We Were Always Running
598 Words
The hallway bent around them like a living thing. Every turn looked the same — dim walls, flickering lights, doorways to nowhere. Rin’s lungs burned, but she didn’t dare stop.
Akira didn’t speak. He just held her wrist tighter every time she faltered, like if he let go, the hallway would swallow her whole.
Behind them, the sound of dragging — slow, patient, almost playful. The masked figure never hurried. It didn’t need to.
“They want you to get tired,” Akira finally said, breathless. “They feed on fear. Confusion. They can twist space just enough to keep you running in circles.”
Rin clenched her jaw. “Then how do we break it?”
He looked over his shoulder, then back at her. “We don’t run toward the exit. We run toward the truth.”
She didn’t know what that meant. She didn’t have time to ask.
The hallway shifted again — lockers melted into mirrors, and her reflection was not moving in sync.
Rin gasped.
In the mirror, she stood still, staring at herself with rainbow eyes that glowed, as if the storm inside her was waking up.
“She’s… not me,” she said.
Akira stopped suddenly, pulling her to a halt.
“No,” he said. “She is you. Or she was. She’s the part you buried. The one that remembers everything.”
The reflection began to mouth something. Silent. Slow. A single word.
"Rei."
The sound of his name almost knocked the wind from her chest.
Rin stepped closer to the mirror. Her fingertips hovered near the glass.
“She knows him,” she whispered.
Akira’s voice hardened. “Don’t touch her.”
“She’s me.”
“No—she’s the part of you that gave up. She’s the one who let them in last time.”
The reflection smirked. Her eyes glitched — static and lightning.
“Rei is gone because of her,” Akira said. “You trusted her once. She led you right into their hands.”
The glass cracked under Rin’s fingertips.
But she didn’t pull away.
Her reflection leaned forward, lips brushing the other side of the mirror.
And in a voice Rin could feel inside her bones, she whispered:
“He’s still alive.”
Akira yanked her back just before the mirror shattered. The shards hovered mid-air like suspended teeth. Then they fell.
The hallway went black.
When the lights blinked on again, they were somewhere else.
A classroom.
Dusty. Abandoned. Blood on the desks in patterns too exact to be accidents.
Akira let go of her hand.
He was pale. “This is where they broke you last time.”
Rin stepped forward, trying to ignore the chalkboard behind her that still had the words scrawled in red: Where is your soul hiding?
“I need to know what I did,” she said. “What I was.”
He didn’t speak.
Because behind her—
A voice answered.
“You were mine.”
Rin turned slowly.
A boy stood there.
Brown eyes. Black hair. Pale skin. A wound blooming at the center of his white school shirt like a forgotten promise.
He smiled.
And for a moment—
The world stopped.
“Rei…” she breathed.
He took a step toward her.
Akira didn’t move.
But something about the way Rei walked—too perfect, too clean, too calm—made her chest twist.
“Is it really you?”
Rei reached out.
And the moment their fingers touched, she felt it.
Not warmth.
Not love.
Not him.
Just…
Cold.
- Writer
