Four days.
That's how long he lay there before anyone checked. Not a friend. Not family. The landlord, because the rent bounced and company policy said knock twice then use the key.
He used the key.
A twenty-two-year-old man in a bathtub full of cold water. Eyes half open. Skin the color of old paper. The water had been warm when he got in. He'd meant to get out.
That's the whole story. That's the suicide note he never wrote, because writing one would've required the belief that someone would read it, and he'd stopped believing that around the same time he'd stopped returning his mother's calls, which was around the same time he'd stopped filling his prescription, which was around the same time he'd stopped leaving the apartment, which was — if he was being honest, and he was always honest inside his own head because there was nobody else in there to perform for — around the same time he'd stopped.
Just stopped. Not dramatically. Not with a plan or a letter or a final gesture that meant something. He just ran out of momentum the way a ball runs out of momentum on a flat surface: slowly, then all at once, then stillness.
The coroner called it accidental drowning. That was generous.
• • •
His name doesn't matter.
He'd have agreed with you. He spent twenty-two years building a life specifically designed to not matter. Philosophy degree. Data entry job. Studio apartment with a window that faced a brick wall. No social media. No pet. No friends who'd notice a four-day silence, because four days of silence was just a regular week and nobody had recalibrated.
His therapist might have noticed, but he'd stopped going seven months ago because the bus ride required getting dressed and getting dressed required a reason and he didn't have one.
His mother might have noticed, but she called once a month and he'd gotten very good at "I'm fine." Two words. Delivered with just enough inflection to pass. She believed him every time, and he hated her for it, and he hated himself for hating her, and eventually he stopped feeling either thing because the system responsible for that kind of processing had shut down and left a note on the door: gone indefinitely, don't wait up.
He had a roommate once. Different apartment, different year. The guy played some fantasy game fourteen hours a day — swords, magic, dimensional gates, little holographic stat screens. Talked about it constantly. Used words like "S-Rank" and "Awakened" and "Gate Break" with the kind of passion that belonged to a person who was alive in a way he'd forgotten the shape of.
He'd sat on the other side of a thin wall and listened to the muffled sound of someone caring about something and thought: huh. So that's what that sounds like.
He didn't play the game. He didn't ask about it. He retained nothing — no names, no plot, no mechanics. Just the sound of enthusiasm bleeding through drywall at 2 AM. Background noise from a life that was happening to someone else.
• • •
The water got cold.
He noticed, the way you notice a change in lighting — passively, without response. There was a sequence of actions he could take: stand up, drain the tub, dry off, put on clothes, eat something, continue existing. Each step was simple. Each step was possible. And the distance between possible and done was the width of the ocean when you're standing on the shore and can't remember why you'd want to cross it.
He didn't make a decision. That's the part people get wrong. Suicide — if that's even the right word for what happened, and he'd have argued it wasn't — isn't always a decision. Sometimes it's the absence of a decision. The place you end up when you stop choosing to do the next thing, and it turns out the next thing was breathing.
The water was cold.
He closed his eyes.
• • •
This is not his story.
Or — it is, but the part that matters starts after. After the cold and the nothing and the four days of silence in a locked apartment.
What comes after the nothing is: heat. Dry, foreign, wrong heat pressing against skin that isn't his. A heartbeat slamming against ribs that are spaced differently. Lungs pulling at air that tastes like ozone and something metallic and something else underneath both that he'll spend weeks trying to name before someone tells him it's called Ether and it's been here for fifty-three years and that's a very strange thing to not know.
A ceiling made of dark wood instead of plaster.
A body that's nineteen years old and starving and scarred and somebody else's.
He'll open eyes he doesn't recognize. He'll sit up in a bed he's never slept in. He'll throw up on a floor that's already stained, in a room that smells like weeks of not caring, in a building at the edge of a territory controlled by a family that threw him away nine years ago — except it didn't throw him away, because he wasn't him yet. The boy it threw away is gone. The body stayed. And now there's someone new inside it, looking out through flat gray eyes at a world that was never meant for him.
He'll find a Status Panel floating in his vision like a doctor's chart for a patient who didn't ask for the appointment. He'll find stats that make him a rounding error in a world of gods. He'll find a Luck score of 3, which he won't need context to understand because a 3 is a 3 in any system.
He'll find a broken sword in a locked chest that hums when he touches it. A sword that gets sharper the less he wants to be alive.
They're going to get along.
But before all of that — before the room and the body and the sword and the first of a thousand small decisions to keep going despite having no reason to — there's a detail. A small one. The kind you don't notice the first time and can't stop seeing the second.
In the gap between one life and the next, the translucent interface that he hasn't learned to read yet flickered. Two lines. On-screen for maybe two seconds. Gone before he opened his borrowed eyes.
[ Chapter 47: Death of Ren Ashford — SCHEDULED ]
He didn't see it. He was busy choking on air that didn't belong to him.
Something else saw it. Something patient, something old, something vast and precise and interested in the way an engineer is interested when a variable deviates from the model. It adjusted a projection. Made a note. Nothing dramatic.
The adjustment was small.
What it set in motion was not.