FALLEN | rowan whitethorn x oc

CHAPTER SIX - everyone is screaming and gavriel is a fake bitch

There had always been a lot of things going on in Isabella's mind. When she had been only a child, she had always worried about her image, her looks; the perception that other people had of her. When she grew older, her mind –which should have become her favorite place for escapism- had turned against her. She would constantly find new things to notice, to worry, to cry about. She was constantly wishing she could stop thinking, stop worrying, but her mind had remained undefeated. And while a young Isabella was trying to get used to the changes of middle school –and failing miserably- her mind kept on attacking her.

She had talked about it with her parents. Seeking for help and reassurance in her family. She knew that they had noticed strange things going on with her. After all, it wasn't normal for an eight-year-old kid to suffer from anxiety and stress. So her parents had taken her to see a therapist.

She thinks too much, the therapist had told her parents. There was nothing that could be done about it. And so Isabella went on.

Her first panic attack happened when she had just turned eleven. She had been invited to a classmate's party for her first time since third grade and she was nervous, terrified. Her mind, always the devil, became a spiral of possibilities behind why she had really been invited. Maybe it was a prank, maybe it wasn't. Whatever it was, she never got to know. Because her throat started closing up while she was in her parents' car going to the party, soon she felt like she couldn't breathe and when black dots started blurring her vision, Isabella gave up and fainted.

By the time she was a seventh grade student, things had gotten worse. Being thirteen was already hard enough, but with Isabella's disheartening mind, it was the closest to hell she had ever felt. Her thoughts were always a dark cloud fluting from side to side, full of harmful words and discouraging phrases. But the worst happened when that same cloud rained. Those days, Isabella could barely stand the pain building in her chest and the tears, threatening to leave a mark in her face, if she allowed herself to shed.

Something was wrong with her. Something was wrong with her mind.

She had always known it was true. And that made everything worse. Because she couldn't deny it, because her parents knew it, her therapist knew it and her classmates suspected it.

Her thoughts and the pain were eating her alive when she first started reading. She had never read for pleasure before but one night, when her thinking was keeping her awake and she could feel the faint sensation of her throat betraying her once again; she picked up a book and began to read. All, to distract herself.

And so it began.

Her mind calmed down, and Isabella realized that books and the worlds that lived inside the pages were the form of escapism she had always looked for. Soon her room was full of books and, while time went by, so did Isabella's love for reading. She was fourteen when she first read Throne of Glass, and she would be lying if she said that Aelin's journey did not captivate her.

After that, the war broke down. It was not safe to go anywhere, if one did, they probably never came back. The government started kidnapping people, safe with the cover of the night, while during the day, they shot bullets at anyone who they deemed suspicious.

The people rebelled.

The victims started taking people away, too. And bullets began to come from all sides. No matter what you did, who you stood with or who you prayed to, death was always walking next to you. Isabella heard her parents talking about international aid not long before her fifteenth birthday. They never came. Instead, by the time she was fifteen, soldiers from other countries took advantage of her people's situation and a civil war turned into a new and modern form of colonization. Then, two days after her sixteen birthdays, the soldiers took her parents. Bombs were thrown. Afterwards, they took her as a prisoner of war. She was taken to their camp and she noticed that there were many like her in their camp. All girls.