Chapter One: Family.
((What are you doing?!)) Mandy's mental voice came shouting, briefly returning me to the present as I walked our body up the corridor and back out into the lobby alongside Temnan 254, or Teresa as she had been formerly known as in tow behind us.
((My legs...my mind...!)) she cried in protest, clearly feeling my invasion of her memories.
((All mine, human.)) I replied back simply. ((Your limbs are mine now to use, your memories are mine to read, your mind is mine to sift through.))
((There's no way in Hell you're gonna get away with this!)) Still her voice was so brash, so angered, holding the wild edge of defiance that could only come from a first time involuntary body like a caged beast being denied its open fields, bellowing in the hearth of its enclosure and clawing the bars.
I could feel her presence thrashing beneath mine; her anger, her ferocity alone now surging her will electrically into me to gain back any sort of control, fierce efforts indeed that I crushed easily enough beneath my will. That in itself was easy enough with her failure to understand her mind was now merely an extension of my being, the control absolute.
((You know, we've enslaved plenty of races, hundreds of each said nearly the exact same thing. So if you take the time to consider how wonderfully blind your people are to what's happening, I would say I'm going to get away with this rather nicely.)) I retorted, speaking only the truth and keeping my tone glacially factual.
Although perhaps there had been a facetious edge to it that I unintentionally added, an edge I felt her positively seethe upon as she continued raging against my will.
"How's the new host, Timmron 348?" Temnan asked kindly behind me, to which I turned to face her with Mandy's smile as I thumbed her hair behind her ear.
"Still fighting, but fairly easy to control." Mandy's medium pitched voice echoed my thoughts rather snugly, I thought. "She isn't one to give up easily, but I'd say... ...a couple weeks, give or take a few hours."
She was positively stunned now, the faint sound of her own voice saying words that were not her own briefly pausing her enraged hysteria. She was completely silent and considerably wide-eyed and slack-jawed (in terms of mental senses, anyway) with her thoughts running blank, save for trying to decipher just what I meant by two weeks. But that curiosity was of no concern to me, if my estimate was correct she would discover the dark definition for herself in due time.
Temnan shared the same cruel smile I had upon my wager, my exceptionally good mood not one to be easily smothered by such cries and curses or snagged by the ill snares of the host mind writhing beneath me. "Two earth weeks, Timmron? She put up quite a struggle coming down here, are you so certain about that?" she asked, folding her arms across her chest and raising a slender brown eyebrow over faded blue eyes.
Temnan's host's face I noticed could easily be perceived to be that of a doll's beneath her control... It was only through Mandy's eyes that I could see the festively plump structure of her face… I could actually see the finely crafted roundness of her rosy cheeks, accentuated by her brown hair tied back into what Mandy called a bun.
I could see the wrinkles by her dim eyes that scrunched the structure together and gave her the complexion of an aged apple. I will tell you, that humans have such sharpened senses in comparison to that of Yeerks; they have eyes that unlock dimensions of bright color that Gedds might only dream of, or at least they'd dream of it if they had the intellect to ponder such things...
And such a colorful, encompassing world! So rich through human eyes, such secrets a world that flourishes like this must contain! The girl's memories held so much more beyond the sight, much to my steady elation; the smells of the loamy earth planting flowers in the park, of the fragrant lemons in the solution as it scrubbed off paint on the walls of the daycare center, the tantalizing aromas of soups and baked bread hanging deliciously in the solemnity of the soup kitchen's dimly lit and depressing atmosphere...
"...Timmron?" Temnan called me across the distance of the rising glee within me. "Timmron? Are you having problems?" she had curled Teresa's aged mouth into a slender smile, before I turned from both the memories and angry rantings of my host and unknowingly smiled.
"No..." I replied slowly, slightly embarrassed by how much the human mind had ironically, and silently possessed me. "But these eyes... ...These eyes are incredible! And what a glorious world of colors to see it all through!"
Temnan chuckled well naturedly, seeming to understand my plight. "Much better than the eyes of the Hork Bajir, although they clearly lack the battle capability Visser Three would prefer." she said, holding the feeble human hands out for emphasis.
"Visser Three... hm." I scoffed a little, knowing of Temnan's rather unconditional loathing for that militantly bent buffoon almost as well as I knew her entire being. I said nothing else with my host having stilled her protests, rather suspiciously with questions as to what Hork Bajir and what a Visser Three was. It wouldn't matter, she would learn what was needed in the Yeerk world, in the same due time as I would learn what was needed in the world of humans.
But I briefly noted a thought or two of protest before I voiced them aloud. "My host mind says that this assumption is wrong. That there are humans who practice all assortments of battle styles, most particularly the martial arts. They've even killed one another historically with such battle arts; perhaps if we all educated our hosts to this then Visser Three will have the brutal force he desires." I said dryly.
Temnan shook her head. "Negative. Such practices are only truly revered in a distant land called Asia. And no martial arts have caught the Andalite bandits yet, I'm to assume they're not as powerful as human media emphasizes."
She edged her way past me, a rather dulled color flaring in her eyes that read she was growing tired from all the meetings and new infestations that had transgressed tonight, eight voluntary and three involuntary, my host among them. She turned her aged face over her shoulder.
"You know, I'll hold you to those two weeks." her voice had become devious and playfully menacing, to which I gathered Mandy's belongings and began to depart myself, having noted the time.
"As harshly as you would like." I replied simply. "Until Wednesday, Temnan 254."
Now we were both alone, my host mind and I walking down the sidewalk away from the Citizens Center with a bright smile and what humans called a cheery 'spring in my step'. I still had a farce to uphold after all, that I had just come out of my first full member meeting, I had had an excellent time, I had clearly enjoyed myself...
Or so I emoted, though I feared Temnan's subtle error in her demeanor that Mandy had noted, that I was too cheerful and too happy to the point of arousing suspicion.
((There's no way you're going to fool my family.)) Mandy spoke for the first time in a long while, a bout of smugness and ill-found confidence rising in her mental voice. ((I swear to God when all this is over, I'm gonna rip you up into a thousand fucking tiny pieces.)) I mentally disregarded such threats with boredom regularly, but still I could not resist a taunt or two for my own ethnocentric divulgence.
((When all of this is over?)) I mocked her silently, immersing myself pleasurably into the cold rage that was feverishly rising in her mind again beneath my good spirits. ((Do you not understand what has happened, slave? Allow me to explain... your body, your mind, your life, your entire point of existence as of this day is all mine. You now serve the Yeerk Empire. You now serve me.))
My host's thoughts were ensnared by the anger and fear swimming within her as she felt the incontestable honesty in my voice; as arrogant as the words were, it made them no less true. I noticed that emotions heavily influenced her arguments, she was an almost admirable tactician in forcing her heart into every reply as if somehow passion made things matter, made things substantial, made things right.
((I don't serve you. You're wrong... You're wrong!)) She tried to shout it aloud, the order of course to speak smothered by my permission. ((My family knows me! They'll know you're not me! They're gonna be pretty fucking confused who Visser Three or whoever is, and I don't have any friends named Temno or whatever, I know that much!))
((They'll learn in time.)) I replied simply, unable to keep the smirk out of my voice. ((Particularly, when my brothers slither into their ears and enslave them too.))
That had done it. I felt her primal passions; her rage, her pride, her complete and utter terror seize a far more desperate control over her senses as she now flung herself against my restraints. Her arms mentally thrashed, her legs kicked and flailed, the mental realm as it were began clouding with unintelligible screams as she fought valiantly for control beneath my power. The host mind was cast chaotic with panic, her logic and confidence abandoned.
It was strange, that as I felt her essence become swallowed by the terror-driven rebellion I detected no sentient thought in the cloud of timeless rage. They were utter surges of what I estimated must have been complete and total insanity, a feverish rise in cold emotions that sent her shrieking and crying in her own head, without any idea at the moment just what she was doing or who she was even screaming at.
Bored with the display, I simply tightened my control over my host, the savagery was thankfully short-lived and left her exhausted in the corner of her mind and screaming at me the moment she could articulate what she was feeling into….less than eloquent words, sorry to say.
((You motherfucker, you stay away from them!)) She shouted and ranted. ((Stay away from my family, you fucking stay away from them!))
((I'm afraid that's an unreasonable request.)) I said with sanctimonious regret. ((If I'm going to be playing you, then it would rather be out of your character to stay away from them now wouldn't it?)) I asked mockingly, before she simply retired to silence.
Her clear and irrevocable loathing for my arrogance, my entire being and the fact I was right practically glowed in brilliance from her essence. It hit me very suddenly with a dark impact that sent me searching again through her memories, if only to lighten the mood.
She made no protest, she had predictably taken to plotting vengeance and murder, her senses in the mental state reeking of fantasies of stomping upon my vulnerable slug-like body on hot asphalt, boiling me alive on a stove and preserving me within an amber, still and helpless as a trophy on her shelf, with many others following the same morbid suit that I simply and emptily dismissed.
I had the task of searching among her vital memories to assume her role, a much more important task than crushing these thoughts as easily as I had crushed her resistance, let her imagine all she wanted, it was probably a consolation and my first act of kindness to this useless animal.
A mother...Grace, and a father... Lawrence Charles. A younger brother... Mitchell, and a younger sister impregnating the mother, six months along the nine month human gestation cycle to be named Lucy at birth. For the sake of preserving a future host body, it meant that the mother was safe from infestation for another few months.
The other two males would prove useful however, their bodies were sturdy, slender and tall, and they seemed malleable enough for a decent line of Yeerk control based on their history. The newborn human child however would not be an acceptable host for a few years, though if raised beneath Yeerk surveillance than the human child's mind was most certainly susceptible to even becoming voluntary. Until then she remained out of the question… which I suppose is what brought me to my host's thoughts on this unborn child.
She would often wonder what the new human infant would look like when the time came, if it would have the father and her brother's green eyes, or perhaps she and her mother's own soft brown eyes, or if she would have her father and her brother's short sandy blonde hair, or she and her mother's auburn tresses.
All of this had been rather jokingly wagered upon between her and her brother, already she had won their first wager that the new infant was in fact a girl. Useful information to regard the child's birth in the upcoming months. She fantasized often enough about holding the child in her arms, holding it very close to her so that she could whisper affections to it as she rocked it to sleep, smiling as the tiny child's eyes slowly fluttered shut, clenching a tiny fist, gumming open air in a murmur as she leaned deep into her heartbeat...
It was a lonesome night of dreamlike sorts; the large novelty Hello Kitty clock read a quarter past five on the far right pink wall of the quiet little nursery. She suspended her bent elbows over the crib's bars and wondered things, watched the baby slumber peacefully, wondered if this were too blessed and too sacred to perceive as real, while concealed in the soft dark.
It was a different sort of dark to her, not the frightening and consuming sort of dark that made one wrestle with and face things unnaturally. Nor was it the kind of dark that blinded the eyes maliciously and brought the scent and taste of corpses to one's mouth upon imagination. Rather it was just the right amount of dark so that one could still make out shapes and trusted colors, the dark that enveloped one warmly and brought waves of unspoken love between two beings that lulled infants and couplings to a light and grateful sort of escape. A dark that served a way to turn from the light that would reveal a whole other day to trudge through...
She reached her hand out and felt a solid beneath her fingers, something soft and sleeping and innocent. The full moon barely sank into the horizon outside the nursery window, where her mother's garden could be unevenly delineated, and the light decanted into angular and soft glows on the baby's toys, the rocking chair, and blended inconspicuously into the warmer glow of the little ladybug nightlight.
Mandy's emotions in this fantasy were pulsating warmth and absolute love and affection; she pictured so many things... Lucy smiling, laughing as she flailed her tiny little arms, toddling her first wobbly steps and blathering out her first words... The thought of such things always sent her heart fluttering with pure elation, the serene little moment always had her near tears every time she imagined it and wanted so badly for time to hurry itself...
Within this fantasy there came other memories, very pleasant times she was fond of holding onto.
She was smaller, about seven, Mitchell was five and her parents brimmed with inexhaustible youth that attracted the company of their grandfather, Jacob. The park by the lake was the family's favorite spot, the sun seemed a little warmer, the air a little richer from the fragrance of the softly rolling water, the hot dogs and hamburgers their father would cook over the flames of a rental grill a little more piquant and filling.
There were memories of the taste of the hot dogs smothered in ketchup, the feeling of the warm sun on her hair and the itch of tall grass on her skinny legs, there were memories of an ultimate and long past freedom that I felt Mandy still long for.
There was the rush of wind through her auburn ponytail as she and Mitchell took turns pushing each other on a large tire swing, the joyous anticipation as the tire creaked its way out over the sparkling little cove, gathering her courage and finally taking the commoving leap out into the lake...
Then came the innocently thrilling rush of the cool water, a momentary grace of floating and breaking the surface with a great splash, shrieking with laughter as Lawrence came wading in after her...
The weather was always enthrallingly gorgeous in these memories, the sun glimmered without a cloud in the deep blue sky, warm and admirably exhilarating... There came from this memory alone others as if the emotions and images had been conjured, spun out the ether into an inexplorable mass of time and darkness that told me I was recalling these things better than her own conscious mind could.
There came the calamity of terror and desperation as she ran from an angry and territorial swan that had made its nest by the tire swing, the frustration and anger of her first kite crashing down into the tall and dry grass, then came the child-like awe and brilliance as she watched fireworks explode into iridescent sparkles and flames, with a startling thunder that sent Mitchell screaming and in tears to his mother.
She remained by herself, watching the display from the grey murky shoreline, deciding that she wanted to create colorful and beautiful things like that one day...
((Having fun, Yeerk?))
Mandy spoke again from the back of her mind. Her mental voice steadily grew angrier, as I realized I had been replaying these fantasies and memories unto her as well, encompassing her within her past and her hopes for a future and thus she realized now how much more I had stolen from her.
((Are my memories fun to watch, Yeerk? Is it all reality TV to you? Oh, don't mind me; I'm having a fucking blast. I just wish I had some popcorn.))
I said nothing. It was within that moment that I noticed I had reached Mandy's home. A considerably larger house that the family had moved into, their former home proving too small to accommodate the growing household with the baby on the way. It was far from new to them, they'd lived there nine years now having planned the pregnancy exclusively... ...there were times she would regrettably recall their old home, lost in a haze of nostalgic luster.
Of course, I now knew these things as intimately as she did; I knew the truth behind the mysteriously cracked banister where Mitchell had struck it with his baseball bat after coming home angry from little league practice, I knew that within the doorframe into their shared bedroom were carved-in notches indicating their height over the years, I knew how much she had cried the day she found out that they were moving, and I knew she had screamed at her parents that she hated them and had run over to her former best friend Amelia's house until sundown.
Then came memories of their current home, such as stabbing her brother's shoulder with a fork when he made fun of her drawing for third grade art class, and writing letters to Amelia that were never answered...
"Mom! Dad! ...I'm home!" I yelled through the house upon entering, slinging Mandy's backpack to the floor in the foyer before trying to head upstairs.
A fairly middle-aged woman resting her hand atop her round stomach turned around from a stove in the kitchen, using her other slender arm to stir a concoction atop the burner. A very sweet aroma hung pleasantly in the thick of the kitchen and the bottom of the teal-carpet stairs, and Mandy's mother greeted me with a smile that rivaled the sugary nature of the smells. Filling for a strawberry pie, Mandy's brain offered.
"Hey honey, how'd your meeting go? You have fun?" She asked, before rather firmly adding, "and that's not where your book bag goes."
"I'm getting it, I'm getting it..." I was careful to use the exact same tired and dry tone, the exact same words, the exact same inflection as Mandy as I gathered her belongings up once more.
I couldn't help internally laughing at Mandy's absolute shock. Up until that moment she hadn't believed for one second that I could pass for her, she held on desperately to some falsified hope that her mother would look at me in vehement revulsion as I walked in, grab the sides of her head, and with enough forceful shaking loosen my grip until I came sliding out of her ear, rendering her free again and this entire experience a begotten nightmare behind her.
She was most definitely not so skeptical of my abilities now.
"Meeting was all right... Finally became a full member tonight!" I said, edging a little pride into Mandy's voice as I folded my arms with a sagacious nod; her mother briefly abandoned the sweet mixtures, all smiles and pride when she caught me near the bottom of the staircase.
"Full member? What, is that like a secret club or something? For doing all the work you did?" she was smiling warmly, masking a tired soreness that clearly marked she was worn out as Mandy was keen to guess when she smiled so softly.
Carrying Lucy was becoming a great exhaustion to her, the weight of her bulbous stomach arching her lower back in the opposite direction and swelling her ankles, revealing angularly curved varicose veins in the shade of her long skirt. Mandy was growing concerned for her mother; clearly it was a questionable condition for her to be up and about in.
"Mom, how long've you been up like that?" I asked rather than directly answering, infusing the just amount of concern into her voice, raising her eyebrow to mask the expendable vulnerability. Like the mixture of ether I measured Mandy's inflection, used her memories and expressions and with an effort I blended them easily enough into a brief fabrication of the same person beneath me like ingredients.
Hopefully enough to render my priorities malleable enough to become a subtle undercurrent, so subtle the alien nature of them would become lost from suspicion into the slipstream. Grace's familiarly airy sigh and her hands resting on her hips told me that so far I remained hidden in absolution beneath Mandy's stolen identity.
"That's none of your business. Lucy wanted strawberry pie and when Lucy wants something, she gets it." Grace smiled slyly. "So why don't you tell me what this full member stuff's about?" she asked, raising an eyebrow of her own.
I laughed dryly. "That's none of your business." I retorted ironically as I shifted the backpack's weight on my shoulder. "But yeah, I guess you could say it's all...a secret." I left off, as Grace threw a crooked smile back at me.
"Oh what, you guys doing some James Bond work? Big step up from cleaning 'Suck it' off a day-care wall." she joked, hobbling weakly over toward her brewing stove, and stirring the boiling syrup with a mixing spoon.
"Laser watches and everything!" I added sarcastically. "When's dad gonna be home?"
"Half-past ten. He's stuck closing again." Grace took now to roughly chopping the stalky leaves from a horde of plump strawberries with a carving knife, pausing only to turn an aged and suspicious eye over her still shoulder to add, "don't touch." as I drew silently toward the large bowl of plump fruit nonchalantly. "I don't know where your hands have been, double-oh seven."
I feigned a hurt expression as I drew my curling fingers back. "Pfft, fine... Disarm a bomb and this is the thanks I get." I murmured sarcastically, before pressing myself off the kitchen counter and heading back toward the staircase. "Call me when it's ready, okay?"
"Call you when I eat it all...got it." Then came the rough and muffled chops of a knife hitting a carving board behind me as I ascended the stairs and finally pressed open the door to Mandy's room.
Mandy had meanwhile been left positively stunned upon what had just happened, in a nebulous way of speaking, before her very eyes. She was silent without protest and without obstruction as I threw down her backpack and had obliviously curled her mouth smartly into a thin and wry smirk. I turned my internal attention upon the human's sick fixation on the morbidity of what was happening.
((Oh, I'll never be able to fool anyone!)) I cried theatrically, unable to hide the cruel bout of laughter. ((This was all a mistake from the start! Whatever shall I do? Whatever am I going to do now?! Surely you're going to stomp me flat, or boil me, or preserve me in some pickle jar now!))
Her silence, her unmoving stillness, her less obvious edge of hurt at the fact that her mother was as blind as I had said she would be and her newly crushed hope served only to feed my cruel impulses as I continued.
((So you finally understand what's happened, human. You finally understand that your life is no longer yours, and that with your memories, your very thoughts open to me as publicly as one of your newspapers, it won't be long before your family joins you.))
((If you bring any of them into this...)) she began slowly. ((I swear to God I'll rip you apart.))
((I personally invite you to try, slave. With every fight you rage against me, you only grow weaker. I can feel it, actually... I can feel your fear growing... I can feel your defeat drawing close... I can feel your logic and reason beginning to crack...)) the insurmountable smugness rose in my voice.
((Shut the fuck up!)) came the explosion, before she tried hiding once more beneath the calmer demeanor she had taken upon early infestation. ((Don't even talk to me. Leave me alone.))
A simple enough request, I did as she said deciding that this would do for the present. Within that outburst there had come a complete and total exhaustion flickering beneath the words, a sort of ravine she'd cast herself into, isolating the depression that came to most involuntary hosts within the first few hours past infestation. She was growing fatigued, rightly so from all of the fighting and raging and all of the circulating emotion, though she deathly feared what would happen if she fell asleep.
Having no access to my mind unless I should speak it to her, she only imagined dark possibilities that commonly ended in waking up to find us back at the Yeerk pool, her family in line at the infestation pier bound roughly by their limbs as their heads were plunged beneath the writhing surface of the sludgy pitch, my own cruel laughter echoing inside her mind briefly following the scene as it faded away into the ravine. Understandable. Most involuntaries were naturally pessimistic when they imagined abandoning their defenses for even an instant, as if they could do anything if they were awake.
((...If it's of any concern to you, it's far too early to infest them now.)) I said, working drearily upon her trigonometry homework on the little desk to the left blue wall of her abode. She didn't answer.
Fine by me, I reasoned as I leafed through a couple pages and managed to finish within the half hour of silence between us. Trigonometry was one thing she wasn't missing so long as I was here, the notion of such child's play mathematics proving difficult bringing me to reclusive laughter.
Her anger and defiance however were by no means smothered completely just yet, but for the present she was silent and cooperative which suited my needs just fine as I began her English reading. She earnestly tried to show interest, if even The Canterbury Tales meant a distraction for the time being, but that too gave way to her gloomy torrent. It astounded me, she was crushed almost moreso by her own emotions than she had been by my control to begin with.
But it made the mechanics of her mind far easier to dictate, the only concern I had was that hopefully this despair would perpetuate itself in her mind, fueled off realization and ill stupor like a black-burning fire that would without question, destroy any hope or fantasy of freedom in its path. Make things easier for me; make the mind pleasurable for me, the mechanisms broken down into something simpler that I could call my own…
"Mitch! ...Mandy!" Grace's voice broke my ongoing dullness as I mechanically snapped her books shut. "Pie's out here if you want it!"
If memory served me right, or rather if Mandy's memory served me right, Mitchell would be coming through the door about now at half past eight from the bustle and blaring of marching band practice. As I dismounted the stairs and headed for the kitchen, her memory proved infallible on that count; he came shuffling through the foyer with his tenor sax case in hand, his calloused and tan face looking darkened and beaten.
"Rough practice, band buddy?" I teased lightly, bringing his head shaking and sighing at me as he set his case down, pulled off his shoes and made a defeated trek for the kitchen, I imagine the aromas must have been entrancing by this point.
"Would have gone better if there wasn't any practice at all." he muttered darkly. "Only got half the opener on the field, the preview's in less than a month, and I swear to God Brenda can't even effing mark time without going out of step!"
He was justified to complain, I suppose. My host knew little about marching band, but with what praises of him and knowledge she had gathered from other students he was practically a prodigy at the sport, having become one of the first known sophomore section leaders in only a year's time. It seemed that he was already accomplished enough to make an ideal influential host to draw in his respective peers. The overnight band trips however could serve a problem; he would probably have to quit the band in order to serve us...
((If you think that his busy schedule is what will protect him, you're sadly mistaken.)) I said, the instant my host had thought that perhaps he would be too busy to join the Sharing.
Yes, it would require a consistent stream of persuasion but the boy was far from being out of our reach. Riiom 329 could probably deem him useful, or perhaps even Seerus 135 if the boy proved more influential than what I had gathered...
"That sucks...I guess." I sympathized mordantly; raising a slightly confused eyebrow and watching him head for the fridge to pour himself a tall glass of apple juice with a half-hearted mutter.
"Yeah." he said grimly. "It does."
"Well grab a piece of pie, it'll take the edge off." Grace proved more sympathetic than I did as it should have been, hugging him slightly around his broad muscular shoulders before heading to the counter with a carving knife in hand.
"Yeah, pie. The ultimate answer, right up there with throwing it up later!" I added cheerily, catching Grace's disturbed eye with a mean-spirited smirk that quickly fell under the ruse of an innocent smile. "What? I might go out for cheerleading!"
Grace shook her head, making her disapproval of my host's rather sardonic humor apparent. "You shouldn't joke about that, especially when Heather's working so hard on the squad."
Heather Lannings, Mandy's best friend of five years, the girl that stole a boy she liked back as eighth graders, the girl that she herself tormented regularly afterward for months on end until it all stopped one day when they were both suspended off the school bus for fighting. Understood.
"Geeze mom, if she can take a finger down her throat, she can take a joke." I said casually, taking a piece of pie from my mother as she handed it to me. Mitchell shared a roughly hidden snicker at this, though not hidden well enough to avoid Grace's disgusted look before she muttered a half-hearted good night and headed upstairs to her bedroom.
"That was pretty good." Mitchell still snickered tastelessly, a laugh of the likes that drove their politically correct mother mad.
"And probably true." I joked back blatantly, taking my slice of pie upstairs with me as I headed back up to Mandy's bedroom.
Pleasantly enough, not a sound from my host, who had taken to mining herself a deep corner in her mind where she fancied her thoughts to be still and safely masked. She thought that staying quiet and taking to calculating abhorrence in her corner would seal herself off from me, as the priest banishes demons from his church. She thought her corner an effective veil that should remain undiscovered and untouched by dark hands and thus it was something that mattered.
I of course had read into all these concepts that I still felt her skirt deep down into, like the frightened animal that has realized its mismatch with superiority. Her every thought still revealed itself to me as naturally as if they were my own when I commanded them to, thus things had only mattered for the few seconds I had been distracted out in this world that used to be hers.
The futility was almost depressing even from my own perspective; she worked so hard over absolutely nothing. She wouldn't reply if I spoke to taunt her as I had planned. She was far too busy constructing futile and empty sanctums of hate and self-pity and exhaustion. Instead I occupied myself with her memories, delighting in the aspect of showering my host's little sanctuary with the most terrible of her childhood memories that I could find, while her silence built on nauseated suspense.