COTE: Glimpse of the Past

[Three Shots] The Rooftop Madness (Part 2)

This is the second part, enjoy...

-oOo-

I WAS FREEZING. Icy water dripped from my hair. They had dumped water over me four times now. My uniform was soaked right through, even my underwear was wet.

Gasps echoed in the room as they were unable to imagine how horrible it is.

"Hooh, so the perspective changed..." Kanzaki idly commented.

But what scared me the most wasn't the way my body violently trembling from the cold. What scared me was the ice in my heart.

I was facing down a deep darkness, so intense and bitter that it made me hate the entire world.

Why am I being bullied? Slowly, that question began to change, Why am I alive? What did I do wrong?

"K-Karuizawa-san..."

"Come on. That's enough, Karuizawa. Make things easier on yourself. There's no need to suffer any further," Ryuuen sneered.

That was a dead end, though. If I told him about Kiyotaka, it might reprieve me temporarily, but there was no guarantee that Ryuuen wouldn't try to blackmail me again. He might even command me to betray Class D.

I refuse to do that, even no matter how hard I loathed the fact that Kiyotaka knows about my past, my life has never been this exciting before he came.

"Hooh? Fufufufu..."

"Wait, don't tell me-"

The screen cut the question off.

"I know what you're thinking. If you give up X, you'll lose their protection. All hope will be lost,"

My teeth loudly chattered from the cold, making my terror audible to all. I struggled desperately to stop, but my mind had already abandoned me. Repulsive memories thrashed around in my brain. The past and present overlapped.

"Do you want to die holding onto hope? Are you okay with going back to the way things were?" Ryuuen's vicious words cut me. "X can't save you. I can, if you give me their name."

I was scared.

"If you won't cooperate, though, I have no choice but to destroy you."

Save me.

"I'm going to list everything there is to know about you, everything you pretend to be, and circulate it to the whole school."

I'm scared.

"When that happens, will you be able to keep your position in your class? Will you still be a leader?"

Save me.

"No. You'll just go back to being what you were before. You'll be back to the real you, that pathetic girl who was always bullied."

I remembered it.

I was stubborn, headstrong, and I made a long life enemies of the other girls even from elementary school.