Episode 1
Akira's POV;
So this is how it ends for me.
Not with a bang. Not with anyone watching. Just rain, and concrete, and the slow, stubborn leak of everything I had left.
I couldn't move. I had tried; once, maybe twice. Before my body made it very clear that it was done taking orders from me. My fingers twitched against the wet ground and that was the most I could manage. The rest of me just lay there, spread out like something discarded. Like something that had already been decided.
The rain didn't seem to care though. It came down hard and indifferent, the way rain always does, hammering the pavement around me in a dull, endless roar. It mixed with the blood pooling beneath my head and carried it away in thin red rivers that disappeared into the cracks of the road. I watched them go. I didn't know why. Maybe because it was the only thing still moving and some part of me needed to remember what that looked like.
I had landed head first.
I remembered that part with a clarity I didn't ask for. The rooftop edge. The hands on my back. The half second of nothing before the world flipped and the ground came up to meet me like it had been waiting its whole life for the chance. My ribs had taken the rest of the impact.
I could feel them now, or rather I could feel the space where feeling used to be before it curdled into something too deep and too wrong to be called pain anymore.
Three broken, maybe four. My forehead had split open on impact. The blood from it had dried at my temple and was now being washed fresh again by the rain.
Funny how precise the body is about recording its own destruction.
I stared up at the sky. It was angry today, coiled and dark, the clouds pressing low like they had somewhere to be and were furious about the delay. The rain came sideways in gusts, then straight down again, then sideways once more. No rhythm. Just rage.
Maybe it was angry for me.
It was a stupid thought. The kind you have when you're running out of better ones. But I held onto it anyway because it was the only company I had down here on the ground, and dying alone felt slightly less unbearable if I could pretend the weather had opinions about it.
I had been alone for a long time before this though. That part wasn't new.
My mind started moving the way minds do when the body gives up; untethered, drifting, pulling up things I hadn't thought about in years. My father's back, always his back, the last image I had of him as he walked out of our apartment with one bag and zero explanation. His family, my grandparents, aunts, cousins, closing ranks behind him like a door being bolted shut. Like my mother and I were a debt, they were relieved to stop paying.
I was nine.
My mother hadn't cried in front of me. I had always respected her for that even when I was too young to have the words for it. She had straightened her back, looked at me with those steady eyes of hers, and gotten to work. That was who she was. That was the only language she had ever spoken fluently, the language of getting on with it.
I had learned it from her.
By fourteen I was running errands for the elderly couple two floors down. By sixteen I had three consistent income sources and a color-coded schedule that my classmates thought was either impressive or disturbing depending on who you asked. I hadn't cared what they thought. I had cared about the electricity bill. I had cared about my mother's medication, the specific one the cheaper pharmacy two neighborhoods over didn't stock. I had cared about making sure she ate before she went to her shift and that there was something warm waiting when she came back.
I had cared about all of it with the kind of intensity that leaves marks.
And I had been good at it. That was the thing nobody ever said but everyone seemed to understand; Akira is reliable. Akira will handle it. Slide it to Akira and it will get done, no complaints, no delays. I had worn that reputation like a coat I'd forgotten wasn't mine. Assignment for a senior's lackey due next week? Sure, slide it over. Cover someone's shift on zero notice? Already clocking in. Tolerate being talked down to, overlooked, underpaid, because making a scene costs energy and energy was a currency I was always short on?
Without question. Every time.
I had told myself it was practical. Told myself I was playing a long game, keeping my head down until the circumstances changed. Told myself a lot of things in the dark of rooms I was too tired to properly clean.
The scholarship had felt like proof. Like the universe finally acknowledging the ledger.
Top of my cohort. Full ride to the most prestigious institution in the city. My mother had cried then, actually cried, in front of me, for the first time I could remember and I had stood in the kitchen holding the acceptance letter like it was something sacred because in that moment it was. It was the first thing in a long time that had felt like yes instead of not yet.
I had deferred it.
Twelve months later I was enrolled at the downtown college because the prestigious institution was a two hour commute each way and my mother had started having episodes. Small ones at first. Dizzy spells. Fatigue that sleep didn't fix. Then the diagnosis arrived and rearranged everything, quietly and completely, the way serious news tends to do.
Terminal.
I had sat with that word for three days before I let myself feel it. Then I transferred my enrollment, renegotiated my work schedule, and added a fourth income source. What else was I supposed to do.
I had not let myself be bitter about it. I had tried, genuinely tried, not to be the kind of person who kept score against a universe that clearly wasn't keeping score back. I had tried to be good. Patient. The kind of person my mother deserved to have in her corner.
And this morning, this specific, stupid, catastrophic morning, I had walked into a hallway on the fourth floor of the east building and found three of them laying into a kid half their size.
The kid's bag was torn. His glasses were on the floor in two pieces. He was doing that thing people do when they've stopped trying to fight back and are just trying to get small enough to disappear.
A normal person would have walked away.
I had never been accused of being normal.
I didn't even think about it, that was the honest answer, and it embarrassed me a little even now, bleeding out on the pavement. I had just stepped in. Opened my mouth and made myself loud and obvious until they turned around and forgot about the kid entirely. He ran. I watched him go and felt something that might have been satisfaction if it hadn't been immediately replaced by the very clear understanding that I was now alone on the fourth floor with three people who were significantly larger than me and freshly redirected.
I had taken the hits. I was not a fighter, never had been, nothing about my life had ever required me to be but I could take punishment, that skill I had refined over years of a different kind. I thought if I just endured it they would get bored. People like that usually did.
I had not anticipated the rooftop.
I had not anticipated the hands grabbing the back of my collar and my belt and the brief, weightless, absolutely silent moment before gravity introduced itself.
And now here I was.
The rain washed over my face and I stopped trying to track the clouds. My vision had started doing something strange at the edges, softening, like the world was losing confidence in its own outlines. I knew what that meant. I had read enough to know what that meant.
I thought about my mother.
I thought about her the way you think about something you can't fix, with a specific, hollow ache that sits behind the sternum and doesn't move. Who would handle the medication now. Who would make sure she ate. Who would sit with her in the waiting room on Thursdays when the appointment always ran late and the chairs were terrible and she pretended she wasn't scared.
The ache deepened until it was the only thing I could still feel clearly.
Was it absurd to want more? Was it greedy lying here at the bottom of everything, bleeding into the rain, to want a second chance at it? Not even for myself, not really. Just to go back and do it better. Be stronger. Be the kind of person who could actually protect something instead of just working themselves to the bone for it.
If I could have it again…
If something, anything, was listening…
I would not waste it. I would not be patient and quiet and endlessly accommodating. I would grow. I would become something that couldn't be thrown off rooftops or worked to the ground or told it wasn't enough. I would find every person who had decided I was disposable and I would make sure they understood, clearly and permanently, what a miscalculation that had been.
And my mother. I would protect my mother.
That above everything. That before everything.
The edges of my vision finished what they had started, the world dissolving into grey and then softer grey and then something that wasn't a color at all. The rain kept falling. I stopped feeling it.
I thought her name one more time like it was the only word that had ever mattered.
And then I closed my eyes, and I let go.