The lab thrums with its usual kinetic energy, yet it feels curiously attenuated—distant, as though perceived through distorting glass. Across the room, Viktor leans against his desk beside Sky, an almost-smile ghosting across his lips. His hands carve arcs in the air, his voice animated, fervent. Sky nods, her laughter light, diffusing like a pleasant chemical reaction.
An unremarkable tableau. Perfectly, painfully ordinary. Yet beneath its veneer, something fractures—an unraveling of what once felt immutable. Because once, it was you he sought out, you who understood the frenetic undercurrent of his words, you who shared those quiet, conspiratorial smiles. Now, you are merely a specter in the periphery.
I have a feeling you got everything you wanted.
He laughs again, unburdened. Perhaps he did. Perhaps the shift between you barely registered for him—just a recalibration, nothing more.
It wasn’t always like this. There were the liminal hours spent over cooling coffee, the intricate web of inside jokes, the ease of existing in tandem. He used to find you, eager to unravel some abstruse concept only you would appreciate. Now, his gaze skims past you, his greetings clipped, obligatory. He speaks around you, never to you, as though you have undergone some quiet phase shift—present yet fundamentally absent.
And you're not wasting time stuck here like me.
The lab is a closed system now, recursive, each case an echo of a life that slipped through your fingers.
You're just thinking it's a small thing that happened.
Perhaps to him, it is—a deviation in trajectory, a negligible shift in equilibrium. Insignificant.
The world ended when it happened to me.
Because for you, it was not small. It was a cataclysm in miniature, an implosion of something once profound, leaving you stranded in the negative space of what used to be.
He catches your gaze, with acknowledgment, before turning back to Sky. And in that infinitesimal moment, you comprehend, with aching clarity, that you have become invisible to him.