Marionette

Skies, Chapter Fourteen - Kagami no Heya [鏡の部屋]

The world crashed and crumbled around her, though she could never remember the cause of it, or even the reason why it bothered her so much. The world left her behind, throwing her into darkness filled with the nightmares she wished she'd never had.

She never truly dreamed of anything - If ever there were dreams inside her head, they were reflections of the world she longed to forget, of ties and circumstances that she failed to free herself from.

Her fingers traced the lines in the back of her mind - the tears that were sewn with times silver thread. Her words traced the border between truth and fiction, sewing the two together in a myriad of whirling emotions.

Mother sank into torment of water, losing her mind and her grasp on the world.

Nobody remembered her before long - They had a new toy.

They had a new source of interest to replace her with.

She had no grasp of time inside her mind - based on a calendar, she would never be able to tell anyone when she'd been put in that darkened hell, and she'd never be able to recount exactly when she'd re-emerged in the end.

However she'd counted days, patterns, nightmares in extension.

Twenty six times she had woken up in a featureless room with no windows nor furniture, save for every wall being made of a perfect reflection and the plain, coverless gurney with wheels set right in the middle of the room. Twenty six times she woke up in a room that always had its lights on, burning the room in a curtain of hot white light.

Twenty two times she spent a whole, tiring day just staring up at the ceiling above her head within the tiny little room, neither seeing a soul, nor hearing them, though she knew there were many just on the other side of the reflective glass whenever she would wake up.

She knew they could all see her, while she could not return their gazes.

Four times a beautiful, mournful woman had left the door in the mirror unlocked while nobody was around to see it, allowing her to venture outside her little air-room without being noticed, where she would take to hiding beneath a flight of stairs just outside the basement door until it was safe to re-emerge.

When she wouldn't be spotted and dragged back into that tiny white room.

But each of those twenty six times, she'd always wake up within what felt like mere seconds to find herself back in that little tank of nightmares, spending days upon days in the metallic oceans confined in a tiny little cage made of bullet-proof glass.

She'd learned in the beginning that there was a set regiment to her life since her mother had died - That her mother had followed the exact same life, except Yukariko was let outside the tiny little room on her one day of breathing air.

There was a pattern to the days in both rooms, one that made sense to her after her seventh time in the little white room.

With every repetition of the cycle, her exposure to the water grew by one day, more and more, as if she was gradually being adapted, and in realization of that, her emotional state crumbled a little more each time until she locked herself away with silver keys in the form of silence.

Her first time was one whole day in the metallic oceans, then it was two days.

Three days next, and then it was four.

All the way up until she was spending close to a whole month imprisoned in that tank without break, all but forgetting what it was like to breathe air.

She lost so many things in that water, while the room of mirrors threw what was left in disarray.

She lost so many parts of herself, her dreams and aspirations.