The room was dark.
Not the dramatic kind of darkness that swallowed light entirely, but the familiar, lived-in dimness of a space that had learned to exist without the sun. Curtains drawn tight. Lamps ignored. Shadows layered over one another until the room felt smaller than it was.
The only real illumination came from the monitor.
Its harsh blue glow cut across the cluttered desk and spilled onto the floor, casting warped silhouettes that shifted subtly with each flicker of the screen. Dust motes drifted lazily through the light, visible only when they passed close enough to catch its glow.
The monitor pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
Then froze.
A victory banner stretched across the display, edges shimmering faintly as celebratory music looped again. Confetti hovered mid-fall, frozen in artificial triumph. Numbers sat proudly at the top of the screen—experience gained, rewards tallied, achievements unlocked.
GAME CLEARED.
Liam stared at it.
The final boss lay motionless at the center of the screen. An over-designed monstrosity with too many wings, too many glowing weak points, and a health bar that had once taken up nearly a quarter of the interface.
Now it was gone.
Replaced by nothing.
"…That's it?" he murmured.
His voice sounded strange in the quiet room—unused, slightly hoarse, like it had been resting for hours. His fingers hovered above the keyboard, twitching once as muscle memory screamed for another command.
Another prompt.
Another emergency.
Another problem that demanded solving.
Nothing came.
No hidden phase.
No sudden reversal.
No last-minute betrayal or secret ending.
Just… completion.
The kind people were supposed to feel good about.
Liam leaned forward slightly, elbows resting on his knees, eyes fixed on the screen as if staring hard enough might force it to change its mind.
It didn't.
The victory music looped again, cheerful and oblivious.
He leaned back in his chair and let out a short laugh.
Not happy.
Not sad.
Just tired.
"Well," he said aloud, the sound swallowed quickly by the room, "congratulations to me."
The words didn't echo.
They weren't meant to.
Around him, the room told its usual story.
Empty plastic bottles clustered near the desk, some upright, others fallen like casualties. Crumpled snack wrappers littered the floor, their faded branding peeling away as if even they had given up. Half-finished cups lined the shelf above his monitor—coffee gone cold at different stages of neglect, each abandoned mid-intention.
A hoodie hung off the back of a chair, worn thin at the elbows. A stack of books leaned precariously against the wall, spines cracked, bookmarks forgotten halfway through chapters that had once seemed important.
The quiet evidence of a life lived carefully out of sight.
This place had always been enough.
A small, controlled space where nothing demanded more than he could give. No expectations. No eyes watching. No pressure beyond what he allowed himself to feel.
Out there—beyond the door, beyond the thin walls of the apartment—life was loud. Messy. Complicated. Full of people who expected responses, progress, explanations.
In here, time obeyed.
He rolled his shoulders slowly, joints popping in the quiet, and glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen.
Late.
Later than he'd intended.
Again.
He thought about standing up. About stretching. About maybe opening the window, letting in air that didn't smell faintly of electronics and stale coffee.
He didn't do any of that.
Instead, he reached toward the edge of the desk, fingers brushing against a cup that was long past empty.
"Water," he muttered. "Just water and then I—"
The pain didn't warn him.
It didn't creep in or build.
It detonated.
A white-hot spike tore straight through his skull, violent enough to steal his breath and his thoughts in the same instant. His vision fractured violently, the room warping as if reality itself had slipped sideways.
"—what—"
The chair rolled backward as his arms flailed uselessly, fingers scrabbling for balance that wasn't there. He hit the floor hard, the impact knocking the air from his lungs in a sharp, humiliating wheeze.
Pain radiated outward from his head, down his neck, into his shoulders. Bottles toppled nearby, one splitting open as liquid spread uselessly across the floor just out of reach.
Okay, his mind scrambled distantly, this is bad. This is very bad.
He tried to sit up.
Nothing responded.
His arms lay at odd angles, heavy and uncooperative. His fingers twitched weakly, numb and distant, as though they belonged to someone else. His chest tightened painfully, lungs refusing to draw in more than shallow, panicked gasps.
"Oh," he thought dimly, fear finally cutting through the haze. I think I'm actually in trouble.
The ceiling blurred above him, swimming in and out of focus. The familiar cracks and discolorations looked strange from this angle, distorted by tears he hadn't realized had formed.
His heartbeat thundered in his ears—too loud, too fast—then stuttered.
Missed a beat.
Then another.
Behind him, the monitor continued to hum, cheerful and uncaring, looping idle victory sounds as if nothing had changed.
Hey, he wanted to say. Something's wrong. I need help.
But his mouth wouldn't open.
He tried again, forcing his jaw to move.
Nothing.
The thought arrived slowly, heavily, sinking into him like cold water.
No one's coming.
The realization didn't hurt as much as he expected. It didn't come with panic or despair.
It felt… quiet.
Heavy.
Final.
He lay there, staring at the ceiling as the sounds of the room began to stretch and smear. The hum of the monitor elongated, warping into something distant. The drip of liquid from the fallen bottle seemed to echo endlessly.
Darkness crept inward from the edges of his vision with unsettling patience.
Huh, he thought faintly, clinging to humor out of habit. So this is how it ends. On my floor. That's… on brand.
His heartbeat slowed.
The pressure in his chest eased slightly, replaced by a spreading numbness that dulled the pain into something distant and abstract. His thoughts drifted, unanchored.
He thought about the game.
About the hours he'd poured into it. The careful planning. The satisfaction of mastering systems that made sense, where effort produced results and failure could always be retried.
He thought about how it felt to clear something completely.
About how empty it felt now.
The monitor's glow flickered once.
Then blurred into nothing.
And as the last thread of awareness slipped away, one final thought surfaced—clearer than all the rest.
"I didn't even get the water."
Then there was darkness.