@ultimaet said: “I will not end the nightmare… I’ll only explain it.” / from byakuya perhaps?
The Twilight Zone Sentence Meme
Sitting in the metal chair across the desk, Sonia squirmed. Nothing about the current situation felt natural, no matter what Makoto Naegi had insisted.
When they went from pods to hospital beds, it had all been done in the same uniform. The same pale blue cotton blend pajamas that were easily cleaned and most importantly, easily identifiable. The former remnants were to be kept comfortable, handled gently until their strength and color and most importantly, minds, were realigned with who they used to be. Their appearances were the last touch, as her green pinafore, petticoat, blouse, and bow were delivered to her cabin with a sense of false cheer. She had a knack of seeing through a shiny veneer: after all, the Princess of Novoselic had given many such smiles herself, when the situation required it.
But she was a princess no longer. Instead she was...well, a woman, sitting in an uncomfortable chair whose feet were pinched and prodded in a pair of red patent leather mary janes. She must have worn heels before and she definitely did as Queen, with tall, thin stilettos that had pierced through fragile skin if she’d applied enough pressure. But so much time in the Neo World Program and in hospital had left Sonia Nevermind familiar with house slippers and not much else. At least Byakuya had permitted her sit in his presence. He looked every inch a member of the Future Foundation, behind a desk in a makeshift war office. Sonia recalled the virtual program’s layout of the island and figured they were in one of the hotel’s common rooms, in the main building where, digitally, she’d met and dined with her friends.
In contrast, she felt rather silly and useless in a diamond-encrusted hairbow, pinned to a blonde braid that decorated the top of her head. Slowly, her hair was growing back thicker, lush and with a golden gleam she barely remembered. Barely. In her hand, she clutched the newspaper that, finally, Kyoko Kirigiri had permitted her to have. One of them, anyway: she’d only been allowed the gist of papers months and years past, when devastation masked hidden codes if they were even permitted to print. Before Sonia herself and her own army likely burned the printers to the ground.
But now, the headlines, shorter and likely written by a small and overwhelmed team, displayed messages of hope, of rebuilding and growth. Hope, with its own struggles all the same, of citizens without any real leadership at all and lost as to where to look for one, or even how to properly organize.
The only answer, it seemed to her, was currently clutching that paper. With a sigh, she raised her head, blue eyes forever fatigued, to look at Byakuya Togami. As strange and uncomfortable as she was, in her bow and her heels, her surroundings presented the only source of familiarity she could, at the moment, remember. At least, something familiar that she knew didn’t exist inside a virtual program: maps and ringing phones and strategy plans. Those she very much did remember, except she’d gone from being a protector to being the enemy.
“Then I implore you to do so, Togami-san,” Sonia prompted him, voice high-pitched but hollow. She couldn’t bring herself to call him -sama, despite how much she guessed it would amuse him. For the little amusement Byakuya Togami ever showed. “Besides the mass amount of devastation I caused for my own people with the intention to burn, shoot, stab, poison, and otherwise murder my country into the ground in order for it to be rebuilt on a foundation and throne of chaos and despair, what else regarding my actions needs to be explained? I’m well aware of what happened to my family: I murdered them myself, after all.”
