Static fills the dark.
It presses against my ears, heavy and endless. No sky. No ground. No walls. Just a storm of broken sound.
From that storm, a figure forms.
A woman.
Her outline flickers in and out, light stitched together with trembling hands. Her hair glows faint blue, spilling across her shoulders as if made of fire under water. Her face shakes at the edges, blurring, repairing, breaking again. Then her eyes lock on mine.
They should not exist in this place. They are too alive. Too sharp. Too full of something the void cannot erase.
I know her. Even when the storm tries to make me forget, I know her.
She lifts her hand. Fingers stretch toward me through the static. Her arm dissolves at the wrist, eaten by the storm, but she does not pull back. She never does.
"Don't forget," she whispers.
The words shatter. They splinter into dozens of echoes, distorted, layered with voices that are not hers. The sound cuts like broken glass dragged over stone.
Still I cling to them.
Light bursts across the void. White so bright it blinds. I reach. My hand meets hers, almost. I can feel the warmth of her palm in the thin space between us. For a heartbeat, it is only us.
Then she is gone.
The static returns harder, filling every breath, crawling down my skin. I open my fist and hold nothing. Always nothing.
Faces bloom and vanish in the noise. Mouths half-formed, eyes empty. They smear and fade before I can grasp them. People who might have been family. Friends whose voices once carried laughter. Strangers I should remember but cannot. Every cycle strips more away.
Every patch erases her too.
But not for me.
I remember.
Even when the city smooths itself into perfection. Even when streets rebuild overnight and names collapse into silence. Even when smiles are painted on the faces of strangers. I carry her with me.
Fragments.
Her laugh, light as a flame in the cold.
The brush of her fingers in a crowd, a touch so fleeting it could have been imagined.
The tiny scar at the corner of her mouth that the patch always tries to erase.
Pieces. Shards. Enough to cut myself on. Enough to keep her alive.
Her name trembles on my lips. I whisper it into the storm so it cannot take it from me too.
Lena.
The sound steadies me. The storm bends around it.
Lena.
The void splits. A mirror shattering. Light spears through. For an instant, I see her hair again, blue fire rippling in unseen wind. I almost breathe.
Then it is gone.
Only the static remains.
It presses until I cannot tell if this place is memory or dream or punishment. My body dissolves at the edges, threads of me pulling into the noise.
But even as I fade, even as the world claws at me with perfect lies, I cling to one truth.
I remember her.
And I will not forget.