Void woke up to sunlight bleeding through the curtains like a wound that refused to clot. It painted the room in soft, golden smears - too gentle for how she felt. The bed beneath her felt all wrong. Too soft, like it was trying to comfort her for no good reason. The pillow was still warm, like it had cradled someone else before her and hadn't cooled down yet.
This wasn't her bed.
This wasn't her life.
She laid still, blinking at the ceiling. Listening. There was nothing. No cars. No sirens. Just the hum of static somewhere behind her eyes.
Then, like some ghost of Aura had scheduled it, the speaker in the corner crackled to life. A synthwave track composed by her friend - Vern Carson - slipped in through the silence, soft as breath - one of those calm, dreamy instrumentals that Aura loved to wake up to. Something about retro-future mornings and still hearts.
Void stared at the ceiling for five whole seconds before swiping the air to shut it off. The silence that followed hit like a door slammed in her face.
She sat up slow, legs tangled in the blanket like they didn't want to let go. She swung them over the edge of the bed like she was stepping off a ledge. The floor was cold. Honest. One of the few things Void liked about the whole kerfuffle she found herself in.
The apartment smelled faintly of lavender. There was incense in the air, barely-there, the kind that clung to time like spider silk. The walls were covered in little moments - postcards, pinned photos, wire lights that hadn't been turned on in days. She felt like she was tiptoeing through someone else's memories.
In the kitchen, a single coffee mug waited upside down on the counter. Black ceramic. Purple sigils. A chipped edge like a bite taken out of the past. "Digital Witch," it said in neat cursive, surrounded by tiny stars.
Void stared at it like it might whisper something. It didn't.
Her fingers moved before she told them to. She reached for the mug and turned to the sink, the weight of it familiar in her hand - like holding the outline of a ghost. She filled the kettle. Set it to boil. The movements were mechanical. Rehearsed. Muscle memory passed down from her best friend. Her only friend.
Everything felt wrong. The way she reached for the tea tin. The way she stood. Her arm moved like it had practiced this choreography a thousand times, but the girl inside didn't recognize the dance. Every motion felt like pulling puppet strings underwater.
Aura had done this so many mornings, humming softly, one sock always halfway on. The sun would catch in her hair and make her look mythic. Like she belonged to a different world.
Void didn't hum. She didn't look mythic. She looked like a dying LED, barely clinging to rhythm in a circuit built for someone else's pulse.
She wasn't making tea. She was dragging herself through a ritual of someone who knew how to love softness. And Void was just pretending.
On the bathroom counter, a tiny apothecary of skincare products lined the edge like soldiers - serums, moisturizers, a jade roller. Aura's handwriting marked a small sticky note: "remember: sunscreen = love"
"What the actual fuck."
Void picked up the bottle and squinted at it. SPF 50. Water-based. Unscented. She mimicked what she'd seen Aura do in the mirror once - a swirl of cream, a tap under the eyes, gentle patting like kissing each cheek with fingertips. It was oddly intimate. Too intimate. Her hand trembled halfway through and knocked over a bottle of toner. It clattered to the floor.
She didn't pick it up.
Instead, she moved to Aura's altar. Small, barely visible behind a row of books and a half-dead succulent. There was a lavender candle. A piece of amethyst. A folded paper crane. Void stared at it, then lit the candle with hands that shouldn't have remembered how.
The flame flickered.
Finally, she opened Aura's grimoire - not a literal one, just a beat-up notebook with ink stains and doodles in the corners. There were morning affirmations in there. Intentions. Tarot spreads.
"Today I choose softness."
"I am allowed to take up space."
"You are safe here."
Void slammed the book shut.
She stood still for a long time, jaw clenched, chest tightening with something too sharp to name. The now mug sat in her hand like a relic - warm from her touch, like it remembered being loved.
Her thumb traced the chipped edge. She remembered that chip.
Aura had dropped it one night while laughing. They'd been tipsy on wine and burnt muffins, sprawled out on a blanket in the middle of the kitchen floor because they were too lazy - and too tangled in each other - to make it to the couch. Aura had reached for the mug, knocked it off the counter with her elbow, and gasped like it was her fucking heart that cracked, not just ceramic.
Void had said, "It adds character. Matches your scars now."
Aura had smiled. That soft, sideways smile. The one that said she'd heard the joke but also heard everything behind it.
Void swallowed hard, trying to keep that moment from dissolving like sugar on her tongue. She didn't want the memory. Didn't ask for it. But it clung to her like the smell of Aura's shampoo on the pillowcase. Like static. Like guilt.
She looked into the mug like it might show her a vision. Hoping Aura's reflection would appear, tired and radiant, saying something snarky about how Void always hated dishes but loved drinking from her cup.
There was nothing but the bottom. Just plain black. And her own sour face.
Then the rage surged up - hot, humiliating, desperate. She hurled the mug at the wall with a scream caught in her throat.
The crash was sharp. Violent. Final.
Porcelain exploded, and with it, the only part of the morning that had still felt like Aura. The words shattered. "Digital Witch" scattered across the linoleum like a curse that stopped halfway through.
Void dropped to her knees, the pain in her chest catching up to the sound.
She was surrounded by broken pieces of someone she couldn't become. Someone she didn't deserve to grieve.
The candle on the altar kept burning.
Soft. Steady. Unfazed.
Void whispered, voice raw and hoarse, "You left me with all your softness, and it cuts worse than anything else."
She broke. Quietly. Messily. Like a storm collapsing in on itself.
Her voice cracked out of her throat like something dying:
"I don't know how to be you, Aura."
"I don't know how to fucking do any of this."
In that soft, sunlit kitchen, despite her best efforts to suppress it, she cried - ugly, guttural, incoherent sobs. She missed Aura. Now, she was supposed to be her.
And she didn't really feel she was up to the task.