Marionette

Cosmos, Chapter Nine - Funsai suru [粉砕する]

How many people had she killed?

Even if she hadn't been the one to physically extinguish the flame of their existence herself, she still in part caused their demise.

She caused her own mother to throw herself in front of traffic to end her own life.

Her own words broke the woman who'd suffered so much ever since she'd been born, driving her to try and end them both had Shigure not stepped in when he had.

She had believed whole heartedly that her plan to buy her classmates time back in Okinawa had been responsible for killing Samuel, and even now she had trouble believing that she hadn't. The life had drained from his eyes as she held him in her arms.

Such a memory was unshakable.

She still couldn't stop herself from thinking he really was dead, unless he was conscious enough to cling to her babbling about anything and everything that occurred to him.

The various others in Okinawa that she harmed and beat half to death weighed on her heart, there was always a chance she had harmed them beyond recovery.

And now, Genivierre had joined Yukariko in just the same way, her flame of existence extinguished all because she tried to save Amaya.

In their own way, they both tried to save her from her father's grasp, weeping as their efforts ended in vain.

Teetering on the last few seconds of their lives, their last thoughts were only of her.

And all she could do every time was watch them die right in front of her, like the useless child she'd always been called by the adults in her Okinawan life.

She couldn't do anything right, no matter what she did.

It made no difference, no matter how much she tried.

So far into the darkness, it was another set of claws to lash and drag her beneath the surface.

She couldn't see anything, couldn't feel anything except for the pain of drowning.

Crushing, suffocating, the oceans grew heavy and as cold as ice as she sunk deeper.

And she had no will left inside of her to try and fight it.

Voices rung, an endless chaos of wordless noise inside her head through the dark.

She couldn't decipher one from the other as they grew louder and louder, to the point of drowning her own thoughts out completely.

Her own desperate apologies were drowned out as well.

'I'm so sorry ... this is all my fault.'

Over and over like a mantra, a broken confession that was more than just familiar to her.

'Everything is all my fault...'

It was the one thing she'd believed without fail for the whole of her own conscious life.

She was at fault.

She was a liability.

She was responsible for another needless death.

And she couldn't cope anymore.

'How dare you so much as lay a finger on one of my students?!' The words rung deafeningly loud, and yet they didn't register inside her head. 'Not just once, but twice in just as many weeks!'

'B-Big Sister M-Meow...' The desperate pleas from the boy she'd once watch die failed to break through, instead mixing with the deafening sea of voices inside her head. 'I-its a monster! The m-monsters going to eat us!'