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You were agnostic when it came to the Angel.
At church, you had bigger priorities than "reading" the books on the pews in front of you. More importantly, someone had to make teeth faces at Elly while she was sweating off her nerves as she struggled to sing on the risers.
You liked the moments she became furious, but couldn't even snap properly.
After church on such similar Saturdays, you two would sleep over at each other's homes, most often at hers, against her will. Her mom did like you, her stone-cold grimace non-commitally rationalized away with, "well, surely they can teach her the piano this time." You thought you were the one tricking her, you truly did.
Your brother only had one fourth of the luck, making it inside only when he felt particularly spined enough to walk past that glare like a gatekeeper. Though he would always sweat. You liked this, too.
The nights he couldn't get in, though, Dess would writhe on her bed in the boredom and damnation of being forced to manage with kids a decade younger, since Mom Mayor was called away for midnight paperwork errors someone definitely wouldn't be fired over, and dad was preoccupied with whatever he even does. Maybe he liked to torment her on purpose. But even so, the TV was in Dess's room, so today you wiped Elly's DB2 save as she cried and her sister hit you upside the head. As if you all didn't know this game inside and out, already, and she was still only in the second area, so yeah.
After that though, Dess would only stare at the ceiling uninterestedly as you two still strove for more glitchy secrets, on the Evil Murder route this time. Perhaps you were less interested in the secrets as Elly was. You just wanted to do it again. With no will to fight for the controller back, she backseats pointlessly as you consider maybe one out of ten of her suggestions. You could only be so cruel consistently when faced with no consequences that ever changed a thing.
This is a horrible way to spend your all-nighter, right? So it's why you two couldn't even last until maybe 1am, half consciously and faintly remembering the sensation your ribs knocking into Elly's as you were both moved to her room. Dess was always tough as bricks, and could carry the two of you with one arm. Not for long though, you swore.
The morning after, you ignored breakfast to continue the save on your own, freezing as you saw it fully completed, out of nowhere. It felt like at the same time, Dess and Elly came back up to drag you down for pancakes. It wasn't fair. You were going to finish this playthrough. You were pouting. But, that couldn't explain the feeling at the back of your head...
"What? Did it bother you that much?" she said, with a smirk you couldn't place. Elly shrugged hopelessly. That is right, this is an equivalent exchange of tormenting, for once. The consequences you needed had finally arrived, though you wouldn't respond properly to them. Instead, you sat there at the table, boiling in a strange sense of betrayal. Maybe it was then, then that you decided to take revenge, though you weren't know who exactly you were mad at. Your thoughts and language were too clumsy, too juvenile to place the feeling of the way Dess looked at you.
All you just knew was, you had to be the one to finish the game.
Now, despite yourself, and despite all you know, you are an atheist in more ways than one.
The rain began to pick up again as the minutes, hours passed since Noelle's mother hung up, your phone lying dead on your cheek. There wasn't much to think of than to curl up within this warm dread.
You shrunk as your eyes met with the cage in the corner. Is there a way for you to go back to the simplicity of just a few nights ago? No, there was never such thing. But back then, before this sensation started to spill out, there was something you feel has been irreversibly taken from you.
It was the feeling of the whole pie tin on your bed. Sitting there, cleaning it entirely with just your knife, staring at the prisoner held within that cage like background TV. You felt satisfaction at its panic, squirming against something it couldn't understand. But only at first. When it simply went still, a strange feeling ached in your body.
Maybe for a moment, you thought there was a sense of understanding. A shared fate, two and one of us in the same meatgrinder. You would stare at each other. Maybe if that sense of harmony could have stayed, then... But, ever since that night, now, now it's only...
That's right. You were the one who started this. It was only natural it would respond.
Dumbly, you recall the figure there as it smiled behind the bars. For a moment, it looked like it formed the shape of a small hand.