trigger warning: sh, kms thoughts, nightmares
It all starts when someone leans down to Ada's ear, the gentle weight of a hand on her shoulder, static noise buzzing everywhere, everything else drowned out into a diminished buzz.
Climb up the suit of armour.
Servants walk past Ada, unnoticed by the young princess, blind to the person at Ada's side. The person is covered in shadows. A singular, thin, long black line that wreathes and twists into a writhing buzz of static noise, whirring around her in a figure of a person.
She doesn't realise that the person is beside her. She merely tilts her head, one finger bunched around a lock of mildly chestnut brown hair. The five-year-old tilts her head— what was that thought? It had come out of absolutely nowhere, a sudden thought that sprung from her mind, previously full of thoughts on a new breed of butterflies that were to be released in the palace garden.
The next thing she knows, Ada's ears turn on to the crashing of metal. Lavender eyes watch as the writhing, morphing figure of a person, more shadow than flesh, walks away. In its place, servants mill around her, panicked, pale and gasping when they find blood dripping down her forehead. She's more blood than girl.
—
Cousin Bellamy's twice Ada's age, fourteen and bobble-throated and lanky. He's awkward, starting to grow into his distinguished features, wearing his hair in an undercut, dark hair flopping over his aquamarine eyes.
"What are you doing?" Seven-year-old Ada is short-haired, lavender eyes bright beneath chin-length hair that swishes around her face like a curtain. She leans into Bellamy's lap, gaze fixated on his phone. She's curious to see what's making him look so disturbed.
The hair on her body stands on end. She jumps, startled. Bellamy shoves the girl away, and one look at her blank gaze lets him know that the damage has been already done.
"I'm just texting my friend," Bellamy says gruffly. "He's being weird."
Ada can't hear him. Cotton balls and grains of aluminium scratch around in her ears. The red-carpeted, silver-chandelier'ed lounge room of Buckingham Palace mutes into a monochrome spread.
The person's back. Writhing shadows, made from that thin line twisted and tangled and wreathed into the form of a person stands before Ada. Ada senses it, but also doesn't.
The face opens up into a thin, wide smile. The gaping maw is alabaster, blank and unmoving. A total contrast to the writhing, black all over.
Cut yourself.
Nails dig into her upper arms. Lavender eyes widen. Beneath the buzzing static, Ada is appalled. What is she thinking? Why would she think of something so jarring all of a sudden?
(The photo Bellamy's weirdo sent him was of an arm. Slit and bleeding and fresh. Bellamy's fingers were shaking over the keyboard.)
Ada blinks.
The blanket is red. Her arm is wet. Wrapped around her fingers is a penknife.
The shadow walks away. Away and into her.
—
Ada is dreaming. She doesn't know that.
It's muted. Every sense, every emotion, the sound of her heart roaring in her ears, the wind that is supposed to be whooshing around her.
Ada is falling.
She's falling in a man endless well. The well is white. Milky. Endless. Ada falls, and she never hits the ground. Ada falls, and watches as the white nothingness morphs into flashes of black.
Ada falls in a checkered well of black and white, and endless sea of chessboards that curl around her and closes in toward her.
Ada is falling.
It is pure silence. She is numb. Her heart hammers against her ribs, but also doesn't. She is so scared, but she is also indifferent. She is falling, but her hair doesn't move. She is falling, but she's not stopping.
Ada is dreaming. She's dreaming of endlessly falling, all around her nothing but checkered squares of uniform black and white swirling around her. They taper into a conical end below, and whenever Ada falls, the end is further than before.
From a square of black, a shadow watches. Watches as Ada falls. Watches as Ada lives.
Watches Ada from within.
a/n — intrusive thoughts are so fucking scary istg
anyways this is how my babagrill traumatised herself!
