Insanity - Aidesse/Jaiden

Aiden plodded down the hallway, the only sound ringing throughout the otherwise silent hallway the sound of his shoes on stone as he approached the door he both desperately craved entry to, and the door he was quietly dreading to push inside.

Lukas had warned him that what he was about to see was... scary.

At first, he'd smirked and laughed it off a bit, seeing as Lukas was a scaredy-cat and got scared of everything. Sometimes Lukas would even jump, getting frightened by his own shadow.

And then he'd seen Petra's eyes as she'd returned from her own little visit.

What he'd seen had chilled him to the bone.

Petra's eyes were hollow, wide, staring at something that didn't exist as she immediately beelined to the others for comfort.

Petra, the redhead who journeyed to the Nether on a nearly daily basis, who got every little random thing for trades, who could kill a spider with her bare hands when she really wanted to...

Petra was scared.

And if it scared Petra, then who knew who bad it really was?

Before he knew it, he was standing in front of the iron door. He inhaled a shaky breath, before carefully reaching out and lifting the latch on the door, hearing the metal thing clunk loudly.

The heavy iron door grinded open, scraping a bit on the stone floor as he shifted it open.

His lungs were paper-thin. Every inhale felt as if he was crumpling a paper bag; every exhale felt as though he were stomping all over it.

"Jesse?"

Toxic purple eyes raised from the ground and leveled in a stare right at him.

Familiar black hair.

Familiar gold hairpin.

Familiar everything.

But cold, unfamiliar toxic purple eyes were what were keeping Aiden from running straight to the black-haired girl and giving her a tight hug.

That, and the shackles keeping her trapped and locked down in this enclosure that had been a bedroom at some point but had become a prison, behind a set of iron bars that were in front of a wall of cracked glass.

They had taken every precaution.

Maybe that was a good thing.

"Aiden."

Aiden nearly flinched at the normal tone of voice that he heard. He'd been expecting a grating, rasping shriek that made him want to clamp his hands over his ears, or maybe a low, gravelly snarl that sounded like Jesse gargled with rocks. Something monstrous, horrific, to reflect the thing she had become.

But she just sounded like... Jesse.

Albeit a faintly surprised Jesse, but Jesse nonetheless.

Jesse stood up and walked over to the glass, making Aiden take a reluctant but cautious step back, hand straying to his sword in case she tried anything funny.

The glass had been engineered by Olivia after the first incident, where Jesse'd nearly strangled Ivor to death before Petra had fled in and sliced right through the tentacle and gotten Ivor out of there, to be extremely durable. Axel could've thrown an anvil at it, and it would've just bounced right off.

But Jesse was stronger than Axel, now that she wasn't Jesse. Much, much stronger.

And they all knew it.

Even so, all of her attempts so far had only cracked the glass.

So perhaps that offered some comfort.

"You look... different." He snapped back to reality to see Jesse looking him up and down a bit. She brushed the long sidebang of black hair that she'd started wearing her hair in, the gold hairpin pinning back the wrong wave of hair, the right and not the left as he was- as they were all accustomed to- revealing scaly black skin that made Aiden's skin crawl.

She smiled- a completely humorless expression that simply twitched her lips up at the ends into something that was alien and unfamiliar and just...

... not Jesse.

"Then again, so do I. So maybe that's not so much of a surprise," the girl said mildly, continuing to look Aiden up and down with that wave of hair brushed away from her toxic purple eyes.

"Stop it." Those two words slipped out from between Aiden's lips before he could stop them.

Jesse tilted her head, taking on a confused expression. "Stop it? Stop what?" she asked innocently.

But Aiden could see the malicious glint in her eyes.

The glint of light that marked madmen apart from normal people, the glint of light that was a telltale sign of danger.

The glint of light that made Jesse not Jesse anymore.

"Stop pretending to be Jesse." His throat was starting to close up painfully.

He hadn't liked Jesse very much at first.

No, that wasn't accurate.

He'd hated Jesse at first.

Always quietly showing up at Endercon, always mildly showing up at the building competition every single year, losing in the competition every single year, and still quietly returning every single year, not at all discouraged by their loss the previous year, always cheerfully telling her team to "cheer up, we'll win it for sure next year!" and losing again anyway.

Every. Single. Year.

And then she'd started interesting him.

It was hard not to.

When you got past the annoying determination, and the overly cheerful behavior, and the mild personality that was almost absurdly adorable, and the fact that she looked like a porcelain doll, and the fact that she really didn't seem to mind losing in the Endercon building competition every single year...

Well, it was hard not to be interested.

She'd pretend to hate him in front of her friends. And he'd pretend to hate her right back.

But at Endercon, the two of them would sit down in some obscure corner and halfheartedly trade insults while playing a board game of some sort- usually Monopoly, since that took up a lot of time.

He always let Jesse win.

She always pretended not to notice.

He wondered if she even remembered.

She'd forgotten this year.

He'd gone too far this year at the building competition. Setting Reuben on fire... well, he hadn't meant to do that. But that had been the result. And that had upset Jesse.

Maybe she'd forgotten, or she just didn't want to talk to him about it, or maybe she'd just stopped caring about the game and the tradition they'd started together every year at Endercon since five years ago.

But she just hadn't showed up.

Alright, if he was to be honest...

he had forgotten their tradition as well.

And now there wasn't much of a chance that Jesse remembered that tradition at all.

"Oh, but I'm not pretending, Aiden." Jesse offered him a cheerful smile. "I am Jesse. I've just changed a bit, is all."

Yeah, right.

"Awww, you don't believe me?"

Oops.

Looks like he'd just said that out loud.

Jesse pouted playfully, a look that normal Jesse would never have worn on her face, let alone even considered wearing on her face. "Well, I guess we've both changed quite a bit, then. For you not to believe me anymore..."

She tilted her head. "Do you really hate me that much?"

Aiden decided not to answer that.

"Well, but then you didn't like me before this anyway. So maybe it's better that we stay this way." Jesse simply shrugged and slipped into a cross-legged sitting position on the floor, that strange glint of madness still playing in her eyes as she tilted her head back to meet his eyes. "Though, if you don't like me, there's something that we have to wonder..."

She purposefully trailed off.

Hating the fact that he had to pick up that sentence to figure out what she wanted to ask, what she was trying to say, Aiden asked, "What is it?"

"Why would you come visit me? If you don't like me, surely you'd just decide to not come at all, wouldn't you?"

Aiden decided not to speak at all, staring at the girl he'd started becoming interested by.

The girl he'd started becoming interested in.

"Well, but the human mind works in strange ways, so maybe it's just something you wanted to do. Or maybe there was something you wanted to say to me...?" Jesse trailed off again.

Well... there was nothing to lose anymore.

He'd already lost everything there was to lose.

"I love you," he told her.

And then he was out the door, running back down the hallway, the huge iron door still swinging shut behind him slowly as he bolted from the room, not daring to look back as tears threatened to spill out of his eyes.

And that was why he missed the way Jesse's toxic purple eyes flickered green momentarily, tears springing into her eyes as she stared after Aiden from where she was still sitting cross-legged on the floor.

"I know."

She thought about it for a minute, eyes still that luminous green, tears slowly dripping down their face like some foreign entity as she stared at the floor and thought.

She looked back up at the pinprick of light that was still filtering through the slowly shutting iron door's doorway, even though there was no way that he'd hear her.

"I love you too."

And then the door slammed shut, leaving the girl who'd been possessed by the Witherstorm to her own insanity.