Fall Into Me

...II...

Meanwhile, Mona had remained staring at the wall in shock. She'd barely noticed when the door opened and Diana came to check on her, or even when Esme came in and stood in front of her.

Echoes thundered through her head. Cries, screams. Mostly her own but... there was another voice there too. One so familiar it made her chest ache. Memories she'd forgotten, talks with family and friends, events she'd been to with Minerva, all of it was coming at her, slotting in like puzzle pieces inside her mind. It was like unlocking a room full of misplaced items, each thing linked to a memory. Not forgotten per-se, simply shelved for later inspection.

Tears had begun to fall, because Mona realised with a horrifying certainty that what she'd been told was wrong. Every tiny comment about her body and her mind was wrong, and she ached to be that little girl running through fields with her siblings again, the one who hadn't been touched by all this darkness and pain. Before Iona really started to sink her claws in and take chunks out of her and feed them to anyone willing to hurt her more.

And Niko-

Oh, Niko.

A rattling wheeze left her chest as the ache of his death trickled into her again, but something about it was wrong. It felt... different. Forced, ugly, fake. Something about it was off putting and-

A flash of something knocked around her skull, an image of Niko in a place that he'd never been. And then another, and another. Mona couldn't understand it, too confused by these uncertain feelings. Niko had died, she knew that. Every place she'd seen him after had been a hallucination.

Or... was it? The thought came unbidden but once it was there it was like a crowbar on Pandora's Box and she recoiled, physically scrambling away as if she could run from the thoughts and images, from the knowledge she now possessed.

There was movement in front of her, Esme holding her hands up in a surrender, a show that she wasn't going to hurt her but Mona wasn't worried about that. How could she be when all of a sudden her twin brother was everywhere in her skull? Vomit crawled up the back of her throat and a cold sweat broke out across her skin. Mona forced herself to focus, to snap back to reality but she couldn't. Not now.

"I've seen him," her words were distant to her ears, muddied by the shock in her body, "I've seen him."

"Who?" Esme asked her.

"Niko. I've seen him."

"Oh, Mona," Esme looked distraught, like she didn't want to tell her the truth. "Niko died."

"No, no he didn't," Mona swallowed hard against the increase of saliva in her mouth, stomach churning.

"He did-,"

"I saw him!" She shouted, eyes wild and wide, "I saw- he's not dead!"

Mona remembered rushing to the hospital after his crash, she remembered seeing him on the bed, she remembered going to sleep and then waking up strapped to a table, Niko strapped to another on her left. She remembered the pain in her skull, the fuzziness. She remembered watching them drag his screaming body down, down, down. To a dark, cold place. No light, no air, nothing. She could still hear him through the floor, the walls, hear him crying and begging. She felt the ache in her throat from her own answering sobs and screams.

And then-

Minerva's castle. They'd dropped her off in the forest and sent her running towards it, and Mona couldn't remember anything. Not where she'd come from, not Niko being alive, none of it. And all this time she'd been living, whilst he'd been trapped in an underground prison.

"Breathe!" Esme had hold of her shoulders, one hand cupping her cheek, "Mona! For gods sake! Breathe!"

But she didn't. She couldn't. The world twisted, churning and flipping, black spots covering her vision until everything but Esme's frantic voice was gone, and then eventually, that disappeared too.