The memory came all at once, not as an image, but as a complete sensation that overwhelms the body before it reaches the mind. The heat of the asphalt under his feet on a summer day, the sound of his little sister’s laugh running in front of him toward the street, and the sound of a heavy engine approaching from the wrong direction.
He did not think then. There was no time to think at all.
He lunged.
He pushed her with all his strength, felt her small hands slip from his grip as she fell onto the other sidewalk, then he no longer felt anything in his legs, only a huge impact, and a sound like something very big breaking, then a hot white sky, then nothing.
He woke up in this same room, about two years ago in the time of his first life.
He sat on the same bed, his eyes closed, replaying that moment, and trying not to replay it at the same time, a contradiction he did not understand then and does not fully understand now.
He heard the door of the room opening again.
This time it was his father, a thin man with tired features, who did not look directly at Loki’s face, but at the medical file hanging at the end of the bed, flipping its pages with fingers that did not tremble.
"The doctor said this is final," his father said, without introduction, without asking how he felt. "You will not walk again."
There was no sadness in the voice. Not even anger. Just a dry announcement, like announcing a malfunction in a machine, or a delayed shipment of goods.
"Your sister is fine," he added after a silence, as if it was the only information that really mattered. "She was not harmed."
"Good," Loki said, and he meant it, despite everything else he was feeling at that moment, even though a small and disgusting part of him wished for one moment that she had been the one injured instead of him, just so his mother would look at him with something other than cold calculation. He hated himself for that idea as soon as it appeared, but it appeared anyway.
His father did not stay long. He left the room, and left Loki alone with a white ceiling and legs he could not feel.
Months passed, or so he felt it in this repeated memory, fast and blurred as if shown on a fast forwarded tape. Months of a wheelchair, of a school that turned into narrow corridors hard to access, of friends’ glances that gradually turned into complete absence. Not many visited him. Even his sister, the one he saved, stopped entering his room after a few weeks, she was satisfied with hesitating in front of the door sometimes without entering, as if seeing him reminded her of something she does not want to remember.
Once, he tried to call her while she was standing behind the door. "I know you are there."
She did not answer. He heard her footsteps moving away.
He did not try again after that.
One night, he heard them talking behind the closed door, thinking he was asleep.
"I cannot continue this," his mother said. "The care, the devices, the special school, all of this... for what?"
"He is our son," his father said, but without real conviction in his tone, more like a sentence he says because it is expected of him not because he believes in it.
"He was useful when he could walk," she said, in a voice that did not rise, and did not shake. "Now he is just a burden."
A short silence. Then his father’s voice, lower this time: "What do you want us to do? Abandon him?"
His mother did not answer immediately. The silence stretched a second, two seconds, three, and each second of it was heavier than any word she might say after.
"I do not know," she said finally. "I do not know, my love."
Loki did not hear the rest of the conversation. He did not need to.
That night, he stopped expecting anything from them.
He began to notice something strange in himself after that. When he talked to the nurse, his voice was nice, polite, a model child who thanks everyone who gives him a glass of water as if it was a precious gift. When he was alone, he was silent for hours, feeling almost nothing, looking at the ceiling without even counting the damp spots on it. And when he got angry, and he got angry with strange speed sometimes for the most trivial reasons, from the sound of a fork falling, from a two minute delay in a meal, his voice changed completely, sharp, cold, not resembling him in any other moment.
He did not understand then what was happening to him. There was no one to explain to him, and no reason for anyone to care to explain.
He sits now, in this room recreated inside the illusion, feeling all of this again, with the same cold clarity, as if the time between that moment and this one never passed at all.
"So this is what it was," he said in a low voice. He did not know if it was really his voice. "This is what I refused to remember."
He looked at the door, which opened again, but this time no one from his family appeared behind it.
Something else appeared. A faint blue light, seeping from under the door, with the same color he knew in the stairs.
He stood up, some strength returned to his legs suddenly, without a clear explanation, as if this room had finished showing what it wanted to show and no longer needed to keep him disabled.
He walked toward the door, oscillating between his desire to escape from this room, and another desire, deeper and colder, to understand everything he had just seen before leaving.
He stopped with his hand on the handle.
He thought of his sister, of that faint sound behind the door that never entered, and felt something like sorrow pass through him quickly before pushing it aside, without mercy, as he used to push aside any feeling that does not benefit him in any way.
He pushed the door.