○✖○✖○—-{The more he spoke, the lesser she felt she could believe her judgement in discerning whether or not his presence was hallucinatory or real. Strolling into her room, perching down on her bed… Initiating small talk and peppering her mind with charming, fake implications of rekindling some kind of ‘bond’. Brittle bones bedded beneath tired, withering muscle and blanched skin refused to lift her weight, protesting even as she shifted as to sit a little straighter— a futile effort to somehow feel intimidating. Perhaps she wasn’t fond of what was popularly known as the ‘monster treatment’— being given harsh judgement before being spoken to… However, she required to feel as though she could win in a fight, should she have to. Her pride was like plexiglas— a scream waited stubbornly in her throat. She fought to swallow it down as she listened to what he had to say.
There were very few people she could initiate any kind of idle chat with— and he certainly wasn’t one of them. Did he even know what he had caused? To attempt to recover from the madness they had all spiraled into after being lulled by his vision of an ideal world was already a difficult feat, an incredibly challenging battle with one’s own mind to believe that things could potentially get better, that they could move forward. Of course, the elders amongst the Future Foundation’s organization were still distrustful, waiting for the remnants of despair to fall again. They were just waiting for an excuse to pull their triggers on them, to get rid of them before they could allow their poison to taint the soil of the world they were attempting to rebuild. To wake from an almost certain death to be confined to a single hospital room for so many months— constantly observed and monitored…
Her mind wasn’t in the best place. For a long while— it was a matter of just learning to lift her head, recovering from paralysis, moving her lips to form words. A living soul locked inside of a corpse, a shell of a person who once was strong and feared. She’d already made such progress. Once she could move without her legs giving way beneath her, she would be able to attempt to use her shinai— to relearn her footwork and the techniques she had worked so hard to obtain. Whilst she was unhappy in such an environment… to leave would certainly stall her recovery, wouldn’t it? The supply on medication she relied on so heavily to sustain the imagined pain of impalement. The very suggestion of leaving this place with him was far from her mind, at the moment.
While she ached for purpose, to actually get out of this bed and do something… Fuyuhiko had left her behind. He’d grown after her ‘death’ and was a stronger, better man because of it. She was proud and yet… she wanted to catch up as soon as she could. Oftentimes it felt hopeless. Her past self would have followed the shaman without a second thought, whatever his goal was… She’d acted as a simple tool then as well. Performing one task after the next, obedient and compliant without much struggle.
Cerise hues snapped with accurate precision, away from her weapon and directly at him. They tapered to slits— an impressively vicious glare, for a patient confined to a hospital bed. Leaving? Where would they go? While she ached to go outside, to be freed from this place that consistently reminded her of weakness… while it was enticing— she wasn’t going to fall into his hands, putty to be shaped to his liking. She was no longer a ‘tool’ so easily manipulated by command.
And why her, of all of them? Was her mindset really so weak that he felt he could target her? To see the world around her through the mindset of that of a simple tool… having any will of her own in the past was unfathomable. It was only after a brutal execution that she could even begin to believe herself as something more…
Left relying on a sterile hospital room for survival left her hollow, feeling akin to an object. Not a tool that could be used to accomplish anything, of course. More so… A sword left in a closet, broken in two. Perhaps a tool associated with memoirs and nostalgia that a master figure was unwilling to throw away. But much too broken to make use of. She lacked personality or identity to keep her mind at peace when she couldn’t otherwise use her body to occupy herself.
"You… you don’t even know…”
Whilst they could take part of the blame, following him had caused all of the occurrences on that godforsaken island. A sensation of emotion swelled and her hands curled into tight fists at her side, flesh over her knuckles whitening. Perhaps the prospect of being considered one of the weakest links served to sink a dagger into her chest. Fueled her anger. When one’s body was weak, who relied so much on strength… And their mind was a mess…
"To recover from execution I still require time… And treatment…" Her hands feathered across the bed so they were balanced vertically beneath her shoulders, squared. She gripped gently at the mattress and attempted to straighten herself up. Her arms ached with protest— but it was something that she did manage to accomplish. Her masked glare, while threatening, held cracks of nervousness in the way that her brows angled and in the beads of sweat that’d accumulated on her forehead. A rising temperature that came with fever and resurfacing memories.
"Bocchan intends to visit tomorrow. I cannot leave." She tried to sound certain, despite the small amounts of evidence on her expression that she was hesitant of her own motives, her clouded judgement. "For you to expect that I would so readily leave with you…"