Gabriel had always thought that fear of flying was something dramatic people did.
He had flown seventeen times in his life — he kept count, for some reason he could never quite explain — and not once had he felt that anxiety he saw in movies, that hand gripping the armrest, that cold sweat on takeoff. To him, a plane was just a bus that flew higher. Noisy, mildly uncomfortable, unavoidable.
He was sitting by the window in seat 24A, headphones in place, his playlist shuffling between Japanese city pop and an anime soundtrack he wasn't embarrassed to listen to in public — mostly because the man beside him had been sleeping with his mouth open since boarding and was clearly in no position to judge anyone.
On his phone screen, the latest chapter of a light novel he had started the night before. The protagonist had just revealed his hidden power before an entire clan that had looked down on him for years. Gabriel read the passage twice, not because he hadn't understood it, but because there was something satisfying about that kind of scene that never faded with repetition.
The revenge of the underestimated. Classic. Timeless. It worked in any language. He closed the app and looked out the window. Outside was nothing but darkness and clouds.
The flight had departed São Paulo at 10 p.m. with a forty-minute delay — turbulence expected along the route, the flight attendant had said with the practiced smile of someone who delivers that line fifty times a week. Gabriel had put his headphones on, reclined his seat two notches — just enough not to bother anyone — and decided he would arrive in Belém asleep.
He had not slept.
He lay thinking about home. About the specific smell of his mother's kitchen on a Saturday afternoon. About the old dog that barked at him for the first ten minutes of every reunion and then collapsed into his lap as if it had never pretended to be indifferent. About his father, who didn't know how to show that he missed people but always showed up at arrivals with some flimsy excuse — he needed to go to the market anyway, what a coincidence.
Six months of college in São Paulo. First semester complete, far from everything he knew.
It hadn't been hard in the way he'd expected. It had been hard in ways he hadn't anticipated — the silence of the shared apartment after his roommate fell asleep, the specific weight of eating alone in a city of millions, the strange feeling of growing up without anyone nearby to notice. But he had survived. And now he was going home.
The plane shook.
Not the gentle kind of turbulence the announcements prepared you for — that soft rocking the flight attendants called normal with the same smile. It was a sharp, sudden drop, the kind that makes your stomach arrive two seconds after the rest of your body.
The man beside him woke with a grunt.
Some passengers further ahead let out muffled exclamations.
Gabriel took off his headphones.
Outside, through the window, he saw the lightning.
Not the distant, harmless version he knew from storms watched from the ground — a white streak on the horizon, safe, almost beautiful. This was close. Impossibly close. The kind of white that has no distance because it is everywhere at once.
The plane shook again.
Then the lights flickered.
There was one second — exactly one second — between the lights flickering and going out entirely, in which the plane fell completely silent.
Not the silence of engines easing down for landing. The wrong silence. The silence of absence.
And then everyone understood at the same time.
The chaos was instant — voices, crying, the sound of something falling from an overhead compartment, the flight attendant's voice over the intercom cut off in the middle of the first word. Gabriel sat still in his seat while the world around him collapsed into panic, and felt, with a clarity he had not chosen, that this was real.
This was not turbulence.
There was no safe landing coming in a little while.
The plane was falling.
He gripped his seatbelt — stupid reflex, useless, but his fingers did it on their own — and looked out the window. Outside was total darkness, intermittent lightning illuminating clouds rushing past too fast. The nose of the aircraft had tilted downward in a way physics made undeniable.
So this is it.
The thought arrived without drama. Without the epic inner voice he had imagined in death scenes a thousand times across every story he had ever consumed. Just that simple, almost bureaucratic sentence, while the wind howled outside and someone two rows back prayed aloud.
So this is how it ends.
He thought about his mother.
He thought about the specific smile she had when he arrived — not the smile for receiving guests, but the one before that, when she was still opening the door and hadn't yet composed her expression, the real smile that lasted half a second before she remembered to be a mother instead of just being happy.
He thought about his father and the market excuse.
He thought about the old dog that pretended not to care.
He thought about how much he had left unsaid — not from lack of love, but from the particular laziness of someone who always believes there will be time, that the next phone call, that the next holiday, that when he got home —
The impact arrived as white.
Not pain. Not darkness.
White.
The kind of white that has no after. Except it did.
The first thing he felt was warmth.
Not the warmth of fire or fever — something different, internal, as if something inside his chest had woken after a very long sleep and was slowly stretching itself awake.
The second thing was sound.
Voices. Close. A woman crying softly — not in despair, but the exhausted, relieved kind that comes after danger has passed. A man speaking in a steady voice, words Gabriel could not understand.
Could not understand.
Gabriel tried to open his eyes.
It took longer than it should have.
When he managed, the ceiling above him was dark wood with exposed beams. A lit candle on a shelf cast uneven shadows. The air smelled of herbs he did not recognize.
He tried to move.
His body responded — but it was the wrong body.
Small. Heavy in a different way. The hands he raised in front of his face were a child's hands — short fingers, tiny palms, without any of the marks he had accumulated over the years.
The woman who had been crying looked at him.
She was young, beautiful, with dark eyes and her hair pulled back, and an expression he recognized before he understood anything else in that moment — because it was the same expression he had imagined seeing for the last time before the white.
The real smile. The one that lasts half a second.
— Lei Tian — she said, her voice breaking with relief. — You came back.
Gabriel stared at her.
And inside a body that was not his own, with memories still settling — layer upon layer, no order yet — he felt the full weight of what had happened land on him all at once.
He had died. And the after had begun...