Fate/Writer's Dream: Immagine Speculare

Chapter Four: Nothing To Live For

     Laying on her bed, she stared up at the white ceiling. The wooden fan above hummed as it spun around, cooling her already frozen body. The four blank walls surrounding her felt tight and suffocating. They encased her in a box that choked the life out of her. The walls kept pressing in, further and further till she couldn't breathe well. Hundreds of void black hands tickled her feet, their fingers scratching every section of her body. They moved up from her toes to her legs, tightening her muscles. Her chest pressed down on itself as the hands gathered around her torso, then around her neck. They strangled her till her throat was voiceless, then moved up towards her eyes and reached to gouge them out.

     Liz sat up from her bed and looked down at her legs. The dark bags under her red eyes were deep and her cheeks were stained with tears. Her long white hair dropped down to her back and reached her thighs.

     She looked to her right at the alarm clock sitting on the wooden counter. It's glass was shattered, but the hands kept ticking, and ticking, and ticking.

     It was a few minutes before twelve in the morning.

     All of the windows blocked out the sunlight with their shutters. Not a single ray reached her room; it was too blinding for her to bear.

     The floor was a complete mess. Hundreds of crumpled clothes littered the ground. Several towels were tossed around to seemingly random places. They were all stained a strange hue of dark yellow, and each one was crusty and hard.

     She swung her legs to the side of the bed and slowly stood up, her long white hair trailing her, and so were hundreds of shadowy limbs that grabbed onto her body. Taking the form of arms and hands, her shadow engulfed her backside and tried to pull her back into the bed. Seemingly effortlessly, she shrugged off the shadows and made her way out of her room.

     Her thin body was clothed by a set of loose pink pajamas. They looked quite nice from the front, but the back was horrifying. All of the shadows connected behind her in sticky-like tentacles that attached to her clothes and skin. The shadows extended from her back and grabbed onto the walls around her, every inch of it palpitating and pulsating, as if it were alive. Uncomfortable sounds of goop mushing together would make anyone's spine tingle if they heard it, but Liz was used to the sound, the smell, and the weight of her guilt that tried to pull her back into her bed.

     Liz resided in a cheap low-quality apartment. It had no air conditioners, no heaters, and had no room service. The only upside was that she didn't need to pay that much to stay. The landlord wasn't nice either. He was a jerk to everyone. He never sympathized with anyone and would never understand their condition, no matter how severe it would be.

     Stepping through the trash and clothes littering the floor, she made her way to the fridge that was near the exit door. It was a small plain mini fridge that laid on the dirty carpet floor. She moved against the monstrosity that attempted to pull her away from one of her main sources of energy: food, but she resisted the powerful urge to rest for all eternity and grabbed onto the doors of the fridge, pulling it open.
    
    
     Inside the nearly empty fridge was a single packet of saltine crackers. They sat there in the middle of the rackets, surrounded by empty containers of other foods.

     Liz's eyes glossed over the fact that she didn't have any more ingredients except for a small snack that wouldn't do anything for her and grabbed the packet. Her fingers rubbed against the plastic casing, the sound of it cracking and folding onto itself tingled her ears. She lifted it up from the fridge and made her way towards the singular table that laid lopsided by the windows, which were also closed.

     The shadowy hands grabbed at the packet in her hand and tried to pull them away from her, but she held onto it tightly, her eyes not even acknowledging them, as if they never existed in the first place.