Chapter 1:
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-Retry.
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-Retry.
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-Retry.
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-Retry!
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"Retry!"
A knock on the door interrupted the, already weakened, concentration of the room's occupant. Eyes that had been closed tightly blinked once and then came into focus, only to widen as the person came to recognize the change of the reflection on the mirror in front of her.
She saw the sweat on her face long before she felt the unfamiliar coldness wet her skin. Then came the other sensations. While worsened by mental exertion, the headache she had been feeling for the last hour was expected, what was not was the pain in her hands.
Composing her features back into her normal stoic expression, the girl that had locked herself in the bathroom raised both of her hands to discover that during her introspection she had unconsciously baled closed slender fingers into fists, and extending her cramped digits revealed she had done so with so much strength that her nails had cut small crescent moons onto the palm of her hands.
The sight of her own blood elicited no reaction from her; she stared at the small wounds with clinical detachment, showing little interest on the way they were healed on the blink of an eye. She had no time to do something as well for the sweat that trickled down her face, for the person on the other side of the door knocked once again.
"Yuki, sweetie, are you alright? I heard you shouting."
Nagato Yuki tried her best to overcome the sudden reappearance of the sense of misplacement that had bombarded her when she had returned to her apartment this day. While the sentiment was alien to her, matching the definition to her situation had not been hard.
She had physically stumbled when, as soon as she had crossed the door frame, all her connections with the Integrated Data Entity had been severed and terabytes of information she had carefully organized in her biological brain had been suddenly replaced by disorganized and mismatched memories that hadn't been there a second before. More than a decade of memories strewn together with the disorganization any human, normal human, mind would have done it. Birthdays, first days of school, childhood pets, and the most incongruous of all: memories of a family.
It would not have been odd for Yuki to not know the identity of the concerned person knocking on the door, but the fact that she did was so illogical that it took her a full second, an eternity of processing time for her, to come up with an answer.
"I am unharmed and do not require assistance. I am merely experiencing the early symptoms of a cold. I'll be out in a minute…"
Here came a pause in her speech, not because she didn't know what to say, but because the final word summoned a large quantity of what she saw as Errors that had suddenly intruded into her thought patterns.
"…mom."
"Oh, honey, I'm going to make you some tea to make you feel better. Just call me if you need anything but hurry up, I am almost done preparing dinner. I can't believe how few groceries you had in the pantry. Tomorrow you and I are going shopping, alright?"
"That is acceptable."
Once the sound of footsteps told Yuki that the woman had departed, and she had spared another second to volatilize her sweat and compose her appearance, she moved to the door and opened it a mere half inch so she could look covertly at her own apartment.
To say she had problems recognizing the space as hers would have been a misunderstanding. Gone was the spartan lack of amenities and furniture she had existed with. While spare, there were now enough objects in the apartment to make it a comfortable living space for a normal human being.
Nagato had the conflictive memories of knowing how empty her apartment had looked just that morning, and the incongruous memories of having chosen and acquired five hundred and fifteen items with wish to furnish it, decorate it, and make it pleasing.
Her barren walls were now decorated with picture frames containing photographs of places and people she recognized only thanks to these new intruding memories. But of all the things that now occupied what had been empty space before, the ones that she had more trouble comprehending were things that didn't seem to serve a purpose, such as the tables that she remembered placing on empty spaces merely because, according to her recall, she had judged them to look good on those locations.
Cautious, Yuki risked opening the door more so she could peer further into the apartment, but that proved to be a mistake when she suddenly found herself making eye contact with yet another someone that shouldn't have been. Yuki's eyes stared into an identically colored pair, but one that had been embedded with humanity by the frank smile of their owner. A man that appeared to be in his late forties lay on a couch in the living room with his head propped up on top of his own arm, while with his free hand he held an open the book the man had been reading a moment before.
"Hey, little nova. This book is pretty good, do you…"
Before the man had a time to finish his sentence Yuki Nagato stepped back into the bathroom and shut the door. She had readied herself to act in accordance with the situation that had been imposed to her, to play the role her new memories told her she was supposed to follow, but she had not been prepared for the way the man's use of a paternal term of endearment had summoned large amount of Errors in her programming.
Not knowing quite why she did it, Nagato Yuki laid her forehead to rest against the cool door, closing her eyes as she reattempted to defragmentate her mind and classify the memories that were interfering with her normal processing.
Had she been operating anywhere near her normal standards she would have had more than enough power to do this and suppress a type of Error she was familiar enough with to classify and understand: Anger at Haruhi Susimiya
But much more urgently, she would have noticed one of the small accidental cuts she had repaired from the palm of her hands had not completely disappeared, and had in fact left behind something Nagato Yuki had been devoid of: A scar.
To be continued.
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