Alone

He stared at his gloved hands, watching the faint teal light ripple across the fabric like liquid glass. The material drank in the glow and released it in soft gradients that traced every seam, every subtle bend of his fingers. The suit felt heavier than it should have, the pressure of it reminding him that there was still something holding him together, even as everything else had come apart. The silence around him was not empty. It pressed in from every direction, thick and patient, swallowing even the memory of sound.

He tilted his hands slowly, mesmerized by the way the distant star fractured along the curve of his knuckles. Its light stretched thin, diffused into a pale shimmer that clung to the edges of his gloves. When he turned slightly, his body interrupted the glow, and a shadow spilled outward, impossibly long, pouring into the endless black. The darkness did not feel passive. It seemed to lean toward him, curious, as though it had been waiting.

For a moment, wonder loosened the tight knot in his chest. The universe looked vast enough to contain meaning again, vast enough to make loss feel small. But the illusion dissolved quickly. Everything had collapsed. That was what brought him here, suspended in the quiet aftermath of a life that had been taken from him without warning, without mercy. His home, the warm clutter of familiar rooms, the woman whose laughter had once filled the spaces between his thoughts, the family whose presence had grounded him. All of it erased in a blink so abrupt that the mind refused to accept the finality.

It was not a decision that led him here. It was theft. The kind that leaves the door open behind it so the emptiness can wander freely.

He tried to summon panic, some sharp instinct that would ignite the blood and force his body into motion. This was the moment when a man should fight, should claw for breath, should rage against the quiet vacuum that threatened to claim him. Instead, there was only a dull awareness, like touching something through layers of cloth. Even fear felt distant, softened at the edges.

He wondered if the suit’s oxygen mixture was muting him, slowing his thoughts into something manageable. But he knew the truth before the idea had fully formed. The numbness had begun long before he entered the ship. It had started the moment the world he loved had folded in on itself, leaving him standing in the echo of what once was.

When they asked him to travel beyond the borders of their solar system, to investigate the strange disturbances rippling through neighboring stars, he accepted without hesitation. There had been no spark of adventure, no childlike thrill at the promise of the unknown. Instead, something inside him exhaled for the first time in months. Relief. A quiet permission to leave behind the rooms filled with memories that would never change again.

His heart tightened now as he thought of that distant planet, its colors, its gravity, the scent of rain striking sun-warmed stone. He pictured the faces he would never see again, frozen in the fragile perfection of memory. Grief did not strike him like lightning. It seeped through him slowly, saturating everything until even the idea of feeling whole seemed abstract.

Traveling through the wormhole had not been like anything the simulations suggested. It felt less like movement and more like surrender. He had compared it, in a detached corner of his mind, to skydiving without a parachute. Not the rush, not the exhilaration, but the long stretch of falling after the realization that nothing would stop the descent. Time lost shape. The ship trembled around him as though reality itself objected to being bent.

Metal groaned with a sound he felt more than heard, vibrations traveling through the hull and into his bones. The structure that had carried him across impossible distance began to unravel piece by piece, panels peeling back like petals torn loose by invisible hands. Warning lights flared and died in uneven pulses, staining the cockpit in brief flashes of color that felt strangely ceremonial.

He expected terror then. Expected the primal surge that demands survival at any cost. Instead, an unfamiliar calm settled over him, steady and inevitable. Acceptance did not arrive as a conscious decision. It grew quietly, filling the spaces where resistance once lived.

The star’s light intensified as the ship’s shielding fractured, its warmth bleeding through the suit in subtle increments. It was not heat as he remembered it. There was no breeze, no shifting air, no comforting scent carried on rising currents. Just a steady touch of energy that reminded him he still existed within a universe capable of contact.

The hull tore open with silent violence. One moment he was enclosed in engineered safety, the next he felt the pull, firm and undeniable. Something larger than gravity claimed him, drawing him away from the wreckage with slow authority. The ship did not explode. It simply came apart, surrendering its pieces to the dark.

As the last fragments drifted beyond reach, the enormity of the emptiness revealed itself fully. No up. No down. Only distance layered upon distance, depth without boundary. The star burned quietly in the vastness, indifferent yet impossibly beautiful.

Then there was nothing between him and infinity.

Then, he was alone.