The candle on the desk had burned itself into a warped little tower of wax by the time Chloe finally looked away from Kael’s latest retrieval cycle.
The kid was still going.
Of course he was.
He sat upright in the old wooden chair with his eyes closed and shoulders locked so tightly they looked painful. Every few seconds, his fingers twitched faintly against the armrest, like his body was lagging whatever impossible amount of processing his brain was doing internally.
To everyone else in the room, he probably looked calm.
To Chloe, he looked like a med student halfway through a forty-hour exam block, trying not to dissociate in public.
The System windows pulsed faintly around him.
She hated that word.
Filter.
Like somebody had taken a traumatized nervous system, strapped restraints onto it, and labeled the result stable enough for public use.
The worst part was that it worked.
Kael was breathing easier now than he had yesterday. His eyes focused better. His speech no longer fragmented every few seconds beneath sensory overload. Even his posture had changed slightly now that his brain wasn’t trying to process every dust particle in the room like an incoming threat.
The kid was improving.
And somehow that made Chloe feel worse instead of better.
Because she recognized the expression on his face. It's the exhausted relief of somebody finally being allowed to unclench after years of constant strain.
She leaned back against the stone wall beside the window ledge and unlocked her phone again, mostly out of habit. The blue glow spilled across her hands and reflected faintly against the dark glass of the study windows.
God, this place still felt ridiculous.
Ghosts.
Magic.
Feudal politics.
And her, sitting in the middle of all of it, wearing scrubs beneath a white coat while scrolling through cached files from a dead world.
The phone should not have worked anymore.
None of this should have worked anymore.
But the System preserved strange things. Fragments survived transitions between worlds the same way scar tissue survived injuries. Ugly. Incomplete. Functional enough to hurt when touched.
Her thumb hovered over a familiar video file. She should have deleted it years ago. Instead, she opened it again.
“Come on! Everybody look at the camera! Say it together!”
Leo’s voice burst loudly from the speaker, energetic enough that the Northern Ghost grimaced from across the room.
Chloe ignored him.
The footage shook violently while highway lights streaked across the car windows behind them. The recording quality was painfully sharp. Modern phone cameras captured everything too well. Every reflection. Every movement. Every tiny second people later wished they could erase.
Leo was practically vibrating in the backseat.
He kept laughing too hard to hold the phone steady.
“Again! Dad, you didn’t say it right!”
Chloe stared at the frozen frame when the old cached playback lagged briefly.
He looked so happy. It was the kind of happiness that took over his entire body because he had never learned how to experience emotions quietly. Leo always felt everything at full volume.
Excitement.
Fear.
Joy.
Frustration.
All of it crashed through him at maximum intensity because his brain never learned moderation naturally. The world overwhelmed him constantly, and in return, he overwhelmed the world right back. This is why most people found him exhausting. Teachers lost patience quickly. Relatives tolerated him carefully in small doses. Strangers always gave that same uncomfortable look after public meltdowns, the expression people used when empathy became inconvenient.
But Chloe remembered the effort underneath all of it.
That was the part nobody else saw.
Leo tried harder than almost anyone she knew.
He practiced conversations alone because he was terrified of sounding strange. He memorized facial expressions from television shows because other children said his reactions looked wrong. He replayed social interactions afterward over and over, trying to understand what mistake he made.
And despite how confusing and painful the world constantly felt for him, he still loved people openly.
Especially her.
That was why Chloe originally chose medicine.
Not prestige.
Not money.
Definitely not because she admired hospitals.
Hospitals were nightmares wrapped in fluorescent lighting.
Residents worked shifts long enough to hallucinate. Nurses carried entire departments on caffeine and emotional suppression. Insurance companies decided whether dying people qualified for treatment based on spreadsheets and technicalities.
And pharmaceutical companies—
Pharmaceutical companies made Chloe furious.
Life-saving medication existed. The science existed. Treatments that could stabilize chronic illnesses, extend lives, or completely prevent suffering already sat inside laboratories and warehouses while corporations inflated prices until ordinary people could barely afford survival.
She remembered diabetic patients rationing insulin because the monthly cost was higher than rent. Asthma inhalers were priced like luxury accessories despite being necessary to breathe. The entire industry constantly markets healthcare as compassion while turning survival into a business model.
And Chloe hated every second of realizing how normal everyone acted about it.
But she endured it because of Leo.
Because she remembered exactly what it felt like watching adults treat neurodivergent children like burdens instead of people. She wanted to become the kind of physician who would have understood kids like him immediately, instead of labeling them difficult and moving on.
Developmental pediatrics. SPED support. That had been the plan.
Then the crash happened.
One rare moment where everything almost felt worth the cost. It was her graduation. Leo was so excited he could barely stay seated.
“Again!” he shouted from the backseat inside the recording. “Everybody together this time!”
The phone shook violently while he laughed.
Then the memory unfolded the same way it always did.
Her father glancing backward.
Headlights flooding sideways through the window.
A horn screaming loud enough to distort the recording.
Metal twisting.
Impact.
Static.
Chloe locked the phone immediately.
The screen went black.
But memory kept going anyway.
The smell of gasoline.
The crushing weight pinning her sideways against twisted metal.
Glass embedded in her arms.
Blood.
So much blood.
And Leo screaming.
Chloe remembered him crawling across shattered glass with shaking hands while the car groaned around them. She remembered him trying to pull her free while crying hard enough that he could barely breathe. He kept repeating her name over and over, as if he stopped talking, she would die.
As they lifted Chloe from the wreckage, she had looked back through her own swelling eyes to see him slumped against the torn fabric of the seat. He was in agonizing pain, his breathing shallow and rattling, but he had looked at her with an absolute, unadulterated devotion.
“I’m glad… your…make-up is still pretty,” Leo said, half-smiling with breath abated.
That was the part that destroyed her. Not because he failed, but because even while his own world was collapsing in pain and terror, his only priority was making sure her perfect day wasn't ruined. His mind might have been different, but his love was flawless.
Leo shoved her out through the broken side door moments before the engine caught fire.
Chloe survived because her little brother dragged her out of the wreckage with bleeding hands and a fractured arm.
Leo didn’t make it out afterward, but for years, Chloe blamed him anyway.
Not openly.
Never directly.
But enough.
Enough that every loud laugh started irritating her afterward. Enough that every emotional outburst made old resentment flare instinctively inside her chest. Enough that she quietly abandoned the entire future she originally built around helping people like him.
Instead, she chose the field furthest possible from developmental care.
Dermatology.
Skin had rules.
Visible problem. Visible treatment.
No emotional minefields buried beneath every patient interaction.
No reminders.
Her online content started almost accidentally after that. Short-form educational videos. Skincare explanations. Preventative care. Medical myths packaged into thirty-second clips that circulated endlessly through the algorithm.
At first, it was easier than hospitals.
Then it became something else.
People listened to her.
Teenagers asking for advice because they were too embarrassed to see doctors. Parents messaging her about symptoms they ignored because clinic visits were too expensive. Random strangers thanking her for explaining medical information in ways they could actually understand.
Millions of views. Brand sponsorships. Entire audiences built around trust.
And somewhere along the way, Chloe realized she kept doing it because helping people through a screen felt like the only apology she still knew how to make.
Because Leo had died saving her.
And she never got to tell him the truth.
"Hey," Kael’s voice broke the silence of the study.
Chloe blinked, quickly locking her phone. The blue light vanished, leaving her in the warm, dim candlelight of the medieval room. Kael was looking up at her, his face pale and slick with sweat, but his eyes were steady.
"I finished reading the last book," Kael said, wiping his brow. "I’m really tired. Can I uh… rest for a while?"
Chloe adjusted her glasses, her influencer smile snapping back into place with practiced ease. "Hmmm,” she hummed, tapping her lips with her finger. “Three more books," she answered as she slipped the phone into her white coat.
Looking at Kael, a boy desperately trying to fix his own fractured mind to save his family, she felt a heavy, unfamiliar ache in her chest. She had blamed Leo for so long, but standing in this drafty, cold northern castle, a universe away from home, the anger completely evaporated.
It had never been Leo's fault. He was just an innocent boy who loved his sister and wanted to capture a memory. She had spent the rest of her life running from that love because the cost of it had been too high to bear.
Leo would have loved this world.
The ghosts.
The magic.
The ridiculous martial artists running across ceilings.
He would have obsessed over every part of it with that same overwhelming joy he brought into everything else.
The thought hurt more than the memory of the crash itself.
Because for the first time in years, Chloe could no longer feel any anger when she thought about him.
Only exhaustion.
Regret.
And the crushing realization that the person she wanted forgiveness from no longer existed to hear it.