Light in Dark Places

Chapter Twenty-Five

As soon as Joan wakes up in the godsforsaken hour to get ready for school she starts thinking that this whole endeavor is madness.

She stares at herself in the mirror and all she can see is a stranger. A familiar strange, but a stranger nonetheless. How is she expected to go to school? Where she'd have to meet people? And somehow talk to them? What would they even have to talk about? ("Haha, were you asleep for the past seven years? No way! Me too! We have so much in common!") Joan cringes and collapses back in bed.

"Get up, nabi, or you're going to be late," Seung-ri calls from the hallway, like she somehow knew what Joan was doing.

Joan lets out a very loud groan then buries her head under her pillow and hopes she suffocates.

*

Benedict has been in the military hospital since this whole ordeal— since he didn't actually have a legal guardian, it made it really easy to justify keeping him here. And now he has to go back to school and he's having a panic attack.

Some kind soul supplied him with new academy shirts— they're open at the left side, with a zipper that's easy enough to pull up to close. Pants he can more or less get into on his own as they are, provided he goes through a few enthusiastic wiggling on the bed. Just dressing takes up so much energy now that he stays collapsed on the bed, near tears, I can't do this.

You can, Beloved. The presence in his mind says. It won't be as scary as you think.

That's shows what you know, Benedict responds unwittingly. It's always scary, much more scary than I think it will be. His chest rises and falls as he thinks about it.

It's OK, Benedict. I'm here. I'm here and you'll be fine.

And that statement really shouldn't be reassuring (Benedict is fairly certain that a presence in your mind is not supposed to ever be reassuring) but he takes in a deep breath and feels moderately comforted.

"We have to go," one of the SDF soldiers says. She looks openly hostile, the way some others do when they see Benedict, but there's not a lot of pity in her expression. "You'll be assigned a guardian soon, but until then, I'm your military escort."

Prison guard, Benedict translates. And he gets out of bed mostly because he's too terrified of what will happen to him if he refuses.

*

Here is a list of very serious troubles that have arisen in Benedict's life over the past few days:

1) The closest people he had to friends were all killed, Transformed to Beasts, or Touched by Misery.

2) He is half-Beast now, with a wing instead of an arm.

3) He is not sure how much of him is a Beast, how much of him is a Misery creature.

4) He is not alone in his mind anymore.

5) He has no idea what's happening with his Ash talent anymore. It's either gotten significantly more powerful or it's just plain malfunctioning.

6) Either way, it's driving him mad.

7) He is very tired of passing out all the time.

8) He now belongs to military custody.

With that rather extensive list of his troubles, it really seems like nothing worse could possibly happen to him now; everything else must surely pale in comparison to this hell that his been his life in the past four days.