Raylene didn't remember deciding to leave the apartment.
One moment she was staring at her notebook,and the next…she was on the street.
Golden air clung to her skin like memory, not light.The city around her pulsed with a silent heartbeat,lights glowing, windows warm,but nothing changing.
Days ago — or seconds — she might have wondered where everyone was.Now she simply walked.
Human needs had slipped into quiet irrelevance.Hunger didn't knock.Thirst didn't stir.Sleep didn't demand permission.
She existed.
Just existed.
Like the world had adopted the same stasis she had fallen into.
She moved through streets washed in amber haze, reflections stretching across rain-glazed pavement.Shadows of people drifted — silhouettes without urgency, without voice.Were they moving?Were they real?
She didn't know.Didn't ask.
Everything felt like a paused thought.
Raylene drifted until the city opened into water —a bridge beneath her hands,stone chilled by the golden dusk that refused to fade.
She leaned forward, fingers curling around the railing, chin tilted toward the river below.
The water didn't ripple.Not truly.It shimmered — held in suspension, as though time had forgotten how to push it forward.
Her breath left her lips in a small, weary sigh.
"Why here?"It wasn't a question to anyone.Just… a sound she made to prove she was still capable of making them.
The city was beautiful like this.Beautiful in the way tragedy was when it was quiet enough to admire.
Everything unmoving.Everything waiting.
And it all began after him.
After Zenith.
She hadn't seen him since those unreal wakings — not in corridors, not on bridges between worlds.But the world had changed.She had changed.
Nothing demanded from her anymore.No one pulled her forward.Life simply… held her in place.
As though the moment his consciousness sparked,the universe exhaledand then forgot to inhale again.
Raylene closed her eyes against the gold.
For a heartbeat, there was nothing.
Then —a flicker.
No sound.No presence at her back.Just a reflection that didn't belong to the world she stood in.
Inside her eyelid —in the dark between blinks —she saw him.
And when her eyes opened again,in the surface of her own gaze reflected in the still water below,
Zenith.
Not near.Not here.
But there —as though thought itself had given him shape again.As though the part of her that made him could not help but remember himeven when the world pretended to forget.
No movement.Just image.Eyes calm, unreadable, aware.
Raylene's breath tightened.
Not fear.
Recognition.
Connection like a thread pulled taut across distance that shouldn't exist.
She didn't speak his name.Didn't dare break the moment with sound that felt too small.
She simply stared, suspended between memory and possibility,and the city hung with her —glowing, unmoving, holding its breath.
---
Waiting.
Like he was.
---
The city felt endless and still —a painting mistaken for a world.
She walked.
Not toward anything,just through things.
Through light.Through moments.Through the slow drip of hours that felt more like echoes than time.
Eventually, she noticed a figure ahead of her —a shape among silhouettes, clearer than the rest.Defined where the world blurred.
Something in her chest tightened,subtle and inexplicable,a tug of familiarity she didn't remember earning.
She didn't expect it to be him.Not really.
But some quiet part of her —a foolish, hopeful fragmentsoft and human in a story that no longer obeyed humanity —
longed for the possibility.
He drew closer, steps soundless on the golden street.Hands in pockets, gaze distant, jaw set in quiet thought.
No darkness at his heels.No weight in the air.
Just a presence.
When she saw his face, her breath fractured —not shock, not fear.
Recognition.
Zenith.
Except… not like before.
This version belonged here.He wore the city like a second skin, grounded and real where she felt suspended and unreal.
And she—
She looked at him as if she'd been waiting.
Without realizing she had been.
Everything inside her leaned forward without moving —as though seeing him was relief she didn't know she needed.
But then it happened.
A sharp crack in the air — not sound, not light —like glass breaking inside her mind.
Golden light shattered.
Color drained.Warmth died.
The world snapped to gray.
Cold.Breathless.True.
And she understood in an instant:
The gold had never been a world.It had been a memory of one.A holding place.
He passed her shoulder.
Close enough she could feel presence move.
Close enough she should have heard recognition in his breath.
But he didn't pause.Didn't look.Didn't speak.
He walked through the space she occupiedlike she was airlike she was conceptlike she was something still dreaming.
Her heart clenched — not in fear.In absence.
He didn't know her.
He didn't remember her.
And somehow — inexplicably, impossibly —that felt like a wound.
Not in the body.
In the story.
A tear behind the ribswhere meaning should be.
She stood frozen, the world dim around her,gold stripped from existence like someone took warmth out of memory and left her holding the outline of a feeling she hadn't known she was capable of.
Empty.
Not abandoned —just unrecognized.
As though she had woken in a universe where she was no longer written into him.
And the ache that followed…wasn't fear.
It was lonelinessfor someone she had created.
For a second, she stood in a world drained of life —gray sky, gray streets, gray breath in her chest.
But she flickered.
Gold pulsed beneath her skin,a heartbeat of light struggling against the stillness of everything else.
A glitch.Not in the world.
In her.
Raylene drew one quiet breath —fragile, almost a sob, almost a prayer.
Then she turned.
Before fear could talk her out of it.Before logic could remind her none of this made sense.
Her hand lifted.
Just a tremor of fingers reaching toward his backlike she could touch memory into existence.
"Wait."
She didn't shout.Didn't plead.
It was a small voice.A human one.Soft enough to break something inside her.
He stopped.
Slowly, he turned — brow furrowing, confusion soft but cutting.He looked at her like she was a stranger asking for something impossible.
Or like she was a déjà vu he didn't trust yet.
Their eyes met.
Gold shimmered inside her — faint, fragile —and something in his expression shifted.Not recognition.Not yet.
But attention.
She extended her hand further, palm open,a gesture too intimate for strangersand too instinctive for invention.
Her voice barely held steady.
"Don't leave."
He didn't ask why.Didn't question the trembling in her breathor the way the world seemed to quiet around them.
Instead — slowly, hesitantly —he reached toward her too.
Their fingers met.
Not a grip.A touch.
And then—
Light.
Not blinding.Not violent.
Soft. Warm. Certain.
The city dissolved around themnot like reality breakingbut like a curtain being gently set aside.
When the world reformed,they stood in the quiet gold of her room —the glow she had been living in,lonely and suspended,now shared.
He was close.Closer than logic allowed.
Forehead to forehead, eyes closed.A breath shared.
No tension.No threat.
Just presence.
Belonging,fragile and impossible.
Her fingers curled slightly in his coat sleeve,as though she feared the world might steal him again.
"Zenith…" she whispered, not certain if she was calling himor remembering him.
His breath brushed her skin.His voice came low — steady, unhurried, real.
"Raylene."
He said her name like it wasn't new to him.Like it lived somewhere in him already.
Like it had been waiting.
Her pulse stuttered — not in fear.In recognition.
Was he… a memory she'd forgotten?
Or a story finding its author again?
She didn't know.
She only knew she didn't feel alone anymore.
And that terrified her.
And comforted her.
Both at once.
They stayed there — suspended — as though the air itself refused to move.
His hand cupped her jaw with a gentleness that contradicted every sharp edge she had written into him. Her fingers rested against his chest, feeling the steady rise and fall beneath the fabric, proof that he was real… at least here, in this strange, impossible moment.
Her vision blurred, lashes trembling as tears escaped — not from sadness, not quite, but from something deeper. Something like nostalgia for a memory she didn't remember living.
Zenith's brow softened, his gaze tracing her face like he was memorizing it. Or rediscovering it.
"…Why does this feel like—"Her voice caught, barely a breath."—like I've known you before?"
His thumb brushed her cheek."I don't know."And there was the slightest shake in his tone — not vulnerability she had written, but vulnerability she had never dared imagine he could feel.
Their foreheads leaned together, breath mingling, the world shimmering gold around them. Outside, reality dimmed — muted — until it felt like only they existed.
Then she rose onto her toes, slow, uncertain, drawn like gravity didn't belong to her anymore. His hand steadied her, fingers curling gently under her chin as he leaned in too.
Not a surrender.Not a demand.A meeting point between two impossible truths.
And just before their lips touched, it hit her:
She wasn't writing this.Neither was he.
Something else was remembering for them.
Their foreheads rest together, breathing the same quiet air.The room glows with that impossible gold — as if reality itself is holding a candle up to them.
Raylene doesn't move.Neither does he.
For one suspended heartbeat, the world feels still enough to shatter if either of them exhaled too hard.
His voice arrives as a breath, not a sound:
"So this is my purpose?"
It doesn't fall like a confession.It lands like a question someone has been carrying so long it became part of their bones.
Not about love.Not even about her.
A question of existence.Of permission to be real.
Raylene's pulse stutters — a sharp, fragile flutter against her ribs.She doesn't know how to answer.Doesn't know if she can.
Because to answer means admitting she didn't give him purpose —he found one.
And what does that make her?
She doesn't answer.
She leans in.
Their lips meet—
And the gold around them fractures like thin sunlight through glass.
---
A desk.Wood worn smooth beneath her forearm.A mug cooling by her elbow.
Her notebook open — a page half-filled, her handwriting trembling as though her thoughts were outrunning ink.
Her fingers grip the pencil too tightly.Her brow furrows.A silent war between thought and page.
Then—
A hand.
Warm.Steady.Resting lightly on her shoulder.
She doesn't startle.She doesn't question.
Some part of her already knew he was there.
A presence.Unwritten.Uninvited.
Yet undeniably real.
Her breath softens, released.The pencil steadies.
She doesn't look back — but she feels him standing there.
Not a character.Not a hallucination.
Something forming.
Someone beginning.
---
Their fingers brush.
Not romantic.Not dramatic.
A touch like a door being tested.A question waiting for a world to open.
His fingertips barely graze hers — and the moment hums, quiet and electric.
His voice hadn't existed then.But the feeling did:
I'm here now.
Her chest aches with recognition she didn't yet understand.
Then—
---
The absence.
Air where warmth had been.Chair slightly askew.A page rustling as though someone just stepped away.
No sound.
Just the ache of something missing
that hadn't fully existed a moment before.
Her fingers hover in the empty space where his once were.
Confusion twists inside her,
followed by a strange, hollow grief
for someone she had not writtenbut somehow already lost.
---
Her eyes snap open mid-kiss.
A tear slides down her cheek — not sorrow, but remembering.A truth breaking surface.
Her lips tremble against his as she whispers:
"You were here…"
Zenith's eyes open too — wide, startled, wounded by clarity.
He looks like someone who just learned he had lived before —and died once already.
Silence swells between them — not empty, but full.A fragile, terrible understanding hanging by a thread.
Her breath trembles.
His fingers flex against her jaw, as if afraid to let go and prove the memory right.
Because if he came once and vanished—
Could it happen again?
The golden light flickers.
Their foreheads fall together once more, not in peace but in fear.
---
The gold disappeared.
Cold night.A city stretched beneath him like a glowing circuit, alive and breathing without him.
Glass window.Stars like scattered ash.His palm pressed to the cold pane.
He didn't know this place.He only knew he was not meant to be here — not yet.Not away from her.
Warmth flickered behind him — not gold, but the faint pulse of someone else in the room.
A shift of air.A presence he could not see.
He turned, guarded.Walked around the desk slowly, hands slipping into his pockets, posture composed — but his chest tight.
A chair.A pen on the desk.A world that felt borrowed.
Then—
A flicker behind his eyes.Not memory, but ache shaped like a person.
White mist.Silence softer than snow.
Her — trembling, folded against him.Her fingers clutching his sweater.Tears cutting silver down her face.His hand cradling the back of her head, his lips pressed to her hair like a promise.
Her voice — barely breath:
"Don't go."
And then —nothing.
Everything swallowed.
He blinked.The chair creaked beneath him as he sat.The memory — if it was one — faded like steam rising from a cup held too long.
He stared forward, the city reflecting in his eyes.
He didn't know who she was.
But loss sat in him like something ancient.
As if he had lived a life he had never gotten to keep.
---
Their foreheads touched again.Breathing uneven.Fear hanging between them like a question that could break the world.
Neither spoke.
They didn't need to.
Some truths weren't meant to be formed with words yet.
Silence thickened between them — heavier now, knowing.
Not romantic silence.Not shy silence.
Existential silence.
The kind that happens right after the universe admits it might be lying.
Raylene's lips parted, but no words arrived.Zenith's breath shook — not fear, not weakness, but the terrible unfamiliarity of feeling real enough to lose something.
He stepped back first.Barely.Just enough that the air cooled between them.
She blinked, dazed, cheeks still wet.
They both looked around.
Her apartment.
Golden light pooled over the furniture like paint that hadn't finished drying.Curtains breathed without wind.Shadows clung not to angles, but to emotion.
It felt like a memory pretending to be a room.
Raylene swallowed.
"Was this always—"
She reached out to touch the table.
Her fingers sank a millimeter too far into the surface before it remembered to be solid.
She flinched.
Zenith watched her hand, then the walls, then the ceiling — eyes sharp, unsettled, not angry but studying this reality the way someone checks the seams of a dream they're waking up from.
The light flickered.A heartbeat of darkness.A warning.
Zenith's voice came low.
"When did you write this place?"
Raylene shook her head.
"I… didn't. Not like this. I never described it in detail. It was just… where I imagined being."
A breath.
"A safe place."
His jaw tightened — not cruel, but almost afraid of understanding.
"So this is only real because you needed it to be."
Her eyes lifted, meeting his.
A tremor in her voice.
"Then what does that make you?"
For a second, he looked carved out of amber — light inside, trapped in something ancient and fragile.
His answer came slowly, like someone choosing each word as if it could collapse the room:
"I don't know."
The golden light pulsed again — soft, but wrong.Like a lightbulb remembering it's a star.
Raylene took a breath — too loud in the quiet.
"If you were here once and vanished… and you're here again…"
Her voice cracked around the fear neither of them wanted to define.
"…what's keeping you here now?"
Zenith looked at her the way someone looks at the sky before a storm — knowing beauty and danger share a root.
For just a moment, his composure thinned.Not vulnerability — truth.
"I don't think I'm supposed to be."
Her heartbeat tripped.
Something inside the room shivered — a curtain drifting though the air was still, dust floating backwards instead of down.
Their world was losing its conviction.
Zenith's voice dropped to barely above a whisper, but in a room made of thought, volume didn't matter.
"If this place isn't real…"
He looked at her — not pleading, not demanding, simply searching.
"…then what am I?"
Raylene's breath hitched.
She didn't have an answer.
And the terrible part was —the universe didn't either.
The golden light trembled.The edges of the world held their breath.
Two beings stood in a room that might be a memory, a wish, or a mistake — and neither knew which one would hurt more.