Entity 128 | ✔️

31/Distort

(YOU MIGHT ALSO WANT TO SIT DOWN SOMEWHERE WERE YOU WON'T HURT YOURSELF AND HAVE SOME TISSUES NEARBY IN THE EVENT OF SEVERE FEELS. I AM SO SORRY YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW -- aka sorry not sorry >.<)

Distort: to change something so that it is no longer true or accurate

Over time, River kept on giving her the same excuse. 'I'm dying'. No matter how much she tried, his excuse stayed the same. The only time it would change was when she forgot to take her medication, which lead her to believe that they were doing something other than curing a sickness.

On a day when her aunt came to visit, she brought up her conclusion.

"I'm worried about something..." Isobel said while sipping her tea.

"Tell me," her aunt answered with a warm smile.

A sigh. "River's been ignoring me, always claiming that he's dying... And if I don't take my meds, it gets better..." Her aunt's eyes were wide with disbelief. "Why?" she inquired.

"Are you not taking the medication I brought you on purpose?" Isobel didn't answer. "Please be honest with me. This is very serious."

"At times..." she said with a half-laugh that wasn't in it's place.

"You can't do that Isobel, do you understand?" All that was received was a blank stare. "This isn't something you can play around with..." A silence filled the room. "I need to tell you something..." her aunt said, changing the subject.

"Go on," Isobel answered with a strange smile, almost pretending that what was just said had never come out of her aunt's mouth.

"You're going to want to deny this, but it's the truth..." Her aunt took a deep breath. "You're gravely ill... Something must've triggered the development, but I can tell you right now that you're very sick..."

"That's nonsense. The meds you gave me are supposed to fix whatever I've got are they not?"

"They won't do anything if you don't take them..."

"What else am I supposed to have? I've already got Asperger's, I don't need any more."

An oddly long pause. "You're schizophrenic Isobel. What you think is real may not necessarily be real..."

"You're lying..." She was denying it, just like predicted.

"This River guy you're talking about... He's not real..."

Isobel stood up briskly tears working their way out of her eyes. "No..."

"Neither is Koda."

"No no no no no..."

"Neither is Pandora..."

"Stop it!" she shrieked. "You're lying! You're the one who isn't real!"

"It's going to be okay Isobel..."

"Shut up!"

"You have to trust me on this one... I only want the best for you." Isobel screamed at her in response before collapsing onto the couch and letting her sorrow take over.

She was already struggling to deal with River ignoring her, and now her aunt corners her and tells her that everything she is living isn't real. Distantly, she heard her aunt's voice telling her to let go of what was broken, but she didn't want to hear any of it. She wanted to be with River, regardless if he was real or not.

Her aunt wasn't wrong in saying that he wasn't real. From the moment she had witnessed him die, something was different in her. Between that moment and the moment she had stepped outside of the DST's department, she had developed a minor form of schizophrenia. Left untreated, it had spread and was at the verge of taking over her mind.

River was real, up until he 'died' while in custody. Now, he was probably somewhere in the Deep Web.

Koda was real, him being the one who had given her River's letter, him being the one who had shown her who or what River really was, him being the one who had assured her a safe return to society. He had however uploaded himself back into the Cloud, and so the Koda that paid visits after around a month or so after their little discovery wasn't real anymore.

Pandora wasn't real, and neither was the 'existing' River. They were complex hallucinations, something her mind used in order to fill in the blanks to an exaggerated degree. Subconsciously, her longing was replaced with images of a couple. She was living a perfect world within a corrupted one, cut off and susceptible to her own mind, left to fend for herself while drowning in her own perception of things.

As time drained on, her newfound disease lead her to live in a world of suffering as she watched everything her brain had created disappear in front of her eyes, almost like watching a picture glitch exponentially until reality was the only thing left. And there she stood, in a small room belonging to a mental hospital.

The guilt she had accumulated after realizing how much trouble River had gone through to protect her eventually drove her insane, to the point where she acknowledged she was crazy, and took her own life quite violently, somehow convinced that everything would start over again.