Chapter Text
Lumine Viatrix sucks in a deep breath, hoisting a cardboard box filled with books into her arms. She tips her head back, looking up at the apartment complex she's moving into.
Right. A new place. New beginnings.
Mona shuffles up beside her, carrying another two cardboard boxes in her arms. "Which floor do you stay on again?"
"Twelfth," she answers.
Mona groans. "You're telling me we have to bring all your stuff up to the twelfth floor?" she asks, glancing back at the pile of boxes in the backseat of Aether's car.
Aether looks up from where he's sitting in the driver's seat, fiddling with his phone. "I did tell y'all to bring a cart," he shouts through the half-down window.
It's a balmy summer's day. Birds are chirping, and the sun is out overhead, warm but not too hot thanks to the blanket of thin white clouds drifting across the azure sky. The air is crisp with the scent of freshly-mown grass and a hint of sweetness from the flowers blooming along the pavement. All in all, it's a pleasant day. Even nice. The kind of day that feels like nothing could go wrong.
And yet, Lumine feels a chill inside her. A cold that lingers, that pools in the pit of her stomach, coiling and festering like something viciously, relentlessly alive. The kind of chill that doesn't originate from inside herself. A chill that she cannot forget, no matter how hard she tries.
She shivers. Shakes her head and looks up at the building again.
It's a nice one—Aether and Mona made sure of that when they were scrolling through the options.
Lumine didn't have many criteria. Just three, really—it should be near enough to her university campus to be accessible, it shouldn't be colossally out of her budget, and above all, it should look decent. She's not even asking for luxury. She just wants it to be… hospitable. Warm. Cosy, perhaps.
So in the end, instead of going for the traditional option of scouring individual listings and hoping to score a jackpot, she went for the commercialised route of a co-living residence. More expensive, but easier on her wallet than a full-fledged hotel, and considerably more convenient than navigating morning rush-hour traffic from further out in the suburbs. So she doesn't have a private kitchen. What student does, anyway?
Definitely pricier than renting from an individual landlord. But it narrowed the funnel, and she could trust that the apartment was probably, at the bare minimum, decent. At least it wasn't likely to have some sordid history being swept under the rug in the hopes of making the place more sellable. What more could she ask for?
Anything for peace of mind. Anything to not have to deal with whatever the fuck had been going on in her life for the past year. She can't take any more of that.
"C'mon, Mona," Lumine finally says, jerking her head in the direction of the building.
Mona turns to look at her, her brow furrowed. Lumine plasters a smile on her face, as bright as she can possibly make it, even with the freezing cold in her belly, streaking down through her blood to her fingertips and toes. "I'll treat you to coffee after this."
"Well, all right." Mona sighs. "I hope this works out for you, Lumine," she adds as the two of them start walking down the path from the roadside to the building, balancing the boxes carefully in their arms.
Lumine nods. She doesn't open her mouth to speak—there's no need to, and maybe she doesn't want to acknowledge that, after the past harrowing year, she's become more wary of the things she voices aloud—but she hopes the same.
Check-in is straightforward enough. She was given the key card a few days ago, and now she finally gets to open up the room she's been allocated.
Unit 12-08. She looks at the number plate on the door for a moment before tapping her card against the reader. It hums and whirrs before beeping, the blinking red light flashing green. She puts the card away and shoulders her way into the unit.
Now, first impressions—it's a nice place. It looks exactly like the photos on the website. A bright space, with large windows at the far end of the room, covered by translucent white curtains that let in diffused sunlight. The heavier blackout curtains are drawn aside, tucked into picturesque bundles at either end of the windows.
She steps further in as Mona oohs and aahs, looking around the room as well.
What she decided to rent was a studio apartment, the cheapest of the various options the residence offered. It was already pushing the upper end of what her budget could afford, but whatever. Looking at how clean and tidy the space is, she already can't help but think it's worth it.
The bed is tucked against the wall, not too far from the window. There's a bedside table with a small lamp and a few sockets so she can plug in her chargers. Next to the bed is a spacious desk with overhead shelves and a mesh office chair, all set on a round, short-pile carpet. They even managed to squeeze a sofa in at the foot of the bed, together with a coffee table, facing a flat-screen television—not huge, but good enough for her. She's not short-sighted. She doesn't need to see things in sixty-inch glory.
There's another door beside the TV which she figures leads into the bathroom. She'll check that out later.
"This studio is really nice," Mona remarks. "Seems like it's worth splurging on, isn't it?"
"Yeah," Lumine says, setting her box down beside the study table. "But more importantly—Mona, are you… getting anything?"
"Nope! Not at all," her friend says. "Feels totally clean."
"Really?"
"Yup. Trust me." Mona stacks her boxes on top of the one Lumine put on the floor. "I'd let you know if I felt something, and I'm really not right now. You can rest easy."
Relief floods through her, faster and more vehemently than she knows what to do with. "Thanks, Mona," she says, glad her voice doesn't come out like a croak.
"You're welcome," Mona replies. "I mean, I don't want to see you go through all that again, either."
Lumine exhales, rubbing the back of her hand against her cheek. "I don't know if I could," she admits. "Sometimes, when I turn off the lights and try to go to sleep, I still—I still—"
Mona draws closer and wraps an arm around Lumine's shoulders, and she stills. She hadn't even realised until then that she was shaking.
"I get it," Mona says, her voice hushed like someone trying to soothe a crying child. "It was difficult. It was hard. You were so, so brave for getting through that. It's over now. You don't have to worry about it again."
"It was awful."
"I know, I know." Mona's hand drops, rubbing slow circles into her back. "It was fucking awful. But you survived it, and you came out so much stronger. We're proud of you, you know?"
She sniffles. Turns and flings her arms around Mona. "Thanks," she says, her voice quivering a little more than she'd like.
"Do you want me to stay over tonight?" Mona offers. "I can crash on the sofa or something."
"Nah, that's against the residence's rules," she says. "I can have guests over, but they're supposed to leave by the end of the day."
"Are they really going to monitor that?"
"I'd rather not risk getting into trouble on the very first day of my stay here," Lumine replies, laughing a little.
"Fair enough," Mona concedes. "But you know I'm always just a phone call away. And I don't live super far from here, so I can come down whenever you need me. We can talk on the phone tonight, you know? If you happen to need some moral support."
"I'm good! Really," Lumine says, peeling away from Mona. "I'm okay now. It's been long enough. I can't keep living like this, always too afraid to do things on my own, always scared of looking over my shoulder. I've been enough of a burden on you and Aether. It's about time for me to stand on my own two feet."
Mona frowns. "You're not a burden to me, and especially not to Aether," she says. "You know that."
"Yes, I know he doesn't mind, but I also don't want to rely on him forever, you know?" Lumine shrugs, taking a step back towards the front door. "We have to lead our separate lives at the end of the day. We don't even go to the same university. I can't keep dragging him from his classes just because I can't deal with my own problems."
Mona looks like she wants to say something more, but Lumine quickly turns and strides over to the door. "I still have a whole bunch of things to bring up," she says, tossing the words out behind her. "Let's go get them and unpack first, then we can find a café nearby or whatever and grab a bite. I'm hungry already."
She hurries out to the walkway before Mona can continue, leaving the door open behind her. She hears her friend let out a loud, distinct sigh before, she guesses, following suit.
It's good, she thinks. Motion. Moving. It helps. It keeps her mind off things. And she wants to keep her mind off things. There's no point lingering on what's already passed.
The more she looks back, the more she cannot help but feel that it might suck her back in. Back into that deep, dark place where nothing mattered and nothing would ever matter, where she was drowning, drowning in the mire of her own despair, her own fears, anything and everything that made her question why she was fighting so hard to live.
She doesn't want to look back.
It turns out that after she and Mona went up with the first batch of boxes, someone from the residence came out and told Aether he could park temporarily in their car park, so that's where her brother drove to. Between the three of them, they managed to move all her items up fairly quickly.
Now, they're just relaxing in her new room—she and Mona on the sofa, Aether lounging on the floor against the coffee table.
"How much are you paying for this again?" he asks, flipping through the channels on the TV.
Lumine sighs. "More than I should be," she admits. "But it's nice, so I guess it justifies itself."
Aether whistles, long and low. "Well, you're on scholarship anyway," he says. "I guess that helps?"
"Yeah, a bit. Money will be tight for a while, but I don't mind if that means I can quit freaking out over creaking floorboards or things scratching in my closet."
There's silence for a while. None of them speaks. Lumine's gaze fixes on the television, watching but not really watching. There's a movie playing on the screen right now. A stupid one. A horror-comedy. She watches as the protagonist screams while tossing sprinkles of holy water at the evil spirit pursuing her, causing it to hiss and recoil.
She thinks bitterly about how that hadn't worked. How a lot of things typically shown in movies hadn't worked.
Aether coughs after a moment. "Should I change the channel?" he asks, glancing back at Lumine on the sofa.
"It's fine," she answers. "Just leave it."
Mona, who's been curled up on one side of the sofa this entire time and hasn't really spoken much, suddenly unfurls herself and stretches out her legs, placing her feet squarely on Lumine's lap. "Maybe we should go eat?" she suggests. "Moving's tough. I've used up all the energy I have, and I'm starving."
Lumine latches onto that, grateful for the change in topic. "What do you feel like having?" she asks, whipping out her phone to look at whatever's in the vicinity.
There are loads of food options nearby, many of them within walking distance. Well, that's expected for a residence that caters to students and other short-term tenants, she supposes. She scrolls listlessly through the various offerings, decides she's not particularly feeling anything right now, and promptly makes her ambivalence someone else's problem.
"Do you have any cravings?" she asks, thrusting her phone towards Mona.
Mona grumbles a bit about being tasked with the difficult job of aligning food preferences among three people, but takes the phone nonetheless. "I dunno," she says, staring at the screen. "Are we feeling… Korean? Chinese? Western?"
Lumine and Aether both shrug at the same time.
"I can't work with that," Mona groans, letting her head fall back over the arm of the sofa. "Give me something, guys."
"Ugh," Aether says, slumping further down onto the floor. "Pizza?"
"I don't want pizza. It's just carbs and nothing else!"
"Then you decide," Aether says. "You're the pickiest among us."
"But I don't want to drag you two into eating something you don't even like!"
"I really don't care," Aether says. "And neither does Lumine."
"You can't just speak on her behalf like that."
"I really am all right with anything, though," Lumine says.
"Don't enable him, Lumine," Mona counters, sitting up and scrolling through Lumine's phone with newfound fervour. "I'm going to find something that'll make all three of us go ooh, and then you will thank me for not once again settling for 'whatever works' the way Aether always does. Honestly. He can't tell what's good for him even if it came up and smacked him in the face."
"Your definition of good just means cheap," Aether says.
"Cheapness is the baseline!" Mona exclaims. "What's the point of paying for expensive food if you can find a perfectly acceptable alternative at a fraction of the cost? Make that make sense!"
"The yummiest food can't be judged just based on how much it costs. You have to factor in the price of quality ingredients, and the skill and labour of the chef, and things like restaurant overheads and other miscellaneous—"
"Then you might as well buy the damn ingredients yourself and cook at home!" Mona huffs.
Lumine looks at Mona and Aether going back and forth like she's watching a tennis match, her head turning from left to right, right to left as they argue over the virtues of eating out versus staying in.
They've always been like that, she thinks. The two of them. Her brother and her best friend. They've been neighbours for nearly their entire lives, growing up together from when they were kids until they finally separated and went their own ways for university. Even then, they were never super far apart—Mona and Lumine took different courses but went to the same school, while Aether went to a different one that was at least within the same locality. It wasn't like he had to take a flight or something just to get together with them. A one-hour drive, yes, but that's… in the grand scheme of things, it's still more convenient than not, especially since he has a car anyway.
Some things are constant. Some things don't change. The relationship between the three of them is clearly one of those, she thinks rather mournfully as Aether and Mona continue to bicker.
Eventually, it reaches a point where Lumine can't take it anymore, so she clears her throat and interjects. "How about we just go eat sushi?" she suggests. "There's a conveyor belt sushi place I saw that's just a five-minute walk away. We can go there? The ratings seem pretty decent."
That quietens the two of them. After some further investigation into this purported sushi place, Mona and Aether both agree to check it out, so they clamber up from the sofa and floor and get ready to head out.
They walk, though Aether complains a bit because he'd wanted to drive. Mona tells him not to kill the environment over a five-minute walk, and he begrudgingly agrees while muttering under his breath about being ripped off by the parking fees at the co-living residence, which Lumine assumes had probably charged a rate that Aether deemed spectacularly unfair.
Even when they reach the restaurant and get seats inside, she finds herself drifting from the conversation. From the back-and-forth, from the plates Mona plucks off the belt, from the warm lights and warm miso soup and warm tea and fresh fish and all the delicious food she keeps putting in her mouth—honestly, the sushi served here is surprisingly delicious despite how affordable it is, something Mona seems astounded by—to her own thoughts.
To whatever remains of her own thoughts.
She hasn't been able to get back into the rhythm of daily living. Not for a while. Not without force. Not without willing herself into at least pretending to be normal, because when she puts enough energy into the pretence, she can distract herself momentarily from whatever the hell is going on in the rest of her nervous system.
She feels it. Traces. Residue that lingers. A deep, dark voice, distorted and guttural, that whispers in her ear at night, that surfaces from the bottomless pit of half-forgotten dreams, telling her that she's worthless, that she's horrible, that she doesn't deserve a space like this among the living when she hardly behaves like one herself.
Dull. Insipid. Lifeless. She just does things the way she's always told. Be a good girl. Be a good student. Be a hard worker. Get a scholarship, go to classes, do whatever would make her family proud. How much does she live for herself? What does she even want for herself?
Questions, questions. The voice in the back of her head crows. It lingers, it murmurs, it husks. It brings to light the fact that she'd never really had to think for herself, not the way Aether had—Aether was always so sure about the exact path he would take in life, and that was always what differentiated them from each other. He had a will, a way, a desire. She had none, other than wanting a simple life.
Wanting a simple, easy life. Is that such a wrong thing to want? To not have a fierce burning inside her that lit the way forward, that guided her wherever she needed to go—is that so wrong? Does that mean she is not fully living her life, and therefore it is a waste of her life for her to be here?
Just living, just existing. Drifting aimlessly with no direction.
Lumine Viatrix.
She was the studious one. The good one, when they were little. Aether was more fidgety and restless in classes, but she never was. She was a good student and a good girl. She behaved well, and she did everything her parents told her to, and maybe at some point along the way, she realised—she never really quite knew what she wanted for herself.
It wasn't a problem until that voice in her head decided to make it a problem, and now that problem—large, gaping, a dark maw lined with teeth—is all she ever seems to be able to think about.
Things like these. Thoughts like these. A reality like this.
She doesn't know how much longer she can survive under the brittle weight of her own thoughts. She can't even blame it on it anymore, not at this stage. Mona told her, didn't she? She'd braved through it—she came out on the other side, still recognisable as herself, even if she no longer quite feels like herself, not entirely.
There are parts of her that have been ripped away. Flayed open, and she cannot be stitched back together, cannot be made whole, cannot go back to the days before that year, when she could simply exist as Lumine without examining the inner confines of her own life, of what exactly it meant to be Lumine.
How long will she have to live like this? How long can she continue to live like this?
She who once was Lumine Viatrix, who still masquerades to this day as Lumine Viatrix—she does not know.
Lumine shuffles up to her door, exhausted from their evening out.
Following their sushi meal, Aether decided he wanted dessert. Apparently, lots of other people had the same idea, and everywhere was weirdly full, so they ended up trudging back to the residence, getting into Aether's car and driving further out because Aether, for whatever reason, was craving hazelnut gelato and refused to settle for any old ice cream because apparently gelato was not the same as ice cream.
Whatever. Lumine couldn't be bothered to fight her brother on this, and Mona had no objections, so off they went on their treasure hunt.
After driving around for a good thirty minutes, Aether finally found his gelato in a quaint little shop that was far less crowded than the others they'd come across. The three of them sat and chatted and ate more dessert until the sugar was starting to get to Lumine's head, and then Aether drove her back to the residence before going off to drop Mona at her rental.
It's nearly ten PM now, and Lumine doesn't know how she used to stay out later than this a year ago, before everything that happened to her.
It's not that Lumine was a night owl who liked to seek entertainment in the middle of the night or whatever. She's not that kind of person. But she did go to clubs and bars and such, because that's… part and parcel of being a university student, she guesses? It's normal. She goes out. Mona goes out, even if she bitches nonstop about how expensive it is afterwards. They all go out. They're young. This is just the kind of thing young people do.
But strangely, she doesn't feel young anymore. She feels like she's aged about ten years.
She wants to dredge up the energy to do things, impulsively and recklessly, simply because she has the time and she can. She wants to continue living the way Lumine Viatrix used to live. Good girl who could be less good when the situation called for it, because it was fun to drink, it was fun to dance, it was fun to hang out with other people with great vibes and great energy and maybe not-so-great food, but hey, food's not really the point when you're out.
She wants all of this, but she just can't. She can't seem to compel herself into sustaining a night the way her body used to be able to. She doesn't know why. She can't explain it to herself. Just knows that it comes hand-in-hand with the gradual, eroding sense of loss she feels, blanketing her life like a murky haze.
She hates it, yet at the same time, she feels too—too empty to really maintain the kind of energy needed to hate something.
She can't feel all that much at all.
Lumine blinks, abruptly shaking herself out of the spiral her thoughts have wandered down, and looks up at the number plate. 12-08. Right. She's at her unit now. She should let herself in.
She takes another step towards the door, and her foot bumps against something on the doorstep. She blinks blearily and looks down. It takes her a second to identify what it is.
A package, the wrapping emblazoned with the co-living residence's branding. There's a note attached to it, printed on thick cream paper, which she crouches to read:
Thank you for choosing to stay with Favonius Corp. We hope you have a pleasant experience! We have prepared a welcome kit to help you get settled into your new residence. If you have any questions or concerns, do feel free to reach out to the front desk. We are always happy to help!
The printed note is signed by someone called Jean Gunnhildr, and the signature appears to be the only part of it that's actually handwritten, judging by the little blotch of ink at the very end of its flourish.
Lumine picks up the package before stepping into her studio. She tosses the package onto the coffee table, deciding she'll figure it out later, before starting to unpack her boxes. The essentials, at least. Her home clothes, books she likes to read and all that. The other stuff, she can unpack when she's in the mood. Right now, she just wants enough of her personal belongings present to feel comfortable. She doesn't have to make the space look lived-in yet.
Lumine finds the bag containing her favourite oversized shirt and shorts and quickly strips out of her clothes and into them. Now that she's in something more comfortable, she decides she can actually start exploring the room, since she didn't do much of that when Mona and Aether were here earlier.
She pokes around the cupboards and shelves. It's really a lot like a hotel, she thinks—the residence has provided a mug, a plate and one set of utensils in one of the drawers, as well as basic condiments like sugar and creamer and even packets of green tea. Which reminds her that she needs to go check out the communal spaces, especially the shared pantry, but she'll do that later.
She steps away from the counter, looking around the rest of the studio. Other than this little countertop and its accompanying drawers, the rest of the room is rather bare, unfortunately, so she decides to go check out the bathroom instead.
Once inside, she quickly establishes that the residence has provided spare towels—good for her, because she'd forgotten to pack any toiletries or related items in her scramble to move—and even a pair of bathroom slippers, tucked next to a rolled-up floor mat on a low shelf beside the sink. She takes out the slippers, puts them on and unfurls the mat so that it's right outside the shower area before resuming her inspection.
It's a nice, sparkling-clean bathroom. Cream tiles with no yellowing or visible dirt, a vase with a bunch of flowers on one of the shelves above the sink, a round mirror trimmed in rose gold. Just looking at it feels nice. She peers at her reflection in the mirror for a moment, then turns to examine the rest of the space.
The shower area is cordoned off by glass, again wiped pristinely clean. There aren't even any water marks. She steps closer, staring through the glass—the shelf along the wall is already stocked with shampoo, conditioner and soap. Great! Cost savings for her.
Decidedly satisfied with her return on investment, Lumine moves back to the sink, opening all the drawers to see what else she can find. She uncovers a shower cap, toothpicks, cotton buds, a plastic comb—but the most important things, she cannot find at all.
Namely, toothpaste and a toothbrush. Which makes no sense, because among all the amenities the residence has provided, wouldn't those be the most important?
Or perhaps they're in the welcome kit they left outside her door. She vaguely recalls the website saying something about its commitment to sustainability, and how because of that they'd ensured that, wherever possible, they wouldn't provide disposable items when there were non-disposable alternatives.
Maybe the toothbrush is one of them?
Either way, there's no harm in checking out the welcome kit. So she goes out of the bathroom to grab it off the coffee table, tearing into the packaging with her nails. The cheap polyester wrapping gives easily, stretching as she yanks at it until it rips and she can dig her fingers in and start pulling out whatever's inside.
It's a white box, rather light. She drags it out of the remnants of the packaging and gives it a shake, holding it up beside her ear. Something rattles inside.
It could really be a toothbrush.
Shrugging, Lumine slides her fingers underneath the lid and lifts the box—
And then she stops. Her heart seizes in her chest. Her breath suddenly freezes, goes absolutely still, too cold, too cold in the back of her throat, because this is impossible. This cannot be, cannot be—
The rabbit plush looks at her.
Pure, soft white fur, with a dark blue-grey knitted scarf around its neck, tucked beneath the plush's head. Long, drooping ears. The mild, innocuous smile. The sewn-on button eyes, dull red, searing her skin.
Lumine screams and tosses the box away, as far across the room as she can make it go, curling into a ball on the floor, unable to think, unable to breathe, unable to do anything other than rock back and forth between the sofa and the coffee table because this cannot be happening, this cannot be happening, this cannot be—
She'd thrown it away after the exorcism. After everything was done, she'd stuffed the rabbit into a garbage bag and tossed it out with the trash. She'd watched as the garbage collectors took it. She watched. There is no way this fucking toy can be here. There is absolutely no way, no way at all, no way.
And yet the cold within her breathes. The cold that nips at her, that claws at her like it wants in. The chill of those eyes piercing into her. That smile. The stupid smile on a stupid toy that she should never have brought home in the first place.
This is, this is, this is—
I see you chose me again.
That voice. She knows that voice.
It ripples through her blood, her bones, through muscle and sinew, squeezing her lungs, an iron band tight around her throat. That low, twisted, guttural voice. It hooks into the tender flesh of her stomach and drags, pulls on something weak and wavering and wordless deep in the pit of her non-existent existence.
I was a little sad that you wanted to throw me away.
The rabbit is there, watching her from the far end of the studio, its head slanted sideways, its red eyes still burning. She gasps, scrambling backwards further from it, but the voice is filling her senses now, and she can't think, can't tear her gaze from the toy. She can't feel herself.
She can only feel it. That presence. That presence.
"Please," she breathes. "Please, go away, go away."
But I'm here, and we can play again. We can play and play and play, and I can love you for as long as you wish.
A terrible, insidious voice. Lilting and distorted and sweet and horrible, all at the same time.
What else could you possibly be without me?
She's drowning. She's drowning and sinking, and the voice has returned, and it's smothering her, dragging her back into the hell she thought she'd escaped, and she feels something soft brush against her face, something soft, and the whole world suddenly drops into a blackness so vast that it feels like the void itself.
Don't you remember me, Lumine Viatrix? Don't tell me you've already forgotten.
The voice whispers against her ear. It's cold. She trembles. She cannot see. The world is dark. The room is gone. There is no floor beneath her.
Only void, only chasm, only nothing.
I was your only friend, wasn't I? I alone showed you the truth. Can you deny that?
Can she?
Nearly one year ago, Lumine bought a stuffed rabbit.
Stupid, in hindsight. Foolish. She shouldn't have bought a secondhand toy. Why did she do that?
But she'd bought lots of secondhand items before. Clothes, furniture, even some electronics. So it never occurred to her that she should be careful about toys.
She's not even into plushies. But she'd been scrolling through one of the many shopping apps on her phone when she came across this particular listing, and for whatever reason, it gripped her.
She couldn't look away.
It was the cutest little bunny, wearing a knitted scarf, with a mild, gentle smile and button eyes. She saw it and fell in love with it instantaneously. She can't even explain why, if asked now. She just knew that she was gripped by an overwhelming sense of, I need to have this rabbit immediately.
So that was exactly what she did.
The asking price was pretty cheap, with postage included to anywhere in the country. She reached out to the seller and transferred the money, and approximately three days later, the parcel arrived at her doorstep.
And that was the day everything went to hell.
In the depths of her blindness, she remembers.
The rabbit. How her life changed after it came into her possession. How much of herself it dismantled, and all the pieces she's still trying to pick up in the aftermath.
Mona was the first to figure out there was something wrong with the stuffed toy.
Lumine slept with it. It stayed on her bed during the day, right beside her pillow, and she hugged it when she slept. The first time Mona came to her room after she got the plushie, even before anything significantly wrong had started to happen, Mona stopped dead in her tracks and stared at the rabbit.
"When did you get that?"
And Lumine had innocently said, "About two weeks ago, from With Wind Comes Glory."
"Who was the seller?"
"I dunno, some rando. Why?"
Mona narrowed her gaze at the rabbit, then edged over towards Lumine's desk, a safe distance from the bed on which the toy lay. "It just feels a little creepy," she said. "Maybe it's the eyes. It kind of reminds me of that movie, you know? Coraline. The one where they had button eyes."
Lumine didn't think much of that, and they quickly moved on to other topics of conversation.
But afterwards, strange things started happening to Lumine. Things that could be explained away at first, so she didn't care too much about them, but increasingly, it got harder and harder to rationalise what was happening. Harder and harder to pretend that everything was fine and she didn't have to worry about a thing.
It began with the nightmares.
They weren't full-fledged nightmares, not at first. She wasn't a vivid dreamer; she didn't often recall her dreams, if she even dreamt at all. So at first, the startling thing was that she woke up with the knowledge that she'd dreamt, because she was so used to jumping straight from being awake at night to being awake the next morning.
So the awareness came first. And about a month after that, the knowledge, because she started to receive bits and pieces of what she was dreaming.
She was already waking up a little… restless. Not quite distressed, not yet. She always forgot, after all. But perhaps her body knew what her conscious mind did not. She always woke up feeling poorly rested, always woke up feeling like she'd run miles and miles despite being perfectly asleep in her bed the entire night.
She couldn't describe it, couldn't explain it. Just knew that she wasn't getting as deep a sleep as she'd like, but obviously, at that stage, nobody would have pinned it on the stupid rabbit.
But then one night, she experienced the dream.
A sensation of being trapped in the dark. Of wandering through a foggy space where she couldn't even see her own hands held out before her. A darkness so thick and muffling and absolute that she could almost believe she was dissolving into it; that the boundaries separating the self from the external world were blurring, blurring away, and there was nothing left for her to do but concede control and turn into a misty, ghostlike figure, wandering through this endless space in search of things she cannot name.
And then there was the voice. A deep, insidious voice that wove through her head and resounded like an echo. It came from everywhere and nowhere at once. It felt like it knew her—not just her name or her age, but details that were far more intimate.
Things it should have had no way of knowing. Things like what she liked, and what she didn't. Things like her dreams and aspirations and fears. Things like what she told herself in the dead of night when she was starting to feel overwhelmed by the choiceless choices she'd made, and the future she couldn't see stretching ahead of her. Things like her life and troubles and what she might eventually do when she graduated and had to eke out a path forward on her own.
All these were deeply private. All these were deeply unspoken, and deeply unknown. Some of them, she'd never even told Aether. Yet somehow, this voice in the back of her mind, it knew it all. And not only did it know, but it also questioned.
It asked questions she didn't know how to answer, asked questions that made her wonder, indeed, why was she thinking so hard?
Just let go. Just release yourself from the burden of carrying so much. At the end of the day, none of it really matters, does it?
A voice that came dulcet and soothing to her, piercing through the mist-shrouded space in which she was trying to move, trying to step forward, trying to find her way back to her body. A voice that could so very easily lead her astray.
She woke up, somehow. She didn't know how. Just knew that she hurtled straight up in bed, gasping, chest heaving, her lungs struggling to draw in air. She woke up like that in the faded hour before dawn, when the sky outside had begun to lighten, but the sun had yet to breach the horizon, when the pitch-black of midnight had morphed into something strange and ungrounded.
She looked out of the window, then at the rabbit toy in her arms, and gripped it more tightly, feeling the fur of the toy rest against her chest, against her cheek. Soft, comforting, almost warm.
It felt like the only thing that could anchor her at that moment, during this transient instant between waking and sleeping, between dusk and dawn, between forgetting and remembering.
In hindsight, she really should have known better.
Or maybe she should be grateful now that she can think about hindsight. Maybe she should be grateful that there was a future for her to perch in so she can look back and talk about hindsight.
Because the dreams were one thing. Everything else that happened after that was another.
She felt deluded, at the end of the day. The way she'd clung to that rabbit and insisted there was no way it could have been the cause, because the rabbit looked so innocuous. She didn't want to believe it, not even when Mona insisted she'd seen the rabbit moving by itself, not even when Lumine herself started to witness it—inexplicable occurrences where the rabbit moved from her bed to her chair to her closet to all kinds of places she didn't recall putting it—or when she realised that every time she slept with it, she was too tired to move the next day, or when the rabbit's eyes didn't show up in photos, or any of the other evidence Mona could present to convince her that there was something off about it.
Back then, she was just—what was she?
She's not sure either, not entirely. She can't explain why she kept so vehemently defending the toy. She just couldn't bear the thought of losing it, of having it taken away from her. She couldn't bear the thought of returning to a bed without it, of sleeping without it.
The rabbit felt like her only true friend.
The rabbit was her only true friend.
The rabbit told her about the harsh realities of living in the world she did. The endless comparisons between herself and her brother. The way she floated through life, always doing as everyone else ordered or wished that she would do.
When was the last time she made any decision for herself? When was the last time she really put her foot down and decided, I shall do something because if I don't, I don't think I could live with myself for it?
She can't answer any of that.
And no one else understood her, either. Mona said she was 'losing it'. Aether wasn't even nearby. And her other friends and classmates—most of them didn't see anything wrong. Probably. Possibly. She's not sure, actually. She can't remember. She doesn't remember much from that part of her life.
She only broke herself out of it because one day, a shadow lifted from the rabbit.
A shadow, a darkness, a faceless, shapeless—thing. An entity she could tell, deluded as she was even then, meant nothing good.
Because this shadow, this mist, this apparition—it used to snake into her lungs when she was sleeping at night, and while she was gasping and trembling and trying to breathe, it would tell her everything, over and over again. About how hopeless and helpless and pathetic she was, and frankly, she would be better off dead because then at least someone else could come and take her place and do more with the existence she'd been gifted and was doing nothing with.
Six months in.
It was six months in before the shadow started peeling away from the rabbit. Six months of long, restless, sleepless nights. Of voices in her head telling her she didn't matter. Six months where she started to withdraw, to retreat from the world into her own isolated corner, because it felt like everyone—even her friends, her brother—was attacking her for no reason, and if they were attacking her, then surely the voice must be right, and no one would miss her at all if she were gone.
Six months in, the shadow appeared, and it started breaking things. Started trying to break her.
She still recalls what it felt like to have the shadow wind itself around her. That apparition with the glowing eyes, the same colour as the rabbit's. The way tendrils of black fog would find her neck and curl in, tighter and tighter, until she felt dizzy and almost blacked out from the lack of air. The way they left no traces on her skin afterwards, but she could always feel them, feel the imprint of them etched into her tender flesh.
Sometimes, the shadow felt like fingers wrapped around her throat.
She feels it again. The black mist, the way it pours like liquid through a room she can no longer see. The shadows writhing, twisting towards her as the rabbit—whatever had been existing inside the rabbit—steps forth.
An all-too-familiar sensation.
She can't bring herself to breathe. Can't bring herself to think or do anything, because fear has frozen her where she is, rendered her immobile, rendered it impossible to escape.
Where can she go? Where can she run? She moved to a new place to escape the haunting of the past year, and yet the ghost of it caught up with her, in the end.
What more can she do?
"Lumine."
The voice. That voice she recognises from the rabbit, the soft, insidious voice. She shivers, lifting her hands, clapping them hard, uselessly over her ears—useless because she can hear it anyway. Useless because no matter how firmly she clamps her palms against her head, she hears every word, slithering through the air, through the gaps between her fingers, spoken into a place so deep within her that it's as though the words are being inscribed into her flesh.
"Lumine, how could you throw me away when you know I care about you so?"
"You don't," she gasps. "You don't care about me. You tried—you tried to kill me!"
"Kill you?"
The voice pauses. Then laughs, light and lilting.
"If I really wanted to kill you, then I wouldn't have let you live for so long, don't you think?"
She'd spoken to it before. The entity that lived in her rabbit toy. She'd spoken to it because she thought maybe, by pleading her case, by trying to reason—hopeless and foolish as such a course of action was—she could perhaps persuade it to leave. She wanted to keep the rabbit; she had no interest in the creature that dwelled within it.
But the entity was never very keen to have a conversation. Or, more accurately, she could never really follow its train of thought. She couldn't even be sure whether it had a coherent train of thought to begin with. The entity responded to her, but it always jumped from one topic to another, and it was always more interested in her than in itself.
Her secrets, her truths, her hidden wishes. It wanted to know everything. It only engaged when she offered it something of herself. She could feel its keen interest, stabbing through her like a knife. Whittling at the edges of her like it wanted to see how much more she would wither.
"What do you want?" she whispers. "Why are you here? Why did you follow me?"
"Why?" the voice repeats, as though musing over the question itself. "Why did I follow you? Where else would you have wanted me to go? My only goal has always been to simply remain by your side."
She can't see. It's too dark. She doesn't even know if she's in her apartment anymore. It's just blankness all around her. Just space. The void. The chasm. A feeling of nothingness, of oblivion so strong that she can scarcely even acknowledge her own sense of self.
"I don't want you by my side," she says. "I don't want you here."
"That's a shame," the shadow replies. "Because there's nowhere else I'd rather be."
A touch again, against her eyelids.
She gasps, recoils, but the pressure intensifies, pressing in until she feels like her eyeballs might explode beneath the sheer weight of it, and she lashes out, flings her arms and legs about, hoping to catch and kick the entity away while it laughs and laughs and her eyes flutter open and—
She stops. Stares.
She's back in her apartment, and beside the rabbit toy, thrown to the far end of the room, there is a man.
Not a shadow. Not a faceless apparition made of mist and malice and who knows what else, with smoking coals for eyes. Instead, it's a distinctively human shape.
She stares at it, startled enough that for a moment, she forgets about her terror, forgets about her past, forgets about the fact that she needs to get away from the accursed rabbit toy as quickly as possible.
A man crouched beside the plushie, reaching out to smooth his hand over its floppy ears, a smile on his face. A man with faded green-grey hair, reminiscent of mint, and dull red eyes the same shade as the rabbit's. He's fair-skinned, and he looks lithe and graceful, even in stillness like this. He has the kind of air that doesn't belong in a studio like hers, a place far too mundane and ordinary for the likes of him.
And his face itself, it's not one she can imagine, not one she can fathom witnessing. A too-delicate, too-perfect face, and she knows without being told that this man is not human.
He's beautiful. A beauty so striking, so violent that for one fleeting moment, Lumine forgets she was ever supposed to be afraid at all. A beauty that skims the edge of the grotesque because of how unearthly it is, how vastly impossible it is.
A beauty that sucks all the air out of her lungs.
The man looks up from the rabbit, and their gazes lock. Lumine's body freezes.
She can't move again, pinned in place by an intangible weight, by a gravity that does not belong to the world's natural order. He rises to his feet and takes a slow step towards her. One, two, three steps, steadily closing the distance between them.
Her heart kicks between her ribs. Kicks, kicks, kicks, too brutal to be alive.
He stops before her. Lowers himself so their eyes are on the same level. His smile never changes, still small, still mild, much like the rabbit's. His hand reaches out, hovering inches from her cheek.
Her breath catches, stumbles.
Even with the air between them, she can feel the cold radiating off him, the same chill that lingers and pools within her body, that makes her limbs ache with the pain of remembering.
"Won't you let me stay?" the beautiful man croons, and Lumine does not know what to say.