I Will Hold Your Hand Gently

Chapter 53: The Rock That Keeps Me from Floating Away

When I awoke that evening, a day after the incident at the Royal Ball, I came to a single, undeniable conclusion. The notebook, always placed neatly on the desk beside my bed, a language that only I could understand, urging me to read it first thing each morning, left me hollow each time I reached its final page.

I didn't belong here. I came from somewhere else, somewhere distant, somewhere I could never return to. The body I inhabited wasn't mine. I was a stranger dropped into the pages of a novel I had once read.

I couldn't tell which memories were truly mine and which belonged to this child, to Five. The dissonance was constant, like a low, thrumming chord that never faded. A gnawing fear settled in the pit of my stomach, a dread I couldn't shake. 

I was alone in this world... 

Truly, terrifyingly alone...

With no one to understand what I was going through...

The memories slipped away like sand through my fingers, only to come crashing back over like burning waves. It left me unstable; mentally frayed, emotionally exhausted. But I couldn't let it show. I had to keep going, even as the world around me felt more and more like a dream I couldn't wake up from. 

I didn't know what would happen if I stopped forcing myself to keep pushing forward, if I let myself slip, even for a moment. Survival had become a quiet, relentless effort. I had to keep moving, keep searching, drowning myself in work for distraction, clinging to anything that might anchor me before the madness of this solitary existence pulled me under completely.

And yet, each time I reached the end of the notebook, after pages of fragmented memories and fading precious moments, there was always one line waiting for me—one line that somehow steadied the chaos in my mind:

Zwei deserves happiness.

The goal I had set for myself when I first arrived in this world, when I met him for the first time, was one of the few things that kept me tethered to reality. Then, at the Royal Ball, when I sat at the piano, fragments of my memories returned. Not all of them came back, but enough to keep me from unraveling completely. In that moment, I made a quiet decision: I needed to find something that belonged solely to me. Something untouched by Five, untainted by the confusion of our merged memories. Something that, in this unfamiliar world, I could truly call my own.

"What would you like as a reward?"

A reward?

I didn't know what I wanted when Zwei asked me what I wanted as a reward. I didn't want anything, but that wasn't entirely true. There was something, something I hadn't been able to admit out loud.

A name.

No matter how many times I combed through my memories, mine and Five's, I couldn't find it. My name was gone, either forgotten or erased completely, perhaps lost in the confusion of our merged memories. Knowing how Zwei works from reading the novel, he must have done a background check on me. Even after doing a background check, no one had ever addressed me by name. Not even Five's. That means there was no name I could be called by.

Then the thought came quietly, almost frightening in its hope.

What if Zwei gave me a name?

A name chosen by him. A name just for me. Something entirely my own. 

"Cielle..." Zwei said, his voice low, calm, and steady, "How does Cielle sound?"

Cielle...

The name echoed through me, resonating deep within a place in my soul. I didn't know its meaning, but that didn't matter because it was mine. A name given to me by him, Zwei, my favorite character, the person who had unknowingly become my anchor in this world.