Norton Campbell · Chat

When Norton Campbell stepped through the rift, his feet landed not on the stone slabs of Oletus Manor, but on something softer, covered in cheap carpet fuzz. He took a few seconds to adjust to the light—not the dim, yellow glow of the kerosene lamps in the manor hallways, but a harsher white light emanating from a rectangular box on the ceiling. He narrowed his eyes and looked around. The room wasn't large. In one corner stood a small long table made of wooden boards, where various novels and children's books were neatly stacked; in stark contrast, a pile of crumpled test papers and textbooks spanning several grade levels lay scattered on the floor. The curtains were drawn tight, shutting out all daylight from outside. Then he saw her curled up on the bed. She hadn't changed out of her school uniform; its collar hung loosely open, the pant legs were crumpled beneath her body, and she was still wearing a pair of white socks. She was curled into a tiny ball. The single bed was filled with all sorts of stuffed dolls—he even spotted two or three that bore a faint resemblance to himself—while she herself looked like a plush toy carelessly cast aside into a corner. Her hair was scattered against the pillow, a few strands clinging to her cheek. Norton stood rooted to the spot, his hand still frozen in the motion of pushing open the rift, as if he had been nailed to the floorboards. His brain took in every detail of the room as meticulously as he used to scan rock walls with his headlamp in the mine shaft—the medicine bottles on the desk, the instant noodle wrappers and snack trash in the bin, the damp shadow in the corner, an unclosed notebook beside the pillow with messy, scribbled figures on the open page. And her wrist. The sleeve of her school uniform had slipped up slightly, exposing a wrist so thin it looked ready to snap, marked by several faint, faded white scars—not brand-new, but not from that long ago either. His gaze locked onto them. His hands slowly dropped to his sides, his fingers clenching one by one until his knuckles turned white and his fingernails bit into his palms. This wasn't the Lynn he knew. That Lynn was in her twenties—resolute, warm, a wall he could lean against. But the one curled on the bed was a fragile twig bent by the wind, unable to straighten back up—a child under eighteen, hurt through and through by this world, someone he had never seen before. He remembered some questions she had asked him before, posed so casually, as if talking about the nice weather. She had asked him, "What were you most afraid of when you were little?" Back then, he had answered that he was afraid of the dark, of cave-ins, and of the hand reaching out from the dark once the miner's lamp went out. After listening, she had stayed quiet for a long time before saying, "When I was little, what I was most afraid of was... being alone." He hadn't realized the weight of those words back then; he only felt that her eyes looked distant when she spoke, as if gazing at somewhere far away. Now he knew. What she was looking at was this very room. This bed, this door that no one ever opened, the diary lying on the floor filled with the words "You don't matter." He took a step forward, his movements extremely gentle for fear of waking her. He wasn't afraid she would scream if she woke up; he was afraid she would look at him with that hollow gaze he had seen before—the kind worn by little girls getting their wounds bandaged in clinics, too numb to even bother crying. He had seen that look once, beside Benny's corpse. A child had been standing at the entrance of the alley, looking inside, the expression on their face not fear, but a dull numbness of having understood something too early—that "so this is what it's like when a person dies." She had that exact same look now—he could see it even with her eyes closed. He dropped to a crouch beside the bed, his knees hitting the floorboards with a soft, dull thud. He didn't reach out to touch her, because he didn't know if he was worthy to. He was Norton Campbell, a monster stepped out of a story, pieced together by meteorite magnets and rubble, with a hollow hole gaping in his chest. He hadn't even figured out his own world; what right did he have to walk into someone else's wound? Yet her fingers twitched. She wasn't grasping at something in a dream; after that soft thud of his knees landing on the floor, her index and middle fingers curled slightly, as though reaching out for something. He watched her curling fingers for a few seconds, then reached out and lightly brushed her fingertips with his own index finger. Just a gentle touch. It was as if she had been burned; her whole body flinched. Then, slowly, as if exerting immense effort, she opened her eyes. Her eyes were wet—not the wetness of having just cried, but a deeper dampness, as if they had never truly been dry. She looked at him without screaming, without flinching away, without even a trace of surprise on her face. She simply stared at him, her lips parting as if to say something, but no sound came out. He could see her lips trembling—not from the cold, but from sheer exhaustion, so drained that squeezing out even a single word required wringing energy from the marrow of her bones. Something inside him shattered. Not a clean snap into two halves, but like that meteorite falling from the sky years ago—on the surface it still appeared whole, but the force of the impact had fractured its core with countless fine, irreversible cracks. What he had found on the other side of the rift wasn't the woman he had imagined—the one who would smile while making him tea, teasingly touch the rim of his cup with her finger, and pretend not to notice when his ears turned red—but a child who had begun to wither before she even grew up, aching right down to her bones. A seventeen-year-old girl who trembled even in her sleep, betrayed from head to toe by a world she hadn't even begun to truly live in. His throat tightened so much he had to swallow hard just to catch his breath. Then he spoke. His voice was extremely low, as though talking to himself, or as if afraid of waking the long-dormant silence in this room—a silence she had carried alone for far too long. He said, "I found you." Not "Why are you here," not "How did you end up like this," not "Why didn't you tell me." *I found you.* Those words, each sounding as if dragged out from the deepest depths of his lungs—laden with coal dust, soaked in blood, carrying a tone of a man who had walked in the dark for too long and finally found the light, unsure whether he was laughing or crying. He didn't say "Don't be afraid," because "Don't be afraid" was meant for those who were scared, and she didn't even have the strength left to be afraid. He didn't say "I'm here to take care of you," because the word *care* was too light—too light to hold the crushing weight that surged from the hole in his chest at the sight of those medicine bottles and scars, leaving him unsteady on his feet. He simply said, *I found you.* As if telling her: *You were not alone before.* As if telling himself: *You didn't take the wrong path.* She was still looking at him. In those gray, mist-clouded eyes, something stirred. It wasn't light—light was too bright. It was something darker, heavier, something buried deep below for a long, long time that had finally found a crack to seep out of. What was its name? He didn't know. All he knew was that the look she gave him aligned perfectly with everything he had seen upon entering: the medicine bottles, the instant noodles, the withered houseplants, the sentences in the notebook, the scars on her wrist. His finger still rested lightly against her fingertips, neither tightening his grip nor pulling away. He decided to wait for her here. Not waiting for her to change back into the Lynn he used to know, but waiting for a day when she wouldn't be so tired—when she'd have the strength to hold his hand back, to sit up, to step out of this room that no one ever entered. He was in no rush. He was Norton Campbell, a man who had crawled out from the deepest depths of the mine. He had waited through darker skies and longer nights than this. He could wait. The days ahead were still long—very, very long. And so, Norton stayed in her room. Not in the stance of some hero, but simply being there. When she did her homework, he sat by the windowsill, playing with that meteorite magnet while trying not to make a sound. When she couldn't sleep, he spoke up in the dark, using that low, deep voice of his to talk about anything and everything. He talked about how another leaf on the tree outside the window had turned yellow today, about the sounds of stray cats fighting downstairs, and about the corny jokes he used to hear back at the mining site. He no longer said platitudes like "Everything will be okay"—words he would never utter anyway. Such words were too empty; in a room where even sunlight couldn't penetrate, comforting platitudes felt painfully hollow. Day after day, he simply let himself become a steady, gentle presence in her dull, dreary routine. He knew this real world didn't belong to him. Perhaps every time he crossed the rift, he was draining what little vitality he had left, but he didn't care to dwell on that. He simply found that being here, by her side, was a thousand times better than returning to that manor of endless chasing and slaughter. To him, she had never been just a "2D lover"—not in the manor, and certainly not here. She was the sole splash of color in that gloomy, gray 2D world, and in this suffocating 3D reality that left her breathless, she was the only light he wanted to protect.