Risk It All (Chishiya X You)

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Your head feels like a foreign weight on your shoulders as you come to, your neck still not entirely strong enough to hold your head up. It feels as though there's a blaring alarm ringing inside of your skull, making it almost impossible to register whatever is around you.

It's dark, there's water dripping, you try to make out a few more things only to realise it must be a room inside of the hospital if the furniture is anything to go by. From the pipes that run the length of the walls, you guess it's the basement.

There's shuffling in the distance, you pray it's Kuina but alas, your luck isn't that great.

Though you can't say you were ever expecting to see who stood before you, the face is familiar from the way it regularly haunts you in your dreams. Hana." The name slipped out of its own volition, your body too shocked and lethargic to react.

Gone was the sweet girl, in front of you stood a hunter eyeing its prey. "It took us far too long to reunite, don't you think?"

"What the fuck is this." You felt nothing but betrayal as you watched her walk around your heels clanging against the concrete floor, the sensation of her nails running over your shoulder had you struggling against the rope that bound you despite your exhaustion. "Don't touch me."

"Would you rather I touch her?" Hana walked towards the chair where Kuina was still slumped over, your eyesight clear enough to make out her face.  It looked as though she was dead, the only comfort you had came from the way her chest slowly rose and fell. "I can play with her instead if you'd like to rest."

"Leave her alone." You spat. "Tell me what this is you fucking psycho, I helped you in the borderlands, I wanted to save you."

"You wanted to but didn't, I suppose that's the kind of thing my company wanted to find out from this whole…" she trailed off, finger tapping her chin as she searched for the right word. "…experiment."

"Experiment?"

"Yes, experiment." She explained. "You see, you and everyone else volunteered to take part. All of you wanting to understand humanity a little more, why people do what they do and all that."

You wished your hands were untied. "I wouldn't have agreed to go into a place like that."

She mumbles a tune under her breath. "I suppose you didn't agree to everything, I do apologise for the wounds and all that though."

You ignored the bait she had carefully laid out, her face falling into a scowl once she realised she wasn't going to get a reaction from you. "What do you mean we agreed?"

She sat on the chair, pulling herself closer to the desk that resided in the corner of the dingy room. "You and everyone else who went into the borderlands all agreed to take part in an experiment to understand humanity but really we wanted to find out how trauma affected people.  Each of you had your own reasons, each of you experienced something that had you dying to understand why it had happened. It was your own pathetic desperation that led you to agree to be placed into something similar to a medical coma, once that happened we were able to use AI technology to project a scenario that wasn't real."

She seemed uninterested in the conversation as she began typing, but still, you couldn't help but push for answers. "So we were never in the borderlands?"

She scoffed back a laugh. "The borderlands don't exist, it was merely a dreamscape that you existed in. It's amazing what technology can do."

"Then what about everyone that died, that was real. How did you project an entire world into our memories?"

"The technology we have access to hasn't been announced to the public yet, it has its flaws but one day, with more testing and modification it can help heal people who suffer from mental, audio and visual impairments. You see, although we could project a false memory into your mind we couldn't project sensations like pain, the experiment needed to be as realistic as possible."