Alive || 86: Eighty-Six [ vers. ENG ]

her heart

The paved roads, the streets crowded with people of all ethnicities, the horn of a car, the barking of a dog in the direction of one of his fellows or the meowing of a cat stretching on a fence, an argument between a group of friends on the terrace of a café, the cries of a baby wanting to attract the attention of his parents from his stroller, the bursts of laughter of children playing in a park, the indiscernible gossip mixed in the various noises of the crowd. ..

All those sounds I thought I'd never hear again, these social interactions that I had only been able to observe in those distant times long before the war started... For the first time in almost ten years, all those trivial things were happening again before my eyes.

At that moment perhaps my heartbeat had started to accelerate. Maybe even for the first time since I had set foot in the Federation of Giad, I was aware that I had definitely left the Eighty-Sixth District...

"Ah... Hi, hermit. Have you finally decided to come out of your lair?"

If it wasn't because of the fatigue I had accumulated after a lot of sleepless nights, I would have wasted my time arguing that one, I'm not a hermit but a young girl in search of knowledge, and two, that Theo was the last person in this house who had the right to reproach me for that since he spent almost as much time as I did between these four walls.

Instead, I grabbed his arm and pulled him into my room. Surprised by this gesture, the boy stared at me but end up following me.

"Look! Who did this?"

With my free hand I pointed inside the room. I didn't notice it right away, but my tone was quite dramatic.

Theo paused for a moment before commenting on the situation.

A big smile formed on his lips.

"Well, what? Someone finally got rid of the mountains of books that were filling up your room? Look, now you can walk everywhere without any problem."

"How is that a good thing? I've been robbed of everything in my few hours of respite and I should be happy about it? Are you making fun of me?!"

"Yeah. That's exactly what it is."

Following these words, Theo broke free from the hold I had on his arm and stepped back as a precaution.