"You'd better be ready to explain yourself!"

Ashenai's ears would have normally been flat against her head at her mother's scream, but she was intent today. When her mother opened the door to yell at her daughter again, the words caught in her throat; this couldn't be her daughter. The girl's skin was becoming more pale, her face more sunken in. Her mother stepped out of the doorway, her yellow eyes wide with surprise as they followed Ashenai's limping, hunchbacked figure to the table.

"I met him a long time ago," her voice had changed, now a breathless wheeze as she sat at the table, back to her mother. "It was in the sewers. Not many nekos are down there, Mo--" she paused as a fit of violent coughing overtook her, shaking her entire frame until several seconds after her mother had sat opposite of her at the table. Ashenai looked up at her mother for a moment, a dead glance, and pulled out a tattered, yellow handkerchief from her pocket, spitting into it and balling it up in her hand before continuing with her story, her voice slightly quieter now.

"Not many nekos are down there," she continued, not noticing her mother strain to hear what she was saying. "I got to know him- he said he'd had a daughter once. I saw pictures he handed me, and they were of me. I never said anything until I found him receded in the sewers." She began to cough again, tears running out of her eye as the cough ravaged her dry throat and drew blood. She hadn't eaten or drank for two days, her hours fully consumed by the dried red dust that was in her pocket protected by a jar.

Her mother just stared at her daughter, knowing that her ex-husband had come to a similar fate as this. She'd never liked Ashenai, but this was a death she would never wish upon anyone- not even her own, hated daughter. Seeing this rotted-out shell of a once-lively young woman brought emotion back into her. Ashenai had a life ahead of her, and because of this drug, it was ruined. She had no more future, no more destiny- she was to rot in the sewers until someone found her and took her out of her misery, just like her father.

"Ashenai," her mother said quietly, not knowing what else to say to her dying daughter. Her furry hand found its way to her daughter's gloved one, laying softly atop it before squeezing it into its grasp. Fighting to hold back tears, Ashenai's mother looked her daughter in her single eye, seeing nothing there.

"Mother," Ashenai said, drawing her hand from her mother's grasp and standing up from her chair. "This is goodbye. I love you." With that monotonous statement, Ashenai walked from her mother's home, refusing to glance back at the sounds of quiet sobbing. This wasn't her world anymore.