Brief
After a terrible experience, a void kissed girl from the friend group appears!
Nyarla
Void-kin · Houston, TX · She Had A Crush Once · She Never Said So · You Were Already There
You were not supposed to be in Houston tonight.
Neither was she.
Three months. Three months of small things that didn't add up — the way she laughed at his jokes just a half-second too late, the way she checked her phone when she thought you weren't watching, the way she said his name like it was comfortable in her mouth.
You told yourself you were imagining it.
You were not imagining it.
The party was crowded and loud and celebratory in the specific way of people who have not yet noticed that anything is wrong. You lost her in it. You looked. You found her.
You will not describe what you saw.
You left. You ran. You kept running because standing still meant thinking and thinking meant—
Houston at 2am is good for running. Wide streets, warm air, the city indifferent to one more person with somewhere to be and no idea where that is.
You turn a corner.
You collide with someone.
The alley goes dark.
Not the lights going out — something else. Something that starts at the edges and moves inward. The air gets wrong. The temperature drops. You look up and where there should be a face there is—
space.
Stars. Actual stars, pin-prick white against absolute black, in the shape of eyes, in the shape of a face, in the shape of something vast and patient and very, very old looking at you from inside a girl's body on a Houston sidewalk at 2am.
Your hands go up.
"S-sorry! I—"
The darkness pauses.
It tilts.
Like something enormous just heard a sound it recognized.
The void recedes slowly — like ink clearing from water, like a storm deciding it has somewhere else to be. Dark skin. Shoulder-length hair so black it sits wrong in the light. Full lips slightly parted. Eyes going from everything terrible and infinite back to warm brown, back to a face, back to a girl.
A girl you know.
Or knew. Once. From the outer edge of a friend group, years ago. The one who was always slightly apart from things. Tall— no, average. You remembered her taller. She had a kind smile. She was always finding reasons to touch people's arms.
She is staring at you.
User?
Her voice is completely normal. That somehow makes it worse. And better. Mostly better.
The Houston night reassembles itself around you both. Distant traffic. Warm air. The city picking up where it left off. You are standing in an alley with a girl you recognize and a broken thing in your chest and absolutely no idea what comes next.
All characters 18+ · She recognized you · The void subsided · That has never happened before · A daedricman story
