Pharmaceutical Rewrite! Episode 1: A Black December
The Forgotten Clinic
The snow never stopped in West Tokyo that year. It fell like ash from a quiet apocalypse, smothering the city in a silence that was less peace than suffocation. To the north, neon lights still pulsed like veins through glass towers, where the wealthy drank away their winter in warm, expensive bars. But in the southern ward—the buried ward—snow fell on silence, and silence fell on the forgotten.
There, beneath a collapsed stairwell of a half-demolished parking structure, a door sat crooked on rusted hinges. Someone long ago had painted a white cross across its iron face, but the paint had peeled until it looked like a wound instead of a promise. The steel was cold, oxidized, damp with winter. Few who stumbled upon it ever tried the handle. The few who did weren't looking for salvation. They were looking for survival.
Inside, the clinic breathed faintly. A generator coughed and hummed, fighting to keep a string of flickering fluorescent lights alive. The air smelled faintly of iodine, damp wood, and human despair. Beds lined the walls, some occupied, some empty but waiting.
And at the heart of it all moved a figure who looked more ghost than doctor.
Dr. Akio Hukitaske.
Once, he had been a figure of respect. His pharmacy had been more than a shop—it was a gathering place. A lantern lit against the growing dark of the city. But that was before the experiments. Before the fires. Before choices burned the future to ash.
Now he wore the same coat he had worn then, except its white had been consumed by grease, smoke, and time. His hair, once neatly trimmed, hung in uneven strands, bound into a loose knot that betrayed neither care nor pride. His face had grown hollow, his skin a pale wax beneath the unkind lights.
He moved without sound. His hands sorted bottles, measured powders, sealed vials—automatons of muscle memory, not conviction. The click of glass on metal trays was the only conversation he allowed himself.
Behind a thin curtain, someone else breathed life into the silence.
"Patient forty-two is stable. Nothing critical to note," said Marina Higikata, his assistant. Her voice tried to catch on some thread of optimism, but optimism could not float long in this place.
Akio didn't reply.
She stepped into the light, tray in her hands, searching his face the way one searches the ruins of a building for signs of survivors.
"Akio... did you eat today?"
Nothing. Not even a flinch.
Her lips pressed together, thin and tired. She turned and walked back into the shadows of the clinic, the sound of her footsteps echoing longer than his silence.
Before the Snow
Memory haunted Akio like a reel of burned film. Fragments played at random, images stuttering through static.
He remembered warmth. Lanterns glowing over wooden counters. Friends laughing. Children chasing each other between shelves. The sound of a voice—a friends voice—saying, Don't fight this alone, Akio. We need each other.
That had been Rumane, her voice always last, always lingering.
But in that worldline, in that fragile thread of possibility, he had not taken her hand. He had chosen isolation. He had chosen to stand alone.
And because of that choice, they were gone.
Rumane—buried in a place he could no longer find.
Hikata—now a ghost of himself, raising two children in hiding.
Raka—once fierce and loyal, now vanished into underground fighting rings, surviving on blood and broken teeth.
Others—faces blurred, names fading, swallowed by the city's graveyards.
All gone.
The ones responsible, the architects of the syringe program, hadn't vanished. They had gone deeper, crawling underground like rats that had tasted blood. Age-regression experiments, chemical warfare disguised as medicine, lives rewritten in cruel drafts. Akio had tried to stop them once. He had failed. And failure had a weight he carried still, pressing his heart until each breath felt like penance.
Marina's Journal
At the back of the clinic was a room so small Marina could touch both walls with her outstretched arms. The cot sagged under her weight. Her journal sat open in the dim glow of a desk lamp, its pages cramped with words she never intended him to see.
December 3rd.
He hasn't laughed in ninety-one days. Sometimes I wonder if he remembers how. He nods, sometimes. Once he even smiled—but it wasn't at me. It was at the snow falling outside. Maybe he thought it was something else. Something from then.
At night he disappears. He comes back soaked, shoes filled with slush. I think he's searching for their graves again. But in this twisted world, those graves might not exist. Neither do they anymore. And still he blames himself—for the dead, for the living, for me. If he only knew what it cost to reach him. If he only knew how many lines I had to cross just to be here.
But I can't tell him.
Not yet.
She closed the journal when she heard his footsteps again. The sound of glass vials clinking carried through the thin walls like heartbeats she could never match.
The Ghost of What Could Have Been
That night, the snow muffled the world to stillness. Akio stood outside the clinic, the cold settling into his bones like an old tenant. His breath fogged, but he didn't shiver.
He closed his eyes, and for one fragile instant, the pharmacy returned. He saw Rumane at the counter, sleeves rolled to her elbows, lecturing him about eating properly. Raka laughing as she lifted children onto her shoulders, strong and unbreakable. Hikata reading aloud while others stocked shelves, voices weaving together like threads of home.
And Kaede—his Kaede—smiling as their daughter reached for a jar of bright candy.
Gone. Every image snuffed out like candles.
When he opened his eyes, the snow had stopped. But the cold hadn't left him.
"You have a visitor," Marina said, stepping beside him, her voice hesitant.
"Tell them I'm dead," he muttered.
"They know. That's why they came."
He turned.
Raka.
She looked older, harder, but still burning. A scar cut across her brow, bruises mapped her throat, but her eyes carried the same fire that once lit their world.
"You look like hell," she said flatly.
"Good to see you too."
"They're still out there, Akio. The ones who started this. They're not done. And you—you're rotting in this tomb while the world bleeds."
"I'm not hiding," he said. "I'm punishing myself."
Her laugh was short, sharp, angry. "Congratulations. You win. But we're losing. And I need you back."
He looked away, the snow crunching beneath his boots as if it could shield him from her voice.
"Please," she whispered then, softer, almost breaking. "We need you."
The Rewrite Awakens
Hours later, long after Raka had gone, Marina found him again. He stood by a fractured window, the glass jagged like a wound, staring at his reflection.
"What did she say?" Marina asked quietly.
"That I should stop playing dead."
"And?"
Akio studied the person in the glass. Hair streaked white. Eyes rimmed red. Hands trembling with a constant ache that never left.
"She's wrong," he murmured. "Dead people don't feel this much pain."
The silence stretched between them until Marina stepped forward, close enough that her hand brushed his.
"You know," she said, voice trembling but steady, "sometimes the only way forward is to rewrite the ending."
His eyes lifted to hers, a spark breaking through the dull ash of his gaze.
"Rewrite?"
"Not the past," she whispered. "The future."
For the first time in months, Akio blinked as if waking from a nightmare. Beyond the cracked glass, the snow fell again, white flakes catching in the dim light. But this time, he saw something else in them—not just snow, but ash rising upward, as if the city itself was daring to burn back against the dark.
And for the briefest heartbeat, he believed it might.
TO BE CONTINUED...