Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Magical-Girls — Magical Girl Who Doesn't Care That It's Cheesy – She's Turning On Her "Sad Playlist" To Deal With This
The shutters over the window are wrenched away by smoking fingers.
Lauren is barely recognisable, heart in the grip of a Resentment-Devil, limned in the black rays-tapering-to-infinity aura of someone whose goodness faltered beneath the toxic gossip-whispers of the minions of the Hell of Sour Despair. She sits in the back of Tomo's math class, she gets grades that are neither too good nor too bad, nobody hates her. She's quiet.
And on the inside, for a long time, she must have been burning. It's loosed, now, turned inside-out by the Resentment-Devil; fire licks between the stands of her hair, her skin slicks off a shimmering, flowing sheet of lava.
"What can friendship and harmony and understanding do against fire?" the Resentment-Devil inside her grates, pressing hands against the glass of the window, which blackens and begins to sag around the outline of her fingers. "I have defeated your friends. What do you plan to do to me, with powers of sunlight?"
"My powers aren't sunlight," Tomo says, ever-present headphones on, antique walkman on the table in front of her. The tiny toothed wheels spin visibly inside it, dragging music from the hissing plastic tape into her ears.
"You're the sunshine girl," it hisses with Lauren's mouth and borrowed teenage spite. "Beam your way out of this one."
"I'm the pathetic fallacy girl," Tomo says.
Behind scratched clear plastic, ballpoint pen on a crooked sticky label says Heartbreak (sad) Mix. Tears cling fatly to Tomo's lashes.
"You hurt my friends," she says, and the Resentment-Devil tips Lauren's head back and back to look up at the wet black clouds zipping up the sky as Tomo's bottom lip trembles.
"You weaponised chuuni little bastards—" it rasps, as the first drops of a downpour hiss and steam on Lauren's flame-wreathed head and shoulders.