"Do you blame yourself?"
The little girl heard a voice. Inside her head. Not from outside.
Still she rose her head from the crook of her arms holding her knees close to her chest.
She was somewhere dark, but she could see the sky- an alleyway maybe?
The ground was hard against her bones, the air acrid, sour.
Everything was sore, her faced soiled, her clothes worn.
But she didn't notice those things.
Instead, she noticed that other than the voice, she was alone.
"What?" She whispered.
The voice, somehow, cocked its head to the side, soft curious eyes in its tone.
"Well it's normal for a patient in this situation to feel a kind of... guilt."
She blinked at the nothingness, the darkness, the lack of any emotion of humanity all that was left in how she felt.
"What situation?" She whispered back, a sort of bitterness and bite nestling itself into the pit of her stomach when she spoke.
The voice knelt down to her level.
It wanted its question answered, even if that voice was simply her own mind.
Her own mind trying to remember- or maybe forget- what truly happened.
"The accident." It clarified.
Confusion still wriddled the girl's thoughts, no words leaving her mouth.
The accident.
What accident?
She tried to think.
Think and think and think and remember, but what was there to remember?
My parents. She thought. Where are they?
"They're dead." The voice said and a sudden shiver made its way through the little girl's body. Those words. They didn't make sense.
"But..." She began, looking around, as if the answer laid somewhere on the concrete floor. "But I just saw them."
"Yes." The voice answered, no emotions in its resonance, only fact. "You saw them die."
"No, no." She said, shaking her head, her hands suddenly frantically searching around- for what- she wasn't sure- maybe something to hold onto. "No, I just saw them, they were just here-"
"Yes. They died."
"No!" She yelled, and her body started to shake, struggling whimpers leaving her throat. Her hands slapped the ground with how she kept trying to look for that thing, that thing she knew would keep her safe- where was it- What was it?
She felt tears stain her eyes, blood stain her knees as she dragged them across the ground to find whatever it was she was looking for.
"They're not dead." She insisted, a crazed sort of tone overtaking her as she began to hear the real world again, the cars passing in the street the alley hid her from, the people talking, the sounds of life muffled by her own false reality. But that noise of life- for someone like her, it was deafening.
She tried to push it away. The sounds, her quirk, the life, the voice, her own thoughts- everything, everything, everything.
She scratched at her ears they hurt so bad, cringed and winced at the ringing that started to pierce her like a needle. She started to bang herself in the head, repeat mindless whispers of denial over and over till it all felt so painful the strands of the hair on her head she could've sworn had their own color gone grey.
