at the cars and people passing by.

Besides the anxiety you felt of a decision laid before you, something else felt off. Something physical felt off. 
There was a certain feeling you felt when your power was activated. It was a certain tingling you felt behind your eyes as you cast the hallucinations. It was how you trained yourself to know it was active, allowing you to decipher fiction from reality. 
For some reason, you began to feel the tingling against your wishes. You looked around while feeling confused, trying to look for any sort of thing that was out of the ordinary. Something was nagging at you to leave as you looked about.

That was when you laid eyes on them...a mother and her child that were obviously suffering from your hallucination. If what you were seeing was true, the other passersby would have flocked to her as her child rolled about on the ground in tears. The mother would also have given more care to the fact that the kid was covered in what appeared to be centipedes. To her, she thought they were just having some kind of tantrum and was leaning over in an attempt to console them. 
In order to verify if it was truly you or someone else's similar quirk, you pulled out your phone and used the screen as a mirror. It confirmed your worst fear as your irises dimly glowed.

"But I wasn't looking at them..." you mumbled to yourself, turning off your quirk. As soon as you did so, the child stopped rolling and looked up at their mother with a worried look. "I wasn't looking at them..." you put your head in your hands.

You took that as a sign to get up and leave. You continued walking, even as your feet hurt, until you found yourself at a nearby park. There were children playing on a nearby playground and others strolling about, but the vast nature allowed you to feel more secluded. 

Unfortunately, whatever troubles you were having with your quirk followed you. 
Within a few minutes, your head shot up in curiosity from the intense screams of the children on the playground. Right in front of your eyes, the children screamed bloody murder as the mulch on the ground began to crawl up their little legs like millions of little bugs. It wouldn't have been much of an issue if there weren't so many. The hallucination easily took over their little legs until they were forced to the ground where the bugs began crawling into their nostrils and mouths, obstructing their breathing.

"Stop," you painfully whispered to yourself, pounding your wrists against your head. "Stop, stop, stop..."

"Hey," a familiar voice interrupted your distraught meditation, "hey...Y/N." Hands grabbed yours to stop them from knocking against your temples. You looked up to meet Chisaki's gaze. "What's going on?" He was kneeling in front of you with a worried look on his face.

"How...how did you find me?" You looked up at him tearfully and completely confused by his sudden presence. 

"Your phone," he answered with a concerned look, "you'd been gone for so long I was starting to get worried. And it looks like I was right to come out." He looked back at the children who were now crying in their parents' arms with the hallucination dispelled.