False Home

Outside Eito’s window, the sky shimmered like a broken screen. White lines rippled through clouds that no longer held shape, blurring into skyboxes trying too hard to stay consistent. The world was slipping, and this time it didn’t bother hiding it.

Hina and him hadn’t moved since they returned to his room that already felt like a distant memory. They lingered in the atmosphere, letting the silence and fading textures of the world settle around them, as if trying to memorize a moment already slipping away. The old radio on his desk crackled faintly, spitting out fragments of voices and distorted music as if struggling to cling to a signal that no longer existed. It was quiet now, too quiet for what used to be a constant backdrop of normalcy: drifting school announcements, the distant hum of traffic, even the faint shuffle of footsteps in the hallway. All of it had faded like echoes from a song no one remembered how to finish.

She traced patterns idly on the floor, studying a faint crack in the wall that hadn’t been there the day before. Her eyes were distant, as if seeing past the surface of things.

Eito stood beside her, still holding the feather, or what was left of it. The strands unraveled between his fingers, curling and flickering as if unsure whether they were real.

“You said this place used to fix itself,” he murmured.

Hina nodded. “The system would notice when something broke. Reset it. Seal the error.”

“But it’s not fixing this.”

“No. Because the cracks are from us.”

He let that sink in. Since waking up again, he’d felt the tension under his skin grow worse. The glitches, the repeating moments, the sense that he’d done all this before. He used to chalk it up to dreams.

Everything in the room felt unfamiliar even though he’d returned here time and time again. The ancient chair with scratches he didn’t remember making. The faded posters curling at the edges. The wall where the calendar endlessly flipped back to the same day. This place was a replica, a cage pretending to be home.

And he was about to leave it.

He studied the way the feather pulsed softly in his hand. “Do you think this is what being real feels like?”

Hina tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

“This.” He gestured vaguely around them. “The confusion. The ache. That weird pressure behind my eyes like I’m supposed to remember something but can’t.”

She tilted her head. “Maybe. Real things aren’t meant to be stable. They change, they hurt, and they leave traces behind that never quite fade.”

Eito gave a small laugh. “So reality as we knew it breaking down... is that what makes us real?”

“Maybe just breaking the mold we were made in.”

He nodded slowly. Eito knew this was the last time he’d stand in his room. He instinctively knew it was a place where every loop had quietly rewound itself, trapping him in the same beginning he could never quite escape. The room that had whispered static to him, confined him, tried to convince him that nothing ever changed.

The floor beneath them trembled once. Then again. A low hum filled the air, building in the corners of the room.

Hina stood. “We should go.”

Eito glanced at her. “Where?”

“The junk zone. It’s where the system discards unsalvageable broken code. No surveillance. Only discarded fragments, remnants of forgotten loops tangled and abandoned. It has pieces the world tried to delete but could never completely wipe away.”

“Why are we going?”

Her face stayed calm and unreadable. “I left something there. A long time ago. From someone the system erased. I thought maybe, if you made it this far…”

“You think it’ll help us?”

“It will," she said with quiet certainty.

Eito studied her. There was a new tightness around her mouth, a flicker of memory in her expression. There was regret there, as if she made a choice she couldn’t take back.

He looked around one final time, and the room seemed to correct itself to remind him of what once was. The desk lamp that always flickered when he turned it on. The worn-out notebooks of his radio notes stacked haphazardly on his desk. The band posters he carefully arranged, now curling at the edges from years of neglect. The small calendar pinned to the wall, its dates marking the days down to the next school break.

“Okay,” he said. “Let's go.”

The window buzzed with flickering static. Outside, two students walked backward down the street before vanishing mid-step. The loop was eating itself.

“Does the system know we’re doing this?”

“It doesn’t. The later it learns the better for us.”

She reached for his hand.

Eito accepted without a second thought.

Their fingers touched, and the static folded around them like a curtain. The world shuddered once, and they whisked themselves away.

And the world was unraveled just a little more.

Behind them, the radio crackled louder for a moment, just long enough to whisper something through the static - faint and warbled, but unmistakably human.

A voice murmured, "One left..." before the frequency splintered into silence.