WE WERE NEVER FIVE
944 Words
Chapter 9 — We Were Never Five
We were four now.
And I hated how rare that felt.
Ansh.
Chris.
Appi.
Me.
The only four people who remembered Meher — the girl everyone else forgot like a smudge wiped from glass.
But we remembered her.
Which meant we were already half-lost too.

---
Chris had brought his laptop. Appi had brought chips and a dying torchlight. I brought the notebook — Meher’s — and a map of our school, with weird symbols circled and re-circled like I could decode silence with highlighters.
We sat cross-legged on the crumbling rooftop above the abandoned chemistry block. The concrete was cracked. The air smelt of dust and monsoon whispers. Antennas jutted around us like skeletons, rusted and strange, humming faintly in the wind.
Ansh looked at me across the circle. “What now, Captain?”
I didn’t flinch.
“We follow her last known moments,” I said. “Every place she mentioned in this notebook — behind the radiator, Room C-4’s broken desk, the locked darkroom behind the art lab. One of them has to hold something.”
Chris raised an eyebrow. “And if they don’t?”
“Then we keep looking,” I said. “Until we forget her too. Or find her first.”
---
It was strange.
The way the more we searched, the more her presence thickened — even as the world erased her.
A student ID, half-burnt in the incinerator. A water bottle with her initials scratched away. A corridor photo in grainy security footage — blurred, almost beyond recognition.
Just... shadows.
And we chased them like believers.
---
Later, Appi plopped beside me and tossed something into my lap.
A KitKat.
I blinked. “Seriously?”
“You need chocolate to think,” she said, as if it were law. “And you go feral without sugar.”
“I do not—”
“You absolutely do.”
I broke into a grin, peeling it open. “If you brought Dairy Milk, I would’ve proposed.”
She mock-gasped. “Save that drama for Ansh.”
---
Even with the silence circling us, that moment —
Me biting into chocolate, Appi leaning on my shoulder, Chris muttering about ghosts and camera grain, and Ansh sketching something quietly beside me —
felt like light.
Felt like a version of peace we weren’t supposed to hold onto.
Because I knew.
One of us will start forgetting soon.
---
The sun drooped low, turning everything amber and unreal.
dead and I have to pretend I wasn’t ghost hunting.”
They got up, packing lazily, cracking dumb jokes. Chris ruffled Ansh’s hair. Appi squeezed my hand.
“We’ll meet again tomorrow,” she said.
“We have to,” I replied.

---
And then it was just me and Ansh.
And the quiet.
He sat back down beside me. The wind had turned colder, more certain of the hour. My KitKat wrapper fluttered off the edge.
I turned to him. “You okay?”
He gave a half-smile. “We’re chasing a girl no one remembers. Okay’s not exactly on the menu.”
“But you still came,” I said.
He looked at me then. “I came because you asked.”
I paused. The weight of his gaze made my skin feel made of glass.
He spoke again, quieter this time. “You always act like you don’t need anyone. Like you carry her memory like a sword.”
“Someone has to,” I murmured.
He nodded slowly. “But you don’t have to carry it alone.”
---
I looked away. The rooftop suddenly felt smaller. The sky too close.
But then, his hand reached mine — not to hold, not quite — just to anchor.
I don’t know what moved me. Maybe the ache in my chest. Or maybe the way his eyes saw through the cracks and didn’t flinch.
I leaned in.
Slow. Quiet. Brave.
And Ansh... leaned back.
His arm came around me, unsure at first. I pressed my head into his shoulder, and he held me — not tightly, not like a scene from a movie — but like he had all the time in the world.
---
“I don’t want to forget her,” I whispered.
“You won’t,” he said. “Not while you’re the one remembering for all of us.”
I breathed in. “But what if one of us does? What if it starts?”
He didn’t answer.
And that silence said more than words could.

---
“You scare me,” he said suddenly.
I looked up. “Why?”
“Because you make me want to remember everything I’ve ever tried to forget.”
---
To be continued...
Chapter 10 — The Name That Isn’t Mine
One of us forgets her.
And it begins… with a name.
---
Author’s Note:
This chapter felt like holding my breath underwater — and slowly surfacing.
Writing the four of them together, as memories intertwine and questions grow louder, made me feel every heartbeat of this mystery. Appi’s warmth, Chris’s quiet loyalty, Ansh’s growing closeness — and Meher, the name that doesn’t fade even when the world insists it should.
There’s a reason we remember.
Even when it hurts.
Even when it feels safer to forget.
Thank you for walking through the fog with me. And for feeling what I feel — especially when the ink smudges and the silence stretches.
If Meher is somewhere between the lines, I know you’ll help me find her.
We were never just imagining her. Were we?
Love,
🕯️ Nav
#FaintTraces
- Writer
