[ The cool grass of the forest crunches softly under her bare feet. She knows without knowing, without even having to look, how she must be dressed; that white dress, that charcoal black sweater. Why would she look any other way in here? For all the time that has passed and all that's happened, Ai has never really left that hallway.
It's like being the unwilling participant of some miserable tragedy. A play nobody wants to perform in but find themselves trapped on stage anyway. Skittering bugs, the wet and rotting fluid of an insect's metamorphosis. Something moulded into the form of a human and forced to play pretend. A living corpse, fooling everyone into thinking its heart was ever even beating.
... Oh.
Oh, but of course- ]
Aah... Ahaha...!
[ She'd wondered from the start just what it had been that'd drawn them together. They were both liars, of course, but surely there was more to it than that. He was so powerful and so bitterly cold, unlike Ai in just about every way he could be... But she's been wrong all this time, hasn't she?
They're the same. Of course they're the same.
What is she herself if not a corpse pretending it's still living?
Something inside of her breaks. Laughter spills out of her mouth. But even as she raises her hands to her face, her voice shudders to pieces and the noise that had come out of her as laughing turns to horrible, heaving sobs instead.
She doesn't know how long it lasts. Standing in that nonexistent wood, she cries bitter, open mouthed tears for - she doesn't know what. An ancient creature born hating itself to death. A country screaming for mercy, for suicide. A priestess reduced to a slaughter animal, two girls hated and rejected by the land they were sent to grant salvation.
Maybe for the first time, she cries for herself. For the mother bleeding out in her own home and the two children whose lives will carry the reek of her corpse forever. ]
Oberon... Oberon, I...
[ Her voice comes out in gasping, desperate breaths. ]
Me too... ahaha... All this time... I've been dead all this time too.
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It's like being the unwilling participant of some miserable tragedy. A play nobody wants to perform in but find themselves trapped on stage anyway. Skittering bugs, the wet and rotting fluid of an insect's metamorphosis. Something moulded into the form of a human and forced to play pretend. A living corpse, fooling everyone into thinking its heart was ever even beating.
... Oh.
Oh, but of course- ]
Aah... Ahaha...!
[ She'd wondered from the start just what it had been that'd drawn them together. They were both liars, of course, but surely there was more to it than that. He was so powerful and so bitterly cold, unlike Ai in just about every way he could be... But she's been wrong all this time, hasn't she?
They're the same. Of course they're the same.
What is she herself if not a corpse pretending it's still living?
Something inside of her breaks. Laughter spills out of her mouth. But even as she raises her hands to her face, her voice shudders to pieces and the noise that had come out of her as laughing turns to horrible, heaving sobs instead.
She doesn't know how long it lasts. Standing in that nonexistent wood, she cries bitter, open mouthed tears for - she doesn't know what. An ancient creature born hating itself to death. A country screaming for mercy, for suicide. A priestess reduced to a slaughter animal, two girls hated and rejected by the land they were sent to grant salvation.
Maybe for the first time, she cries for herself. For the mother bleeding out in her own home and the two children whose lives will carry the reek of her corpse forever. ]
Oberon... Oberon, I...
[ Her voice comes out in gasping, desperate breaths. ]
Me too... ahaha... All this time... I've been dead all this time too.