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Kizuna was shellshocked .
The sudden shot in the back hadn’t startled her. It was the shock from it coming from her best friend. She couldn’t muster the willpower to free herself from her headset, let alone move.
Closing TOME. See you next time!
She had been betrayed . Betrayed by her companion, of all people. What right did he have- Who cares if he had the right!
TOME had logged her out and kicked her back to the desktop. In its absence, the faint droning of her air conditioner starting back up made its way past her headphones. It mocked her, for having been removed from the situation. For failing .
In her immediate clarity, she realized that the two of them had completely different end goals. How could she have not seen it before? He was such a lily-livered, oversympathetic–!
She stared at the white and purple and orange and blue nothing-shapes of her wallpaper, her unsorted mess of files scattered along her peripheral vision. If she didn’t feel so paralyzed right now, she’d have ripped this expensive headset off and smashed it on the ground like some child. She let out a shuddering, bitter breath. Don’t do anything you’ll regret later . She didn’t have the drive to anyway.
Start key, shut down. Kizuna sat there for a while, muddled incoherent thoughts distracting her again. She was too upset to think anything that made sense. This wasn’t admitting defeat. Whatever it was, it wasn’t that. This was out of her hands– hell, what difference did it make? She could never log in again for all she cared, she could block Zetto on everything, block the Netkings, delete her email address, hole up in her room like a coward .
Her next shuddering breath had no rage. She blinked hard.
Kizuna put her headset in her chair and cried out in frustration. I need to go to bed.
She shuffled through the mess on her floor and changed into the stained white shirt draped over her bedpost before she had the chance for a second thought.
-
Her trip to the restroom didn’t do much for her. Looking at herself, the weight of it all felt crushing. It put it into stone for her– her character hadn’t failed, she had failed, she had let Zetto get in the way of what mattered. Her dark hair was mussed from having her headset on all day, and she felt sticky from stress-sweat. Here, she couldn’t pretend to be calm and put-together. She couldn’t carry a gun, nor sharpshoot worth a damn in the real world. Here, Kizuna was confronted with her own face. The face of someone who, in the span of half an hour, had become just as much of a nobody in a fantasy world as she was in the real world.
It was all that I had. She had the counter in a white-knuckle grip. Her last bastion of adequacy.
She whimpered and collapsed in the corner between the sink and the wall. So many people could be hurt. If SOFDTI created something new, something the same or worse .. How hard could it have been to pull that trigger? Intimidating her just for show , it was all so transparent. She was never a somebody in TOME to begin with. Her pride was what had gotten her into this situation. Her theatrics . She was no more than a roleplayer with a fancy title.
Look at yourself, wiping your eyes with your fists like a child.
With trembling fingers, she grabbed a wad of toilet paper to wipe her nose. She threw it into the toilet and rose to her feet. She splashed her face with warm water in the sink, not much a help now that she was overheating, but it kept her face from getting sticky. It’d be good to get to bed soon.
-
Upon shambling upstairs to her room, she checked her phone on the nightstand. It was 3:36 AM. Figures. She didn’t need to be up early in the morning, at the very least. It’d be better to ignore her messages for as long as possible once this whole thing was done with. She wiped her nose on her shirt.
When she finally got in her bed, there wasn’t a lot going through her mind anymore. It felt empty.
Her air conditioner whirred to a stop and left her in silence, save for the pop s and cracks of the house settling.
She bunched her blanket in her arms and held it tight.