The door clicked shut behind him with a sound too final for such a flimsy hinge. Outside, the city greeted him with gray skies, cold air, and that familiar buzz of distant engines and forgotten conversations. His footsteps echoed down the stairwell like a metronome counting time he didn't have.
Then, just as he reached the last step, he glanced over his shoulder.
"…Wait," he said suddenly, as if remembering we were still here.
He stopped at the threshold of the building, pulled open the heavy metal door, and blinked as the daylight washed over his face—soft, bleached white, like the sky couldn't decide whether to rain or just brood all day.
He turned back, eyes narrowing playfully.
"You're still here?"
There was a smirk in his voice. A crooked grin on his lips.
"You must really not have anything better to do."
He stepped out, the city swallowing him in its noise and motion, but his voice still found its way through, steady and clear.
"Fine. You want to know who I am?"
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a white plastic case, and popped it open with a snap.
Two earbuds stared back at him like tiny sentries. He took one between his fingers.
"I'm Rony. Just Rony. No hidden surname, no secret noble blood, no prophecy tattooed on my spine."
He put one earbud in.
"In this whole loud, cold, overly complicated world—"
He paused for the second bud.
"—I live with my little sister."
There was a moment there. Not silence, exactly, but weight. Like the air stopped pretending not to listen.
"Yeah," he said, tapping the bud into place. "Just the two of us."
He adjusted the strap of his backpack, blending into the slow tide of pedestrians as if he didn't just drop something heavy and quiet into the middle of the street. Then he kept talking, hands in his pockets, tone lighter than it had any right to be.
"My mom and dad were... the kind of people you think only exist in movies. Happy. Sweet. Mom used to say Dad could fix anything, and Dad used to say Mom could design happiness with a needle and thread."
A car honked. Somewhere a street vendor shouted about curry rice.
"I was in middle school when the war started. Not the one you read about in textbooks. This was smaller. Dumber. About borders. Lines on a map drawn with rulers and erased with blood."
He tilted his head back, staring up at the skyscrapers stretching toward a sky too far away to care.
"I asked my teacher once: why do people fight over a line? She said it was complicated. I said that sounded like an excuse."
His voice didn't waver, but it dropped a little.
"Dad didn't come home. Just a knock. A folded flag. My mom didn't cry right away. She just sat there, like someone forgot to press play on her next breath."
The sidewalk under his feet was cracked in a familiar way. He dodged it instinctively. Years of repetition in a single step.
"She kept going, though. She was always working—freelance design jobs, stitching patterns for boutiques that never gave her credit. I helped when I could. But I was still a kid."
Then he stopped walking, just for a second. Just enough to show you the weight of what came next.
"She was sick. From birth, I think. Some kind of chronic thing I never learned the name of. But after Dad died, it got worse. Her heart wasn't just tired—it was breaking. But she smiled. Always smiled."
He looked sideways at us—at you—like the smile itself hurt more than the loss.
"She worked herself until the end. Not out of duty. Not because she had to. But because she wanted to. For us."
He turned a corner into a quieter side street, where the buildings leaned a little closer and the world felt a little smaller.
"You're wondering if I'm sad?"
A pause.
"I am. Of course I am. What kind of idiot wouldn't be?"
His voice thinned into something dangerously honest.
"But you know what I realized?" He didn't wait for an answer.
"Life isn't unfair. That's too simple. Life is fair. Brutally, cruelly fair. It takes and takes and doesn't care how much you already gave."
He stopped in front of a convenience store window, eyeing the cheap sandwiches and energy drinks stacked behind glass.
"But my sister's still here. She's younger. She's bright. And she's all I've got. So I work—part-time shifts, odd gigs, a little tutoring on weekends. I don't get to fall apart. Not yet."
He turned to face his reflection in the glass. His eyes studied the boy staring back: earbuds in, smile faint, bags under his eyes like bruises from thinking too much.
"You keep living. Not because it gets easier. But because someone else can't if you don't."
He let that hang in the air for a moment.
Then:
"Anyway, enough of the melodrama. That's your free tragedy quota for the day."
A grin again. Smaller now. Tired. But real.
He stepped away from the glass, checked his phone for the time, and groaned.
"Great. I'm gonna be late. Again."
Then he looked directly into the unseen camera, breaking the fourth wall one more time with a shrug.
"Still think I'm just an extra?"
And with that, he kept walking, earbuds humming quiet music only he could hear.
Above him, the clouds began to shift.