Work Text:
Shinobu has come to the conclusion; she is weak.
Not just physically. She is weak, and immature, and cannot handle the big emotions her little mind feels. She sits down on her bed in the butterfly mansion, holding up her wrist and gently tracing the veins on that are visible.
That would be all of them.
She is pathetic, so she curls up in a ball and hides her face by pressing her forehead against her knees and sniffling as tears streamed down her cheeks. She is weak, so she allows herself to tip over onto her bed and pull the covers over herself.
She hasn't been eating, or sleeping. Only taking care of her patients. She didn't know why she was reacting to a nightmare like this, she has them all the time. Maybe it was this one specifically that got to her, maybe it was the fact that it was her sister, walking up to her and placing one hand on her cheek.
Caressing with her thumb as she smiled genuinely and sweetly. Oh, how Shinobu missed that smile. She missed it before the words, "You couldn't have done anything," slipped out of those lips. It only got worse as she continued speaking; and Shinobu wished that she woke herself up faster. It didn't help after that she had sleep paralysis, not being able to move while ringing filled her ears.
Her body and her mind is weak. No matter how hard she tries, she cannot understand her own emotions. She can smile, she can laugh, she can tease others and play around, and in the end she'll always end up on the restroom floor with a needle in her neck, injecting herself with wisteria.
She is malnourished, weak and pathetic. She is malnourished, weak, pathetic and sensitive. She can't handle her own emotions. She will always overreact when something goes wrong because she can't be mature. She's barely an adult. But people hold her to that expectation, and she wants to make her sister proud.
But her sister is dead.
Why couldn't she be happy? Why couldn't she have gotten married? Had more time to enjoy her life and spend time with Kanao? With her? Shinobu doesn't deserve that opportunity if her sister never got it.
That's why she lay on the bathroom floor with a pill bottle in her hands, coughing up the ones she couldn't bear to swallow.
Because there will not be the butterfly sisters without the eldest one.
She prays in her head, apologizing to her sister she couldn't do anything more before the life in her eyes slips away from her.