# Chapter 12: Between Realities
Yunar sat up abruptly, his body reacting before his mind could fully process where he was.
Tears were falling. Warm. Involuntary. Soaking his face without any control.
"What's happening?" His voice came out hoarse, confused, loaded with a panic he didn't understand. "Why... why am I crying?"
He looked around frantically, trying to recognise his surroundings. The room was familiar, but at the same time completely strange. As though it were an imperfect copy of a place he should know.
"Where am I?" He continued, hands trembling as he touched his own wet face. "Sara... are you there?"
At that moment, the door opened.
Mrs. Wan walked in — silver hair perfectly combed, apron tied at the waist, expression carrying that slight maternal irritation. She was holding a medication bottle and tossed it toward Yunar with the ease of someone who did this every day.
"My son, are you still in bed? Take your medication. You're going to be late for school."
Yunar caught the bottle in mid-air, instinctively, but his brain took a few seconds to process the words.
"Son?" He repeated, completely confused, looking at the woman as though seeing her for the first time. "What's happening?"
His mother sighed, crossing her arms.
"Hurry up. You'll miss your classes."
Yunar opened his mouth to protest, to ask more questions, but the words didn't come. Something inside him — perhaps instinct, perhaps resignation — made him simply nod.
"Right."
He opened the bottle with trembling fingers, took one of the white tablets, and put it in his mouth. He swallowed dry, feeling the pill go down his throat with difficulty.
He got out of bed slowly, still disoriented, and walked to the small mirror hanging on the wall. His reflection stared back at him — red eyes, swollen, face marked by tears that kept falling.
He ran his hands over his face, wiping the moisture with the back of his hands.
"Why am I overthinking this?" he murmured to himself, trying to convince himself. "All of that was just a dream."
But even as he said the words, something inside him screamed that it wasn't true.
---
## Back in the Original Reality
Eren was breathing in gasps, each breath costing a monumental effort.
Blood streamed from the corners of his mouth, from his nose, from his ears — red paths tracing maps of pain across his pale skin. His body trembled violently, kept upright only by sheer force of will.
Calmly, with a strange serenity for someone who was dying, he said:
"You always were better at making choices." His voice came out weak, but clear enough for Yunar to hear every word. "What are you going to do? You can't have both. You need to choose one reality."
He coughed, and more blood stained his lips.
"How will you live, knowing you're going to hurt the feelings of... yet... another... person?"
Eren's eyes closed slowly, his eyelids falling like heavy curtains. His breathing — that faint, wheezing sound — stopped completely.
Silence.
"No!" Yunar shouted, grabbing Eren's shoulders in desperation. "It doesn't have to be like this! You don't have to die!"
But the words were useless.
Eren's body began to disintegrate.
Not violently, but slowly and inevitably. The skin began to dissolve into tiny particles — a dust made of those same impossible colours as the fragments. Lilac, violet, brown, cosmic shades that shouldn't exist.
The particles floated in the air like dust lit by the light of late afternoon, dancing in invisible currents before simply... disappearing.
Yunar held tighter, but there was nothing to hold. Eren was becoming nothing, being deleted from existence atom by atom.
Within seconds, there was no body. There was no Eren.
Only emptiness.
Yunar remained kneeling there, his hands outstretched holding air, eyes wide with shock and horror.
Hours passed.
Or perhaps minutes. Time seemed to have lost its meaning.
Yunar stayed kneeling, completely still, as tears fell silently. He didn't even blink. He just stared at the empty space where Eren had been moments — or eternities — before.
Until the place itself began to come apart.
The edges of the reality started to blur, like wet ink running down a canvas. The colours bled into one another. The sky, the building, the rooftop — everything began to dissolve.
And then Yunar woke up.
---
## Back in the Alternate Reality
Yunar got out of bed slowly, each movement heavy as though he were submerged in thick water.
He was still in the same room. The same reality. The alternate reality where he had never met Sara the way he should have. Where his daughter didn't exist. Where Eren had imprisoned him.
The door opened. His mother came in, drying her hands on a dish cloth.
"Your psychiatrist is coming today. Get yourself ready."
Yunar just shook his head, without energy for words.
The phone on the nightstand buzzed. He picked it up mechanically, unlocked the screen.
*Alya: "I'm coming to see you. See you soon."*
Yunar read the message three times before simply placing the phone back on the bed, without replying.
---
## The Session
When the psychiatrist arrived — a middle-aged man with thin-framed glasses and a perpetually concerned expression — Yunar was already sitting on the living room sofa, motionless as a statue.
The psychiatrist sat in the armchair across from him, opened his notebook, picked up his pen.
"How are you feeling today, Yunar?"
Silence.
"Did you have any more dreams? Anything different?"
Silence.
"Yunar, I need you to respond. I can't help you if you won't talk to me."
But Yunar just stared at a fixed point on the wall, as though looking through it, through reality itself.
The psychiatrist asked more questions. Many questions. About the dreams, about the tears, about Alya, about how he was feeling. Each one met with only absolute silence.
Finally, after almost an hour of frustrated attempts, the psychiatrist sighed and closed his notebook.
"That's alright," he said softly. "We'll continue next time."
He stood, picked up his bag, and walked to the door. Yunar's mother accompanied him, exchanging a few words in a low voice that Yunar couldn't — or didn't want to — hear.
The door closed.
Silence again.
And then, moments later, the doorbell rang.
Yunar heard his mother open the door. Female voices — his mother and another voice, younger, familiar.
"Good afternoon. I came to see Yunar."
"Oh, Alya! Come in, dear. He's in the living room."
Footsteps approaching.
Yunar didn't move. He stayed sitting on the sofa, staring at nothing.
Alya came into the living room, her eyes immediately finding his. Instant concern settled across her face.
She approached slowly and sat beside him on the sofa. She leaned in and placed a soft kiss on his forehead — a gesture so familiar, so filled with genuine affection.
"Are you okay?"
"Of course," Yunar answered automatically, his voice flat, emotionless.
Alya didn't believe him. Obviously she didn't believe him. But she didn't push it. Instead, she opened her bag and took out a transparent plastic container.
"I made it myself," she said with a small, hopeful smile. "You haven't eaten anything yet, have you?"
Yunar just stared at her.
A single tear rolled down his face — slow, heavy, carrying the weight of two realities.
Alya opened the container, picked up the fork, and speared a piece of food. She raised it to Yunar's mouth carefully, as though feeding someone fragile, broken.
"Say 'ahh'," she said softly.
But before he could obey, before he could do anything at all, Yunar simply pulled her into a hug.
Tight. Desperate. As though she were the only solid thing in a universe that was crumbling.
Alya said nothing. Asked no questions. She just set the fork back in the container and put her arms around him, holding him firmly. Her hand moved to his hair, stroking gently, repeatedly, in a comforting rhythm.
Hours passed like that.
Yunar was no longer shedding silent tears. He was sobbing. Deep, violent sobs that shook his entire body, as though something inside him were breaking over and over again.
"You don't have to cry this much," Alya murmured against his hair, her own voice trembling slightly. "I'm here."
But the tears wouldn't stop. They couldn't stop.
---
## The Night
They stayed in the living room until the sunlight through the window began to fade, replaced by the gradual darkness of evening.
Yunar finally pulled away, wiping his face with trembling hands.
"I'll get a jacket to walk you home," he said, his voice rough from crying.
Alya shook her head gently.
"Hm-hm. If you're not feeling well..." She hesitated, biting her lower lip. "Then I... I'll stay with you tonight."
Yunar said nothing. He just nodded slightly.
---
## In the Room
They lay side by side on Yunar's bed — him still dressed, her having only taken off her shoes. The darkness of the room was broken only by the faint light of the moon coming through the half-open window.
Hours passed in absolute silence.
Neither of them was sleeping. Just lying there, existing in the same space.
Yunar turned slowly and held her again, pulling her closer, as though trying to fuse their existences into one.
Alya responded, her arms closing around him.
And then, slowly, she lifted her face. Her lips met his — soft, questioning, offering comfort in the only way she knew how.
The kiss was long. Slow. Carrying something that was not only physical need, but a deep necessity for connection, for confirmation that both of them still existed, were still real.
The night continued like that.
The two of them holding each other in the dark, breathing together, existing together, while the world turned silently around them.
---
## Dawn
Morning light began to filter through the window, painting everything in soft shades of gold and amber.
Alya was now sleeping deeply, her breathing slow and steady, her face relaxed and peaceful against the pillow.
But Yunar had not slept.
Not for a single second.
His eyes were fixed on the notebook on the nightstand — that notebook that always haunted him, that always contained messages he didn't remember writing.
Slowly, carefully, so as not to wake Alya, he reached out and picked it up.
He opened it.
The writing was still there. Unchanged. Immovable.
*"You cannot escape love."*
*"Find me."*
*"It's the only way."*
Yunar stared at those words, reading them over and over.
*It's the only way.*
The words began to echo in his mind, growing in volume, in urgency.
*It's the only way. It's the only way. It's the only way.*
Repeating faster and faster, a mantra that accelerated until it became a deafening roar inside his head.
And then, like lightning cutting through fog, a memory returned.
The mountain.
The white-haired man.
Lying on the ground, dying, blood streaming from his mouth, nose, ears — exactly as Eren had died.
The man gripping his arm with cold, weak fingers, pulling him closer, using his last strength to say:
*"This is the only way."*
*"You cannot escape lo—"*
The sentence never completed. Cut short by death.
Yunar's eyes went wide, the memory exploding in his mind with crystal clarity.
*You cannot escape love.*
That was it. That was what the man had been trying to say.
The fragments were not created to destroy.
They were created to reunite.
And there was a way to reverse everything.
---
*END OF CHAPTER 12*