The hospital room smelled of disinfectant and quiet desperation.
Alex stared at the ceiling from his bed, tracking a hairline crack that ran from the light fixture to the far wall. It was something to focus on — something that didn't stare back.
Outside the window, the city carried on without him. Indifferent, as it had always been.
He had grown up in St. Maren's Orphanage, a grey building full of grey rules and grey meals. It wasn't a cruel place, exactly — just a hollow one. The kind of place that didn't break you so much as it slowly emptied you out.
But Alex had always been a quick learner. He watched, he listened, and he adapted.
By the time he aged out at eighteen, he had taught himself enough coding and design work to land a handful of freelance clients. By nineteen, he had his own small apartment, a secondhand desk, and a quiet pride in the life he had built entirely by himself.
Earth had never been generous to him, but it had been his. The noise of the city, the smell of rain on concrete, the glow of a laptop screen at two in the morning — these were the textures of a life he understood.
Then his eyes changed.
It started one ordinary morning. He had woken up, shuffled to the bathroom mirror, and froze. His eyes — once a plain, unremarkable brown — shimmered faintly, like molten gold catching the light.
He blinked. They blinked back, strange and knowing.
The ability revealed itself slowly, the way a language becomes understandable after long enough immersion. When he looked at people, he began to see things that shouldn't have been visible.
A coworker's irritation flaring like a heat haze around her shoulders. A cashier's sadness pooling at the corners of his eyes long before any tear formed. Affection, contempt, fear, longing — emotions hung around people like auras, readable as words on a page.
And more unsettling still, he could tell when someone was lying. The deception showed itself as a faint flicker — a dissonance between what their eyes said and what their mouth offered.
It should have felt like a gift.
Instead, it felt like standing too close to a speaker with the volume turned all the way up.
The headaches came first. Dull and persistent, nested behind his eyes like something trying to push its way out.
Then the nosebleeds — sudden and violent, striking him in the middle of a work call, in the grocery store, once while he was crossing the street.
He had tried to control the ability, to close it off the way you might squint against bright light. But it didn't respond to willpower. It simply was, constant and consuming, and it was slowly tearing him apart from the inside.
Now he lay in a hospital bed at nineteen years old, an IV needle taped to the back of his hand, listening to the rhythmic beep of a monitor that measured a life he hadn't yet had the chance to fully live.
He hadn't been on a date. He had never let anyone close enough for that. No time, or perhaps no courage — he was never quite sure which.
He didn't know what it felt like to love someone, or to be loved in return. Not in the way he had sometimes watched couples through coffee shop windows with a strange, distant ache.
'I never even tried,' he thought, and the honesty of it hurt more than the headache behind his temples.
He closed his eyes — those treacherous, beautiful, ruinous eyes — and made himself a promise. Quiet. Fierce. Stubborn.
'If I get another chance, I won't waste it. Whatever life puts in front of me — I'll take it.'
The monitor beside him let out a long, unbroken tone.
And just like that, Alex's story on Earth came to an end.
His consciousness didn't disappear. It simply... untethered.
The hospital, the city, the entire familiar weight of the world he had known dissolved around him. What remained was a vast and endless void. No sound. No light. No sense of up or down.
Just the quiet echo of who he was, drifting through an infinite dark.
Then he felt it.
A pull. Slow and steady, like a warm hand reaching through the darkness and finding his. There was nothing threatening about it — no urgency, no force.
It felt almost like being guided home.
It wrapped around his formless soul with a comfort he had rarely known in life. He didn't resist it. He had no reason to.
He simply let it carry him — through the void and beyond, toward something unknown waiting on the other side.