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ERICA IS DEAD.
Nat can still see her limp body now as she sits quietly in the dark cell, her eyes staring blankly ahead of her, tears long run dry against her pale cheeks.
She's gone.
Erica was ripped away, violently and unceremoniously, from her shaky hands. She had tried to grasp on to the girl with everything she had, but she was already gone. There was nothing Nat could do.
Natalia scrunches her eyes closed, her fingers coming up to tangle themselves in her hair. This can't be real. This has to be some kind of sick joke!
How can she be gone?
One moment, she was smiling wide while Nat drew her portrait, and now...now she probably sits in a morgue somewhere- cold and alone.
A dark, empty feeling fills her body, an emotion that makes her feel so hollow that she desperately wants to tear out her heart from her chest and start anew.
She knows this feeling.
It's a familiar one to her, by now.
She had first felt it when she was eight years old.
She had come home from school, a self-drawn portrait in her hand and a proud grin on her face, to find her mother bleeding and lifeless on the floor, her father clutching her body desperately to his chest.
She had screamed, of course, her cries tangling in with those of her father as they wailed together in grief.
Soon, a concerned neighbour had appeared at their door. The older-woman, who she can barely remember now, had called the police, ushering the small child away from her mother's body and allowing her husband to move past them into the house to stay with Atticus until the police arrived.
It had been Noah who was on call that night.
Nat vividly remembers how he had attempted to comfort her in the absence of her father. It was awkward (mostly for him, at least; she was way too busy crying to be concerned over such trivial things), but years later, she really does appreciate the effort he made that night, even if it made no real difference to her then.
After Noah's (poor, at best) attempt at comforting her, Maria's body was pushed out, Atticus running after her frantically. The distressed man had stopped the gurney from going any further, chucking his body over his wife's cold, dead one and sobbing into her side.
The feeling in her chest as she watched her father scream, clutching Maria's body tightly to himself and praying to a higher being to save her, was similar to how she felt now.
