The Reader and the Ink I COMPLETE I ??

I've died more times than I've slept. Bled in a thousand ways. Loved until I hated love. And yet, I still read...

The sirens weren't what woke her. They were a distant hum, nothing more than static against the screaming inside her head. She was already awake when they found her—awake in the cruelest way. Her eyes fluttered open to a sky she didn't recognize, its blue too vivid, too sharp. It sliced against her vision like glass.

The bottle beside her was empty. Not a drip left. It lay on its side, rocking slightly with the wind, as if still deciding whether it had done enough. As if it, too, had regrets.

Boots thudded against concrete. Hands touched her, voices broke through. "She's breathing."

Barely.

A flash of white. Latex gloves. Cold air on her skin. All of it layered, one sensation over another. She felt it all—not just the moment, but the echo of every moment she'd ever read about. Her chest burned like the heroine who drowned in chapter eighteen. Her wrists ached like the boy who lost his grip on a rooftop ledge. Her heart... shattered and reformed and shattered again a thousand times.

That was what it meant to be a Reader.

The world said it like a curse. Reader. Like it was something wrong. Something defective. And maybe it was. Because in a world where Authors created and watched from behind glass, Readers lived every word as if it were etched into their skin.

People thought they understood. They saw Readers in bookstores, huddled over paperbacks, crying over characters who didn't exist. They laughed. Called it sensitive. Overdramatic. Addicted.

They didn't know that she couldn't stop.

Not just wouldn't—couldn't.

Every story she read embedded itself like shrapnel. The joy was sharp and bright, but fleeting. The pain lingered. The deaths. The betrayals. The hopelessness. It lived inside her like it was her own. Because to her brain, it was.

She had loved so many times she had forgotten how to love for real. Not because it stopped mattering, but because it mattered too much. She remembered every kiss. Every heartbreak. Every confession whispered in the dark. Her heart was so full of borrowed memories that it had no room for new ones.

No one taught them how to live like this.

She had tried. God, she had tried to shut it off. She stopped reading once for a month. Thirty days of silence. It nearly killed her. The silence was worse than the pain. Her brain, wired for narrative, for feeling, began to hallucinate stories. Her mind wrote its own horrors. Without books to channel it, she bled herself dry.

Now, the stories were back. And they were louder.

She had read one the night before. A war epic. A death scene that lasted seven pages. The boy died slowly. Regretfully. His mother holding his hand as he begged her to lie. To say he was going to live.

She felt that death.

She was that boy.

The paramedics lifted her onto the stretcher. One of them asked her name. She blinked. It felt like an intrusion—like someone had flipped to the wrong page.

"She's fading," someone said.

Fading. Funny choice of words.

She had been fading for years. Not all at once. Piece by piece. Chapter by chapter. Until she didn't know where the stories ended and she began. Until her body collapsed beneath the weight of a thousand lives she had never actually lived.