Banishing Bandits

Her hero.

(lil-kissy)

Annie brandishes her bat at anyone even looking at Kisa funny and holds her tightly with her other arm.

"Let her go!"

Annie screams as loud as she can, though barely a peep makes it through the shadows gagging her. Her free hand claws at the murk, slipping through it like slime only for any wounds she makes to quickly fill back up again.

She cannot see what's happening or where she's going, but she can feel it. She can feel the bone-deep chill slowly crawling up along her body as she starts sinking into wherever she's being dragged.

Annie yelps as the grip becomes painful and tries to pull away, but it holds fast and her small body doesn't have the physical strength to fight it. Her heart is now pounding in her chest hard enough to hurt and when it screams in her ear and then starts yanking her away, she screams in terror and kicks out.

Annie shivers and her heart beat picks up pace. There's something distressingly familiar about this sudden presence and she whimpers slightly in fear.

Annie's lips thin, the corner of her mouth lifting in a grimace, and her eyes look off over Joey's shoulder.

A bead of sweat rolls down her cheek.

Joey plunks down just the biggest tub of cheese balls you’ve ever seen in front of his daughter. Her name is sharpied on the lid.

“These are yours. The ones in the TV room are mine. Got it?”

Annie stares up at him. Looks at the gigantic jar and then back at him.

In the last year and a half she’s jumped from therapist to therapist, failing to find one that clicks with her just right until the last two months. In that time, and with a new alteration to her medication, she’s finally started to show improvement. 

She’s started going out more, she’s started reaching out to old friends and engaging in old hobbies. She’s managed to get a part-time job to take up some of her excessive free time. She’s starting to eat... better, she’s starting to lessen her addiction to some of those bad habits, replacing them with better, more productive or healing ones.

The thought of dueling still causes her extreme anxiety and distress and she cannot bring herself to touch her duel disk or deck, and keeps them locked away in a box in her closet, but slowly she is starting to improve.