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The falling up is the worst part. It’s that stomach-flipping lurch of a roller coaster, but it never levels out.
There is no floor beneath Kaelix, no bed under his back. There is only an aggressive, hospital-corridor white that burns behind his eyelids even when he closes them. It’s the kind of light that doesn't just show things, it flays them. He can’t feel his legs, but he can feel the ache in his ankles, a sharp, grinding heat, like his bones are being forced into shoes two sizes too small. He knows he's on a pedestal. He can’t see it, but he can feel the edge of it biting into his heels, keeping him pinned in a pose that makes his spine feel like it’s about to snap.
Then comes the sound.
It isn't just static. It’s a rhythmic, dry clack... clack... clack... like plastic hangers hitting a rack, but too fast, too frantic. It sounds like teeth chattering in a cold room. Kaelix’s heart starts hitting his ribs in time with the noise, and every time those hangers strike, a fresh jolt of adrenaline spikes through him, making his fingers twitch.
Then the Shadow shows up.
It just occupies the space in front of him, a hole in the light. It’s the Manager. He isn't a man, he’s a suit filled with cold air and the smell of stale coffee and expensive paper. He has no face, just a blurring, static-filled gap where a head should be.
“Posture,” he says.
The voice doesn't come from the Shadow's mouth. It vibrates inside Kaelix’s own throat. It’s heavy, like a hand pressing down on his chest, forcing the air out. Kaelix tries to shift, just an inch, to stop the burning in his lower back, but he’s locked. His muscles aren't meat anymore. They feel like cold, cured resin. He is a statue that can still feel pain.
He tries to ask how much longer. He tries to ask for a sip of water. But when he opens his mouth, there is no air. His throat is packed with dry, gritty sand. It tastes like dust from an old attic. He tries to cough it out, and he can hear the dry scrape of it against his windpipe, but nothing moves.
The Manager leans in. Kaelix can feel the cold radiating off him. He looks into the camera lens hovering near the Shadow's shoulder, and he doesn't recognize the thing looking back. His mouth is gone. Someone has smoothed over his lips with thick, flesh-colored putty. It’s seamless. It’s just a wall of skin from his nose to his chin.
Panic hits him then, that hot, oily nausea. He wants to claw at his face, to rip the skin open so he can breathe, but his hands aren't his anymore.
A dozen other hands reach up from the edges of the pedestal. They are cold and damp. They pinch the skin on his waist to make it tighter. They yank his chin up until he hears his neck crack. They are grooming him, but not like a person. Like a piece of fruit being polished before it’s sliced open.
He tries to think of a song. Anything to remind himself he’s human. That one melody he always hums when he’s nervous. He finds the note in his head and tries to force it out through his nose, through his pores, anywhere.
FLASH.
The camera shutters, for him it’s like being hit in the face with a wet towel. Every time he tries to make a sound, the light hammers him back. Flash. Flash. Flash. It is weaponized. It is meant to break him.
“QUIET,” the Manager says.
The word hits like a brick wall. Kaelix’s ears start ringing so loud it drowns out his own thoughts. He staggers, but the hands won't let him fall. They have hooks in his sleeves and wires in his hair, propping him up for the next shot.
Everything starts to blur. It’s a strobe-light montage of torture. His clothes are being ripped off and replaced in a heartbeat. His fingers are being bent into shapes fingers shouldn't go. He isn't a person anymore. He is a prop. A medical dummy.
“You’re only worth the image,” the Manager whispers, and his breath smells like a basement. “The rest of you is just noise. And we’re cutting that noise.”
The light gets brighter. Hotter. Kaelix can feel the "skin" on his face starting to melt and fuse together. He tries to scream, a real, soul-ripping scream, but he has no mouth, and his lungs are full of dirt. He strains until he feels his own ribs crack under the pressure, but the world stays silent.
And everything shatters.
Then, just the dark.
Kaelix wakes so abruptly it feels like a rib has cracked.
The white from the dream pulses behind his eyelids, but here, it has been traded for the slow, sickly blush of dawn seeping through a paper-thin curtain. In the hush of the apartment, the world hasn't yet remembered how to make noise.
He lies in that silence, pulse going triple-time, lungs hissing for air. His first reflex is to gasp, but he clamps down on it at the last microsecond. His instincts from the nightmare is still too fresh, Don't move. Don't ruin the shot. What escapes is a shudder, sanded down to nothing, leaving a violent stutter in his diaphragm.
He slams a hand over his mouth, pressing until his bottom lip flattens against his teeth. The pressure is grounding as he bites the edge of his palm, harder and harder, searching for the sharp sting that will tether him to the room. The taste of metal, faint and familiar, blooms under his tongue. The urge to sob is molten, but he cages it behind his teeth.
He lies still. Not daring to move.
Not a single thread of the comforter rustles. Not a single hair dares to move on the pillow. The sheets cling to his body with the humidity of fever-sweat, and Kaelix becomes aware, in a brutally detailed way, of every millimeter of his own skin. If he moves, even a little, he will make a noise.
There’s a body beside him. Freo is peaceful, his head turned just so, face slack with deep sleep. His chest rises and falls in a pattern that’s almost hypnotic, crisp, measured, with a barely-there whistle at the top of the breath. It’s a beautiful sound.
Kaelix stares at Freo’s profile, counting the inhalations, desperate to sync his own body to the rhythm. But he can’t match the tempo. His heart is too fast, his breath too jagged. The contrast is almost enough to make him laugh, if he wasn’t so sure the sound would come out as a shatter.
Fourteen hours. Freo spent fourteen straight hours in the studio yesterday, looping and layering Kaelix’s vocals until they achieved a flawless, shimmering texture. Freo is the one who makes Kaelix sound like something worth listening to. He’s the one who edits out the ragged edges, the gasps, the ugly little mistakes of being human. The world only hears the version of him that Freo sculpts.
But now, in the gray morning light, the raw version of Kaelix is leaking through. Ugly, broken, and too loud even when silent.
If he wakes Freo… if he ruins this perfect stillness with his panic, he’s not just being annoying. He’s undoing the work. He’s proving the Manager right, that his voice is just noise.
He tries to will his heart to slow, but it’s a snare drum thudding against the mattress. He tries to redirect, the feeling of the pillow, the warmth of the blanket, the stinging bite in his palm. None of it works. The dream is still stuck in his throat like the dry sawdust and dead moths.
A tear slides out, then another, soaking into the pillow without a sound. Kaelix watches Freo’s face, waiting for the flicker of an eyelid, some sign of irritation that he’s been found out.
He’s supposed to be the happy one. The "Idol." The brat who’s always talking, always moving, pulling the others into the light. That’s the brand. But right now, he feels like a defective prop, a glossy statue with a hairline fracture running straight through the center.
He tries the breathing exercises. Inhale for four, hold, exhale for four. But pulling air into his lungs feels like inhaling barbed wire, and holding it only makes the urge to scream twice as strong.
He tries humming, just the barest vibration behind his teeth. But the resonance brings back the White, the painted-shut lips, the cold hands on his jaw, the crushing weight of “QUIET.” The memory is so fresh he can almost taste the acrylic putty on his skin. He stops, biting his lip until it bleeds, fighting the urge to tear at his own throat just to see if there’s still a voice box inside.
He is a singer, and he is afraid to breathe.
Kaelix folds into himself, tucking his knees up, making his body as compact and silent as possible. He keeps his hand clamped over his mouth and lets the next wave of tears pass through him, silent as vapor. He counts the seconds until the sun hits the far wall.
It takes forever.
He lasts, by his own count, seven more minutes. Seven minutes of holding his breath in staggered increments, of trembling through the urge to run, to get up, to crash into the bathroom and close the door behind him. He wants to pace. He wants to scream. He wants to rip open his own chest and let the messy, embarrassing feelings spill out. But that is not how this works. That is not how he is allowed to exist.
He is not allowed to make noise.
The ghost of his old manager’s voice curls around his ribcage, equal parts threat and instruction, the way it did for years until Kaelix learned to anticipate the reprimand before it happened. He remembers every flavor of the word “unprofessional.” The quiet, scathing comments during shoots, “Too much movement, try again.” The eye-rolling in the green room when he couldn’t keep his hands still, or his mouth shut, or his laugh beneath a library whisper. The direct orders, always with that unblinking calm, “Models don’t get to have opinions.” Even in sleep, he can't outrun the script.
The panic builds, pressure behind his sternum. If he doesn’t do something soon, he’s going to pass out. He can’t let himself pass out. The idea is terrifying.
He makes a compromise, a sound, so tiny it might not even be real. A whimper, high-pitched and crumpled, that escapes before he can stop it. The moment it leaves his throat, Kaelix clamps down again, shame spreading across his cheeks, hot and blinding. He waits, stomach dropping, for the world to snap back at him.
Across the mattress, Freo’s breathing pauses, just for a second. In that pause is an entire list of possible responses: anger, frustration, disappointment, indifference. Kaelix expects one of them, but none comes. Just the tiniest hitch, then the steady rhythm resumes.
Kaelix doesn’t feel reassured. If anything, the calm makes it worse. He draws further into himself, knees to his chest, arms folded so tightly it hurts. He slides backward on the mattress, inching until only the narrowest strip of sheet separates him from the edge. He becomes, by intention, the smallest possible occupant of the bed. If he could, he would shrink himself to the size of a thumbtack and slip through the floorboards.
The panic won’t let up. His mind blisters with bad possibilities, what if Freo gets annoyed? What if Freo leaves? What if the next album tanks because Kaelix can’t hold himself together long enough to record the vocals? The thoughts cycle, louder each time, until they drown out every other sense.
He is so lost in it that he barely registers the tremor of the mattress.
It starts at the far end, a minuscule, almost molecular shift, like a distant train passing underfoot. His anxiety magnifies it, the bed rocks, rolls, threatens to tip. Kaelix’s eyes fly open, zeroing in on Freo as he stirs, head turning, messy turquoise hair falling across the brow like a sleep mask.
Freo doesn’t sit up right away. He turns first, slow and automatic, as if some part of him always knows when Kaelix is about to spin off the axis. An arm extends blindly, palm brushing over the sheets, reaching for Kaelix’s warmth.
“Kae?” Freo’s voice is thick, honeyed with sleep, but it sounds like a thunderclap in the room. “You okay?”
The question shatters the thin glass that’s been holding Kaelix together. He jerks, startled so violently that the breath explodes from him in a sob, sharp and involuntary. The noise, once out, cannot be recaptured. He recoils from it, as if his own voice were a stinging insect.
He pulls away, knocking his foot against the edge of the mattress. The bed wobbles and, for an instant, he thinks he’s going to topple off completely. Freo’s hand finds him, fingers gently gripping his wrist.
“Kae, hey, hey, it’s okay—” Freo is awake now, voice laced with concern, but Kaelix can’t process the tone. All he hears is the noise he’s made, the broken record of apologies that starts up and refuses to stop.
“I’m sorry,” Kaelix gasps. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean— I didn’t mean to—” His chest hiccups with the effort of breathing. “I’ll be quiet, I’ll be quiet, I promise, I’ll be—”
Freo’s hand is warm on his skin. “It’s okay. You’re not in trouble. Just breathe with me, yeah?”
But that’s not possible. Kaelix is back on the pedestal, back under the ring lights, every cell in his body screaming that he has ruined the take, ruined the moment, wasted everyone’s time. The only thing worse than making noise is making a scene, and now he’s done both.
He curls tighter, one hand fisted in his own hair, the other digging crescent moons into the meat of his thigh. “Sorry,” he whispers again, voice so hoarse it’s almost gone. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t want to wake you—”
Freo sits up. Kaelix can’t look at him. He can only stare at the wall, eyes swimming with tears that will not fall, listening for the verdict. He expects to be told to shut up, to calm down, to be less. He expects the weight of disappointment to be so dense it bends the air.
Instead, Freo just waits, letting the silence stretch.
It’s unbearable, but it’s not a punishment. Kaelix doesn’t know what to do with that.
The panic is peaking, so loud inside his head that the outside world has faded to a grey smear. He is stuck, halfway between flight and collapse, unable to move in any direction. All he can do is repeat, on loop, the apologies that have been burnt into his neural pathways. “Sorry. I’ll be better. I promise.”
He means it. Every time.
He means it even more when it’s obvious he can’t.
Freo doesn’t rush.
He sits up, legs crossed under the sheets, back straightening with a small pop as if he’s preparing for an all-night mixing session. He keeps both hands visible, splayed flat on either side of his thighs, the universal sign for “not a threat, not gonna grab you.” The movement is careful, almost ceremonial. It’s the same posture he takes when he’s working with delicate samples, move too fast and you risk ruining the entire track.
He watches Kaelix, lets the silence bloom between them. There’s no hurry, no pressure, just the gradual stabilization of the room as Freo’s presence fills the air. In the golden hour after a panic attack, the right kind of silence is a bandage.
When he finally speaks, his voice is measured, calm, and pitched to glide over the splintered nerves in the room.
“Kaelix,” he says, using the full name, and waits for the eyes to flick over. “Breathe with me.”
It sounds so easy, so obvious. Kaelix tries, and it comes out as a thin wheeze, but at least it’s something. He squeezes his eyes shut, willing the world to stop tilting. Freo’s inhale-exhale is steady, audible, almost exaggerated for effect. Not a sigh, not a yawn, just a clear template for Kaelix to follow.
They sit that way for half a minute. For Kaelix, it feels like the first time he’s been invited to copy someone else’s rhythm, instead of being forced to. The thought alone almost undoes him.
He chokes on the next breath, coughs, then covers his mouth again, mortified.
“I’m sorry,” he says, voice gone ragged and child-small. “I shouldn’t have—” He cuts himself off, breath hitching as he tries to stuff the rest of the apology back where it belongs.
Freo’s hands remain on the mattress. “Hey. I don’t mind waking up if it’s you. You know that, right?”
Kaelix shakes his head, barely a motion at all. He can’t look Freo in the eye.
The next words come out on a sigh, as if it’s something Freo’s been thinking about for a while. “You aren’t ‘just noise,’ Kae… You’re music.”
Kaelix laughs, but it sounds like it hurts. “What if I’m the wrong kind of music? What if it’s just… too much?”
Now Freo does move, but only to rest his forearms on his knees, leaning in a little. “My job is to listen for what other people can’t hear,” he says, calm as a meditative bell. “All day, every day. If there’s something going on with you, that’s the most important thing I could possibly tune into. So go ahead. Make as much noise as you need.”
Kaelix tries, really tries, to accept the permission. He peels his hand away from his mouth, tests the words. “I feel crazy,” he says, and the honesty has a weight that surprises him.
“Good,” Freo says, with a hint of a smile. “Means you’re still here. I like that version of you.”
Kaelix wants to say thank you, but he doesn’t trust himself not to cry. Instead, he burrows deeper into the covers, hiding his face, hoping it’ll be enough to have someone else hear the mess for a little while.
He waits for Freo to close the gap, to offer a hug or reach out with a soothing pat. But Freo just keeps anchoring the moment with stillness and voice.
“Cry as loud as you want,” Freo says. “You’re not a statue anymore. You’re allowed to take up every inch of this room.”
That’s what does it, the suggestion that he could, if he needed, scream. That there is air in the world for his voice.
“I tried to stay still,” Kaelix admits, voice so soft it almost doesn’t clear the blanket. “I didn’t want to be a problem.”
Freo’s reply is immediate, almost rehearsed, “You could never be a problem. Not to me. You’re not a prop, Kae. You’re a person. If you need to scream at three in the morning, I’ll just sample it and make it the hook of our next song.”
The laugh that bubbles up is real this time. It’s shaky, but it feels like his own. He lets it out, and the sound is ugly and wet, but Freo’s face lights up with pride.
“See?” Freo says. “Perfect pitch.”
There’s still a tremor running through Kaelix’s limbs, but it’s slowing, less an earthquake and more the aftershock. He risks a look up, and Freo is right there, open, patient, the absolute antithesis of the mannequin-hands from the nightmare.
For the first time all night, Kaelix thinks maybe he won’t break. Maybe the cracks are just the shape of his voice.
He lets himself lean, just a little, into Freo’s side. The warmth is immediate. Freo doesn’t pull him closer, he just lets Kaelix settle, lets him decide how much contact is right.
They sit that way, connected but not coiled around each other, for a long, gentle moment. Freo breathes, and Kaelix breathes, and the world doesn’t end.
“I’m glad you woke me,” Freo says, after a while.
Kaelix believes it. He tries to say thank you, but what comes out is a sigh carried by relief.
And this time, he doesn’t apologize for the noise he made.
The aftermath settles like a weighted blanket, too warm, a bit suffocating, but safe. There’s no frantic rush to fill the air with words or apologies. Just the sound of two people breathing, and the ghost-music of the sunrise trickling through the curtain.
Kaelix lies flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, Freo’s arm hooked around his chest like a safety bar on a roller coaster. He still feels the adrenaline going through his veins, the phantom pain in his jaw where he bit down on his own hand. But none of it seems as dangerous, not with Freo pressed up against him, body radiating heat.
For a long time, neither of them moves. Kaelix listens to the pulse of the room, the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the faint exhale of traffic a block away, the slow, intentional breathing that Freo sets like a metronome.
He wonders, for the first time in hours, what it would be like to make a noise without fear. To try it out, just for the hell of it.
Freo is the one who breaks the spell, whispering so close to Kaelix’s ear that the words feel like a vibration inside his skull. “The silence isn’t a rule anymore, Kae.”
Kaelix lets the syllables roll over him, searching for the catch. There isn’t one. Freo is just offering.
He hesitates, but Freo’s hand, now palm-flat over his sternum, grounds him in the here and now.
“Give me a note,” Freo whispers. “Just a low one. Let me hear you’re still in there.”
Kaelix wants to protest, to say that his voice is shot, that nothing beautiful could come out of his mouth after a night like this. But he swallows the excuse. He tips his head, buries his face in the place where Freo’s neck meets his shoulder, and lets out a hum.
It’s a terrible hum. Frail and off-key and so thin it barely qualifies as a sound. But it exists.
Freo closes his eyes, as if to better tune in, and the way he listens is so complete, so absolute, it’s as though he’s in the middle of the studio, isolating the track and looping it on repeat.
“There it is,” Freo murmurs into Kaelix’s hair. “That’s the texture. It’s beautiful.”
Kaelix huffs out a laugh, and it vibrates up into Freo’s hand, the sound messy and unpracticed, nothing like the refined runs they lay down in the booth. But Freo doesn’t mind. He cups Kaelix’s throat, not to silence, not to manipulate, but to feel the tremor of sound, to hold it steady, gently.
Kaelix hums again, this time catching the rhythm of Freo’s heartbeat. He matches the pitch to the thump, and together they make a tiny, private duet. The room, which once felt like a glass jar sealed against all sound, is suddenly elastic, full of possibility.
He realizes, in that moment, that he’s not just a prop or a pedestal. He’s half of a whole. Every quirk and crackle in his voice is a thing to be treasured, not hidden. The silence is not a vacuum but a canvas, waiting for him to paint something messy and alive.
The tension that has lived in his limbs for years finally dissolves. He goes slack, letting the full weight of himself rest on the mattress, trusting that Freo will be there, even if he’s heavy, even if he’s too much.
They lie together in the new silence. Not a punishing void, but a warm, humming field, the kind that builds and builds until you want to sing just to see what happens.
Kaelix doesn’t say thank you. He doesn’t have to. The next time he breathes in, he fills his lungs to the top, and the sound he makes, however small and imperfect, belongs entirely to him.
When sleep claims him, it’s a decrescendo, a fading hum, with Freo’s hand still gentle on his throat. Even in the deepest dark, he knows that whatever sound he makes, it will be heard.