LOST TIME MEMORY Vol. 1

Chapter 4: The Mekakushi Dan

This did not feel like his usual dream. It felt different. He could control himself here. And like a bird flying over the cityscape, he could see from where he flew, tiny dots standing completely still. They were people. At the same time, he could feel and sense what it was that they were feeling and sensing. Every experience of theirs was his, too.

The warmth of the sun reflected into the eyes of a pair, a boy and a girl. They were standing in the middle of the school rooftop just as they had once before. The boy, Shintaro, was looking out from behind the fence with the wind against his hair. The girl stood behind him, but he couldn't look at her. His eyes were frozen in place and frozen in time, and he could only stare at the setting sun. This didn't feel like a recollection but rather a vignette of a lucid dream. One that he could thankfully control, to a certain extent. But why could he control it? It didn't feel like a dream. And if he was in control, then why was she there? Why couldn't he control that?

"Hey," she whispered to him. He didn't answer. "You're not supposed to be here, you know."

He felt a needle pricking at his heart every time she spoke. The scenery changed before his very eyes. He didn't flinch as he could see it coming. This was supposed to be his dream, but it was getting to be out of his control.

"This is better," she said and walked around what was now their old classroom, tinted with the crimson embrace of an unforgiving sunset. "But that's not your desk." He looked down. What was beneath him was certainly not his own desk. His was the one beside it. There was an origami of a swan lying on this particular desk. It wasn't the one he had in his bedroom drawer, but a different one. It's the one he made for her. "It's mine," she said.

He grimaced and quietly endured the lump in his throat that was constantly trying to get a word out through trembling lips before stepping aside and letting her sit down. Yet, he remained steadfast in his effort to not look at her. She sat down, and then said something that threw him off.

"Haruka and Takane are in the hospital." His mind was thrown into a mixer, and the fluids poured out of his ears and eyes. This wasn't supposed to happen. This wasn't her line, not here, not at this place. None of this makes sense. Why wasn't he in control? What was she saying? At some point, he wasn't able to tell if his brain was still melting or if he was crying. But he kept standing there, enduring. Always enduring. But how long would he have to endure? He couldn't keep this up. She'd keep haunting him for the rest of his life and he would convince himself he deserved it and it would be endless, miserable torture.

"I'm sorry," he said. The first words he'd spoken to her ever since he left the house.

"Won't you look at me?" she asked.

"I can't."

"You can."

He didn't reply.

"We can go back to the bridge?"

The landscape warped into itself, and they were morphed into standing at the top of a familiar hill. Or rather, a bridge with a clear view of the sun that was reaching its time of slumber. Shintaro lost his breath, his face contorted into festering despair, and he accidentally looked her way. Into her bright, red eyes. Only, her face was leaning on the ground, and so was her body. She wasn't smiling, though she'd sounded like she was that entire time. She looked completely at ease, even with all the blood that poured out of her dead, twisted body and her black school uniform that soaked it all. Shintaro desperately held his breath with tears running uncontrollably. He never breathed out. Not for, what was to him, an eternity. He shut his eyes.

"Don't look away." Her words couldn't reach him. "You have to remember. Don't you remember what you did here?" What was she saying? Of course, he did. "No, you don't." What... How could she... "You were here. All by yourself in the silence of the night. What were you doing?" I- He can't remember. Shintaro didn't know what she was talking about what the hell was she saying what the hell was happening-

"We can go somewhere else then." The world blinked into darkness, then opened its eyes and revealed the inside of a building. A mall. The one he'd been to before. "Here."

He carefully took a peek, avoiding looking her way. But the scenery in front of him made him regret ever trusting her. It scorched itself into his eyes. It was a grotesque cascade of blood with corpses spread all over. And almost all of them, he recognized. How could he forget? He'd just met them all yesterday.

Shintaro opened his mouth to breathe, and finally, he woke up.