Marionette

Cosmos, Chapter Six - Modoru kabe ni [戻る壁に]

The darkness swayed back and forth in her mind, a tormenting edge of reprieve and reminder.

With the echoing of voices seeking to remain ever prominent inside her head, the darkness mixed, mingling into a world that bore no comfort.

Haunting, chilling, a reminder of worlds lost in the turbulence of the now-passed days.

They grew louder, more prominent with every passing minute, gradually to the point where she wanted to scream.

To just let it all out, the same as that familiar voice in the depths of the darkness did.

There were no people in white coats to silence her, unlike her mother. There were no painful needles that would lead to hell in chemicalized water.

Just a room she wasn't allowed to leave, no matter how much she wanted to.

If she screamed her lungs out, ripped her throat raw once again, would it help ease the agony inside her head?

But every time the mirror of her own voice would rise to torment her, she'd lock it all up again, desperately pushing it away as if she were in denial.

She honestly didn't know whether she understood what was even going on anymore.

The clacking of buttons was the first thing to come to Amaya's notice through the sea of voices threatening to drown the world out, bringing her to force her eyes to open in spite of the exhaustion that had only gotten worse the longer she struggled to stop herself from sleeping.

Her body needed the sleep, but she couldn't let herself fall vulnerable to nightmares – Not when they were getting so horrifically realistic.

She was starting to doubt which world was the real one, with every passing glimpse.

She lifted herself upright from the couch, turning her head towards the source of the clacking in the room.

Samuel in all of his bouts of energy, was messing around with the cordless telephone for some reason, keying in buttons at random, she guessed.

She wouldn't blame him if he was starting to get restless from being couped up in this room for nearly two days.

If she was here all on her own, she probably would have cracked, already.

At least with the restless boy here, she had something to focus some of her attention on.

Not much had happened after the sudden revelation that Samuel was actually bi-lingual, much to Amaya's surprise.

Shigure had seemed to act as if Samuel could only speak English, and the boy in mention had made no prior move to prove the man wrong.

In fact, Samuel seemed rather embarrassed when Amaya had tried to question him about it, though he waved it off with a remark that a lot of Japanese words confuse him still, so he liked English better.

'Miss Glarey Lady taught me inside my cage.' He'd eventually explained quietly, with his gaze averted from her. 'Nobody would visit, so Miss Glarey Lady always talked, and that creepy man always gets really angry when I say his name wrong.'

Ah. Yes, she understood exactly what he was talking about.

It made horrible, familiar sense when he explained it like that.

It was almost the same as Amaya.

A contrast of languages, one of the few things that Genivierre was always quite handy with. After all, Amaya learned most of her English from the very same woman before she'd ended up in that facility after her mother's suicide. The painful pronunciation demands were of her father in the small couple of days he ever re-emerged from his facilities while her mother was still alive.