The city breathed below Orion, a beast of a million lights and a million secrets. From the rooftop of the Central City Hospital, the world was a beautiful, indifferent tapestry of neon rivers and dark canyons. The night air was cold, carrying the distant wail of a siren and the smell of rain on hot asphalt. It was the kind of night that felt clean, but Orion knew better. The world was never clean. It was a wound, and he had spent his life learning how to stitch it closed, only to find his own guts spilling out.
He sat on the ledge, his legs dangling over the abyss, the concrete cold and rough against his palms. In his pocket, a small, heavy box felt like it was burning a hole through the fabric. A circle of platinum and diamond that had, an hour ago, contained the entirety of his hope. Now, it was just a piece of carbon, a cold, dead rock.
He had a name. Orion. A name for a hunter, for a constellation. A name that spoke of destiny and grandeur. It was a joke the universe had played on him, a cruel irony that had followed him his entire life. He had spent thirty years hunting for a place to belong, only to find he was the prey.
He closed his eyes, and the rooftop dissolved. He was back in the restaurant.
The restaurant was called "L'Étoile Filante," The Shooting Star. It was a place of whispered conversations, clinking crystal, and soft, ambient light designed to make everyone feel beautiful. For a moment, Orion had believed it. He had watched Lisa across the table, the candlelight catching the auburn highlights in her hair, and felt a warmth that had nothing to do with the candle. It was the feeling of coming home after a lifetime of being lost.
He had practiced the speech in his head for a week.
*Lisa, you are the one constant in a life of chaos. You are the home I never had. Marry me.*
It sounded clumsy, but it was honest. It was his entire life, boiled down to a few simple words, a fragile offering of a heart that had been mended too many times.
She was nervous, he could tell. She was shredding her napkin into tiny, damp pieces, her smile not quite reaching her eyes. He thought it was excitement. The thought was a knife he would later twist in his own heart. He had mistaken the tremor of a guilty conscience for the flutter of a happy one.
They had ordered wine. An expensive vintage he could barely afford but had bought anyway, because this night was supposed to be perfect. He had swirled the deep red liquid in his glass, watching the legs cling to the sides, and thought about the color of blood. It was a habit of his, a surgeon's morbid curiosity, a constant reminder of the fragile, red thread that held them all together. A thread he had spent his life trying to tie, only to have it severed again and again.
"Orion," she had said, her voice barely a whisper, a fragile thing in the opulent room.
"I... I have to tell you something."
He had smiled, reaching across the table to take her hand. Her fingers were cold. A chill that, in retrospect, was a warning. "Anything, Lisa. You know that."
She pulled her hand back. The first small, sharp crack in the evening's perfect veneer. A subtle rejection that he had ignored, blinded by a hope that was now a pathetic, dying ember in his chest.
"I think I'm pregnant," she whispered.
The words didn't make sense. They were just sounds, disconnected from reality.
*Pregnant.*
The word floated in the air between them, alien and absurd. He tried to process it. He was a cardiac surgeon. He understood biology. He understood timelines. And the timeline was wrong. It was a broken bone, a misaligned suture, a diagnosis that defied all logic.
They hadn't been together in a month. Not since the night of the hospital's annual gala, when he'd been called away for an emergency transplant. He had come home at 3 AM, exhausted and smelling of antiseptic, to find her asleep on the couch. He had just kissed her forehead and gone to bed, the scent of her perfume a faint comfort against the sterile smell of the hospital that clung to him.
A cold knot began to form in his stomach, a slow, twisting of his intestines.
"Explain yourself,"
he said. His own voice sounded distant, calm. The calm of a surgeon before an incision, the forced steadiness of a man standing on the edge of a cliff.
"I… I…" She wouldn't meet his eyes. She stared at her water glass, at the lemon slice floating in it, as if it held the answers she couldn't speak. "It just happened."
"Answer the fucking question, Lisa," he said, his voice losing its calm, gaining a sharp, dangerous edge he didn't know it possessed. An edge honed by years of being dismissed, of being told he was not enough.
"How. Did you. Get pregnant?"
Her shoulders began to shake. A single tear traced a path down her cheek. It was a beautiful, perfect tear, and it filled him with a rage so pure and hot it was almost blinding.
"It was my boss. Okay? It was my boss. Are you happy now?"
The world didn't just crack. It shattered.
The restaurant noise faded to a dull hum.
The candlelight seemed to dim. The face of the man who had stabbed him in the operating room, the man who had smirked and whispered, "An orphan shouldn't have this much," suddenly superimposed itself over Lisa's. The words of his stepfather, spoken from the doorway of a bedroom Orion was no longer allowed to enter, echoed in the sudden, suffocating silence of the restaurant.
"Why should I pay for him? He's not my blood."
The faces of his classmates in high school, sneering as they knocked his books from his hands.
"Hey, *kouhai*, go study in the library where you belong."
The laughter that had followed him down the hall, a sound that had echoed in his nightmares for years.
The image of his mother, her face turned away from him as she handed him a small bag to the orphanage director. "It's for the best, Orion. He... he needs a fresh start."
The lie, so thin and transparent, a child's excuse for an adult's cruelty.
A lifetime of rejection, a lifetime of being the problem, the surplus, the one to be discarded, all crashed down on him in the space of a single heartbeat. He had fought. God, how he had fought. He had bled for scholarships, had gone hungry for knowledge, had practiced sutures on a piece of fruit until his fingers were raw. He had climbed a mountain of corpses and carved a place for himself at the top, only to find it was a precipice, and she had just pushed him off.
His last hope. The one person who had seen him, not as an orphan, a nerd, a rival, but as Orion. She had seen him, and she had chosen someone else. The final, ultimate confirmation that he was, and had always been, utterly, fundamentally alone.
He looked at her, at the woman he had loved for eight years, the woman he was going to marry. The woman who had just taken the foundation of his life and shattered it with a few, simple words. He saw not the woman he loved, but a stranger, a creature of casual cruelty.
"What did he give you?" he asked, his voice quiet, dead. The voice of a man who had just seen his own corpse lying on the table.
"What did he give you in two months that I couldn't give you in eight years?"
He didn't wait for an answer. He didn't want one. He stood up, the chair scraping loudly against the floor. He threw a handful of bills on the table, enough to cover the wine he had wanted to be perfect. A final, pathetic attempt to maintain a semblance of dignity.
"Let's end it here," he said, the words tasting like ash, like the dust of a collapsed star.
"Let's break up."
He walked out of the restaurant, leaving her crying over a glass of water and a lie. He didn't look back.
***
Orion opened his eyes. The city was still breathing below him. The wind was colder now, biting at his exposed skin. He pulled the small, heavy box from his pocket. He opened it. The diamond ring inside caught the ambient city light, a tiny, captive star. A symbol of a promise that had turned into a threat.
He had a name. Orion. A hunter. And tonight, he realized, he had been hunting for happiness his entire life.
He had tracked it, cornered it, and just as he was about to capture it, it had turned on him and ripped out its throat.
He wasn't angry anymore. He wasn't even sad. He was just... tired. The weight of thirty years of being the spare, the unwanted, the second-best, was a physical pressure on his shoulders, a gravity that had finally become too strong to fight. It was the weight of his father's abandonment, his mother's rejection, the bullying, the loneliness, the endless, grueling work. It was the weight of a thousand tiny cuts, each one insignificant on its own, but together, they had drained him of all his blood.
He looked down at the ring, then at the street so far below. It was a simple choice. Continue to carry the weight, or let it go.
He closed his hand around the ring, the sharp edges of the diamond cutting into his palm. A small, sharp pain, a final, real sensation in a world that had felt like a dream for weeks. He thought of the future that could have been. A small house. A dog. The laughter of children. Lisa's smile, the first thing in the morning. It was a beautiful dream, but that's all it had ever been. A dream for a boy who was never meant to wake up happy.
He let go.
Not of the ring. He kept his fist clenched around that. He let go of the ledge.
For a moment, there was only the wind, a deafening roar in his ears. The city lights blurred into streaks of gold and white. He didn't scream. He didn't think of Lisa or his mother or his father. He thought of a single, clear image: himself, at seven years old, standing in the doorway of an orphanage, with a small bag in his hand, watching a car drive away without looking back. He had been fighting ever since.
The battle was over.
The wind rushed past him, a cold, violent caress. He saw the sidewalk rushing up to meet him, a gray, unforgiving slate. He thought of all the bodies he had cut open, all the hearts he had held in his hands, all the lives he had tried to save. He had always been a healer, a mender of broken things. And now, the most broken thing of all was himself.
He closed his eyes. He didn't think of forgiveness. He didn't think of peace. He just thought of the silence. The blessed, final, absolute silence.
The impact was not a sharp pain. It was a dull, wet thud that echoed in the vast, empty cathedral of the city. A sound that was quickly swallowed by the relentless hum of traffic and the distant cry of another siren.
The ring rolled from his open hand and skittered across the cold pavement, coming to a stop near a storm drain. It caught the light one last time, a tiny, defiant spark in the overwhelming darkness, before the rain began to fall, washing the blood and the life and the last remnant of a hope that was never meant to be, down into the gutter.
The city swallowed his silhouette. The ring rolled and stopped at the edge of the rooftop, catching the moonlight once before darkness covered it. Below, Tokyo continued its restless breathing, unaware and unrepentant.
When the morning came, people would say there had been a tragedy up on the rooftop. Some would whisper about a broken man at the end of his tether.
Others would find their own cheap moral lessons in his silence. But for Orion — finally — there was a calm he had never known. The battlefield was over. The weight of despair that had been his companion since birth had, at last, eased.
The impact was not an end, but a transition. The cold, wet pavement and the sharp, final agony of his body did not fade;
they dissolved, like a painting left in the rain. The roar of the city, the angry blare of a horn, the hiss of tires on wet asphalt—all of it unraveled into a profound and absolute hush. The crushing weight of thirty years of despair, the gravity that had finally pulled him from the ledge, simply vanished. He was no longer falling, but drifting, a consciousness untethered from bone and blood, adrift in a vast, cavernous silence. There was no up or down, only a timeless, directionless float. He was not in darkness, but in a soft, sourceless grey light that revealed nothing but an endless, orderly expanse. He was not alone. In the distance, other silent, shimmering figures drifted like motes of dust in a sunbeam, each one a story that had reached its final page, each one waiting in the great, quiet library of what comes after.