Sophie wasn’t sure what she had been expecting when she woke up this morning, but it certainly hadn’t been the news that had been handed to them like it was some boring, run of the mill announcement. The second that the words left Director Blackthorn’s lips, it was like her brain synapses had stopped firing signals to one another, and instead of feeling anything, the world just went grey. Boring. Average. And then the feeling started. Even then, it was uncertain; her legs were wobbly, her perception of the world around her tilted at a precarious angle, like one wrong step would send her sliding until she slid off the very edge of the Earth itself, careening into the vast emptiness of space until she would eventually collide with the stardust that she was made out of. In that very moment, she longed for it. She longed for oblivion because at least she would be able to feel something. She looked around, looking for some kind of guidance or reaction from the people that she loved and cared about, but all she could see were blurry figures; it was as if the shock had decimated her ability to use her own vision. Some rational part of her brain told her that it had to be her power going haywire, but the rest of her brain was sliding directly towards grief, and drowned out anything rational that could explain away any of this. Her lips parted as her eyes turned back towards where Director Blackthorn had been standing only moments ago. “No.” It was no more than a choked out whisper, a verbal denial of the news that she had just been given. She didn’t want it to be true, so it couldn’t be.

She wished that was the way that the world worked.

Memories began to flood her brain almost immediately. A sweet looking girl with wide, blue eyes reaching for her hand, leading her to the cafeteria when she had lost her way in the winding hallways of the hospital they had both been imprisoned in. The high pitched and stuttering voice of the girl who treated pudding cups like they were the finest of delicacies, because here, they were. The way that she had grown accustomed to touch again, after refusing to let anybody come near her because the thought of skin-on-skin contact made her feel nauseous, but her friend had made it feel somewhat normal again. Lucy Lovelle had made the world feel somewhat normal in the time after she had been tossed into Monroeville, and now, she was gone. Dead. Of illness or exhaustion, according to Director Blackthorne.

Beneath the cold, familiar feeling of the despair that seemed to grip her from the moment that her parents had been turned against her, something else raged. Deep down inside Sophie, there were a lot of emotions clamoring to be let free, and she was so far inside her own head that she didn’t have the energy to stop them. She stood, her vision sharpening as she looked directly at the man that had delivered the news, his charming English accent grating against her ears like sandpaper. Something inside of her snapped, something else twisted, and something heated and vicious rose up inside her. Her breath came faster as she turned from the room, making her way back to the sterile, white cell that the doctors here had the audacity to tell her was her bedroom. In that moment, it had never felt more like a prison. She closed the door behind her, taking a moment to lean against it and let the gravity of what she had been told wash over her.

Lucia Lovelle was dead.

Dead.

The anger rushed back, and Sophie didn’t even think about what she was doing before she was doing it. Her mattress was flipped off the bed as she let out a scream of both pain and frustration. Anything that wasn’t bolted down was her target, and she sent it all clattering together, wanting something, anything to break and shatter the way that she felt she was. The unfortunate part of literally living in a mental hospital was that absolutely fuckin everything was designed to prevent suicide, which meant that she was hoping for something that wouldn’t come. Her door slammed open, and orderlies rushed in, restraining her even as she screamed “no” over and over, wriggling to get free. She lashed out with every single body part that she could, trying to get them to let go so that she could run, break something, break herself, anything to get some of the satisfaction that she so desperately needed. One of the orderlies jammed something in her side, and Sophie stopped thinking altogether, the last “no” frozen on her lipss as her world went black.

When she woke up, Sophie groaned. Her head was pounding, and the sterile whiteness of the room that she was in certainly didn’t help that any. She looked around, trying to get a better grip on her surroundings when she realized that this was a place that she knew very well. Solitary confinement. Sophie curled up on the floor wrapping her arms around her body as she finally felt the tears start to come. “No.” The word was choked out partway through, drowned out by the sob that caused her shoulders to shake. She didn’t want to believe it, she couldn’t believe it, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t the truth. Lucia Lovelle, her friend, was dead. The cell around her fell silent, shattered only by the sounds of low sobbing, sniffles, and the name of an innocent girl who only deserved the best repeated over and over as the girl saying it struggled to accept her death.