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▶• ılıılıılılıılıılı. 06

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📟 : record six 𖣠 your shadow mouths my name

⏯ synopsis : you’re a voice on the other side of the radio. she’s your wrong frequency — a mistake. a fortune, maybe, at the edge of a devastated world. you never told her your name. she never asked what you looked like. but when the nights get colder, in a world full of silence, you keep talking.

⏯ pairing : ellie williams & fem!reader

⏯ word count : 11.4k

⏯ a/n : i feel very nervous posting this. you'll understand why—i hope and i know you will. this part is huge, i'm SORRY, i hope (again) you won't get bored or tired while reading !! there are definitely still some mistakes and typos, i'm truly sorry for that. if you have anything to say after finishing, you're more than welcome to leave it in my comments and asks and even dms. i'm happy to see any kind of feedback. now, enjoy ♡︎

♡︎ taglist : @angelaut0matec @valeisaslut @bluminescent-moon @marleeeen111 @oneinameliann @500daysofpoppy @isabelckl @elliescoquettegirl @mars4hellokitty @wewerewildandfluorescent @ellsbigshoes @haminii @500daysofpoppy @purinukie @soltwent @stanseventeen @lesfortlouandarcane @ilovelliewilliamss @brooke111111

The night split open.

Not with thunder. Not with rain. Not with anything you could trace or predict. It was the most dangerous of all disasters.

Human.

Who brought screaming. Who brought fire. And after, they left the kind of silence that follows when you’re too afraid to breathe.

You sit hunched on the edge of your cot, elbows biting into your knees. Your palms lie open, raw, like you don’t know what to do with them. Your thumb won’t stop dragging over the pale creases—back and forth, back and forth—as if skin could erase blood, or the sound of people screaming your name. It only burns. Nothing fades.

The barracks breathe around you, restless and too alive. Boots scuff the floor, bunks groan under sudden movements, voices break in places where they shouldn’t. The air stings—burned rubber, damp earth, the sour press of sweat sunk into mattresses long before tonight. All of it clings to your tongue like you’ve been chewing on smoke.

Fear isn’t what you feel now.

It’s what keeps crawling back, hours later, when the noise is gone and the night pretends to be quiet again.

Right after, the world presses closer, every sound sharper, every movement too near. At first, it’s heat in the veins, a storm that shakes the cage of your chest. Then it freezes.

You feel it sooner than the others—where they burn on the fuel of adrenaline, you’re already fading pale, a shiver tracing the slope of your shoulders like frost finding its way in.

You close your eyes, but the dark doesn’t stay dark. It cracks with white flashes, the rattle of gunfire shredding the sky—and then the sky isn’t the only thing tearing. Your chest clamps tight. Your fingers twitch against each other like they want to creep away from you.

You never saw their faces. In this world, there are too many packs like them, crawling out of the dirt with empty hands and sharper teeth. They didn’t come for survival; they came for the noise, for the way fear swells in a room and makes it theirs. They left with batteries, with wire, with anything that hummed when you touched it.

They left with lives.

Voices are what you’ve always remembered best—their weight, their grain, the slips between syllables. But theirs you can’t recall. What stays are the boots; uniform in their way, mismatched in another. Boots taken from the dead, the thud and drag of them. You see them everywhere, pressed into mud, smearing across torn linoleum, stamped into the walls beside the blood.

Somewhere beneath the buzz, beneath the tremor in your fingers, a thread of memory catches. Your mind leans toward it. You are back there, before the storm broke.

Mia’s laughter still clung to you when you shut the door behind your back. She had slipped something into your palm before the shift—half a broken pencil, with a joke about ‘official station equipment.’ It was dumb, and you’d both laughed anyway.

You hung your jacket on the crooked nail hammered into the wall. Bent down, brushed your fingers along the cat that wove between your legs. Her fur had thickened, sleek with new health, scars almost swallowed under fresh hair. You touched the spot where her whiskers had started to grow again.

“Hey, mouse,” your voice came out in a quiet murmur. “How’s command without me?”

She pressed against you, purring like a tiny motor.

Light on. Switches flicked. Routine, steady. The ritual kept your hands busy, gave your mind the illusion of control. Check the dials. Test the band. Make notes. Same every time.

But that night, you rushed it.

Because there was weight low in your stomach, a knot pulled tight, threaded through with anticipation. You’d promised yourself: if the workload was light, if you cleared the calls quickly, you’d allow the indulgence. That small breach of protocol. A stolen turn of the dial. Her frequency.

That small, stubborn string of numbers.

You slipped your hand into your pocket without thinking and felt it. The pendant that always lay there.

For the longest time, it was nothing but weight in your pocket. Smooth from years of someone else’s life. No name, no numbers, no claim of yours upon it. Just a thin disc of tin, with the mark of a firefly stamped on its face, the black paint worn down to a faint blur; a ghost of someone else’s allegiance. An inheritance you never asked for. You kept it only because habits are hard to break—because your hands liked to find it there, rolling the edge between your fingers, tracing the circle like it might answer back.

It was after one of those nights—her voice low, tripping over itself as she told you scraps of childhood, military school, a friend she once had. Not details, not names, just the shape of a story, awkward and uneven.

She wasn’t used to speaking when silence on the other end meant listening, not absence. You weren’t used to holding a silence that mattered.

When the frequency became hers, when something inside you became hers irrevocably, when her words pressed too close, you looked at the pendant differently. Saw it as more than an orphaned trinket. You pulled a knife across the metal, scored the numbers in, your hand steady even as your chest was not.

Not because you needed to remember—you knew you couldn’t forget—but because you needed it to be real. To ground the weightless, to give the unspeakable a shape.

To trap it inside something small, something you could hold and carry beyond the walls of the radio room—the quiet illusion of her presence always within your reach.

You told her, then, that you’d never seen fireflies. Not the emblem, not the cause, just the insects themselves. The irony of it was almost funny, that you had spent so long under their shadow and never once beneath their glow.

She said they crowded her backyard in the summers. She didn’t suggest catching them in a jar for you.

You both already knew what it was to burn behind glass.

“Do they really shine?” you asked, voice careful, as if the wrong answer could scatter it all.

“Yellow,” she said. “Like bulbs. But not enough to light the dark.”

“Liars.”

And then there was silence.

Since then, the pendant has been different. Not a relic, but a vessel. A secret pressed into tin, cool against your palm whenever you reach for it. Were her hands as cool as tin?

You blinked and bit your lower lip hard, driving the thought away. Somehow, you just knew her hands were warm like late summer air. You released the little disk warmed by your fingers, shifted in your seat and glanced at your palms.

You’d marked your wrist, a tiny cross, so you wouldn’t forget the thing you wanted to ask her. The ink had worn off by the time you sat down. You tried to summon it back, frowning at your hand, distracted, chasing the ghost of the word.

The room was quiet, only the hum of the equipment. Out here, on the rise, the radiocabin always felt separate, half-removed from the rest of the base. Alone but secure.

You thought the main work was done.

Hours slipped between checks and logs, the clicks of switches, the scribble of your pen across the journal. Your handwriting had loosened, a little cursive, wide at the tips, lazy in a way you never allowed yourself. Notes spilled across the page in long, careless arcs, each word a small rebellion against your usual precision. You paused, reread, smirked at your own looseness, and felt—just for a heartbeat—that you’d earned it.

A reward for a few quiet days, a few stolen moments without disaster. You reached for the dial. The line you’d been waiting for. Jackson.

And then—

A sudden intervention of fate, a warning sign, a heightened animal sense that you ignored.

The cat, usually a perfect shadow, jumped. She hadn’t done this before, not in the cabin, not on the desks, not anywhere near the fragile things you left for her. She leapt straight onto the shelf and toppled the empty glass jar, dry autumn flowers scattering across the table, stems snapping like brittle bones.

You startled so hard you yanked the headphones from your head, the sudden silence pressing in.

“Shit.”

A sharp breath escaped you—not for the cat, but for the jolt that rattled straight through your chest.

The cat brushed past you, wide-eyed, alert. Something in the air, you realized, though you didn’t name it.

“Now you owe me a new jar, troublemaker,” you muttered under your breath with a smirk, and the cat meowed something in high tones.

By the time you crouched to gather the glass, the shards were everywhere—large, jagged, catching the faint light. You carried them carefully to the bin, brushed the dust from the table, set back the little things that had fallen with it. And in those minutes, the moment slipped. The voice, if there had been one, was gone.

At first, the sounds on the horizon were only noise, faint and unshaped. Then fire flared in the black sky. Bursts of guns. Screams. Your breath caught as you stumbled back to the desk, fingers shaking on the dial, switching to the regular channel—dead air. Nothing. They must have called you. From the east gate, or the far one, when they realized.

And you hadn’t answered.

You had been here, daydreaming about the girl you’d never seen, arguing with a cat, picking up spilled flowers, while the one thing they trusted you with fell apart in your hands. Mia had the shift at those gates. The others you’d just begun to know—people who smiled at you in the morning, who brought you old, half-broken devices, because they knew it was your little passion; who saved you a place in line or slipped you an extra piece of bread for your night watch.

They were all out there.

And you? You weren’t there for them.

The weight of it settled on your chest like a noose, dragging tighter with every breath. Cold spread through your ribs, crawling up to the base of your neck.

You were standing in the middle of the room, frozen, staring at the window as if the black sky might split open and show you something you weren’t ready to see. You couldn’t move closer, couldn’t step away. Couldn’t cross the door and disappear into hiding, but couldn’t run out either. Your body betrayed you, caught in the chokehold of its own hesitation.

You clenched your fists until your nails dug into skin, as if pain could anchor you, could make you act. But your hands still shook.

Anger flared, hot and useless, curling up your throat. You almost cursed yourself out loud. You hated this paralysis, this cowardice; most of all you hated yourself.

For a moment, you wanted nothing more than to collapse, to crawl under the table, press your forehead to your knees and cry until there was nothing left—cry so bitterly you could forget there was ever a choice to make, forget the weight of having to answer for it. Running headfirst into danger wouldn’t have been the hardest thing. What terrified you was the moment before—the decision itself, the breaking free of paralysis, the reclaiming of your own body.

To tilt the scale, to choose a side—that was always heavier than throwing yourself into the current and letting it carry you. But the seconds kept bleeding away, each one dragging a life onto that same trembling scale. Life didn’t wait for hesitation. Life didn’t forgive mistakes.

That night, you were unforgiven.

The radio coughed—first a wet crackle, then a torn syllable that was almost nothing and somehow everything. It raked through the fog behind your eyes like a hand, and you felt the numbness unthread, seam by trembling seam. Instinct came faster than thought: radio, always radio. Your body remembered before your head could argue.

A voice fought itself through the static—garbled, ragged, a name or an order caught on the edge of comprehension. “—east—” or “—gate—”. Whatever it said, it landed like a stone and made something else shout back up through you: do something.

You quickly wiped the damp of your cheeks, erasing any traces of shameful indecision.

You grabbed the knife without deciding. Your fingers closed on the handle as if they had done it a hundred times, though they hadn’t. The metal was colder than you had expected. It was blunt and useless for grand gestures; it was enough to hold, enough to put between you and the thing you might have feared. You tucked it into your fist like a promise.

There was no dramatic pause.

The room dissolved into motion: you shoved past the couch, feet finding rhythm before your mind finished bargaining. The door swung open and the night hit you—thin and sharp; the air smelled of smoke and something hotter, the ground was a hard, unfamiliar plane under your boots. Far off, fire threw a pocked light against the clouds. Closer, a shout snapped, and someone answered with a string of gunfire. Sound arranged itself into a map: toward, away, danger.

For a breath, you thought of staying—and letting the world sort itself without your small, imperfect hands. The thought was a treachery. Dropping into action was not courage. You ran because not running would have been to let the scale tip while you stood and watched.

You couldn’t watch life from the farthest window anymore. You were never a heroine, but for once, you decided to be a part of this life. To do something you wouldn’t regret after, rotting in delay and realizing that the moment was gone.

The shadow was turning into a figure. The night swallowed you whole.

You bury your face in your hands. Darkness blooms there, warm and close, the pulse a little too close to your temples.

This is the story. Half of its weightness lies on you.

When you rise, it feels like pulling yourself through water—slow, resistant, your body reluctant to follow the command. Your knees drag at the movement as if they would rather stay folded under you.

In the far corner, a mirror hangs crooked on the wall. The glass is dull, its surface mottled with shadows instead of reflections. It doesn’t give back a face so much as a shape.

You stop in front of it.

The jacket that once fit you now sags from your shoulders as if it belongs to someone else. Fabric pools where it shouldn’t. Angles replace softness: your collarbones push sharp beneath the skin, your shoulders drawn narrow, your chest hollowed by hunger that has grown too ordinary to even name. You look at it without alarm, without shame—like watching a cracked wall or a leaking roof. A fact. Something you live beside, not against.

You turn away, pulling the jacket closer, hunching yourself into its thin embrace. Cold chews at your fingertips. One boot threatens to give out, the sole peeling loose; you know another pair in your size would be a luxury, one more thing the base can’t afford.

And then—movement in the doorway. Mia’s head slips into the frame, her eyes finding you quick. She jerks her chin once, still softly for you, toward the corridor. No words. She doesn’t need them.

So you go. The cot behind you sags back into emptiness. Whatever you have been waiting for all this time on—whatever you have feared, postponed, tried to drown in stillness—it comes for you at last.

The street is too wide, too empty. You walk side by side at first, though your steps fall just half a beat behind. Your hands are buried deep in your pockets, your teeth pressing hard into your lower lip until it stings. Your eyes keep darting over the broken facades. You don’t hold on to anything for long; the gaze wanders, never resting where it might hurt too much.

The silence stretches thin between the empty shells of buildings as you keep walking. Through the gaps you catch glimpses of the fence that hems the settlement in, the broad wall of concrete meant to keep the infected away. And there, just behind it, where the ground dips, you know what waits.

A handful of crosses lean at strange angles, cobbled together from scraps of wood and metal, lashed tight with wire. Some are old, weathered by seasons of wind and snow, while others stand too straight to have been there long. You don’t need to see them clearly; knowing is enough. There are new graves among the rows—or what should have been graves. The earth, frozen stiff, refused to open. The ground was clawed at, scarred by shovels, then abandoned. Soon there will be fires. That, too, you know before you see it—the way ash always drifts heavier in the mornings after.

Mia’s left arm hangs in its sling, wrapped in gauze that has already gone grey at the edges. The further you let yourself stare, the further your thoughts drift, until the base feels like a place you’ve already left behind. The guilt burns sharper than the cold. Mia hasn’t said a word. No one really has. Not aloud. But you know. No one needs to accuse you when you already carry the weight yourself.

She finally turns, slowing her steps until you almost collide into her shoulder. Her brows are lifted just slightly, her mouth parting like she wants to speak but isn’t sure she should. The silence hangs, taut, until she lets out a breath and says quietly, “You weren’t at the post.”

The words hit like a blunt edge. Your answer rises too fast, too defensive, and it almost stumbles on your tongue. “Look, the cat—”

But you hear yourself, hear how thin it sounds, and interrupt yourself.

Mia doesn’t blink. Her eyes search yours, steady, patient. She doesn’t push. She never has.

You remember it in all the quiet ways: the end of long shifts, when she’d nudge you to come sit outside with her and Jade, sharing stale crackers and whatever scraps of warmth the night had left. How Jade laughed too easily, how Mia rolled her eyes but never stopped smiling when she looked at her. You never felt like an outsider. With them, you never felt the need to say something when you had nothing to say. They had folded you into that space as if you belonged there. And with time, you did.

But sometimes, watching them—Mia leaning into Jade’s shoulder, Jade brushing her thumb across the back of Mia’s hand—you felt something hitch inside your chest. Not envy. Just the faint, restless ache of recognizing something you could never quite claim for yourself. A reminder. Of what was missing.

They had each other’s warmth here, where hands could touch and voices didn’t have to cross static. You had only the cold of your bunk, the brittle hush of nights when the radio was your only company. Only a voice you could never reach, pressed against your ear like a secret.

Still, you never resented them for it. Quite the opposite. Their love was proof that warmth could exist here, despite everything. And their friendship, the way they drew you in without hesitation, had kept you standing more times than you cared to admit. That’s what lingers now, in the pause between you. Mia just waits, as if to remind you—whatever else you’ve done or failed to do, she’s still here. On your side.

“You weren’t even on the frequency.”

She fills the pause with the last try, as if asking you to come back to your senses. But all in vain.

“I was!”

The words snap out before you can temper them. Too sharp, too eager. You know she hears the crack in them.

Who taught you to lie, little firefly?

She exhales, slow and tired. Not angry. “Listen. We both know this wasn’t the first time. I won’t ask you about it. But they will.”

She knows, and you know that she knows, and so on. Well, maybe you did miss a couple of calls before, hanging on another frequency. Maybe more than just a couple. And it isn’t carelessness—it’s more dangerous than that.

You feel it the way a scar remembers the blade: not freshly cut, but never gone. The fault is etched into you, and you know you’ll carry it forward, however quietly.

But there’s another blade and another scar—

There’s Jackson.

She’s carved into you like something permanent, something you can’t wash off.

You’ve let her seep under your skin until the rules that held you in place began to loosen. Until you stopped watching the clock, stopped repeating the ritual phrases that once felt like lifelines. Every half-hour call, every scribbled note in the logbook—suddenly they were paper walls, hollow routines dressed up as order. A pantomime of the old world, as if counting the minutes could hold anything together.

And you began to ask yourself: who is this for? Who are you keeping safe, if no one goes beyond the gates anymore? What is the point of a voice that exists only to tick boxes and fill silence with protocol?

But her—Jackson—she cuts through all that. She is the breach in the script, the break in the pattern. On her frequency, you are not a function, not a placeholder to keep the illusion breathing. With her, you are yourself—raw, unguarded, seen. A voice, yes, but never faceless. Never empty.

That’s why you missed the calls. Not because you forgot, but because you remembered too much. Because for the first time, something mattered more than the job. More than the logbook. More than the farce.

For a moment you want to look away, to find another ruined wall, another distraction. But you don’t.

“Then I’ll answer.”

You say, your voice low but steady this time.

“Because answering is my job, isn’t it?”

They do ask questions. Of course they do. That’s what this place is for.

The room swallows you the moment you step inside. Narrow, windowless, bound in steel and concrete. The air tastes of iron and old dust. Everything here gleams in the wrong way—too sharp, too sterile, polished to strip away any human trace. There are no papers, no mugs, no half-forgotten belongings. Nothing here carries a trace of personality, no sign of the person who spends their hours inside these walls. Even the face across from you might as well be carved from the same faceless stone, revealing nothing.

His expression is a mask, his voice a metronome.

The man wears the same standard-issue jacket as you, only cleaner, sharper, like it was cut to fit his rank. On the shoulder, the patch catches your eye: a butterfly stitched in dull thread. Mourning cloak butterfly—the name unspools in your head, fragile, incongruous. The kind that outlives winter, that was the idea of insignia. The winter is coming, and now you’re not sure at all if you’ll survive it. For a second, you imagine it pinned beneath glass, wings spread. A man of his posture, his bulk, that implacable face, and here he is branded with a butterfly.

You don’t laugh. It’s just the kind of stray observation a tired mind makes, absurd enough to notice, too thin to linger on.

Then your gaze slips lower, to the small black letters stitched beneath: MCB. The other meaning. Military Communication Base. The patch no longer looks whimsical; it looks like a seal, a warning stamped in fabric. And the man himself shifts with it—no longer an awkward figure dressed in irony, but a wall, an emblem of order and discipline.

Mia wanted to wait outside, to be near when it was over. You’d seen the shadows beneath her eyes, the fragile pallor that blood loss had left behind. She needed rest more than you needed comfort, so you told her to go. You told her you’d handle it. Maybe it was just another lie you’ve grown used to telling.

The man doesn’t offer you a seat. Perhaps he wants you to stand exposed in the centre of the room, as if unease itself were part of the ritual. The gravity of his intent almost makes you laugh. For men like him, you’ve spent your life inside four walls, learning how to speak to static instead of real people.

He begins without preamble. A grey person in a grey room. You start missing your radio corner, your M and your J.

“State your station and your shift.”

“How long have you held your post?”

“Confirm the date and the hour of the last missed call.”

His words arrive with precision, the clipped rhythm of protocol. No space for hesitation, no room for stories: he’ll never know about the cat breaking the glass jar.

Your answers are clean, contained, stripped of inflection. Yes. No. Forty-seven minutes. Monitoring gate sector west. Each one falls into place like a weight, like the neat entries you’ve made a hundred times in the ledger back in your room.

There was never really a choice: four walls, one task, one voice among wires. If you spend your life breathing the same air, your lungs adjust; if you hold the same machine long enough, it begins to feel like an extension of your hands. You know it better than your own reflection.

But mastery is not faith. You can love the quiet thrill when a voice cuts through the noise—and still see the emptiness of the order behind it. They put you here to chase ghosts, to sift through static for echoes of the past. The signal lives, but the purpose is hollow. And now, standing under the expressionless gaze of the man’s deep-set eyes, you understand: it was never the system that mattered. It was the chance that, by mistake, by accident, someone real might answer back.

The light burns your eyes. A lamp dangles low from the ceiling, thick-bellied glass humming faintly as it sways. Its yellow glow pools across the metal table, carving your face into harsh shadow. Suspended on its cord, it hangs like a spider on its thread, patient and unblinking.

Yellow. Like bulbs.

You shift your shoulders back, spine strung tight, as if posture alone could make your version of the truth more convincing. In your pocket, your fingers close around the pendant, pressing its familiar edge into your skin until it leaves a mark.

Somewhere out there, a stranger’s voice had cut through the static and made everything else sound like noise. This man is just an interference on the air.

The questions keep coming. They pass by you almost without shape, blurred and weightless, too far removed from what really matters. You know the answers before they’re even asked, and they fall from your lips with automatic precision, clean and unshaken. As if your mouth remembers the script your mind no longer cares to follow.

“Why did you change frequency?”

“Who authorized the switch?”

“What reason can you give for failing to log the deviation?”

He sits like marble, unmoving. His back never bends, his shoulders locked, his hands folded neatly as if he were carved that way. For a while you think he might never move at all—a figure molded out of military wax.

And then he does. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he shifts his weight. One elbow rests on the table, his palm lifting to cradle his jaw. The posture cracks, the statue fractures—and there he is. Human. Unarmored. And that makes the silence heavier.

His eyes fix on you. Not the dull stare of protocol. It’s different. Patient, searching. Long enough that you feel the air thinning around you.

“You’ve found someone, haven’t you?”

The words don’t fall like a question. For this one you are not ready.

Something inside you gives way. It’s like the snap of a rope you’ve been hanging from; the drop is instant, sickening. Your stomach lurches, hollow, as if the floor has been kicked out from under you. Blood drains from your face so fast you feel light-headed.

It’s a missed step. A blank shot that wasn’t blank at all, detonating in the center of your skull. Your chest tightens, ribs aching as if ice water has been poured straight into your lungs.

The echo of the phrase remains, circling, relentless.

You force your mouth to open.

“What? You mean Mia? Or—someone from the base?”

A flick of his hand cuts you off, sharp as a knife through paper.

“Not them. Don’t play games with me.”

The look he gives you is almost weary, almost indulgent. A teacher watching a child fumble through a lie.

“You’re young,” he goes on, his voice unhurried, almost conversational. You’re starting to feel nauseous; maybe it’s from malnutrition—maybe from his indulgency. “Before all this,” he waves his pathetic hand, pointing at something beyond the base. “The outbreak. People liked to toy with that kind of thing. Long-distance romances. Midnight calls. Secret little games for the lonely.”

The words feel wrong in his mouth, clumsy, too large for him. They make you wince—dated, awkward, almost embarrassing. And still, the truth of them coils inside you, undeniable.

“It could even make them forget about those who were near them.”

You feel like you’re losing your foothold.

His gaze doesn’t waver. His hand stays pressed to his jaw. When he speaks again, the softness has drained from his tone.

“But this isn’t then. It isn’t harmless. You’re distracted. And distraction kills.”

His words pin you to the spot like needles fixing a butterfly to cork.

He doesn’t raise his voice. The calmness is worse than shouting.

“Eight died. Four because your report came late. Do you understand?”

You do.

And you know he’s right, that he’s not here to humiliate or ridicule you. And you hate it. He’s here because he wants his people to live; they are not comic villains—the world isn’t black and white. In their eyes, your mistakes might as well be crimes.

And you want to slam your palms to your ears. To scream at him, to tear the sound from the air. To tear him from it. You want to curse, to shriek into the empty room, to dare him to stop it, to shut his fucking mouth.

You want to knock over this steel table nailed to the floor and throw it at his all-knowing face.

You want to go back to your radio, call her and hear her voice. You want to cry your miseries on her shoulder, wrap around her body and never let go.

But how can you never let go of something you’ve never held?

Your hands tremble, fingers gripping nothing.

You feel it—the collapse of the illusion you’ve been clinging to. That you could fool them. That you were clever enough, careful enough. That your voice on the radio was yours alone.

Your mouth goes dry. You want to say something, anything—but nothing comes.

He leans closer, his eyes still pinned to yours.

“Tell me,” he says, his voice low. “It wasn’t you who slipped her what she needed, was it? Who else could’ve? Or maybe you don’t even know who you’ve been talking to. Maybe she’s not who you think. Maybe she’s been using you all along.”

You simply snort at it. Cheap trick, nonsense. You can’t tell if he’s serious, or if he’s only trying to shame you into breaking, to make you doubt yourself. You know her—maybe better than you know anyone from the base.

“You think you’re invisible, girl. Smarter than the rest. Nothing lasts forever, though.”

Oh, fuck him.

In that moment, you see him as you should have all along. Not a faceless officer, not a dull interrogator wound tight by protocol—but a danger, sharp and waiting. A hand on the wire you thought was secret, a shadow behind every word you thought was yours.

Your stomach knots. The breath in your chest turns thin.

You’re not laughing anymore.

It’s been a week.

A week of work you’d never really done before. They kept you everywhere else—hauling crates in the warehouse, sliding rations into waiting hands, sorting papers until numbers blurred on the page. Some days they pushed you toward the children, as if their restless energy could drown out your own.

It was just enough work to wear you down to the bone. Each night you crawled back to your cot, muscles screaming, and collapsed into a shallow sleep that never gave you rest. Just enough to keep your body standing. Never enough to quiet your mind. You can’t even remember the last time you woke and felt whole—maybe you never have.

And yet—it isn’t your body they’re punishing. It’s your heart.

They’ve carved you away from what matters most, cut off the pulse you used to live by. Your old routine throbs like a phantom limb—you still reach for it in empty moments, still feel its absence burning. You used to measure your days by the radio, by the breath between your words and the static that carried hers back to you. Now there’s only blankness.

The days leave nothing behind; you can’t tell one from another, just the grey smear of repetition. But the hunger—that stays sharp. A week without her hasn’t dulled it; it’s only honed it, a blade beneath your ribs. You replay every conversation until the words grow brittle with overuse, then spin fantasies of new ones you’ll never get to speak.

It feels like they’ve ripped out an artery and demanded you keep living. For the benefit of society.

And every night, as exhaustion drags you under, you dream of sneaking back through the corridors, slipping into that room that still feels like yours, sliding on the headset and pressing it close. Just to hear her. Her voice, sleep-rough, blurred with static, drifting toward you like oxygen.

They wanted to strip you of attachment, to beat discipline back into your bones.

All they’ve done is teach you how much you can’t bear to lose.

This morning, the message came.

Not directly—never directly. A stranger brushed past you, dropped the words like a stone in your hand, and vanished into the crowded hall before you could even catch his face.

You were to take the night shift. With the radio. Back to your old post.

You stood there long after, the echo of it burning against your ribs. It should have been relief, maybe even joy, but there was no room left for either. Every step since has carried the weight of eyes on your back.

Nothing has been said about your “distractions,” your wandering loyalties. As if they’d forgotten.

But they don’t forget.

And so you’re split open, caught between two fears: that you’ll fail whatever test this is, or that you’ll never hear her voice again. You don’t know which is worse.

You need to break this week of silence, to let her know you’re still here, still breathing. In a world where every day can be the last, the words “I’m alive” mean more than anything else. But what if pressing that button becomes the mistake that marks you unfit? What if one wrong word, one stolen second, costs someone else their life?

And another sort of thoughts concern you as well. God, you have so many concerns for a simple radio operator. Ex-radio operator.

Did this week hollow her out the way it gutted you? Or did she simply drift on, less lonely than you ever were?

The questions tear at you, sharp and endless.

Your duty pulls you one way. Your heart pulls you another.

And both roads look like ruin.

Now you’re back at the desk, staring down the headset like it’s both salvation and execution.

Your hands tremble against the wood, nails digging faint crescents into the surface. The hum of the radio surrounds you, strangely intimate, a reminder of everything you’ve been denied. The silence is heavy, daring you to break it.

Somewhere at your feet, the cat winds between your ankles, tail curling, patient in her small orbit. She doesn’t know you’re standing on the edge of a choice that feels larger than life.

You can’t move yet. You can’t even reach for the dial.

Because if you do, you risk everything.

And if you don’t, you lose her.

You are suspended in this fragile balance, where silence feels like betrayal and words like surrender.

The hours drag on in contradictions like these. You squeeze your head, then you rest it on the cold table surface, every pause in the radio hum like an opening you cannot step through.

Once—twice—you reach for the switch, only to freeze with your hand hovering mid-air, as if the whole world were watching.

Secret little games for the lonely

The phrase suddenly pops up in your mind, burned deep into it, like a brand.

This is all that you are in others’ eyes. But who made you lonely?

So you take your hand off the panel.

By dawn your throat aches with all the things you haven’t said. Your fingers are stiff.

You flip the logbook open for another routine check-in, and suddenly the very sight of it makes your stomach turn. Neat columns of names, dates, signatures—it all feels suffocating. The radio, once almost tender, almost alive when you were waiting for her voice, now grates against your ears until you want to tear the wires out. Every little procedure, every shift you will be forced to sit through, is just another reminder that you are no longer free to reach for what matters.

In a sudden, sharp motion you shove the logbook off the table, pages scattering across the floor. You press your head into your hands, elbows digging into the wood, trying to hold yourself together.

You start to hate it all. The radio itself. Because if it isn’t her, then what is it good for?

And yet—somewhere in the hollow of your chest, a treacherous thought begins to form: perhaps if you earn back their precious trust, if you prove yourself obedient, they will loosen the leash.

They cannot listen in, not with the outdated equipment rattling in the command post. They don’t know her frequency. What they have are the check-ins, the logbooks, the neat little lines that betray a missed call. All you have to do is stop stumbling. Play along—until it’s safe again.

They will give you nights like this again. You tell yourself you only need to wait, as if patience could make you cleverer than them.

But you know what patience costs.

When you finally rise from the chair, it’s with the hollow certainty that you’ve failed twice over: failed your duty, failed her.

You walk away with empty hands, empty lips, and an empty heart. And the echo of your own cowardice.

Not tonight.

Two days ago you didn’t reach out to call her. The calls kept coming one after another, as if to test you.

Yesterday you didn’t reach out either, as if to punish yourself—though for what, you couldn’t say.

Today?

You wish you had done it yesterday.

Because yesterday you were summoned again.

This time, fear gripped you in a way it never had before. You started being there quite too often.

The face of command had changed. No longer the old familiar man with tired eyes. A woman spoke to you. She smiled. Her eyes did not.

You don’t remember much of the conversation, not clearly. What you do remember is the way the world cracked—not into two halves, but into a before and an after. Small, careless freedom on one side, and on the other, the abyss.

At first, you didn’t understand what she meant. You didn’t react right away—you didn’t know who she was talking about or where she was trying to lead you.

The moment she asked it of you, still smiling, you felt your heart drop. It fell into your stomach, rolled down into your legs, heavy as lead, and all the way into the toes of your cursed new boots. Boots that had belonged to someone else. Someone you hadn’t heard that night. How memory works: you remember the boots, but not your own words.

Did you interrupt her mid-sentence? Did you refuse before she finished explaining? You think so. You think you couldn’t bear to let her finish.

Because she kept asking, gently, insistently.

“Have you ever told her how hard it is for us?”

The words landed like a stone in water, sinking fast. What would she—Jackson—even hear in that? Static, a stranger’s complaint. To make her carry your burden would have been the cruelest thing.

“What if it’s easier for them?”

You almost choked on it. How could anyone’s life be easy here? And even if it was, what right would you have to demand it of her? To let those words cross the frequency would have meant to admit you saw her not as a person—not as Jackson, but as a resource, a vein to be mined. You felt sick at the thought.

“What if they have more than they need?”

That one almost made you laugh. As if abundance existed outside of fairy tales and fading memories. The question itself felt obscene, grotesque, like a cruel joke whispered with a smile.

“Wouldn’t you want to know?”

And then, only then you realized what it was for.

They weren’t asking you to share. They were asking you to strip her down to nothing—to her rations, her shelter, her secrets. To turn her into a ledger entry.

What they were asking was not curiosity, but hunger. Not discovery, but theft. Knowledge not as connection but as leverage. You didn’t want to know. The only thing you wanted was to keep her untouched by this—unsullied, free of their reach.

One person? An anonymous voice on the radio, your accidental correspondent? That was their plan? Their great hope? To gamble everything on coincidence, on the fickle chance of two voices colliding across static?

Each question left a bruise, but none of them pierced you deep enough to sway you. The absurdity of it steeled your refusal. The bile rose, sharper, and you understood:

they will never comprehend how sacred her voice has become to you.

Your sense of reality tilted. You wanted to laugh, but the sound would have been a scream. The world had become a place where the simplest idea—to ask a few harmless questions—felt like a knife carving through everything you had held dear.

Never.

Not even once.

Not even in jest.

Not even to ask the smallest, safest question.

You didn’t even let yourself consider the halfway option. It wasn’t the questions themselves that sickened you—it was the very act of them. The idea that someone could pry, even gently, even under the guise of saving lives, felt like betrayal from the first second. She never asked you about the base, never questioned your work, never pressed you for a name, or for anything beyond your state. She never tried to map your life like a territory to be measured.

For the base, it was a small matter, a trivial step toward some distant, indirect goal: maybe a few more rations saved, maybe a few lives spared. But for you, it was everything unraveling at once.

You shook your head again, mouthing “no”, and got out of there.

And the smile stayed on the woman’s face. She knew you’ll be back—sooner or later.

But the world around you had already caved in.

Now everything circles back to this room. Always.

Every road seems to lead here, like you’re caught inside a loop, some unfinished gesture, a door that refuses to close.

You sit on the sagging couch with an empty stare, and the radio room feels foreign again, stripped of the fragile order you once built. The flowers are gone. The books you once read aloud are missing—someone must have taken them during another shift. The broken clock has been pried off the wall, leaving only a pale round mark where time used to hang.

Even the cat has slipped out into the night, hunting or wandering, gone without a sound.

Someone untangled your headset cable and twisted it the wrong way; the wire frays where you used to curl it around your finger while waiting. The soft lamp that made this place bearable has burned out, and the ceiling light feels merciless now.

You don’t know what hour it is, or even what day of the week. You blink into the dimness, thinking of how odd the whole habit of keeping track always seemed to you. A number, a mark on a page, a bell struck at the same time every day—it was never about truth. It was about the illusion of order, of pretending the world still ran on rules. But time isn’t neat like that. Time frays. It slips. It devours. And here, in this room, it folds back on itself until you can’t tell if you are living a day or remembering one.

They wanted you to reach out to her?

Who are you to hold back when tomorrow they might demand worse?

You have already lost so many chances, let so many words vanish between you. You feel that something has been left unsaid—something vital. Maybe your name. Maybe the single, smallest truth that she deserved but never received.

Now she feels too close, too personal, for anonymity to make sense anymore. You can’t even remember why you clung to it so fiercely in the first place. Foolish.

You jump up from the couch.

Despite you being the one who disappeared, you’re praying for her to stay alive and answer.

Your hands move with a feverish urgency, spinning the dials, adjusting the machine. Your brow lifts, lips raw and chewed, breath uneven. You forget the headset at first, then remember, tugging it over your head in a clumsy rush. The microphone tilts crooked, almost falling against your cheek.

You lean forward, close enough to feel your own breath warm the metal, and whisper the only words that will come:

“Are you there?”

Not a name. Not a question of substance. Just a thread tossed into the static, a plea stripped down to its barest form.

You freeze in place, waiting, your whole body has become an antenna tuned only to the possibility of her voice.

Time passes, though you have no idea how much. It doesn’t matter. You only know that you’re still here, standing with both hands pressed flat against the table, leaning into its edge like it’s the only thing keeping you upright.

And then it happens, like it always does.

The crackle bursts alive, sudden and sharp, and a voice cuts through the miles. Her voice.

“—the hell? What the—what the fuck—”

Your breath stops. It feels like your stomach turns over on itself, a violent, impossible somersault. You slap a hand over your mouth because you don’t know if you’re about to laugh or cry. Your throat burns like you’ve been holding it all in for years.

Then her tone shifts, raw, urgent:

“You okay?”

You let out a breath you didn’t realize you’d been choking on. Somehow, the word comes out:

“Yeah.”

She curses again, rough and wild—not at you, but at the sheer fact of it, at the shock and the weight of what just happened. Static swallows the edges of her voice, but you can still feel it.

A beat. Then, softer, stripped down to the core:

“Something happened?”

You flinch, because yes, something happened—so many things—but where would you even begin? The words push at your lips, hot, desperate, and for a moment you think you might spill everything: the attack, the lives, the questions, the silence.

But you force the simplest truth, small and fragile.

“Yes.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

The question lands like a strike to your chest. No sound escapes—not because you can’t, but because you won’t. You won’t let her carry this weight. She’s too far, too vulnerable in this distance to shoulder what’s pressing against your heart.

The urge to cry rises, but even that feels selfish—too raw to spill where she might glimpse it. You breathe, trembling, letting the tremors flow through your hands, through the small press against your lips, holding everything close.

You shake your head before realizing she can’t see.

“No.”

The truth is not for her to carry. It’s yours.

There’s a pause on her end, long enough that your heart stumbles. And then her reply comes like an anchor thrown straight into your chest:

“Alright. You don’t have to. Just… stay with me, yeah? That’s all I need.”

You almost forget how she can turn easy words into bullets. Every syllable somehow magnified, tender, almost cruel in its simplicity. It’s meant to calm you, but all it does is the opposite of calming.

You sink onto the chair, hands lifting to press against your cheeks. It’s a grounding, a way to steady yourself when the warmth of the voice is so immediate you almost forget to breathe.

Stay

You can’t promise her that. You can’t promise her any real tomorrow waiting on the other side of this night. You can’t tell her that nothing is stable, that the ground beneath you might shift before sunrise. It hurts—to know you can’t give her certainty—and you don’t want that hurt to reach her.

You let out a breath, slow, almost guilty. “I don’t know how long I can.”

The noise is carrying her inhale. You know that she feels the shift in the air too. “Then how long do we have tonight?”

You close your eyes.

“Maybe until dawn,” you whisper.

“Then let’s not waste it,” she says, gentle, firm, as though it’s already decided. As though that’s more than enough.

It makes you smile, with the faint twitch of the left corner of your mouth.

“And how?”

“You know how. I’ll distract you. You’ll call me a loser. Nothing new, nothing changed,” she says it like she might shrug at it, with a sly smile.

You can’t help but laugh, the sound is sincere but hollow.

“Deal, loser.”

She lets out a soft huff of a laugh, almost triumphant. “You kinda like calling me that.”

It makes you exhale through your nose. “And you kinda like being one.”

The words hang between you, lighter than the air was a moment ago. For a heartbeat, it almost feels normal.

Then she shifts, voice dropping just enough to sound like she’s half-teasing, half-serious.

“I almost forgot. I’ve got something for you.”

Your breath catches.

“For me?”

“Who else?” she says, like it’s obvious, but there’s no smugness this time—only that same unspoken insistence that you don’t have to stay under the weight alone.

Your curiosity slips out before you can stop it. “What is it?”

She exhales through her teeth, like she’s trying to swat the question away with a wave of her hand. “Forget it. I thought you were dead, so—nothing here for you.”

You huff, half-offended, half-amused. “Wow. That’s cold.”

“It’s true,” she deadpans, but the edge is playful, masking something else.

For a beat, the static fills the space between you. Then her voice comes back softer.

“Gimme a couple minutes, okay?”

You hesitate, caught between a dozen questions and the sudden, sharp thrum of anticipation in your chest. Then you just nod and whisper.

“Okay.”

There’s a shuffle on her end—fabric, movement, something set down and picked up again. The line hums with her absence, and you find yourself holding your breath.

When she speaks again, her voice is farther, muffled, like she’s turned away. You lean in instinctively, as though closing the distance could help.

“Don’t get too excited,” she says, almost casual, though you know she is not. “Heard this the other day. Didn’t think I’d get enough time to practice.”

The words land with a weight you don’t miss—time without you. A gap she filled alone.

Then it comes.

A sound you’ve never heard in your headset before.

Strings.

Gentle, tentative, the tempo soft as a touch, slowed as though she’s coaxing the notes out. For a moment it feels unreal, as though you’re listening to something stolen, too intimate to belong to anyone but you.

A stumble. A discordant twang that snaps against the quiet.

“Shit—sorry,” she mutters, low, a half-laugh tangled in the apology. The rustle of her shifting, starting over.

You’re smiling before you even realize it, wide and helpless, the burn at the corners of your eyes spilling without warning. You press the headset tighter against your ears with both hands, greedy for every sound, greedy to be closer.

This time there are no breaks. The music flows steady, carrying you with it.

But then—more.

Words, low and uneven, her voice carrying the melody not with skill but with everything she has, every ounce of her laid bare in the tremor of it.

The room feels too small for it. The night outside presses its face to the glass—a dark, endless backdrop—but you barely register it. Everything recedes: the scattered papers on your desk, even your own reflection in the black window.

All that remains is her.

There is nothing more sacred than this.

It begins almost like a confession, the strum soft and steady, a fragile pulse you’re terrified might stop if you move too quickly, if you even breathe too loud.

“And I’d give up forever to touch you”

Barely a whisper, she’s afraid of saying it out loud, the words themselves could break.

You feel them land inside you anyway, raw and unflinching. You close your eyes, press the headset harder against your ears, and for a fleeting second it feels like her mouth is against yours, like the song is spilling directly into you. The closeness impossible but so vivid it burns.

“’Cause I know that you feel me somehow”

It doesn’t sound like singing so much as believing, the kind of belief that hurts, that claws its way out of her chest.

The guitar slows, tender and aching, and you’re aware of nothing else—not the room around you, not your own body—only her, somewhere out there, tethered to you by wire and air and courage.

“You’re the closest to Heaven that I’ll ever be”

It makes your throat close, makes your lungs rebel. Heaven isn’t a place; it’s this: her voice breaking against your ears, her choosing to give it to you anyway.

“And I don’t wanna go home right now”

There’s a faint catch when she says it, a fracture, like the plea is too heavy for the line to carry. The night outside deepens. The window reflects only your tears now, silver streaks down your cheeks.

“And all I can taste is this moment”

Her voice wavers, but the words strike clean, burn bright.

“And all I can breathe is your life”

You inhale sharply, choking on the thought that she might mean it—that somehow, impossibly, she is breathing through you.

The chords linger, round, imperfect, and yet you think you’ve never heard anything so absolute.

“And sooner or later, it’s over”

The whisper curves downward, but she doesn’t stop—

“I just don’t wanna miss you tonight”

The silence between lines feels enormous, unbearable. You ache to fill it, but you can’t. You can only hold on tighter.

Then, softer still, a secret pressed into your ear:

“And I don’t want the world to see me, ’cause I don’t think that they’d understand”

It’s a confession she shouldn’t be able to make, not like this, not to anyone. Yet here it is.

“When everything’s made to be broken,” her voice climbs, falters, breaks in just the right place.

“I just want you to know who I am.”

It breaks on am, crumbling but true.

The line dies slowly, carried away by the last vibrations of string.

You can’t breathe.

You can’t think.

The world has narrowed to the impossible fact that she sang for you—sang you the shape of her heart, raw and unpolished, and put it trembling into your hands.

In that hollow left by her final chord, you understand: there is no distance great enough to swallow this.

Nothing remains. Not the night shift outside, not the weight of questions, not the faint, gnawing presence of death. All of it vanishes, folded into the silence that follows.

You are nothing but the music. The notes she memorized, trembling on her fingertips. The chord she stumbled over and cradled back to life. You are gone, dissolved into the space between breaths and strings, and nothing else exists.

And yet—the radio remembers.

It holds the echo of her voice, a ghost that lingers longer than you, longer than the night, longer than time.

“Ellie.”

The word slips out like a breath held too long, barely louder than a sigh. With that sound a butterfly could move its wings, a gentle rustle of leaves in the night.

“What?” you whisper, your voice trembling with disbelief and wonder.

“…My name. My name is Ellie,” she says again, softer this time, tasting the sound. “I’ve wanted to tell you for so long.”

Seconds fall away like drops from a waterfall, each one slipping silently into the dark. Ellie moves forward, deliberate, fearless. She chooses you—not as a hesitation, not as a test, but as an act of raw honesty she can no longer hold back. She has laid down her coin: truth. She has given up on holding herself apart, on keeping the distance, on pretending she can wait forever. And now she waits—only for your next move. Back, forward, anything but the quiet that gnaws between you.

But the truth has already been decided. You chose her the moment you answered her call, the moment your voice met hers across the airwaves. You have kept choosing her, through every heartbeat, every stolen instant, every thread of longing and fear. You are running toward her, with or without miles between you, with or without reason, driven by the gravity of what has always been there.

So you respond to her confession with your own name.

Ellie hears it and treasures it—the sound of your trust, of your closeness—but she can’t help herself.

“I liked you better when you were Montana,” she murmurs, carving this moment into memory forever.

You blink.

She spoiled the moment, but you couldn’t imagine it going any other way than that.

“Oh, shut up!” You burst.

“I’m kiddin’. Humor is my language of affection,” Ellie says, soft, almost coy.

“So you’re mute,” you shoot back, trying to mask the flutter in your chest.

“Hey… I said affection. Are you deaf?” Her voice is playful, but it reaches inside you, brushing against the places you thought only fear and longing touched.

“Fuck you, Jackson.”

“Call me by my name,” Ellie asks gently.

You rub at your eyes with the sleeve of your jacket, trying to wipe away the shimmer that’s already betrayed you. The laughter slips away, leaving only the rawness underneath. A small, shaky breath, a quick sniff, and then the truth stumbles out of you—desperate, almost broken:

“I need you so much closer, Ellie.”

Something in the way you say it can make Ellie’s heart freeze. Fall. Break. It seems like she can cut herself with the shards of her name slipped from your lips.

Ellie doesn’t answer right away. Something collapses inside her defenses.

When she finally speaks, her voice carries no smirk, no armor. It’s simple, unadorned.

“I love you too.”

Ellie.

ellie. Ellie. ellie. Ellie. ELLIE. ellie. e. l l i e. ellieellieellieEllieelLieeLlieielIeellEillie

You write her name in your logbook.

You don’t hide it, you don’t disguise it—just leave it there, black ink bleeding into the page. Let them see, if they want. They won’t understand. They will never know her the way you do. They will never love her the way you do. Ellie is no longer your secret; she’s a vow you keep breathing when they ask you to betray.

You write her name in steam on the window glass.

Your breath fogs the pane, each letter blooming and vanishing, leaving behind a mark. The same mark that sits in your chest.

You write her name in fallen leaves.

You spell it with pine needles, threading her into the sky, into the dark seam of the horizon. You whisper it to the stream, you bury it in the soil, you scream it raw into your pillow.

You mouth it to your cat, as though telling her bedtime stories, but every story turns into the same one—Ellie. Always Ellie.

And it tears you apart.

You can’t see her chrysolite eyes, hidden beneath the mischief of her fiery lashes, or the way she wrinkles her nose when the sun dares to spill its brightness across her face.

She rejects the sun.

She is the sun.

She belongs to no one—nobody’s daughter, only the child of wilderness. She smells of gunpowder and restless winds, of feathers tied to arrows shot straight through your heart. She never misses. You knew that from the very start.

You can’t feel her uneven breath ghosting your neck when your joke is too much for her.

You can’t hold her battered hand when she entrusts you with the secrets she doesn’t share with anyone else.

You can’t wrap yourself in the nylon of her guitar strings, can’t become the fragile melody she keeps alive under her fingertips. A tune she carries on patrols, a hum that clings to her lips. God, you don’t ever want to leave her lips—that much is true. You want to hear her speak your name, your real name one more time.

But all you are is a voice. A secret. One word is enough for you. Yet for Ellie there could never be enough words, not in a hundred languages.

You can’t count her scars, every scratch she didn’t even know she has. But you would. You’d count each one, make the number your password, the key to your own wounds, the number of nails in your coffin. The beats left in your chest before death finds you. And when she comes, you’ll tell her your story, and her name—and she will spare you. Death will have Ellie’s eyes. You’ve never seen her eyes, but her voice… it’s enough to know that when the end arrives, it will sound like Ellie.

You would handle her with care and treasure her like she is going to break.

It’s never been about meeting her just to kiss, to fuck, to test the curve of her body against yours. It’s so far beyond that.

You’re already drowned. Already gone. Her voice burrows under your skin; this longing keeps you awake on nights when the silence doesn’t carry the crackle of static and her low, steady tone.

You can’t bear silence anymore if it isn’t shaped like Ellie.

You can’t bear the weight of her absence.

She lingers in the core of your bones. She’s your infection. A fever. Your own cordyceps.

And, obviously, you are not immune.

And if some clicker tore your ribcage open and pulled out your heart, they would find her there—Ellie, in the deep brown of her fingertips, the shade of rust and august and dried blood.

In the auburn of her hair. If she ever tried to find you, she would only need to look in the mirror—trace the constellation of freckles scattered over her cheekbone.

You’ll be there.

Dwelling in a shape of her forever. Until the sun explodes, and the moon turns into ashes, and the stars collide. You will be there. No matter what.

That’s how you feel for her.

Love?

How can something like this be trapped in four letters?

You would braid it into the feathers of cranes so they could carry it to her across the sky. You would whisper it to fireflies, let them glow with your secret, mistaken for stars as they rise into the dark, delivering the message to her.

Because Ellie doesn’t see it. She thinks she has no light of her own, only a reflection of someone else’s shine. Once a sun, now a moon. But the way she glows to you—it should be a crime.

Four letters will never be enough.

But Ellie’s name has five of them.

For you, that is perfectly enough.

Time after that stretches differently. The days pile up, heavy and indistinguishable, while the weeks crawl toward winter. What grows is not ease, not comfort, not even safety—only your feelings.

They swell, deepen, and root themselves into your bones. And yet the space for them shrinks: conversations taper down to once a week, to those stolen minutes before dawn, when the world is hushed and no one is listening. They are never enough. A voice like Ellie’s deserves whole nights, deserves laughter that spills over, deserves quiet mornings where the air is safe to breathe. Instead, you get scraps in the dark, whispers that vanish as quickly as they begin. What should be endless is rationed down to survival.

“You’re awake?” “Always.” “I wish I could see you.” “Don’t say it too loud.”

“Shimmer’s got sick.” “Is it serious?” “I don’t think so.” “We don’t have horses here. I wish I could learn how to ride them and get away.” “I’d teach you.”

“Don’t call too often. They’re starting to notice.” “But I miss you.” “I know. I miss you too.”

“I once saw a giraffe.” “You’re such a storyteller.” “But it’s true!” “Maybe you saw a dinosaur too?” “You won’t believe it, but—” “I’m hanging!” “Trust me.” “...I do.”

It is unbearable, loving like this. Loving when it is mutual, when words could run for hours, and having to measure that love by the clock, by fear, by walls that keep closing in.

The others no longer hide their disapproval; they’ve turned their backs on you. The punishments begin: they call it youthful defiance, but they make sure you see the hungry children, the dwindling supplies. You are fed little, reminded daily of what is at stake. To them, Ellie is nothing but a dangerous dream. To you, she is the only tether left.

You know for certain now: the single wire connecting her to them runs through you. If you break, the connection breaks with you. You’ve known for a long time what must be done. So you don’t mark your maps. You don’t draw red circles around the places Ellie might be—where Jackson is. You don’t carve little trails that point toward her. If anyone found them, it would ruin everything. Instead, you save food bit by bit, and you wait.

Until one night, you take the backpack and the knife from beneath your pillow.

It isn’t because you have nothing to lose. It is because you have too much. You leave behind Mia and Jade, who help you slip through the gates. You leave behind the cat, who pressed against your legs for the last time without knowing it was the last.

And you leave the radio. Perhaps you shouldn’t have done it—yanked out the wires, smashed the bulbs, hurled the headset against the wall until only a plastic skeleton remained. But only after the destruction, only after the bridges burned, do you feel the loop around your neck loosen, the door that was always opened finally shut.

And you leave Ellie.

Not a farewell, not a warning that you’ll be gone, not a single word, no hope. She will be waiting for you tomorrow, and you won’t show up. Bad kind of a deja vu. You don’t say to her neither over, nor out.

But you have lied too much already, promised too many times what you couldn’t keep—that you would come, that you would survive.

She deserves to live without being tied to a piece of metal.

She deserves something real—not a ghost.

You disappear on the last day of October, if you were counting—on the day when all ghosts are allowed to leave their shelters and wander the earth.

#overnout

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