Beckett
I can’t look at anything else.
The ceiling. The same water stain in the corner. I’ve been here since I woke up and I knew the second I opened my eyes — before Rane said a word, before anyone told me anything — I just knew. The same way you know when a room has changed while you were gone. Something missing from the air.
She’s not here.
And it keeps circling. The way she looked at Rane right before.
The moment I saw it — and I did see it, that’s the thing I can’t get away from — I saw her face settle into something decided and I had one second where I understood what was happening and then the dart hit and the ground came up and that was it.
One second.
It cost everything.
She’d barely finished saying yes before I was already gone. But I heard it. Even under, somewhere, I heard it. Small and quiet and certain the way she does everything.
I should have been faster. I keep coming back to that and I know it’s useless and I keep coming back to it anyway.
She sacrificed herself. Stood there and did the math the same way I do, except hers ended with her walking away with them instead of us lying in the dirt.
And the worst part — the part that’s been sitting on my chest since I woke up — is that I knew she would.
I knew it before it happened. I’ve known it for months.
I’ve watched her whole life in miniature, in the small things.
The way she ate like the food might disappear.
The way she made herself small in doorways, in rooms, in conversations.
The way she found the edges of every space and stayed there.
I know what that is. Not just surviving — that’s too clean a word for it.
It’s making yourself invisible so completely that eventually you forget there’s anything left to see.
I know what that costs.
I’ve done it too. Different walls, different corners, same architecture. You give up everything that makes you a target and you call it living and after a while you stop noticing what’s gone.
She was learning to be exactly who she was meant to be. That’s what I can’t put down. Reach for things. Stay in the room instead of finding the exit. It was slow and uneven and half the time she didn’t even know she was doing it but I noticed.
I always noticed.
And now she’s gone and the ceiling has the same water stain it had the day we got here. Rane is talking. Vaelor is in the kitchen. My hands are doing nothing. That one second keeps running on a loop in my mind, but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s not here.
And I let it happen.