Crazed Minds | ✔️

forty two

"I just wanna be yours."
-MICHUUL, DUCKWRTH
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"What are you going to do now then?" I ask, glaring up at them, voice shaking.

Rosa rounds the chair and flips open the black box. I tilt my head back to get a view of what's inside to see a little dial and a couple of buttons that link the chair to the box.

"When the building in the woods was burnt down, this room was built for the sole purpose of dealing with students like you. And with this in mind, I'm about to serve the purpose of the room and induce physical pain. I believe electrocution will destroy the part of your brain that is triggering the voices. No more voices equals no more deaths."

I try to scramble out of my seat but it doesn't budge. "You're going to electrocute me?"

"We're saving you from yourself!" Rosa says from behind me.

"Please!" I yell, giving up on escape since it's clearly impossible. "Please don't do this to me. Just let me go!"

"That's the voices speaking," Rosa surmises. "They don't want to die."

I want to scream. It's not the voices! It's me! It's Olivia Mitchell. "Don't do this," I say so quietly I barely hear it myself. I can feel tears streaming down my cheeks but I do nothing to stop them.

I turn to Jasper and yell through my tears, "How could you do this?!"

He winces and yells back, eyes stoic, "Because I love you! And I care too much to watch you live with these voices in your head!"

"You don't love me!" I reply, shaking my head to shake away the tears.

He stares at the ground again.

"Get ready," Rosa says from behind me.

I'm about to protest again, when I feel a large jolt of electricity pulse through my body. It feels like I'm being struck by lightning. My head is racing and the voices are yelling and shouting and I don't know if it's a voice who's screaming or me. It's excruciating, and the whole time the tears are coming in free fall I'm screaming at Jasper who isn't showing any emotion. He just watches.

Without warning, the electricity stops, and I gasp for air. I can still feel tingles of electricity in the tips of my fingers as my heart frantically tries to pump blood back around my body.

"I'm sorry," Jasper says quietly, shaking his head.

"You're breaking my heart, and all you can say is sorry?" I reply in a crackly, smashed-up voice.

Before he can reply, Rosa starts it again and I'm on fire once more.

And I scream the only word that I know can lessen the pain.

"ALEC!"

Alec

"You hear that?" I ask Seth who's sitting beside me on the sofa next to my comfy armchair. We've been searching for Liv for ages, ever since she bolted in the Dining Hall. Jasper also seems to have disappeared. Night is falling and we're sitting in the library, our brains completely blank of any places she could possibly be.