Marionette

Cosmos, Chapter Fifty Five - Fukahi [不可避]

Whatever repairs were completed at the end of the day, Amaya couldn't say.

Following her latest spat with a handful of her so-called classmates, even an eavesdropping Koro-sensei had decided that enough damage had been done, and it was in her own best interests for her to leave early.

She had helped out enough, she had been targeted enough, and it was entirely understandable that she wanted to be anywhere else by now.

Amaya went and tried to expel some of her anger at the gym, wore her knuckles raw through her sparring gloves, returned home with takeout for her siblings and proceeded to detail clean the whole building interior top to bottom, regardless of the time. Upon her arrival home, the twins had immediately noted her horrid temper and proceeded to keep Samuel in line like mute drill sergeants, promptly stifling any and every hiccup that had any chance to worsen the girl's already volatile mood.

Not that it would have changed anything in the end.

Amaya was about as angry as she could be without exploding.

It was well past midnight by the time Amaya had exhausted every single piece of cleaning, maintenance and organizing she could complete without waking her siblings up, and easily past 3am by the time she had worn herself out enough to force herself to shower and collapse in bed.

There was no alarm ringing to rouse Amaya in time to cook breakfast and packed lunches, nor was there any commotion from departing siblings shouting their farewells as they left for school. After what felt like mere minutes since she had switched off the light and curled up in bed, she was awoken by the jarring sensation of being shaken awake.

She cracked her eyes open to find herself staring blankly at the wall in front of her, curled rather tightly in a ball on her side. She actually felt cold, like there was a chill in the air trying to seep into her bones, and beyond that, she was exhausted.

Her body felt so heavy, all she wanted to do was go back to sleep.

'Amay?' Came Karma's voice, reminding the weary girl that she had not awoken naturally

Sluggishly, Amaya turned her head to look up at the evil incarnate from over her shoulder, blinking slowly as she struggled not to nod straight back to sleep right then and now.

'...What are you doing?' She mumbled out.

'Yuta-kun asked me to wake you up.' He explained after a moment with a strange lack of his usual taunts as he watched her without waver. 'Apparently they couldn't wake you up, no matter what they tried.'

'Oh...' Amaya could feel herself nodding off as those words sunk in on her.

'You were pretty close to cracking yesterday, huh?' Karma asked.

'...I was?'

She honestly couldn't remember at that moment, but she didn't disbelieve him.

'Amay, the kitchen and living room swapped colours overnight.'

After a few seconds of sluggish thought, Amaya recalled that Karma had not turned up, though presumably that might have been because she was out at the gym trying in vain to vent her anger when he might have turned up at the house. So he went home, instead?

She sighed as she lifted a hand to try and rub the sleep from her eyes.

'The cracks Samuel's door-slamming put in the walls bothered me...' She explained.

The kitchen was now sandstone and the living room was now apricot following her task of filling in all the cracks and sanding the excess away. She repainted the rooms in the other's colours because if she didn't, she wouldn't have had enough paint to finish the job.