Forgotten Child 1

"You saved me, Yuki! Thank you!" a young Saki said to a young Yuki in the middle of a park playground. There were three slightly older boys, a year older, laying in the grass bruised and slightly bloodied from an altercation with Yuki. Saki had tears in her eyes and covered in dirt from behind thrown around by the boys.

Yuki was grinning partly with pride and partly embarrassed by the praise. He patted Saki trying to comfort her and keep her from crying. "I promise…"

The fog around Saki's head began to clear making her start to sense her surroundings. She attempted to budge from wherever she was laying, but everything felt stiff to her. All of her body was barely responding to her, unwilling to move to her requests. Saki was forced to stay on the hard cold floor that she slowly began to feel with her senses warming up and returning to her. It left her with a deep solitude that she had not remembered for a long time. The old forgotten feelings were coming over her slow crawling uncertainty and concern for the unknown. She hated those emotions and had tried to leave them behind her in the past along with the little girl.

'I promise…' said the little boy Yuki, 'I promise that I will always protect you. So you don't have to cry anymore.'

'Yuki…'

Saki thought not certain why memories of her past were suddenly being recalled by her.

The room was beginning to become clear to Saki as her vision returned to focus. She was able to see where she was finally, no longer in a void of confusion. The cement floor that she was laying on stretched out for the entire room that was hardly even a room when she examined it. It looked like she was a warehouse or some large storage facility that there was only one room, but it was the entire structure.

Around her, there were iron bars that were meant as a prison or jail cell for her, but she was not the only one to be in the warehouse. As she searched the modestly empty space (there were only a few crates and machines laying around) she saw other cells like hers lined along the wall and in another row across from her. There seemed to be too many for her count clearly, but at least twenty or more. Most of the cells seemed to be empty, but there was a variety of people young, adult and old left to wait until their fate was decided.

"What is this place? Who are all these people?"

Saki took a chance to move again starting to get the feeling back into her legs enough that she had confidence in standing this time. Her legs were slow to move for her as though she had never used them before, but after a moment they remembered and quickly turned. As she began to stand up her head quickly lost balance feeling light. She fell back against the iron bars as she tried to recover herself causing an uneasy rattling through the bars that echoed through the room alerting the others to the new resident.

However, Saki was not about to give up and used the pain in her back to force herself back up. The bruises along her skin were pushed off and her feet slapped the ground firmly planting in defiance. A determined expression rolled across Saki's face as she cautiously walked, rather dragged, herself over to the edge of the cell that was connected to the next.

"Hello?" Saki called out to the person that was her neighbor. When she looked closely she recognized that they were wearing a girl's school uniform from Monou High School. Upon seeing this Saki pressed against the bars trying to see better.

"Hello? Can you hear me?"

There was a slight movement from the girl, but Saki kept trying to get her attention. Eventually, the girl turned over revealing to be bruised and battered as though she had been dragged behind a car through the dirt. "Who's there?"

"Excuse me… Huh… You go to Monou High School right?"

"Yeah?" The girl's hair covered most of her face preventing her from being recognized.

Saki gave a sigh of relief to know that there was someone that she might know that was in the same situation as her. She had not been able to find Hitomi in her search making this the first person that might be able to help her out. "That's good."

"No! No!" The girl had suddenly backed away pushing herself across the floor with her hands into the opposite corner of the cell away from Saki. "Please! No more! I'll do…anything…please…" The girl tried to bury her face in her legs making herself as small as possible. She could not look at Saki for more than a second before she had run away. Her entire body was shaking against the bars making the bolts rattle. "Please…no…"

"But I…" Saki stretched out her arm through the bars knowing that it could not reach but hoped that she could calm her down. When she saw that it was only making matters worse for her she drew back looking down pensive. 'She so scared of something… what happened to her? Was it that dark shadow I saw before?' Saki walked away letting the girl have peace from her. The room was staring back at her with many soulless eyes that did not seem to have a light of hope in them. They looked like they were just waiting to accept their end and were no longer living, but simply existing in their bodies. 'What's going on? Why am I here?' All the room felt like it was quietly screaming that slowly drained away from the chance of escape and built chains around each person.

A sound of something being unlocked far to the distance bounced through the warehouse alerting everyone breaking them into the muddled crackle of fear. Saki watched the people crawl into the corners of their cells away from the door as much as possible. The door far at the end of the warehouse opened complaining to be oiled. Out of the entrance, two shadowed figures appeared to block the light that was being cast.