#chapter 2 trial

Hotaru stood before MonokumAI’s throne, every cell in her body screaming with nerves, and the whole world seemed to have stopped. Time doesn’t sound anymore. There’s no ticking of the clock. There’s no music, no voices, no nothing. Everything is black and white and dark and quiet and why is it so quiet she can’t stand it—

She didn’t mean to.

They all knew it was an accident— and Hotaru knew that if she could reverse time and take it all back, she would in a split second. But she was all too aware that there was no such thing as an accident in the walls of Akedo City.

Her legs were trembling, and standing was becoming increasingly unnerving. She felt those crystalline tears storming down her cheeks in a relentless cascade. For the first time in her life, there’s no one there. There are no comforting or patronizing hands on her shoulders, no voices whispering you’ve failed, nothing trying to shroud her view of the scars and fears before her. For once in her seventeen years of living, Hotaru had no friends nor enemies— just the faceless line of accusations before her.

And that scared her more than six years of any of that ever could.

She sees the chain coming- the chain they promised would guide her to her execution. She’s…she’s ready. If she tells herself that, it’ll be okay.

Hotaru brushes tears away from her cheeks, smiling softly yet shakily at her class. Her heart hurts— the whole world seems as though it’s weighing down on her until the pressure reaches a point where agony rages through her. She carefully waves at her peers, hoping her sweet smile and hopeful tone will make her tears seem nonexistent.

She only manages to sob out a few words before the chain reaches her.

“I deserve this.“

As soon as she felt the metal clamp around her throat— there was nothing grabbing her and nothing beneath her feet. The chain was an illusion— fitting. A hatch has caved in right under her footing. There’s no more floor. No more support. No more chain, no more nothing. Nothing but free space and…

"Down the Rabbit Hole”

Falling.

It’s not a long fall, and Hotaru feels her knees smack against the linoleum floor beneath her and she cries out because it hurts it hurt it hurts it hurts and she can’t breathe because the world is red and it hurts—

A hall stretches out before her. There’s no one, no other sign of life, it’s just her. Just her. Alone. Afraid. Uncertain of what’s to come.

Until a flash of white flickers at the end of the hall.

She shouldn’t follow, she tells herself. But her feet don’t listen and she’s rushing down the hall, racing to identify what might be her one and only compatriot in this cavernous hall of hopelessness.

Every time she turns a corner, it’s there, just seconds out of reach. She has to run faster. She has to catch it. Her feet thunder against the linoleum floor, an unrelenting echo through the maze incarcerating her, and she never seems to catch up. The walls are too distant, too cold, and she’s so afraid and she has to find it she has to escape her loneliness she can’t be abandoned again she can’t be—

She deserves this.

Those words flash through her brain as soon as there’s no more space before her. She’s crashed into a wall, and she’s in a pile in the floor before she can even blink.

She pushes herself up to look at the area around her. There’s no wall in front of her. There’s a blank space, a remainder of a hall—

And then she realizes that it’s been craftily sketched on.

There’s paper against her fingertips. Paper. Only paper and the wall behind it. No matter how many times she tries to reach beyond that blank space, searching for her escape, seeking out that little flicker of white fur that she pursued for what felt like forever. There has to be an escape. She can’t be fated to just curl up here and starve to death, a tiny little remnant of a person.

And then any fear of a slow death is extinguished in a second.

There are spears. So many of them. Needles of incredible size embedded in her body, from her shoulders to her feet. She’s nothing but a sword in a barrel trick gone horribly wrong. Blood stains her apparel, and there’s so many spears and so much pain pain pain—

And the final thing she gets to see, through blood blurred eyes, is the dangling silhouette of a plush rabbit, held aloft by puppeteer’s strings.