Gakuen Alice will definitely never be mine, but the story below (save for the quotes I have taken from Gakuen Alice- which admittedly, I took a few liberties with) is mine.

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Natsume Hyuuga stood somnambulantly as the fire died out.

The wind whispered gently into his left ear like an unspoken secret that the corners of his mind subliminally embraced, and he shivered as the cold air blew out his fire as quickly as a brush of air to an illuminating candle at midnight.

The silence that followed began the prelude to a symphony of the hurried rush of blood through his veins and the irregularity of his heartbeat pumping away seconds of his life.

He was never fond of waiting, even if it was for a good cause, because it gave him too much time to think. And thinking was never a good sign, especially for a dark soul like Natsume.

When he was eight, he used to think only terrible thoughts when he got the chance. They would begin innocuously, a burgeoning fire providing him with warmth on a cold night. But as it grew in size and strength, he would have nightmarish flashes of it entering through his mouth, grasping tightly onto his lungs and suffocating him. And his mind would retaliate against this fire with unparalleled anger, hatred, and rage. But this would only fuel the uncontrollable fire further, and the futility and frustration of it all would make him want to scream out in vexation.

Thankfully, he learned over time to ponder not of his past—because thinking meant reliving, and reliving meant suffering all over again—but rather of the unknown future, where his very foundations shook with instability. He learned to skew his mental timeline, mold it like clay, into a convoluted structure in which the memory of 'before' disintegrated at the very moment it was created. Because even with uncertainty, he reasoned, there could still be happiness. But in the past, nothing but pain awaited him.

He shuddered, and reminded himself again that the true reason he came out today was to reunite with the love of his life.

x x x

He held onto her hand as she turned around.

It took a little longer than a second for the true gravity of what stood before him (—the wrinkled corners around her gentle eyes as signs of her vivacity, the long hair finally freed from the pigtails, the immutable smile of which took four years to grow unbelievably more beautiful than ever before—) to become manifest in his eyes.

The moment was finally here, and there was no denying it.

"…Natsume?"

And she remembered.

x x x

Before he knew it, time elapsed.

He was sitting on a chair clad in his uniform. The familiarity of the location hit him with a nostalgia reserved only for those well acquainted with the area. He recognized every bit of it—the forest trees swaying with the music of the wind, the regular arrangement of desks and seats, and most importantly, his own conflicting emotions of flourishing distaste and mild melancholy.

He was back in the Academy again—somehow. And oddly, it was exactly as he had left it.

Strangely enough, before him was a plate of mashed potatoes. The sludge on his bowl was painted a saturated yellow, and the pallid frozen peas beside it looked like they had been there for quite some time.

How did he get here? For how long was he here?

He shook the strange feeling off. Somehow he felt that there was no point in looking for answers.

Suddenly, he was approached by a man dressed all in white.

"Hey, how're you doing?"

The old man looked friendly, although Natsume was never a good judge of character. By some means, he felt unaccountably attached to the man, and acknowledged the greeting with a curt nod.

"…Fine," Natsume replied brusquely. He picked up his plastic fork, and poked at the strange substances on his plate.

"Did they drug you yet?" The old man quietly probed.

Natsume was confused by the question, but he did not think much of it, and responded with a mindless "What?" before yawning. He childishly began to create a catapult with his fork and his peas, pulling his fork backward and releasing the peas one by one to check and see which method of release was the most effective. The farthest pea nearly flew off the table.

"I guess not, then," the man mumbled, and proceeded to take a seat beside Natsume. "So, anything new?"

Natsume rolled his eyes at the old man, who had just interrupted the fifth launch. He sighed,

"Well, Mikan—"

Natsume stopped, and his muscles tensed, the grip on his utensil tightening. Where was Mikan? He couldn't possibly have lost her—after all, she was just here…

"Ah, the brunette?" The old man flashed a warm smile, and continued, "Were you able to find her?"

Natsume did not know how the old man knew this information, but nonetheless, released a deep sigh of relief, and nodded profusely. "She remembers me, too," he added.

"Does she now?" The old man began to gather the peas, and return them back to Natsume's plate. "That's great news, son."

"Where is she now?" Natsume questioned. "Mikan, I mean."

The old man fell completely silent, and Natsume's body froze.

He couldn't have lost her. Panic overwhelmed him. A life without Mikan was inconceivable, as if walking on a tightrope without any sense of balance.

"Where is she?" Natsume reiterated his question clearly as he looked deeply into the old man's eyes, stressing each syllable intensely.

"She's not here right now," the old man said, shifting in his seat uncomfortably. That was incontrovertibly insufficient an explanation, of course, but before Natsume could press further, the old man muttered something so softly that Natsume would not have noticed it had his mind not been searching for those very words all along:

"You only see what you want to see."

Something shifted in the room, but Natsume could not fathom what it was. "Wait," he said, "What do you mean by that?"

"You know, son," the old man laid back into his seat, "People say that happiness can only be achieved if you lower your standards."

He could see that the man's eyes were filled with a sadness that even permeated Natsume's heart and flooded it with sorrow. He knew, by some means, that the man was trying to tell him something about his own life, but any penitential memory, any sorrowful storyline, was transformed into a mushroom-cloud of smoke in the fireplace of his existence.

"What does that have to do with me?" The fire was still burning, strong.

"Sometimes, it's not about whether something physically occurred or not." The sagacious man sighed. "It's about love. And hate. And everything else in between."

Love. He knew he felt that with Mikan when he first saw her, and it did not matter that he was barely a decade into his life when it happened, or that it would be illogical for a child to know what love even meant at such a young age. Rationally, it made no sense whatsoever, and he knew that. But how could that possibly matter?

The man continued, "Life may not even really exist, as far as we're concerned. When we die, life ends, too. And we all have a different way of viewing it. It's arbitrary."

Natsume looked straight ahead seemingly impassively, and asked, "Where are you going with this?"

"What I'm trying to say is that all of this—" he gestured to the room, the hallway and the ceiling, "—is not what you think it is. Not even close."

Natsume was perplexed, but he was not a fool. He quickly came to the conclusion that the man was senile. But, then, what was this man doing in the Academy?

Before he could answer that question, familiar winds blew in his right ear, the same ones on the day he saved Mikan. And upon a sudden impulsion, everything became clearer.

The walls surrounding him—once vibrant with color and laughter and happiness—began at once peeling itself away from his field of view, revealing nothing but white. Pure, tasteless white. The tables shifted and metamorphosed into circular counters decorated in varying shades of gray. His uniform melted away into nothingness, revealing a hidden layer of bleached clothing underneath that he did not recognize.

What Academy?

"Let me explain, Natsume," the old man said. "You were admitted here in Saint Alice Hospital when you were twenty-two years old because you had trouble dealing with certain things that happened to you."

"I'm sixteen. I'm… sixteen," Natsume kept repeating. He didn't know whom he was convincing anymore. "I'm sixteen."

"No, Natsume. You are twenty-seven years old. You have been here for five years, and every single year this happens cyclically, so you need to listen carefully."

Natsume was still baffled and skeptical of the whole ordeal. The fire was fading. But what if it were all some sick joke? "Stop fucking with me, old man," he threatened.

"When you were eight years old, your sister Aoi burned down your entire village. She was a devoted pyromaniac, and in the process of killing a total of fifty innocent citizens, she took the lives of herself and your parents. Thankfully, you were out that day, so—"

"My parents weren't—"

"Listen. You were out that day, so you were saved by the mess. You, however, had no one to turn to, and so you followed a man named Rei Serio, who was a follower of the yakuza. You worked under him for many, many years. He trained you in an incredibly ruthless manner, and you killed various innocent people—"

"Swear to me, Natsume, that if you're captured and have no way to escape, you'll take your own life."

"—but you didn't really understand the gravity of what you were doing. Then you met Mikan Sakura, a girl struggling to survive, when you turned twenty. She loved you, and you loved her, which was completely fine, save for the fact that Kumicho Kuonji wanted her as his mistress. You couldn't let that happen, of course—"

"I can't bear to see the woman I love sink into the same darkness I am in."

"—so you tried to defy him. You were unsuccessful, and when Kuonji found out about it, he made sure you were going to be killed. Thankfully, you got to the cops before the mob could get you, and you met police officer Ruka Nogi, who was in charge of your case. You guys became really good friends, and worked together to help find Mikan Sakura…"

No.

Something rooted within Natsume was reborn, and, desperate to survive, it crawled out of the hidden areas of the fireplace and pervaded into his heart. He fought it—fought it desperately hard—but the match was set from the beginning.

After all, he knew the rest of this story all too well.

Mikan Sakura would be taken and gone forever. He would find her as the wife of Kuonji and no longer the innocent, pure girl he fell in love with. His heart would be broken apart and its pieces scattered across planes, across worlds, across times. He would swear to do anything to re-do his life.

"You were admitted into this hospital for your chronic delusions and that's where 'Alice Academy' was born. You always started with yourself being eight years old, because that was when your nightmare began. You incorporated people from this mental hospital – for instance, Hotaru Imai, the inventor with alexithymia. Anybody you didn't have names for, you made them up arbitrarily—like Kokoroyomi, Kitsuneme and Mochiage."

He would make an intricate world in his head where everything went right.

"…Natsume?"

Where he could control the fire.

Suddenly, Natsume saw Kitsuneme's flying form in front of him, and focused his eyes a little harder. Below Kitsuneme were two people attired in blue holding the boy up, preparing to strap him onto an ambulance stretcher.

"You only see what you want to see."

The information fell between the old man and Natsume, and tears formed in the latter's eyes as he tried his best not to let them fall. The fire was out, and not even vestiges of his hope could be rediscovered. "It's... all a lie," he said softly.

Mikan…

Natsume felt the old man place his hand on his shoulder. "Listen to me very carefully, Natsume," he said. "The emotions you felt in this world you've created are real. How could anyone deny that they happened? After all, how could anyone be able to explain how you're not the same person you were yesterday?"

Natsume stayed silent.

"You find anyone who understands anything about this world, and you'll find that most of the lessons they've learned are taught by people who don't even exist." The man looked at Natsume, but seeing that Natsume did not return the gaze, he sighed. "Because truth be told, you always had it in you to overcome those obstacles, and to cope with the adversities of life. You just didn't really know how to manifest it."

The old man picked up the fork, seemingly examining it. "Maybe you were perfectly capable of feeding yourself, but you just wanted the comfort of someone feeding it to you. After all, doesn't food always taste better when it's shared between two?"

Natsume looked up to the white ceiling, completely speechless. He was not fluent in the language of reality. Every time he tried to speak, the letters—the syllables and consonants and vowels—all amalgamated into an indiscernible accumulation of confusion before they even had a chance of being expressed. Sorrow caressed his insides, and all he could do was stare at his fingertips, hoping for the fraction of a second that this was all a dream and that some fire would sprout from his desperation.

Unfortunately, the bullet had been fired, and it would do its job to make its way through his skull, tearing apart the intricate world he had crafted and leaving behind a trail of the remnants of memories he worked so hard to lock away deep inside.

But I don't want to be limited by who I was.

The old man, as if having read Natsume's mind, looked at him profoundly. "So go write a happy story for yourself. God knows we've seen too many sad ones."

A happy ending.

That notion being genuine seemed foreign to him, but it was possible nonetheless.

He could still see the scene of friends who would never grow old unless it was together, people who had made the right decisions in their lives against all odds. He could still smell the mixture of strawberries and 'fluff puffs'—the aroma of family and friendship that, however deceitful, was as real to him as the sun was a ball of gas.

They were still there hidden in the depths of his mind, constantly enticing him back to the fleeting realm of imagination. And there, he would be the main character of his own story; his heroine would triumph with him. She would be his and his alone—she would remain as pure and as beautiful and as angelic as he recalled her.

In this make-believe world that he had created, he learned more about real life than what he could ever have imagined. He learned about sacrifice. He learned about courage. He learned about love.

He learned, above all else, that imaginary did not mean non-existent.

Nothing would disappear so long as his mind continued working. And nobody could rob him of that.

As the fragmented fantasy timeline patched itself up and unlived memories washed over his mental shores, he lit the fire again with the snap of a finger, as if hitting the 'reset' on his life.

"Welcome to Alice Academy!"

Because in the end, that's all that mattered.

End

I know that I left this site a long time ago, and I suppose that it would be hypocritical for me to be posting this given what it says in my profile. However, I assure you that this would be the last (read: completely final) Gakuen Alice story you will see from me. Initially I wanted it to be an original story inspired by Gakuen Alice, but somewhere along the way I got the impression that this story was inseparable from its source of inspiration, and to portray it as an original would deny it so much development. Hence, this story was born.

This story is— as you may have already noticed—pseudo-AU in that it is a definite (albeit unlikely) possibility for the ending of Gakuen Alice. I hope I wasn't the only one who thought that Gakuen Alice would end wonderfully if it were all in someone's head.

I realize that it may be difficult to understand, but I hope you recognized the small symbols that I dropped here and there. :-) I also am aware that there may be errors and details that irk some readers, but I truly hope I did not disappoint to the point that you cannot overlook those minor slip-ups. This was really just a Sunday-night burst of inspiration, and I apologize in advance if anyone turns out hating it for any reason.

This is dedicated to Anna, because she just recently emailed me about being in Tokyo, and I was a complete dork and did not check my email until after she left the country. :-( Also, because my birthday gift to her was pretty terrible. Anna, I know you don't read GA stories anymore, but I really hope you enjoy this.

In any case, I truly love how much the fandom has flourished over these past few weeks. The quality of writing has definitely improved, and I'm so impressed by every writer involved in the whole process. I think it is a great indication that this fandom is certainly self-sustaining.

To the small audience that I have, I must say thank you. You have given me so much motivation that it is not feasible to put it in words. May you all have an amazing time reading and writing literature, and keep in touch!

Cheers,

MiladyQueenMab