[The Day I Held Her hand]
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...*Badum*...
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...*Badum*...
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...*Badum*...
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I could hear the sound of my own heartbeat... A slow but steady beating, the sign of life in any human... Even through the surrounding darkness, I was comforted by the sound, if only a little bit...
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... Where am I?...
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I couldn't tell... The only thing I could see was an empty abyss, dark and colourless as the night itself... I felt... Cold... As if I was standing out from the comfort of my home, and into the chilly cold of a rainy night... It was a strange feeling, very weird and frightening...
I can't remember much... I returned home one day, went to bed, and I'm now here... Was this a dream?... No... It couldn't be. My dreams are never so... Lucid. Even though I can't see anything, I can feel my consciousness drifting aimlessly through this dark abyss...
Did I drink something weird last night? Maybe I should stop drinking any carbonated drinks before bed, I hate the morning vomit it gives me... So, what happens now?... If this is a dream, then when am I getting to all the weird parts?...
???: ''... F...o...''
Huh?... What's that?... I can hear a faint echo. It's not much, just a couple words... I try to focus on it, and the words, anything to escape this quiet unpleasantness... As I focused more and more, the words began to grow louder. Their just three simple words spoken over and over, yet I kept on reaching towards them...
???: ''... Fou...''
Yes! I can hear it clearly... I didn't stop. I moved more and more towards the sounds. A part of me said maybe I shouldn't, but another part of me said I should keep moving, keep going forward... This feeling was greatly bizarre, but I followed it, putting my trust into it...
???: ''... Fou... Fou!...''
There! The sound feels so clear now, and there's now a feeling as well... I think I feel... Something licking my face?... Wait... This couldn't be one of 'those' types of dreams, could it?... Welp... Down the rabbit hole it is!...
???: ''Fou! Fou! Fou!''
Little by little... I could feel color returning to my vision, first there was a ton of blurry shapes, but in time those blurs formed cohesive images. In time, light filled my vision too... Which gave way for a new world to enter my eyes...
''Gah... Wha-?...''
Once the blurs stopped being just mere blurs, I felt everything spin like a bad carousel ride made to only make people vomit... I could feel my legs again, and my arms, and my everything else. I instinctively moved up in hopes of stopping the spinning, it was rather hard to get on my feet with all these sensations assaulting my brain...
But somehow, I managed to get up mostly okay. The spinning was going away too. And now that things weren't spinning like a mixer bowl I could take in my surroundings.
I was in some sort of corridor.... A pristine silver metal floor laid beneath me, above were some very bright lights shining down (More like blasting down really...) artificial light to illuminate the place...
Looking directly at the light might have been a mistake, because I felt so much nausea hit me at once. My legs gave out a little and I landed on my butt as my senses were still out of order...
???: ''............''
I could feel another presence close to me, but my brain was still booting up its systems for it to acknowledge their presence. When my mind had finished taking its time, my eyes laid upon a very strange thing... A small and very fluffy looking thing, with fur as white as snow and long ears like that of a rabbit... Is this some kind of squirrl?...
Squirrel?: ''Fou?... Fou! Kyu!''
The little fuzzy creature let out some small sounds that sounded like the mewls of a baby dog... It then ran off to the right, and as my eyes chased after its shape, another thing entered my view... Something much larger than the little squirrel...
It jumped up and was caught gently in the arms of a person, a girl... She stood there as the creature climbed on top of her shoulder where it laid and observed me from its safe vantage point. The girl looked at me just as the creature was, and only now did my brain put everything in order, enough to at least recognise that I'm being looked at by another human being...
''Huh?...''
I took in the girl's appearance, she was a bit short, around my shoulders kind of short. Her bright lilac colored hair grabbed my attention, but the most eye-catching thing about her were, well... Her eyes. Colourful little gems that shone with a lavender light, hidden behind two glass screens in the form of her glasses... She was a true beauty that you'd rarely ever see in your life...
She wore a grey hoodie over a black shirt, over a white-collar shirt and a black skirt. Around her neck was a red tie that had a weird symbol sewn into it, it felt familiar... No, that wasn't right... The girl herself felt familiar to my groggy brain for some reason...
Girl: ''Um... Since It's neither morning nor night, could you please wake up senpai?...''
''What?...''
I tried to stand up, but my shaking legs didn't quite let me stand up... A minute after waking up and I'm about to embarrass myself in front of a cute girl, just my luck...
Girl: ''Are you not feeling well? Here... Let me help you up''
The girl offered her hand... So small and delicate... It looked as if it could break at any moment, as if it was made from glass. Everything about her felt so elegant and polite... But there was an ever-present fragility to her that I couldn't quite understand...
I tried to move my hand, but I hesitated... Mere inches away from taking a hold of her hand, I stopped as something in the back of my mind grew afraid... I didn't quite understand why...
But... As I looked into her eyes, those shining little gems... I could see the simple and pure intent inside them... A simple wish to help me, a simple desire to offer her hand to the stranger in front of her... Seeing that little wish in her eyes, something inside my heart stirred. It broke through my doubts and allowed me to move forward, to grab hold of her lithe hand, and to answer her selfless wish...
A choice made from a simple desire...
A choice that would change everything...
And the moment... Where I chose to move forward...
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