Between us : You & Me

MelanieOdum · 2026-07-31T18:07:48.132230Z

so is he going to find her before the shadow guy does or do we live through more chapters of them missing each other?

by Rehan Azam

Note: this short story continues directly from Part Two,

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CHAPTER 1

THE WEIGHT OF A NAME

The platform outside the station was loud in the specific way ordinary life is loud after something extraordinary. Announcements overlapped. A rolling suitcase caught on a gap in the tile. None of it aware of how close it had all come to not existing. Kai and Elara stood just past the gates, neither of them quite ready to be two separate people again.

The last flickers of his golden light had not yet faded from his hands. She had not let go of him until they did, and even then the connection lingered, a quiet electricity, the kind that follows a brush with death. She drew a shaky breath, eyes tracing the tired lines carved into his face.

"So," she said softly, almost teasing, though her voice trembled. "That is what is between us, then. Almost dying twice before lunch, and a stranger who fights with light."

A faint smile tugged at his mouth. He reached to brush a stray curl from her cheek, his touch gentle despite the exhaustion behind his eyes. "I promised. No one gets hurt."

"You kept it," she whispered, leaning into his hand before she made herself pull back. Her gaze searched his. "But you did not tell me you were this. Whatever this is. A sorcerer, or something older." She tried to laugh, but the awe in her eyes betrayed her. "It changes things, Kai."

His smile faded. "It does not change this," he said, and the words came out heavier than he meant them, more like a vow forced through his teeth than comfort. His gaze slid past her to the skyline, and beneath the noise of the crowd he felt it again, a pulse of something old, calling his name in a voice that was not his own.

"I have to go," he said, quietly, clipped.

Her relief dissolved into sharp fear. "Now? You just tore a piece of the sky out of the air. Can you not at least tell me who called you? Who they were?"

His jaw tightened. "Someone knows my true name, Elara. That has not happened in a long time, and it means the rules have changed. I need to find out what that means, and I have to do it alone." He set a hand on her shoulder, eyes steady and aching at once. "You do not have to worry. I will be back before you notice I am gone."

"That is what people say right before they are not," she said, and then, softer, pleading, "Give me something real, at least. A way to find you again."

He almost laughed. "After all that, you still want something ordinary."

"Especially after all that."

He reached into his pocket for a pen he did not remember carrying, and had just begun to press it to a scrap of paper when the phone in his other pocket rang, that same unknown number, cold and patient, exactly as it had rung an hour before the sky nearly fell. His hand stilled. Behind Elara's shoulder, her own phone lit at the same instant, her sister's name flashing, three missed calls already stacked beneath it.

"I have to go too," she said, torn, glancing at the screen. "She was supposed to meet me twenty minutes ago. I forgot everything the second the lights went out."

"Go," he said, folding the unfinished scrap back into his pocket without thinking, the ink barely dry. "Be normal for a while. You have earned it."

She hesitated at the top of the stairs, and for a moment he thought she might ask outright, the way people who wanted to see each other again usually managed to. But her phone buzzed a third time, sharper, and his mind was still half caught on the voice from the call, promising this was not over, and between the two of them, the ordinary and the impossible, the moment slipped by unclaimed.

"Thank you," she said instead. "For today. For all of it."

"Thank you for not running the second the lights went out."

"I thought about it," she admitted, smiling. "Briefly."

"Understandable."

"Goodbye, Kai."

"Goodbye, Elara."

She went down into the crowd, and he watched the color of her coat disappear into all the other colors, and only then did the obvious thing occur to him, standing alone on a platform that had nearly ended the world a few hours earlier. He did not have her number. He did not know her last name, or where she worked, or anything beyond the sound of her laugh and the shape of her hand in his during the worst hour of his life. He had torn a meteor out of the sky and forgotten the one ordinary thing that might have mattered most.

He almost turned to run after her. He got as far as the top of the stairs before the phone rang again in his pocket, insistent, and the moment closed over itself like water.

I do not even know your last name, he thought. And I already miss you like I do.

At the far end of the platform, the crowd thinned into silence. The pull in the air grew stronger, a rhythm beating from somewhere beyond the ordinary world. He glanced once more toward the stairs where she had gone, then let the light rise from his hands, no longer wild but a controlled brilliance, and stepped into a rift that shimmered like starlight. In an instant he was gone, leaving only the faint scent of something like woodsmoke and rain on the night air.

High above, on a shadowed rooftop, a figure shifted. Angular, cloaked in darkness, its eyes catching the light strangely, violet where they should have been any ordinary color, watching the space where he had vanished with the patient hunger of someone who has waited a very long time for a door to open.

"Soren," it said, the name landing like a stone dropped into still water. "At last. The game begins."

CHAPTER 2

THE HIDDEN SANCTUM

Earlier that same day, before the meteor, before the sky tore open above the station, there had been a garden.

It sat behind the old part of the city, past a stone gate too narrow for cars, where the cherry blossoms had come in early that year and stayed, scattering the paths in drifts of pale pink that never quite settled. Kai had not meant to bring her there. He had meant to keep the whole day light and simple, nothing that mattered too much, and then she had seen the trees through the gate and pulled him in by the sleeve before he could think of a reason not to follow.

They found a bench near the pond, half shaded by a tree old enough to have forgotten how many springs it had seen, its branches heavy and low and dropping petals onto the water in slow, unhurried spirals. Somewhere behind them a fountain kept its own quiet rhythm. Somewhere further off, children were shrieking over something that did not matter, the good kind of noise, the kind that belongs only to ordinary afternoons.

"You are doing the thing again," Elara said, laughing before she had even finished the sentence, one hand rising to cover her mouth as though she could take the sound back.

"What thing."

"The thing where you look at me like I said something funnier than I actually said."

"You did say something funny." He was laughing too now, eyes crinkled shut against the sun coming soft and gold through the leaves. "You said fountains are just very slow, very polite waterfalls that went to finishing school."

"They are."

"They are not."

"Name one fountain that has ever been rude to you."

He opened his mouth to argue and found, to his own surprise, that he had nothing, which only made her laugh harder, the sound of it bright and unguarded, carrying further than she probably intended. A petal drifted down and caught in her hair and he reached over without thinking to brush it free, his hand lingering half a second longer than the task required, and she let it, still smiling, still watching him with something warmer than amusement underneath the humor.

"I like this," she said, quieter now, tipping her face up toward the canopy of pink and green above them. "Whatever this is. I do not even know your last name and I like this more than I have liked anything in a long time."

"That is a low bar. It has been an hour."

"It has been a very good hour."

He did not have an answer for that either, not one that would not give away more than he meant to, so instead he simply let his hand find hers on the bench between them, and she did not pull away, and for a little while neither of them said anything at all, content to sit beneath the trees while the light moved slowly through the blossoms and the whole ordinary, extraordinary day waited politely outside the garden gate to begin.

He thought of it now, that hour, that bench, that laugh, standing on the mossy steps of a place that had nothing green or gentle about it at all.

The dimensional rift had folded around Kai like silk, the sensation of being stretched across time and space a familiar discomfort, and torn open again above a valley hidden deep in mountains far from any city's eyes. Twilight had settled there. Lanterns flickered, casting long shadows across a temple complex carved into the mountainside, ancient cliffs rising around it like silent guardians. The clean scent of pine and wet stone replaced the exhaust and neon hum of the world he had left behind, and beneath it, stubbornly, he could still smell cherry blossoms, or thought he could, or wanted to.

Kai landed lightly on the moss-covered steps of the Ikato Sanctum. For a moment he simply stood there, shoulders relaxing slightly at the sight of the old gate, its wards still pulsing faintly with protective light after all the years he had stayed away.

"So the prodigal flame finally remembers where he came from."

His mouth curved, a private, genuine expression he had not allowed himself in days. "Master Aldric. I was expecting a warmer welcome."

From the gatehouse emerged a tall, wiry man in dark robes, silver hair escaping its tie in the evening wind, eyes as sharp as ever beneath a sternness that could not quite hide the reluctant affection underneath it. "Warmer welcome? Last time you were here you nearly burned down the east wing with your controlled brilliance. Half the apprentices still call it the Oven."

"I was experimenting."

"You were showing off." Aldric's eyes softened slightly. "And the worst part is, you could afford to. Still can, I suppose."

Kai lifted a hand. A single disc of golden light, his signature, spun into being above his palm, brightening until the courtyard was lit as though under noon sun, erasing every shadow, and then, with a flick of his wrist, he let it go dark again, leaving only the indifferent stars.

Aldric, entirely unimpressed, folded his arms. "Still dramatic. You could have just said yes."

"Where is the fun in that."

For a moment silence settled between them, teacher and student, years of distance between them and the old bond untouched beneath it. Aldric's gaze finally caught the anxiety Kai could not quite hide, the shadow left by the call.

"You would not have come back unless something enormous forced you," he said, quieter now. "You have not answered a single one of my calls in two years. So tell me. Who spoke your true name?"

The last of the humor in Kai's face flickered and died. His jaw tightened, memory replaying the hiss through the phone, the violet glow on the rooftop. He did not need to answer.

"That," Aldric said, stepping closer, seeing at last the full depth of the trouble on his former student's face, "is what changes everything."

They sat afterward in the master's small office, the air heavy with old paper and burning incense, a feeble defense against the size of what they were about to discuss.

"They need Soren," Kai said, the name sounding like a curse in his own mouth. "They need my power to open a gate. But why. My parents died in a fire years ago. I always thought I was just an orphan who found magic."

Aldric was quiet a moment, weighing how much of it was his to tell. "That fire was not natural, Kai. It was the moment your power manifested. Whatever happened to your parents that night, it did not create your power so much as hand it to you, all at once, before you were ready to carry it. That is why I took you in. That is why I spent two years teaching you to hold something most sorcerers never touch in a lifetime."

Kai looked down at his hands, the hands that had turned aside a meteor and burned a shadow-thing to nothing, and said nothing.

"I will not pretend I know everything," Aldric went on. "But I know this much. The name Soren means something to whoever is hunting you, something older than you or me, and it is not only your power he wants. There is history behind that name. History I am not the right person to tell you, because it is not mine to tell." He held Kai's gaze, steady. "Ask him yourself, when you find him. I suspect he has been waiting a long time for someone to finally ask."

Kai's jaw tightened. "You make it sound like I owe him a conversation."

"I make it sound," Aldric said, "like a war built on a story only one side has ever told is not a war you can win by force alone." He paused, and when he spoke again his voice had lost all its earlier warmth. "There is a girl who was standing beside you at the station, Kai. If they know who you are, they will know who she is."

The color drained from Kai's face before the sentence had even finished.

CHAPTER 3

THE CITY BETWEEN THEM

Kai told himself it did not matter. He told himself this on the first day, scrolling through nothing, half expecting the unknown number to become a familiar one instead. He told himself again on the second day, standing on platforms that were not the right platform, at hours that were not the right hour, chasing a feeling more than a plan. By the third day he had stopped telling himself anything and simply admitted that he was looking for her, uselessly, in a city of millions of people who were none of them Elara.

He did not have a name to search. He did not have a face to show anyone. All he had was a train line, a rough hour, and the particular ache of a promise he had not managed to keep even to himself. Ask me again sometime, when we are not strangers. He had wanted there to be a sometime. He had not built one.

Elara, for her part, went back to her ordinary life with an ordinary kind of stubbornness, filling a notebook with things she was not ready to call poems, all of them, without exception, about a light that was not sunlight and a boy who joked to keep himself from feeling too much. Her sister noticed the distraction and asked, more than once, what exactly had happened on that train. Elara said, truthfully, that she did not know how to explain it in a way that would not sound insane, and left it there.

She went back to the same platform some mornings, at the same time, telling herself it was coincidence rather than hope, and told herself she was not disappointed each time the doors opened on strangers who were not him.

It was on the sixth morning, on that same platform, that the air around her changed.

She felt it before she understood it, a familiar wrongness pressing at the edges of the ordinary crowd, the kind of silence that has weight. A man stood too still near the far pillar, watching her the way commuters do not watch each other, his eyes catching the light strangely, a flicker of violet where there should only have been brown.

"You are the one from the train," he said. Not a question. "The girl who trusts him."

Her pulse spiked. She had no light to call, no shield of gold, nothing but the ordinary instincts of someone who knew, suddenly and completely, that she was in danger and entirely alone with it.

"I do not know what you mean," she said, already backing toward the crowd, toward whatever safety numbers could offer.

"Of course you do." He smiled, unhurried, a man in no rush at all. "He never gave you a way to call for help, did he. Careless of him. I would have thought Soren, of all people, would know better than to leave something so valuable unprotected."

Her phone was in her hand before she had decided to reach for it, though there was no number in it that would help, no name she could call that would bring him running. The platform was full of people, and none of them seemed to notice the shadows pooling, wrong and patient, at the stranger's feet.

"Stay away from me," she said, with more steadiness than she felt.

"I would," he said, "if I thought you mattered any less to him than you clearly do." His gaze sharpened as the train, on schedule, unbothered, began to rattle in from the far end of the tunnel, its lights sweeping the platform. "Let us see how far a stranger's promise really stretches. Let us see if he finds you before I do."

The doors opened behind her, ordinary and gleaming, offering an exit that felt, all at once, like the only door in the world worth taking. She did not wait to find out what he meant. She ran.

End of Part Three

For any Query email to: rehanazamauthor.gmail.com

Between us : You & Me | A Short Story By Rehan Azam

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