Make Me Sane [Mirabelle/Closed]

In the silence that followed her question, there came a guttural sound that made the very Earth beneath their feet quake. It carried on longer than one would have thought possible considering the longer it went on, the more it came to sound like a scream. If it wasn't already, the Songbird's hand would have gone clammy in Kionchi's as adrenaline began to work its way through her veins once again. Breathing became harder despite the reassuring presence of both her spirit and her companion.

"Shit." the spirit spat, her form disappearing in an instant. The shadow reappeared just down the row of tents, moving quickly away from her wielder. Whatever kind of care she'd had for Mirabelle and about Kionchi's presence in the sanctuary of her inner world was seemingly all but forgotten. 

"What!?" the question was heavy with worry, the shinigami's voice almost breaking as she called after her spirit. "She's never like this. Never. She might be aloof sometimes but she never just runs off like that. And- and. I don't know what that thing was."

She looked from the ground to her hand in Kionchi's before looking back into his face. He was worried. A hint of fear might have even been there, but that could have just been a reflection of her own she was hoping to find. A pale finger lifted to replace a stray strand of hair before her hand cupped his cheek and brought his face to hers. The kiss was soft and quick, and as it ended she gently tugged her hand free of his with an apologetic look. "I have to find out what that is. You don't need to protect me this time, I'll be okay."

A smile of reassurance quirked at the corners of her mouth before she turned and trailed after her spirit. From what she could see, she'd gone in the direction of he big top. The colors of the stands passed by in a blur as her shunpo carried the Songbird from stand to stand. Her eyes scanned the spaces between for any sign of her spirit but found none.

"Beldame?" her voice carried through the eerie silence without interruption or echo as she set foot on the ground at the base of the circus tent. Distant memories of the spirit's warnings to stay away from the tent rang in her mind but she couldn't afford to pay them any mind. "Where are you?"

Cautious steps carried the shinigami around the corner of the tent, her foot just narrowly missing one of the stakes in the ground. As she righted herself and attempted to orient where she found herself inside her inner world, the spectral figure of her spirit manifest just before her. "Child."

"Beldame!" some of her fears were put to rest as she laid eyes on her spirit once more. Though even through just the name she was so often referred to as, she could tell that something was wrong. Her spirit was uneasy. "What was that? Why did you run?"

"Never you mind. Leave, now." the spirit seemed more to order than she did request, yet her wielder still felt the need to comply. Before she was able, another scream tore through the world. This one was louder, as its origin was mere feet away. "Quickly."

The shinigami's eyes wandered from her spirit to the tent. The person whom she trusted the most was telling her to leave, seemingly for her own safety. Why wouldn't she listen? A weight in her chest when she thought about leaving was the only thing still keeping her there. That, and she wasn't sure she could leave even if she wanted to. She still had no answer as to who or what had brought her into the world in the first place, so who was to say she even could? 

The same hand that had cupped her lover's hand not moments ago reached out to touch the fabric of the tent. It was an abesnt minded gesture but one that drew the spirit's fury. "Don't-!"

Though she'd been warned innumerable times before, this warning came too late. As her fingers made contact with the coarse canvas of the tent, the paint on it seemed to decay and fall away. Tiny cracks spider webbed their way over the entirety of the tent until the very structure of it seemed to be unstable. But it stood. The shinigami watched in horror as the handiwork of her gesture spread. The cracks branched off from the big top and out into the open air. Pieces of the sky began to fall free, not unlike the paint from the tent had fallen into the dried hay at her feet. Awestruck and dumbfounded, the redhead followed the cracks with her eyes as they spanned the entirety of her inner world.

Paint chips flaked away at a faster rate the more the cracks roamed through the realm. The scream came back again too, this time somehow louder than it had been before. Flecks of paint began to kick up in a wind that came from all sides of the clearing, turning them into a faded blurry rainbow of colors. Pulse pounding in her ears, Mirabelle looked back at her spirit for a sense of comfort. Where she expected to see the shadowy specter, she instead found the shadows flaking away in the wind to reveal a grisly woman who's dress was soaked in blood. 

"Wh-who are you? WHERE IS BELDAME!? WHERE IS MY SPIRIT? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HER?" the words came out quiet and shaky at first before the fear she'd been keeping in check took over. Her eyes couldn't tear themselves from the image. Even as, piece by piece, in her peripherals the world around her seemed to shatter and fall away into a black abyss she couldn't bear to move her sight from where she'd last seen her spirit.

"Child." the woman's lips moved as he spoke, the same voice she'd heard for years coming from them. The same name she'd been called so many times before being directed at her but by someone who, at the very least, sounded like her spirit. Even the tone the annoyed parental tone she used when she was angry was the same. "What did I tell you about approaching that tent?"

'YOU didn't tell me ANYTHING!" now the tears were coming as Mirabelle finally found it in her to search around her for the familiar spirit. They came down harder and faster as she realized there was little around them aside from things that just seemed to be coming into focus. "B-beldame did. Where is she?"

'You're looking at her." the response to the question drifted through the air from all directions, it's speaker still unseen. 

'You shut right up." the spirit snapped, blood spilling from a wound in her neck to freshly coat the front of her dress. Bare feet slapped stone as the spirit marched behind the Songbird over a still invisible landscape to scream at someone who still couldn't be seen. "Had you just stayed quiet, all would be well."

"Wh-what?" standing, the shinigami spun to face the strange woman. Through her tears more of their surroundings were becoming visible but still not enough that she could make out where they were. "I don't understand. You can not be Beldame. She doesn't look... like that."

"It is me and this is how I look." the woman spun and bowed to offer the redhead a compassionate smile, the kind she'd so often dreamt her spirit would give her if only she'd had a face. As she straightened herself once more, Beldame cast an annoyed look over her shoulder. Facing forward, she stopped short and whatever words she'd been about to speak seemed to catch in her throat. "BItch."

The wielder looked at her spirit in confusion before following her gaze. Behind her back stood a ghastly figure that only seemed to get worse in appearance the longer she looked at it. First she noticed the hair, long and black like Kionchi's. Then she noticed the body, shapely and toned like her own. Next was the dress. It began as off-white near the shoulders but quickly became grimy and full of blood halfway down the body of the woman. From the bottom of the dress came what could only be described as an umbilical cord, a spongy looking length of tissue that connected the 'mother' to the 'child'. The child's body was obviously undeveloped, as it's paste white skin bore no blemish or muscle definition to speak of. It even lacked nipples and genitals. The last thing the shinigami saw was the mask. It didn't seem to be a mask so much as a helmet. The back of it wrapped around the base of the 'mother's' skull under her mass of hair. Large, deep cracks showed the innards of the mask's beak just before it met with the facial portion.

The thing was hideous. It made her stomach churn. bile going so far as to rise to her mouth before she was able to choke it back down. Worried green eyes cast themselves in the direction of Beldame, or whatever the spirit was, hoping for an answer. Her pursed lips didn't seem to be letting information out any time soon.

"Are you going to tell her, or shall we?" the voice came again, though neither of the bodies seemed to move their mouths to speak. Instead the woman simply tiled her head while the child reached up and took her hand. The other spirit further pursed her lips, almost seeming to pucker in response to the thing's question. "Fine."

"Mirabelle." the pair regarded her now, both of them resting their gaze on her from where they stood. "That is Beldame's true form. And this is the true form of the world in which she resides, a decrepit replica of the space your corporeal body occupies. One wherein she can rule with an iron fist those who have wronged you. She may bury them and raise them time and time again, to her heart's content."

"That. Is. ENOUGH!" Beldame roared, her blade suddenly in hand. The world around the group coming into focus as if beckoned by the pair. Tombstones jutted out of various tiles from the hideout's flooring, the wood panels on the walls either broken or rotting, and a single lonely wanderer in the corner painting nonsense on the wall in what looked to be blood. "She doesn't need this. She doesn't need you!"

A loud pop echoed through the room as Beldame began her advance on the masked mother and her child. The blade in her hand was no longer the deep black it had been, instead it was crystal clear. Inside of the blade a strange fluid seemed to dance as the spirit walked, clinging to the sides of the blade's inside before washing away to another section of the blade. Second by second the volume of the liquid grew as the spirit walked, her feet nimbly avoiding the tombstones jutting from the floor. 

"Excuse me," the Songbird rose from her position on the ground. Her tears were over with but her skin held their memory in the form of a glossy finish. Her own steps over the broken ground were less graceful than her zanpakuto spirit's but she moved as quickly as she could to stand between her and the other... being. "but who are you?"

"Don't you dare tell her." The pair tilted their heads in unison at the woman's question, seemingly not at all fazed with the approach of the other spirit. Neither did the venom of her words seem to sting them as the looked on at the girl.

"Should the mask not have given it away? If not that, then surely our complexions should have."  they seemed almost concerned that the woman hadn't pieced the conclusion together. The tone of their voice was hard to discern as it was one voice layered over another but she could only guess that the pair had assumed she had made the connection herself. "We are what she is not. Something not necessarily natural for your kind."

Until now, Beldame had stayed where Mirabelle had been keeping her but, having had enough, she pushed the Songbird's hand off of her midsection and charged at the newcomers. The blade in her hands seemed to shake, the crystalline blade almost ready to explode. Beldame stood tall, the tip of the blade pointed at the pair, ready to strike. Before she was able a snake of white hot electricity knocked the blade from her grip.

"Stop." the Songbird's words were soft spoken, her voice just this side of shaking. As her eyes met the shocked expression of her spirit, they were angry. "I want to hear what they have to say."

"We thank you." the child stuck its tongue out at Beldame as the mother regarded the shinigami. "The most simple way we can say it is that our mask is your mask. Or, it will be one day. The day it suits you, that is."

"Oh." her mouth was suddenly dry. It hurt to swallow, both literally and figuratively. She was like Nagisa. Like Kiriko. Like how many others? This was the third piece to her soul, one that didn't exist when she was reborn but existed now. "I see. What more can you tell me about what she did?"

Her gaze shifted back to Beldame, still angry. If they were right, and so far they seemed to be, then there was more to uncover. "What else did she hide from me?"

"A great many things, too many for us to list here and now." the pair looked at one another before they looked back at Mirabelle. "The most important, we feel, is that she hid us from you. Not simply because we feel disgruntled, mind you, but because of what she hid us with. We aren't sure how you're to feel about this but she hid memories from yo-"

"STOP" the Witch interrupted once more, this time more of a plea than anything. "You can not tell her that."

"-u. Memories of anything she felt too painful for you to bear on your own. A majority of it was of your living life but there were things she hid about you life as a shinigami too. We feel its best that when you leave you review anything new you might remember. Not that we know how it will work, but we suspect it will be not unlike watching a film."  the pair looked at each other once more before nodding and facing their shinigami once more, their explanation over. 

"I see. I'll have to do that, thank you." teeth clenched, Mirabelle began to silently weave a spell. Pushing a palm out toward Beldame, a gust of air knocked the spirit over and held her down. It wasn't more than three steps before Mirabelle sat at her spirit's  side, stroking the done-up hair and wiping away some of the pooling blood on her dress. "You had my trust. You had me fooled. It breaks my heart to find this out, you know."

Despite her words, the shinigami's tone was stone cold. A kind of calm before the storm. "You and I could have had so much. We could have had a bright future. We could have. But not anymore. You saw to that the day you put this into motion."

As the Songbird watched, iron pillars fell from the sky and through the building's roof . One for each limb and one to fall just beside her head, an unspoken threat not to cross her again. Each iron pillar brought with it a scream from the spirit as it shattered her bones and pinned her to the ground.  "You'll sit here and rot now. You'll rot until the day I deem you worth of use by my hand. And so help me, if I ever find you cross me again after that? I guess, then, I'll have to find out what existence as a shinigami is without a zanpakuto spirit." 

"And you-" her words stopped short, as her eyes searched the room for the other spirit she couldn't find it. "Where did you go?"

"We're always watching. Always there for you. " the voice came, again, seemingly from the walls. "You are welcome."

"How did you-?" the question hung half answered as the reply came part way through.

"We spent months with your memories. We know you very well, Mirabelle. Farewell."

With the spirit bidding her farewell, and their hold on her relinquished, Mirabelle found herself slowly drifting away from the new space of her inner world. Bit by bit she found herself coming more and more into her physical body. As soon as she was able, the Songbird sat herself up in the couch. She wasn't eager to share her spiritual revelation but if she was going to do it with anyone, it would be with Kionchi when he awoke. 

[WC: 2850]