He opened his eyes to light that felt too honest. The world smelled of antiseptic and wet pavement. Through the blur, he saw a ceiling he didn't recognize — bright hospital panels, not the familiar fan of his cramped room. Outside, the city was still a chaos of rain and noise, but here it moved in slow frames: the soft clack of rubber soles, a muffled radio, voices that belonged to other people's mornings.
Police uniforms. Ambulance lights. A cluster of faces like a small, human tide that never quite reached him.
He forced himself to sit up. Everything ached as if someone had kneaded his body into confession: hands scraped raw, his arms and legs a map of torn skin, his waist stinging where metal had met flesh. He tried to put weight on his feet and the room swam. A doctor hovered, a folder in hand, voice careful.
"You need to rest," the doctor said. "You've got multiple abrasions and a few fractures. Don't try to leave — you can get up later."
He nodded because arguing felt childish and slow. The man's words were a net he couldn't be bothered to tear. But the moment he glanced toward the window, he saw her.
She stood across the lot near the emergency entrance, a motion at first, indistinct through rain-smeared glass. He couldn't make out her face from that distance; the hospital light and the drizzle blurred edges into suggestion. Still she was there, and the sight of her steadied something inside him.
She was alive.
That simple, brutal thought hit him harder than pain. Enough — that's all it needed to be. Alive was a small mercy he hadn't expected to win.
The doctor's voice again: "You're not to move without help. We'll check you in, get scans—"
He stood anyway, stubborn and stupid. The corridor's tile was cold under his bandaged feet. Nurses watched as he shuffled past like a man trying to walk off a storm. He moved toward the parking lot, toward a shadow he could not name. The world hummed—the electricity of people going on with life while his hung on a single thread.
Outside, his motorbike looked like a memory in black and orange: charred, twisted metal where his life's small investment had been. He had poured his wages, his pride, his small carved-out freedom into that machine. Now it was a collapsed shell, smoke still ghosting from the engine. He felt something crack inside him — a sound like glass.
He pressed a palm to the hot metal and the heat got under his skin. Tears surprised him; not loud, just salt and quiet. This was his first bike. He had fixed it himself, counted coins for it, learned its every growl. Losing it was losing a piece of the life he had been building by the thinnest of margins.
A police officer came up then, formal and efficient. "Sir, we need a statement. Witnesses reported someone jumped. You—"
"You saved her," he said before the question finished forming. The sentence was flat, fearing he might be mistaken. The officer's brows flicked.
"We have a report that a man jumped after attempting to save—" the officer began.
"Yeah." He swallowed. "That was me."
Paperwork. Questions. Names that felt like labels and meant nothing. He signed where necessary, mouth dry. They asked for details he didn't have the bandwidth to explain — why he'd been on the flyover, the speed, the skid. He answered because you answer when someone asks. Then, frictionless sympathy and process: they would file an FIR, they would need contact details, they would do their job and go back to the city's other emergencies.
When he finally crawled back into the narrow room they had shoved him into, the mattress felt too small for the noise still racing through his veins. He lay down, bandages pressing into his skin. Pain was steady now — a metronome. He closed his eyes to stop the motion.
His phone buzzed on the bedside table. He fumbled for it, thumb clumsy over cracked glass. The local news was playing in a low corner of the screen. The headline scrolled, names he didn't know. Then, a face filled the frame — clear now, unmistakable.
It was her.
Up close, on the TV, her features were real and ordinary: damp hair clinging to a pale cheek, a small bruise near the jaw, a look that had once been unreadable now fragile. He watched as reporters said, "—rescued from the flyover after attempting to—" and then the clip cut, faces and facts rattling like pebbles. The anchor's voice blurred into white noise.
He pressed his forehead to the pillow and tried to recall. Where had he seen her before? Not in the orphanage. Not in the jobs he'd taken. The memory lodged like a splinter—present but untouchable. He reached for the moment before the jump: her face turning toward him; her eyes catching his as if she recognized a saving hand and something else, something he didn't yet understand.
Sleep took him then — heavy, fitful, full of echoes.
But sleep didn't bring peace.
It brought her.
In his dream, a girl appeared—her face faint, like a memory hiding behind fog. Her hair danced in the wind, and for a brief, heart-stopping moment, their eyes met.
He jolted awake, breath sharp, heart pounding.
"Who… was she?" he whispered into the silence of the room.
And then—like a spark in the dark—he remembered.
A few days ago.
He was riding through the city, tired and lost in thought. He stopped at a signal as the light turned red. Rain wasn't falling that day, but the sky hung low, heavy with clouds.
As he waited, a BMW M8 Competition rolled up beside him. The car's glossy black surface reflected the signal lights like liquid fire. Suddenly, the sunroof slid open—and two people popped out, laughing like children in the middle of traffic.
Their joy was loud, unfiltered, contagious. They shouted, teased each other, stretched their hands out to feel the wind.
Everyone around stared at them as if they were mad.
But he… he couldn't stop smiling.
"How lucky," he thought, watching them, "to find someone who makes life feel this free."
And among those two—was her.
The same girl he saw on the edge of the flyover.
His chest tightened.
"Why… why did she try to end her life?"
He pushed his plate away. The food sat untouched. His hands were busy, but his heart wasn't in it.
No matter what he tried to do, one question kept echoing inside him—
"Why?"
"Why… would someone who looked so happy… want to die?"