SILENCE | ATEEZ

16 | Where Pain Lingers

The air feels thick as it passes through her throat, a slight bitterness spreads through her tongue. Her body is immobilised, unable to move an inch. Everything dawns to her, that her time has already been used up, that this was it. This just might seem as the end of her sufferings, the continuous betrayals she had endured, friends she had lost, everything that had been tormenting her.

In the end, it all circles back around her. It's like losing all of herself completely, not being able to have anyone who would save her from her own misery.

Saera leans her head back to the wall, hands covering the wound she acquired that tears up everytime she makes an effort to move. Winces of pain came out of her lips as she bit his tongue, holding it in. Her eyes are now swelled with fresh tears that she held in for so long. Her heart wrenched, she felt numb. Blood seeps out against her fingers that hold the wound together. It pools around her, and every second feels like an eternity as she drowns in the pain she had refused to let herself succumb to.

Her vision starts to blur, interlaces with other visions that do not even correlate to what she was seeing. Saera rubs her eyes with her free hand, in hope to have her eyes stop giving up on her. Rubbing it unconsciously makes the vision worse, it was as if the illusions she was seeing were coming to life. Her heart beats faster, even though part of her knows that these visions she is seeing now could literally mean one thing.

Her body is starting to succumb to the virus inside her.

Visions after visions came visiting her. She is not there anymore. Trapped in the entrance of her visions, her eyes slowly turn into a darker shade. Her soft skin all now are full with black tendrils that crawl on every inch of her, claiming it as its own. Sweat starts to trickle down her forehead, mixed with blood drying up on her.

A vision.

It was not a vision.

Saera's body hits the cold tiles of the floor, falling unconscious.

It was not just a vision.

It was a fraction of her past memory. One that she had kept away from her heart and mind for so long.

It was right there in front of her. The key answer to salvation. The antidote that was right there in front of her. It was not some kind of old manuscript, not some sort of chemicals that need thousands of failed experiments, the answers never lied in anything else other than what she was seeing with her eyes.

It has always been there, right in front of her.

How could I be so blind ?

How could I be so foolish?

A fraction of her past memory overflows into the nerve of her brain, as if someone had shifted a specific bit of her life that she had forgotten, or rather been out by force. These visions, they are too real for her to deny what unfolds in front of her eyes.

How could I not remember any of it ?

A figure stands in front of her, giving her a small smile, nodding his head from afar. His hands rested in his pockets, he was all suited up, looking as dashing as ever. He picks up a withered petal down from the ground, holding it close to his chest.

She recognised that petal. A white petal comes from a flower that was once very familiar to her. Even though the petal was already ruined, she knew it so well. Saera scrambles herself up, trying to stand up on her own two feet, but her body holds her down to the floor. Blood trickles down on her forehead, her lips turning as pale as the petal. The blasting of sirens around her is deafening, but she is too tired to notice it.