He didn't move.
Time had either stopped entirely or abandoned him, skipping past his body like water around a rock. He remained at his desk, motionless, fingers resting lightly on the wood, eyes locked on that same meaningless crack in the wall. The world had become mute. A grainy, black-and-white film playing on a screen he couldn't turn off. He felt the furious beating of his heart, sharp and frantic like wings slamming against a cage—but he couldn't hear it. Couldn't hear anything.
The phone lay on the floor below, a lifeless shard of plastic. Not a device anymore, but a weapon—its last transmission now a toxin seeping through his bloodstream.
From somewhere below, a voice filtered upward, muffled by floors and grief.
"Everything okay up there, honey?" his mother called. Her tone was light, unaware, preserved in the amber of five minutes ago. "That was a loud thud."
He didn't answer. He couldn't. The idea of forming sound felt like someone asking a statue to sing. The world around him had thickened into something unbreathable. The air didn't move. Nothing did.
Then came the sound of footsteps on the stairs, each one pulling him slightly closer to the surface, but not enough. His mother appeared in the doorway, her expression warm and curious—until she saw him.
The smile drained from her face like ink bleeding from paper.
Her eyes took him in: skin gone colorless, posture slack, eyes staring but seeing nothing. In a heartbeat, something inside her understood. The kind of knowing that lives in a parent's bones.
"Alex?" she whispered, crossing the room quickly, kneeling beside him. She hovered there, hand inches from his arm, afraid to touch him—as if contact might shatter him into pieces she wouldn't know how to gather. "Sweetheart, what happened? What is it?"
He turned his head toward her. Slowly. Mechanically. Like every muscle in his body had to remember how to function.
He looked at her face—the fear creeping up behind her concern—and tried to make his mouth work. The words caught in his throat, foreign and sharp, like they'd never belonged to language at all. He choked them out anyway, because he had no choice. Because she needed to know.
"Leo," he said, his voice cracked and dry, barely more than air. "He's… gone."
The look in her eyes changed instantly.
First confusion. Then horror.
Her hand flew to her mouth, stifling the cry that broke loose. Her knees buckled slightly where she crouched beside him, and for a moment, she seemed just as lost as he was.
That reaction—the way she broke—was what made it real.
Until that moment, it hadn't fully landed. The grief had been theoretical, abstract, like a nightmare he hadn't woken up from. But seeing it hit someone else, watching it punch the air from her lungs—that made it true. It gave the tragedy weight.
His father appeared next, drawn by the sound of her grief. He stopped in the doorway, taking in the scene: his wife crumpled on the floor, his son unmoving, the phone on the ground like a crime scene marker. Understanding spread across his face like frost, slow and dreadful.
Then came motion. Quiet chaos.
His parents became a blur of urgent movement, trying to do something—anything—to make it better. His dad disappeared to make calls, his voice low and shaking. His mom tried to talk to him, her words soft and breaking, fingers brushing his shoulder as if physical contact might pull him out of whatever pit he'd fallen into.
But it didn't. Her touch registered on his skin like cold air, nothing more.
He was inside himself, unreachable. An island surrounded by a sea of panic. He could see them, could hear them vaguely, like voices through thick glass—but none of it touched him. He was adrift in the eye of the storm, a stillness that hurt more than the panic would've.
At some point—minutes or hours later, time had abandoned all structure—two new figures filled the doorway.
Billie. Finneas.
They didn't speak.
Billie's hand was over her mouth. Finneas looked like someone had punched him in the gut. His fists were clenched, jaw locked, his whole body radiating disbelief. The kind of shock that doesn't look loud—it looks still. Like he's holding in a scream.
Billie's eyes immediately went to Alex.
And something in her face fractured.
Because she saw it. Saw him. Or rather, didn't. The Alex in front of her wasn't just quiet—he was absent. She moved into the room on instinct, one step forward, hand halfway raised, reaching for something she couldn't define.
But the moment she crossed the threshold, she felt it.
The wall.
Not a physical one, but real nonetheless. An invisible, humming field of grief and dissociation. Her hand hovered in the air, useless, then dropped back to her side. Because no amount of presence—no closeness, no history—could penetrate what had sealed him off.
And for the first time, Billie couldn't reach him.
That truth hit her like a fresh blow. She turned her face away slightly, blinking too hard, breathing too fast. She had always been the one to spot the shadows in him before they grew. But now? There was nothing to spot. The shadows had taken over. The boy she knew was no longer looking back.
Around him, love surged. Parents. Friends. His people. All of them broken. All of them trying.
But Alex? He remained still.
Not asleep. Not unconscious.
Just… gone.
He sat in the middle of them all, not seeing, not hearing, not feeling. Staring at a world that had collapsed in the space of a single sentence. The music that had once filled his life, the drive, the ambition, the noise—it was all gone now. All that remained was silence.
And even that was too loud.