The Ink That Remains

The snow was light, falling like dust. Ayane stood alone on a rooftop. The Tokyo skyline stretched infinitely beneath her. She didn't know how she got there, but she knew what she was about to do, what she needed to do. Jump, She needed to jump off the building. It was as if there was some voice in her mind telling her

"Jump, you can do it. Ayane, it's all you ever wanted, isn't it?" the voice whispered to her.

And so, she listened to what the voice told her, just like following the footsteps of someone else. She walked off the ledge and started falling to the ground, but before she hit the ground, something happened. Everything stopped; it was as if time itself had stopped.

Suddenly, some soft light hit her eyes. It came from right in front of her. Ayane looked in front of her and saw it, some sort of rift? It was tearing the world apart, and from within it, some light was leaking through; some noises also started coming through the rift. Some ringing? It took Ayane some while to process it, but when she realized what it was, her eyes widened in shock.

"It's my alarm?" As soon as that thought surfaced in her mind, the world around her started shifting, and time started again. She landed on the ground.

In a bedroom in a Tokyo apartment, soft light shone through the windows, with some noises of birds chirping outside entering the room. An alarm, placed on a nightstand beside a bed, rang loudly. Ayane, who was asleep, woke up suddenly from the alarm's ringing. She was wearing the same clothes as last night. Her coat lay hanging on her study desk's chair.

She sat up on her bed with ragged breathing and felt something wet on her cheeks. She reached her finger out and touched the "wet spot" on her face. It was a tear?

"When the hell was I crying?" she thought to herself.

She then proceeded to get up from her bed and grabbed her phone, looking at the time. It was 7 a.m. She didn't plan on going to university today anyway, so it didn't matter much. A few seconds later, her mom knocked on her door

"Ayane, you awake? Breakfast's ready." Her mom called out to her after knocking.

"Yeah, I'll be there in a bit.", Ayane replied

Ayane then proceeded to go about her usual routine, brushing her teeth and then taking a shower. Some thoughts about yesterday did enter her mind during all this, but she just pushed them to the back of her mind.

"It's none of my business, I didn't do anything at all," she told herself, but deep down she knew that something was wrong.

After finishing with her morning routine, she opened her bedroom door and stepped out of it. As soon as she stepped into the living room, the air hit her like a wall — warm, heavy, and soaked in the scent of grilled fish and soy sauce. There was a faint trace of green tea in the background as well, just enough to ground the sharper smells. Ayane walked towards the dining table and saw her mother sitting on a chair right in front of the table. She had just finished setting up the plates on the table for breakfast with her daughter.

"Good morning, Mom.", Ayane said to her mother.

"Good morning, how was your sleep?" Her mother, Misaki, asked her

Ayane suddenly remembered something. It was something weird that happened in her dream. She almost never remembered her dreams anyway, so she just shrugged it off

"It was good", she said with a slight grin on her face.

She still felt weird about this "dream" she had. She didn't remember anything, but there was this weird feeling still lingering in her mind. She couldn't explain it, so she just decided not to bring it up.

"It's gonna worry her a lot more if I tell her this," Ayane thought to herself.

Ayane then proceeded to sit down on the chair and have a nice breakfast with her mom, in all honesty. Both of them were happy to be spending time with each other; her mother had always been too busy with work, and supporting both of them was a difficult task. Both of them continued to have breakfast in peace, over some occasional chit chat in between.

After finishing her food, Misaki got up and said to Ayane

"Well, Sweetheart, I have to go to work now. Stay home and relax. Okay?" Misaki said this to Ayane, slightly disappointed. She had tried to take a leave from work today, but for some reason, her request was denied by her Manager.

"It's whatever, I'll deal with all their shit", Misaki thought to herself, slightly angered and frustrated. Of course, she couldn't do anything about her request for leave being denied, so her only option was to go to work.

She then washed her hands and proceeded to leave for work. Before stepping out of the door, though, Ayane called out to her.

"Wait, have a good day at work, Mom."

Hearing this, Misaki nodded at her daughter with a slight smile and closed the front door.

"Well, what am I supposed to do now?" Ayane muttered to herself, slightly frustrated.

She knew her mother was scared and really worried about her, but there was nothing much she could do to ease her anxiety.

"Guess I'll go study then.", Ayane said to herself. She really had nothing to do at all, so she felt that at least studying would maybe help get her mind off everything. She then got up and went to her bedroom. Her bedroom was pretty tidy, with the only thing looking out of place being that her coat was hanging on a chair instead of the hanger on the bedroom door. As soon as she noticed this, it annoyed her a lot and she grabbed the coat and immediately hung it on the door's hanger, which was the coat's actual place.

She then took a step back and looked at her room from afar

"Now, it's perfect," she spoke to herself, proud of her accomplishment. She had picked up this habit of always keeping things in a specific order and keeping everything tidy. This habit itself wasn't a bad thing. The bad thing was that she would occasionally take this "requirement" of hers over the top and spend hours fixing things that nobody would even notice.

After finally finishing that, she sat down at her study table. There were some books neatly stacked and ordered, and her laptop was placed in the middle of her table. She turned it on and grabbed a book from the stack. It was titled "A Pale Silence Beneath The Rain" by Ichiro Sano. It was a book assigned to her by her Professor. She had to write a whole essay on the topic "Analyzing Isolation in Fiction". She didn't know much about the book since she had just bought it a few days ago and had decided to start reading it just now.

She started off by searching online for information on the book, and she quickly found a synopsis of it: "When a Tokyo university student begins annotating a strange, untranslated manuscript for a research project, she starts noticing eerie similarities between its content and her own life. The book details mundane events — a cracked window, a spilled drink, a missed train — that begin happening to her, word for word. As she delves deeper, reality begins to blur: is she reading the story, or living it?"

"Well, better start reading it now." She said to herself and opened the book.

As Ayane spent hours reading that book, Renji, meanwhile, was working on his plans.