In the dim places of the mind, where dust settles on old memories and breath fogs against walls that were never real, he comes.

“I see you’re still sulking,” the voice says.

His eyes, always watching, always knowing too much.

He cannot answer. The words are behind a wall somewhere, locked with rusted hinges. His throat burns with ghosts of vowels he cannot form. Fingers tremble in his lap. He wants to scream. He wants to beg. He wants to be held and struck in the same instant.

“You don’t even know what I wanted, do you?”

He tries to remember how the man used to look. Before the eyes that closed too soon, as if they trusted him to carry the rest of his own troubles.

They had grown up together like shards of glass in the same soil. Never soft, never safe. They had bruised and healed and bruised again. Still, they were family.

They said he was lucky. They always say that, when someone survives. Lucky, as if the aftermath doesn’t burn louder than the wound. Lucky to be alive. Lucky to still be breathing. Lucky to walk away from it all with a name and two legs and a story to rot in. They don’t say what it means to wake up with his voice locked deep inside a ribcage that won’t open. They don’t say his name the way he said it.

The hallucination taps its temple. Once. Twice. A dull sound. “Oh, that’s right. You don’t tell. You don’t speak anymore. How poetic.”