Glitch

chapter 4: Memories Forgotten

For the next two and a half days, we were in a predonlinant silence. We walked when it was light enough to do so without stumbling over roots and fallen branches. When the sun started to go down we collected firewood while walking, and Bail started camp fires when it got dark. Each night he found and cooked food for us both, saving little bits of each meal for the mornings. 

 I hated the silence, but I certainly didn't want to talk to Bail, so I found ways to discretely entertain myself. I remembered a few songs my friends and I had made up back in school, and I sang those in my head. I remembered things that I had never thought were important until then; little things like when a few of my friends snuck into my dorm one night and we stayed up all that night talking about what we thought our future mates would be like. We had been so tired the next day that we all fell asleep in class and were sent to a remediation class, but we barely paid any attention to that class because we were giggling so much. 

I remembered when we had found my locket burried behind the school. We weren't even supposed to be back there in the first place, but we had gotten bored when the teachers let us out for a break after class. We saw the tiny glint of the chain reflecting sunlight and dug it up together. None of us could decide who wanted it more so we played games and whoever won the most of them won the necklace, but we kept adding more and more games so that the odds were in one of our favors or the other. Eventually the teachers called us back into class and we decided that I would keep it until we could decide a winner. I guess I became the winner because we never actually finished those games and I forgot that I had it. Those memories were lost to me until Bail came along and found my little gold locket and put it in my bag. 

I remembered a collection of things that I had forgotten and each of them seemed so dear to me that I wondered how I had managed to forget them in the first place. I looked over at Bail only a handful of times within those two and a half days, but when I did he was always looking at me in a way that I never thought anyone would look at me. It was almost like the way you would expect your mate to look at you, a sort of longing desire, but he couldn't have been looking at me with that type of emotion. The only times anyone had looked at me with anything even remotely close to affection in their eyes was my first simulation.

The instructors sent me into the metal box and told me that no matter what happened I wouldn't actually be hurt in any way, no matter how much I thought I was. The simulation started and I was almost immediately enountered by a level one creature. I remember seeing it, then smelling it, and then the fear that ran through me. I ran away from the creature but it followed me, and no matter how far away I ran, it kept following me. Eventually I turned around and fought it. I got pretty scraped up in the simulation and when I finally got in a semi-solid punch to the creature and the simulation faded away, I found that the injuries weren't real.

After that first simulation, my interest was peeked, I paid more attention in class and studied harder that I ever had. Thinking about it then, I realized that I had kind of pushed my friends away. I didnt have any real memories of my friends after that simulation. That realization came at me like a punch to the gut. I didn't have any friends anymore, No one would care that I was missing. No one would even notice. I doubted even that the people in charge of the simulations would notice. I was just another kid they had to prepare for some game they wouldn't even be a part of. 

No one would come to save me. No one would ever take me away from this nightmare, and I'd be stuck with this guy claiming to be my friend when all he's ever done since the minute I met him was hurt and scare me. I was truley and utterly alone; that hurt more than any false injury the creatures in the old simulations could do to me, because those injuries went away as soon as the simulation went down. But this pain? this ache? it was real and would never go away.

Bail cut through the silence and my pain for a moment when he stopped and spoke suddenly.

"Sam, we're here." 

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hey guys, sorry its been quite a while since i've last updated. I meant to update a week ago but i have had a major block and couldnt think of how to do this chapter, its kind of a filler but whatever right? anywho, thanks to two really awesome people i finished it.

vinh, here ya go

shane, thanks for the inspiration and encouragement 

<3 kay baii~!