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The witch slouches in the filth of her dark, cramped corner, feeling eaten up and emptied by her own contempt.
“Look at yourself,” a familiar voice casually rings out.
Seven years of hiding in the shadows and keeping her head low had given her a lot of time to think. There were only so many miserable hours she could endure in the darkness before her mind absorbed itself in terrible thoughts and visions to fill up the lonely silence. And so, it was inevitable that the girl would visit eventually, descending like a disease.
The beautiful girl stands tall, her condescending gaze falling down on the witch. It was the first time the witch had been looked at in a long time as she had spent most of her years avoiding human contact.
“What a shame…” the girl says. “After all that work I did to ensure your survival, and this is how you live.”
The witch does not look up. She already knows how the girl must look. Skin smooth and flawless, unlike the witch’s own marred flesh, along with the long, silky curtains of pink hair framing a pretty face–the epitome of girlhood, nothing more than a sickeningly sweet poison.
Nevertheless, she feels herself being tugged painfully up by a grip on her short hair. The witch is forced to meet the girl’s gaze. The girl’s lip curls with sugary disdain. “Feeling sorry for yourself, hm?”
“Go away,” the witch rasps out. Her voice, having been unused for a while, comes out harsh and ragged, a contrast to the melodic quality of the girl’s voice.
“Oh, cheer up,” the girl says. “You’re here alive, aren’t you? You won. You should be proud of yourself.”
“My friends are dead,” the witch said waspishly. “How could I be happy?”
A tsk. The girl rolls her eyes. “Why are you still pretending? Nobody is watching now. You don’t have to keep pretending you care about them more than you actually do.”
The witch stares at the girl. “But I didn’t want them to die,” she mumbles feebly. The witch knows her words are hollow, and the girl knows it too, because she laughs.
“Drop the act,” the girl leans in. “You’ve always known what you’ve wanted from the beginning.”
The witch trembles as the girl draws herself closer. The girl reaches out to cradle the witch’s face, her unblemished fingers gliding across the scarred mess of the witch’s skin. “Don’t you remember? You watched Sua practice her death. You saw her give you more lines. You knew what she was doing and you said nothing.”
There so many things to find appalling about the girl. In the closeness, those loathsome details were magnified, exposing more clearly the girl’s repulsive nature. There were those gloating eyes that burned into her prey. There was that disgustingly bright smile, the same as the one that Sua’s blood splattered across all those years ago.
But the worst thing about the girl was that everything she said was true. Infuriatingly, the witch could not deny a single thing without uttering a lie. The clear memory of Sua holding the needle to her neck each night, looped through the witch’s mind like an unceasing cant, flooding every cell of her body with guilt.
For what she had done, the witch had been drowning in misery and disgust every single day; the passage of years did nothing to dispel it. Even so, the girl reinvigorated something deep within the witch; pain that had grown old through years of torment became fresh again, like a wound that was reopened. The shame choked her.
Under the raging turmoil, the witch reacted in the only way she knew how to. Lurching forward, the witch reaches for the girl’s slender neck and strangles her. The force of the sudden attack sends them to the ground, with the witch landing on top of the choking girl. Mindlessly, the witch springs upon her prey, clawing and hitting with reckless abandon. The witch feels the girl thrash and scratch back, but her struggling is useless: the girl is utterly pinned and dominated by the witch. It feels good. Adrenaline rushes into her veins like poison. The witch wants so badly to crush the girl that it makes her nauseous. She needs to win.
The girl’s pulse beats rapidly against the witch’s own racing heartbeat. They’re both breathing heavily, their chests rising and falling in sync.
“Satisfied now?” The girl croaks out.
The girl’s face is bloody and broken. She is not beautiful anymore. With her mask off, she looks more like the witch now: weak and defeated–a lethal predator turned prey or… perhaps the girl had never been a predator at all, but merely another sheep who pretended to be a wolf. She finds that the girl pinned underneath like this is smaller than she seemed to be, taking up less space than expected. The sight of the crushed, unraveled girl under her gives the witch not the cool relief of victory, but a bitter taste in her mouth.
Back then, as a young girl, she tried to learn to crush in order to survive in a world that was meant to crush humans completely. Maybe she was despicable for trying to, but the world was just as despicable for giving her the illusion that she could even do anything.
In the end, nobody could escape being crushed, not even her vile self.