Ethan tried to count his breaths. One, two—then the numbers smeared, and the darkness changed.
A picture frame.
A young man stared back, jaw set in that stubborn way, fine lines bracketing his eyes. The glass was spiderwebbed with cracks that caught light. Ethan reached for it and his fingers met cold glass—then nothing, like the surface stepped aside between heartbeats.
He knew that jaw. He'd seen it in the mirror for forty-seven years. I know him.. He's my..
Another frame slid in, edges tapping soft. Two young women, shoulder to shoulder, smiles practiced for someone else's camera. Hair pinned back tight on one, loose and stubborn on the other, a curl refusing to behave. They looked like sisters. They looked like—
The third image arrived and the dream turned mean.
A hospital bed. Fluorescent light making skin look too thin. A woman slick with sweat, hair plastered to her forehead, arms trembling with exhaustion and relief. A newborn in her arms—purple-red and slick, eyes squeezed shut, fist already curling.
The woman's face flickered. For a moment she was older, familiar in a way that made his chest ache—then younger, the same stubborn curl from the photograph plastered wet against her temple. Mother and daughter. The same bed. The same moment. Two births layered over each other like photographs left too long in the same sleeve.
The photo was too close. He could see the raw smear on the sheet, the clamp of a wristband, the thin plastic line of an IV taped down. His gut tightened hard, and his mind tried to dim the scene the way it dimmed everything else that threatened to split him open—colors bleeding out at the edges first, red turning brown, skin going gray.
The baby's fingers stayed sharp anyway.
He couldn't remember the baby's name.
The thought hit like a snapped cord. Ethan tried to force the name up through his teeth, to pin it to something real, but his mouth filled with cotton and the word died behind his tongue.
The frames flipped faster, one after another, rifling through a drawer they had no right to open.
A classroom. Fluorescent buzz too loud, chairs scraping too sharp. Other kids laughing at something he couldn't parse—the joke, he didn't understand, and when he tried to join in they went quiet and stared. The teacher's hand on his shoulder, gentle but firm, steering him back to his desk. Alone again. Safer that way.
A dinner table. His father's voice rising, not yelling yet but building toward it, and Ethan's hands gripping his fork too tight because if he could just hold still enough, small enough, maybe the attention would skip over him. It never did. His father's face inches away, breath smelled like cigarettes, hot on his face, demanding to know why Ethan couldn't just be normal, why he always had to ask smartass questions, why the hell he had that look on his face was. Ethan didn't know what look. He never knew. He picked himself up and went to his room and he wouldn't ask a second time.
The weight of learning to pull himself down. To compress. To fit in. To not draw attention, to not stand out. So he wouldn't see it, the faces that meant he'd done something wrong again without knowing what. It was best not to ask. Play his Gameboy in the corner. Read his magazines. Stay out of everyone's way. Keep it to yourself.
Years of it—making himself less, smaller, quieter—until the mask was so heavy he couldn't remember what his face looked like underneath.
Then her. Standing in the doorway, hands grabbing his sleeve, mouth moving fast, wet-eyed, pleading. The dream turned the volume down but the meaning landed: Don't go. Please. I'll fix it. Don't leave.
Ethan stepped back. Not dramatic, not cruel—just an inch of space that might as well have been a canyon. Robot mode, she'd called it, she hated him for being able to function, for being able to pick up the pieces and walk away without collapsing where she could see it.
He couldn't stay after that. He couldn't live in a house that had lied to him and call it home.
Her face was there—he could see it, could see the exact way her mouth twisted when she realized he wasn't going to break down, wasn't going to beg, wasn't going to give her the reaction she needed. But her name—
Her name was a hole.
Twenty-one years of marriage and he couldn't remember what to call her.
Paper next: divorce documents on a table, signature lines like cuts. A cardboard box with KITCHEN scrawled in thick marker. An apartment that sounded wrong—too empty, footsteps too loud, refrigerator humming and buzzing in the silence.
In the corner of the scene, Stephanie sat cross-legged on the floor among half-packed boxes, laptop open, mug of tea steaming beside her, and she talked him through it the way she talked him through everything: one step, next step, breathe.
Ethan's chest loosened on reflex. Relief rose like a hand finding a rail.
Stephanie.
Her name came easy. Her face came easy. She was whole in his memory, every detail sharp, and that should have been comforting but instead it made his stomach drop because why her—why could he remember her when he couldn't remember his own children's names?
Stephanie looked up and smiled, and it wasn't flirtation—not yet. It was steadiness offered like a tool you could grip.
His hand came up and found his headset on the desk: black plastic, familiar weight, the little nick on the band where he'd dropped it last month. His fingers slid over it without friction, and the helplessness hit hard because it was so stupidly specific—he could see it, but he couldn't touch it.
A wrong note threaded the air—thin and clean, too steady to be static. The coffee in his mug rippled. Not from shaking. Rings ran outward as if something breathed on the surface. Then the liquid climbed the ceramic wall for a heartbeat before remembering it was supposed to fall.
Reality blinked.
Not an earthquake. A missed beat, and then everything returned slightly misaligned—the desk grain too perfect, the monitor's glow lagging behind his eyes.
He braced his palm on the desk. For an instant the texture was there—hard, ridged, real.
Then his hand sank.
Stephanie leaned close to her camera and her face had gone pale. Her eyes flicked past him, over his shoulder.
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Something moved behind him.
Stephanie saw it and her mouth opened. Her scream hit the mic—tinny, distorted—and the world tore.
It peeled, as if a thin skin of everything he knew was being pulled off glass, leaving bright nothing underneath. The edges of his monitors stretched into ribbons. The walls went translucent. The sound of Stephanie's scream narrowed until it was a thread.
Then it snapped.
Something seized him. Not his wrists. Not his ankles. It grabbed the point inside him that made him him, and his body hung there heavy and irrelevant.
A hand appeared in the brightness. It was simply a hand because it behaved like one: grasp, pressure at his sternum, fingers sinking in without breaking skin. Ethan felt them pass through flesh like flesh wasn't the layer that mattered.
They found the center.
They took hold.
Then they tore.
Blue fire drove into his chest in a narrow line, cold and intimate, and his nerves discovered new words for hurt. It burned behind his eyes, under his tongue, inside the places he didn't know could feel anything at all.
In the middle of it, one clear thought punched through—clean, ordinary, devastating.
My daughter is bringing the baby by.
The image arrived with it: her at his front door, carrier awkward against her hip, smile tired but proud. The baby's face scrunched in newborn anger.
Ethan wasn't there.
He wouldn't be there.
His office faded into view—chair turned slightly toward the desk like he'd meant to come right back. The mug on its coaster, coffee gone cold. The headset cable draped over the edge like something severed.
A bracketed line flashed across the brightness: [AUTHORITY SEEDING: REJECTED]. The letters burned across his vision, then collapsed. Another line followed: [CRITICAL INSTABILITY: SOUL COLLAPSE IMMINENT].
Stephanie's scream returned, distant now, filtered through thick walls. It wasn't just her yelling his name. It was the sound of someone realizing they couldn't reach you.
The brightness peeled away and replaced itself with a hallway lined in doors.
Each door had a photograph taped to it.
His son in a cap and gown, grin too wide—the same jaw from the cracked frame, the same stubborn set Ethan saw in his own reflection. One daughter in a dress, pretending not to be nervous. The other daughter on that hospital bed, exhausted and triumphant, holding her newborn.
Ethan ran. The doors slid away from him, keeping the same distance no matter how fast he moved.
At the end of the hallway, the last door stood open a crack.
Stephanie was behind it, one hand braced on the frame, the other reaching toward him. Her face was wet. Her lips moved: Stay with me.
He surged forward and the space between them stretched. His lungs strained. The blue pain flared, and the grip around his center tightened.
The door slammed.
Ethan hit it with both palms. Smooth, cold wood. He pounded and the sound came out muffled. On the other side, the world kept going.
Stephanie at her desk, headset half on, one hand shaking as she grabbed her phone. Her thumb fumbled. Her voice came out ragged and urgent: Police. Address. Something happened. Please.
She called again—someone else this time. Ethan saw his ex-wife's face in his mind, not as an enemy, just as the woman he'd left after she broke something he couldn't glue back together—first reaction hard, defensive, then collapsing into pure fear because Stephanie's voice would crack and the situation would be bigger than their wreckage.
The dream cut.
His front door. A knock, light and hopeful. His daughter shifted the carrier higher on her hip, smiling as if to say Look what I brought you, and her hand tightened around the strap when no footsteps came from inside.
Another knock, harder.
Her smile slid away. The baby's face screwed up, mouth opening in a silent wail.
Ethan tried to push himself into the scene, to open the door, to grab at the carrier. He couldn't get past the threshold. The frame held him out like a rule.
He understood then—with cold clarity that tasted like ash—that this wasn't a nightmare about dying.
It was a nightmare about being missing.
No goodbye. No body. No proof. Just a hole in the world where he used to be, and the people who loved him forced to circle it until they wore themselves raw.
Stephanie's voice rose again, shredded now: "Ethan!"
He jerked toward it, and the dream rewarded him with the last image it knew would hurt: his grandson, not a newborn anymore but a toddler now, a year old, standing unsteady on fat legs, one hand reaching up toward empty air, searching for a hand that wasn't there.
Then the world tipped hard.
Wet grass slammed into his back. Cold air punched the breath out of him. The taste of smoke snapped into the taste of earth, and the ache in his ribs returned.
His grandson's hand reached in that last frame—just a reflex, just air—but Ethan's mind wrapped around it like a lifeline.
Don't forget.
The words weren't spoken. They bloomed inside him, loud and sick with urgency, because he could feel it coming—the slip, the fade, the cruel erasure that waking always brought. Names first. Then faces. Then the warmth of holding something that mattered.
And he'd felt this before.
The recognition hit him in the gut. The cave. The darkness after he fell. He'd been here before—not this exact place, but this exact moment. Standing at the edge of waking with his hands full of something precious and feeling it drain out between his fingers.
He'd fought then, too. He must have. He'd clawed and screamed and begged, and it hadn't mattered, and when he woke in the dark with his ribs broken and his head ringing he'd had nothing—no names, no faces, just a hollow ache where something important used to be.
It was happening again.
The baby's name.
It wouldn't come.
His chest hitched. Desperation surged hot and wild. He remembered the color of his grandson's eyes but not the syllables he'd said so many times this past year. He remembered the way his daughter looked at him when she placed the carrier on the floor—proud, tired, trusting him with something she'd made.
Her name. What was her name?
He'd named her. He'd held her in a hospital room twenty years ago and he'd said the name he and his wife had picked out and she'd opened her eyes for the first time and looked at him and—
Gone.
I'm losing them.
The realization cracked through him. Not that he'd died. Not that he'd disappeared.
That he'd forget.
That he was already forgetting, had already forgotten, had woken up in a cave with broken ribs and no memory of the life he'd lived and he hadn't even known to grieve because you can't mourn what you don't remember losing.
He clawed for anything solid—birthdays, Six Flags trips, the Minecraft pickaxe his son loved so much it broke in three places. His brain coughed up details but not in order, not in time. He tried to say them out loud, to list his children like they were coordinates on a map, but the dream had already started tearing pages from the book.
Three kids. I have three kids. A son and two daughters. The younger daughter just had a baby. The baby's name is—
Static.
My son graduated from—
Static.
My older daughter, she works at—
Static. Static. Static.
Please, not this.
He wasn't asking the dream. He wasn't asking whatever force had brought him here. He was asking anything that would listen—any god, any system, any cruel architect of this place that had decided he was worth taking but not worth leaving whole.
Take the pain. Take the fire. Take whatever you want from me, just—
Let him keep them.
Let him keep their faces, at least. Their voices. The way his son laughed too loud at his own jokes. The way his older daughter rolled her eyes when he made bad puns. The way his younger daughter held her baby like she'd finally figured out what she was supposed to be doing with her life.
The waking pressed closer. He could feel it at the edges—warmth replacing cold, the smell of smoke thickening, his body remembering it had weight.
No. Not yet. I'm not done—I haven't—
He grabbed at the grandson's face. Held it in his mind with everything he had. Memorized the scrunch of the nose, the unsteady legs, the reaching hand.
I'll remember this. I'll hold onto this one thing and when I wake up I'll still have it and I'll know—I'll KNOW I had a family, I'll know I was someone's father, someone's grandfather, I'll—
His grandson's hand reached again. Small fingers grasping. One year old and already learning that sometimes the people you love aren't there when you need them.
Ethan reached back.
Nothing. Too late.
And the world went black.
Ethan's eyes flew open.
Darkness—real darkness—pressed in close. Rough fabric scratched his cheek. Something soft shifted under his shoulder when he moved. Somewhere nearby, embers gave off faint heat and the smell of last night's smoke.
He lay still for two breaths, inventory running before thought could catch up. Air, pain, where—then his hand went to his chest before he could stop it, palm pressing the spot that still remembered blue fire.
His mouth tasted like ash.
Wasn't he reaching for something?
His hand was still extended. Fingers curled around nothing.
There had been—something small. Something important. He'd been trying to hold onto—
The shape dissolved before he could name it.
And the names were gone.
gone .
...no...please breathe...look...