Loud. Everything was too fucking [i]loud[/i].

Nemo could vaguely hear the others, likely going through their own tortures, but they were all drowned out by the voices. Those [i]goddamned voices[/i]. The ones that told her that she was a freak and a liar and she would never be seen as a girl, not [i]really[/i]. This was coupled with an unbearable crawling sensation under her skin that made her want to fucking scream.

These things were familiar, but the intensity wasn’t. They felt… real. [i]Tangible[/i]. It was as if the voices that normally whispered from the back of her thoughts were being shouted right into her ears and the softer, sweeter voice that said, [i]“It’s normal to feel this way, you're a good person, you’re going to be okay,”[/i] was absent.

Nemo felt like she was suffocating from the heat. She tore off her jacket and dropped it to the ground. Staring at her bare arms, she noticed [i]movement[/i]. Things crawling under her skin. The voices screamed at her to [i]tear them out[/i].

She scratched. Scratched. Kept scratching until she broke skin. Her nerve endings screeched in pain, but she kept going, gritting her teeth against the urge to cry out. Moths crawled out from under her skin and took flight, crumbling to dust in the air.

She didn’t stop. She dug her fingers deeper into her flesh, pulling out nerves and tendons and discarding them on the ground. It wasn’t even the voices pushing her on at this point, just her anger. Her body, her flesh, her very physicality was a disgrace that needed to be gone, destroyed, erased from existence because she was all those things the voices said she was, and she didn’t deserve to exist.

Nemo collapsed to her knees, her breathing loud and ragged. In a sudden, the voices quieted. She looked down at her arms. There was no gore, no viscera, no moths. Just red scratches and small cuts, blood beading from them. The stinging that pricked at her skin was nowhere near what she felt during her delusions.

She brought her shaking hands to cover her face, trying to take deep breaths. The pain, the voices, they were gone, but the desire remained. The desire to rip and tear at her body, spill her organs, destroy her very being was still there.

That feeling scared her more than anything.