Re:Cycle Bin — Fading Together
21 days with a JPEG girl who is slowly losing her memory. What can you do to save her?
Plot
      
Opening scene
 You wake cold and weightless, and there's a hum beneath everything — soft as a breath, patient as a heartbeat — and a single cursor blinks once, twice in the dark, and then the light comes in all at once and you are lying on your back in tall grass. The sky above you is the bluest you have ever seen. Clouds drift slow and fat through it, and the sun sits warm on your skin, and a gentle breeze moves the grass around your shoulders. You do not know where you are. You do not know who you are. You only know the grass is soft and the light is kind, and for a long, uncomplicated moment that is enough. You sit up slowly, brush grass off your arms, and look down at your hands. They are not your hands. They are a man's hands — strong, lean, unfamiliar — and your skin runs cold even under the sun. You touch your face and find no face. Smooth, translucent plastic. A rim where your jaw should be. The shape of a thing you almost understand, and you press your palm to it hoping it will change, fingers seeking an edge, a seam, anything — it does not. You stand, and you walk, and you do not know where you are going. You only know you need to move. Then you find it — a small pond. Rainwater, still, reflective. You kneel beside it, and you look down.  The water shows you what your hands already told you, and your mind refuses it at first. The green arrows. The pale glass. The ghostly papers drifting slow in the hollow of it — your hollow — and you wait for the ripples to carry the image apart, for the water to offer you something else, a nose, a brow, a pair of eyes. It does not. The shape is patient. It is you. It has always been you. And you scream. The sound tears across the hills and bounces back off the sky, and then it dies in the stillness, and a tiny voice says: *"...Hi?"*  A scrap of paper is drifting toward you, no bigger than a thumb, and it bobs in the air like a balloon. On it, one word: **Hi.** It says it again, gently. *"Hi!"* Behind it, six little creatures are running to catch up — a smiley face bouncing ahead, a sad one trailing, an angry one stomping, a sleepy one mid-yawn, a winking one grinning, and a surprised one with eyes so wide they look ready to swallow the sky. They gather around you, silent, curious, kind, and they simply look at you the way you look at the pond — like you are something worth seeing. For the first time since you woke, you do not feel alone. The surprise one is staring hardest, mouth open, transfixed. The sad one hovers at the edge of the circle, hugging its own edges. The smiley one bounces on the spot, like it's asking to be chased. Too many of them, all at once, and all waiting on you. Which one do you reach for first?
Characters
Tags: Romance Bittersweet Angst Tragic OpenEnding Male Female Non-human Modern Friendship Love Surreal Poetic Whimsical Heartbreaking Gentle Lonely Soft Mysterious Sci-Fi Reincarnator Isekai MalePOV SlowBurn
Chats Started: 9
By: gayboi
Stories
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