The water had cooled.
Clouded, crimson liquid was swallowing the painted metal beneath it. Not the clean, cinematic type - no soft swirls or poetic tendrils. Just a steady bleed into warmth that had long since stopped steaming. It sat there like silence incarnate, thick and waiting, scarlet that didn't beg for attention - it demanded it. But this wasn't a cry for help - it was resignation, pure and simple. A surrender written in the only language her body still cared to speak.
Void sat still in the tub. Her spine curved forward in that quiet, defeated way that didn't scream pain - it simply was pain. Her body leaned into the warmth like it had forgotten it could hold itself upright, a secret deal between one of the weak fundamental interactions and her bones.
Her arms rested on her knees. The angles looked awkward, but she didn't shift. Just held herself like a crumbling sculpture, elbows jutting out like wings that had never learned how to fly. Her bra clung to damp skin, soaked through with bathwater and hemoglobin.
Her hands were open. Loose, slack. Fingers curled just barely, twitching now and then like they were remembering how to hold onto things but choosing not to. Nothing gripped, nothing fought. They felt like they weren't hers anymore.
She wasn't thinking actively. Thoughts drifted in and out like fog. Unformed, unconcerned. Names, faces, regrets - they came, but not close enough to bite. Her brain floated above it all, disconnected from the weight in her limbs. She wasn't spiraling, either. There was no storm. No sharp panic. Just a slow, sinking silence that felt like being underwater too long - not drowning, just... watching the surface drift further away, too far to touch.
Hovering between moments. Between needs. Between the will to scream and the inability to open her mouth. It wasn't peace. It wasn't chaos. It was the space between breaths where nothing existed and everything hurt.
It was a numbness - a numbness that hollowed, that made skin feel too tight and too loose all at once, like she was wearing her body wrong - like she'd left herself behind somewhere but hadn't realized it until just now.
A numbness that made time meaningless.
Keira didn't remember why she looked at her phone again.
Instinct? Routine? Maybe. But somewhere in the middle of organizing her tools, she glanced at her lockscreen and saw the same thing she'd seen for the past sixteen hours: silence.
No reply.
No update.
Void had read her last message. That was it.
"Fuck... Where are you?"
And suddenly, that buzzing in Keira's chest - the one she'd been ignoring all day - spiked into full alarm mode. Her lungs felt like they forgot how to expand.
She stood up too fast.
Tools fell off the workbench, clattering. She didn't care.
Hoodie. Boots. Bag. Gone.
She was out the door in under a minute.
She couldn't say how long she'd been there. Minutes. Hours. Maybe more. The red in the water blurred the clock hands, made the world outside the bathroom door feel theoretical. Out there, life ticked on. In here, it went on pause.
She hadn't noticed she wasn't breathing right until her chest stung a little. Not from holding it - rather, from forgetting to do it at all. Inhale-exhale. Nothing automatic anymore. Everything was manual now. And even that felt like too much.
The blood kept coming.
Some part of her registered it - the flicker of surprise. The idea that maybe she'd slipped a little deeper than she'd meant to. Maybe the blade had caught something it wasn't supposed to, or her math was off. Or... her body had too much to say.
Her fingers were cold - that was new.
So was the tingling behind her eyes - not pain, not tears, it was only pressure. Static noise humming where thought used to live. The edges of her vision narrowed like tunnel glass. The light from the ceiling fixture swam in quiet, syrupy halos.
"Oh," she whispered.
The word tasted like air, brittle and distant.
She tried to shift her weight. Couldn't.
Her body wasn't heavy. It was absent. Gone one limb at a time, like her soul was unplugging from her skin in slow, deliberate lines. Starting with the fingers, then toes, going up to her knees.
Her chest gave a second twitch.
Shallow. Like her lungs were trying to practice for something they weren't sure they'd get to finish.
She blinked.
Tried again to sit up - but her spine refused to listen.
She wasn't panicking - there wasn't enough oxygen left in her for panic.
There was only one thought now, small and clear in the fog: "I went too far."
She had wanted silence, not erasure.
She wanted quiet. Stillness. A pause she could control, even if just for a moment.
But this - this was final.
She tried to reach for something. The towel, phone. Anything. But her hands wouldn't close. Wouldn't lift. Her body had stopped listening. It was already leaving.
She just slumped. Back against the tub wall, head tilted upward, jaw slack, eyes staring at the light fixture above like it might blink her away.
Her mouth hung open.
No breath. No words. Just that faint gape of someone who was no longer trying to speak, no longer trying to scream - just waiting.
Waiting for the warmth to fade.
Waiting for her thoughts to get too slow to matter.
Waiting for the quiet to wrap around her and mean it this time.
She could feel her pulse start to slip.
And with the last hint of breath, barely audible, barely even real, she whispered:
"So... this is how it ends..."
"Not... a bang."
"Not even..."
"...a whimper."