She knew that something was off from the way he looked at her. He had the eyes of someone who just saw a ghost and she was pretty sure that she wasn't one. And then he suddenly hugged her, he held her tightly, so close that she could hear his heart beating furiously as he started crying, repeating her name as a mantra.
She couldn't help but hugging him back, trying to make those painful tears stop while her hand gently caressed his back as she whispered comforting words to his ear.
«It's okay... It's alright, now...».
She knew all too well how he was feeling, the sense of guilt crushing their hearts as they tried to go on. But she also was aware that the Okabe in front of her wasn't the same who was forced to give up on Mayuri to save her. Judging by the way he looked at her she could tell that he came from a world where he made the right choice, the choice of leaving her behind so that Mayuri could finally live happily. After all seeing her smile was what both of them wished for.
Just by looking at him she could tell what he was thinking, he was like an open book to her, after all that time that they had spent together, but, even though it meant a death sentence for her, she couldn't allow all that to go on. She couldn't stand Okabe looking at her with love mixed with unbearable pain in his eyes, because she knew that, in one way or another, he was suffering because of her.
As she pressed the "send" button on her phone she felt tears welling up in her eyes. But she couldn't cry in a moment like that, that would have meant making things difficult once again, and that was the last thing she wished for. She had to believe in him, in her beloved Hōōin Kyōma, and, leaving science aside once again, she had to believe in that read thread that tightly bound them.
«Okabe... Have a good morning, when you wake up!».
"Just how long you plan to act so stubbornly, not admitting your feelings even to yourself?"
The words Amane Suzuha spoke to her rang in her mind as she watched the somewhat ominous figure of the Time Machine, the one that brought her name, the only hope she had to bring Okabe back to the Steins;Gate worldline.
Many weird things happened during that long, long year since she first met Okabe Rintarō that day at the Radio Kaikan building. There had been those weird dreams that were too vivid, too real to be just a consequence of her brain reorganizing her memories.
And then, when he told her about worldlines and time travel, she felt as some strange kind of feeling was gnawing at the back of her mind, like a voice telling her to remember. The same voice that made her run out of her hotel room like a fool whispering: "I couldn't forget you even if I tried to, idiot Okabe!", and the moment when tears fell from her eyes watching him disappear like that, as he had never existed, memories of other wordlines ran through her mind like a movie as she made up her mind.
"There's no wordline, no place, no time in which I haven't loved you".
She took a step into the machine. She wanted to see him so badly. She had to believe in herself. She had to believe in him. She had to believe in that red thread that tightly bound them.