phobia
(“Everyone is afraid of something.”)
Blood mixes with torn skin and shattered bone on the concrete, unmoving bodies sprawled in twisted positions at her small, bare feet. She turns on her heel and retrieves the stilettos she had tossed away earlier, nudging a teenager’s corpse out of the way as she does so. It barely registers that the boy is the same age as she is, if not younger; she doesn’t even pause to consider committing his face to memory.
(She won’t remember how he fought with such life, such anger, or how easily the tip of her spear punctured his heart like a balloon.) Pop.
There is no need to memorialize the dead. Instead, Chrome pulls a cell phone from someone’s bloodstained pocket – doesn’t know, doesn’t care who – and calls in: “I’m done.”
Arachnophobia, spiders. Hypsiphobia, heights. Aichmophobia, needles.
Every fear that’s been documented, every terror known to man crawls at the base of her skull. One eye is to see the world around her, to observe and mimic and weave reality, with strings fabricated in the crevices of her mind.
The other – lost years ago, leaving behind a sunken socket covered by the skull on her eyepatch – is for fear. For terror, insanity, death. In that darkness, she internalizes that which makes the skin crawl and the heart stop and gives it shape, bringing forth grotesue figures and children’s nightmares.
She is the monster in the closet. She is the creature under the bed.
She cuts through flesh like paper, destroying bodies offer little resistance.
It’s easy, too easy by now, to feed their minds; to spread the indigo Mist like a poison, infecting their senses; to render them immobile by nothing but the terror coursing through their veins.
Chrome may not have the strength of the Sun or the viciousness of the Cloud or even the cunning of her Master, but the world she fashions with a sightless eye is enough. She snaps minds, breaks hearts, tears people to pieces from the inside-out.
Her slim hands no longer tremble when she washes the blood off of them, rubbing the scarlet from her skin. The screams of fear are silenced by the sound of her heels clicking on tile, the scent of death masked by the smell of roses.
The Guardan glances up, then, to look at her reflection in the mirror before her. A wide, innocent eye; a pale face; a fragile body. She’s not a child, but not a woman either – just a too-skinny girl with gawky limbs and awkward angles. It doesn’t occur to her that she should perhaps question what she’s doing, what she’s already done. (To question why a mere girl is doing the work of adults.)
Chrome stares at herself for a few more moments before bending down to splash her face with water. Mirrors don’t show the truth any more than a television does.
People only ever see what she wants them to.
(“Chrome-chan, you’re not scared?”
The girl blinks slowly, tilting her head to the side. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I mean, you don’t seem to be scared of anything, y'know?”
“… No.” Chrome shakes her head. “Everyone is afraid of something.”)
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