海崎雪路
Yukiji is Kichi's sister.
Yes.
Nishio was Kichi's husband.
Yes.
Theia was their daughter.
Yes.
I killed Yukiji's family. The only family she had left.
A hard Yes that she flinched from.
Pai lay like a limp noodle on the infirmary bed in the convalescence room, self-loathing filling her to the brim as she stared up at the ceiling. She couldn't move even if she tried. Every part of her – her body, her heart, her mind, her spirit – was lifeless. Her heart muddled through and kept pumping, but she felt more dead than anything else.
She'd been in the convalescence room for the whole day since she fainted. Kanou had wanted to take Pai to see Aihara, to find out if her sudden dizzy spell had anything to do with her being Hanyou. She'd flat-out refused to see Aihara though, stomach roiling nauseatingly at the reminder of what she was, what she'd done because of being Hanyou, the reason why So Fu used those like her in the first place.
Kouta had asked her if she wanted him to get Aihara to come to the house, but she rejected that as well. She didn't want to bring Aihara and her knowledge of Hanyou into the one place that she still considered pure and untainted by that darkness. It was her own small act of rebellion against her absentee parents, and the truth they'd kept from her for her entire life. If she could keep Ayashi House safe from her past, then the sins she'd committed wouldn't reach out with envious fingers to hurt the people here.
She knew she was being childish, but she didn't care.
She thought that, maybe, Shin knew what was wrong with her. Not with her body, but her heart, her mind. He didn't say anything, but she could see, from the bleak look in his eyes, that he knew her fainting had something to do with the things she'd done.
He stayed with her as long as he could after she woke up, until duties left unattended to with Kouta pulled him away. In that time, she waited for him to give voice to the heaviness that lingered between them, the reality she tried to hide from at every turn.
He never did.
Yukiji was the first face she opened her eyes to after she passed out, with Shin right beside her. Instead of looking at her in hatred, suspicion, blame, Yukiji smiled with such relief that Pai had to bite back a trembling cry that warbled like a live thing stuck in her throat.
How can you look at me like that? She'd wanted to scream. How can you look at me like that when I killed your only family left?
She'd had to bite her tongue to keep her silence as Shin helped her sit up when she was still too groggy to do it herself. Kanou checked her over several times throughout the day to make sure nothing was amiss, that his observations of her otherwise healthy countenance despite her fainting weren't wrong. As soon as Kanou cleared her, Yukiji threw her arms around Pai and hugged her so tight she saw stars for a few moments.
Kanou heeded Pai's refusal to meet with Aihara, but still called the nurse to talk over the phone, Kouta taking over before Aihara hung up. Fainting, unsurprisingly, wasn't unusual when it came to Hanyou who still lived as half-and-half, instead of the whole they'd chosen. It wasn't an indicator of how long she had left, but there wasn't much cause to worry when it happened.
Pai blinked slowly at the ceiling, noting how sluggish her thoughts moved in the soup bowl of her skull.
Why didn't you tell me? You knew, and you never said anything.
Does a mother warn their child of every cruelty she knows of in this world? Does she warn them of every possible mistake there is to make so that they may avoid it?
You're not my mother.
Your life would be easier if we were, she cackled. Her voice scraped at Pai's nerves like sharpened nails on a blackboard. Instead, your mother abandoned you. Your father abandoned you. Your sister abandoned you. Everyone left you.
So did you.
Kuniumi stopped her mad twittering abruptly. She could feel Kuniumi's shock at the flat, deadened tone in the thought.
You are no different from my mother, she continued. You leave me whenever you don't want to deal with me and my questions. You left me after Yamato tortured me. You left me when I found out that Kagetora blames you for So Fu's existence. You will leave me again, like you always do.
We protect you when we leave, Kuniumi murmured. She didn't sound sorry. She didn't sound angry. Her words were spoken for the sake of it, rather than to defend herself. We leave to protect you from us.
The only one who can protect me is me, she answered in a hushed whisper that was quiet even in her own mind. I absolve you of your promise to not let me hurt. Let me be hurt.
You'll drown. And there – there was the pain, the regret, the sorrow in Kuniumi. You wipe your face of it, but your emotions are too strong. You feel too much. You'll stop breathing if we let you.
Let me.
And then she did the one thing she'd only been able to for a short time in her memories; she slammed a wall of pain and anger and resentment and rejection and betrayal between them, right on the wavering line she could barely feel that kept the two from merging into one. She only had a moment to sense the impossible shock – and was that pride? Was Kuniumi proud that she was doing this on her own now? – before everything was silent.
There was no voice to talk back to her thoughts. There were no fingers to pry apart the seams of her unravelling mind. There were no eyes to flick through the memories and feelings that made Pai the fracturing person she was. Everything was silent. Just like it used to be.
She could hardly remember a time when Kuniumi wasn't there to natter away at nonsensical nothings. She found that she didn't like this empty silence echoing back at her like some huge, black serpent that's presence sat heavy inside her skull, watching and waiting.
She knew this wouldn't last long. A tight bundle of iced nerves sat in her stomach, growing colder and harder with each passing minute she lay back, staring grimly at the ceiling. She'd made her decision, and she needed to carry it out, now. If she delayed, she knew she'd convince herself to stall it for just one more hour, one more day, one more year.
She knew what she was getting herself into; a whole world of hurt unlike anything she'd ever felt before. Her previous tastes of the deadly cocktail of guilt had been small. They were nothing compared to what she knew would happen once she told Yukiji the truth.
But she had no choice now. Her past no longer concerned just her alone. It had stretched its greedy hands out to her present, and it stole three lives from one of those living in the house she called home. She had no right to let Yukiji be tortured with the not-knowing that came from the silence of her family, the silence Yukiji didn't know yet was that of death.
×
Yukiji almost went ballistic when she saw a pale-faced Pai walk into the children's bedroom that evening, where she was attempting to put them to sleep on her own since Mizutani was out running an errand for Obaasan.
The only reason Yukiji didn't start a railing tirade of, You need to take care of yourself, Pai-chan! and, For goodness sake, look at you, you look like death, and you want to put these demons to sleep? Are you serious right now? was because Pai told her, in a voice so quiet Yukiji had to lean in close to hear, that she needed to talk to her about something important.
The kids, sensing the awkward tension between Yukiji and Pai, were more subdued than usual. They obediently trooped to their respective futons, wiggling around and snickering to each other for only a little while before turning on their backs or bellies on Yukiji's command and starting to sleep.
Little Emiya was still held in Pai's arms as she lulled him to sleep. She held him carefully as he lolled sleepily against her shoulder, cradling the back of his head with a sad smile, her chest tight and aching at the thought of what she was going to do.
Her head pulsed with the headache that never truly went away. Her eyes were thick in their sockets, blood pumping sluggishly through her veins. The strain of forcing the wall between Kuniumi and herself was worse than in her memory. It was like she was trying to move through a glacier while her body was drowning in lava; the ice kept her frozen in place, the fire blazing her up so that she couldn't keep too still lest she be burned by it.
Emiya brought her back to reality when he hiccupped and snuggled closer, laying his forehead against the side of her neck. "Pai-tan," he mumbled drowsily, tiny wings fluttering on his back as his body grew limp with sleep. "Love you, Pai-tan," he gurgled.
Pai hummed, unable to speak around the ball of cotton stuck in her throat. She looked over to where Yukiji crooned a lullaby softly to Chizuru, and the cotton doubled in size. Pai patted Emiya's back as she rocked to and fro, moving slowly across the room.
Yukiji looked over when he said that, and she gave Pai a small smile, wobbly at the edges, nervous, wondering at what she had to tell her. A lump grew in Pai's throat as her gaze sidled away from Yukiji, images of another child filling her mind, in another woman's arms, sitting in a growing puddle of blood as she cried and cried endlessly until someone had the sense to pick the girl up from the red paint of her dead parents soaking into her cute little clothes.
Pai continued to walk around the expanse of the room, treading lightly so the floorboards didn't creak and wake everyone else up. It was already eight o'clock; if the kids woke up now, it would be another three or four hours before they went back to sleep.
Her mind aimlessly drifted as she walked, flitting from one awful thought to another painful memory. She'd made her decision, she knew what she had to do, but the crying little girl inside her kept trying to make her change her mind, to bargain and do it another time, another time that would never come if she didn't do it now.
I'm sorry! she screamed at the little girl. I'm sorry for what I did!
And even though the wall was still in place, still keeping her out, she thought she knew what Kuniumi would say to that.
Sorry never changed the past.
"Pai-chan?"
She looked up. Yukiji knelt at Chizuru's futon, gesturing for her to lay Emiya down in the empty futon beside his sister's. Carefully holding him so he wouldn't wake up, Pai tiptoed over and went down on her knees to settle him in. She held still as a statue when he wriggled under the blanket, a little frown of concentration on his face before he finally shifted to lay on his stomach, and the frown smoothed out.
So small. So sweet and innocent. Such an easy target for So Fu.
Pai swallowed and tucked the blanket securely around him, avoiding Yukiji's eyes pinned on her. Just as she finished, her hands started their shaking, so much so that she had to clasp them together by her chest to keep their trembling from waking Emiya. She looked at Yukiji, an excuse, a lie, already on the tip of her tongue, so used was she to keeping this a secret.
She saw the look in Yukiji's eye, the remorseful knowing that came with being told what was happening to Pai. She looked down at Emiya as she stood after Yukiji, and said nothing.
They walked in perfect silence to the door, and she waited for Yukiji to dim the lights down until the room was blacked out, but not quite. Pai had learned the hard – and loud – way not to switch the lights off completely because, as if she had a superior trigger sense, Hana would wake and start squalling in fear of the darkness. That would wake everyone else, and more time would be spent to calm the kids down.
Yukiji slid the door shut, and turned to her. "You said you wanted to talk."
Pai's voice didn't come out when she tried to speak, and she had to swallow the muteness several times before she said, "Can we go outside?"
Yukiji nodded. Pai could see how tense she was from the stiff movement alone. "Good idea. It's a little more private there."
The walk outside was a silent one. It took only a minute for her hands to stop shaking, Yukiji eyeing them warily the whole time.
Karasatengu let them through the gate easily enough once he saw that, firstly, Pai was with Yukiji, and secondly, they were only going a little way from the boundary wall. The crows perched in the trees, ever watchful, cast their baleful crimson eyes down at them once, twice. Cursory glances to ensure they weren't a threat to the inhabitants of Ayashi House.
At least one of us isn't, Pai couldn't help thinking scathingly.
They came to a stop at the tree Pai had been found beside more than a year ago. She was the one who stopped there – Yukiji looked like she would walk further along the way. She watched the other woman give an uneasy look at the tree, as if she was remembering the fact that Pai had been found here, bloody and unconscious, in the arms of the princess Yukiji served.
It was strange for her to realize that Yukiji appeared calm now. There was a skittish look in her eye that belied her fear over what she must suspect Pai was about to tell her, but she didn't let any of that show on her face. Pai would have applauded her for it, if she didn't feel like she was too drained to do more than stand in front of the elm tree and breathe.
She'd made her decision to do this, but she hadn't gone much further than that. She hadn't thought it out, laying out the schematics of her plan; her map to tell Yukiji that she'd killed the only family she had left after the Kitsune's attack nine years ago.
In the end, it was Yukiji who lit the fire that illuminated what meandering path her map made.
"It was them, wasn't it?" Her voice didn't tremble as she spoke, but it was quiet. So quiet that if not for the bursting silence of the forest, Pai wouldn't have heard. "The ones you were with. So Fu."
The words were wrong on innocent Yukiji's lips. Pai wanted to clap her hands over her ears and shout at her to never say that name again, to never speak of the horrible shadowy monster that took and took and took without compromise.
Yukiji delivered the final, crippling blow that tore a hole through Pai.
"They have my sister and her family, don't they?"
They have my sister and her family.
Something splintered in her to hear the hope still colouring Yukiji, cracking like wood struck by a bolt of lightning. Pai was going to darken that hope to black. Yukiji still thought her family was alive. She thought they were just being held captive. Would that be better? Would Yukiji prefer that her sister and brother-in-law and niece were being tortured, over them being dead?
All it took was the memory of bone snapping through leaking skin, the steel of the manacles coloured in slippery red as she breaks her own wrists to be free and she knew that death was not an answer. It was a reprieve, but it wasn't an answer, because what happened to those left behind? When you died, what happened to the people who had to keep living with a hole the size of you, dug deep into their souls?
"I did not let myself get close to anyone there," she said instead of answering to the false hope in Yukiji's eyes. "To let them see you care about another was to let them see a weakness they can exploit. I tried to keep myself apart, but..." she swallowed as she thought of his name, his face rising up like a ghost in her mind. "But there was one person who got close before I could stop him."
Yukiji was listening with rapt attention, standing tense and stiff in front of Pai, arms clamped to her sides. The wind buffeted the dark strands of her hair tied in a loose bun at her nape, sending a few locks over her face that she impatiently pushed aside. As she did, Pai caught her furtively wipe away a tear that fell down her cheek with the sleeve of her shirt before she focused on Pai again.
"Who is he?" Yukiji asked.
Is, is, Pai chanted, hating herself for still hoping he was alive when she was telling Yukiji her own family wasn't. Is, maybe he's still is, and it's is not a was.
"Rikuto. His name is Rikuto."
Who is he? The question repeated itself to her.
"Tell her who I am. She deserves to know. Tell her who the hell I am to her!"
Who was he? What was he to her? She didn't remember. Why did he think Midori knew the answer to that? Why did she kill to protect him?
Pai steeled her tenuous determination and continued. "So Fu never sends its Agents out alone. We – they are always paired, or grouped. I was on a mission with him."
"A mission?" Yukiji repeated, puzzled. "What mission?"
Pai shut her eyes for a moment. With the absence of sight, her ears picked up the sound of thunder rumbling not too far away. The scent of the air was cold, too still, warning of a gathering storm. It chilled her skin, a trail of ice dribbling down her spine. She could smell its intoxicating, heady scent, teasing her with the promise of its cold, crystalline showers.
She wished that the rain could be enough to wash away her red hands.
"A kill mission."
Pai opened her eyes again to see Yukiji flinch, still watching her with a wary look. Maybe she suspected where this was going. Maybe she did, maybe she didn't. It didn't matter, either way. The map Pai followed only led down one road, to one truth. It didn't deviate, didn't branch off in other possibilities.
One map.
One road.
One truth.
And as she talked, she watched another tear streak down Yukiji's face, following the path the first took. Then another. And another.
Yukiji was crying, but silently. Her shoulders shook, her lips trembled, her eyes shone with horrific knowing, but she didn't make a sound as she looked at Pai without a single trace of blame in her eyes.
She didn't think that it was her who did it. She could see it, in the trusting way Yukiji looked at her, that she thought Pai was going to tell her it was Rikuto who killed her family.
It was supposed to be him.
It wasn't.
Pai's head felt too airy and light, her body dragging it down as she took a step back, as if she wanted to run away. Instead, she stumbled on a root. Yukiji made a move to help her, but she stopped when Pai slumped against the elm tree heavily, dropping her eyes from Yukiji's silently quivering form, unable to continue talking while looking at her.
Pathetic, she could imagine Kuniumi sneering. Weak. You can't even look at her as you destroy her.
"It was his mission. He was supposed to carry it out. I was back-up. He was supposed to kill two people, a man and a woman, in public." Her voice changed, breaking down into a whisper that was too loud and too quiet all at the same time. "We didn't – we didn't know there was a child. There was no mention of her in the files."
"Did," Yukiji licked her lips, staring with eyes gone wide as saucers. There were tears, there, in her words, watery and flushing out of her body like toxins. "Did he kill my sister?"
There it was.
Out in the open.
That word, that word she hated to hear, to even see it written.
Kill.
Did he kill her sister?
Pai shook her head, fighting off the dizzy spell that overcame her at the jerky move. She had to finish this. She'd started this, she had to finish this. There was no turning back now. She couldn't let herself, and at this point, she knew Yukiji wouldn't let her stop.
It was not Kuniumi's voice that floated from the abyss then, to force her to speak. It was Mad Chiasa's.
"Finish what you start, even if it kills you. Even if you are already dying like a dog in the dirt. You see it through to the end."
"He couldn't. He froze when he saw the little girl."
She looks at the targets. They are still there. She looks back at Rikuto.
"Take the shot." She says, staring at his twitching, hesitating finger. She knows he is not going to squeeze hard enough around the trigger.
"He couldn't take the shot. He couldn't take the girl's parents from her, right in front of her. He failed his mission."
The words hung like an axe over them, swinging from Pai to Yukiji, trying to decide who it would be better to behead first.
Yukiji frowned, perplexed. She didn't understand. "He didn't?"
Pai nodded slowly. Her heart laboured to keep her alive even as she felt it buckling under the pressure to keep herself steady, to stop herself from screaming.
Something in Yukiji shifted then. Her quiet, desolate calm shattered in an instant, and she took a step towards Pai. Her hands reached out and grasped Pai's shoulders, eyes too wide and bright with the destructive force of her own hope.
"Where are they? Where are they? Where's my family? Please," her hands tightened, fingers digging bruises into skin. Pai tried to move away from that steel grip, but all she could do was look up at the tears in Yukiji's beautiful eyes that didn't belong there. "I need to know. Where are they?"
Pai closed her eyes.
Rikuto isn't like her. He is still sane, he is still something close to normal, he still has a chance to be redeemed, to be forgiven.
"Pai-chan," she was crying, loud hiccupping breaths, and desperate, so desperate as she shook Pai, trying to make her open her eyes and tell her what she wanted to hear, even though she could hear in her voice that Yukiji knew what she would hear wasn't what she wanted. "Tell me!"
Mizushima Kichi's forehead comes into focus, a red dot trained right between her eyes.
She shifts the gun to the side and aims at Nishio's head. She waits for him to drop down beside the body of his wife, hands fluttering over her prone body frantically, desperately calling her name.
He dies not two seconds after his wife.
"It was me."
She could feel Yukiji stop breathing.
Yukiji's hands shook as she slowly let her go. Her eyes peeled open, sore after being screwed shut too tight for too long. The pain that twisted Yukiji's face stole her breath, so profound and raw that it was like looking at an amputated limb that's festered wound was still too fresh, still too deep.
Yukiji's face was alive with the anguish. He breath was ragged as she stared, lurching away, scalded by Pai's words. A harsh gasp broke out of Yukiji as she lifted her trembling hands to her mouth, to keep a cry from bursting out.
"No," she whispered, muffled. Her voice shook with aggrieved emotion, head swinging from side to side in denial. "No. You're lying. Why would you say something like that?"
"I'm – I'm – it's the – I'm not lying," Pai lowered her head, looking at her zori sandaled feet. "It – it was me. I am not lying."
Turn it back! The innocent child in her screamed. Turn it back, you didn't say anything! Stop saying anything!
I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry
"What about Theia?" Pai flinched at the name. "The little girl? My niece, where is she?"
Yukiji still had hope. Pai had only mentioned the parents. What about Theia, what about the little girl, what about my niece, what about her? Did you kill her?
I might as well have.
No one heard the sound of Pai's soul breaking like shattered glass but her. She strove to fix her face into total blankness, but she couldn't stop the twitch of her eyebrow as she forced herself to keep the crying child inside her from coming out until later, later when she was alone, when there was no one to see her in her eternity of weakness.
Later. Always later.
"She died."
Yukiji stepped back again, eyes filling with horror as the realization of what Pai was saying finally hit her. Her foot caught on an upturned branch. She fell back, and Pai made a move to go to her, to help her, but she froze when Yukiji shook her head again and wrapped her arms around her middle, rocking back and forth.
"No," she moaned, pressing her forehead to her knees. She held herself so tight that her nails dug pink marks into her skin. "No, no, this isn't happening, this isn't real."
I didn't want to I didn't want to I didn't want to I couldn't let Rikuto die her body was so small I'm so sorry I'm so sorry I'm so sorry
Like the ocean, a vast and indomitable thing, the words surged out of her before she could control them, leash them, hold them back. They were impossible to contain, and a sense of digging her own grave overwhelmed her, making her stutter to near incomprehensibility.
"I didn't want to, Yukiji-san, I'm – I'm sorry – " she wasn't breathing right, the air punching in and out of her spasmodically. She couldn't keep quiet, she couldn't stop talking, trying to convey the depth of her guilt and sorrow to the one person she knew she had no right to speak to ever again. "I didn't mean to, I didn't – I didn't want to, I'm so sorry – "
The flip of a switch.
"You're sorry?"
Yukiji's voice pitched an octave higher as she rose, unsteady on her feet, eyes glimmering with something that scared Pai. Between one blink and the next, Yukiji's wings appeared, black as a crow's, feathers like that of an eagle, the wingspan that of an angel. They flared at her back as Yukiji glowered at her with such loathing that her breath halted in her chest, stuck in a cage that was locked with the key thrown far away. Yukiji's eyes melted from the warm brown that could hold so much gentle kindness, to crimson lined in yellow, pupils slit, entirely inhuman in every possible way.
These were not the eyes of a Kamigami. They were the eyes of an enraged, grieving Hengen, facing the person responsible for their anguish.
"You're sorry for murdering my sister?" Yukiji repeated tightly. "You killed a child, my entire family, and you think your sorry is enough?"
Yukiji moved forward, eyes glowing with a rage Pai had never seen in her before – and that was when the tendrils of paralysing fear wrapped around her heart squeezed.
Pai stepped away instinctively, but came up short when her back hit the tree behind her. There was nowhere for her to go, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Yukiji was no longer someone she knew, someone she trusted.
Yukiji was Hengen. Yukiji was Ayakashi, stronger than her, and angry. Yukiji wasn't Yukiji anymore; she was a hunted, and Pai was the prey.
Yukiji saw the fear in her eyes, her pale face, and stopped dead. All the anger and hurt drained away in seconds, and her shoulders drooped, wings quivering as they flapped once before resting against her back, a black cloud settling over her. The glowing fire of raging emotion in her eyes dimmed, until they returned to the brown that harkened to her humanity.
"How could you do it?" her words were a subdued, battered whisper. "She was my sister. Theia was a child. Nishio – they were my family."
Pai didn't try to defend herself. She didn't say, I was fifteen years old. She didn't say, I was a child, too. She didn't say, Rikuto would have been cancelled if I didn't.
She didn't say anything, because nothing could justify what she had done. She was an open wound now, and her own guilt melded with the betrayal and pain in Yukiji's eyes was salt rubbed into her, burning her alive without a flame.
"I know," she finally managed, speaking around the glass in her throat. "I – "
A glimpse of that anger, that hurt betrayal, flickered past Yukiji's eyes again. Pai she cut herself off abruptly, pressing her lips tight together to quell the need to apologize to infinity, a need that was useless because no amount of apologizing could make up for what she'd done.
Yukiji's lips curled, loathing splashed like ugly paint over her face. "I can't look at you right now. I just – " her voice cracked, and she stopped.
Without another word, she spun around, wings disappearing as quietly and suddenly as they'd appeared, and started walking off.
Pai watched the tense set of her shoulders, the quick-paced walk that spoke to how quickly she needed to get as far away from her family's murderer as she possibly could. The silence left behind by Yukiji walking away, leaving her alone as the rain drip-dropped until it was a downpour flattening her hair to her skull and her clothes to her pale skin, was worse than when she'd screamed at Pai.
The silence brought with it pain.
A dagger of fire spiked through her head, and she winced, groaning as she lifted a hand to the sides of her head. She fell to her knees, unable to remain standing any longer, and leaned forward to touch her forehead to the brown leaves littering the ground as the pain grew until it felt like she was banging her head on stone. She bit her lip so hard to keep the cry inside that her teeth tore through skin and her mouth filled with the copper tang of her own blood, but she didn't notice as the walls came crashing down, and then Kuniumi was there.
Everywhere.
All Pai could feel was her presence, a swirling dark mass of mania, of grief, of laughter and tears of blood and sorrow and longing. It consumed her, seeping into the cracks of her fractured soul, until she didn't know who she was anymore. She didn't know where she began and where Kuniumi ended, or if she was getting it wrong and she'd been Kuniumi the whole time, pretending to be a person she wasn't, a person called Pai, a person who'd killed Yukiji's family.
When the tears fell down her face, they were stained with salty blood that drew tracks of red ink down her ashen face.
Does it hurt?
There was no pity. No care in that cold, hard voice that caressed her bruised mind as much as it did cut into her like a sharpened blade.
Yes, she was sobbing pitiably, weeping, and she couldn't make herself stop as her cries pitched into low keens coming from the back of her throat. It hurts.
This is what you wanted.
I know.
You pushed us away.
I know.
Do you want the pain to stop?
Yes. No.
She was cold, so cold, and the tears flowing down her face hurt. They only made her feel the sting of the wind more fiercely. Another lance of pain drove into her skull. She whimpered, falling on her side and curling into a foetal position. Black spots danced in front of her eyes. She lifted her hands, clenched into fists, and pressed them against her temples as she pressed her forehead against her raised knees. She felt like she was dying, being torn apart from the inside out, the guilt inside her slicing pieces of her soul and hanging the dirty, blood-stained strips up for her to see.
I don't want to hurt let me hurt I don't want let me hurt I deserve it I deserve it –
And more.