𝐙𝐄𝐑𝐎 - 𝟎𝟎𝟏 𝐅𝐀𝐍𝐅𝐈𝐂 ✔️

009

Your powers grew stronger every day, but that only made them more difficult to understand. The rose laid on your pillow as you continuously willed it to wake. Your eyes bore into it, waiting for the petals to liven, the stems to straighten.

It doesn't matter how hard you try. You groan out loud, each thrust of energy more tiring than the last. Please. You plead. Please work.

It felt like the rose was beginning to tease you when it didn't. Maybe it found pleasure in your irritation. That only made it grow more.

Blockages were uncommon for you. They came and went, of course, but not as often as they did for the other children. Papa said he admired that about you. He said that was why you were "the original". You still didn't know what that meant.

"Please," you plead aloud, "Any day now rose."

Earlier today, your mentor, the redhead, decided to move on. The rose was deemed a failure, so she intended to exercise other parts of your mind. For a change, you were given a brief book on psychology and some mind teasers. You enjoyed books, so the lessons went smoothly.

Except for when you returned to your room and saw the rose still there. You've been trying to revive it ever since. How could you just give up when you knew you could do it?

One of the chapters in the book, you remembered, talked about how the brain needed breaks to thrive. In saying that, music was also a common way of doing so. Maybe all you had to do, was take a step back and relax.

You reach for the walkman, which was still hidden under your bed, and place the headphones back on your ears. Nowadays, music was your favorite way of destressing. You climb onto your bed and relax as the drumbeats engulf your hearing.

♫ Why can't you relax? ♫

♫ I'm staring at your faded photographs ♫

♫ And asking why I've wasted all this time ♫

♫ On nothing but an empty fucking lie... ♫

By now, you've memorized all the words. Listening to this again and again on repeat never got tiring. In fact, music helped the brain grow stronger. You wished someone would tell Papa that, so you could have more of it. A break was needed from the tedious nursery rhymes that played in the rainbow room.

Only Papa would never approve of the profanity in this song. Papa wouldn't approve of a lot of things. You might have to put up with the nursery rhymes a bit longer.

Maybe out in this new world 001 was so excited to take you to, there would be more music. There was probably tons of it, everywhere and anywhere at your disposal. The thought filled you with anticipation.

For now, you let your body free and drift away into the ambiance of the song. You let the adrenaline run through your body. The notes pound away in your heart until they fade away completely.

When the song's over, you feel more relaxed. You sit up from your bed and admire the rose beside you. You imagined what it would look like again, red, green, and thriving. You imagine the way it would smell. (Like grass, quite honestly.) You imagined the way it would feel, with the petals no longer brittle or wilted.

Please work.

You'd been doing a lot of daydreaming lately, so it came just as easily to you now. The rose came to you in your mind, bright and blowing in the wind. You picked it up in your hands and felt the energy slowly seep into its stem. The action wasn't draining, but rather relaxing.