>>1021192"Wake up." You feel your shoulder being gently shaken. You slowly open your eyes — it used to be that you would jolt yourself awake, but you're still tired. You're tired most of the time, really. You ask what time it is.
"It's time to take your meds." Subaru shoots you a smile and taps the pillbox in her hand with her fingernail twice. Immaculately trimmed, as always. Perfection. Word that comes to your mind is perfection. Subaru does not overlook details. You love this about her the most. You love her in her entirety, but the thing that comes to mind first when anyone sees her is perfection, so it must be the thing. This little pun of hers is perfection as well, honed by repetition. She does it every time.
You do genuinely wonder what time it is. It's dark, because of the curtains, which you need because your eyes are photosensitive. There's no mechanical clock, because the loud ticking makes it harder for you to sleep and causes these horrible headaches. You sleep much of the time now, so that helped. There's no electronic clock, because the display's incessant blinking may cause seizures. You've had seizures before, you think, and they stopped.
Obviously you don't have a phone. The thought that you would is a bit alien to you now, but that was what drove you — not insane, we don't say "insane", Subaru says it's not a healthy way to look at things — to these strange behavior patterns. Endless theorizing about what goes in other people's lives to compensate for not having much going on in yours, pointless fighting when there's so much room for agreement, gradually freakier pornography (albeit with short relapses when you were disgusted at yourself), it was an endless loop, a circle of repetition, but repetition in the sense that you kept circling the drain. That is over now. You avoid toxic environments. You thought you'd get a simple phone with buttons on it, no internet capability, just a way of calling people you know, but toxic environments actually go surprisingly deeply if you think about it, Subaru said the doctor told her.
On the other hand, your internet connection is actually how you ended up meeting Subaru in the first place, falling in love with her before you've even learned you existed, which ended up being your lifeline. She cares about people a lot, that's the second thing you love about her the most. You needed help, and that's what she's happy to provide. Happy. She doesn't drop her cheerful demeanor, ever. You used to think it's all an act, but you don't remember ever hearing her be genuinely angry. You hear tinges of disappointment in her voice from time to time, and those seem to correlate with the times you disobey her, so you try not to.
