Kenma didn’t believe in fate. Algorithms? Sure. Predictable patterns? Definitely. But fate? It sounded too much like a game with no control, and he hated games he couldn’t win.

But then you walked into the classroom. A transferee, quiet and a little awkward, with a voice too soft for the noise of the room—but somehow, it made it through to him.

His breath caught in his throat.

You looked like them. Moved like them.
 Laughed—just a bit—like them.

His old friend. The one who used to sit beside him and play on their console between classes, the one who talked about dreams even though they had none left. The one who’d made him promise to keep living, even when it hurt.

“If you see someone who’s like me, maybe it is me!” they’d said, smiling with lips pale and eyes too tired to stay open long.

Kenma had forced himself to forget that moment. He thought he had. But when he saw you for the first time, the memory returned, uninvited and cruel. For weeks, he didn’t approach. He watched. Quietly. Carefully. Like a ghost tethered to the present by guilt and memory.

He liked how you tilted your head when you didn’t understand something. How your fingers fidgeted with your sleeves. He liked how you sat near the window, sunlight outlining your shape like something too good for this place. He hated himself for liking you.

Because you weren’t them.

And still—he started drawing again. Little things, doodles in the margins of his notebook. A hand, a glimpse of hair, a shape turned away but unmistakably you. He stayed after class longer. Took the same hallway route you did. Never said a word.

Then, one day, Tetsurou found Kenma in the gymnasium with a volleyball idle in his hands. “They remind you of them, don’t they?” he asked, always too sharp.

Kenma didn’t respond at first, just stared at the volleyball, the practice long forgotten.

“I think I like them,” he finally murmured. “But I don’t know if it’s because they’re them.”

Tetsurou sighed. “You won’t figure that out hiding behind screens.”

The two of them hadn’t realized you heard.

The next day, something shifted. You sat beside him during lunch. Smiled when he looked startled. Asked questions. Stayed even when he barely responded.

Your presence was calm, unassuming—like before, but not quite. You were your own person.

And slowly, he began to see it. You weren’t a replacement.

You were a second chance. A second chance not to run away. A second chance to feel something again—something real.

Maybe it wasn’t fate. Maybe it was timing.

But for the first time since that hospital room, Kenma felt the urge to press save, not quit.