She sighed, taking a seat on one of the many benches in her home. It was uncomfortable, and cold, and it left a hollow feeling in her. Not that she felt much anymore anyways. She let her head fall back, thudding against the cement of the wall. The dull pain was a welcomed feeling. She'd rather feel it than nothing. Holding her camera in her hands, now outdated and often malfunctioning, she refused to give it up; it was the only sense of normalcy she had anymore. A constant reminder of why she was alive now. Why she escaped, above her daughter. Why it had to be her escaping from all that bloodshed, face marked by a claw, granted mercy with the snapshot of a camera. She turned the camera around, seeing herself in the lens, distorted. Forgotten. Broken. Unworthy of the attention and care given to it.

She finds her balance as her feet hit the floor, pushing herself from her seat to stand. It’s a mindless action, unconscious. She doesn't know where her legs will take her, but it seems as though she's already made up her mind in letting them. She's headed towards a darkroom, she thinks, the place she felt most comfortable, away from the rest of the doors, the endless piles of furniture and cutlery in her own home, away from consequence. Even if it was simply a repurposed room, it was security. Safety, a way to get away from...
It was hard to breathe. She hugged the camera to her chest, standing in the middle of the room. Her mind was a hurricane of panic and memory, feeding into each other in a terror-infused cycle, toxic and intoxicating all the same, clouding her mind as much as the alcohol she so often used and abused to cope before. She still had nightmares of that thing, it would follow her wherever she went and she saw it in every corner, every shadow of her life. It was always there, lurking just out of sight. She was choking on nothing, she could only sit and stare in constant fear and terror always swallowed her whole as she gasped for air that wouldn't come.

Her throat is now dried out - she’s completely parched and as a cough bundles up inside, it spluttering out from her lips, her ribs ache. She coughs again, her chest rising and falling at an uneven pace as her gaze pans the room, immediately coming to land on an array of short brown locks and her heart bursts. Tears begin to burn the rims of her lids, her lips soon twitching as her hand slowly moves across to wrap around a few brown locks. Her thumb lightly brushes down the strands of her daughters hair; it twists her heart.
Her gaze travels back, the memories flooding back - they'd been fighting, probably one of their biggest ones yet. The battles the two had when she hit her teens; but a particular fight they'd had, she had ran out on her - with her soon looking for her daughter. She'd crossed the roads to follow her daughter, and she eventually found her daughter nearing an old house. It wasn't until she came closer right to the very doorstep which her daughter was perched, that the door was creaking open slowly. She's almost dripping from sweat, the droplets cascading down the frame of her face and down the sides of her neck. A gloved hand came out and yanked her daughter by the hair & while she desperately tried to hold onto her daughter by the hair, the force was that strong that strands of hair were pulled and left in her hand.

"Ti -- ly" It comes out in two syllables, she's unable to properly speak. Her stomach began to churn, and her heart had stopped. Something clawed at her face - she can't help but begin to panic and scream with a snapshot of her camera taking a blurred image of the door slamming in her face. Something took her daughter and she never found out what. Evidence wasn't good enough, nobody tried hard enough. After years of being put on medications, docile, she had simply enough of it. Even with her harrowing anxiety and fear, she had enough courage to figure out the truth. So she began her life into studying Derry, taking pictures of the area and linking clues together to find what had took her daughter but whatever it was - IT wasn't human.