Reo didn't think of the night as meaningful while he was in it. It was just another stretch of dark between one place and another, the kind that slipped by unnoticed most of the time. The streetlights were spaced too far apart, leaving pockets of shadow where the pavement disappeared and came back again. His shoes scuffed softly with each step. The sound felt louder than it should have, like the night was listening.
He hadn't planned the walk. He rarely did. He left the building because staying inside had started to feel stale, airless. Outside was colder than he expected. Not painfully so, just enough that he noticed it through his jacket and adjusted his pace without really thinking about it. His hands were in his pockets. His shoulders were slightly hunched. Anyone watching would have seen a man going nowhere in particular.
The city around him was quiet in the way cities never truly are. Somewhere far off, a siren rose and fell, dulled by distance. A car passed on a perpendicular street, tires whispering over asphalt. An apartment window glowed briefly as someone moved inside, then went dark again. The rest was stillness, thin and brittle.
Reo walked past a closed convenience store with papered-over windows and a faded poster advertising a sale that had ended months ago. He noticed the poster because it was peeling at the corners, flapping gently when a breeze passed through the alley beside the building. He thought, vaguely, that someone should fix that. Then the thought slipped away.
His mind drifted in fragments. An unfinished email he hadn't sent. A phone call he'd meant to return and hadn't. The mild irritation of realizing he was almost out of clean socks. None of it felt important enough to hold onto. The night absorbed each thought as soon as it formed.
He crossed an intersection without breaking stride. The pedestrian light was red, but there were no cars. He didn't look both ways. He'd crossed this street hundreds of times before. His body knew it better than his conscious mind did.
Halfway down the next block, the temperature seemed to drop another degree. Or maybe that was just his imagination. He exhaled and watched his breath fog faintly in the air, then disappear. The sound of his footsteps echoed differently here, sharper, boxed in by brick walls on either side. The street narrowed, funneled into a corridor of darkness.
He became aware of someone ahead of him a second too late.
The figure stepped out from the shadow near a recessed doorway, sudden and solid. Not running, not lunging. Just there. Reo's first thought was annoyance – an instinctive flare at having his path interrupted. His second thought never fully formed.
The man said something. Or maybe he didn't. Reo couldn't later have told you what the words were, only that there was sound where there hadn't been before. A voice, low and indistinct, swallowed by the night before it could settle into meaning.
Reo slowed, more out of reflex than decision. His hand tightened in his pocket around nothing. He opened his mouth, not to argue or plead, but to say something neutral, something that would smooth the moment and let it pass.
The sound of the gun cut through the night with brutal clarity.
It wasn't like in movies. There was no dramatic pause, no visible flash etched into memory. Just a sharp, concussive crack that seemed to punch the air itself. The sound hit him first, a physical blow that rattled his skull. For an instant, everything else vanished behind it.
Then came the ringing.
It flooded his ears immediately, high and insistent, as if the world had been reduced to a single, sustained note. It drowned out whatever else might have been happening – the man's movement, his own voice, the city beyond the block. Reo staggered, surprised less by pain than by the sudden loss of balance, like the ground had tilted without warning.
He felt himself falling before he understood why.
The pavement rose up to meet him, cold and unyielding. His shoulder hit first, then his cheek. The impact knocked the breath out of him in a sharp, involuntary burst. For a moment, the ringing was joined by a dull roar, like blood rushing through his head too fast.
He tried to push himself up. His arm didn't respond the way he expected it to. There was a strange disconnect, a lag between intention and sensation. His fingers scraped weakly against the concrete, skin dragging over grit.
Something warm was spreading beneath him.
The thought arrived slowly, heavy and imprecise 'That's not right.'
He lay still, chest heaving in shallow pulls of air. Each breath felt thinner than the last, as though the space inside his lungs was shrinking. The ringing in his ears wavered, dipping and rising, never quite fading.
He became aware of the cold next. Not just the ambient chill of the night, but the specific, penetrating cold of the pavement against his face and hands. It pressed into him relentlessly, leeching heat, making his skin ache where it touched. He tried to shift his weight, to find a warmer position, but his body didn't cooperate.
His vision blurred at the edges. The streetlight above him smeared into a pale halo, its hard lines dissolving. He blinked, slowly, deliberately, as if that might fix it. The halo only grew larger, softer.
Footsteps retreated. Or maybe they didn't. The ringing swallowed everything.
He wanted to turn his head, to look back toward where the man had been, to confirm that this was real. The effort felt enormous, disproportionate. His neck twitched, then settled back into stillness.
'I've been shot,' he thought, and the words felt oddly distant, like something he'd read rather than experienced. There was pain, yes – an intense, spreading ache in his torso that pulsed in time with his heartbeat – but it wasn't the sharp agony he'd expected. It was deeper, heavier, as if something essential inside him had been damaged beyond simple sensation.
Another thought followed, incomplete: 'This is bad.'
Time stretched. Or maybe it fractured. Seconds slipped past without clear boundaries. He focused on his breathing, counting without numbers, just the rhythm of inhale and exhale. Each breath came with more effort. His chest felt tight, resistant.
His mind reached for something to anchor itself. A memory, a plan, a next step. Nothing came. Only fragments drifted up, half-formed and unfinished.
He should call someone.
He should–
The thought fell apart before it could finish.
His phone was in his pocket. He knew that. The idea of reaching for it surfaced briefly, then sank under the weight of exhaustion. His arm felt impossibly far away, like it belonged to someone else.
The ringing softened, replaced by a muffled quiet. Sounds returned in distorted pieces: the distant hum of traffic, a dog barking somewhere far off, the faint buzz of the streetlight overhead. All of it felt unreal, as if he were listening through a thick wall.
The warmth beneath him spread further, soaking into his jacket. He noticed it with detached curiosity. He wondered if it would stain permanently. The thought struck him as absurd, and he almost laughed. The impulse fizzled out before it reached his throat.
His vision dimmed further. The halo of light contracted, tunneling inward. The edges of the world darkened, creeping closer to the center of his sight. He tried to blink again, but his eyelids felt heavy, unresponsive.
A strange calm settled over him.
It wasn't acceptance, exactly. There was no grand realization, no life flashing before his eyes. Just a quiet understanding that something irreversible was happening, and that it was already too late to do anything about it.
Regret tried to surface then. He felt it stirring somewhere distant, an urge to catalog mistakes, to wish for more time, to bargain with whatever force might be listening. But it arrived too slowly, like a message delayed beyond usefulness.
I didn't—
The sentence never finished.
His heartbeat thundered in his ears, then slowed. Each pulse felt weaker than the last, like an echo fading in a large room. The cold crept deeper, seeping past skin and muscle, settling into his bones.
He became aware of the weight of his body against the ground, then of that weight diminishing. Sensation receded in layers. First his fingers, numb and tingling. Then his legs, distant and unreal. The pain dulled, replaced by a spreading emptiness.
The streetlight flickered.
For a moment, darkness rushed in, complete and absolute. Then the light steadied again, dimmer than before. Reo watched it without emotion, as if it were happening to someone else.
His thoughts slowed. The spaces between them grew longer, more pronounced. Each one required effort to grasp, and slipped away just as easily.
'This is how it ends,' he thought, 'not with drama or certainty, but with mild surprise.'
The world narrowed to the sound of his breathing. Then even that faltered, becoming irregular, shallow. He felt the instinctive urge to draw in a deeper breath, to correct it. His body didn't respond.
Darkness pressed in from all sides now, thick and heavy. The remaining sliver of light winked out, leaving nothing behind.
There was no final insight. No last words. Just the fading awareness of being there at all.
Silence stretches longer than it should.