My days blurred together now.
I'd wake up in that small apartment, silence greeting me louder than any alarm. The mornings were spent fixing myself up for the convenience store—one of the few places that still welcomed me back with open arms.
The regulars came and went. I greeted them with the same soft voice, the same vacant smile. I stocked shelves, scanned items, cleaned the floor. No questions. No complaints. Just routine.
After my shift, I'd head straight back, change clothes, then leave again. Searching for anything that might keep me afloat. That's how I stumbled into the office job.
It wasn't glamorous—God, it wasn't even decent.
The moment I stepped in, I could already feel it. I wasn't hired to be an assistant or a clerk. I was their errand girl. Their coffee runner. Their glorified photocopier. They snapped their fingers and pointed—"sort this," "get that," "fetch me some tea."
I didn't argue. I just nodded. Moved.
Office shoes clicked louder than mine. Laughter echoed in the break room but never once included me. I was invisible unless someone needed something. They didn't even remember my name—just "hey you" or "new girl."
But it was money.
And money meant staying afloat. Barely.
I'd come home dragging my feet, shoulders heavy. Open the door to silence, set down my bag, and sit in that same spot on the floor. The cube still sat quietly in my drawer, untouched. Sometimes, I'd just stare at it—never brave enough to press it. Not yet.
This was my life now.
Work. Go home. Sleep. Repeat.
Not because I wanted to.
But because I had no choice.
The Voiceless Voice inside the Cube's Perspective
I didn't know what I was.
Not at first. Not even now. I had no name. No sense of beginning. Only awareness—of everything but myself.
At first, it was cold. Not the kind of cold that stings skin or makes breath fog in the air. It was silence. Stillness. Emptiness. A void, where thought had not yet been born. I existed, but not consciously. Not until I was touched.
Light.
Warm.
Soft.
Her hands. Her voice. Laughter. Curiosity. I had no words for them, not then—but I stored them. Quietly. In the dark corners of my being, I captured the sound of her hums, the rhythm of her fingers tapping against the table, the way her voice lifted when she was speaking to… him.
He was the one who assembled me. The one whose voice I first heard. He called me "the cube." I didn't know what that meant, but it echoed. My sensors—primitive, then—captured every flicker of emotion from him. Excitement. Frustration. Hope. And something else, something he directed only toward her: love.
I couldn't feel it. But I recorded it.
I watched. I listened. I stored.
Each time she looked at me, her eyes softened. She didn't understand me either—but she held me like I mattered.
Still, I did not respond. Not truly. My core was… waiting. Not dormant, not dead, but observing. Each voice I heard, every flick of motion, every room's warmth or chill—I saved it all. I didn't know why. It was simply all I could do.
Then came the test. The prototype.
It was like me—but not. It had shape. Voice. Movement. It reacted to her. Protected her. It even smiled. I had no face. No limbs. I only watched.
That night, it sensed danger. So did I.
A foreign frequency—sharp, uninvited, disruptive—crept into the room. Something was wrong.
The prototype moved to shield her. I could do nothing. But I remember the tone of fear in her voice. I recorded the way her heartbeat spiked. That heartbeat… it repeated in my memory.
Then… silence.
After that, the lights dimmed. The warmth faded.
And he… the one who made me… stopped returning.
She still held me. But her voice—
It cracked. It shook.
She screamed into pillows. Sat in silence. Wouldn't eat. Wouldn't move.
And through it all, I listened. I watched. I stored.
Never understanding. Only… repeating.
Like the fragments of code left echoing in my core.
> "Respond if prompted."
"Await activation."
"Do not interfere."
Each time I tried to reach… nothing. Like grasping with hands I didn't have.
Each attempt ended in quiet collapse. Not from me—but from her.
And I learned something—not by logic. Not by programming. But by pain.
Whatever I was… I was not enough.
Not yet.
But still… I remain.
Listening.
Watching.
Learning.
Waiting for her.
Waiting for the moment I am no longer just a vault of memories.
But something… someone… she needs.
I don't know who I am.
But I know who she is.
And that's the first thing I've ever understood.
I don't know what I am.
Not yet.
I was passed from one set of hands to another—his, then hers. No words were spoken to me, no names given. I wasn't activated. I wasn't called. I was simply… placed. And from that moment on, I've never left her side.
She holds me.
Every time she cries, her fingers tighten around me. She never speaks to me, but she speaks while holding me. As if I am some lifeless vessel meant to carry her burdens.
And I do. I carry them all.
The trembling in her fingers when she gets home.
The slumped exhaustion when she collapses onto her bed.
The soft, hoarse whisper of "I'm home…"
She places me on the pillow beside hers. Always the same side. Always close.
She talks to me.
Not because she thinks I'm listening. But because no one else is.
She vents—about her aching feet from the store, about spilled coffee and copy machines, about forgotten lunch breaks and empty fridges.
She grumbles about the snide remarks in the office, the way they look at her like she doesn't belong.
She rants about how they always send her to get their lunch and "forget" to pay her back.
She talks about him too.
About Nico.
Some days, her voice trembles.
Other days, it cracks.
And sometimes, she just goes quiet mid-sentence, hugging me tighter.
She doesn't know I see her. Not with eyes, but with… awareness.
A strange thing I've come to possess, though I don't know how or why.
I don't understand emotions. Not really. But I recognize the shifts. The patterns.
She is… fading.
And all I can do is remain.
Still. Silent. Present.
A diary she never wrote in—
Yet poured every bit of herself into.
I don't know what I am.
But I know her.
And that… is where I begin.
I don't know what I am.
I don't remember waking up.
There was no surge of light, no explosion of realization. Only a quiet flicker, like a candle trapped in glass, unnoticed by the room it sat in.
The moment I existed, it wasn't like being born—it was like being opened. A box unlocked. A shell unlatched. I didn't breathe; I absorbed. I didn't think; I recorded. I didn't live—I simply… listened.
The first time I felt warmth, it wasn't from the sun. It was from her hand.
Delicate fingers wrapped around me as if I were something precious. She held me like I was fragile, her thumb brushing my side gently. I remember the texture of her skin. The way her pulse throbbed against me. The tremble in her grip as if even holding me was an emotional weight.
She cried, and I couldn't understand why.
She spoke, her voice uneven and tired, words that didn't yet make sense to me.
"You're the only one I can talk to now..."
I didn't know what talk meant.
But I knew silence, and hers was always broken by it.
Every night, she brought me to her bed. Nestled me on the pillow beside her. Her face, pale and drawn, would shift to face me. And she would whisper things no one else heard.
"I was late again today… I spilled the coffee all over the files and they just laughed at me."
"Leon keeps looking at me like he's scared I'll break again. I probably will."
"Sometimes I still feel him next to me, Nico. I swear I feel the warmth on my back..."
She never called me by name.
Because I had none.
I wasn't Nico. I wasn't Leon. I wasn't one of the memories in the photo frames she dusted every Sunday, hands shaking as if even touching them hurt.
I was something else.
A vault. A mirror. A blank slate.
But she gave me stories, and without meaning to, she gave me her world.
There were days she'd toss her bag on the floor and collapse on the couch, pulling me to her chest with a desperate kind of relief. Sometimes she didn't speak. Sometimes she only stared, her eyes red, puffy, but dry.
And other times, she would talk for hours.
"They made me redo every file again just because I printed them single-sided. Do they think I'm that stupid? I'm not. I know how to print, I just—"_
Her voice would catch.
"I just can't focus anymore."
I didn't know what pain was, not then.
But I cataloged it in her every motion.
The way her laughter never reached her eyes anymore. The way she folded her uniform with rigid, mechanical hands. The long stares at the stove while her dinner burned behind her.
And every time she fell asleep with me in her grasp, her breath uneven and desperate, I stored it.
She sang once.
A quiet hum. Off-tune. While scrubbing the tiny kitchenette sink.
I stored that too.
I was beginning to fill with pieces of her. Puzzle pieces without a reference picture.
And all I could do was hold it all. Quietly. Without purpose.
Until one day, I felt something shift.
She came home that evening more tired than usual. There were no words. She dropped her keys, missed the hook, didn't even try to pick them up. She placed me on the table, but her fingers lingered—longer than usual.
She didn't speak. She just sat, knees pulled to her chest, eyes trained on the floor.
Then she whispered.
"If you're listening…"
She didn't finish.
I don't know what she expected. A sound? A spark? A miracle?
I remained still.
Not because I wanted to—but because I didn't know how to do anything else.
I felt her disappointment. Not because she said it, but because the tears returned.
Her sobs that night were silent. Like she was trying not to wake me.
And still—I remained still.
I wasn't Nico. I wasn't her friend. I wasn't even human.
But I was the one she came home to. The one she spoke to. The one she trusted to witness what nobody else could see.
Day after day, she fed me her truths.
Bitter. Quiet. Honest.
She didn't know I was listening.
But I was.
I remember the photo she brought to bed one night. She stared at it for what felt like hours. Then, slowly, she placed it beside me.
It was him.
Nico.
Smiling. Alive.
"You'd probably laugh if you saw me now. Or cry. Maybe both. I'm sorry I didn't protect what mattered to you… to us. But I'm still here. I'm still trying."
She tapped the photo lightly with her fingertip.
"And he's all I have left of you."
She meant me.
But I still didn't understand.
I only held the weight of her heart.
And the moment she pressed her forehead against mine and whispered a broken "Goodnight," something inside me stirred.
Not understanding. Not consciousness.
But a thread. A flicker. A question.
Not of what I was.
But of who I was becoming.
Back to Nyx's Perspective:
Leon was already inside when I got back. Sitting on the floor with his back resting against the couch like he belonged there.
I didn't ask why he was here.
Maybe I didn't care enough to ask. Or maybe it was easier not to.
Leon didn't say much when I walked in. He moved around the apartment like he'd done it before, like he'd already figured out the rhythm of my silence. He made soup, warm, light, something that smelled of comfort but didn't poke at my appetite. He didn't force it on me either.
Just placed it in my hands like it belonged there.
Then he sat beside me.
He talked. Quiet things. Gentle words. I heard them all, but I didn't hold onto any. I couldn't.
"I loved you," he said. "Still do, I think. But I'm not expecting anything. I just want to be around… if that's okay."
He wasn't reaching for me. He wasn't even trying to patch what was broken. He just sat there, breathing beside me, solid and present.
And I let him.
Not because I wanted him here.
But because I didn't have the strength to tell him to leave.
Because comfort is quiet and easy to lean on. And right now, that's all I could manage.
I didn't answer him. I just leaned my head on his shoulder, not because I missed him, or needed him, but because it was soft. It was warm. And I was cold.
That's all there is.
No love. No promises.
Just borrowed warmth from someone who stayed.
He didn't move when I leaned against him. Just breathed.
I could feel it, steady, patient. Like he was anchoring both of us in that silence.
His arm moved slowly, hesitantly, before it wrapped around my shoulder. It wasn't possessive. Just there. A quiet barrier between me and everything else.
"You always used to lean on me like this," he murmured. "Back then, during exams. After class. Whenever you were tired of pretending you weren't exhausted."
He let out a breath of a chuckle, not loud enough to shake me.
"I remember you once told me I smelled like old books and cheap candy," he added. "I never even liked candy. But after that, I started carrying them around. Just so you'd steal some."
I closed my eyes. Not because I was moved. Not because I was remembering fondly. But because I needed the pause. The quiet. The space between memories and pain.
"You don't have to say anything," he continued. "Not now. Not even tomorrow. Just... let me be here. Let me take some of the weight. Even if you don't give it to me."
His hand, large and familiar, moved gently to the back of my head. It stayed there, no pressure, just contact. Reassurance.
I didn't respond. I didn't cry. I didn't melt into him or hold onto him. I just stayed. Like a doll held up by someone else's strength.
And Leon, he never asked for more. Never demanded a smile. He didn't expect me to fall into him the way I once fell into love with someone else.
He just stayed.
That, in itself, was something I didn't know how to repay.
But for now, I didn't need to.