[Watch Eclipse: Zero Volume 1 - A Silent Village Before Reading This]
Jerry woke up and she was there.
Not in his room. Not in his bed. Not in any of the ways that stories usually meant when they said she was there. She was on the steps outside the store, sitting in the early morning cold with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and a cup of something steaming in her hands, watching the sun come up over the mountains like it was a show she'd bought tickets for and intended to enjoy every second of.
It was 5:47 AM.
Jerry knew this because he checked his phone. He always checked his phone. Timestamps were important. Data points. The scaffolding of a structured life.
But standing in the doorway of Norvan's store, looking at Yuki wrapped in a blanket on the steps, watching the sunrise with the full attention she gave to everything she actually cared about — the timestamp felt irrelevant.
Not unimportant. Irrelevant.
There was a difference.
"You're up early," he said.
She didn't turn around. "You're up every day at this time. I wanted to see what you see."
"I don't usually watch the sunrise."
"I know. You told me. You stretch by the window, you check the time, you open your laptop, and you start coding." She took a sip of whatever was in her cup. "You walk past this every morning and don't look at it."
"I've seen it before."
"Jerry." Now she turned. The blanket shifted on her shoulders. Her hair was messy from sleep. Her eyes were clear and awake and looking at him with the specific expression that meant she was about to say something that would rearrange the furniture inside his head. "You don't watch the sunrise because you've seen it before. You don't watch the sunrise because you've decided it's not productive. It doesn't fit in the schedule. It doesn't serve the work."
She held his gaze.
"Sit down," she said.
"I have code to—"
"Jerry. Sit down."
He sat down.
The steps were cold. The stone went straight through his pants and into his bones. The air was sharp — the kind of cold that came before the sun was high enough to warm anything, the kind that made your breath visible and your ears sting.
Yuki moved the blanket so it covered both of them.
The warmth of the shared blanket was immediate and disproportionate — not just physical warmth, but the warmth of proximity, of another person's body heat mixing with yours, of the specific intimacy of being wrapped in the same piece of fabric at 5:47 AM while the world was still waking up.
"Now look," she said.
He looked.
The sunrise was — and he struggled with this, because his vocabulary for beauty was limited and his vocabulary for productive analysis was enormous and the sunrise was not something that could be analyzed into meaning — the sunrise was doing something that he had never actually seen it do before because he had never actually looked.
It was not just light replacing dark.
It was a performance. A slow, deliberate, infinitely detailed performance that involved the entire sky and the entire mountain range and the mist in the valley and the specific angle of every surface in the village and the way that angle interacted with the light to produce colors that shifted second by second.
The mountains were not just dark shapes against a brightening sky. They were layered — the closest ones dark, the middle ones blue-grey, the farthest ones almost transparent, as if the distance between here and there was visible as a physical thing, a substance, a medium that the light had to travel through and that changed the light as it passed.
The mist in the valley was not just mist. It was alive — moving, breathing, rising in some places and settling in others, catching the light and releasing it, creating pockets of gold and shadow that shifted and reformed constantly, like a landscape within the landscape, a second world existing inside the first one.
And the sky — the sky was not doing its layered thing, the way he'd always described it to himself. The sky was painting. Layer on layer on layer, each one distinct and each one blending into the next, the colors not just changing but evolving — deep blue becoming purple becoming rose becoming gold becoming something that didn't have a name, something between gold and white that was the color of the sun itself arriving at the edge of the earth.
Jerry watched.
He forgot to check the time.
He forgot about the code.
He forgot about the schedule and the routine and the analytical framework and the pattern-recognition architecture and the doctrine and the systems and everything that usually occupied the space inside his head.
He just watched.
And Yuki sat beside him, inside the same blanket, her shoulder against his, and she watched too. Not watching him watching — just watching. Together. Two people doing the same simple thing at the same time, without purpose, without agenda, without converting the experience into anything more useful than what it was.
Which was enough.
Which was, it turned out, everything.
They sat there for twenty-three minutes.
Jerry knew this because when the sun was fully up and the performance was over and the sky had settled into its daytime blue, he checked his phone and saw the time and did the math.
Twenty-three minutes.
In twenty-three minutes, he had not thought about code. Had not thought about patterns. Had not thought about the doctrine or the broken systems or the weight of what he was building.
He had thought about nothing.
Or — not nothing. He had thought about the sunrise. About the colors. About the mist. About the specific quality of the light as it arrived. About the warmth of Yuki's shoulder against his.
He had been present.
Just present.
No framework. No analysis. No conversion.
Just here.
"How do you feel?" Yuki asked.
He thought about it.
"Strange," he said.
"Good strange or bad strange?"
"I don't know yet."
She smiled. The real one.
"That's a start," she said.
She did this to him.
Constantly.
Not aggressively — not in the way of someone who had identified a flaw in another person and had appointed themselves the solution. Not as a project or a mission or an intervention. She did it the way sunlight did it — by showing up, consistently, and illuminating things that had been in shadow.
The sunrise was the first.
The market was the second.
Three days after the sunrise, Yuki took Jerry to the market. Not to buy things — Jerry bought things at the market regularly, efficiently, with the focused purposefulness of someone completing a task. She took him to be at the market. To exist in it. To treat it not as a supply station but as a place where people were.
"You walk through here three times a week," she said. They were standing at the edge of the market, the morning bustle beginning around them. "You buy rice. You buy coffee. Sometimes you buy candles. You never stop."
"Stopping is—"
"Not productive. I know. You've mentioned." She took his arm — casual, natural, the way she did everything, without making it a thing — and walked him into the market.
Not to any specific stall. Just... into it. Into the flow of people and smells and sounds and the specific chaotic energy of a small market in a small village doing the small commerce that kept the place alive.
She stopped at the vegetable vendor — the young woman with the baby on her hip and the dirty hands.
"These are beautiful," Yuki said, pointing at a pile of tomatoes. Not beautiful in the way a painting is beautiful. Beautiful in the way that food is beautiful — the specific beauty of something grown and harvested and brought to market by someone who had put their hands in the dirt every day for months.
The vendor looked surprised. People didn't usually comment on the beauty of her tomatoes. People said how much and she said the price and they paid and left.
"Thank you," the vendor said. She was young — maybe twenty, maybe younger. The baby on her hip was quiet, watching Yuki with the enormous eyes of a baby who had decided this new person was worth observing.
"How old?" Yuki asked, nodding at the baby.
"Seven months."
"She's perfect."
The vendor smiled. A real smile — the first real smile Jerry had ever seen from her, in two months of buying vegetables three times a week. He had never asked about the baby. He had never commented on the tomatoes. He had never done anything beyond the transactional minimum because the transactional minimum was all the routine required.
"Her name is Lissi," the vendor said.
"Lissi," Yuki repeated. She looked at the baby. The baby looked at her. Some communication happened between them — the kind that babies have with certain people, a recognition, an assessment, a decision rendered in the ancient court of infant judgment.
The baby smiled.
Yuki's face did something that Jerry had never seen before. It softened in a way that went beyond her usual openness — deeper, warmer, more vulnerable. The face of someone seeing something that activated a part of them they didn't always show.
She looked at Jerry.
He was staring at her.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing. You just — you're good at this."
"At what?"
"At people. At... being with people. Making them feel seen."
She bought four tomatoes. They cost almost nothing. But the transaction — the real transaction, the one that mattered — was the thirty seconds of human contact that the money was wrapped around. The vendor's smile. The baby's name. The word beautiful applied to vegetables by someone who meant it.
They walked through the rest of the market like that. Slowly. Stopping. Yuki talked to the old man who sold household goods — his name was Petran, he'd been selling things in this market for thirty-one years, he had opinions about batteries that were surprisingly passionate. She talked to the couple at the food stall — their names were Dosha and Venn, they'd been married for twelve years, Venn's soup was legendary in the village and Dosha's bread was the thing that people actually came for but nobody told Venn that.
She talked. She listened. She was present.
And Jerry stood beside her and watched and felt the village — the village he'd been living in for two months, the village he'd analyzed and mapped and studied from the window of his room — become something different.
Not different in reality. Different in his perception. The village hadn't changed. He had.
Or rather — Yuki was showing him the parts of it he'd been too efficient to see.
The people.
Not the patterns. Not the systems. Not the structural dynamics. The people.
Petran with his thirty-one years and his battery opinions. Dosha and Venn with their twelve-year marriage and their unspoken agreement about whose cooking was actually the draw. The vendor — her name was Taya, Jerry learned, because Yuki asked — with her seven-month-old daughter named Lissi and her tomatoes that someone had finally called beautiful.
People.
Jerry wrote in his notebook that night:
"Yuki showed me the market today. Not the market I've been going to for two months — a different market. The same place, seen differently. She sees people where I see patterns. She engages with individuals where I analyze systems."
"I am not wrong to see patterns. But I am incomplete if I only see patterns."
"Alistor told me this. Get your hands dirty. Understand the village. He was right. But Yuki showed me what he meant in a way his words didn't fully convey."
"She showed me by doing it. By being it. By treating every person in the market as a person — complete, interesting, worth thirty seconds of genuine attention."
"Thirty seconds. That's all it takes. Thirty seconds of actual seeing."
"I've been in this village for two months and I didn't know the vegetable vendor's name."
"Her name is Taya."
"Her daughter is Lissi."
"Her tomatoes are beautiful."
"I should have known that sixty days ago."
He closed the notebook.
He thought about Yuki.
About the way her face had changed when she looked at the baby.
About the softening. The vulnerability. The specific quality of someone seeing something that activated a part of them they usually kept protected.
He wanted to see that face every day.
He wanted to be the reason it appeared.
He wanted—
Stop, his analytical brain said. Categorize. Process. File.
He didn't stop.
He didn't categorize.
He let the wanting exist without converting it into anything.
Just wanting.
Simple.
Terrifying.
Good.