🌙 Episode 27 — “The Smile Behind the Glass”

Tokyo’s rain that evening felt wrong from the start. It wasn’t the kind that blurred the world into grey haze — it came in precise, razor-like streams, each drop slanting at the exact same angle, as though the storm was following a rule that nature had never written.

Ren noticed first when his umbrella, usually battered by chaotic gusts, remained eerily steady. The streets glistened like liquid mercury under flickering sodium lamps. Beside him, Nara tilted her head back, letting droplets run down her face.

“Feels staged,” she said, blinking slowly.
Ren frowned. “It’s just rain.”
She turned her gaze to him, her pupils dilated in a way that made it hard to tell if she was joking.

“That’s the thing about ‘just rain.’ You never ask who’s pulling the strings.”

Miyu ( Ren's cousin)was with them too — her sharp tongue and easy sarcasm had made her the quick foil to Nara’s strange otherworldliness these past few weeks. She’d been teasing Ren about his “tragic poetry habit” earlier, but now even she seemed off-balance.
The street was empty. No cars. No footsteps. Just them.

Then the lights started stuttering.
Not the fast, chaotic blink of faulty wiring — each lamp flickered once, in sequence, moving down the road like a silent wave.

Nara stopped mid-step. Her head rolled unnaturally far to the right, the vertebrae in her neck making a faint series of pops, like bubble wrap under slow pressure.

“He’s nearby.”
The words were whispered, but they cut cleanly through the rain.

Ren glanced at Miyu. She mouthed Who?
Nara didn’t answer. Her lips twitched, the barest hint of a smile forming — not the crooked, clumsy grin she used when she misunderstood Earth customs, but a thin, blade-like curve.

They passed a high-rise with mirrored windows. For a moment, Ren’s reflection caught his eye. Three teens under umbrellas.
But in the next pane of glass… there were four.

The fourth figure didn’t stand with them. He stood between them.
Tall. Too precise in posture, like a drawing done with a ruler. His coat was black, but the fabric gleamed as if it were made from ink itself. His head tilted slightly down, yet the reflection caught the upward curl of his lips — a smile so faint it almost looked accidental.

Ren turned sharply — nothing behind them. Only rain and silence.
But in the glass, he was still there.

Nara stepped toward the pane, as if drawn to it. Her reflection bent strangely, lagging a half-second behind her real movements. When she got close enough for her breath to fog the glass, she leaned in until her forehead touched it.

“You can’t touch me yet,” she murmured. Her tone was almost flirtatious, like she was teasing a lover from across the room. “But you’re watching. I like that.”

The reflection in the glass mimicked her head tilt perfectly. The smile widened by a hair. And then, without a flicker or fade, he was gone — leaving only their own three reflections staring back.

The walk home was a quiet one. Miyu kept glancing over her shoulder, as though expecting to see that perfect black coat somewhere behind them. Nara hummed to herself in uneven bursts, like she was trying to remember a song but couldn’t get the notes in the right order.

Ren lay awake for hours that night, the smile replaying in his mind. It wasn’t cruel. It wasn’t mocking. It was knowing. And something about that was far worse.

Elsewhere in Tokyo…
A dim lounge. Jazz spilling softly from old speakers. The air heavy with cigarette smoke and expensive cologne.
The man from the reflection sat in a corner booth, swirling amber liquid in a glass. He didn’t glance toward the window beside him — yet his reflection was already there, smiling faintly in the rain-slick glass. Watching.

Not moving.
Not needing to.
For now, watching was enough.