The Dreams

Chapter Thirty Four

Rina had hoped to wake up the next morning blissfully content and well rested. As usual, her joy was tainted by her failing health. She woke up late which was in and of itself a bit of a disappointment.

Normally, Hibiki woke her up before the day dragged on too long. She tried her best to avoid sleeping more than eight hours. She had no idea when she finally fell asleep the night before it was hard for her to guess if she had enough or too much sleep. Hibiki was still sound asleep next to her, his arm holding her close to his bare chest. He could not be blamed for not waking her up if he had not woken up himself. It made her think that she had probably not overslept by too much. Hibiki kept to a pretty reasonable routine even without the help of an alarm.

She wanted to get up, but her brain was still foggy and her eyes wanted desperately to stay closed. Every time she forced them to open, her eyelids would flutter rapidly before closing again and stubbornly refusing to open for a few more moments.

She felt trapped between a dream and full wakefulness. It was an annoyingly familiar sensation. She would have panicked if her body did not feel so adamantly at peace with everyone and everything. She had never felt so relaxed and so sore at the same time before. Muscles she did not even know she had felt tired and aching.

Thinking about the events of the previous night was like trying to wade through chest-deep water. The progress was very slow and sometimes almost all of her progress was lost as another wave of sleepiness knocked her back to her starting point.

She realized she had questions both for herself and for Hibiki. There was so much she could not remember at the moment, which made her uneasy. Loss of memory after such a short time could not be a good sign. She was slightly afraid that she had not been herself before. If she could not remember she had a terrible feeling that it might not have been her there with Hibiki after all.

She needed to know, but she could not muster the energy to fully wake up, to ask the question. It was maddening and terrifying to realize she could not command her own body to perform such a simple task.

This was like before. Back then she ended up in the hospital. She did not know how long she had to wait before she was noticed that time. This time she would have to suffer through Hibiki waking up and discovering her like this. Anticipating that made her heart ache.

The last thing she wanted to do was to cause him any sort of pain. Right now he radiated contentment. Even through this haze of sleepiness she could feel it. The last thing she wanted to do was to cut that feeling short for him. He deserved to be happy.

That feeling and that feeling alone pushed her to open her eyes one more time and then to fight to keep them open. She did not blink. Her eyes burned and started to water, but she dared not allow herself even the opportunity to blink for fear that her eyelids would not open again.

Holding her eyes open like that was tiring work, but she gave it everything she had, and she waited. If she could have moved she would have woken Hibiki up, but her body was still too lethargic to respond to even the most insistent, willful demands from her mind.

Even after just a few short moments, her mind started playing tricks on her. She could not even be sure that she was awake. This felt just as real as a dream. Maybe it felt even less real than a dream. The more she tried to think the more confused she became.

Everything was fuzzy and muted. Time did not seem to behave as it should from her perspective. All of it seemed to point towards this being a dream. None of this seemed like her dreams, though. Her dreams were strange, bright, vivid, and oddly realistic. This felt more like a typical description of a dream.