The office scanner gave its polite beep as Ren Takahiro slid his ID through. Fluorescent lights hummed above endless, empty cubicles. A row of monitors glowed like sleeping city windows — faces to meetings he'd attended, people whose names he could no longer summon without effort. The digital clock on the wall read 9:47 PM.
Ren was thirty-five. He felt older.
He loosened his tie, caught his reflection in the steel elevator door — hollow eyes, a jaw that had stopped smiling years ago. The suit fit. The life fit. But inside, something had been missing for a very long time.
"Same as yesterday," he muttered, and the sound of his own voice was a small, private accusation.
Outside, Tokyo was loud and indifferent. Neon signs bled into puddles. Commuters shuffled past with the practiced indifference of people carrying invisible weights. Ren's phone buzzed in his pocket.
Haru: Blue Lantern. You coming? Don't make me drink alone.
Ren smiled despite himself, thumbed a reply.
On my way.
Haru Yoshida was the kind of friend who refused to let people become ghosts. Loud. Pointedly cheerful. Irritating at times, and the only person who still called Ren by nicknames he hadn't used in years.
The Blue Lantern Izakaya hung its faint blue lanterns like a promise of warmth. Inside, the air was thick with smoke and laughter — sizzling skewers, the chorus of clinking glasses, and a television that never quite shut up.
Haru waved from the counter, hair a mess and grin unapologetic. "There he is. You look like death warmed over, man."
"Good to see you too," Ren said, dropping onto the stool across from him. He accepted the beer Haru shoved his way without ceremony.
Haru watched him take a measured sip. "Rough day at the grindstone?"
"Rough year," Ren corrected. He kept his voice flat; answering honestly felt like opening a door he didn't want anyone to walk through.
"Laundry list of reasons?" Haru asked, half-joking. He'd learned the circumspect approach over the years: pry gently, then step back the moment the other person flinched. "Or is the boss still allergic to recognizing talent?"
Ren let out a breath that could have been a laugh. "Boss is terrible at remembering names. Consistent, at least."
Haru snorted. The TV behind them bellowed a commentator as if the whole izakaya were a stadium. On-screen, players moved like highlights of a life Ren used to lead.
"You watching?" Haru asked, lowering his voice with a small, knowing smile.
Ren pushed his beer slightly away. "I don't… watch like I used to."
"You always watch," Haru said. "You just don't always let it touch you."
Ren didn't answer immediately. He let the noise of the bar float around him — the chatter, the clatter, the low, comforting chaos. It wrapped around him like a blanket he didn't deserve.
The match heated up. The camera tracked a forward tearing past defenders. The commentator's voice rose.
"Japan has a great chance! Will he score—"
A shot. A collective gasp in the bar.
"OH WHAT A MISS!"
Haru groaned theatrically. "For crying out loud."
And then the camera cut close, zeroing in on the striker's face.
Ren's throat closed.
Ryoji Kanzaki filled the screen: confident, composed, polished in a way that made his smile look like a brand. The room's noise receded as if someone had turned down the world.
Ren felt the old, familiar pain — a sharp, private ache that tightened his chest. It arrived without images, only sensation: the hollowing sensation of a past pulled away, the memory of a single night that lived like a raw, unreadable scar.
That night… the moment everything was stolen from him.
He kept his stare on the tabletop, fingers wrapped around cool glass. Haru watched him, then looked back at the screen, then back again, like someone watching for a visible wound and finding only tremble.
"Hey," Haru said softly, not loud enough for the whole bar to hear. "You okay?"
Ren's answer was economy itself. "I'm fine."
"You don't sound it." Haru's voice carried that small, unflinching care friends give when they've spent years learning what to say and what to leave unsaid. "It's Ryoji, right? Still messes with you."
Ren's jaw tightened. He didn't want an apology and he didn't want pity. He wanted change — something he'd long given up hoping for. "Old news."
"It shouldn't be old news," Haru said, leaning forward. "You were—" He stopped, searching for words that wouldn't turn a table of beer into a funeral. "You were the one who made people stand up and notice, Ren. You're still – you know that, right?" He smiled, but it was a small, fragile thing. "Don't let this be the line you stop at."
Ren's response was quick, clipped. "I know what I was."
Haru pushed his plate toward him, more like a gesture than an offering. "Then don't pretend you don't remember. Don't pretend you don't deserve better."
There was a pause as Ren poured another swallow of beer. The bar hummed around them — laughter, the TV commentator's frustration, a waiter calling out orders. Haru's concern sat beside him like another presence, warm and a little awkward.
"You should've been out there tonight," Haru said, voice steady. "That should've been you putting the ball in the net."
The line landed like someone gently placing a hand on an old bruise. Ren's fingers tightened.
"Drop it, Haru," he said, softer than before but with a steel undercurrent. "Tonight is just a match."
"You keep saying that." Haru reached out, a quick touch to Ren's forearm that felt both like grounding and accusation. "You deserve it. You deserve a shot."
Ren swallowed. He remembered bright crowds, a ball singing underfoot, the simple honesty of running toward a goal. He remembered loss too, the way the world had tilted and refused to tilt back for him. He'd learned to turn those memories into a private, biting fuel — not hope.
Two beers later, they left together. Haru walked with him for a block, then shrugged. "I'm taking a different route. Call me if you need anything. Really — anything."
Ren's reply was minimal. "Will do."
They parted. Haru's figure receded into the city light. Ren kept walking, alone on Shinagawa Road. Streetlamps carved the pavement into rectangles. The night smelled faintly of rain and the metallic tang of the city. Footsteps echoed.
He thought about Ryoji, about a name that had come to mean everything he'd lost. He thought about Aiko, about faces that had been warm and then closed off like a book slammed shut. His thoughts circled, never settling.
He almost missed the sudden, small shape darting across the road. A girl — no more than six — bright backpack bouncing, hair a blur. A truck's headlights bloomed behind her, white and threatening.
A spasm of instinct cut through the fog of his fatigue. Ren moved. He didn't calculate. He just moved — because some part of him remembered exactly how to run.
He shoved the girl onto the sidewalk. Her small body rolled safely out of the truck's path.
Then the truck hit him.
The impact was monstrously loud in his ears and then unbearably muted. Pain shivered through him like lightning. Asphalt scraped his face. He tasted iron. The sky above him spun, a dizzying, indifferent blue.
Someone screamed. Horns blared. His breath came in short, stabbing gasps.
"MY DAUGHTER!" a voice keened. Footsteps pounded. A woman's silhouette lunged into the scene, hands flailing.
She stopped when she saw him.
Tears streaked down her face. Her hair was long and brown, and for a second the world was a single, clear point: the face he once loved, the face that had slipped away.
"Aiko?" he managed, voice thin and weirdly small.
She dropped to her knees, voice unraveling. "Ren? Oh God, Ren—" Her hands trembled as she reached for him. "Please, someone—call an ambulance. Stay with me, Ren!"
He wanted to answer. He wanted to tell her everything he'd kept in the dark: the wasted years, the quiet rage, the nights he'd replayed a nameless loss. But words were heavy stones pressing on his chest.
Pain closed in, slow and inevitable. The noises around him dimmed into a distant tide. Aiko's face swam. Her tears fell like rain across his cheek.
"Why…?" he croaked, not sure if he was asking her or the night. Regret rose like bile, hot and raw.
Darkness came for him, not with malice but with the neatness of a curtain being lowered. The last thing he heard was Aiko's voice, fractured and pleading.
Then there was nothing.
A flat, endless nothing that hung like the space between heartbeats.
Then—warmth. A prick of light. A pulse returning to fingers that felt younger.
He blinked.
A ceiling unscrolling itself into focus. Wooden beams above him. A poster he knew from youth.
His hand — smaller, uncalloused — lifted into view.
Ren sat up, breath hitching, lungs working as if newly tuned.
He was not thirty-five anymore.
He was seventeen.
When his eyes opened again… he was 17 years old.