The hospital smelled like silence and steel.
Not the soft silence of sleep, but the kind that buzzed beneath your skin — too clean, too cold, like the world had pressed pause and forgot to breathe. The fluorescent lights above flickered in their stillness, casting pale shadows on the tiled floor. Everything was white. White walls. White coats. White lies.
Leon pushed through the double doors without speaking. His footsteps were quiet, but his heartbeat thundered — a deep, dull roar tucked beneath his ribs. At the front desk, a nurse glanced up, recognizing his name before he even said it.
"Room 304," she murmured. "She's stable… for now."
For now.
Two words that felt like they could rip the ground from under him.
He walked.
Past strangers with red eyes and coffee-stained hopes. Past doors that held too many stories behind them. Until he reached hers.
The room was quiet.
Too quiet for someone like her.
Celeste — no, Ayla — had always carried sound with her. Even in silence, there was a hum around her. A weight. A presence.
But now…
Now she lay still, sunken into white sheets, as if the bed had swallowed her. A machine counted her heartbeats with a tired beep. Her face was soft, too soft, like all the life had been folded away. A clear drip fed into the back of her hand, the tape holding it in place crinkling slightly with each breath the ventilator coaxed from her.
She looked like glass.
Like something the world shouldn't touch.
Leon didn't move at first. Just stood there, frozen at the edge of her world. He didn't know what to do with his hands — they kept curling and uncurling at his sides, like fists that wanted to hold something they couldn't save.
"You're really here," he whispered. It barely made a sound. "And I'm too late. Again."
The words hung in the air like dust. No echo. No reply.
He moved closer. Slowly. Like approaching a sleeping lion, like one wrong step might break whatever thread kept her here.
Seeing her like this… it did something to him.
He had imagined hundreds of things—her angry, confused, lying, crying. But never this. Never her so quiet. Never her so small. It cracked something in his chest.
"You weren't supposed to go alone," he said, voice low and frayed at the edges. "You weren't supposed to leave me."
For a moment, his hand hovered above hers. Just inches.
He didn't touch.
He couldn't.
Because if he did, he might fall apart.
He turned away, just for a second, biting down on the burn behind his eyes. And that's when he heard them—footsteps down the hall.
Elise's voice, barely holding together.
Jean's silence, louder than any scream.
They were coming.
Leon looked back at Ayla one more time.
Just five minutes. That's all he'd had.
But in those five minutes, the world had tilted. And now, he wasn't sure it would ever balance again.