Ink Stained

39: red is for blood, red is for Mask*

憑き物–

妖藏

악마 소유

Oдержимость

She jerked herself out of the stupor when Coach Ami blew her whistle sharply to get the girls to stop jogging.

Pai, confused, mind sluggish, slowly looked down at what she had written. Her mouth dropped open in shock.

What...is this?

The words 'demon possession' stared back at her, scrawled in deep blue ink, in different languages. It was like something out of a horror movie filled with bad tropes – only, this wasn't a movie. This was real.

She wrote this.

Pai didn't know these languages. The only language she actually knew was Japanese, and she was passably good at English. She couldn't begin understand how she had written all of this – she could see the middle two were Chinese and Korean, but – but that was it.

How did she know what the words were? She had been writing unconsciously, looking down at the pen as it moved down the page yet not registering what it was she was writing.

Even as she stared down at the words, she could feel the comprehension of what each said slipping from her fingers, disappearing into the mist of her foggy memories. Her lips pressed into a thin line. The curved edge of her fingernail pressed into the paper under each word, forming indents in the page.

What the hell is this?

Pai reached up to touch above her lip, but no blood fell. She frowned, confused. Surely, it must have been some form of repressed memory that had her writing in different languages. Yet her nose did not bleed like it always did. Why?

She looked up when Coach Ami blew the whistle again and the girls began another warm-up exercise. The sound had a spike of pain lancing through the back of her skull, and she winced. She jerked her head to the side, hands coming up to her ears as she felt something warm and wet touch the inside of her ears. The sensation of it was a discomforting one, more so because of how alien it was. Pai's lips pulled back over her teeth as she brought her hands down.

Her ears were leaking blood.

She gaped in dismay as she touched the pads of her forefinger to her thumb, rubbing the blood between her fingers. She touched her ears lightly again, and they came away wet, again. There wasn't much blood, but the fact that it was there at all appalled her.

Swallowing thickly, she stood, fisting her hands against her sides as she left her spot on the bleachers and went straight to the bathroom, notebooks and bag scattered around the spot she'd been sitting at. Thankfully no one was around, everyone in their own club rooms. No one was there to see and question why a line of red painted itself against the side of her neck.

When she got to the bathroom, she washed her hands clean before cupping them and splashing the water gently against her neck and around her ears. The white sink turned pink as she washed her ears of the blood, water running pale red. After no more blood was left to wash away, she yanked out tissue paper and dabbed at her neck and ears, refusing to make eye contact with her reflection in the mirror. She didn't want to see the look in her eyes, because she already knew what would be there.

Confusion. Fear. Worry.

Pai left the bathroom a minute later, going back to the bleachers and taking a seat right where she'd left. She glared at the page in her notebook, scrawled over with words of languages she didn't know.