Ash had broken off ties with Alaska only a few months earlier, and the aftermath had been anything but peaceful.

The echoes of her laugh—that sarcastic laugh that used to make him laugh before it hurt—still haunted him. It rang in his head during class, as if every word she spoke around him was a veiled mockery. She had undone him with surgical precision, as if she had prepared for this. She had exposed his vulnerability in front of everyone, stripping away any dignity he still held onto at the end of their relationship.

Then came the days when he wiped his phone clean, as if he could erase the pain with a tap of the screen. Photos, messages, videos—everything was summarily deleted, as if in a pathetic attempt to rewrite the past.

But none of it helped. Alaska lived on in him, not as a sweet, fond memory, but as a wound that itched inside. And he scratched back, until it bled. Ash knew that something inside him had changed—or broken.

There were times when her absence became so unbearable that he felt angry at the air, the sky, the people around him who went on with their lives. Sometimes he found himself wondering what she was doing, where, with whom. If she laughed at him. If she thought about him. And he hated the idea that she probably didn't.

It was in this spiral that Rai appeared.

The twin brother.

The same face, the same eyes — although more restrained, more tired perhaps. Rai appeared like a vision that Ash hadn't asked for, but from which he couldn't turn away.

When he first saw him, standing in the hallway with an expression of someone who would rather be anywhere else, Ash froze. For a second, his heart raced as if Alaska herself were there, masked in men's clothes.

Ever since then, he had been watching.

Rai was reserved, quieter than his sister. He sat in the corners, his shoulders hunched, his headphones in his ears, a book on his lap.

During breaks, he would often retreat to the empty room where Ash also hid—a coincidence that seemed banal at first. But it soon became a ritual. They shared the same silence, like two shipwrecked people on nearby islands, pretending not to notice each other’s presence.

Ash noticed.

He noticed the way Rai ran his fingers through his hair, the way he frowned as he read, the way his jaw clenched when someone interrupted him.

He noticed the differences between him and Alaska, but also the hidden mirrors—a familiar gesture here, an expression there. It was like being trapped in a disturbing dream, where the past blended into the present with cruel perfection.

At first, he saw Rai as an extension. A body borrowed from longing.

But something changed.

Ash began to see him as himself.

Rai, with his silence, with his distance, became more than a reminder. He became a possibility. And when that thought took hold, something inside Ash clung to it with both hands.

It wouldn’t be the same.

There would be no loss.

There would be no abandonment.

If Alaska had escaped, Rai wouldn’t.

He would find a way. It didn’t matter how.

Because love—or what was left of it—didn’t have to make sense. It just had to be eternal.