The days when she’s with her Những người bạn are the hardest. Because there’s something wrong, and she knows it, but a force is keeping her from telling them. So she’s quiet, silently choking on the words she’ll never say. “Don’t trust me. Don’t come near me. I’m sick. I’m not who bạn think I am.”
But she can’t say it, and they can’t hear it.
And that’s when she knows she’s really, truly, alone.
So when they ask her if she’s alright, she nods, and they know it’s a lie, but they don’t say so. “Leave her to her thoughts,” Aisling might say. “She keeps her secrets for a reason,” Delta would explain. But not even they can see that behind her glasses is an unknown pain, a threat to her life, one she can’t explain to even herself.
At the end of the day, she’ll even push Eric from her, hoping he gets the message, that she needs time to think. Sometimes he understands. Sometimes he’s afraid for her, afraid she’ll relapse, she’ll fall a victim to self harm. But he trusts her. So he lets her go.
In her room, she collapses, and whatever vault, kho tiền her emotions have been stored in unlocks. Tears start to spill and she lets out silent screams of anguish and torture, the hate in her released in a ball of furious instability. Eventually she’ll fall over, sobs wracking her body, scorch marks on her hands and everywhere in the room. A questioning voice echoes in her mind, and, eventually, the room itself.
Glistening vàng turns to sapphire blue, and Phoenix kneels over Fin in a motherly way. The younger, bởi many years, is nothing but a wreck now, yet the spirit does not mind. “Kyra,” she murmurs, as caring as possible. “What plagues you?”
And Kyra shakes her head, full of regret, and sighs out, tears trekking down her face. “I don’t know,” she responds, equally as quiet and calm, but void of emotion. “I really don’t know.”
The spirit does not, can not touch her. So Phoenix gives up, sits on the mattress, and waits for the fit to end.
This happens too often now for someone not to see. But Kyra is a child of the Bat. It’s easy for her to hide things from others. It’s even easier to hide it from her sisters and brothers. There’s something terrible living in her, something not even she knows, and no one may ever know. She has a theory. She hates the theory. Logic will not apply again if she acknowledges it. So she ignores the evil hisses and whispers in her head that do not come from Phoenix. Having two voices was fine. Three...
It’s making her insane.
And she starting to like it.
She doesn’t know why she can suddenly translate binary like it’s a native language. The nghề viết văn on her tường is completely foreign to her, and how it got there, and why it’s blood red. There are blank spaces in her memories. But this is a part of her now, she understands.
And as the night falls over the mountain, a place of tình yêu and trust and calm, Kyra fells none of these things. All she feels is a sense of horrible guilt, of restless envy and sickening bloodlust. She cannot close her eyes without seeing all of them dead, and her hands soaked in blood, but she learns to separate herself and become indifferent about it.
The last thing she hears each night before unconsciousness is a harsh, icy whisper, calculating and cruel.
You will return.
And eventually...
She does.