Glass Breaks Too Easily. (Eyeless Jack x Reader Book 2)

Chapter One.

It wasn't as if things had been particularly quiet since Jack's leaving; more or less things just became better hidden and less spoke about. We talked in hushed whispers regarding Tim's steadily decaying mental health and spoke only through telepathy regarding how absent The Operator had been. Something was in the works and we knew it, we could feel it. I had my own assumptions about the absence of The Operator, but nothing could be proved. All inquiries weren't to become anything more lest the associates begin to panic, and that was the absolute last thing we needed.

I wasn't sure that Tim could handle an outbreak if one were to happen, which was becoming more and more of a concern rather than a probability nearly every day. The associates grew restless without the ominous threat looming above them that belonged only to their creator, to their God. I had expected for The Operator to run us all through yet another test after (Name); I was still debating whether that test had been a success or a complete failure, even years after the fact. Another test would absolutely throw Tim over the teetering edge he had been swaying on for the last year or so; Tim hadn't been an exception to the list of those susceptible to the sickness being near The Operator for long periods of time would cause. He gave us medication to ward it off, but there was no drug strong enough to stop it completely. Tim had always been affected by it a little stronger than I, but then again, he had also been more 'sick' from the very beginning.

Tim hadn't always been able to hold himself as a leader, and only I had been around him long enough to know it. Tim had been a very, very sick man at one point in his life; though, I couldn't blame him. We had just been chosen by The Operator, and so it only made sense for us to believe that we were inexplicably losing our ever-loving minds.

However, when things became too real to dispute, Tim hadn't been able to really quite grasp it, and this showed itself quite a few times over the years. Sometimes it was as if he was still a college kid, running through the woods, desperately looking for his friends, desperately looking for an escape. Of course, part of the increased delusion was his already-present mental illness; Tim had been 'diagnosed' with Schizophrenia during our college years. He had made the mistake of speaking with a therapist in regards to what he was seeing, what he was feeling, what he and Jay were going through. His therapy didn't last very long, but his 'hallucinations' did.

Though his 'illness' made up for about a quarter of his occasional erratic behavior, the sickness made up for the rest. It was a plague; a form of severe pestilence that couldn't be warded off by modern medicine. The Operator's sickness was not modern, it was something well-practiced and centuries old, something with a nearly flawless pattern of success. The Operator used his sickness to lure in his prey, which proved itself to be another concern of mine. Was this finally it? Had we reached the expiration on our lease agreement with him? Had we occupied this space, these positions, for far too long? Perhaps he thought it was time to rid of us. Perhaps that's why he had tested us in the first place with (Name). He had brought her in rather effortlessly; perhaps he was only testing the waters.

I had those concerns long before she had become an official proxy; however, it seemed that there was no other soul, not even Tim, who could see past the shimmering blindness that could only belong to something sparkly and 'new'.

(Name) may very well have been used to create a distraction; if The Operator could use her to occupy our time with training, he would have plenty of time to populate and carry out sneakily cultivated ideas and plans.

Oh, how I missed the days of knowing. There had been a time where The Operator, Tim, and me had been something of a little family. He hadn't created a pool of individuals to do his bidding back then, so we were all forced to have an extremely open line of communication; this very reason was why he created those little white prevention pills.