Work Text:
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Time is so funny here.
Each of their prisons were designed to limit them. Shiori had spent countless hours, weeks, months, minutes, years just looking at it. Hers is lackluster. It’s a barren room with only essentials provided for her. A bed for counting the layers of dirt on the ceiling. A floor for scratching her nails. Four walls to get lost in.
Pero brings her books. They end up confiscated, just as everything else does that ends up in her cell. The guards say she’s too smart. She’ll make anything into an escape.
Is escape to them escaping reality into stories or is escape the very literal sense of the word? It’s what she thinks about instead of sleeping. If every brick in these walls feels like toys she wants to knock them over. The twins share her sentiment at least.
“What if we blow it up?” Mococo asks, her voice muffled. Shiori imagines she’s trying to bite through the wall again.
“Moco-chan, if we do that, we’ll die.” Fuwawa says.
“That’s also an escape, if you think about it.” Shiori says. She gets two stammered responses and it makes her laugh, endeared to them. The demon dogs are playful, but easily distracted. That’s their prison. Games and toys and activities. Distraction after distraction to keep their noses away from freedom.
Bijou is funny.
“I’ll say something like,” the gem is muttering, “like I’ll say my gem is going cold! They’ll come into my cell to warm me up and then when they go mad I’ll just grab their keys.”
Shiori leans her head back against the wall-sediment, stone, magic layered underneath, bone fragments- and listens. Without a book to occupy her mind, it felt like she was scattering all over the place. Her soul felt thin. A loose rock was hammering around inside her skull.
“Is this before or after they try to break you in half due to madness?” Shiori asks airily.
Bijou is silent for all of three seconds. Shiori doesn’t know what she looks like, but she can imagine a stern expression aimed at her. It makes her smile.
“You got a better plan?”
“No no, stick with your plan.” Shiori says. “I think it’ll be funny.”
Bijou huffs, “You aren’t even gonna help.”
“Because that’ll make it funny.”
For Bijou, her prison is loneliness, in every form of darkness that they can enclose her in. No sunlight. No one to look at her.
For Nerissa, it’s pain.
Shiori is quiet. Nerissa is a brightness all on her own, too soft for cells and too kind for chains. She does what she’s told, even if she doesn’t like it. Even if she’s sad.
“That’s messed up.” Shiori says.
A charming laugh on the other side of the wall, “I guess, yeah, but all the things Pero brings me fills me with so much hope. I know, one day, I’ll get out of here.”
“Oh, that’s nice.” Shiori comments. “Good for you.”
“I’ll get you out too.” Nerissa says. “Everyone! We can all be free and go see the world together.”
Shiori closes her eyes. It sounded stupid enough to laugh at. There were better things to think about. She wants to count the dust mites in the air. She wants to carve her nails between every brick.
“Shiori?”
“Hm?”
“Do you have any ideas?”
Shiori opens her eyes. Six hundred and eighty two bricks. No window. A single door, barred by magic runes. The book at her side hums sleepily, or maybe that’s just her, maybe she’s the one humming.
“Shiori?”
“Oh, I got absolutely nothing.”
“Yeah, me too.” A pause. “Got any more stories for me?”
She’s too nice. They all are. The twins giggle mischief between them, making funny noises at the wall between them to get her to laugh. Bijou makes banter with her. The gem is fun to tease. Nerissa can’t sing in her prison, but she talks about lyrics and emotions so passionately.
Shiori jabs her nails between the bricks of her cell. She scratches at it, even as her fingers hurt and bleed. She hums over the sound.
The twins are quiet. Mococo is utterly silent. It’s Fuwawa who speaks, her voice more of a mouse instead of a dog.
“They’ve never been that mean.” Her voice breaks. “Not ever! Why did they hurt her? We just want to play.”
“Were you being loud?”
“Not very!” It’s weird to hear only one voice without the other echoing them. Without Mococo, Fuwawa sounded tiny. “Not… a lot. Just a little.”
“Just a little?” Shiori asks. She’s scrapping hard at the grout between stones, down to where she feels the magic. It’s a chain link fence around her. It’s evocation and conjuration- brittle key lines and secrets- and other resources bound together. She wants to bite it.
“They didn’t like it.” Fuwawa sounds heartbroken. “She’ll wake up, right?”
“Well, it takes a lot to get you two down.” Shiori notes. “I’m sure she’ll be barking new in an hour.”
“Yeah.” A little more lively. “Yeah! Moco-chan is just taking a puppy nap.”
“You mean a cat nap?”
“No.”
Bijou sometimes loses herself. She’s so quiet Shiori will forget she’s there. In the silence of darkness, she will hear her sniffle. Shiori pauses. There’s blood dripping down her palms. The magic burns her fingertips. She can feel it like ropes along the wall. Chains. Prison.
“Biboo?” Shiori asks.
A louder sniffle, “What?”
“When you get out, what’s the first thing you wanna do?”
“What do you mean?” Bijou’s voice is muffled, like she’s curled up tightly and disappearing. “I’m never getting out.”
“But if you were-“
“Stop talking about it.” Bijou whines. “It hurts.”
Shiori stops talking about it. She rakes her fingers down the walls, even if her hands look like claws. Her mind is a fractured animal. Her book is laughing at her. It takes her a while to recognize it as her own laugh.
“Shiori?” It’s Nerissa, beautiful Nerissa who frets and worries, “Are you okay?”
“Are any of us?” Shiori asks back.
“You were laughing to yourself.”
“I was thinking about something funny.”
“Well?” Nerissa prods. “Wanna share with the class?”
“Us escaping and getting out of here.” Shiori says lightly. “It’s a pretty funny joke, isn’t it?”
Nerissa is quiet. Shiori runs her fingers over the wall one last time before she steps back. There’s blood and magic running like lava from the scratches. Shiori barely hears Nerissa over the ringing in her ears.
“I wish I could laugh at that.” Nerissa says softly.
Shiori can’t help it. She laughs for the both of them. She’s delighted. She’s hungry, in every ravenous way that wants to catalog how sunlight looks when they smile. She sits on her bed to grin at her work.
“Oh,” She breathes happily, “I think you will.”
And carved onto the wall, seeping magic and bloodlust, is one word.
Exit.
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