Tohru Honda 4/12
It had been two days since the big scare. Yet for Tohru those two days had felt like and eternity. She was paranoid, she was afraid of what lay waiting for her just out of sight. Constantly she found herself looking over her back at every slight noise. Every shadow she saw was yet another demon. Even worse was the thought of someone finding out her secret. Some person who would be willing to call her crazy and send her away. Tohru didn't want that. If people were any good at keeping secrets then no one would know about them.
The day after Tohru had woken up screaming her mother had gone out and bought her a dream catcher and sleeping pills. Tohru was grateful for the pills, they really did work, but the dream catcher was pretty much useless. She didn't believe in the bullshit. Someone had once told her that they only worked if you believed that they would. Well she didn't believe it, so they must have been right she guessed, because she still had nightmares.
They weren't the type with vivid imagery and plot lines, nor were there the usual dilemmas and villains. Tohru only experienced the dread, a restless fear filled sleep that leaves you semi conscious and exhausted in the morning. These were the breed of dreams that wished you could awaken from, only to find that it was pointless to struggle and that the only way out was to let the dark run it's course. There was nothing in her nightmares, Tohru didn't even know what she was afraid of, it was a faceless fear. Perhaps the unknowing made it all the more terrifying.
She would awaken to the occasional fleeting whisper, which she had concluded was the sound of her nightmares fleeing to darker places, away from the luminous sun. Once in the shower Tohru thought she heard a murmur of a voice in the background of the rushing water, but dismissed it as a phantom of her minds creation. Tohru heard many of these "Could be" whispers, never being able to decide if they were fact or fiction. For her the preferred explanation was paranoia left over from her night scare. In her mind she'd yet to recover form the shock of her ghastly encounter.
The Mid afternoon bell rang signaling the start of lunch. Crowds of students burst into the halls and crowed the doorways of classrooms while they tried to get wherever it was they were going to. Tohru sighed and watched as the last of her classmates filed out of her science room. She smiled to herself, 'good day so far,' and picked up her things.
Tohru's footsteps echoed lightly off the walls as she made her way to the second floor lunch room. The bell signaling the start of the next block had sounded as she reached her locker, but it didn't matter since she was going to lunch, hopefully, to see Uo and Hana.
"Well I hope you guys are there. It would be a shame if you weren't." Tohru rounded a corner then stopped. She had heard something strangle.
It was an odd metallic clanging, like the sound a metal tray makes when it's hit, only diluted as if it were far away. the sound gave Tohru the eerie sense of being in two places at once, for lack of a better description it was like being up close and personal with an echo.
Despite her heavy feelings of uneasiness curiosity got the better of her, and Tohru stayed where she was.
Ms. Minako stepped around the corner of the hallway and into the adjacent corridor. She was on her way to her next period class, which would be starting within the next 15 minutes. Noriko, that was her first name, always like to give herself time to prepare and go over her lesson plans before the start of a class, which is why she was heading over so early.
After she rounded the corner, Noriko was pleasantly surprised to see a student from her previous class, Tohru Honda. She knew her to be a fine student, Tohru was always kind to her peers and never gave Noriko a problem teaching. She flashed her student a soft smile and a slight nod in her direction. "Nice to see you again miss Honda." Noriko said.
Ms. Minako was perturbed by the reaction she was given by her student. Tohru stared at her, eyes wide and gasping for breath. Miss Honda had the look of something who wanted to run and hide. Noriko was upset to see the girl like that, what was the poor child so afraid of? She saw that, with much effort, Tohru had taken a step back. The girl was clutching her bag so tightly that her finger had turned white.
"Tohru.." She said gently, desperately wanting to kill and fear within Miss Honda.
Tohru turned and ran away.
Tohru burst through the bathroom door and ran into one of the stalls, slamming the door shut behind her before sliding the latch into the lock. She collapsed onto the toilet then rested her head in her lap, all the while taking deep breathes to calm her racing heart.
"A demon." The brunette told herself quietly.
"Or just a creation of my paranoid mind." Tohru added, the statement was no where near as confident as the first.
She covered her face with her right hand then paused to contemplate what she had just scene.
Her teachers heels had been the cause of the metallic clangor, but the body they were connected to was not the same as it had been fifteen minutes ago. First off, Ms Minako's shadow was all wrong. Given the lighting, it should not have been on the floor moving on it's own accord. Her little shadow seemed to be fidgeting, waiting impatiently for it's master to move.
As the eye traveled upwards nothing seemed out of ordinary, there were no other signs of the occult, until it reached the shoulder areas. There was a darkness spanned across it, the normally blue oxygen pumping veins were black, as if stained from a sinister poison. Lapping at the edges of her mouth was yet another living shadow. In fact, Tohru noticed that it seemed to bleed from all of her teachers available orifices, down her neck from within her ears and her eyes. That was the other thing, the icing on the cake, were her eyes. Two completely black soulless looking beads, they were like masks made to shut out the person underneath.
It was perhaps the most terrifying thing she had ever seen. For, at least she was graced with the luck of not seeing her assailant the previous night. Standing before her was a dead, soulless, walking corpse, bleeding a wretched darkness with evil nourishing it's veins. The thing standing before Tohru was not her teacher, it was a monster, a vile creature that defied every scientific law she knew. An Abomination that should be dammed for daring to slink it way through the halls of her school, and for standing there in front of her.
To put it simply, it made her skin crawl.
Minako's mouth was pried open by the cursed black and spoke to her. "Nice to see you again miss Honda." It said.
Tohru was assaulted by several voices sounding in unison. They masked over their hosts true voice, leaving Minako's true voice distant and faint.
She gasped and stepped back, away from the inhuman echo.
Tohru could hear the air flowing swiftly down her lungs as it came in short ragged breaths. She did not want this thing to speak with her. Nor did she wish to engage in conversation with it. And, she especially did not want it to use someone she knew as a puppet to scare her.
He breaths came in louder now, sounding loudly in her ears, drowning out the sounds her teacher's stolen body was emitting. However, Tohru saw the word mouthed on Ms. Minako's lips, her name.
"Tohru." Dark spidery webs inched forth from the shadow, asking for her.
Tohru turned and fled from her puppet teacher, and the beast within it. That thing, that dark thing, would not address her. She would not allow her name to be tainted and sullied, to be spoken by their voice.
Young miss Honda's footfalls echoed off the white tiles as she ran down the hall.
The bell ending lunch rang. Tohru gathered her things and stood to open the bathroom door, readying to leave for class. She didn't know what to think as she joined the throngs of students in the hall. Maybe she was paranoid, or perhaps there were demons harassing her. Though, what scared her the most, was the idea of being crazy.
Needless to say, her day was ruined.
a/n Blahh this took forever! I actually did layout a good chunk of the fic..now I just need to commit to it.