Rehab for SuperVillains (18+)-Chapter 269: Lital - 4

She lingered at the queue’s end at first, a spectral figure with hollow eyes.

Then she retreated further, until she abandoned the line altogether.

Instead, she slumped on the frigid floor by the fractured tiles beneath the window, knees drawn to her chest.

The symphony of spoons scraping empty bowls assaulted her—metal on porcelain, a dirge of satisfaction she could never join.

The scents twisted the knife: charred onions, watery broth, a cruel tease that set her insides aflame.

By the fourth day, her stomach’s roars dulled to a whisper, then silence—a betrayal of her body surrendering to starvation’s embrace.

Warmth fled too, as elusive as kindness.

The boiler had rusted into obsolescence years ago, but blankets were prizes for the compliant, the broken ones who bent without shattering.

Lital’s defiance—or was it mere existence?—earned her nothing but the chill.

In the cavernous sleeping hall, she huddled at the periphery, behind rusted metal shelves that groaned like weary bones.

Even the mice shunned her now, their whiskers twitching in disdain since the box had marked her as something other, something tainted.

And as the others beheld her—hunched, mute, frost-kissed skin paling to translucence—they shed their last shreds of restraint.

The bullying sharpened, sprouting fangs that sank deep.

A girl with sneering lips emptied icy water into her boots, the cold seeping like venom through wool and flesh.

A boy, eyes gleaming with petty triumph, wielded a stitching knife to carve jagged slits into her sleeves, exposing raw skin to the draft’s bite.

They scattered crumbs into her matted hair, cackling as cockroaches swarmed, drawn by the feast, their legs a prickling reminder of her degradation.

Once, in the dead of night, someone stitched dead insects into her coat’s lining—crushed husks that crumbled against her skin, their dried innards flaking like accusations of her worthlessness.

She offered no resistance.

No flinch, no plea.

Her impassivity ignited them further, transforming apathy into provocation, a silent challenge they couldn’t ignore.

So she sealed her lips forever.

Blinks became rare, deliberate; movements ghosted through the air, as if she dreaded stirring some slumbering malice in the ether.

Her voice emerged only in solitude—within the box’s stifling womb, her face angled toward the festering seam in the boards.

The crack.

"Lilly."

The name hadn’t been chosen; it bloomed unbidden on her tongue one forsaken night, a weed in barren soil.

She uttered it like a invocation, a desperate tether. Not for salvation—for companionship in the abyss.

And Lilly responded.

It began as echoes, faint and faithful.

"I’m cold," Lital would rasp, and the crack exhaled: "Cold..."

"They’re hurting me," she’d confess, tears freezing on her lashes, only for the words to rebound, breathier, burrowing into her mind like roots: "Hurting me..."

But the mimicry twisted, evolving into judgment, laced with a clarity Lital lacked.

"You let them hurt you."

"You let them laugh."

The timbre was identical—her own fragile softness reflected back.

Yet where Lital quivered with dread, Lilly remained unyielding, a mirror devoid of cracks.

No terror tainted that voice.

Only dispassionate scrutiny, a scalpel dissecting her frailties.

And the shadows deepened, insidious tendrils creeping beyond the box’s confines.

In broad daylight, they slithered along baseboards like veins pulsing with secrets, vanishing into cupboard fissures before reemerging.

They draped across her pallet, ephemeral shrouds that dissolved at her touch.

Sometimes they elongated into limbs, spectral arms reaching with languid hunger.

Once, she swore fingers unfurled against the wall, beckoning before retracting into nothingness.

No one else perceived them.

Feet trampled through the shapes obliviously, blind to the encroaching dark.

But Lital saw.

Always.

Her eyes, once downcast in avoidance, now hunted the gloom, tracing its whispers.

Nights amplified the torment.

She coiled into a fetal knot, arms barricading her chest, coat a threadbare fortress.

Breaths came shallow, measured sips to sustain life without inviting invasion.

For deeper inhales... might summon the intruders inward.

She’d witnessed their attempts—beetles probing her lips like thieves at a gate, antennae feathering her cheeks in mocking caresses.

She’d mastered slumber with sealed mouth, a vigilant sentinel against the swarm.

Yet even vigilance faltered.

One night—the pivotal fracture—she sensed a whisper against her cheek.

A twitch dismissed it as stray thread, a errant hair.

But it persisted.

Deliberate. Alive.

Legs unfolded—countless, elongated, barbed like thorns.

It advanced toward her ear, a purposeful pilgrimage.

Her gasp shattered the hush; she swatted wildly, but the centipede had breached, delving into the canal with relentless wriggles, its body grinding against her eardrum, vibrations echoing like thunder in her skull.

Screams lodged in her throat, unspoken.

Instead, she convulsed in mute agony—limbs thrashing, nails rending her own flesh in futile excavation.

Heels gouged the floor, splintering wood and drawing blood.

Her tongue clamped between teeth, copper flooding her mouth as she stifled the howl.

Her form contorted, a puppet in seizure’s grip, until exhaustion claimed her, leaving her limp and shattered.

And from the shadows beyond the cracked boards, the voice slithered forth once more, intimate as a lover’s murmur.

"Let me in."

"I’ll make it stop."

"You don’t have to feel it anymore."

...

The moment of transformation was deceptively quiet, a whisper in the storm of her suffering.

No cataclysmic thunder roared.

No piercing wail escaped to alert the world beyond.

The box held its secrets close, muffling the birth of something monstrous.

It started in her eyes—wide and veined with crimson, staring into the void without focus, without hope.

Then they drifted shut.

Not from the weight of fatigue.

From surrender.

A final, aching acceptance that hollowed her out.

She sprawled on her back amid the sodden straw, blood crusting at the edges of her lips like forgotten accusations.

The floor beneath her was slick with her own despair, her hands quivering in one last futile spasm before falling limp, as if her body had finally betrayed her completely.

The whisper coiled inside her mind, no longer a tentative invitation or a probing query.

It was a vow, etched in the marrow of her bones.

"Let me in, Lital."