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"The me five hours ago won't know, will she?" she said, somewhat wistfully, "That you had called me Kurisu."
Before the dizziness overcame him, he met her gaze, and at the moment he still did not know how many times he would have to see that expression again, with her confident smile and periwinkle eyes, glistening as if they were trying to hold back tears.
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"This is not a dream," he protested. "Just like in reality, I can..."
He brushed her cheek with a quivering hand.
"...I can touch you. Just like in reality, you are... here."
Her eyes hardened, and her voice was cold with the rationality of a scientist.
"Touch is but a electrical signal that your brain lets you perceive."
As if to prove her point, she took a step back, and the sensation of her skin against his fingers faded as if it had been a lie.
Even in a dream, he could not win an argument against her.
"Okabe," she called, and he raised his head to see her eyes soften. "Before you wake up, promise me... when you return to the Beta World Line, I want you to promise to forget about me."
"There's no way -- "
"This is a dream, remember? Dreams are something you forget once you wake up."
She spoke with a voice that brooked no argument, but he knew that she meant well -- too well. She was willing to sacrifice herself -- again -- and, again, he was powerless to stop her.
She crossed their pinkies, making a morbid scientific threat to seal the promise, and when he teased her for it, settling them into a familiar banter, it seemed that they had returned to those days of tranquility and normalcy, it seemed that fate and the merciless laws of the universe had loosened their chokehold around his neck.
And for that moment, he could almost believe that it was still summer, those short yet unbelievably long weeks, when they were still ignorant and impetuous, before he knew that her cold genius exterior masked a childlike inquisitiveness, before she realized that beneath his insufferable chuunibyou syndrome lay a lonely boy who held too close his bonds with his friends, before they discovered that curiosity and coincidence could toss their lives and even the world into disarray.
"Kurisu!"
"Okabe!"
Their voices overlapped.
"What's wrong?" He asked.
"Wh-what about you?" Her cheeks were dusted with a faint blush that brought a smile to his lips.
"It's nothing. I only wanted to call your name."
"Wh-what a coincidence... me too."
Why was it so easy to be honest to one another now, when they had found it so difficult before?
They exchanged light banter, trying to drag out the moment, the dream, for even a second longer.
"Okabe..." She said finally. "It's about time... don't you think?"
He nodded in agreement despite his growing reluctance. With every second he stayed, he grew more and more unwilling to part, to return to that cold reality in which she no longer existed.
He watched her set up the Telephone Microwave (Name Subject to Change), trying to burn the image of her flaming hair and confident backside into his mind, trying to ignore the lump in his throat. The dream was coming to an end.
Kurisu straightened, finished with her work, her cell phone in hand. She didn’t hesitate when she pressed the button to send the D-mail, but she turned back to face him as electricity began to crackle behind her.
"You promised," she whispered.
Forget me, she had told him.
Don't forget me, her eyes implored him.
The vertigo washed over him in waves, and he wanted to tell her that he could not forget her, could never forget her. He would swallow a thousand needles, and she could stab electrodes into his hippocampus for all he cared, but he wanted her to haunt his nightmares until the end of his days --
The sickening sensation of shifting worldlines twisted his stomach, like he had been abruptly turned upside down, like he had been aggressively shaken to wakefulness.
And he was left with a memory of a dream of a promise he was told to forget.
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He disappeared right before their eyes, and the dark liquid spilling from the bottle of Dr Pepper might as well have been his blood.
She pressed a hand against her temple, and fought against the fog in her mind that had forgotten him as soon as he faded from existence, taking with him their memories. She would not lose, not to herself, and definitely not to the illogical laws of the universe that rejected the existence of the man who had fought alone against the vagaries of fate.
"O --" Yes, that was it, that was the first syllable, a familiar nerve pulse, a familiar configuration of her mouth, a sound that she had repeated countless times, across an infinite number of timelines.
"Oka -- be..."
She gasped, forcing the syllables out of her, even as they choked her as they made their way up her windpipe. The sounds of his name clawed at her throat, reluctant to escape, and she shut her eyes as they burned in their sockets.
"Rin...ta -- rou --"
Why had she forgotten?
Someone she could not forget, should never have forgotten.
"Yes," she remembered, and her heart lurched from the memories, her head reeling from the images and sensations and raw emotion that flooded into her consciousness, and she thought that the sudden shock of knowledge rivaled even the epiphany that was the sweet reward after grueling hours in the lab of experimentation and data collection.
She remembered it all, like a childhood memory sparked by object association, and when she spoke again, her voice cracked, and this time it was not from the reluctance of the sounds she forced through her throat.
"Okabe Rintarou."
She sank to her knees, holding her face in her hands, and let her palms muffle her sobs.