Chapter 19: Shadows on the Shore

The ocean sounded the same as last time.

That endless hush, like the world breathing through its teeth. Waves folding into themselves, dragging secrets back to wherever water goes when it dies.

Yume was ahead of me, barefoot on the sand, her dress brushing the wind like a white flag in a war that doesn’t care who wins.

She laughed when the tide kissed her ankles. Soft, breathy, a sound that didn’t belong on a dying girl.

“This feels different today,” she said.

“Different how?” I asked.

“Like it’s saying goodbye.”

I hated the way those words tasted. Salt and iron. The kind of taste that stays no matter how hard you spit it out.

---

We walked for a while. She asked me to describe the horizon. I told her it was a knife, cutting the sea in half. She laughed again, said I made everything sound violent.

Maybe because that’s all I know.

Fighting. Bleeding. Losing things I didn’t know how to keep.

---

Then it happened.

One moment, she was there — talking about a song she wanted to write, fingers brushing the air like she was trying to catch the melody.

The next, she wasn’t.

She crumpled into the sand, silent, like someone cut her strings.

“Yume!”

I dropped beside her, hands shaking as I turned her over. Her skin was too pale, her lips too dry.

She blinked, slow, like dragging herself back from somewhere far away.

“Kazuki…?”

“I’m here,” I said, the words burning on the way out. “Stay with me, damn it.”

She smiled — small, weak, the kind of smile that should be illegal.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “Guess… I’m just tired.”

Her eyelids fluttered. And something inside me cracked like old glass.

---

The Hospital

White walls. Bleach stench. The hum of machines whispering things you don’t want to hear.

I sat outside the room, fists digging into my knees, while some doctor with dead eyes told me everything I didn’t want to know.

“Her condition has progressed,” he said, flipping through charts like they weren’t sentences.

“How long?” My voice didn’t sound like mine.

“Maybe… weeks.”

“Maybe?”

He adjusted his glasses. “It’s hard to say. But… I’d prepare.”

Prepare. Like this was a meeting I could reschedule if I tried hard enough.

---

I walked into her room after that. She was asleep, face turned toward the window like she was listening to the light.

I stood there, hands trembling, wanting to punch something. Anything. The walls. The floor. God, if He had the guts to show up.

Instead, I just sat down. Quiet. Still. Like if I moved too much, she’d vanish.

---

Later, when she woke up, she smiled like nothing happened.

Like there wasn’t a clock above her head, ticking so loud I could barely hear my own thoughts.

“How’s the ocean?” she asked.

“Still there,” I said. My voice didn’t crack. Small victories.

She reached for my hand, fingers cold and soft.

“Good,” she whispered. “I was afraid it would leave before I did.”

I looked at her then. Really looked. And for the first time, I wanted to scream. Not because she was dying.

But because she was smiling while doing it.

---

That night, I walked out of the hospital and into a street that smelled like rain and exhaust.

I found a wall in an alley and hit it until the skin split on my knuckles, until the pain drowned everything else.

Blood slid down my fingers like red confetti.

And I thought about her words. About her laugh. About how nothing I do can change this.

Then I thought:

If I can’t stop time, I’ll break myself buying every second she has left.