Void stood in her kitchen, staring down a burnt grilled cheese sandwich as if it misgendered her.
Smoke curled lazily from the crust like the last fucks she was willing to give. The air smelled like betrayal, plastic, and processed cheddar. It hissed at her when she poked it with a spatula that had clearly seen one too many fires. Appropriate.
"That's what I get for trying to feel something," she muttered, flipping the blackened abomination over like she was burying a corpse. "Should've just licked a fucking battery."
Cooking used to be Aura's thing. She remembered Aura's careful way of buttering the bread to the edges, always with real cheese - none of that synthetic shit - and some jazz track humming in the background. But Aura was gone. And Void? She was here, setting off the smoke alarm for the third time this week, still pretending the smoke coming out of her failure didn't sting her eyes.
Three girls. One after another. All of them sweet in that "I love weird girls" kind of way. The kind that called her fascinating, wanted to hear about her lab, her projects, her "techno-witchery." All giggles and emojis until the moment she stopped performing novelty and started bleeding honesty.
Void would've taken a breakup. A "hey, it's not you" or even a blunt "you're too intense." But no. They left with nothing but silence, like she was some inconvenience who's easier to just sweep under a rug. Just gone. One after another, like the universe had her on auto-delete.
The sandwich hit the plate with a heavy finality. Rather unsurprisingly, it offered her nothing but a faint thud.
She dragged herself into the corner booth she'd welded together from scavenged server rack legs and pressed her forehead to the cool table surface. No one ever warned her how quiet it would get after being left. Not just from others, but inside. She felt like an abandoned mainframe still running diagnostics, still waiting for an operator that wasn't coming.
Aura had jumped. And now, for the first time, Void got it. Not in a romantic, tragic-heroine way. Not in the tired metaphors of drowning or vanishing. No. She understood the practical horror of being done. The unbearable banality of trying, failing, and trying again while the world watched with apathy.
She picked up the grilled cheese - edges crispy, nearly cremated, cheese barely molten - and took a savage bite.
It was awful.
She chewed anyway.
"Fuck it," she mumbled through the mouthful. "I live out of spite now. And sodium."
Because giving up was easy. Giving up was the grilled cheese version of this fucked up sandwich of life she found herself thrown into: burnt, underdone, and cold in the middle.
But Void? She wasn't done yet.
She had salt in her veins, anger in her gut, and a list of people who still needed to know she existed.
...and zero cooking skills.
"Guess it's time for that kebab place again..." she exhaled, making the first good decision that week. A decision that put herself first.