POWER MANIACS (girlxgirlxgirl)

14. Through the prey's eyes

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Irie lays against the wall and looks up at the ceiling.

It's five in the morning. Her head feels empty, even if it's just for a moment. There is a constant humming tune, two chords, playing again and again. It's silent. It's consuming. She feels as if the emptiness of space and time itself exists within herself. She is floating in a different reality, disconnected from her body and her memories. Just existing. For a moment, she is just existing. As if standing in a dark, quiet and deep forest, the trees swaying from side to side, the sky comfortably and calmly gray. Chills run down her arms, but Irie doesn't shiver. She simply counts the tiles on the roof as her mind continues to buzz, numbly.

In front of her, the punching bag lies deflated and broken on the floor. The red leather outer layer of the item looks like a stain of blood when Irie squints her eyes. She punched through it. Once. And then just kept going, twice, thrice and on and on and on. Now it is completely destroyed and Irie finds it kind of peculiar. She hasn't punched through one of these punching bags in nearly three years now. It takes pure, raw emotion to lose enough control like this, for her to be able to ruin Company material. She hasn't felt strongly enough about anything, and honestly Irie thought that she had simply grown up.

But now she sits here. All alone. Five in the morning, staring at the ceiling as her mind continues to buzz. With possibilities, opportunities, thoughts and then... nothing. Just nothing. It's what they told her she should do whenever she started feeling like this. Started feeling too emotional. She should sit down, count the tiles on the ceiling and let her mind go numb. Just think about nothing and enjoy the silence, something which is very rare inside her head.

Irie hasn't been able to get Dahlia out of her mind. The first night after they let her go, the Ice Powered thought it was rather normal that she would both dream about her best friend and think about her at every living moment. They were, after all, extremely close once, and after meeting like this it's only normal that she would be completely obsessed with it until it fades away. The next day the same thing happened and Irie shrugged her shoulders, the third day following in the same footsteps. But after ten days and not a single wink of peaceful sleep or a moment without thinking about Dahlia, Irie is not just exhausted. She is worried. Purely worried about whatever is going on with her stupid head and stupid mind.

Is it weird that she can't stop thinking about Dahlia? It's her personal little obsession at this point and it's tiring. Not just thinking about her in general, but worrying about her. Obsessing over the fact that she might be in danger. Every night now, Irie lays in bed, eyes open and heart beating at an inhuman pace, scared shitless that her best friend might be in some kind of trouble. And it doesn't make any sense, because Dahlia is just as safe as any other person. Right? It's naive to think like that but it's the only way for her to calm down, when every single waking moment is spent wondering about a person she will never meet again, and whether that person is okay.

And Irie should just take Enya's advice and let Dahlia go. Because not only is she being ridiculous, she is also a danger to herself at this point. The Company doesn't want them to have any loose ends, any connections with the outside world. Unless it is absolutely necessary. Irie knows this better than anybody, she's learned it the hard way and she won't go back to stage one. None of them have any contact with their families or friends from their previous lives, it's like they're all dead and all of their memories have somehow been wiped. But Irie just can't seem to cut this one loose end off. Not when it's bothering her like this, like a song that just won't stop playing in her head.

Annoying, distracting and oh so terrifying.

"You know what's funny?"

Irie snaps her eyes open. Instead of drifting back to reality, it's like she has fallen directly back down to earth from space. She looks both bewildered and mildly bothered when her unfocused gaze lands on a black and red-haired girl, walking towards her across the training hall. Enya smirks at her from the other side of the room, wearing some kind of comfortable night-wear that contrasts her usual tight fitting white uniform. A pair of loose-fitting gray sweatpants and a nearly see-through white t-shirt. Irie is still in her white uniform. She doesn't want to wear her sleep-wear, she doesn't want to go to sleep. Irie wants to go back to that mental state where she feels absolutely nothing, and hears absolutely nothing.