A Different Script

Between Light And Water

The water is everywhere. Cold. Endless. It presses my skin like the weight of all years I've carried, like the world itself has turned against me. My lungs scream. Pain. There is no air, and the sound is swallowed before it leaves my throat.Time is dissolving. Seconds  Stretch into eternities. I feel myself slipping sliding past everything I know, past everything I've been, past jagged edges of my life that I thought kept me alive. 

I am fading

The water is all i know. Cold, heavy, endless. My chest aches, my lungs burn, "At least this time....I'll die before you," I force a smile. My mission is done, I've served my purpose, my mind fragments into darkness

And then-a touch

At first, it is nothing more than a whisper against my shoulder, so light I think it might be water itself playing tricks. A brush, soft and fleeting, almost a memory. My body twitches, instinctive, even as my mind drifts. Then it comes again. Stronger this time. A pressure beneath me, firm but gentle, lifting slightly. Not enough to move me, not yet-but enough that my sense spike in alarm and disbelief. I want to recoil, to dimiss it as imagination, but a tiny, fragile spark stirs inside me. Someone is here. 

The arms find me fully, sliding beneath my back, lifting with careful  insistense. I feel the weight f their strength, the warmth cutting through the cold that has seeped into my bones for too long. Time stretches, each hearrtbeat like a drum echoing in endless water. very fraction of movemoent feels like an eternity, and yet the arms do not falter, They hold. They carry me. 

Hope, long buried and thought dead, flares inside me-sharp, raw, dangerous. I have never wanted anything more than this simple, impossible act: to be saved. The water still pulls, still threatens to drag me back into oblivion, but the arms fight against it, patient, unyeilding. And I- ragged and fading, allow myself to cling- to life, to warmth, to the first sensation in forever that someone will not let me fall.

Each fraction of moevment is a struggle. My body barely obeys. My lungs beg for air I cannot take. But the surface grows closer. Closer. The light stretches, warm and unbearable, promising life. My heart-raw, ragged, wild-beats in sync with the gentle insistence of the arms beneath me. I am carried. I am being lifted. I am not yet free, but I am moving. And for the first time in forever, I let myself feel it-the fragile, dangerous, hope that I might survive, that I might rise, that I might live.

The light breaks, harsh and sudden, but my mind barely register it. Air touches my lips, but my lungs refuse it. everything is still heaving, still distant. Voices. Somone's voice-shouting. Urgent. Sharp. Fractured by the night air and my fading ears.

"Help! Someone, help!"

I feel movement, rough and insistent beneath me. Arms tightening, pulling me in a direction I dont understand. My  body drifts with them, unsteady, still almost stone i water, still only half there. More voices join, shouted commands that I cannot comprehend but that vibrate through the water into my chest, into my bones.

There is a suddent, sold jolt-the docks. My head bumps against something firm. A rought surface, splintered and unyielding. Then weight shifts beneath me, and a third presence lifts me in one motion, steadying, carrying bot me and the person who saved me. My ears catch the splash of boots, the rough sound of movement on wood. Words. Commands. The air pressing sharp against my skin.

I hear a voice close now, careful, insistent, as if guiding someone fragile back to life. But I am only a body, a shadow of a thought, barely registering beyond the thrum of someone else's despiration

"Almost there....Hold On!...."

The voices blend with the water dripping from my hair, the ache in my chest, the faint pulse of wamrth from the arms that refuse to let go. The world is distant, fractued, yet alive in sound alone. 

I am saved. I am being carried. And though my eyes do not open, though my mind is frayed and scattered, I know-somehow-that I have not yet fallen completely.

Finally. Air. A ragged, impossible gasp touches my lips, but my chest still burns, my body barely mine. The world is a haze of cold water, blurred shapes, and something warmer-someone.

Her presence hits me before I even see her. Solid, insistent, alive. The arms that have carried me feel endless, her heartbeat pressed against me, vibrating through my bones. And then I see her eyes. Blue. Vast, stor-swept, terrifyingly alive. They anchor me even as my mind dissolves. In through the fog, but beneath it glimmers a cheer, a desperation that I stay here, that I fight, that I matter.

Her hair cligs wetly to her face, dark and tangled, yet somehow it frames her with impposible beatuty, a wild halo against the night. Her hands grip me, unyeilding, trembling with tension, yet strong, carryinging the weight of her care across every inch of me. Every shiver of her, every frantic pulse of breath, screams: I will not lose you.

I try to respond. to move. To speak. But my body is nothing but lead, my lungs screaming for air I cannot take. Yet even in this haze evenas the water still presses and the world bends around me, there is a pull. A wamrth. Something inside me-a spark I thought long dead- threads into the rhythm of her heartbeat.

I don't understand it. I can't name it. It isn't thought yet, only feeling curling in my chest, fagile, insistent, electric: a tether, a longing, something unnamed that makesme cling, that ake me want to rise.

Her voice cuts throught the night, sharp and trambling:

"Aqua.......stay...please,dont leave me. I need you...please...stay with me."

Every word lands inside me, dragging me upward, pulling me from the abyss. I snese everything-her desperation, her courage, the toll this has taken oh=n her. She is soaked, trembling, exhausted, yet unbroken. For me. She fight for me when she should be tending to herself. She sacrafices herself to save me.

I want to look closer, to memorize every detail, to imprint this moment forever-but the world is slipping. My vision swims. The sound of the water, her voice, the rush of the night air-all blurring into one.  And even in my haze, in the pull of consciousness from the depths, there is something..something soft, almost unbearable, blooming inside meat the sight of her: the ache of care, the heat of closeness. A stranger?

No. Akane.

I want to reach out. I want to hold. I want to remember. But I can't. Not fully. Her blue eys, shimmering with tears and light, burn into me one last time.

and then-darkness swallows me.

Not death. Not peace. Not oblivion. Just a pause. A surrender. Suspended between the warmth of her presence and the cold of the water. And even as I fade, somewhere deep inside, something trembles-something I do not yet understand.