@exploited--innocence should know she invited this.
Rika didn’t like to be this kind of person, she’d tell herself, the currently-needleless syringe rolling in her gloved hands. It wasn’t what she wanted to do. People should be allowed to make their own choices --
It’s just sometimes people made the wrong ones -- and she couldn’t have that.
It was almost fitting that the table they’d managed to secure in the basement of the Magenta building was surplus from a hospital -- after all! Weren’t they saving people? Wasn’t this the cure? It had perhaps been to her detriment to rely so heavily on Saeran, the little lamb he was even in his darkest moments. Too soft-hearted, perhaps. But the world could not show him softness in kind, and Rika only regretted that she had to involve Ju-Li in this lesson.
Rika didn’t regret it at all -- angelic wolf, glistening fangs inviting come under come under -- as if she wouldn’t pluck Saeran from her strip by strip of flesh. This was for his own good.
Her heels clicked against the hard concrete floor -- finished, but undecorated, no sense of home to be found in this prison -- as she circled the exam table, waiting for Snow White to wake up. Leaving Rika to wonder when she became the wicked stepmother. Her dress and stockings were plain and black, like dressed for Mass, like for a funeral -- calla lilies in vases on any table that would hold them. The room not entirely unlit, but lit poorly.
“Wake up,” Rika said, in an aspartame voice -- saccharine, but empty. “You wouldn’t want to miss this.”