X~1~X
Taken by the hand she was drug out into the open space, where everyone could see. She was told—no, ordered to get down on her knees and to put her hands above her head. Not knowing what else to do, this small child with the red eyes and teal hair obeyed with visible tremors of fear. She knew what was coming, but didn't know how to stop it. Had no idea how to get these people to stop it.
The crowd around them belted out shouts of anger and hatred, so visibly angry, wads of spit could be seen flying violently from their mouths.
"Kill it!" They all screamed.
"Mama, not again, okay?" The little girl pleaded, her voice a quiet whisper.
The woman standing just behind her raised a large blade an inch or two above the girls head, the muscles in her long arms taught with tension, yet altogether still.
"Mama, no okay?"
It was too late. The blade flew into the young girl's skull. Her pupils swelled to cover the smoldering red of her irises. They rolled back into her head, the deep veined whites of her eyes bulging as blood began to leak in steady streams from the single wound down her face, rolling in rivets off of her nose. The small girl's body gave a little jolt, tensed, went still, and her form held there for all of five seconds. It was with the white hot escort of agony that the hell-pit red of her eyes and soulless black of her pupils rolled back to prominence on her face. She shuddered and reached a bony, pale hand to the blade still standing upright, buried inside her brain. The small girl wrapped both hands around the handle and pulled with all her might until the offending object was dislodged with a small squelch. Those unfortunate to have been close enough were splattered faintly with the copper scented red of her veins.
Chaos seized the world.
"Such a bad child you are! Demon child!" And without another glimpse of daylight she was shut away. But that was a long time ago. And things change.
But not that much.
Somewhere very far away, pushed into the deepest recesses of anyone's mind, exists a lone, white building owned by some obscure, multi-million dollar corporation no body of any importance (or anybody of no importance) really bothers with. Somewhere, very, very deep within this marbled, corporate mausoleum sits a girl with sea-green teal hair down to her knees and eyes as red as the shade of those overpriced plastic cups. Somewhere very far within this carefully hidden away portion of the very far away corporate building, tattered and grey (one white dress) flutters around her rail-thin frame, making her look fragile, like a flower waiting to be plucked and trampled by careless children.
She is a fragile one.
In appearance.
Everyday this girl with the odd hair and terror-invoking eyes sits against the formless wall of her five by four room and dies.
Well everyone needs routine, don't they?
But sometimes, it is those little breaks in routine that make life all the more worth living, or, in this particular case, death all the more worth avoiding. So maybe, if you think about it, the sudden thunderclap of fear that rocketed through her malnourished, skeletal body at the sound of a single knock on the wall wasn't entirely unwelcome.
An emotion to label this moment? Fear. An emotion to label the moments following? Terror. As for later on, who can really say?
"Hello?" A muffled voice calls from somewhere too far off, but after such a long period of silence, the sound, however faint and garbled, is welcomed and in symphonic proportions.
The teal haired girl shrieks in surprise as another knock comes.
Six hundred, forty seven deaths since someone last opened the door, she notes in the back of her mind. She doesn't think to ask if anyone has ever knocked before.
With the stumbling, frantic, hindered movements that are her maximum capacity for movement, the girl reaches the door and collapses against it, pressing her ear as tightly as possible against the freezing stone.
The voice isn't coming from the door, but the wall. She crawls on all fours over to the wall and presses her ear against it instead.
Somewhere the girl finds her voice and is not pleased at the dead, toneless, painful sound that her words are delivered in. "Hello?" She whispers timidly.
A reply comes racing back immediately, "Hello!" A distinctly youthful male's voice yells significantly louder from whatever lies beyond the wall.
She jumps again.
"No one talks to me…" She trails off stupidly, for lack of anything else to comment on.
"Who are you?" The voice asks her.
She ponders over that briefly, but responds with a definite (but severely lacking) confidence. "…Evil." The teal haired girl has heard it enough for it to be qualified as a label.
The voice pauses for a beat or two. "I don't understand."
The girl doesn't reply to this, but shifts with her back to the wall when her energy begins to deteriorate. She hums in response, as loud as she can manage to let the voice know that she still hasn't left but doesn't really have anything to say.
"Us." The voice suddenly says. She produces a humming sound again. "You're one of us, aren't you?"
"Who's us?" Pain. Her throat burns. Her everything burns. Something beats heavily inside her brain, like a dull buzz that grows sharper with each passing second.
"You know."
"I do?"
"When was the last time you died?" She doesn't reply. "Ah. So I was right."
"You were?"
"Hey, do you… do you know where they took my sister?"
If she wasn't lost before, she definitely is now. "I don't… I don't know of any sisters."
"Hnn," the voice musses from the other side loud enough for her to barely, just barely hear the vibrations of it.
"You know," it says, "I don't think you're evil."
"You don't?"
The voice chuckles at her, a low, rumbling buzz under the sharp ringing zipping around her brain.
"You do?" it asks in return. It doesn't speak again for a few more moments. "Do you know where they took Rin by any chance?"
"The sister? No. I don't… No."
"You're too unsure," it declares.
"I am?" she asks. It chuckles back at her. "What's your name stranger behind the wall?" The girl cries out, her curiosity consuming her.
"Hmm… Len. My name is Len."
"M-miku." She chokes up. It's been far too long since she's heard her name spoken. "Why are you here? It's only ever been me, this room, and the guards and those ones," she says suddenly, hoping Len has the answers she has been begging for since what seemed like the beginning of time.
"Miku." She ignores the way her heart constricts at that, writes it off as a friend of the rapidly increasing onslaught of physical ailments that are accompanying that ringing in her ears. "When was the last time you died?"
She thinks that the question is the answer. But not that she'd have the ability to reply anyways before the ringing erupts throughout her body and her vision goes black. This time, however, there is something that accompanies her to the beyond.
Something maybe a little bit like the feeling of company, in a cold, cold world