CYAN

It was not a dream. It was something less formed than a dream. It was just a sensation of warmth turning into cold.

I felt something slipping through my hands like sand. There was the smell of salt water and the sharp tang of iron.

I felt the weight of someone leaning against me. Then that weight became an absence before I could even fully register that it was there.

My thoughts were not complete yet. They were not coherent. They were just a direction, like a compass needle pointing toward something that was no longer there.

Then I reached the surface. I did not break through it with a splash. I was just present all of a sudden.

I felt the texture of the fabric against my cheek. It was not my fabric. I felt the specific weight of a heavy blanket. It was not my blanket.

I heard the sound of a television playing at a low volume. Something was on the screen, but I was not watching it.

The light in the room was coming from the wrong angle. It had the wrong quality. This was not my window.

These things registered in my mind, but they did not land. There is a difference between those two things.

Registration is passive. Landing requires something that I did not currently have access to.

I sat up slowly. I did not move slowly because I was in pain. I moved slowly because speed requires intention.

Intention requires more energy than was currently available to me. I looked at the room through a narrow lens.

The circle of the image was present, but it was surrounded by the soft dark of peripheral nothingness.

The image itself was slightly blurred at the edges. It looked like someone had adjusted the focus partway and then simply walked away.

I did not feel panic. I did not feel relief or confusion. I just had the awareness that something was around me and that I was inside of it.

My memory did not arrive in a continuous stream. It was not like a film playing in a theater. It came in separate frames without any connective tissue between them.

In the first frame, I saw my own hands. They were dark. There was something on them that did not belong to me.

In the second frame, there was a sound. It was not quite a voice and not quite a scream. It was muffled, like the way sound travels through deep water.

The third frame was a sensation of something warm becoming cold. It was the specific temperature shift of life leaving something that was only warm because of me.

In the fourth frame, I was running. I saw the dock and the dark water.

In the fifth frame, there was nothing. It was the nothing that comes after the body decides it has taken enough for one day.

The gaps between these frames were not frightening to me. They were just gaps. My brain was selecting what to show me and what to hold back.

It was like a parent deciding what a child is ready to see. When I tried to reach toward those frames, they receded.

My brain stepped in front of them and told me not yet. I accepted this.

My brain has been doing this my whole life. I have learned that pushing against it costs more than waiting for it to open up.

Someone was there with me. I remembered this much. I could not see the face clearly, but I remembered the shape of a person.

I remembered the temperature of a presence. It was familiar in a sensory way rather than a logical one.

It was not the recognition of a name or a face that made it familiar. It was something more primitive than that.

It was a similarity to something I already knew. My body categorized it as being adjacent to what is safe and adjacent to what is known.

I remembered a voice making something like a bet. It mentioned a number. Two days.

The voice was cold and precise. It was nothing like warmth, but it was close to the shape of something I recognized.

The image in my mind cleared slightly at the edges.

The face was familiar in a specific way. It had the same architecture as someone else’s face, but it was much colder.

It had the temperature of someone who built walls earlier than most people do and built them much better.

The name arrived. Nick. He was Noah’s brother. He was the man with the jaw that I had hit on a pavement in what felt like a different life.

He told me to follow.

So I followed.

I did not decide to do it.

My body moved toward the warmth in a cold room without being asked.

I looked around the room properly now. I saw the couch and the blanket. I saw the coffee table and the television.

Everything was clean and ordered. It was the specific order of someone who controls their environment because that is the only version of control they can have.

I moved through the space slowly. I saw the kitchen and the bathroom. I saw the details of a space that belonged to a person who bought the same brand of everything. To this person, variables were just inefficiencies.

The last two days arrived in my mind as awareness rather than memory. I was aware of moving when I was directed to move. I was aware of eating when food appeared in front of me. I responded when I was spoken to.

All of it happened from the outside of myself. I was watching myself do these things through someone else’s eyes that happened to be my own.

I recognized this feeling. It was not new. I had been here before. It was not this apartment, but it was this state of being. I was looking from behind glass at my own life operating without me.

"This feeling again," I said aloud. I said it to no one, or I said it to myself. It was the same thing.

I sat back down on the couch. There was a quiet in my head, but it was not a peaceful quiet. It was the wrong kind of quiet. It was the silence of a room after something loud has stopped.

I took an inventory of my mind. The constant low-level noise that my brain always makes should have been there.

My thoughts should have been running and making observations. My pattern recognition and analysis should have been running on everything all the time.

Instead, there was almost nothing. There was just a hollow space. Underneath that hollow, there was a specific wrongness. I knew the space shouldn’t be empty because something was filling it before.

The name arrived quietly and without any drama.

Cassian.

That is what was there.

That is what filled the space. Now the absence of him was louder than the name itself.

A thought about my medication surfaced. It was muscle memory. My brain had learned early on that it needs management when certain states arrive.

I had not brought it with me. I had been here for two days without it.

A quiet urge appeared at the edge of my mind.

It was an old friend that was not really a friend. There you are, I thought. I was wondering when you would show up.

I did not follow the urge today. I noted it and set it aside. I have had years of practice, so I knew it could be set aside even when it felt like the only thing that would help.

Another presence flickered at the edge of the emptiness. It was a face, but it was not Cassian’s face. The word arrived before I could even decide to think it. Noah.

The resistance in my mind was immediate. I shut the thought down fast. It was faster than the last time I shut it down, which had been faster than the time before that.

But the restraint only made the feeling stronger. That is the thing about suppression.

I have known this academically for years, and I lived it anyway. Knowing something and being able to stop it are two entirely different skills.

Underneath it all, there was a quiet truth. It was not dramatic. Cassian chose someone. He is choosing someone.

And it is not me. I know this. It shouldn’t matter, and yet it does.

A thought arrived again about the person who owned this apartment. I noticed that

Nick watches too closely for someone who performs the act of not watching.

He had brought a stranger home, which contradicted everything his apartment said about him.

It contradicted the order and the control and the single-brand lifestyle.

The contradiction was interesting to me, even in this state. My brain still noticed those things.

The curiosity was small, but it was present. It was the first thing that had felt like the real Cyan since I was on that dock.

Why did he let me stay? I wondered. He didn’t have to. He wanted to leave. He left anyway and then he came back.

I did not have the answer. I noted the curiosity and set it beside the other things for later.

The turning point was small and not dramatic at all. A thought crossed my mind fully.

Two days. That is what he said. Cassian will wake up.

Everything about it was utterly impossible but I still wanted to believe.

Then the next thought came. Cassian was shot.

It was not fragmented anymore. It was not a frame without connective tissue. It was complete and clear and present.

Everything followed in a sequence. I remembered the dock and the blood. I remembered Cassian’s weight and the car. I remembered the hospital and the floor. It was all playing like a film now.

The buffering In my brain ended. The quiet became something else entirely. I sat very still for a moment while the information arrived in full.

"I need to go," I said aloud to the empty apartment.

The device was sitting on the cushion beside me. It was not my phone. It was Nick’s spare. He had left it with a passcode that he had said aloud as if it was nothing. But it was not nothing.

I picked it up and entered the passcode. I dialed his number... Something I’ve memorized my whole life.

The phone rang once.

"Master Cyan," a voice said. It was Reginald. He answered on the first ring because he always answers on the first ring for me.

I exhaled. It was the specific exhale of someone who had been somewhere else for two days. I had just heard the first voice that sounded like home.