Chishiya x Reader Oneshots

Safe and Sound

[Req.: "If you are willing to, could you write some chishiya x reader for me? Where the reader has problems to sleep bc of panic attacks and anxiety caused by the games and all the deaths she had to witness, but chishiya tries to help by sleeping next to her and the moment she's in his arms she falls fast asleep, bc she feels totally safe with him...

just thought it would be cute :3"]

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You learned many things inside the Borderlands. Dark things, mostly; things you never even wanted to know about in the first place. One of those things is that death as such is not to be feared... but the way of dying. Once you're dead, everything is over. However, the games have taught you that dying itself can be long and painful, and the images you'll never be able to forget are so much worse than the thought of what comes after death.

The blood. Limbs, separated from its body, cries and pleads, voices so full of terror. It is even worse when someone dies that you've known, no matter for how long. And so many have died since you woke up in this damned world. So many lives lost...

While you're still there.

It's not fair. No one deserved to die, and it is not right at all that they are gone and you're still playing those games, night after night. Waiting for your own life to end in a horribly painful way.

How could you not have nightmares because of that? When every bright red laser shooting from the sky indicates that another person is killed, when all those cars returning to the Beach almost empty even though they have been full a few hours before prove that the deaths never stop... Whenever you watch someone leave for a game that you know, you already expect them to die. The past has proven that it is unlikely for people to return, and those who do consider themselves lucky. And in the nights, as soon as you can be sure who won't ever set a foot into the Beach again, you can't help but wonder how it happened.

You imagine the worst scenarios, your friends burning alive, slow and agonizing torture, death by falling so deep that one can't even see the ground, awaiting the impact with growing fright and desperation.

Yes, desperate is a right term to describe what you're feeling. Desperate that there doesn't seem to be a way out of this other than death. Desperate that whoever is kind to you won't come back sooner or later. Desperate that you can do nothing to help them or keep them safe... since you barely can keep yourself safe at all.

Faces, covered in bloody wounds revealing flesh and bone, return to you night after night. You can't even remember the last time you managed to sleep through a whole night without a single nightmare, and it is almost normal that you wake up screaming and panting multiple times a night. It's only fair because you're the one who is still breathing. Your suffering is the payment you have to pay for surviving.

And yet it's so hard to endure. Crying doesn't help anymore, and there's no one who could take away your burden. You tried to talk to people, which helped a bit since most others feel the same, but the dread never fully leaves. Sleeping pills barely help either, and increasing the dose would most likely get you killed.

A thought you've had as well. By ending this misery yourself, you would at least have the power to decide how it would end. You could make it quick, painless... But no, you can't do that. You owe it to the dead that you'll continue to fight and find a way out of here as long as possible, so their sacrifice hasn't been entirely in vain.

It's such a high burden though! Being the one who survives and has to live on for the others...

Once more you scream into your pillow, shaken out of just another terrible dream with images that will haunt your mind for days. The tears streaming down your face have already soaked the entire pillow, and you feel like you can't breathe. There's so much pressure on your chest, but the feeling of suffocating isn't new to you.