Arc One
Chapter one
...
An ambush?
Or an explosion?
She wasn't sure exactly. All she knew was that in the next moment her body was being embraced by the cold. Looking above, the sunlight was drifting further and further away. The girl knew that she had to do something—to get out of this mess, yet for some reason her legs refused to cooperate. This whole entire situation was undeniably familiar.
Her body was locked in place, both arms and legs losing feeling. She could feel the aching in her chest and started to feel oddly tired with the heavy weight of darkness crushing her. Eyes glancing back at the light, the realization hit her just how far away it was. Why was she fighting anymore? With how things were, she wasn't going to make it anyways. And ever so slowly, her eyes began to shut.
She was tired and a nap...was starting to sound nice.
"You're just going to let them die then!?" A panicked voice jolted through the darkness.
The girl's eyes opened slightly at its call. She wanted to reply to it; to tell it no. But then again…
Who was it?
Who was going to die?
...
It was in the beginning that everything felt like a dream.
It was a feeling akin to déjà vu. Everything was strange, everything was off, and her vision seemed to be playing tricks on her. Much of what she went through and what she had witnessed at first was hazy. The things she saw, the people she came to know, and the surroundings she was in were all different, yet familiar at the same time.
But the one thing that struck her as odd was the fact that everything around her was much too big. Upon first looking at her hands as well, she realized that they were much too small for somebody her age. And then she couldn't help but wonder: Come to think of it, what was my age?
A question that was so simple for any person to answer couldn't be answered in her mind. No matter how hard she searched, she came up empty. And that question was one of many that followed. This all happened after the first night that that dream—that nightmare—happened.
Who was she?
Where was she from?
There were simple questions like that which went unanswered. The only answers that were there in her mind were random and vague, seemingly unconnected in anyway with who she was. And it was right away that she didn't feel like she belonged where she was. In her mind, she knew that she was somebody who belonged somewhere.
It just so happened that it wasn't the place she was now.
Blank faces whose names she didn't know floated through the vast emptiness of her mind, some of them with their voices echoing in familiarity to her. She figured that those were people she once knew. They had to be, right? They were there, she had discovered, along with all the other useless information trapped in her head. Places she knew of, stories she'd heard, and a language once so familiar. Those were the only things left over in her mind and none of it matched up with what she was seeing. The other memories, the ones she could use to identify herself with, were all gone.
Carved out and left void.
And it was the second time that the nightmare occurred—and the very same—that she finally came to a conclusion, one that nobody would ever want to think of.
That had happened.
It was then that she figured that perhaps everything she was seeing wasn't actually real; that perhaps it was her way of coping with what had happened. But it was also after the second nightmare that her mind became 'awake' and that she realized every face that she saw and every experience she had—all of it was very, very real.
It was as if somebody snapped their fingers and destroyed that peaceful trance she had been in; cold water to the face. The more she tried to think and find the answers to who she was, the more difficult it was to find.
Her appearance…She always had brown hair and brown eyes, right? And she took after her mother, the only parent she'd known. But her conscious begged to differ at the thought that Japanese was the first and only language she knew; something that at the same time it was trying to convince itself that it was the truth.
English.
English it cried.
Why…did it hurt so much to think about those things? She wasn't so sure. It was as if her memory was familiar and then foreign at the same time. And it was tearing her apart. It was as if somebody had mashed her own thoughts together with someone else's, making a messy collage in the process. And that was how she could describe her memory loss—her amnesia.
She knows.
Thinking like that could really make a person hurt on the inside.
And it did.
After realizing just how messed up she felt, she lost countless nights of sleep and even cried over it (or maybe it was the fact that she was an infant with no control over herself). And with the passing of each and every day afterwards, she struggled with her mind to find something, anything that would bring her ease.
And then it was a single thought that brought her to her senses: she was alive.
She was alive.
She was alive.
There was no need to linger on any dark thoughts.
In fact, there wasn't a need at all to linger on the thoughts she didn't have. The only thing that really mattered was that she was indeed living. A new face, a new body, different surroundings—that's all she really needed. Sure, she was going to take all the knowledge she could from her mind, but in order for her to live a sane life, she realized that everything else would have to go. All of this 'who she was' needed to disappear. The only thing that truly mattered was the here and now, not what was in the past.
In certain situations, letting go no matter how hard it sounded was the best option.
And she had a new name as well.
It was Rin Nohara.
...
Author's note: Chapter one of the official rewrite. The story has taken on a different perspective, hopefully allowing a bit more freedom with how I write (It won't be limiting me to just Rin's point of view). It's taken me awhile to getting around to it, but I'm quite pleased with this chapter. I've also decided that a better way for me to go around the story was to break it up into different arcs. I thought it would be more helpful with timeskips and would more sense rather than summing it up in a sentence "And years passed." I just couldn't really wrap my head around that.
And as of what's planned right now, each arc will have a specific purpose in the story. This first arc happens to deal with Rin figuring out her new life and who she is. Hopefully it will help with keeping the story in check and not just going about what her everyday life is (I found that the last version was lagging through that). Let me know what you guys think!
~BlueCampanula