Interlude: An Average Day in the Average Life of an Average Electrician

(Point of View: Kaito)

When I started working and managed to have a normal, monotonous life with Lucy, I always woke up before the alarm.

It wasn't because I suffered from insomnia, nor was it out of some deep-seated, work-induced anxiety.

I was probably doing it on purpose.

Over the years, my body and mind had learned a desperate survival mechanism: to steal time back from time itself, pulling me out of the dark depths of sleep around five in the morning. I wanted to be awake for it. I desperately needed to savor every single, silent, solitary second of peace before the real world started its daily routine of crushing me into dust.

And my peace had a name, a scent, and a comforting, anchoring weight resting flush against my chest.

Lucy was asleep on top of me, with her head pressed exactly over my heart. Her soft light brown hair spilling in a chaotic, beautiful halo across the cheap cotton pillowcase and the crook of my neck. One of her legs was tangled so tightly with mine that I could feel the pulse in her calf.

She held onto me as if she were terrified I might vanish into thin air, evaporating like the morning mist before the sun fully rose. She breathed softly, a sweet, rhythmic sound—a tiny, broken sigh on the exhale—that was the only soundtrack I ever wanted to listen to for the rest of my life.

The apartment around us was freezing. The insulation in our dilapidated third-floor walk-up in the outskirts of Tokyo was practically non-existent, and the early March chill seeped right through the single-pane windows. But beneath the thick quilt, radiating from her skin to mine, was a pocket of absolute, untouchable warmth.

I treasured every passing second, staring up at the water stains on the ceiling, listening to the beat of her heart echoing against my own.

I mentally mapped the room in the dark: the pile of my dirty work clothes in the corner, her neat row of textbooks on the wobbly desk, the faint, blinking green light of the cheap microwave in our kitchenette. It was a poor life, but in the quiet of the dawn, it felt like a kingdom.

Then, at exactly 5:30 AM, the alarm went off.

It was an electronic trill from my battered smartphone, sharp, metallic, and utterly merciless. It was a sound specifically engineered by society to forcefully drag you out of happiness and throw you onto the gears of the machine.

At the first shrill ring, Lucy’s body twitched. But in her sleep, instead of pulling away, annoyed by the sudden noise like most people would, her grip on me tightened. Her slender arms squeezed my torso harder, her face burrowing deeper into the crook of my neck with a small, adorable groan of protest. Her leg pressed flush against mine, locking me in place. Instinctively, her muscle memory and her heart refused to let me go. She didn't want the world to take me away yet.

That moment… that beautiful, heartbreaking, profoundly unfair moment, was always the hardest part of my entire day.

Untangling myself from her embrace felt like tearing away a piece of my own soul.

I unquestioningly reached out, slapped the phone to silence the alarm, and let out a long, slow breath. I rested a rough hand on her hair, stroking the silky strands gently to soothe her subconscious panic.

Slowly, agonizingly, I slipped out from under her and out of the sheets with the practiced delicacy of a thief in the night. The moment the cold air hit my bare chest, I shivered, quickly pulling the heavy quilt up to her shoulders and tucking her in tightly so she wouldn't catch a chill.

I stood up, and the very first thing I felt was pain.

It wasn't a sharp, localized agony, but a dull, heavy, constant hum that radiated from the base of my spine, crawling all the way up my latissimus dorsi to settle like a yoke across my shoulders.

It was the accumulated, inescapable weight of years spent crawling through dusty crawlspaces, hauling heavy coils of copper cable, and contorting myself into unnatural, punishing positions to reach a faulty junction box.

I looked down at my hands in the dark room. They belonged to a twenty-five-year-old man, but they looked like those of a hardened veteran of a forgotten war. Stone-hard calluses lined the palms, thick as leather. White, jagged scars mapped out old electrical burns—souvenirs from rushing jobs when the main breaker hadn't actually been tripped. And there was a perpetual, stubborn layer of black industrial grime that lived deep beneath the fingernails, a permanent stain that no amount of pumice stone or chemical soap could ever fully scrub away.

They were ugly hands, only built to destroy themselves, so hers wouldn't have to.

The train ride into central Tokyo was the part of the day where my soul withered a little more.

By 6:15 AM, the platform at the local station was already swarming. The sky was the color of a bruised plum, spitting a fine, freezing drizzle that made the neon signs bleed across the wet pavement. I stood in line, my collar pulled up, clutching my heavy canvas toolbag.

When the train arrived, I was swallowed by the crowd. Hundreds of people surrounded me, all of us packed so tightly against one another that I could feel the shallow breathing of the man pressed against my back.

Everyone shared the same hollow, dead-eyed stare, fixated on the floor or the glowing rectangles of their phones. Everyone was a stranger to the other.

We were the blood cells of the city, pumped through subterranean concrete veins to keep the giant beast alive. We were just cogs in a monstrous machine that chewed us up, digested our hours, and spat us out fourteen hours later.

I caught my reflection in the dark glass of the train doors as we rattled through a tunnel. My eyes were sunken, dark circles bruised into the skin beneath them. My jaw was tight. I didn't look like a hero. I didn't look like a protagonist. I looked exactly like what I was: an expendable laborer.

Today, the work order on my phone read: Major Fault - Luxury Office Complex, Roppongi. Eighty floors of pristine glass, polished marble, and brushed steel, piercing the Tokyo skyline. It was a fortress where managers in bespoke tailored suits moved millions of yen, negotiated international mergers, and decided the fates of hundreds of employees with a single, casual click of a mouse. They lived in the sky.

And I was headed for the basement.

The contrast was sickening. We entered through the service elevators in the loading dock, completely bypassing the lobby with its indoor waterfalls and artisanal coffee shops.

The moment the steel doors of the service elevator opened on Sub-Level 4, the smell hit me: stagnant water, ozone, and burning plastic.

A massive water main had burst the night before, flooding the electrical sublevels and frying the localized servers that powered the trading floors on levels three through ten. The backup generators had kicked in, but the main feed was a chaotic mess of short-circuited nightmares.

For the next seven hours, there was no sunlight. There was only the harsh, artificial glare of my headlamp cutting through the gloom. I was knee-deep in freezing, muddy water, wearing heavy, insulated rubber boots that felt like concrete blocks. The air was thick and humid, making it hard to breathe.

"Kaito! Feed the blue line through the conduit! And don't ground yourself, unless you want to become fried chicken!"

The foreman’s voice barked in my earpiece, shrill and impatient. Tanaka was a corporate climber who never actually got his hands dirty, preferring to sit in a dry control room with a tablet while we waded through the muck.

"Copy that," I grunted, my teeth gritted.

I was wedged between two massive concrete pillars, contorting my spine into a 'C' shape to reach the blown transformer box.

The heavy rubber safety gloves made my fingers clumsy, and my shoulders screamed in protest as I wrestled with a cable as thick as my wrist.

Every single muscle in my forearms burned.

One slip, one accidental touch against a live, unshielded wire in this damp environment, and the voltage would stop my heart before my brain even registered the pain.

The only thing that was making me work so hard was the thought of Lucy. I was only waiting for the moment of going back home.

I thought of the way she smelled like vanilla and the cheap laundry detergent we used.

Then, I breathed in the stench of burnt rubber and pushed harder, finally clicking the massive connector into place.

"Main line secure," I gasped into the radio, sweat stinging my eyes despite the cold water around my legs. "Ready for test."

When we finally surfaced from the subterranean hellhole for our mandated lunch break, the harsh afternoon sun felt alien. It was 3:00 PM already. We had been down there for eight hours straight.

I dragged myself to the alleyway behind the complex, where the company vans were parked. My coveralls were soaked halfway up my thighs, smeared with grease and mud. I slumped onto the rear bumper of our van, every joint in my body throbbing in a dull, synchronized symphony of agony. I felt hollowed out.

"Bro, you look like absolute hell," a very familiar voice spoke.

I didn't even have the energy to look up right away.

That was Jean—my coworker, my best friend, and the only real ally I had in these urban trenches.

He was a half-French, half-Japanese man who somehow managed to look cheerful even when covered in industrial grime. He tossed me a hot can of black coffee he'd just bought from a vending machine. I caught it clumsily with one numb hand.

"I’m serious, Kaito," Jean said, his usual joking tone absent. He sat down heavily next to me, cracking open a convenience store onigiri. "You’re doing way too much overtime. You pulled three double shifts last week. You’re killing yourself. I mean it. If you drop dead from a stress-induced heart attack at thirty, the company will hire your replacement before your body even goes cold. Tanaka won't even attend your funeral."

"I know, Jean," I replied, my voice raspy from breathing in dust and ozone all morning.

I popped the tab on the coffee and let the bitter, scalding liquid burn down my throat.

It was fuel. Nothing more.

I then reached into the breast pocket of my dirty coveralls, my fingers fumbling slightly as I pulled out my worn leather wallet.

I opened it carefully, treating the object inside with the reverence of a holy relic, and showed him a tiny, crumpled photograph. It had been meticulously cut from a high-end jewelry store catalog.

It was a ring, not gaudy or massive, but simple and elegant, with a thin platinum band. The diamond was small but flawless—perfectly cut to catch the light. It was the kind of ring a princess deserved, not the girlfriend of a basement-dwelling electrician.

"Three months left," I said, my voice dropping to a low whisper, almost afraid that speaking the words too loudly would break the spell. "If I keep pulling the double shifts, if I take every weekend emergency call Tanaka throws at us... in three months, I’ll have enough saved up to buy it outright. No predatory financing. No debt."

I carefully tucked the photo back into the wallet, right next to a photobooth picture of Lucy smiling brightly, throwing up a peace sign.

"And," I continued, looking out at the brick wall of the alley, "I'll have enough to put down the deposit for that apartment we looked at outside the city. The one in Chiba. It has a real garden, Jean. A little patch of dirt where she can grow those hydrangeas she always talks about. Away from the smog. Away from this." I gestured vaguely at the towering glass monolith of the Roppongi complex above us.

Jean stopped chewing. He looked at the wallet, then up at my exhausted, sunken face. He sighed heavily, rubbing the back of his neck, leaving a streak of grease across his skin.

"You’re crazy, Kaito," he muttered, shaking his head. "A romantic, absolute, goddamn fool. You're giving her pieces of your own lifespan." He clapped a heavy hand on my shoulder, squeezing tightly. "Just... try not to die before you can actually put it on her finger, okay? Otherwise, who else is going to buy my drinks at the wedding?"

"I won't die," I promised him, forcing a tired smile. "I don't have the time to die."

"Glad to hear that." He said, with a warm, genuine smile, while friendly slapping my back.

Jean was a really good guy, probably the only one I could consider a friend. We literally grew up together in school with anime and video games.

Now? We don't have the same free time we used to have during school, but our friendship is still the same as in the old days.

The shift finally ended at 9:00 PM—fourteen hours of relentless, back-breaking labor.

By the time I dragged myself off the train at my local station and started the fifteen-minute walk home, my legs were trembling with every step. My knees felt like they were filled with crushed glass.

I reeked of stale sweat, damp earth, and burnt metal. I felt like a walking shipwreck, an utterly average man, slowly being crushed to powder by an average, indifferent world.

'Ah... I really need a shower now.' I said to myself.

Then, I turned the final corner of our narrow, dimly lit street, and saw it.

The light in the window of our third-floor apartment was on. It was a warm, yellow, inviting glow that cut through the oppressive darkness of the Tokyo night like a lighthouse beam. It was a beacon. Suddenly, miraculously, the heavy ache in my lower back didn't sting quite as much. The air felt a little easier to breathe.

I climbed the concrete stairs, my heavy boots scuffing the steps, and slid the key into the lock. The second I pushed the cheap metal door open, I was instantly hit by the rich, savory smell of chicken curry and the undeniable, soul-soothing scent of home.

"Kaito? Is that you?" A melodious voice called me.

Lucy emerged from the tiny kitchenette. She was wearing one of my oversized, faded gray t-shirts—the one with the cracked band logo—and had her hair tied up in a messy bun. There was a tiny, endearing smudge of curry sauce on her left cheek, holding a wooden spoon like a scepter.

To me, in that exact moment, standing amidst the cheap linoleum and the peeling wallpaper, she was the most breathtaking, wonderfully illogical creature in the entire universe. She was an angel who had somehow decided to live with a mole in the dirt.

I dropped my heavy, sixty-pound toolbag onto the entryway floor with a dull, echoing thud. I didn’t care that my clothes were coated in toxic grime. I didn’t care that my muscles were screaming for rest. I didn't care about the world outside that door.

I closed the distance between us in two quick, purposeful strides and grabbed her.

My rough, heavily calloused hands slid down to her waist, moving to touch her ribs, pulling her flush against me with a desperate, grounding, overwhelming force. I crushed her to my chest, erasing every single millimeter of distance between us, and buried my face deep into the crook of her neck, breathing in the scent of her skin, the shampoo, the spices.

It wasn't a casual, normal hug. It was the frantic grip of a drowning man who had been underwater for fourteen hours and had just breached the surface for his first gasp of air. It was deeply possessive, raw, and vital. I buried my face in her shoulder, letting out a long, shuddering breath, feeling the tension drain out of my spine and transfer into the floorboards.

Lucy gasped sharply for a fraction of a second, surprised by the sudden intensity. But then, she melted entirely into me. Her body softened, conforming perfectly to the hard angles of mine.

"Welcome home, darling," she whispered into my ear, her breath tickling my skin.

But today, she was... different.

I couldn't quite put my finger on it in my exhausted state, but she was clingier. More frantic. More anxious than usual.

She dropped the wooden spoon onto the counter with a clatter and wrapped both of her arms tightly around my neck, burying her face against my shoulder with an intensity that matched my own. Her fingers dug into the fabric of my dirty jacket.

"I missed you to death," she murmured, and there was a slight, almost imperceptible tremor in her voice. A fragility that hadn't been there yesterday.

Lucy's grip on me tightened, as if she was afraid that I would have gone away from her.

"Me too... me too," I said, before slowly pulling away and giving her a soft kiss on her lips.

For the rest of the evening, she didn't leave my side for a single second. It was as if she believed that if she let go of my hand, I would have disappeared again.

While I sat at our small, wobbly dining table and ravenously ate the hot curry, she practically sat on top of me. She pulled her chair flush against mine, wrapping herself around my left arm and resting her head heavily on my shoulder.

She watched me eat with wide, glassy eyes, seemingly terrified of putting any physical distance between us. Every so often, she would lean up to press small, desperate, lingering kisses to my jaw or my cheek, looking at me with eyes swimming in unspoken worry and a dark, heavy remorse I mistook for affection.

"You work too hard, Kaito," she told me later. "Y-You need to rest."

We had moved to the small couch.

I was sitting on the floor between her legs while she ran her soft fingers gently through my hair, massaging the aching, knotted muscles at the base of my skull. Her touch felt like heaven.

It erased Roppongi, Tanaka, and all my stress from that day.

"You're destroying your health," she continued, her voice thick with emotion. "I hate seeing you come home looking like a ghost. You don't have to do this for us."

"I'm building our future," I corrected her, leaning my head back against her knees and giving her a tired, genuine smile. "It's an investment. Just a little longer."

She stopped massaging for a second, her hands hovering over my shoulders. She swallowed hard, looking away toward the hallway.

For an instant, I saw Lucy biting her lower lip.

'Just a little longer.' I've used this sentence for so long now that I've lost count.

"I... lit those new candles in the bedroom," she added, her voice dropping an octave, trying to sound cheerful but failing to hide the slight crack in her tone. "The expensive ones I bought yesterday. The vanilla and sandalwood ones. They're to help me relax... and to help you relax. You need to turn your brain off tonight, Kaito. Let me take care of you."

"Vanilla and sandalwood," I repeated, closing my eyes and letting the sheer comfort of the moment wash over me. "Perfect."

Later, in the profound darkness of our small bedroom, illuminated only by the faint, flickering, golden light of that expensive scented candle on the nightstand, we lay under the heavy quilt.

After some special time together, she fell asleep just like she had that morning—her head resting squarely on my chest, her arm thrown across my stomach, holding onto me so tightly it felt like she was afraid I was the one who was going to disappear.

I lay awake for a few minutes longer. I looked at my scarred, calloused hands again in the flickering candlelight. They still ached. The phantom vibration of the power tools still rattled in my bones. The world out there was cruel, it was violently unfair, and it was methodically eating me alive, day by day, hour by hour.

But as I slowly, rhythmically stroked her light brown hair, feeling the steady rise and fall of her breathing against me, I thought about the picture of the diamond ring carefully hidden in my wallet. I thought about the house in Chiba. I thought about the garden, and how beautiful she would look with a wedding dress and... a baby in her arms.

'I'm just a normal guy,' I thought, letting my heavy eyelids finally drift shut. 'I'm a nobody. But as long as I have her... as long as she's holding me like this... I am the luckiest man in the entire world.'

I fell asleep with a peaceful, foolish smile on my face, completely lulled into absolute security by the rich, warm scent of vanilla and sandalwood.

The scent of my happiness.

The scent of the perfect, fragile, doomed illusion.