It was the first time in years he'd dared to hope for clarity.
The ophthalmologist had called it a "partial success." Ren could see better now—shapes no longer dissolved into fuzz at a distance, colours no longer bled into each other like watercolour on damp paper. The thick, heavy lenses he had worn since childhood were gone, replaced by thinner glasses and, occasionally, soft contact lenses. It was not perfect. It would never be perfect. But to Ren, it was as if the world had opened by half a door.
The surgery had taken place just before the end of high school, when he was seventeen. He remembered waking from the anaesthetic and turning toward the window, his eyes raw, bandaged, watery. When the nurse had unwrapped the gauze and told him to blink slowly, he'd cried—not from pain, but from the sudden sharpness of sunlight. He could see the leaves. The outlines of birds. The cracks in the windowsill. Things that had always existed, but had never looked real.
Still, even with his improved vision, Ren remained quiet. Detached. He walked the school halls cautiously, like he'd trained himself not to expect the world to be kind just because he could finally see it better.
Aika never came back.
Her desk remained empty. The space beside his at lunch stayed untouched. The echo of her footsteps—the weight of her presence—was nowhere to be found.
He had spent the summer haunted by the shape of her absence. Now, in the last semester of high school, he was walking toward the finish line alone.
Then came the accident.
It happened on an ordinary winter evening, with the sky already dark at five p.m., the kind of cold that made your breath visible and your joints ache. He had been walking home alone—head down, backpack heavy, thinking too much. He'd crossed at a light that should've been green.
The car came from his left. It didn't stop.
Later, he would be told the driver had been texting. That the tires had slipped. That Ren had no chance of reacting in time.
All Ren remembered was a blur of headlights and the crack of his body hitting pavement.
He didn't lose consciousness. He wished he had.
Pain, hot and total, flooded every limb. He couldn't breathe. Couldn't scream. Couldn't even tell where the hurt ended and he began. His legs were numb. That terrified him more than the blood.
He woke in the hospital three days later with a halo of machines blinking around him.
The prognosis: spinal trauma. Incomplete injury. Permanent nerve damage. He would recover some movement, but walking unaided? Unlikely. Full sensation? Gone. He would use a wheelchair from now on.
Ren didn't cry. Not when the doctor said it. Not when his parents clutched each other in grief. Not even when he was wheeled into physiotherapy and watched other patients—older, stronger—struggle with far less.
He went silent.
His world shrank to hospital ceilings, the thrum of wheels, the taste of metallic tablets on his tongue. Nurses complimented his quietness. "You're so strong," they said. "Never a complaint."
But inside, he was howling.
Not from the injury itself—but from the shattering of everything he had hoped to become. He had just started to dream. Just begun to believe he could step forward—into a future he hadn't fully imagined but wanted.
Now?
He could barely reach the sink on his own.
There were moments—late at night, when the ward was quiet and the lights low—when he would stare at the blank ceiling tiles and wonder: Would she have protected me from this, too?
But of course, she was gone.
After his release, Ren didn't return to high school. His body couldn't keep up with the demands of daily classes. Instead, he finished his final units from home, through an accommodation program. His teachers sent him modules. He sent back perfection—flawless essays, algorithm solutions, design reports. He didn't ask for praise.
He didn't want it.
He wanted purpose.
And so, he turned to the only thing that made sense in a world that no longer fit him: systems.
Code didn't care if he could walk. Interfaces didn't mock him for using a wheelchair. Data logic flowed in clean, comprehensible lines—unlike emotions, unlike people. The only language he could trust was built on truth and rules. If it didn't work, he could fix it. If it broke, he could rewrite it.
He became obsessive. Installed every open-source platform he could find. Took apart old hardware. Built accessibility extensions and automated interfaces for screen readers. When a caregiver complained about hospital interface delays, he designed a patch that made them run 22% faster.
He started leaving his code in public repositories. Quietly. Anonymously. But the dev forums noticed. Someone called him "the ghost coder with a heart." The nickname stuck.
Ren never commented. Never posted selfies. His profile picture was a still photo of a skylight and stormy clouds.
He didn't want recognition.
He wanted control.
By the time he was twenty, companies were offering him remote work. Consulting roles. Backend architecture contracts. He accepted only what interested him—always behind the screen. No one saw his face.
No one saw the wheelchair.
But sometimes—late at night, during debugging marathons or endless compile loops—he'd open an old sketchbook.
The pages were brittle from age, smudged in places, but always clear where it mattered.
Aika's face.
Drawn again and again.
Sometimes crouching in front of him, offering his glasses like they mattered. Sometimes standing in the middle of a courtyard like a general facing a war. Sometimes simply walking ahead—hood up, fists swinging.
He never sketched her crying.
He couldn't imagine it.
In his mind, she had never fallen. Never flinched. She had kept walking—through city lights and law offices, maybe teaching others how to fight back.
She had saved him.
And all he had left… were ghosts of her.
Until one day, years later, he rolled into an office building where he'd been hired for a systems overhaul.
And fate whispered: She walks here too.
But what if she walks into the same boardroom—and doesn't remember the storm she once stood in front of?