holy shizzlebiggle guys this is it. this is the second to last chapter. wow. luckily there's like four more books after this tehe --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- trigger warnings: damn lot of grief --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOT MUCH LEFT TO IMAGINATION Catherine, amicably, was screaming. When most people think of screaming as an action, they think of terror, of bloody knives and scream queens. This was not that sort of scream. It was the kind of scream that ripped open your throat, raw and primal, mixed with rage and disbelief and grief. And it wasn’t an ashamed scream, either. There wasn’t any worry for who or what saw or heard her - let the world see what they had done. When the package had arrived, she had already been numb with grieving. Her mind felt as though it had been drowned and left somewhere deep underwater, and all the sounds around her were muffled. She sat locked in her room, Heaven’s routine going on outside without her in it. And then, through the haze, the door rang with no one on the other side. She’d stumbled up, pushing her stringy bangs away from her eyes as she almost instinctively pulled the door open, using the wall beside her for support because she couldn’t stand on her own. Outside was a single package, brown and unsuspect. Her mind didn’t process the Satanic Package watermark stamped dutifully in the corner of the box’s face, simply passing over it to pick up the package senselessly, peeling back the tape with limp fingers. Her eyes, blankly, stared at the contents. Then she dropped the package and sat back hard on the floor inside the door. Shaking, Catherine drew herself up into a ball, whispering over and over, “Who would - why would - how -” in an incessant loop. Inside the box were the remnants of a soul. Stuck to the lid with a square of clear tape was a note, followed by a Sharpied-on heart: Thought you’d enjoy the leftovers. ♥ It was nearly a minute before she could react, but it felt like hours, sitting there quivering. When she finally could, she screamed. The open box went flying across the landing, and she started dumbly at it for a second, barely even aware of kicking it. “You monster!” she shrieked into the sky. “You monster! How could you?” The world was spinning, and yet it still went on, didn’t react, didn’t stop and give her time to calm herself. “How could you? You’re all monsters! All of you!” She was screeching now, leaning over the railing of her balcony and screaming, screaming at the world and the people and God and why would they do this? What did she do to deserve this? What could she have done? Mitsuri hadn’t deserved it. Mitsuri had given herself up and she should have been saved, there should have been justice and the good guys had to win. They had to. And yes, that monster was gone and dead, locked up in the Abyss below, but Mitsuri was gone too and so it wasn’t really a win. It couldn’t be. “[eff]ed up,” Catherine said through clenched teeth, clutching her knees to her chest. “What a [eff]ed up system. What a [eff]ed up world.” She didn’t know about the world - not really, but she knew enough of what was real that she was able to come to a conclusion herself. It needed to end.
