Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
JETT
Darkness.
The star-studded Void reached into infinity around him.
It whispered sweet nothings, sang to him, bullied him, promised him rest.
Release.
He deserved rest after everything life had thrown at him: abandonment, pain, blood, death. His life had been defined by those, but the Void promised him an end to pain. Eternal rest after a lifetime of agony.
Rest.
He wanted that, wanted it more than he wanted to open his eyes, more than he wanted to feel, more than he wanted to breathe. He wanted to rest more than anything else.
“Ji-tae,” a voice said, full of longing and fear.
Ji-tae. Jett. Those were his name. The names he’d worn like a shroud for 46 years. But he didn’t know who the speaker was, where the voice came from, why it was so sad.
Rest.
“I don’t know if you can hear me, Jett.” The voice continued, soft as rose petals, solemn as the grave. “I miss you.”
Darkness fell once more, the voice fading with the whispers of the Void.
“It’s been a week since you died.”
That voice tugged on something in Jett’s core.
The deepest part of his soul yearned to touch the speaker, to feel their embrace.
A thread bundled into a cord braided into a rope between them, a tangible hold on Jett that existed elsewhere.
It was warm, comforting, a balm on the pain Jett still felt. He wrapped himself in the feeling.
Rest. Rest.
“I can’t—” The voice cut out, choked by the darkness. “I can’t do this without you. They ask all these questions, all the time. They echo in my head. I—”
Jett’s soul burned for the speaker as a pulsing sound echoed around him. He knew that tone, that cadence, he’d heard it before, but the memory was clogged, hazy. Jett wrapped the tether to the speaker around him, basked in the warmth.
Restrestrestrestrestrestre—
Jett knew this feeling. This smell, this touch.
He knew it like he knew his agonies. It was the warmth that made him sleep at night; the touch that soothed him when he ached.
But he lost the thread as the darkness whispered promises of rest and everything faded once more.
“Jett. Please,” the voice pleaded, waking Jett from his rest. “Please come back to me. I can feel you there, but you’re fading so fast.”
The voice spoke louder than the whispered refrain of “Rest.”
He heard despair in the speaker’s voice—the man’s voice. He knew it was a man just as he knew he was a man.
“Jett, I need you back…”
Love.
REST REST REST
Jett knew love. He knew it as warmth on his lips, as comfort in the dark. He knew the voice had been his savior. The one to drag him from the brink of death, of despair.
“Jett.”
The tether strengthened its pull against the darkness that bellowed ‘REST.” Heat burned away the aching cold in Jett. It promised and pleaded, pulled harder, grew brighter, warmer.
REST
Jett was drawn to the warmth like a moth to flame. He knew it, and it knew him. He fled the cold, the worry, the despair. He fled rest because he remembered that there was so much more he wanted to do.
He fled because he remembered who the speaker was.
“I love you.”
Eddie.
His Eddie.
The warmth and smell and comfort came from him. His lover, his beloved. The man he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.
Jett pulled on the darkness, on the tendrils snaked around his limbs, tearing from them. And woke.
Screaming.