?? | Chishiya x OC | ??
*Currently editing*
"I've always have that thought about you, that I don't want to remember you longer, than I have ever known you."
Seina was never ordinary
unpredictable, an emotional rollercoaster, heartbreakingly beautif...
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE What ifs are just regrets dressed in prettier words
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♤♡♢♧
Chishiya hadn't meant to look for her.
Not really.
He had more important things to think about—the game, the aftermath, the next move. And yet, as he walked through the halls of the Beach, his mind kept circling back to their last conversation.
There had been something in Seina's eyes when she asked if he regretted anything. Something familiar. Something that pulled at a memory he couldn't quite place.
And he had no idea why that thought made him change direction. Why his feet carried him somewhere else entirely.
When he stepped onto the balcony, she was already there—cigarette dangling between her fingers, gaze distant as the city stretched out before her.
***
Seina lay still on the bed, cigarette resting between her fingers, the smoke unraveling into the air like the ghost of something already lost. Shadows pooled in the corners of the room, the only light bleeding in through the gaps in the curtains—neon and distant. She stared at the ceiling, but she wasn't really seeing it. Her mind was elsewhere. Everywhere.
In some other version of reality, maybe she hadn't let go. Maybe he hadn't let go. Maybe she and Chishiya had finished med school together, side by side, instead of drifting into something unrecognizable. Maybe they had woke up to the same quiet mornings, falling into the same exhausted nights. Maybe they had worked in the same hospital, brushing past each other in sterile hallways, two parts of a whole that had never needed questioning.
She liked to think that in that world, he had been happy with her.
She didn't care about herself. That had stopped mattering the second she saw him again in this place. And maybe that was the most pathetic part of all—that it took being thrown into a dying world to realize she had been numb for so long. That since the moment they had gone their separate ways, she hadn't really felt anything.
A sharp inhale. Reality pressing against her ribs. She crushed the cigarette into the ashtray, rolled onto her stomach, and pressed her face into the pillow as if she could smother the thoughts before they swallowed her whole.
For a moment, she almost laughed. A bitter, humorless thing caught in her throat.
Because wasn't this ridiculous? She was in a place where people dropped dead every night, where survival was the only currency that mattered, where tomorrow wasn't guaranteed—and yet her mind was still tangled in something as stupid as an unfinished story between her and him.
Something that had unraveled long before this world had tried to kill them.
She hated herself for it. For the way she kept chasing ghosts. For the way even drinking felt pointless now.
