Work Text:
The charming thing about code was how predictable it was. How with enough training, anyone could read a program and reasonably predict the outcome. How close it could come to making a new reality. Complicated strings of boolean and decimals leading to a true or false, yes or no.
It becomes less charming when it crosses reality and fiction.
The sea is remarkably blue, for a detail of Rei’s life that at most took up only the smallest fraction of her memories. She didn’t make it a habit to visit beaches often in her life before, when there wasn’t anyone to go with her, back when she claimed she didn’t need anyone.
The only time she had truly had a good, observable look at the ocean was when—
Well, that is better left buried.
Yet this world captures everything right, down to the smallest details; how the unforgiving sun scorches the only uncovered portion of her skin, right below her bobbed hair. How inappropriately dressed she is for the ocean, how the foamed waves tend to crest around her similarly inappropriately dressed partner’s legs. How, much like the sun, Teruya’s smile is unbearably bright and warm.
“Y’know, my father would complain whenever I did this. Said somethin’ about how nothin’ corrodes quite like salt water. Said I was wastin’ a perfectly good pair of pants—not that pa was wrong, but it’s more fun this way, isn’t it?” He laughs, and briefly the world shakes— (No, that’s just her vision, blurring in and out, she didn’t realize that salt water burned quite this much, a mistaken hypothesis on her part—) “But I’m sorry Rei, I’m gettin’ off topic, where were we? Oh right, you said this was your first time on a leisure visit to the beach, yeah? I was real surprised when ya asked me here of all places—not that I’m complain’ of course!”
Technicalities aside, yes. She wonders when this world is going to collapse, straining under the weight of reality, under the weight of a ghost. If she’s not going crazy, then the weight in her coat pocket—she never—
She had considered it, but she’d never even bought the ring before. Yet it’s here, heavy like the weight of fourteen lives on her shoulders. This is a beautiful dream, it’s wonderful, it’s tearing her apart.
She’s not even in the water yet, but her face is wet, the dampness clinging to her features. She has to turn away. At this, her lover’s expression changes, and he bridges the divide between them, stopping just short of where the waves end and Rei begins. Just enough so that only one of them remains dry. Just enough so that his ankles remain submerged.
He smiles. Her reason tells her it’s just a few lines of code, but it still means the world to her. “I know you know,” he whispers, and the world groans, collapsing under the weight of a swelling dream. “But you can ask me ya know, I’ll give you an answer.”
It’s funny. It’s wonderful. He’s in front of her, alive and a dream come true. But she has to throw it away.
“Teruya,” she’s corporal, he’s temporal. The ring stays in her pocket. A buried dream. But her request— it’s still nothing but a verbalized long gone dream. She says it anyway. “Stay with me, forever.”
I love you.
But I have to go.
“Always, Rei.” His eyes are damp too, dizzyingly bright and beautiful. That’s not code, that’s her memory. “I’m always with you.”
So she reaches out to him, one last time, throwing her arms out— he catches her, and lifts her heart up one more time.
Then, with all the strength left in her heart, she rejects the world, and the edges blur.
He still smiles at her.
(It might seem like a happy fantasy…but it was nothing more than a disgusting sight to me.)