Playback Ends Here

Content Warning: This story contains terminal illness, death, grief, references to suicide, substance abuse, emotional distress, and medical themes.

“Help him!” The woman’s voice cracked against the walls of the bedroom. “You’re supposed to help my son!”

The doctor didn’t blink. Rowan was on the bed between them, half-conscious. His breathing was ragged, every breath a struggle.

“Mrs. Hale,” the doctor began cautiously, “we’ve done all we can. The disease isn’t only taking over his body anymore. It’s…” He paused, looking for a gentler word for cruelty, “…it’s taking over his mind.”

Rowan’s mother shook her head vigorously. “No. He just needs rest. He’s been—he’s been tired, but he knows me. He knows his bedroom.” Her voice trailed off to a whisper. “He doesn’t remember what his brother looks like. He doesn’t remember what his sister, or his cousin, or his aunt looks like. I—I don’t know what to do anymore.”

Rowan’s lips trembled, but no sound came out.

“Rest,” his mother whispered. Her trembling hand brushed his hair back. “You’ll remember in the morning, baby. You will.”

“His withdrawal will become more pronounced, however treatment may be arranged. I’m very, very sorry.” The doctor clicked his pen and turned away.

When the door closed, silence bloomed.

Rowan’s eyes drifted, dazed, around his room. His nightstand was crowded with pill bottles. On the edge of the dresser sat an old video camera, its screen flipped open to nothing but black. It looked like it had been pushed aside and forgotten, just another piece of a life slowly fading.

That night, when the pain became unbearable, Rowan begged for pills. His voice was soft and apologetic. His mother hesitated, but when she looked at him, sweat clinging to his hair, his frame so fragile on the bed, she gave in. Anything to keep him from suffering more.

She put the tablets in his hand, her fingers lingering in his palm.

“Sleep,” she whispered. “Just sleep.”

Rowan listened.

The dream came quickly.

He opened his eyes to find himself untethered from his bed. His quiet bedroom had morphed into a golden landscape. He ran down hills, laughing wholeheartedly as breathing finally came naturally. He flung himself down onto the earth, feeling it cool against his skin. He didn’t cough, he didn’t ache, he was whole.

For a moment, Rowan thought that this must be the truth. He was alive. For once, nothing hurt.

However, when he blinked, what he saw was the field fading away before his eyes like watercolors left out in the rain. Suddenly, he could feel his weight and his pain.

His eyes cracked open. The ceiling of his bedroom loomed above him once more. The pills hadn’t provided the relief he desperately needed. He struggled to pull the blanket tighter around him. A feeble protection from the darkness.

Then a faint click came from the dresser.

Rowan turned his head. The old video camera had come on. Its light shone softly in the dark like an eye that wouldn’t close. Rowan didn’t say anything. His throat hurt too much. He only stared, listening as the machine hummed to life. He drifted to sleep again, and the second dream came quietly.

He opened his eyes to find the endless field replaced, the grass that once bent to his joy, gone. In its place stretched the halls of a school he’s never seen before. The air smelled of pencil shavings and paper, heavily laden with the weight of a thousand lonely thoughts.

A bell rang above him, low and hollow. Its echo slid down the walls as students poured out of classrooms, their laughter sharp and distant. Their faces blurred, their footsteps muffled. Within moments, the place was empty again.

Rowan was by himself.

The silence pressed down. He walked slowly, passing by clocks mounted above the doors every few steps, their hands dragging forward with unbearable slowness.

He turned a corner. It was then that he saw her.

A girl was sitting at the end of the hallway on a windowsill. Outside the window, there was nothing but white, blank as unwritten paper.

She was staring into it, but when Rowan stepped up beside her, she turned.

“Hey,” she said softly, her voice steady and calm.

Rowan hesitated. He forgot what it felt like to talk, especially to someone who wasn’t his mom or doctor, but he attempted it anyway. “I… I don’t think I belong here.”

She tilted her head, studying him with intrigued eyes. “Who does? It’s school.” She then smiled softly at him, but not with pity. She smiled at him like he was normal. Like he wasn’t a dying boy. “I’m Elara Mensworth,” she said.

Elara Mensworth. The syllables felt important, though Rowan wasn’t sure why. As she stood up from the floor and reached out her hand, Rowan found himself reaching for it, his fingers shaking.

“This is my place,” she said as they walked. “Everyone is welcome here. Everyone is seen.”

Rowan scanned his surroundings. The hallway seemed to go on forever and every classroom they passed was deserted. Still, there was something comforting about Elara’s presence. Where she walked, the darkness seemed to relax.

He followed her into a classroom where a clock ticked constantly on the wall above the blackboard. Rowan sat down beside her at a desk, and while there were no teachers, no students, no lessons, he felt a strange sense of belonging.

“Why do you stay here?” Rowan asked.

Elara turned toward the broken window, light slipping through the cracks. “Because here, I just need to exist. And it’s enough.” She met his eyes again. “That’s special. The type of thing you can only dream about.”

Rowan nodded, though something inside him twisted at her honesty. He didn’t tell her that in his waking world, he barely remembered faces anymore, that even the ones he loved most dissolved like smoke when he tried to hold them. For now, in this fragile dream-school, he chose to let her see him as normal. Above them, the clock ticked. The sound was steady, slower than a heartbeat.

The next night, Rowan convinced the doctor to give him pills.

Pills.

Pills were all Rowan could think about in his waking world.

Relief, he told himself. Pills were relief. He deserved relief.

Upon arriving at the old school, Elara was sitting on the same windowsill, her eyes fixed on the shattered glass Rowan hadn’t noticed before. Her fingers traced over the fractures, avoiding the hollow center where the cracks had started.

“What’re you doing?” Rowan asked softly.

Elara just smiled. “I’m tracing the cracks.”

Her fingertip followed each line, pausing at intersections and retracting when a fracture split too suddenly. Her eyes focused intently, counting rather than admiring.

Rowan sat across from her and, after a moment, raised his hand, letting his fingers mirror her movements along the glass.

Elara shifted closer to him, her finger still tracing. “A tiny crack appears every minute.”

Rowan smiled. “You notice?”

Elara shaped her lips into a thin smile. “I notice a lot. I’ve been here for a while.”

Rowan paused, letting her words sink in for a moment before returning to tracing.

After a while, Elara dropped her hand in her lap and stood up from the windowsill. “I wonder what I’m going to do when I graduate.”

Rowan glanced back at the window. He could already see a new fracture forming near the edge. “We’re young,” he said. “No need to wonder about that yet.”

Elara giggled softly. “I know. I just… can’t help it.”

“I don’t think we should.” Rowan admitted.

“Why not?”

“We don’t need to wonder about the future when there’s enough to wonder about in the present,” Rowan said. “This is good enough, right?” He asked.

The room was silent except for the sound of the clock ticking.

“Right.” She said, grinning. But she didn’t look back at the window.

For days on end, every day Rowan woke up, he was asking for more pills. His mother’s hands trembled every time she put them in his palm, but she never refused. “Just one more night,” he’d whisper. “I just need to sleep.” Or, “It hurts too much.”

Night after night, Rowan swallowed escape. Every time he closed his eyes, she was waiting for him. Elara, on the windowsill, her face lit faintly by the fractured glass. Their talks filled the emptiness of the deserted school. Sometimes she would laugh, and it would echo through the halls. Sometimes she would only sit in silence, and that silence would be enough.

For Rowan, the dream was no longer a dream. It was a place. A place where his body worked again, where his mind wasn’t vanishing piece by piece, where someone looked at him and saw him whole.

And so he slept. More and more.

Until one night, something about the school changed.

The halls felt emptier than normal, stretched thin around Rowan. Elara hadn’t been in her usual place at the windowsill, but the wall beside it made him stop. A giant crack ran straight down the hall, too deep to be natural.

He turned the corner to find Elara standing in front of a door he had never seen before. She turned back towards him for a brief second before refocusing on the doorway. “This wasn’t here yesterday,” she said. When she opened the door, only half of a room was inside.

A bed with twisted sheets. A nightstand cluttered with pill bottles. Posters curling at the edges.

Rowan froze.

It was his room.

Before Elara could process it, he reached over and slammed the door shut, his hand covering hers. He couldn’t let her see what he’d been running from. He would never let it happen. “Forget what you saw,” he whispered, voice breaking.

He walked away quickly, the school stretching unnaturally around him. A clock was ticking. The enormous gash in the wall guided him until it vanished into a corner.

The school dissolved as he began waking up, the crack slipping from beneath his hand as if it had never been there at all.

His bedroom’s ceiling swirled above him as a wave of unbearable pain surged through him. A sob escaped him before a gut wrenching scream tore through his throat.

His mother ran in, her hair disheveled, and fell next to him. “Rowan! Rowan, look at me!”

“IT HURTS!” he yelled. “IT HURTS EVERYWHERE!”

He writhed against the bed, a sound clawing out of his throat that didn’t even sound human. “I can’t do this! I CAN’T!”

“I know,” she said, trembling. “I know, baby, I know.”

The doctor rushed in as Rowan begged, “MAKE IT STOP! PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!”

His mother held him tightly, rocking gently, whispering, “You’re here, you’re here,” until his cries faded into exhausted silence.

The halls were emptier than usual.

Even the occasional blurred shadows of passing students had vanished completely, leaving the air empty and compressed. When Rowan stepped into the classroom, he found only Elara, slumped over a desk, her hands clasped tightly.

“Elara,” whispered Rowan.

She didn’t lift her head. Not at first.

When she finally looked up at him, her eyes were swollen and glassy, the skin around them rubbed pink from trying to wipe the tears away. Her nose was red, her lashes clumped together. He had never seen her like this. Not steady. Not sure.

When she spoke, her voice shook. “You can’t keep doing this, Rowan.”

His chest tightened. “Doing what?”

“Cheating death.” Her words cut through the air, sharper than glass.

Rowan took a step back, but the sound of the clock grew louder than it ever had before, piercing the silence and plunging into his bones.

“I’m not—” he began to say, but the sound of the clock cut him off.

TICK!

“You are,” she said, and then she ran out of breath halfway through the words. Tears clung to her eyelashes, falling down her cheeks. She shook her head at him. She was simply exhausted. “You can’t run from time, Rowan. It will keep passing, whether or not you try to outrun it.”

Elara’s lips trembled. Her mouth closed as she failed to get herself together. She couldn’t be strong anymore.

“You’re only holding onto me,” she whispered, “because you’re scared to let go.”

Rowan’s breathing quickened. “No, I… I need you.”

TICK!

Elara rose from her seat, crossing the classroom in a single, desperate movement. “You need to rest. You need to stop fighting. You need to turn off the camera.”

TICK!

“No. I won’t do it.” Rowan struggled to say.

TICK!

“You can Rowan!”

TICK!

Rowan’s chest began to feel heavy and his head started throbbing uncontrollably. Heat crawled up his body, making him lean against a desk to steady his now wobbly knees.

TICK!

“NO!” He shouted.

TICK!

“Please, Rowan, you have to,” Elara whispered. Her hands went to her hair, fingers knotting into it. “Please.”

Her shoulders trembled. "I’m so tired, Rowan.” She said honestly. Her hands twisted in her hair and fell back down, shaking at her sides. “I can’t keep doing this."

“Please,” she said again, softer now, the word barely there. “Just… let go.”

The ticking swelled to thunder, shaking the walls.

Clutching at his head and knocking over desks, Rowan slammed against the wall, the world tilting and collapsing around him.

The hands of the clock whirled furiously, faster and faster, until they froze. Time stood still, holding its breath, every sound swallowed in thick silence.

Crack!

In an instant, the clock and windowsill exploded into shards, raining through the air like broken stars.

The pain he was always begging to be given pills for, to just numb, consumed his body in the very place he believed it could never hurt him. The beeps of the heartbeat monitor filled the air, and the ceiling from his bedroom broke through the school's ceiling tiles like another world taking over. Because it was.

Time had won, and the thin line separating dreams from reality had finally been erased.

Elara reached for him, her face streaked with tears but soft with weakness. “Please. Let’s rest.”

Her arms folded around him in one last hug, warm and steady as she held him together.

“I’m sorry, ’Lara. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I’ll let go, I promise. I’m sorry,” Rowan cried into the curve of her neck, his voice breaking against her skin.

Her trembling fingers slid into his hair, gentle, careful, while her tears soaked quietly into his shoulder. “It’s okay, Row,” she whispered. “We can rest now. Okay?”

She felt his small nod against her, felt the fear slowly loosening its grip as he held on to her instead.

His body had already begun to let go. Now, at last, his mind was ready too.

And then, the dream ended.

Rowan’s eyes opened to his bedroom ceiling again. The monitor beside him chirped softly, thin and fragile. The doctor stood at the counter, sorting pills, unaware.

Rowan swallowed. His lips trembled, but he forced the words out anyway. “Turn it off.”

The doctor glanced over. “Turn what off?”

Rowan pointed a shaking finger toward the dresser. The old camera blinked back at him, its small light steady, watching. Fear flickered across his face, sharp and raw. He didn’t look away.

The doctor hesitated, then pressed the button. The screen went black.

And something he had believed could never happen began to happen. The pain loosened its grip. His breathing slowed. His eyes grew heavy, his eyelashes trembling at the edges. All he could feel was how light his body was becoming, how free he was in the choice he had made.

He didn’t resist.

He was finally ready to rest.

A shuddering breath racked through Rowan's body, quivering on the way out. His chest stilled.

Finally, the monitor stretched into one long, flat note.

As the monitor screeched, chaos ensued. Rowan’s family ran to the room, his mother collapsing into the doctor’s arms.

On the far wall, the photographs hung serenely. Rowan and Elara were in the school, laughing in front of a window, side by side beneath ticking clocks with no dread.

Upon the nightstand beside them was a folded newspaper. The front page featured a picture of Elara Mensworth, smiling sweetly, with the headline: “Gone Too Soon: Local Teen Remembered.”

The light flickered once against the wall of photographs. Then it was still.

Days later, Rowan's mother sat on the edge of his bed, her hands shaking as she searched through his things. The room was quiet, silent with the weight of one who will never come back.

Her fingers found the old camera, still warm even though it hadn’t been used in a long time. She reached for the power button, curious to see what could be on it.

The screen flickered to life, grainy at first, then suddenly sharpened. Rowan and Elara’s faces filled the screen, the frame slanted as though it had been set down in a rush. They were laughing like the kids they were: carefree and unhurried.

“Why do you record everything?” Elara teased, nudging him with her shoulder.

Rowan shrugged, grinning. “Just for memories. We don’t want to forget too much from school.”

Elara tilted her head, her smile softening. “We should watch it after graduation."

“You think we’ll graduate together?” Rowan asked, amused. “You’re too stupid to graduate with me.”

A loud laugh burst from Elara. “Oh, shut up! Of course we’re graduating together,” she said quietly. “If we don’t, then we can die together.”

Rowan laughed, the sound carrying a warmth his mother hadn’t heard in months. “I wouldn’t mind dying with you.”

The video cut to static, then black.

Rowan’s mother lowered the camera, her tears spilling freely. They hadn’t graduated. They hadn’t grown old. But in some place beyond her reach, her son and his best friend had kept their promise.

Together. Always.