Arthur laughed once, quietly, at nothing. "Right."
He left his bag at the foot of the stairs and went up to his bedroom. The rest of the house was a cold shell. His room was the opposite, and it was messy on purpose. Fantasy novels leaned in stacks against the nightstand, one good sneeze from collapse. Game cases lay across the desk beside half-built models and spare computer parts, and a coil of cable had been sitting on the carpet so long it had worn a groove.
Posters of sprawling landscapes and glowing broadswords covered the walls. Figures of knights and mages stood along the shelves, guarding nothing.
In the corner, his custom-built computer waited.
He pressed the power button and listened to the fans spin up. He dropped into the chair, peeled off his damp jacket, and the orchestral music of his favorite RPG swelled through the speakers. The tension in his shoulders came undone a knot at a time.
"At least you guys don’t judge me," he told the loading screen.
The game opened on a fantasy kingdom lit by a golden sunset that never ended. Titans waded slowly through a sea of clouds in the distance. His character, an armored warrior with a glowing broadsword across his back, spawned in the middle of a crowded city square.
The NPCs reacted almost at once. A merchant waved from a stall. A passing mage bowed. A fellow warrior bellowed a greeting across the cobblestones.
Arthur took the keyboard and mouse and steered his warrior through the streets. "See?" He leaned back until the chair creaked. "This is better."
He played for hours, sunk in the rhythm of exploring and fighting. In the game he wasn’t an outcast. He had friends who fought at his side and a guild that needed him. He had a house he had built board by board, and pockets heavy with currency he’d earned. People knew his name for the monsters he had killed, and nobody knew it for the stains on his shirt.
He stopped his character on a high cliff over the painted world and looked at the screen.
For a moment he let himself imagine living there. A place where he could make his own road. No school corridors. No chair kicked into his shins. No empty house at the end of the day. No one laughing the second he walked into a room.
He smiled, tired and a little wistful. "Maybe in another life."
It slipped out before he noticed. He glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen.
1:47 a.m.
His stomach answered with a loud, hollow growl.
"Great." Arthur hit the quick-save key. "I haven’t eaten."
He left the game running, his warrior standing watch on the cliff, and padded downstairs in his socks. The rain had stopped at some point. The house was silent in a way it hadn’t been earlier, heavy and listening.
He flicked on the kitchen light. A package of meat he’d bought two days ago sat in the fridge. He set it on the counter, took down the wooden cutting board, and pulled a sharp knife from the block.
"Let’s see," he muttered, and started cutting.
His mind drifted back to the game while he sliced. Tomorrow he might start a fresh playthrough with a different build. A master inventor, maybe, salvaging old technology to make strange weapons. Or a merchant sailing the cloud seas.
He set the knife down at the edge of the counter. "Definitely an inventor."
He wiped his hands on a towel and remembered he needed the bathroom before he started cooking. "Bathroom first."
He turned on his heel.
His sock hit a patch of water on the linoleum, left by the ice dispenser he’d been meaning to fix for weeks. His foot shot out from under him.
"Whoa..."
His body twisted in the air. He flailed, one hand reaching blind for the counter, and his fingers brushed the smooth wood and found nothing to hold. The kitchen tilted. His shoulder slammed into the lower cabinet doors hard enough to rattle his teeth. He went down sideways, the breath leaving him in a rush.
Then a blunt pressure punched into his abdomen.
Arthur went still.
For several long seconds his brain refused the information. There was no sharp pain yet, only a heavy tightness just under his ribs. He blinked up at the ceiling.
Slowly he lowered his chin.
The knife had been knocked off the counter in the fall. It was wedged under him with its handle braced against the floor, and the blade was buried deep in his stomach.
His breath caught. "No."
Panic came in cold and total. He tried to push himself up and get away from the pressure, and the moment his core tightened, pain went off through his whole body, white and searing, and took his vision with it. He collapsed sideways with a choked gasp. The knife slid free and clattered across the linoleum.
Warmth spread over the cold floor beneath him. He stared at the pooling red, and the edges of the room swam. His hands shook as he brought them down and pressed them against his ruined shirt.
"No, no..." The words barely rose above the roar in his ears.
The blood kept coming, hot and fast between his fingers. Each breath was ragged and shallow, like drawing in crushed glass. He told his legs to move. He told them to stand, to get him to the phone on the wall.
They didn’t listen. They had turned to blocks of lead.
He dug his elbows into the floor and dragged himself an inch. Then another. He crawled toward the kitchen archway and left a red smear behind him. Someone might hear. A neighbor might be awake.
At the hallway he understood. Nobody was going to hear him. The nearest house was fifty yards off, and his own front door was locked.
His arms gave out. He rolled onto his back and his head struck the hardwood. The ceiling seemed to lift away from him, further each second. A deep cold started in his fingers and toes and began its slow march toward his chest.
Pieces of the day drifted past at the edge of his sight. The stale air of the classroom. The laughter that followed him like a second shadow. The girl in the cafeteria walking off with his notes.
Then softer things. The little boy’s grin around a red toy car. The woman’s voice saying thank you. His cluttered bedroom. The orchestral music still playing upstairs, and his warrior on the cliff, watching a sunset he would never see again.
His cracked lips curved into a faint, shaking smile.
"So that’s it."
His eyelids grew too heavy to hold. He wondered whether the game would crash, or whether the warrior would just stand there until the power failed. Then a heavier thought settled on him.
Nobody would know. Not tonight. Not tomorrow, when his chair sat empty in homeroom. It could take days before anyone noticed he was gone.
He swallowed, and his throat was dry.
"I guess..." It was barely a whisper, small against the silence. "I really was alone."
His eyes closed.
The pain faded to a dull hum, and then to quiet, and then the world went out.
When Arthur opened his eyes, there was no ceiling.
There was no pain either. The fire in his stomach was gone. The cold of the hallway floor was gone. He couldn’t feel his own body at all.
He looked down, expecting a ruined shirt and red hands. Nothing was there. He was a point of awareness hanging in an enormous, empty space.
"What...?"
His voice came back to him strangely, with a ring in it like a chime struck inside a cathedral.
He turned. Nothing. He looked up, down, left, right. No floor under him, no sky over him, no walls. Only a boundless dark.
"Am I dead?" The words sounded very small.
He waited. Nothing answered.
Then, far off in the black, something shifted.
A single point of light sparked into being.
Arthur stared at it. It pulsed, white at first, then a deep iridescent emerald, and began to swell outward. It wasn’t harsh. It was warm, and it carried a low thrum he felt in a chest he no longer had.
It grew brighter, and brighter.
The darkness cracked around it and came apart like glass shattering in slow motion. Emerald and gold poured over him. He threw up an arm against the glare, and as his vision adjusted the light drew itself inward and took the shape of a silhouette.
A figure stepped out of the radiance.
A woman.
She seemed to drift more than walk. Long, luminous hair trailed behind her in shades of starlight and pale green, and a soft aura moved around her, slow and steady as a heartbeat.
Arthur couldn’t speak. He couldn’t think. He stared.
She stopped a few paces away and looked at him.
Out of habit he braced. He waited for the judgment, the pity, the disgust, the cruel amusement he had learned to expect in every pair of eyes.
None of it came.
Her eyes were bright and very old, and they held him with a warmth so complete it hurt. It was the look of someone who had been waiting a long time for him to arrive.
His throat tightened. An ache he hadn’t asked for rose in his chest.
She smiled, and it carried the weight of a sunrise over a darkened world.
"Arthur."
He froze. Hearing his name spoken with that much care broke something loose in him that he had kept shut for years.
She held out a hand. The light gathered around her fingertips like fireflies.
"You don’t have to be alone anymore."
For the first time in his life, Arthur had nothing to say.