Masked(WARNING: VERY TRIGGERING)

Part Three

'You think its so hard to be living how you are but imagine being me. Stuck in a reflection, a shadow, the back of your head. It's painfully boring!' He sighed loudly and began moving about while having James match his movements. "Boring or not, you're controlling me now, aren't you?" The evil reflection laughed and grinned over at him. 'I won't be able to for long. You got worked up, so I had a second to use. We can make a deal to where we're both happy, if you're up for it. Rather than me just using you as a puppet every time you get angry.' The thought of losing control of his emotions would mean a loss of the control of his body as well was.. quite terrifying. However, he didn't want to make a rash decision. "How about I think about it? I don't want to make the same mistake I did to end up here in the first place." 

As his breath steadied, the control of his own body returned and the figure in the mirror glared a bit at him. 'I'll give you a year. Will go by in a flash.' With an eerie smile, he waved and the mirror seemed to vanish into thin air. 

-0-0-0-0-0-

If a year had passed in that time, like the demon had said, that would mean James was seventeen by now. He wanted to look at himself, but didn't want to see that strange reflection yet again. He continued to finish his food slowly, deep in thought. Sixty-five days of sleep, no bathroom breaks. How was he even alive with how little he had been eating and drinking?

Much less, how was he still remotely sane with being left in this room? There seemed to be no side affects. Time was moving quickly, and he could amuse himself with the seemingly limitless songs he knew by heart. Did he always know them by heart? He could recall so many lyrics but as he thought, he realized before the entire ordeal.. He didn't know over half the songs he could sing by heart now. There were countless memories he'd been reliving in hopes to ease the pain of missing those dearest to him. What about James best friend? What happened to him?

There was no way of knowing, but an aching started in his heart as he finished the last bit of food and sipped slowly on the water. The ache turned into a vast emptiness and he started to sob and cry while being alone in the room. Why was there such an intense sadness inside? A loneliness that seemed to grow, though not as fast as it should with no one around?

Sanity would slip, if he was remotely human still. That, would be his breaking point of realization.

Sitting down on the floor, the brunette stared at the ceiling. "I'm not human anymore." He said quietly in defeat. "Just to have the body you wanted, you traded humanity." The words he spoke to himself were almost laughable, and choked on a chuckle. A thought coming for him to hang on to at least see his family. One last time. That's all he wanted, as much as he hated them before.

Closing his eyes, he sighed out and stood up. Crawling onto the cot and curling up in a fetal position once more to sleep, James was unaware of the memory that would be unlocked on this time of sleep.

-0-0-0-0-0-

///WARNING. EXTREMELY GORE FILLED AND TRIGGERING. READ WITH CAUTION.///

As he drifted off into his slumber, it was as if reality shifted when he entered the memory that was kept away until this day. Since it seemed like a good anniversary present.

He was standing, at the front door of where he used to live before. The reflection in the glass being the girl he had been before the captivity. He was confused by this but no emotion changed on the girls face that he saw through in memory as she rang the doorbell. 

As the curtain was pulled back, he could see his mother and he wanted to cry out and hug her. The vision didn't change though as the door was opened.
"******! You're home!" His mother cried out, sobbing and hugging the girl who's eyes he was seeing through. There was a weak hug in response from the body James was viewing through and he wanted to cry too but in the memory there was a weak and raspy response. "Yes, did you miss me?" 

Something didn't feel right about it, and the vision continued.

"Boys! She's back!" Hearing her mother speak in Russian next, thanking god and apologizing to the girl he was viewing this memory through. She weakly laughed, as though it pained her to smile. "I am." They walked up the stairs, and James' younger brothers hugged him and were crying out they way they called her 'sister' as they did. Even her dad was there, raising an eyebrow a bit as he did but then enveloped her in a bear hug as he sobbed quietly. "I thought we'd never see you again.." Petting her hair back and on the inside, James sobbed with him but the memory he viewed did not show emotion still. 

They took her to the kitchen and sat her down, her brothers getting her plushies she left behind and handing them to her while saying 'they took very good care of them while she was away'. It was as if she was only gone for a few days but from how distressed they were, it could have been shorter or longer. The answer was given to James as his mother spoke and handed her a bowl of potato salad. "Six weeks. The police said to give up on you, that you were dead.. But we prayed every day while you were gone." She looked so tired, no doubt having had trouble sleeping every night. Shockingly, her dad looking in a similar state. 

"Well, I'm back.." "And for good! I'm never letting you out of my sight again! I talked to my work and they said you could start working with me at the counter for every shift if you ever came back!" "Fun.." The words felt empty, untruthful. Not only that, but she hadn't had a single bite of the potato salad she knew how to make from heart and loved to eat. Seemingly, it didn't matter to the family and they hugged her in relief. 

James only felt more unsettled as the day went on in this memory with the girl barely even talking or showing much emotion without force. He wanted to cry out, to tell them how much he loved them. But it was only a memory.

Then, the unsettled feeling began to make sense when his two closer in age brothers got home.

-0-0-0-0-0-

As her older brother walked towards her in the kitchen to hug her as he seemingly missed her too and claimed he blamed himself for her disappearing, she pulled a knife from the block on the counter and plunged it into his hand that was extended. He screamed out in agony as it was pulled out immediately after and blood started to pool on the ground. "You, who not only used me as some sort of toy growing up, but never apologized or spoke to me after? Feeling remorseful, claiming you missed me? L a u g h a b l e." She spoke in a weirdly formal way, it didn't make sense as James was viewing it and he heard the insanity in her own laugh.

"Respectfully, fuck you." She had watched him crumble to the ground and took the already bloodied knife and stabbed it into his jugular, watching as he choked on the blade, coughing out more blood to the floor. His death, already imminent.

The whole family had flooded to the kitchen in that moment, seeing what had happened and the deranged look upon the daughters face. Following with the two deaths that killed James on the inside and wanted to make him stop what he was seeing but it didn't.

She had immediately grabbed to more knives and expertly stabbed the two youngest boys in their hearts. "Pain would be unjust, but you still deserve death for all the times you abused me in your anger." Her mother had cried out in loss, three of her sons now dead on the floor because of the daughter she was mourning only a day before. The look of complete insanity on the girls face as she looked at her three remaining family members, who had frozen in shock and pain of heart. Until the woman who raised her leaped forward to the crumpled bodies on the floor.

"******... Why?" Her mother shook in fear as tears overflowed and she sobbed as she held the two dead boys in emotional agony. "Why? Why did you pressure unreasonable expectations on me with my body? Pretty much fat shaming me, shaming me for my mental illnesses. Not accepting me for who I am, taking any of my words and using them against me no matter the situation to emotionally manipulate and abuse me? That's not even counting all the times you've hit me!" She screamed out, only anger showing. She picked up another knife, ready to throw it at her mother when her younger brother of two years lunged out and tried to stop her. "Of course, the middle child to save the day now that he's the youngest and second child." She said so matter of fact, it was as if she was bored, and aimed the blade at his stomach. Yanking her hand to one side, she ripped open his guts and he began to not only bleed out on the floor, but his entrails were now outside his body and he screamed in pain. 

Only his mom and dad were left, crying at the loss of four of their children and in shock at the one standing there with a knife. It was only moments of screaming as her last brother died of blood loss, the stench of his insides punishing all their noses. "******, you know better. You'll go to hell for this.." Her mother was sobbing as her father spoke this in an uneven tone of threat, as he was terrified for his life. "What about you? What about all the hate you spew and hold, the way you kept your children as slaves, and beat them! You're racist, sexist, and homophobic! Its awful! You didn't support me on anything I did or wanted to do! Claiming it was out of my reach no matter what!" "Why the kids though? You're going to kill us too, right? Why did you have to kill them? Your older brother was going to graduate.. your younger brothers were destined to be adults. You're an awful sister for-" The words were cut short, quite literally, as she had slashed a deep cut to his throat. He spat out blood and gurgled as he tried to hold the wound but it was spilling immensely, her mother crying even harder and holding his neck and trying to keep him alive. "No.. no no no! Not my husband too!" 

He slipped away quickly, and she held his neck still as his last gurgle of a breath spat out. An unimaginable emotional pain hurting her all the way to her bones. Crying out in the agony of emotional distress, she hugged onto the body of her dead husband. "My sons, and now the father of them.." She was a mess, brain breaking and praying in Russian. Looking at her daughter as though she could see right through, she screamed at her. "You Demon! Possessing my daughter!" She was a crying mess as she screamed out in scolding.

The laughter that followed in the young teens throat was inhuman. "Only now you see that? Too late for you, unfortunately!" James couldn't handle what he was experiencing in this memory, feeling as broken as his mother was. As much as the statements were real, the anger he had felt towards them prior meant nothing. They didn't deserve to die, or be killed. This is heart-wrenching and he wanted to puke as he could only watch through the eyes of the body that had killed all of his family.

While his mother was loudly praying in the language she knew first, the girl who was possessed walked towards her calmly before pulling her hand back and slamming the knife into the grown woman's skull with brute force. 

Dead within an instant, she followed the action with a hard kick to her mothers body before walking past the carnage she created. Blood was everywhere in the kitchen but she didn't look back, walking out of the front door and looking up at the man who kidnapped her. The man who would be taking her to torture.

-0-0-0-0-0-
///GORE OVER///

James jolted awake, beginning to cry as he sat up. The soft sobs turning into screams of emotional turmoil as he held his head and wanted to take it all back. Actions which weren't fully his own, but caused by the intense want of something he deemed his family the reason he couldn't have. It pained him to the core. Not only the brothers he cared for deeply, but the people who raised him with a hand that wasn't cruel to the point he was dead. 

It was burned into his head how his mother looked in the final moments. The touching moments with his brothers he practically raised giving their deaths so much more pain to his heart. Agonizing and cruel, bringing him closer to insanity than the physical torture ever did. In a way, what little humanity he thought he had left, started to feel more and more far away.

Now, he was unsure if he could ever sleep again.