LONG BUT IMPORTANT NOTE: So, I'm very very interested in psychology. As a result you'll find that a lot of my ocs will have some sort of mental illness they'll be dealing with. Marisol herself has at least four, if phobias count.

Two of these are schizophrenia and PTSD. Last night I couldn't sleep so I decided to watch educational videos on these. I found some interesting facts and so I was inspired to write this chapter.

HOWEVER, I am NOT a professional. Not all information will be 100% accurate. Feel free to correct me if you know better. (Also this is unedited.)

I also got to writing this chapter and realized some things can and will be quite triggering for some people. So, I will put a warning right here so you can be aware of what's here. Read at your own risk.

WARNING: graphic scenes of gore and violence, mentions of flashbacks and post traumatic stress, mentions of torture, bullying, and taunting, suicidal thoughts, mentions of autophobia, racial slurs, intrusive thoughts

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Getting to Ziana's garage went pretty smoothly. Marisol didn't even see or hear a peep from Kale the entire way there.

Ziana towed the Milano to the garage via the tractor beam on her smaller ship. (It was surprisingly powerful, considering the vessel was the size of a postage stamp.)

It wasn't until after they arrived that everything went to shit.

Ziana parked them outside the garage and told them they could walk around, make themselves at home while she worked on repairs.

The garage itself wasn't actually that big. There were a few ships parked around here and there, engines opened wide up for all to see.

A couple of them were even suspended into the air on hydraulics; tool boxes were scattered all around the room in no particular order.

There was a set of double doors at the back of the garage, which lead into a narrow office space before branching out into a small living area.

Marisol guessed Ziana must have stayed there whenever she wasn't off racing fools or fixing dummies' ships.

It was a decent set up. A couch in one corner, a TV in another. (Yes, they had space TV's, albeit much fancier gadgets than the ones Marisol had seen on Earth.)

Bookshelves were full of space vessel magazines and mechanic manuals. (Ziana and Peter had a fairly lengthy conversation about all of it later.)

Forking off to the left, there was a bedroom decorated from wall to ceiling in space ship posters. (Ziana had a bit of an unhealthy obsession.)

There was a bathroom in the hall, a kitchen, and a seemingly random room that wasn't used much for anything besides storage.

The first sign of trouble occured when Marisol was sitting with the others in Ziana's living area.

Groot and Peter had run off to do something stupid and boyish. (They had taken quite the liking to each other, it seemed.) Meanwhile, Gamora was avoiding everyone, clearly still ticked off over the most recent events.

Rocket was trying to con Drax into giving him some metal contraption he must have spotted him with whenever Marisol wasn't looking. (Though it was likely that Rocket would just take the item regardless of Drax's response.)

No one was paying Marisol any mind. She feel her usual sensation of suffocation. That inexplicable, impending doom that told her she wasn't safe until someone spoke to her, that undying paranoia that she could never really get rid of.

In addition, her vision blurred for a moment, a vision forming in her mind's eye.

It was a graphic image that made her stomach churn -- one moment everyone was sitting calmly, the next they laying dead, mangled on the floor.

Rocket's furry body had been stuffed so that he was a raccoon plushie; and Groot was nothing more than a pile of leaves. Gamora was laying in a pool of green blood; Peter was flipped over the couch, his intestines dangling out of his guts.

Drax's head was cracked open, blood seeping out and staining the carpet underneath his body, varies slashes along his arms.

Even Ziana was there, neck snapped and back twisted so that her spine was poking through her skin.

The vision lasted maybe a second, but that was enough to get her heart racing, palms sweaty.

At first she thought it was another nightmare of the future, but when she heard the voices she knew better.

They didn't always go hand in hand, but they often did. Marisol couldn't put a name to what they were, but occasionally, not very often, she heard the voices of people from her life back on Terra.

Not even people she cared for either. It was the voices of rude teachers or peers. People who'd tried to put her down or call her names of make fun of her for her heritage.

She only heard them once in a blue moon, and she hadn't really heard them in over three years. (Or maybe it was just that she had gotten use to hearing and ignoring them.)

The voices tended to send her messages, usually reminding her how stupid and useless she was. They told her that she needed to kill herself or that she was being followed or that she needed to hurt someone else.

The graphic images usually came with the voices, along with vivid hallucinations, albeit not quite as friendly as Kale.

These essentially amounted to demonic like characters that attempted to intimidate her. (Like the big blue blob that like to try to bulldoze her or that bizzaro Groot thing that enjoyed stabbing at her eyes.)

Sometimes they showed up at the same time as Kale, but most of the time they drowned her out.

As if Marisol's brain was trying to tell her that all of her shit was much stronger than any positivity she might have been holding on to.

(As annoying as Kale was, she was, in fact, the personification of Marisol's positivity.)

This time, there were no hallucinations, not even Kale was floating around. But the voices sounded off immediately after Marisol came to from the vision.

She stumbled back slightly, eyes widening. No one seemed to have noticed. Drax was too busy trying to fend Rocket off.

Gamora was too absorbed with ignoring everyone. And Peter and Groot had completely disappeared.

Marisol blinked, rubbing her temples, her head begining to pound steadily as whispering rose steadily in her ears.

It sounded as if someone were standing right next to her, mumbling in her ears. She didn't bother looking, though, because she knew no one would be there.

The voice was hard to make out at first, just a distinct murmuring of something less than pleasant. Gradually, it grew louder and louder.

"Useless."

"Troublesome."

"Good for nothing border rat!"

"Spic!"

They were easy enough to ignore. Marisol had been doing it pretty much since her first time in that white room.

She stood at the center of the room, focusing on breathing, trying to keep her mind occupied by solving a few riddles. (A challenge when the voices insisted on telling her how stupid riddles were.)

"They want you dead."

At some point Rocket left, retreating into the garage, possibly to go bug Ziana or steal whatever it was from Drax. Gamora and Drax followed, probably to make sure the latter didn't happen.

This left Marisol alone to deal with the bone crushing loss of air that always came with empty rooms, coupled with the voices, which were more persistent than usual.
(Perhaps, she was just losing it after all.)

She leaned against the wall, her breathing becoming shallow. The voices were getting even louder now.

"Just go die. No one wants you here, spic."

Marisol's head pounded with every syllable they spoke; it was getting impossible to ignore them. She wanted to scream at them to shut up, but she knew it wouldn't do any good. They weren't real.

Even so, they rendered her quite useless. She found herself sliding down the wall until she was sitting on the floor, but she couldn't really feel it.

She couldn't feel anything. Her body had gone completely numb, not even so much as a tingle as one would feel when their foot was asleep. There was just...nothing.

Her vision was impaired as well. It was impossible to see even two feet in front of her; she couldn't even make her hands out in her lap as she clenched them into fists. The voices were suddenly screaming.

"WHY DON'T YOU JUST DIE!!"

And as if that weren't bad enough, Marisol still felt the lingering hopelessness she always got whenever she was alone. It was getting buried under the voices and other nonsense, but it was still there.

Then, just to put icing on top of the terribly traumatizing cake, Marisol's brain decided that now would be perfect timing for a random flash back. 

It wasn't a typical flash back either. She wasn't suddenly whisked into a scene from the past, not inherently anyways. The flash back wasn't visual.

It was more physical or maybe emotional. She wasn't really sure. All she knew was that she was feeling the same paralysis and fear and hopelessness she'd felt on Halfworld.

Marisol could have sworn needles were prickling her arms. She could feel the gadgets and gizmos the scientist had poked her with and the bumps on her head from where she'd hit it more than once on the cage that was much too small.  

It was difficult to breath, and at some point Marisol was sure someone was choking her. She found herself desperately longing for her Pappa and pleading quietly to go home.

All the while dread settled over her like a blanket of porcupine needles, and the voices raged on in her head.

"THEY WANT YOU DEAD!"

"GO DIE, SPIC!"

"USELESS BORDER HOPPER!"

"GO HOME, SPIC!"

She was shutting down before she even knew it. Marisol could feel everything and nothing all at once. She heard the voices; yet at the same time they were soundless.

Her head was in agonizing pain and completely empty all at once. She was flashing back to her time as a lab rat, her mind making her believe she was still there, while simultaneously having a clear head space.

She wasn't sure if she was actually taking in any air or not, but she didn't care. She didn't care about anything.

Her mind wasn't processing anything. Marisol could no longer register that the voices were just in her head or that she wasn't actually in the science lab on Halfworld.

She couldn't differentiate reality and fantasy. She didn't know she was still in Ziana's place, safe and sound. All she could register was the sheering pain in her sides, on her arms, on her head.

All she could feel was the drowning sensation of loneliness. She couldn't see anything in front of her, and, if she had been able to form a coherent thought, she might have even thought she'd gone blind.

"YOU ARE SO STUPID! NO ONE WANTS YOU HERE!"

"GO HOME, BORDER HOPPER!"

She wanted to scream. To move and tell the voices to shut it. She just wanted it all to stop. But she couldn't find the strength to do any of it.

Marisol's body had turned against her. It was like someone had flipped a switch and shut her whole system down.

She couldn't move a muscle even if she tried. All she could do was sit and stare blankly at her hands in front of her, watching the formless blobs that were her fists as they clenched in her lap.

Marisol wasn't sure how long she'd sat like that. It felt like an hour or two, though it was probably only a few minutes. It was hard to tell.

"THEY'RE GOING TO KILL YOU!"

"YOU DESERVE TO DIE!"

"USELESS SPIC!"

The first thing she actually saw were waves, which was rather confusing when mixed with all the other crap.

It was like one of those images of sound waves her old Terran science teachers showed the class sometimes. Wavey, curly, bouncing up and down. There was a distinct, repetitive snapping noise coming from somewhere, which did little to help.

If anything it just reminded her of that nightmare she'd been having an made everything ten times worse.

Then, she heard a voice rising above all the others. "Yoowhoo! Mari! Hello! Paging Mari!" The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but she couldn't place it.

Something about it sounded off, different from the other voices, but she couldn't quite place it.

All she knew for sure was the sheer volume of the voice was enough to make her want to borrow into herself and never come out again.

The syllables were long and drawn out, and it sounded off right along with the snapping. Was someone snapping in her face? Or was it all just more noise in her head?

"Marrii!!" Snap, snap, snap. Visions from the dreams swarmed her mind now as well. Marisol couldn't tell if she was awake or sleeping.

"Don't do that, you idiot." This voice briefly stopped everything. She couldn't immediately place it, and when it stopped the other noise started up again.

"Why not?"

"Because it's stupid! Only stupid people do that. You're a stupid person."

But as the voice went on, everything else began to clear away, and Marisol found herself slowly being pulled back into reality.

She latched on to the voices, namely the second one, letting it drag her back into coherence and normalcy.

"I am not a stupid person!"

"Yes you are. You are always doing stupid things, like going back for that stupid music box when we were escaping a freakin' prison!"

"Wha -- pfft! This is coming from the guy who thought putting explosives in a box would protect the ship? Or the guy who freaking wrecked my ship!"

It took a few minutes for her vision to clear up, but the more she focused on that one specific voice the quieter the others got, the more clarity was brought into her mind.

"It's not my fault you only got trash from the Ravagers. Hey, when you get back to Yondu maybe you can ask him for better merch...and not just so I can steal it from you later."

The pain and loneliness soon faded all together; and her body wasn't numb anymore. Breathing was no longer a chore, and after a while even her headache subsided and she could move with ease.

Two blurry figures appeared before her before taking shape as Rocket and her cousin. She wasn't entirely sure where they'd come from or when they'd come in.

She hadn't heard anyone enter. She hadn't heard much of anything besides yelling.

Peter was sitting in front of her, rolling his eyes and grumbling childishly at what Rocket had just told him.

Rocket was perched on her knees, and for a moment Marisol caught an image of herself throwing him across the room violently by the tail.

The idea made her want to throw up, so instead she turned to her cousin and punched him in the chest.

"Ow! Hey!" Peter complained, falling backwards. "What the heck?"

Rocket snickered from where he was sitting on her legs. Others' pain had always been extremely amusing to him.

Marisol ignored the both of them, her head ringing a little with the sudden silence.

It took her a moment to recall where she was or what she was doing there, and she refused to speak, knowing that it would likely just come out a mangled mess.

She was sitting next to the couch, huddled in one corner; for a moment she couldn't remember how she'd gotten there.

Marisol let out a small breath, slowly so that neither Rocket or her cousin noticed. Slowly, her memories came back to her. The race, meeting Ziana, going to her garage. The orb they were trying to sell. Everything.

Her arms and legs felt like lead, eyes burning, lids drooping closed despite her protesting. She desperately wanted to stay awake, lest she have another nightmare.

But it had been almost four days since she'd slept, and after that episode she was absolutely exhausted.

Kale appeared next to Rocket, eyeing her oddly. She didn't say anything, but from the look in her eyes, the message was clear. Go to sleep.

As annoying as she could be, Marisol couldn't help feeling some kind of relief with her there. If she was going to be hallucinating, she would much rather be seeing her than anything else.

Peter rubbed his chest as he sat up again, staring out Marisol with that same annoying look Rocket had earlier. "Are you okay? You looked really out of it for a minute."

Marisol nodded curtly. When she spoke, her sentences came out slurred and garbled, her thoughts not quite forming properly as they transitioned from her head to her mouth. "Didn't hear...is...fixed? We...sell..."

Rocket and Peter flashed her identical looks of confusion, clearly not comprehending what she was trying to say. Marisol let out a frustrated sigh. She really needed a drink, but when she tried telling them that all that came out was, "dr...ink..?"

Fortunately, someone at least understood that bit. Ziana appeared in the doorway, a small grin tugging at the corner of her lips. "Wanna see where I keep the good stuff?"