The Platform Between Living and Nothing

Tokyo Station, Platform 17. 5:42 p.m.
Rain. Again.

The kind that blurred buildings, umbrellas, and faces into the same meaningless smear. Amano Kaito didn’t mind. If anything, he preferred the world like this, out of focus. Easier to ignore. Easier not to feel.

He stood with his back against the chilled concrete wall, headphones on, not listening to anything. Just silence. White noise. A barrier.

Students passed him in waves: laughing, pushing, messaging friends they’d see in two minutes. Lovers kissed beneath dripping steel beams. A man cursed at the weather and shook out his soaked sleeve.

Kaito stared at the yellow safety line near the edge of the platform and wondered, not for the first time, what it would feel like if he stepped over it.

Not in a suicidal way. Not really. Just… wondering. The same way you’d wonder how long it takes to fall asleep after your heart stops. Or if people still cry when they drown.

He wasn’t sad.
He wasn’t anything.

Just tired.

"Amano-Kun, you're so talented! You'll go far."

They always said that.
They didn’t know he stopped caring two years ago. That his mother left. That his father left long before she did, in everything but body. That the only light in his world, the one person who had ever seen him, moved away without saying goodbye.

That he only kept breathing because inertia made it easier than stopping.

The train would be late. Again.

A voice crackled overhead with a delay announcement. He didn’t even hear the words, just the static. That was life now. Static.

Kaito reached into his pocket, feeling the edges of the unused suicide note he wrote a year ago and never threw away. He didn’t carry it for drama. He just liked having the option.

His gaze drifted to a little girl, maybe five years old, holding a red umbrella three sizes too big. Her mother was distracted on the phone. The girl leaned forward, peeking curiously past the yellow line.

Too far.

Her foot slipped.

Kaito didn’t think.

He moved.

Like instinct. Like a reflex pulled from somewhere beneath the years of apathy. One step, then two. He reached her before she fell completely. Threw her backward toward her mother.

And as he turned,

the train lights burned through the rain.

It was fast.
There was pain, but it was brief.
Not the kind he imagined.

He didn’t hear screaming. Or crying. Or the brakes. Only the sudden absence of everything, like the world skipped a frame and didn’t bother to reload.

His thoughts bled into white.
And then-
There was silence.

Not peace. Not heaven.

Just… nothing.

But in that void, something flickered. A wordless, alien presence, watching.

Not kind. Not cruel.

Just… curious.

And then-
A voice, but not a voice. A thought spoken in the language of systems and stars:

[TRANSLOCATION: ERROR. SUBJECT IDENTIFIED: EXISTENCE CONTRADICTORY.]
[ERROR CODE: 000.000.]
[INITIATING MANUAL OVERRIDE.]

Amano Kaito should have ceased.
But stories don’t always end the way they’re written.

Sometimes, they bleed.

And sometimes, the ones who should have died…

...wake up somewhere else.