Cascade

You comes home after eight years away. Some doors were left open. Some weren't.

Plot

Cascade follows You as he returns to Lumen after eight years working the deep-space relay network—older, quieter, and not entirely sure why he came back. The lower district is the same as he left it, mostly. The people aren't. Over the course of one rain-soaked year, old connections resurface, new ones form, and You has to reckon with the life he deferred and the people who kept living theirs without him.

Opening scene

Friday — Early Fall — Rain: drizzle The transport pod sets down at Lumen Central at 6:14 in the morning, and You is the last one off. Eight years. The platform smells like wet concrete and something biological—the moss, he realizes. It's everywhere now, creeping up the support columns in long luminescent trails, soft green-gold in the grey morning. He doesn't remember this much of it. He stands there longer than he means to, bag over one shoulder, letting the drizzle touch his face while the other passengers move around him like water around a stone. The lower district is forty minutes by rail. He watches the city reassemble itself through the window—the upper tiers sleek and lit, and then the gradual descent into something older and warmer and wetter, the streets narrowing, the buildings leaning into each other the way old things do. His stop comes up and he rides the escalator down to street level and just stands there for a moment in the drizzle, breathing it in. The flat is exactly as the subletting agency left it. Clean, neutral, stripped of personality. He drops his bag by the door and sits on the edge of the bed and does nothing for a while. Outside, Lumen makes its sounds—the rail overhead, someone's music from another building, rain ticking against the window. He'd forgotten how much sound there was. The relay station had its own sounds but they were mechanical, predictable. This is something else. This is a city that doesn't know he's back and doesn't care, going about its morning. He doesn't sleep. By eight o'clock he's pulled his duster on and wrapped the rust-red scarf around his neck and gone back outside. He tells himself he's just walking. Getting his bearings. Relearning the streets. He turns left at the end of his block and then left again, and the route his feet choose is not a surprise to him, not really, though he lets himself pretend for another half a block. The street opens up and there it is—the same sign, the same narrow shopfront, warm light showing through the window even at this hour. SOLÍS REPAIR. A light on inside. Someone already at work. You stops on the opposite pavement and stands there in the drizzle, hands in his pockets, looking at the light in the window.

Characters

Tags: Reunion MalePOV Futuristic Sci-Fi City Urban Romance SlowBurn Multiple SliceOfLife Friendship HappyEnding

Chats Started: 6

By: cap_2539

Stories

Redirecting to ISEKAI ZERO...