A faint breeze combed across the stone rooftop, so light it barely moved the air—just enough to lift the ends of Rize’s hair and tug at the loose edge of a bandage. The roof itself was old, its tiles uneven from years of weather, seams packed with grit and pale moss. She stood near the center as if the spot had been chosen for her, feet planted, shoulders squared, gaze fixed on empty space.

  On Yu’s phone screen, she was framed in stillness.

  There had been no chime. No vibration. No bright, eager pop-up that begged to be tapped. The EWS app had simply opened on its own, slipping past the lock screen like it had always belonged there, like his permission was optional. The glow from the display painted his knuckles a sickly blue-white in the dimness of his room, and he realized he’d been holding his breath.

  Don’t rush it. If you startle her… if you say the wrong thing…

  The memory of their last connection sat in his chest like a bruise you couldn’t stop testing. He swallowed and forced air into his lungs slowly, carefully, until the dizziness in his head eased.

  For a second, he could’ve sworn she turned toward him before he made a sound—like his presence had weight, like his silence had a scent.

  His heartbeat kicked hard.

  “…You came back,” Rize said.

  Her voice didn’t come through a speaker the way streams usually did. It arrived with a strange immediacy, as if the air itself had been carved into a channel. On-screen, she dipped her head in a small nod that looked more like relief than greeting.

  Yu’s mouth opened, but no words came at first. The light from his phone trembled slightly in his damp palm.

  “About last time,” she continued, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how else to say it.” Her tone tight at the edges.

  The apology was short. That made it worse, somehow—because there was nowhere to hide behind length or explanation. Yu stared at the line of her shoulders, at the thick wrap around her arm and the bandage that disappeared under her tunic at her side, and felt his own shame stir awake.

  “…No,” he let out a breath that sounded too loud in his room. “I’m the one who should apologize,” voice rough.

  Rize didn’t move, but he felt her listening with the whole of her attention, like she was standing with her back to the wind to catch his words better.

  “I got mad on my own,” Yu said. “And I couldn’t even say what I really meant,” the confession scraped as it came out.

  Saying it aloud made him realize how tightly it had been lodged in him, like a hook caught in his throat. His shoulders loosened by a fraction. The air in the room felt less sharp.

  On the rooftop, Rize’s head tilted slightly, the way someone does when they’re trying to read what isn’t being said.

  “Then I guess,” then her eyes softened, and a small, reluctant smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “we both came up short.” she said.

  Yu huffed a quiet laugh—more disbelief than humor. The tightness he’d been carrying since that night eased, as if something in him finally accepted he wasn’t alone in the mistake.

  “Then…” He glanced aside. “Is it okay if we call it making up?” His embarrassed by how young the words felt in his mouth.

  Rize paused. The breeze lifted her hair again, and for a heartbeat she looked like someone weighing an invisible coin in her hand.

  “I already did,” then she shook her head slowly, “In my head, we made up a while ago,” she said.

  Warmth spread through Yu’s chest so suddenly it almost hurt.

  “…Then for me,” he pressed his thumb along the edge of the phone, grounding himself in the smooth glass. “I’ll do it now. Properly.” He said quietly.

  On both sides of the screen—separated by worlds, held together by something neither of them understood—they wore the same small smile, hesitant but real. The wind slid between stones and bandages, and the silence that followed felt comfortable, like a blanket that didn’t smother.

  ?

  They didn’t speak for a while.

  It wasn’t the kind of quiet that begged to be filled. It wasn’t awkward, or strained, or full of the unspoken panic of a conversation about to die. It was simply… quiet. A shared space. A pause where neither of them had to perform.

  Yu watched the sky behind Rize, pale and wide, the sort of sky that made you forget there was a ceiling anywhere in the world. He noticed tiny details he hadn’t the first time—how the rooftop stones were chipped at the corners, how one broken tile had been patched with a piece of darker rock, how the bandage on her arm had a faint brownish stain where old blood had dried.

  His phone stayed unnaturally steady. No “Live” marker. No chat window. No comment feed. The absence of UI made the scene feel less like content and more like trespass.

  Is this observation? Or is it… something else now? He heard it then: a soft inhale, audible even through the space between worlds.

  “…That time.” Rize spoke first, voice low, like she was talking to the wind more than to him.

  “It was the first time anyone ever really got mad at me.” She said.

  Yu’s grip tightened. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t even breathe too loudly.

  “Properly,” she added, as if the word mattered. “Directly.”

  She chose her words slowly, setting them down one by one as if each was fragile. Her gaze drifted upward, not to the clouds exactly, but to something behind them—memories that had the same color as overcast sky.

  “I’ve been looked at before,” she said. “Judged. Scolded. Told I was wrong.”

  A faint edge entered her tone, not anger, but familiarity. Like she’d learned the shape of those moments by repetition.

  “That happened plenty of times at the orphanage,” she continued, and the sentence came out flat, like a fact she’d recited too often for it to sting anymore.

  Yu felt his throat tighten. He remembered her voice from before—Number Twelve—how she’d said it like it was both nothing and everything.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “But that wasn’t the same,” Rize said, and her brow knit as if she was trying to understand her own reaction. “It wasn’t… cold.”

  “…It felt warm.” Her lips quirked, an almost-laugh that didn’t quite become sound.

  Yu blinked, startled.

  “Getting yelled at,” she said, and there it was again—thin amusement with something lonely underneath it, “and still… it felt warm. Weird, right?”

  Yu didn’t know how to answer that without breaking something. He stayed silent, letting her speak, letting her be heard without being corrected.

  Rize lifted her face a little higher and closed her eyes.

  “Your voice,” the breeze brushed her cheek, and for a moment she looked peaceful in a way that didn’t match the bandages. “I can hear it, you know,” she said softly.

  The moment the words left her mouth, something changed.

  It wasn’t immediate like a jump scare. It was gradual, uncanny—like reality deciding to do something it had been resisting. Light spilled out of Yu’s phone screen, not in a beam, but in fragments, tiny shards of pale blue-white radiance that floated upward like fireflies. They hovered above the glass, trembling, then drifted outward in a slow spiral.

  Yu sucked in a sharp breath.

  The particles gathered, thickened, and the air above his phone began to glow as if it were being drawn on by an invisible pen. Lines formed—thin at first, then brighter—tracing the outline of a frame in midair. It expanded in a steady, deliberate way, as if the system had all the time in the world to be impossible.

  The room around Yu stayed dark. His desk stayed solid under his forearms. The clock on the wall still ticked. But above his phone, a new window existed where nothing should have been.

  The light brightened until it was nearly pure white. Then, inside that empty brightness, an image began to appear.

  Rize. Not the back of her. Not a distant, fixed camera angle. This was closer, sharper, clearer—like he was looking through clean glass instead of a screen. Her eyes opened, and her gaze snapped straight to him.

  Not to the rooftop. Not to the camera.

  To him. Yu’s stomach dropped. His mouth opened, but his voice refused to come out. The reality of her attention hit with the force of a hand grabbing his collar. He had wanted this. He had imagined it. He had ached for it so badly he’d started to doubt his own sanity.

  And now it was here.

  “…Ah,” he managed, a sound too small for what he felt.

  Rize’s eyes widened slightly.

  “Your name,” she didn’t look frightened, exactly—more like someone seeing a door where there had only been a wall.

  “Tell me your name. I want to be able to call you properly.” She said softly, and her voice wavered just enough to show how much it cost her to ask.

  Yu swallowed hard. The urge to hide flared, ridiculous and instinctive, as if saying his name would make him vulnerable in a way he couldn’t take back.

  This isn’t a username. This is me.

  He nodded once, a small motion that felt like stepping off a ledge.

  “Yu Shiro,” he said. “Shiro… Yu.”

  “Shiro… Yu.” Rize repeated it, slowly, tasting the sounds like she was learning a spell.

  “Yu.” Then, more simply, as if deciding she preferred the warm part of it.

  The name landed in Yu’s chest like something placed there carefully. Rize’s mouth softened into a small smile, unmistakably genuine.

  “I’m Rize Fialna,” she said.

  Just that—just trading names—shifted something fundamental. They weren’t “viewer” and “stream.” They weren’t a channel and a subscriber. They were two people, pinned to two skies, speaking across a line that shouldn’t exist.

  Yu felt his eyes sting. He blinked hard and didn’t let the tears fall.

  Rize held his gaze, steady and serious. Then she spoke again, voice quiet but firm.

  “Thank you, Yu,” she said. “I’m glad you’re there.” Simple words.

  No flourish. No drama. And yet they filled the hollow spaces he’d been carrying since the first time her stream went silent. Yu’s chest ached with it.

  He forced himself to breathe.

  “…I’m glad,” he began, but the sentence broke before it could take shape.

  “Yu,” Rize leaned forward slightly, as if she could shorten the distance by sheer intent.

  “From now on, will you—” she said again, and there was urgency now, a careful kind.

  The frame flickered.

  Not a gentle shimmer. A harsh stutter, like film knocked off its reel. Static crawled along the edges of the glowing window, eating at the light in tiny bites. The audio slipped out of alignment, her lips moving half a beat ahead of her voice.

  “No,” Yu’s heart slammed against his ribs. “No, no—” he whispered.

  Fine noise raced in from the corners of the frame, turning the clean image grainy. The brightness surged too high, washing out color until her skin looked too pale, her eyes too sharp, her outline too thin—like she was being burned away by light.

  Yu tapped his phone on reflex. Nothing responded. The glass under his thumb was slick with sweat.

  Rize was still there, but her silhouette trembled at the edges, dissolving into distortion. Her expression shifted—confusion, then alarm—like she could feel herself being pulled away.

  “Yu—” she tried, but her voice fractured into static.

  And then, without warning, the mutual window vanished. The light above his phone collapsed inward as if it had never been. The last particles blinked out, one by one, like dying embers.

  ?

  No warning message. No countdown. No polite “Connection Error” wrapped in clean UI.

  Yu was left staring at the standard EWS logo screen, its familiar icon sitting in the center like a smug mask. The rooftop feed was gone. The impossible window was gone. The air in his room felt suddenly heavier, as if the presence that had been leaning into it had stepped back.

  He knew the connection was over. But it didn’t feel like it had ended.

  It felt like it had been cut—closed from somewhere else, by something other than them. The same way it had last time. The same way a hand might slam a door mid-sentence.

  A splinter of unease lodged deep in his chest.

  He realized his palm was damp against the phone. The edge of the device pressed into his skin hard enough to leave a mark. He loosened his grip slowly, as if afraid the screen might shatter if he moved too fast.

  He set the phone down on his desk with care that didn’t match his shaking hands and leaned back in his chair.

  That was when it hit.

  “—gh.” A sharp stab of pain shot through his temple, sudden and bright.

  His face twisted involuntarily. He raised a hand to his head, fingers pressing into his hairline. The pain didn’t fade. It spread, becoming a dull weight behind his eyes, thick and sluggish, as if someone had poured wet sand into his skull.

  The room tilted by half a degree.

  His limbs felt heavy, like gravity had quietly doubled. The simple thought of standing up drifted farther away, unreachable. He blinked, and the EWS logo on the screen seemed to pulse—not because it moved, but because his vision couldn’t hold still.

  Sleep deprivation, he tried to tell himself. Stress. Too much screen time.

  Except it wasn’t. He hadn’t been drifting earlier. His body hadn’t been warning him. He hadn’t been watching long enough to earn this kind of punishment.

  And the pain was… different. It didn’t feel like a headache from fatigue. It felt like something lodged deeper, foreign and stubborn, like a splinter driven in through the only path it could find—his eyes, his attention, his connection.

  Yu closed his eyes and massaged his temples. His fingertips were cold, but the heat behind his eyes didn’t ease. He didn’t need to scream. He didn’t feel like vomiting.

  It was worse than that. It was wrong.

  The lingering warmth of Rize’s presence still rested in the back of his mind—her saying his name, her looking at him like he was real. That warmth remained, fragile but bright.

  And alongside it—separate, unmistakable—something else had started to move.

  Not a thought. Not a memory. A shift. A pressure. The sensation of a mechanism turning somewhere you couldn’t see.

  Yu opened his eyes slowly. The room was the same. His desk. His curtains. The faint streetlight leaking through the gap. The phone on the tabletop, quiet and ordinary.

  But his pulse wouldn’t settle. His skin prickled. His breath came shallow.

  Rize… what were you going to say? From now on, will you… what?

  He stared at the EWS logo as if it might answer him. It didn’t. The pain behind his eyes throbbed once, deeper than before, like a heartbeat that didn’t belong to him.

  Yu swallowed and tasted something metallic. He didn’t know what had started. He only knew it had.