The world ended with a tremor, a roar, and then an ache so deep it had no sound. Heat, metal, sky—then nothing.
When the world returned, it smelled like tatami mats and laundry soap. Air moved through a paper screen with the hush of a sleeping ocean. The ceiling was too close, wooden, crossbeams dark with age. I lay there, heartbeat steady and foreign in my chest, counting breaths until the numbers felt like mine.
My hands were the first betrayal. They weren't my hands.
I lifted them into the slant of morning light. Knuckles like pebbles, tendons jumping beneath the skin. No scars I knew. The skin tone—lighter. The fingers—longer? Leaner. I closed them into a fist and something inside the body laughed, a silent thrill of power running up the forearms to the shoulders. I sat up too fast. The room tilted and caught itself. A calendar on the wall—kanji characters I somehow understood without trying. I blinked.
Japan.
The word arrived already unpacked.
I looked down at myself. A school uniform shirt lay folded neatly on a low chest. A mirror hung on the back of the door at knee level, as if daring me. I crawled to it and caught my reflection.
A young face. Younger than I'd seen in decades of mirrors. Fourteen, my mind supplied, sliding the number into place like a puzzle piece. Cheekbones I didn't know. A nose I didn't know. And the hair—wild, unashamed, a flame you could spot from a county away. The sight punched a laugh out of me: half disbelief, half something close to panic. Then the laugh dissolved into silence. I touched the mirror. It fogged under my breath.
Memory wasn't a straight line anymore. It split and braided: blades whipping air, a hand I loved wrapped around my fingers; a hospital room with a man's shallow breathing; fists and feet in a back street, laughter, the taste of blood, the ache in a chest going wrong, a sudden night. The past belonged to two people now, and both of them were me.
I leaned back on my palms and let the two lives argue. The man who had mapped every inch of hardwood from Los Angeles to Madrid. The boy who had thrown punches at older kids because they were cornering someone smaller. The man who died in the sky. The boy who died in a chair beside his father's bed, a heart that decided it'd had enough of grief and simply stopped.
I don't know how long I sat there, eyes closed, letting the braid settle. When I opened them, the room was the same and I was different. I felt…wired. Coiled. My joints hummed under the skin like a machine idling.
On the low dresser were small things: a cheap comb, a rubber band, a few train tickets. I stood, careful, and the floor felt springy beneath my feet. I rolled my neck, shoulders, wrists; the body answered with clean clicks and a bright lack of rust. Curiosity tugged at me.
I crouched, pressed my fingertips to the tatami, and jumped.
The ceiling came at me fast. Instinct tucked my chin. I kissed beam and gravity, landed quiet. The shock up my shins was nothing. My breath stayed even. I grinned at the mirror because I couldn't help it.
What are you?
Not trained. Not polished. Raw. There was no discipline etched into these legs, yet the springs in them felt like compressed thunder. I bent my knees again, this time testing angles, pushing through the balls of the feet, feeling the chain fire: calves, quads, hips, back; all of it in clean sequence as if the body had been waiting for someone to flip the switch and ask it to be serious.
If I'd had this body then—
I cut the thought off, not because it hurt, though it did, but because it was unnecessary. Then was gone. The court I kept in my chest like a chapel had burned down with me, and I'd woken up in a different temple.
Voices drifted up from the street. Bicycle bells. A dog barked like it was trying to bargain with the morning. I went to the window. A narrow lane cut through the neighborhood, wires sagging overhead, old women watering potted trees at the curb, boys in matching blazers shoving each other in the harmless way that means we're friends, we just don't know how to say it yet.
And I knew them.
Names rose from the other life's pockets. Yohei—lazy eyelids, quick hands, the kind of loyalty that doesn't make speeches. The others like satellites, louder and softer, braver and stupider in turn, a pack that looked rough until you watched where they pointed their teeth. Bullies changed schools to avoid them. The weak ate in peace behind them. They fought not because they loved fighting but because someone needed to stand in the door. The memories made my chest warm.
Another ache curled up inside that warmth and stared at me with my daughter's eyes.
Gigi.
I sat on the window frame and bowed my head. No crowd around me now. No camera lens to hide behind. Just the sound of water hitting leaves and a prayer falling into my hands. I didn't ask for explanations. I didn't have any. I asked for her path to be bright. I asked for her next life to be loud with laughter and quiet with safety. I asked for the woman who carried me through storms to be held up by a thousand gentle hands I would never see. I asked that my girls be allowed to grow around the hole I left without falling into it.
"Live," I whispered, to people who couldn't hear me, and then I sat with that word long enough for it to turn around and look back at me.
Live.
On the wall, past the calendar, hung a poster of a comic hero flexing his absurd muscles. I walked over to it and pressed my thumb into my own bicep. The muscle answered with a dense, untrained thrum. I ran through simple tests because routine calms you when nothing else does. Pushups until the floor felt bored of me. Sit-ups until counting lost meaning. A wall-sit into the burn that used to be my oldest friend. The burn never came. Or rather it came late, like a bus that misses three stops and still gets you there on time. Sweat collected at my hairline and this felt good, felt clean. I laughed again, softer, the kind of sound you make when you find a secret pathway no one else sees.
No training scars in the tendons. No overuse whispers in the knees. Every hinge brand new. But the instincts—those were ancient. My ears sorted the hallway steps by weight and rhythm without being asked. A fly cut air near my shoulder and I tracked it because my spine told me where it would go before it got there. The body wanted to move. Not for the sake of movement, but because it understood, deep and wordless, that movement was how we solved problems.
Basketball.
The word landed in the center of my brain and rang like a bell. I didn't know this city's courts. I didn't know this school's schedule. I didn't know if this world measured heroes in points or poetry. I knew the fraction of a second between a rebound and a put-back, and I knew that nothing I'd ever loved could be reached without work.
Whoever this boy had been, he hadn't worked like that. He'd fought. He'd run. He'd leapt at walls because they were walls. But the precision of repetition, the boring holiness of drills—that wasn't written in his fibers yet. Good. I knew how to write.
The door slid open a fist-width.
"You alive, idiot?" a voice said, in Japanese that came out of my mouth as easy as breath when I answered.
"Barely," I said, and the voice on the other side snorted.
Yohei's head appeared, hair falling into his eyes, a half-grin stitched on like always. He looked me over with the slow care of a medic and a friend.
"You look weird," he said finally.
"I am weird," I said, and that made him laugh out loud. It did me some good to hear it.
He leaned a shoulder to the frame. "We're going by the river. New first-years keep shaking down the kids from Class B. Thought we'd…you know."
He didn't have to finish the sentence. The other life finished it for him. We don't play heroes. We stand around until heroes are unnecessary.
"I'll come," I said, and then the word surprised both of us with how much I meant it.
We stepped into the lane and the morning put us in its mouth and chewed lazily. The others waited at the corner, jokes already midair. I remembered them with that aching, grateful clarity reserved for faces you thought you'd never see again. They orbited me and I orbited them, and the balance held.
"Your hair's a mess," one of them said.
"It's a style," I said, because the boy who had lived in this body would have said it, and also because it was true.
We walked. The city opened in small offerings: a bakery window and the warm shiver of sugar in the air, a stray cat with one ear torn like a reminder that softness costs, a PE class running laps in a schoolyard, the thunk of a ball on asphalt—
I stopped. The others took two more steps and then looked back at me.
"Go on," Yohei said, amused. "We'll catch up."
I drifted toward the fence like a tide pulled across the bay. The court was cracked, lines ghosted by sun and rain. A group of kids in white shirts played three-on-three with the clumsy ferocity of the uncoached. Feet slapped, shouts bounced off walls. The ball had the low growl I knew better than my own name.
One of the kids bricked a jumper. The rebound punched the rim, made a decision, and sailed over the fence. It came at my face. The old life and the new life agreed, for once, without argument.
Hands up. Gather. Absorb.
Leather kissed my palms. Weight, spin, grip. My fingers took their measure like a tailor. I felt the pebbled texture wake up something under my skin that had never slept, no matter how long my body lay quiet on any floor.
A boy at the top of the key raised his hand, meaning toss it back. I spun the ball once, twice. The other kids watched the way people watch a dog deciding whether to run or sit. I didn't make a speech. I tucked my elbow, bent into the dip, and sent the ball home to him in a line that cut air clean and reached his chest like it had known the route since morning.
He blinked. The ball was already gone from his hands, a bounce-pass to the corner, a quick cut, a return, a layup off the glass. The net whispered approval. The boys hollered like they'd invented victory. I smiled, felt it all the way back to the man I'd been, and then further, to the boy I was now.
"Let's go," Yohei called, not impatient, just real.
We moved on. At the river, the usual ceremony. Big kids trying to be bigger by making smaller kids smaller. The pack closed around me and I could feel my body priming itself—vision widening, breath settling, the muscles of the back loading like a bow. We didn't need to break anything. We needed to be present. Sometimes presence is its own kind of weapon.
"Problem?" Yohei asked the tallest of them, tone casual enough to make it a real question if the answer was decent.
The tall one did the math on our numbers and our reputation and miscounted on purpose. He sneered and reached for a bag that wasn't his. I stepped in without thinking, a half-step that turned the world sideways and showed him how big the river looked from this angle. He didn't want to swim. It was remarkable how fast he discovered that. He spit a word I didn't bother to translate, shoved the bag back into its owner's chest, and left in a flurry of bravado, dragging his courage behind him like a lazy dog.
The younger kids bowed awkwardly, gratitude making them clumsy. They ran off, laughter sputtering into something freer. We stood there for a minute, letting the moment unspool.
"You're off," Yohei said, eyes narrowed but soft. "Different."
"Better," I said, and I wasn't bragging. I was making a promise.
On the way home we passed the court again. The kids were done, the ball abandoned by the fence like a moon with nowhere to pull tides. I climbed the chain-link without asking myself why. The others leaned inside the gate and watched.
I stood at the top of the key. No crowd. No clock. No lines I recognized. Just chalk ghosts and air. I bounced the ball once. The sound went through me like a heartbeat laid over a heartbeat. I slid right, stopped hard, let the body test its brakes. They worked. I stepped back and shot.
The release was ugly. The elbow, wild. The wrist, lazy. The ball made the rim rattle and sulk before it fell in.
Good, I thought. Ugly means we fix it.
I took another shot. Adjusted. Listened to the body and then ignored it and then listened again, searching for that thin place where instinct and instruction shake hands. Ten more. Twenty. The form tightened little by little, like a shirt you keep washing until it decides to fit.
Yohei finally tilted his head toward the lane. We had other places to be. I scooped the ball and placed it where I'd found it. The court held the promise of every court: Come back and I will be here.
Back in my room, I stood under the window and the afternoon moved over the floor in a patient square. I sat and tied the laces on a pair of shoes that weren't mine, in a room that wasn't mine, in a life that—suddenly, absolutely—was.
I didn't know the coaches here. I didn't know the politics. I didn't know how a boy with a burned heart became a man with a new one. I knew work. I knew appetite. I knew the first step of a long road when I felt it under my feet.
In this world, with this body, I would learn the language of every muscle and teach it to sing. I would honor the boy whose memories I carried by using what he'd been given and never used like this. I would honor the girl I loved by living a life bright enough that, wherever she was, she might see it and smile without knowing why.
I lay back on the tatami, palms on my chest, breath even.
"Alright," I said to the ceiling beam I'd almost head-butted this morning. "Let's be the best this world has ever seen."
The room didn't answer. It didn't need to. The answer had been stitched into my bones long before I woke up here.
Tomorrow, I'd find a real court. Tomorrow, I'd start counting again, not breaths this time, but made shots, broken habits, built ones. Tomorrow, I'd begin.
For now, I closed my eyes and listened to the quiet hum of a new engine.