Hello. Thanks for taking the time to click on this story ^^ This is the first thing I've ever posted on Fanfiction...and the first writing piece I've posted in a long time, actually. I don't mind ratings and reviews, but I'm kind of hypersensitive to criticism (sounds stupid, I know...), so please don't leave anything cruel behind...

Anyways, this is a headcannon of mine based on the videogame Ib. The headcannon itself is hard to explain without spoiling anything for people who haven't played the game yet, so hopefully, it makes sense. To be as vague as I can: instead of being burned, she was cut.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, Ib is a Japanese horror-style game made by a person named Kouri using the RPG Maker 2000. All characters in this short story belong to him respectively. It's a free download game, with a lovely storyline. I encourage you to play it if you haven't yet, or watch Let's Play playthroughs on Youtube (my favourites were by Pewdiepie and Cry- aka, ChaoticMonki, if you were curious!)

But enough of my rambling. Hope you like it~

- Maple/Flounce

Mary All Alone

The small blonde girl wasn't sure how long she'd been sitting there.

Solitary in the shadows of a corner, with her knees drawn close and her head buried down into darkness, it easily felt like forever.

Mary had never been one to have a sense of hours and minutes. All she knew was that it had been a very long time.

Yes. It had been a while.

Such a horrible, lonely, very long time in this Gallery.

The girl in the emerald dress shifted for the first time in ages. Wavy golden locks spilled over her shoulders and hooded her expression with all the perfection of a painting. She was, of course, a painting. A collection of colours smeared across canvas to impersonate a human life and nothing more. Tentatively, Mary reached up with a shaking pale hand no larger than that of a nine-year-old's and traced the horrific slash that fractured her face from forehead to cheekbone, cutting right across her nose and separating one big blue eye from the other. A soft, pained whimper escaped the child's mouth as she pulled her fingers away. They were covered in skin-tone paint. As if she were bleeding. As if she could bleed like a real person.

"Ib...why…"

Why did you leave me alone?

Her voice, the only noise in the whole dim room, was soon devoured by the merciless jaws of silence. There were no more voices anymore. Even her sobs had died away eventually. It was just nothing again, as it always had been. The quiet nothingness of the Gallery. Her home. Mary bit the corner of her lower lip and tried to stop tears from sliding down her newly disfigured face. They were bright aquamarine- watered down blue paint leaking from her eyes that seemed to glow an iridescent hue through the gloom.

The Gallery had always been such a terribly quiet place. She'd been in every room a thousand times, but nothing seemed to change. Nothing ever did change, nor did it seem like it ever would in the future. There was no future. Or past. Only the present. The Gallery was a place without age or date. It lacked the confining chains of time. The only limits were the very walls it was made of.

The dolls and mannequin heads, the moving portraits and headless statues; all of them the girl was dearly fond of. But throughout the entire Gallery, there was not a single person like her to talk to or play with.

Consequently, Mary's imagination had flourished.

Her imagination had taken a bleak world and splashed it with colour. It had encouraged her to create things. She used her crayons to draw houses- the pink one was where she lived -and roads and forests to pass away the eternity. But every time a new person from the Outside came, she couldn't stop herself from asking them questions. Was eating at cafes fun? Did they have any friends? What did rain feel like? What was Christmas?

With every question she asked, the more intrigued she became. The more she inquired about their lives, her desperate want for freedom grew stronger. Ib had been the most interesting person to come to the Gallery by far. She was about the same age as Mary, and the nicest person she'd ever met. No excessive screaming, or crying, or complaining. Mary had wanted Ib to stay here with her in the Gallery and play games and talk forever. Then, after they got bored of drawing houses and playing with the dolls, they could've jumped through the Fabricated World together, and Mary would have finally been real. That was how forever worked…right?

But now Ib was gone, and Mary was alone again.

And it was all thanks to a complication named Garry.

Hugging her knees, the girl's eyes flickered evasively across the floor. Drops of beige paint slid from the bridge of her nose and landed on the wooden boards in splatters. She didn't really want to look at the damage that must've been done to her portrait to cause this much pain. But she had to…she had to see what had happened…

Golden locks swung in perfect symmetry as Mary glanced up at the wall she'd for so long been avoiding.

It was a beautiful painting, really. Maybe even a masterpiece. A little girl in a green dress wearing a blue ribbon-tie around her neck stood in the center of it, smiling with her hands clasped in front of her and pale yellow roses unfurling across the ground. The little girl in the portrait was absent at the moment, leaving only a blank, torn canvas behind. That was how it looked when she wasn't resting in it. Mary winced and gave a shiver. Nobody had hurt her this badly before.

Nobody except him.

The last thing she'd seen before he had taken Ib away was his hand tearing the fabric on which she was painted. Garry ripping her head in half had been the last thing Mary saw before the raw agony of it all had buckled her knees.

Nothing; absolutely nothing could compare. Not the wretched empty feeling inside of her, or that time she'd tripped and hurt her ankle. Mary stared at the marred portrait without blinking as the realization finally soaked in.

Ib and Garry were gone. She was never going to escape…and she was alone again.

Mary grit her teeth together and squeezed her eyes shut as stinging hot tears poured from them anew. Her palms slammed against the floor, fingernails gouging into the wood as rage and jealousy surged through her body.

"It's not fair!" She shrieked the words with unearthly violence. "It's not, it's not, it's not!"

All she'd wanted was a friend.

She just wanted a friend who wasn't made of paper and paint. She wanted to hear more stories about how Ib had gone to school and made friends. Mary wanted to go to school and make friends, too. She wanted to taste macarons, and run outside in the winter to make snowmen and have a mother yelling at her to put on a hat because she was worried about her catching a cold; and maybe have a birthday party, if it wasn't too much trouble. She didn't want to be a painting anymore. And she certainly didn't want to be all alone.

She'd tried so hard to make Ib like her better than Garry…but no matter how big of a rift she caused, or how much she tried to distract her, Ib always worried about the cautious, purple-haired man until they found him again. Envy flared through the girl, making her shudder furiously.

If he'd just stayed put and died like a good boy to take her place in the Gallery, everything would've been different. Everything would have been different, and so much better.

Streaks of blue tracking down her face, Mary cast a wild look around the room, blonde hair whipping around the girl and making her look more like a demon than a child. Her eyes landed on a section of the floor where a few blue petals lay scattered next to the pallet knife that she had dropped when Garry tore her portrait.

All she'd wanted was freedom.

"I was so…close!" Her voice tore like a ragged snarl from the back of her throat as she crawled on her knees towards the knife, hand grabbing the handle in a death grip that she would have loved to place around the purple-haired man's throat.

Rage fueling her motions, Mary stabbed the floor over and over again as if it were Garry himself, tears streaming down her face and forming a puddle around the fallen blue petals as she screamed her anger into silence.

"He hurt me…"

Silence was deafening.

"He took away Ib…"

It was maddening.

"I hate him."

It made you lose your mind.

"I hate him!"

But it wasn't as if the little painted girl would know a thing about that.

With a final savage stab at the floor, the pallet knife snapped in two. Mary's clenched fist beat uselessly into a sorrow-soaked mixture of chipped wood, broken metal, and pulverized rose petals. She stilled for a moment, shaky breaths rattling through her small body. Slowly, her anger began to drain. A hollow, hopeless feeling clutched at the girl with bruised fingers. The unbridled rage in her eyes flickered out and left a sad little husk of a girl in its wake.

Mary stayed in that position, staring numbly at the floor, for a long time. In her mind, Mary replayed the earlier scene where she had been advancing towards a frightened Ib on the stair landing and suddenly been knocked flying by Garry. He always had been the biggest nuisance with the worst timing. And as she lay there on the floor with her skull cracked open, maintaining just enough of a grip on her consciousness to keep one eye open, what had she'd seen, but the girl she had wanted to so desperately to gain the affection of hugging him. Like he was a hero who had just slain the monster under her bed.

Ib had been scared of Mary. Maybe she even hated her now….and who could blame her? Who would ever want to be friends with a painted horror such as herself?

Mary probably would have sat there staring at the floor for a long time, except a nudge at her leg suddenly beckoned the girl from her deep thoughts.

Peering past her tangled golden locks, the girl was quite surprised to see a doll by her side.

It was one of the disfigured blue dolls that wandered the Gallery; the kind with the messy black hair, grin, and big red eyes that Mary thought were the cutest things in the world. This doll was wearing a pink dress. It seemed quite familiar for some reason...like a memory that she couldn't quite recall…then again, most dolls looked the same…and it seemed to be holding something. Sniffling a bit, Mary blinked away the last of her liquid sorrow and swiped the azure water off of one cheek.

"What's…-" she trailed off as the tears cleared from her vision and she saw plainly the object in the dolls hands. It dismissed all confused thoughts.

A rose.

Her yellow rose.

Making a small noise and unsettling grin stretching wider across its cloth face, the doll held the fake flower towards her in a motion to take it.

Mary stared for a moment. The kind gesture went straight to the heart she didn't have. A small smile appeared on the girl's scarred face.

"Thank you!" She giggled, reaching out and carefully taking the rose from the doll. It was as if Mary had forgotten all about how angry and sad she'd been just minutes before. She held the flower close to her blue-ribbon tie, admiring the soft yellow hue of its synthetic petals while starting to happily chatter to the doll about how pretty it was. The doll only made tiny noises in response, but they seemed to form intelligible words to the girl.

"We should play kagome kagome later, with all of your friends, too," Mary suggested brightly, shifting her legs underneath her in preparation to stand up. It was a shame that Ib wouldn't be able to join in…but it was her fault for leaving. The doll in the pink dress nodded in agreement and grinned somehow wider, taking a few steps forwards towards the door and urging her to follow.

Silence was a strange thing, if you haven't gathered that by now. It comes and goes as it pleases- and the Gallery was no exception. Just then, silence came rushing back. It opened its jaws and returned the obscene amount of noise Mary had made back to her. Only, it wasn't her voice. And they weren't her words. It was somebody entirely new and different.

How fascinating.

"Where am I!?" the hysterical sobbing came from somewhere out in the Toy Box.

How did they even get into my box…?

"Oh god, somebody please help me…"

Maybe I ought to go greet them.

Mary's expression went blank. Her eyes, which had been brimming with joy just moments prior, where suddenly devoid of all feeling. They left only cold calculation in their place. Slowly, the girl's hand slid across the floor and wrapped around the hilt of the broken pallet knife, dragging through the mixture of tears and flower metals and beige paint in the process without eliciting any sort of reaction.

I don't want them to be lonely.

Mary rose to her feet and swayed in a search for balance. Her head was still angled towards the floor, a curtain of wavy blonde hair falling to hide her face.

Lonely…like me…

Flower in one hand and weapon in the other, the green-clad monster disguised as a sweet little girl took a step towards the door.

Then another.

"Anybody…?"

And another.

"…Please!"

How perfect. How wonderfully perfect. That poor person out there…must've been terrified…she bet they missed their friends. And eating at cafes…and making snowmen…and having birthdays…

I wonder if anybody will notice them gone…

Mary looked up with a smile just as crooked as the slash across her face, a pale-faced nightmare moving slowly through the shadows. It left no guess as to what she planned to do with the knife clutched in one hand. She'd been in this Gallery for a while. Such a horrible, lonely, very long time…

But that was all going to be over soon. Now she was going to get out. A raspy giggle escaped from her mouth.

She was going to see Ib again after all.