I slept little. Or rather, I dreamed too much.
In my dreams, I was someone else.
A younger Ryouhei. More naive. Easier to break.
Sometimes I had my eyes torn out. Other times, I spoke in Sera's voice. In one of them, she called me by a name that wasn't mine.
"Shōta."
I woke up trembling. That wasn't my name.
But I cried anyway.
—
Sera pretended to sleep. I could tell by her held breath, by the way her back didn't follow a natural rhythm.
She felt it too.
The cracks.
—
> "Not all futures can be avoided."
"Some just leak through more slowly."
I read that line on one of the journal's loose pages. I didn't remember writing it. Or when it appeared.
The words had an irritating quality. Like they knew me better than I knew myself.
—
We stayed in the clearing for three days.
Reviewing notes.
Rereading the journal.
Comparing versions.
Each page seemed to shift slightly from day to day.
A new line.
A crossed-out paragraph that hadn't been before.
A warning rewritten in darker ink:
> "Stop reading. He's watching too."
"Who is 'he'?" Sera asked one night, while we fed a campfire that sounded more like it coughed than burned.
I didn't know what to tell her.
Because every time I read the lines, a part of me understood them perfectly.
Only that part… wasn't me anymore.
—
I started having lapses.
Minutes I didn't remember walking.
Hours where Sera said I spoke in another language.
One day, I woke up with dirt on my hands.
I had dug something. A deep hole.
At the bottom: a metal box with my name engraved.
Inside: another note.
> "Stop digging."
—
"You're changing," she finally said. No more detours.
"Does that scare you?"
"Yes. But what scares me more… is if you stop changing."
The way she said it… had no hate.
It held grief.
As if she already knew that in this game of shadows and fractured futures, the real price wasn't sanity… it was identity.
—
That night, we didn't sleep.
We sat back to back, in silence.
Just listening to the branches crack like bones,
to the wind whisper names neither of us recognized,
and to the journal… writing a single word again and again:
> "Remember."
> "Remember."
> "Remember."