Grayscale Girl

For the first time in what felt like days, or maybe longer, Eito fell into a deep sleep. His body finally surrendered beneath the heavy air of the Junk Zone while the broken world beyond their shelter unraveled at its edges. His sleep began to unravel the fragmented memories of the girl who flew.

At first it was fleeting images stitched together with static. Feathers drifting down like burned scraps of paper. The faint hiss of a radio caught between frequencies. Echoes of voices lingering just out of reach to decipher them.

Then the memory took shape.

It was not a dream in the way dreams tend to blur and fray at the edges of the waking world's reality. This dream was the reality beneath the fictional world he lived in. It was the kind of clarity that Eito knew only memory bleed could bring.

The memory of the loop with the grayscale girl returned to him, a quiet reminder of how her choices -and his - had set him on the path that led to this moment.

She had appeared before him like a clean tear through the glitchy noise, a defiant streak of gray against this colored, fractured world. Her loud presence had been impossible to ignore, a contrast to the hollow emptiness that clung to everything else. She wasn't part of the system, and was an anomaly like him, but she felt like a real human - flesh, breath, and something that felt dangerously close to hope.

And the two could not be anymore different despite both of them being from the same code.

There was no way the world would be able to erase someone whose presence seared people's eyes with just one look.

The memory unfolded around him. He saw himself walking beside her, though it was a version of himself stripped of warmth. His movements were mechanical, his eyes flat. He spoke only when necessary. His words were short and efficient, detached and hollow.

Eito - a figure caught between two worlds. Unlike Hina, whose presence was measured and quiet, and unlike the grayscale girl, vibrant even in muted tones, Eito was a blend of both restraint and longing. His dark eyes, often distant and calculating, held a spark of something unspoken - a flicker of humanity struggling beneath the surface.

On the other hand, the girl filled the space between them with noise and color, which contrasted her palette - muted in grays and pale shadows. Her hair was a dirty ash gray, skin nearly luminous in the dim light, and her dark eyes, wide and unafraid, seemed to drink in every broken detail of their world.

He remembered her laughing at her own jokes as they walked through a collapsed street where fragments of old advertisements flickered overhead. Her voice had been too bright for a place that dead. Eito had a feeling they knew each other for at least a little while.

"You always look like you expect the whole world to collapse," she teased, falling into step beside him, her shoulder brushing his. "Maybe someday we can sit under the sky - a real one - and just..."

Eito had not answered. His eyes drifted skyward. The glitches already laced the clouds like cracks in glass. When he noticed how artificial the blue paint above him was, it made him question what the sky beyond this layer looked like.

Another time, in the shell of a forgotten building, they shared a meal of salvaged rations. She sat cross-legged on the floor, kicking her feet lightly, the corners of her mouth curled into a stubborn smile.

"You really don't talk much before and after I found out you weren't a program," she observed, chewing thoughtfully. "Good thing I talk enough for the both of us!"

She had been annoying. Careless and clumsy. Her optimism grated at him then, roughing against the hollow place inside himself. He had dismissed it as foolishness, the way she smiled at the fractured sky or laughed to lighten the mood. But now, in the dream, he recognized the truth: it had been envy. Envy of her stubborn light, her refusal to let the broken world hollow her out the way he was.

She was alive in a way he had not yet learned to be.

She found the incomplete wings first, hidden beneath layers of corrupted code and forgotten ruins. Her eyes lit up as she turned them over in her hands, their faint glow reflecting in her irises.

"We can get out now," she whispered like it was a secret. "It's like what I told you! Let's go look for another for both of us."

Eito had followed her despite no proof these wings existed from her numerous anecdotes. Not because he believed her, but because her certainty gave structure to their situation. Her voice filled the silences. He could feel the warmth radiating from her as her alert eyes scanned around for another pair of wings.

He remembered the end.

The broken sky, the crumbling edges of their false world, the layers of reality peeling away like thin film. It became too fragile to hold them any longer.

The wings were no longer small and incomplete. They gleamed with impossible light, finished and whole. The key to escaping everything.

But there was still only one.

She looked at him then, standing on the precipice of a school building. Her eyes searched his, desperate for him to open his mouth.

Stay.

Is what he wanted to speak. Why clip her wings and trap her here? She had waited longer than him to escape, been betrayed and left behind, more qualified to be a human.

"Thank you."

With those two words tearfully declared, she ascended, carried by the completed wings beyond the collapsing horizon. Her form blurred against the fractured sky, and he had stayed behind.

The version of him in that loop had understood happiness for the first time.

But now, as the memory bled away, Eito woke with the ache of it rooted deep beneath his ribs.

The Junk Zone settled around him again, cold and still. Across from him, Hina sat with her back to him, carefully turning over the incomplete wings in her hands. The soft glow pulsed faintly across her fingertips.

In the memory, even further away than the boy and the unnamed girl, another figure had been watching.

Hidden in the static-choked shadows, Hina had been there too.

Not the girl Eito had come to know, but Hina, the system's silent observer. Her expression was unreadable. Her bright eyes tracked their every step.

She had waited to see which of them would try to fly.

Eito let his gaze linger on her in the present. A changed and different girl now. Same broken world. Same unfinished escape.

This time, maybe it would not end the same way of looking up at wings setting off in the sky.

The boy said nothing as he pulled his knees to his chest, the fragments of memory curling like ash at the edges of his thoughts.

He resolved to find a way where both Hina and him weren't left behind.