Tisis

Doubts (N)

Where...what...what is going on here?

I...I must have died, alright...or at least I'm still in some of delirium.
There's no way any of this can be real...that's right...my...my brain is fabricating these events to distract me from what's actually happening...any moment, I'll just...stop breathing and everything will fade to blackness.

Yet still...such a crazy dream...a little pup appearing out of nowhere, carrying wooden rings...and then there's Sirus, who's calmly sitting next to me, petting the pup on his lap...what did the voice beyond call him? Tyr?

Every now and then, the pups ears perk up from its bed, but he goes right back to sleep, as if it was the most normal situation in the world...

"Are you...okay, Nym? You don't look too good," Sirus asks me from his seat, propping himself up, almost throwing the little dog from his lap, who gives an offended yelp, but curls himself right back together...just like Zero used to do.

"Hey, you guys okay down there?!" the voice from beyond the hole shouts.
"Not sure! I think I accidentally broke her or something!"
"Yeah well, can you blame her? Popping the question at her when you were just about to die! You should've done that ages ago!"

Sirus rolls his eyes and mutters something I can't understand.

Really, such an elaborate little dream my brain is cooking up here...one could almost think, that they were actually real.

The digging noises come closer with each passing hour and Tyr dutifully serves as delivery dog for things like edible plants and water pouches.

Another token of proof, that this can't be real...the only place they could have gotten a water pouch like this would be back in the cave...and the cave must have been obliterated by the crash.
I'm sure of it.

I think back to the colony...sure, it was the safest place to be, built to withstand the hazards of space, but this is just like...just like back when we entered the asteroid belt...without the shields, the ship had as much chance as a snowball in summer...and the same...would be true for the colony.

Once again, I have failed to protect them from disaster...not that it's going to matter all that much in a little bit.

Suddenly Sirus is standing...well, more like leaning right next to me and grabs my face, "Nym, hey, are you alright? You haven't said a single word since I...well, probably made a complete fool out of myself...but I just figured..."

"Why...?" I ask, looking the image of Sirus directly into his rugged and bloody face.
"What...what do you mean 'why'?"
"Why...do you torment me like this?"

Sirus' eyes grow wide...as if he didn't have the slightest idea what I am talking about.

"I'm...sorry, but...what do you mean?" he asks, an expression of concern on his face.
"This! I...you are nothing but a figment of my imagination! The last sparks of my life produce a fake reality, a false hope, but none of this here is real! It's all fake! You, the pup, the voice, the water, everything! There is only darkness and increasingly less oxygen to go around!"

Sirus reacts to my statements with a swift and powerful slap to my cheek...judging from his jumping around and quite loud vocal expressions of pain, I think the slap might well have hurt him far more than me.

The patches of fresh blood seeping through the bandages I faintly remember putting around his cut up hands is additional proof to this.

After a few seconds, he stops jumping and raises his hand, saying, "J-just a moment...be right back with you...!"
"Hey, no killing each other until we got you out of there!" the voice from beyond proclaims.