Chapter Text
It is not often that Lenoch sleeps, but when he does, he dreams of this: Leaning back in his favourite gaming chair, headset on, clicking away merrily at his keyboard. On the screen, tense battles occur, his tiny protagonist fighting against terrifying forces of evil. He slashes, dodges, jumps, movements a coordinated symphony. The protagonist rushes at the villain for the kill—
And then he wakes up.
I had a night in which everything was taken from me.
How can I speak again?
Is it possible to be dysphoric about a body you designed?
There is space where muscle should be, bone where fat should cover it. In the cover of night he clenches his hands and feels the way tendons strain under paper skin. Exhaling, he is reminded of the tragedy that is his body.
What does it feel like to take a full breath of air?
He doesn’t know. He can’t remember anymore. But he knows it didn’t feel like this.
This, this half-hearted attempt at survival, forever gasping at air, forever choking on smoke,
forever,
forever,
forever,
forever,
forever,
forever,
forever,
forever,
forever,
struggling to live.
Sometimes, he forgets he isn’t normal anymore.
He’ll grab a cup of instant noodles at the neighbourhood store, intent on a taste of nostalgia, and the realisation will smash into him, harder than any physical blow—Oh. He can’t eat this. His stomach can’t stand it.
And then he has to push his cart back to the noodles section, painstakingly steering it along bends, before putting his tiny cup back on the shelf like a fool. His eyes will burn, as if it hadn’t been the truth since he first awoke in this world that he’d never be able to indulge in simple things like this again.
The energy he spent returning that little cup—little, so little, couldn’t he have bought just one—will mean giving up on another ingredient, and so he sacrifices the cucumbers. He’ll get some from Evelyn, anyway.
but they taste terrible and he wanted to buy some nice juicy ones by himself
Was it always this taxing to go shopping?
(No. It wasn’t. He used to be able to buy a month’s worth of groceries at a time, speedily pushing a laden cart along aisles as if he could make it fly if he went fast enough.)
(He wishes he still could.)
Hark, starlight.
If humans are made of stardust then the universe must have played a cruel joke because
If humans are made of stardust then he is a white dwarf.
his bones see fit to crumble his muscles split leaking energy his lungs burn to ash his mana corrupts in circular fate his life burns and burns and burns and burns and burns and burns and burns and burns and burns and burns and burns and burns and burns and burns and burns and burns and burns
and withers away
like the wick of a birthday candle
Type Ia Supernova – Occurs in binary star systems. Requires one star to be a white dwarf. Upon the merging of a white dwarf with its binary companion, or critical accretion of mass from its binary companion, the white dwarf approaches the Chandrasekhar limit. Its core reaches the ignition temperature for carbon fusion, 50 kiloelectron volts, and thermal runaway begins.
The white dwarf is unbound in a supernova explosion.