(Teo Alvarado — Winter, 2051, Sendai)
The wind at the docks always smelled like metal.
Cold steel, engine grease, and salt — it stuck to your clothes, your skin, your bones.
Teo Alvarado didn't mind.
He'd gotten used to smells that reminded him he was still here.
The men at the docks called him "Boss", even though he never asked them to.
He didn't shout, didn't curse.
He just looked — and they worked faster.
One guy once joked, "You stare like you can lift a man with your eyes."
The next day, Teo actually did.
A crate had slipped, corner pinning a younger worker against the floor.
No time for thinking.
Teo grabbed the crate by the edge — wood splintering, metal grinding — and moved it enough for the kid to crawl free.
No roar. No words. Just breath.
Since then, no one joked around him again.
Scene — "The Dock Ghost"
At lunch, the others huddled together near the heater, slurping noodles from vending cups.
Teo sat a little apart, arms resting on his knees, watching the snow settle on the cranes.
The foreman passed by.
"Alvarado," he said, "you ever smile?"
Teo blinked. "Not lately."
The foreman laughed nervously and walked away.
They all did, eventually.
It wasn't their fault.
They only saw the size, the silence, the scars on his hands.
They didn't see the rhythm — the way his feet still shifted when the world felt heavy, the faint tap of fingers like he was still counting down a shot clock only he could hear.
Sometimes, when the wind hit the corrugated metal just right, it sounded like a crowd —
and for half a second, he was back in 2029.
The Second Governor's Cup Championship.
The gym lights burning.
Riki yelling from the sideline.
The ball leaving his hands —
perfect rotation, arc, breath, rhythm.
Then the world crashed back into metal and wind.
Scene — "The Shop with the Sign"
He noticed the ramen shop a month ago.
Tiny place by the harbor exit.
Sign painted by hand: OPEN LATE. DRIVE SAFE.
The smell reached the pier sometimes — miso, garlic, soy,
and something else.
Something like memory.
He'd pass by after work, every night,
hands aching, body heavy.
Always too tired to go in.
Until that snowstorm.
Scene — "Return Visit"
The night after his first visit, he went back.
He told himself it was because the heater in his apartment broke.
It wasn't.
The bell over the door jingled.
Kaiya looked up from the counter.
"Oh. You again," she said, voice teasing, half-asleep.
"I was starting to think you were a hallucination."
He grunted — halfway between a greeting and an apology.
Kaiya slid him a bowl. "Same as last night?"
He nodded.
"You know," she said, wiping her hands, "most people talk when they eat."
"I'm not most people," he replied.
"Wow. Mystery man. My favorite species."
He almost smiled. Almost.
They stayed in silence after that —
her scribbling notes, him eating slowly, snow brushing the windows outside.
The shop felt small, but warm.
The kind of warmth that didn't ask for anything in return.
When he looked up,
he saw her adjusting the framed recipe on the wall — Lechon Miso, 2050.
Her sleeve slipped. A faint burn scar on her wrist caught the light.
Something about it pulled him back to Cubao —
the scar on Riki's arm from the same year,
the same glow of streetlights on skin.
The smell of Ate Bebang's carinderia —
soy, garlic, basketball sweat, and home.
He hadn't thought of that in years.
Kaiya caught him staring.
"What?" she asked.
Teo blinked. "That smell."
She raised an eyebrow. "Rude."
"No," he said quickly. "The food. Smells like… somewhere I used to know."
She leaned on the counter, curious now.
"Then you'll have to tell me where. I'm trying to map nostalgia."
Teo didn't answer.
He didn't know how to explain it —
that her ramen shop somehow smelled like the life he'd buried two decades ago.
Scene — "Gravity Lessons"
The heater flickered.
Kaiya frowned. "Not again."
Teo stood up without a word.
In two steps, he was beside it, crouching, adjusting the wire.
"You an electrician too?" she asked.
"No. Just tired of cold dinners."
The light steadied.
Kaiya smiled. "Look at that. Silent man saves soup. I should give you a loyalty card."
He straightened, brushing snow from his coat.
"Do I look like a loyalty kind of guy?"
"No," she said. "You look like someone who needs one."
Their eyes met —
a flicker of something familiar, something almost playful.
He exhaled, the ghost of a laugh escaping.
The sound surprised them both.
When he left, the air outside felt sharper.
The snow heavier.
Walking back through the docks, the cranes' lights blinked like dying stars.
He passed a group of workers huddled around a heater —
they nodded, but didn't speak.
At the edge of the pier, he stopped.
Looked out at the water.
His reflection blurred under the falling snow —
older, colder, but still carrying that same heartbeat he used to guard the rim with.
He flexed his hands —
they still hurt.
They always would.
And somewhere in that quiet ache,
he realized the ramen shop was the first place in years
that didn't look at him like a weapon.
He turned back toward the harbor street.
Steam still curling from that little shop window.
He thought of her laugh —
the quick, startled kind that didn't sound practiced.
And for the first time since Cubao,
Teo Alvarado knew he'd be back tomorrow.
[END OF ACT II]
(title fades in)
NEXT: "The Noise Between Them."
— where silence starts to sound like rhythm again.