Sacred Stone [Murasaki, Ryouko]

She hated it here, everyone was looking at her and around her. Her head couldn't handle it. People staring at her. Was it pity, disgust, or fear? She couldn't tell from some of the shinigami that attended her. It had been nothing but pain so far, whether it was in her head or in her body. It was like her body was constantly deprived of nutrients and trying to find them elsewhere.

Ryouko couldn't tell them that though. She kept her mouth shut now and tried to get through this whole thing but then she was staring face to face with the captain commander which made her eyes water. It must be really bad if she's here, maybe she's here to say that she's going to be experimented on, that she'll be contained, maybe she'll say they'll try to execute her.

It could be good news, maybe they found a way to reverse whatever she'd done, maybe they knew what she had done. Isn't that just a little too optimistic though? How stupid of her to even consider things like that.

She didn't tell Murasaki no, who in their right mind told the captain commander no? Ryouko couldn't say yes either. Shrinking back into the bed meekly like inactivity was the safest course of action for her.

She was a shinigami... Was she? She no longer felt like one. She had been leaking reiatsu uncontrollably since she had recovered. Maybe it wasn't problematic because it was just the constant flow of her regular power but the simple fact remained that it wasn't depleting.

The things around her were also different, instinctually she felt herself taking from them. It was like all the memories of all he people that had laid in this bed before her were being siphoned away, absorbed into her like a sponge. Did she say anything about that?

"No I can't."

She murmured in response to the reassurance, her eyes squeezed shut like she was upset from the words themselves. She couldn't be normal anymore, not like she was now. She wasn't even herself anymore so how did she even find some semblance of normality?

Even if she got out of this without being imprisoned or tested on to find answers, she couldn't imagine herself being anything but some kind of freak people would want to leer at. So her tears ran down her cheeks and she told the strongest shinigami in the whole wide world the situation for what it was.

"I want to be normal again but I can't!"

Fix it... She remained guarded as she bit her lip in frustration and anger, the unknown part of it ate away at her. She did hate it, she was scared of it, but she also was aware that part of her felt happy after the shock wore of. She shouldn't be and it was stupid to be happy about feeling herself change, and yet she was prettier, she didn't feel tired as much, she had no health problems.

It was all too perfect though, like when people gave her food and she couldn't deal with the idea that they were doing it all out of kindness. There was always the suspicion that they'd treat it like a debt to make her give something up later or do something she didn't want to do.

"What if it's too late..."

She asked, a little rhetorically, she could overhear the people attending her speak sometimes. Statements like fused with her were thrown around. Ryouko thought she was pretty stupid but she felt confident in being able to guess that it meant there was something still in her.

The questions in her head were if it'd kill her, have awful side-effects, or something even worse.

She was better than her, she could just think to herself 'oh, it could be fine so why worry haha' and it was all better. They weren't the same regardless of whether or not she was a shinigami or something else now. She curled up protectively, everything still felt wrong to her but everyone else would take care of it. The same people that she'd been looked down on all this time, they'd fix it.

Not her though, she couldn't fix it, and even if they could fix it. Why bother, those freaks probably wanted to study her more than help her go back to normal. Even if she did get better then what? Be eternally indebted to this woman the same way she felt when the nice woman gave her bread when she was younger?

Accepting help was in itself a plague.