Good Night | Dreamcatcher [COMPLETED]

27

When Jiu was younger, she would sing whenever she got the chance. For as long as she could remember she'd sung, and when she did people would say her voice sounded like an angel. And they were right. Maybe her voice wasn't that powerful or rich, but it was soft and smooth. Little Jiu's eyes always crinkled with happiness when she got complimented, and in her naïve mind she'd convinced herself that she was an angel. It made her parents laugh when she ran around outside, pretending she could life off her feet and soar into the air with feathery wings.

How ironic, that all these years later, the angel had fallen and become a demon instead.

It was hard to describe the crushing, agonising guilt ripping her head apart. She had never been so free and she'd never been so depressed. If this was freedom then she didn't want it.
As she sat wide awake, hands pressed into the creaking, dusty mattress and legs curled underneath her, she couldn't stop her mind from replaying that bittersweet moment. She'd been mindless and helpless, with the demon binding her tightly in chains of blackness, and she knew nothing. Remembered nothing. Until that moment.

Her friend lay dying before her, blood leaking from her body and life leaking from her eyes. And then she shimmered gold like a phoenix and turned to ashes. And the trapped one, she, Jiu remembered. Every memory the demon had cut away and squashed came bounding back, hitting her empty mind with the force of a bomb. And with the memories came something she hadn't been allowed for a while.

Grief. She was in agony, disbelief and shock hurtling through every bone in her body. She felt the demon screaming, trying to push the feelings away, trying to reduce her to the lifeless husk she'd been before, but its attempts were in vain. Grief won, and poured down her face in the form of tears as she herself screamed. For a moment it was just the two of them, herself and the demon screaming in unison.

She was on fire, she was frozen in place, she was dying. Her body felt like it was about to combust and yet the only thing going through her head was 'Sua is dead Sua is dead my friend is dead she's gone she's gone she's gone'. She'd killed her. And she closed her eyes, not wanting to see anymore, wanting it all to disappear. At some point in that moment, she'd passed out, and when she awoke in that dark room, the demon was gone.

The demon was gone. Jiu knew she was supposed to be happy about that, it was supposed to change everything. She was free now, anything she'd done when the demon was inside her wasn't her fault, right? The demon had been pulling the strings, controlling her. She wasn't guilty. But that wasn't the truth. At some point in their friendship she'd been appointed as a sort-of leader, someone who took care of the others and made final decisions. It was her job, if you like, to solve arguments and support her friends in hard times and plan trips and make everyone happy.

It seemed, instead of that, she'd caused a rift between two of them, brutally tortured two others, and manipulated one into killing another.

There was a voice in her head that sounded too much like a demon, repeating the same cold truth:

You hurt them.

It didn't matter that the demon had orchestrated it all. It was her fault for being too weak, for letting the demon in. Her love for her friends should have been enough to fight it off. But she didn't fight, and she didn't care, and she let it use her. So all the torturing and pain and death might as well have been her ideas to carry out. It didn't change anything.

The worst part was that she couldn't even cry. She knew no one else was sleeping, and they weren't exactly hiding their grief. Each pillow had to be stained with tears. But not hers.

Whenever she looked at her pillow for too long, the drab, brown fabric twisted and morphed into a mirror, and when she laid her head on it and tried to sleep, she fell through it.