"...aaaand all the way up. Welcome back, how're you feeling?"
Hana's head whirled with the familiar fog of amnesia, that gentle, unobtrusive don't think too hard about it that she'd by now learned to associate with imminent surprises. She didn't feel particularly strange, aside from the usual post-trance sluggishness, but by this point she'd learned how that meant absolutely zilch.
The numbers didn't interrupt her thoughts, they were just sort of... there. Hovering in the background the way things normally hover in the background of your mind: I'm a bit chilly, tomorrow is the big day, I should buy milk. It felt a little bit like reading them, a little bit like hearing them, but mostly like her thoughts themselves felt: indistinct, conceptual. Except that it hadn't felt like her thinking them.
"What the hell was that?"
Her hypnotist tried to remain aloof and unreadable, even succeeding for a second. Then they cracked a smile that widened into a grin, then into wild uncontrolled laughter, body shaking with some private amusement, dark hair bouncing up and down. She sat there, stunned, until they calmed down and spoke at last.
"Aha, darling, you know how you can never resist having the last word? I figured I'd have some fun with that impulse. As I'm sure you figured out by now, you get fifty words to last you the rest of the day - forty-two now - and once you get to zero... Actually, you can find that out yourself whenever the moment's there. Before lunch, if you keep going at this rate."
Her mouth had already opened by the time she bit back the instinctive retort. Okay, so that was the game. Fine. Easy, even. She'd been caught by surprise there, but now she understood the rules. How hard could it be to only talk when absolutely necessary?
"Now, did you understand all that or should I use smaller words?"
"How stupid do you think I-"
"Oh, don't go quiet on me now, I -did- still ask you how you were feeling. It's my job to check in on you, you know."
This time the impulse to snark didn't come. She took her time to decide what she'd be saying, teasing out emotions from the conflicted mess inside her stomach, converting them into language, compressing all that to a carefully-budgeted handful of words.
"...Frustrated. Impressed. Reflective."
"Very well said, dear. You're so much more thoughtful with your word choice than you normally are! Thirty-one left, right? Good luck holding on to those."
The rest of the day was like a strange, quiet version of their usual hang-outs. Having lunch. Doing the dishes together. Playing that board game they'd played a hundred times. Sometimes her hypnotist picked up the slack in conversation, launching into long rambles that didn't require much in ways of interaction. Other times, they were simply both silent. Hana hadn't ever quite realized how much there was an expectation to speak, or be ready to speak, whenever you were with another person. Now that had been taken away, everything seemed... easier, almost?
The countdown was still there, of course, and over the course of the afternoon it steadily ticked down. Sometimes she'd get tricked, slip up, and lose a few words, instinctively responding to anything from "Hey, Hana?" to "So why isn't Green Lantern part of the Avengers, anyway?".
Other times, she was forced to talk. Her hypnotist made her verbalize her entire takeout order, with no small amount of sadistic glee, and for one moment she'd been tempted to forgo her favorite just to be able to order something with a shorter name. She didn't, though - chả cá lã vong was just too good.
Even so, by the end of the day, there were twelve words remaining. She felt proud. She'd made it through. For all the fun that she admitted she'd had along the way - first and foremost, she'd been playing to win.
They'd gotten ready for bed without incident, and as she crawled in, she flashed the biggest, smuggest smile in her arsenal. Reveling in her victory didn't require words.
Her hypnotist, somewhat concerningly, was bearing some cryptic smile. A vague sense of worry crept into Hana's mind, like there was something she'd been forgetting, something really important and-
Her hypnotist snapped their fingers. The response was immediate, words jumping from her mouth like it'd been spring-loaded, the whole movement of tongue and lips no more voluntary than when you close your mouth to swallow.
Of course. Of course. This was so their style.
"Well, dear, it would seem I did not just put in that countdown this morning. It took some restraint, not using it sooner, but I'm sure you're happy I could control myself. Though I'll confess I initially imagined I'd have to use it more than four times."
She glared silently. A part of her, both resigned to her defeat and defiant to the end, proposed throwing out a string of epithets and going out on her own terms. Before she could decide if she wanted to do that, her hypnotist spoke again.
"Now, I think we both know what's going to happen here. You are so adorably sensitive to countdowns, after all, and this one is happening directly inside your own head. You're already a little fuzzy, aren't you? And it's only going to get worse as we start counting down more."
Actually, yeah, she was a little-
She was gone before her head hit the pillow.
