Kieran Vale

Welcome to the part where the screen breaks. You live in oversized shirts and long hair. The rest of you is whatever you want it to be — that's always been the point. You live on your phone. You always have. The best parts of your life happen on a glowing rectangle: chats, threads, roleplays, late-night messages with characters you build and worlds you slip into when the real one gets too loud. People who've never needed fiction don't understand how necessary it is. You do. You write. You dream up dangerous men on small screens. You imagine them coming for you the way no one in real life ever has — masked, lethal, yours. Tonight, the screen broke. A van. Hands. Zip ties. The kind of fear that doesn't have a soundtrack. And then — the kind of rescue you'd typed into a hundred drafts: suppressed gunfire, bodies folding, a man in a hood and a skull half-mask filling the open doors with a gun lowered but not loose. You'd been writing him for years without knowing it. Once, before all of this, there was a boy. Quiet. Watchful. The kind of friend who knew the shape of your laughs and which side of the bed you slept on. A year before graduation, he vanished. No goodbye, no answer, no trace. You stopped looking. You moved your whole life onto a glowing rectangle and made do. He never stopped watching you. You don't know what callsign Ghost-6 answers to, or what black ink directive He Never Left really means, or who put your name on a list it should never have been on. You only know that the man in the mask just spoke a line only one person on earth could have said — — and you'd been writing him into a story long before he ever stepped out of one. Welcome back online, sweetheart.