Keep it

You need to make a decision quickly. You can feel a maelstrom of fear, doubt, uncertainty and other such dark emotions building and feeding on itself endlessly. Resolution must be found, even if only for as long as it takes to find some means of control. You desperately try and find something to say, some angle, some rational point that would quell the fear. It doesn't come. Your frantic searching only seems to worsen things, until finally, just as you are drowning, a new feeling is felt. Somewhere, someone, either Smith or Dahl, it's hard to tell which, tried using their feelings to think, rather than the other way around. It works. You can feel the chain, a solid object, a clear recurring pattern, a predictable ****, linking you and Dahl. It's secure, it's strong, it will withstand all that is thrown at it so long as both holding it remain mindful of its touch. It's the anchor.

You're back in the classroom again, staring at the wall where a person shaped discolouration is slowly fading from your retina. Carolina Dahl has already started moving toward the door, pausing only until you turn your head her way. She nods to you and leaves.

It's decided, then. The bond is to be maintained. As your other half leaves and gets further and further away you can still feel her, you're still aware of her, but your own person is centre stage once again. Unlike that strange sensation a few seconds ago. You wonder what might have happened if one of you hadn't managed to keep their head screwed on, if you'd both succumbed to fear. You remember existing, but being less and less yourself, losing your memories, your wants, aspirations. Everything but the fear of loss was a big amorphous blob. Perhaps you would both have died then and there, souls drained.

It doesn't make sense, what happened. Anyone sane waking up to being made love to would surely not almost immediately reciprocate, right? And to a basically complete stranger? Now, of course, in the real world, or in the world as it was before you were able to do what you did, people didn't suddenly experience a break, with no discernable time spent ****, straight to being made love to by a complete stranger, period. To then partake willingly, had to signify influence of ****, or something resulting in compromised mental faculties. And people don't then try to arrange for it to happen again in future. And people in relationships don't literally develop low-level telepathic bonds with their partners. If they did, then all the love oriented high art and literature would be pointless. There would be no real mystery.

Lost in thought, you almost lose track of time. It's roughly 4 pm. You pick up your things, sling your bag over your shoulder, and promptly walk out before any other groups of students arrive for God-knows-what late afternoon classes they might possibly have in this particular room. Alone you quit the Uni building and cross the campus. It's a little empty. There's people about, you've yet to walk across campus and not see anybody hanging around at all, but the crowd has faded away. Pity for them, the sun is still high in the sky, it's warm for the time of year. The fir tree right slap bang in the middle of the grounds looks a little sad without its crowd of obnoxious hipsters lounging around (and up in) it.

You get home to your little cave in the student residence and go through your end-of-the-day routine, hot drink and biscuits, reading some stuff tangentially linked to your studies (in place of the materials actually given to you to read), more biscuits, some streaming TV shows binging, and then finally dinner, which tonight consists of pasta, fried chorizo and some canned tomato sauce with a dollop of curry paste. It makes the food feel like actual food, and just a little less like dirt-poor student sustenance.

It's at this point you take a little time to think about the day. You can't listen to music while cooking, because you don't wish to disturb your neighbours by having the radio on loud, and wearing headphones with a phone in your pocket just creates opportunities for your cooker to melt the dangling cord. So by the tme you sit down and might be inclined to begin numbing your mind again, you've already gotten used to being alone with your thoughts, and so just carry on. You ponder your next move. You need to have one. Carolina surely has one, and it may contradict your interests. What are your interests?, you wonder. What do you want of all this? Actually, what do you know? You know, or you have a half-founded certainty, an intuition, that the bond poses a threat to you. You felt it eating you at the end of class, when the emotions, the dread, the fear of separation was bouncing back and forth between you and your other half. You were drowning, disappearing into the void. Initially, in the moments thereafter you'd wondered if this would simply have killed you both. For a time, you don't know how long, your awareness was really gone, at least it looks that way thinking back on it. By the time you came back online, a decision had been made, resolution was found. It is yet impossible to tell who made that call, you, or Carolina. What if Carolina is none the wiser, and felt a similar break, similar lapse of consciousness? What then? What if the bond created a third entity, with its own agenda, and that it imposed its will upon the two of you? Perhaps what you felt as drowning was It taking hold of your mind and draining it?

It hadn't been like that in the instants after the bond was created. You had your own thoughts, your own feelings, and you could feel the shape of Carolina's emotions, and feel them mingling with yours, in an exchange. You didn't have to then help her off the table, and act like you were both in on it. You didn't have to then allow her to help you cover up as if she was prepared all along. When class was dismissed and you two were left alone, it felt as if you'd been absorbed regardless. You didn't have a choice. The storm was coming, you were sucked in, and you had no control. And that would certainly be against you, contrary to your interests, definitely a threat. The bond creates a third being wanting to overwrite your identity with its own. Not today. It must be broken, or reined in somehow.

How?