It started with a pencil and silence.
Ren sat on the floor of his bedroom, knees drawn to his chest, a sheet of paper flat before him. The wind outside pressed softly against the windows, carrying that eerie stillness before a storm—a stillness that made everything feel expectant, like the world itself was holding its breath.
He had always been better at drawing than speaking. Even when he'd learned to navigate words, craft software, present clean code and polished reports—language had never come as easily as pictures. He could draw feelings. Emotions. The moment someone's spine straightened with resolve. The way hands curled when they didn't know where to go. The pause in someone's shoulders before they turned away.
But tonight, he reached for words.
A letter.
A final one.
Not a confession. Not a plea. Just a fragment of truth, folded and left behind like a pressed flower in a book.
Hi, Aika.
His pencil hovered after the greeting. His handwriting was sharp, as if afraid that even the paper might misinterpret his intent.
You probably don't want a letter. You're not the sentimental type. You'd probably roll your eyes at this. But I needed to say something. Just once.
He paused.
Scratched his chin. Looked at the page. Looked at the drawing tacked to the wall beside his bed—her, mid-turn, hair catching in the light of the fountain.
I don't know why you protected me so many times. I don't think you even remember half of them. But I do.
I remember every one of them.
I remember the way your voice cut through the noise. How your presence made bullies falter. You said you hated injustice. But I think it's more than that. I think… maybe, you just hated watching people hurt alone.
He stopped writing.
His chest ached in a way he didn't have a word for. He remembered a day she'd sat beside him during lunch, unspeaking, sharing half her rice balls without explanation. A moment no one else noticed.
It had mattered.
I never had the courage to say thank you properly. I was afraid you'd laugh. Or worse—shrug it off. Because to you, helping seemed automatic. Like breathing. Like blinking. Like throwing punches when someone pushed the line.
Ren exhaled, fingers trembling.
But to me, it wasn't nothing.
To me, it was everything.
He looked at the final lines, hands hesitating. He could end it with a name. An emotion. A truth. He could say what his heart had carried for months—that her presence had changed him, shaped him, given him something to hold onto in a world that always told him to stay small.
Instead, he wrote:
I hope someone protects you one day. Like you protected me.
—R.
He folded the letter, hands still unsure.
It wasn't meant to win her over. It wasn't even meant to be remembered.
But it was meant to exist. And sometimes, that was enough.
He slipped the envelope into his school bag, heart pounding like he'd hidden a secret too bright to look at.
It was the last Friday before summer break.
The hallways buzzed with restless energy—students dumping notebooks into bins, lockers slamming open and shut like the school itself was exhaling. But Ren walked slowly. One hand brushed against the cool metal of the lockers as he moved, his footsteps echoing on the mostly empty floor.
He hadn't seen Aika all day.
Rumour had it she might be transferring.
Someone in homeroom had whispered it—her guardian got relocated, or something like that. A new dojo, a different prefecture. Ren hadn't asked. He wouldn't know how. Aika was never the kind of person who offered details. She appeared, she fought storms, and then she vanished into her own quiet world.
But if there was even a chance it was true…
Ren reached into his bag and pulled out the envelope.
It wasn't much. Just a folded piece of stationery with his uneven handwriting, sealed with a trembling line of tape. He hadn't signed it. He couldn't bring himself to. What mattered wasn't who it came from. It was what it said.
His fingers hovered over the edge of Aika's locker door.
What if she thought it was weird? What if it got lost? What if she never even read it?
But what if she did?
He slid it into the thin slit of the locker and pressed his hand flat against the cool metal.
A silent farewell.
He wouldn't know until much later that the letter would never reach her. That someone—probably some idiot passing by—would yank it free and crumple it, laughing at the handwriting. That it would be tossed into a trash bin before Aika ever opened her locker again.
But that afternoon, Ren believed it was his last chance.
So he left it there, and whispered one word under his breath.
"Goodbye."
That night, he didn't sleep.
He stared at the ceiling, replaying every moment he'd spent with her—the rooftop, the fountain, the flash of her fists and the sharper flash in her eyes.
And the way she had always, without fail, stepped in when no one else would.
The world had always been a little too sharp for him. Too loud. Too cruel. But somehow, she softened it—not with kindness, not with comfort, but with presence. With certainty. Aika never made him feel pitied. She made him feel witnessed.
He rolled over and pulled out his sketchbook. The one he never showed anyone. The one filled with pieces of her.
She was still only pencil and charcoal on the page. A ghost in motion.
He flipped to the last drawing. Her crouching beside him at the fountain. A tilt of her head, her hand holding out his glasses. And behind her, the blurred streak of water and sky.
This time, he added something small.
A note at the corner of the sketch.
Not words. Just a date.
The day he thought he'd said goodbye.
What happens when you give the only part of yourself you can… and it's never seen?