Worm
The pen in Es’ hand hovered over the paper, unmoving. The daily log form was only halfway complete, and yet Es had suddenly lost their concentration and could not recover it for the life of them.
They were prepared to face hostility from the prisoners. They were prepared to sit through long hours of nothing. They were even prepared to occasionally find fur in their food. They were not prepared to be assaulted by phantom melodies at random times without warning. To think that they thought they understood how hard their job would be when they had only just dealt with Haruka...
Abandoning the form, Es stood from their desk and left their room. They had tried waiting for it to go away before to discover that it rarely works. What they needed was to trick their mind into thinking of something else.
As though Milgram itself knew what they sought to achieve, such an opportunity appeared before them as soon as they entered the corridor.
“Mikoto? What are you doing here at this hour?” Es asked. “This corridor may be available to you outside of meal and shower times, but...wouldn’t you rather be talking with the other prisoners?”
“Huh? Oh, Warden!” His signature innocent smile sat on his face. “Yeah… I think I lost one of my earrings while I was showering. The others are busy, so I didn’t want to bother them. Could you help me find it?”
Es sighed. They shouldn’t be too friendly with the prisoners, but this was as good a distraction as any. “Alright. I’ll help you. Don’t expect me to do this regularly.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll ask someone else next time. Thanks a lot though!”
Es had decided near the beginning that showers would be used on a daily basis every morning, with female prisoners going first. Prisoners could opt out of showering if they wished, but not for more than two days in a row. As far as they had seen, Mikoto showered pretty regularly every other day. Hopefully his earring hadn’t had that much opportunity to move…
“Okay… I usually shower in this stall, so it should be… Huh. It’s not here.”
“Why this one?”
“Oh, well, Haruka likes to shower in that stall, because it’s closest to the door. He had some trouble with the faucet the first time, so I took the one next to him to help him out and, you know, make sure he didn’t have too much of an issue with anything else. He talks to me a lot, so I guess I just kept using this one.”
“I see.”
While Mikoto inspected Haruka’s apparently-preferred stall, Es moved to the other end of the room. There were ten stalls in total, in case it was decided that the prisoners all shower at once. For a room used every day, it was remarkably clean. Jackalope probably took care of that too, somehow.
Nothing looked out of place. Nothing glittered in the corner of their eye or made a crunching noise under their foot. Each successive stall held more nothing than the last. Where could this thing have-
“Hey, what song is that?”
They looked up to find Mikoto suddenly next to them. It dawned on Es all at once how tiny they were compared to him.
“Oh, am I in your space? Sorry about that.”
“It’s fine. Just approach with more care next time. But what are you talking about?”
“The song you were singing just now! Something like ‘Nee nande ita ita itai no yamete’... Ah, I forgot the rest of the words already. It sounds really catchy though!”
“Catchy…?”
So they had been repeating the melody without even being aware of it? This was hopeless.
“I guess that you’ve said you’d be examining our crimes through songs… Well, it makes sense that at least one of them would eventually get stuck in your head in that case. Oh, by the way, I found my earring. Thanks!”
“I’m...glad to hear that.”
As they exited the shower room, Es worked to suppress a groan. They were only four songs in, but if this was what was waiting for them… They didn’t even want to think about it.
Not that they could stop themself.
Ita ita ita...