Interlude 01
The operating theatre had gone quiet. It was, fortunately not the silence of loss but instead the one of a collective exhale after nine hours of holding your breath.
"Outstanding work, everyone." Dr. Wei's voice carried the restrained warmth of a man who did not distribute praise lightly. "Truly outstanding."
Hiro pulled the surgical mask from his face and let it hang around his neck. His back ached in three separate places he'd been warned by his seniors, his feet had long since stopped sending useful information, and his eyes burned with a very specific type of fatigue.
But underneath all of that, deeper and steadier, was the relief of something done right. The patient was stable. After a long and stressful nine hours, the aneurysm that had been slowly writing a death sentence for a forty-two-year-old father of three was gone.
His colleagues were already moving, stripping off gloves, murmuring between themselves. Dr. Wei clapped him briefly on the shoulder as he passed, one firm grip, nothing more, which from the man was practically a standing ovation.
Leaning against the scrub sink, Hiro pulled out his phone.
“Coming home soon. Probably within the hour. Don't eat without me.”
He watched the screen for a moment. The little dots appeared almost immediately.
“You said that last Tuesday and came home at midnight smelling like hospital and regret.”
He smiled despite himself.
“That was Tuesday. Today I mean it.”
“I'll believe it when I see you. How did it go?”
“Well. Very well.”
“Good. Good for you buddy. Now go do your thing. Because you have something that must be done, right? I'll be here.”
He pocketed his phone and went to find Dr. Liang.
He caught his superior in the corridor outside the attending lounge. Dr. Liang was a compact man in his late fifties with that slow but ultimately oppressive presence that left everything slightly rearranged after he passed through it.
"Hiro." Dr. Liang nodded without breaking stride. Hiro fell into step beside him.
"Do you have a moment, sir?"
"I have a corridor walk."
Hiro followed the man for his walk. "I wanted to let you know my formal leave request went through. For 14 days, beginning the fourteenth of next month."
Dr. Liang stopped. He didn't make a show of it, he simply stopped, and looked at Hiro with the evaluative patience of a man who had heard every possible excuse for absence this profession could generate.
"Half a month? Admin didn't flag this on my system."
"Yes, sir. It was finalized earlier."
"That’s a whole sabbatical, son. Are you heading off to discover a new continent?"
"Something like that, sir. It's a marriage."
Dr. Liang paused for a moment before resuming his walk, slower now. "Yours?"
"I would hope so, yes."
The older man made a sound that might, in a different man, have been a laugh. "The woman you've been seeing. The one from the Foreign Affairs office."
"Chen Yao. Yes."
"Chinese?"
"Born and raised here. Her mother's side goes back three generations in this city."
Dr. Liang was quiet for a moment, hands folded behind his back. "I take this 14 days leave is for two ceremonies?"
"Indeed. One would be held in her hometown, one in Japan. Her extended family, her grandmother especially, can't travel. And Chen Yao wouldn't hear of doing it without her grandmother present." He paused. "I wouldn't either, honestly. The woman is my second best ally against her son.”
“He’s against this union?”
"No… not exactly. He knows me, but he still has his reservations about Japanese men."
“I see,” he just nodded at that as if that was the most understandable thing, before asking, "And the honeymoon?"
"We haven't decided where yet. Somewhere neither of us has been ideally."
"So." Dr. Liang stopped again, this time in front of the lounge door. He turned and looked at Hiro, something close to a smile on his face. "Half a month for a wedding, a second wedding, and a honeymoon."
"Trust me, sir, managing my father-in-law is going to feel exactly like a 24-hour emergency shift. Just with higher blood pressure and less anesthesia."
This time it was definitely a laugh, brief, dry, quickly suppressed. "Forward the HR confirmation to my desk. I'll sign off on your case transitions." He pushed open the lounge door, then paused. "Hiro."
"Sir?"
"Congratulations."
"Thank you, sir." Hiro allowed himself exactly one beat of satisfaction. "I'll try to make it back alive."
Moments later, he found a quiet corner near the window at the end of the ward corridor and typed, “It's approved. Half-month leave starting the 14th. I'm clocking out as soon as I finish the post-op report and then I'm coming straight home. Do you need anything? Should I stop somewhere?”
The reply came in under a minute.
“Actually, yes. Can you stop at the pharmacy on Jianguo Road? The big one near the crossroads.”
“Okay okay. What do you need?”
“Pregnancy test.”
Hiro stared at his phone for a while then his phone chimed:
“Made your heart jump, didn't I?”
He let out a breath that had apparently been holding itself hostage somewhere in his chest.
“That is genuinely not funny.”
“It's a little funny.”
“Chen Yao.”
“You went pale didn't you. Even through text I can tell you went pale.”
He leaned his shoulder against the wall.
“I didn't just go pale. I simply experienced a brief cardiovascular event.”
She responded with an unapologetic emoji.
“I thought for a moment your father, he typed, was going to kill me.”
“He would never. My father loves you.”
“Your father tolerates me like a man tolerates a stone in his shoe. With discipline and the hope that one day it will resolve itself.”
“Okay that's fair. But you have to admit he's warming up.”
“He called me "the Japanese one" at New Year's.”
“That's basically a term of endearment from him.”
“Come oooooon.”
“He said it warmly!”
“He said it while looking at my chopstick form.
And you know my chopstick form is fine. But even if it wasn't, I was practically raised in this country. I’m telling you, he was looking for something to criticize and settled on my nationality.
Imagine what he's going to say when he finds out what we're doing behind closed doors.”
A pause followed, then she wrote. “You think my dad doesn't know that his 26 year old daughter has sex with her boyfriend of 2 years?”
“Oh don’t get me wrong. I know that he knows. But the moment I get you pregnant. The man will have tangible evidence that we did things before marriage. Nothing will stop him from flaying me then.”
“Most likely.”
“Whoa, there. You're supposed to reassure me right now.”
“Not in the mood. I just made it home from work. I'm tired and sweaty.”
“Hm. Hopefully you're not too tired for what I was thinking for later tonight.”
“Weren't you the one who earlier was saying he was afraid of being killed by my father for messing with me without us being married?”
“True. But so long as we make sure he doesn't find out till marriage, we’ll all be good.”
“That’s a risky life you're living.”
“I am a neurosurgeon. I would not have taken this path if I didn't like risks.”
“Is that what you're going with now?”
“I'm coming home the moment I clock out. Do me a favor: don't shower.”
He pocketed his phone before she could respond and turned back toward the ward.
The post-operative report for a nine-hour procedure was, in Hiro's considered opinion, one of medicine's great injustices.
The surgery itself demanded everything: focus, precision, the complete suspension of any thought that wasn't directly relevant to the six-inch window of a human brain under his hands.
The report demanded something worse: accurate memory, organized prose, and fine motor control, something you would typically not find in someone who had not just spent nine hours on their feet.
He had once made the mistake of saying this out loud to Dr. Wei, who had looked at him, his eyes reflecting the patience and patience of a man who had written ten thousand such reports and said, Welcome to medicine, Hiro. Paperwork is where most of us lose our soul.
The workstation monitor cast a pale glow over his face as he typed.
He cataloged the surgery piece by piece: the methodology, the raw findings, the step-by-step procedure.
Under complications, he typed none—and offered a silent, exhausted prayer of thanks.
Prognosis, follow-up, signatures. He watched the blinking cursor, checking his work.
It was flawless. In this job, a report written at the tail end of a brutal shift was the only lifeline the morning crew had when they walked in fresh.
They deserved a clear picture. So he wrote with a specific reader in mind: the ghost of a surgeon who hadn't been there to see it happen.
Two hours passed. He checked his work once, checked it again, and verified it a third time because exhaustion makes a man paranoid. Finally, the report was done, verified, signed, and submitted.
He reeled back in his chair, staring up at the fluorescent lights for four heavy seconds.
Then he rose. Time to finally go home.
The goodbyes were minimal, practiced over years of long shifts. A nod to a nurse, a hand raised toward a colleague. Nobody stood in his way. They knew that vacant, post-op stare. They lived it.
The parking garage was three levels below, smelling of damp concrete and gasoline, locked in that perpetual chill buried structures kept year-round. His Jeep sat parked exactly where he'd left it eleven hours prior. He climbed into the driver’s seat, then promptly pulled out of the parking lot.
He didn't live far—a detail that was, in all honesty, a massive part of why their arrangement worked.
The house—technically his parents’ but handed down when they moved back to Japan four years ago—was nestled on a quiet street just fifteen minutes from the ward, much like Chen Yao's apartment was about that same distance from the Japanese embassy.
In every practical aspect, their relationship lived in the commute between his hospital and her embassy.
They traded houses every seven days, balancing his unpredictable call schedule against the late-night crises of international politics.
It made their shared time feel tight and compressed, but rewarding because every hour had to be earned.
Right now, that reality translated to a sharp, warm ache of impatience. He wanted her, badly, but he wasn't pushing the accelerator. He was explicit with himself about that rule.
He knew the precise physics of impact. He knew what steel did to anatomy at sixty miles an hour. No amount of eagerness to be in Chen Yao’s bed was worth turning himself into a trauma case for the morning shift to inherit.
He kept his speed within the limit, eyes scanning the mirrors. His mind was already at the front door, anticipating her face when she opened it—the way she looked when she pretended she hadn't been listening for his arrival, focusing too hard on her phone or a book to hide that she’d been waiting.
He was caught up in that thought when the headlights blinded him from the opposite lane.
The vehicle crossed the dividing line at full speed, its high beams sweeping wide with zero warning.
Hiro had only the tiny sliver of a moment these events grant: enough to see it, not enough to escape it.
His hands tore at the wheel, his foot slammed the brake—instinct operating ahead of intellect—but physics never compromises.
The gulf between his reaction and reality was total.
Announced by the sound of a crash and a scream cut short, the universe turned a blinding white for Hiro, granting him only one final, brutal realization: he was dead.