The Blue That Faded First

The sky over the Alps is the same color as it was the day Killian left. A hard, brilliant blue, stretched taut over the world, so sharp it almost cuts to look at. I remember thinking it should have been overcast, maybe stormy—something to mark the moment. But the universe is indifferent, and it had been the kind of clear, crisp day where the mountains felt close enough to touch.

Now, months later, it is the same.

The sun is brittle. The wind slides down from the peaks, brushing against the glass walls of the observatory, rattling the equipment left abandoned in the wake of my obsession. I have stopped noticing the cold. It is just another thing that was supposed to matter and no longer does.

I lean closer to the screen, the dim glow of the monitor staining my fingers blue. A flicker, then static, then the voice—thin, distant, stretching across an impossible expanse.

“Lauriane?”

His voice.

The first time I heard it, I could not breathe. It had come out of nowhere, late at night, in the dark hush of the lab. Just a whisper, almost a breath, but unmistakable.

I had spent weeks buried in telemetry logs, searching for any fragment of what had happened to the Astra. The official report was empty. The ship did not explode. It did not send a distress signal. It did not veer off course or drift into the abyss. It simply vanished, like breath on glass. Every agency, every expert, every machine capable of processing the event gave the same answer: nothing. There was nothing to find.

But I found this.

A flicker. A faint, repeating quantum fluctuation at the exact coordinates where he had last been. A persistent anomaly in the entanglement field. A trace of something that should not have existed at all.

And then—his voice.

“Lauriane?”

I had played it back a dozen times that night, heart in my throat, trying to convince myself it was an error. Some distorted reflection of past telemetry, an echo of meaningless data. But I knew better.

Killian was not just my husband. He was the only person who ever truly understood me. The only one who could quiet the noise in my mind, the only one who ever made me feel like the world wasn’t slipping through my fingers. We had spent years together, in love with the same things: the stars, the silence of deep space, the pursuit of something greater than ourselves.

And then he had left. Because I told him to.

“Go, Killian,” I had said. “You were meant for this.”

I had kissed him and sent him off to the Astra, and now he was gone. And I could not bear it.

I refined the signal.

Night after night, alone in the lab, I adjusted the equipment, reprogrammed the synchronization parameters, amplified the anomaly. And the more I worked, the stronger he became.

His voice, once faint and broken, grew clear.

He spoke of the blue.

“It’s everywhere, Lauriane,” he whispered. “Like drowning in the sky.”

He told me time felt strange, stretched thin. He told me he could feel me, that I was close.

“Lauriane?”

His voice was quieter, uncertain.

“What’s happening?”

A pause.

Then, more distant:

“Everything around me is blue. I can’t...”

I kept going.

The world outside the lab shrank, became unreal. I did not return calls. I did not sleep. I did not notice when the seasons changed, when the snows came and swallowed the peaks, when the observatory was left empty but for me.

The university pulled funding. The team dissolved. They called my work delusional, irrational, obsessive. I did not argue. I simply stopped answering.

Because I could hear him.

Because I knew I was right.

I built the neural interface helmet to strengthen the link. The anomaly was unstable, fragmentary—I needed something to bridge the gap, to stabilize the signal. If I could directly sync my consciousness to the quantum field, I could go beyond simple observation. I could perceive what he perceived. I could bring him back. It was the only way. If my mind could sync directly with the anomaly, I could see what he saw, feel what he felt. I could bring him back.

Then one night, after months of refinement, I reached the threshold. The field shimmered, solidified. And for the first time, I saw him.

Not a recording. Not a projection. Something real.

He was standing in his flight suit, exactly as he had been the day he left. His hair floated weightlessly, the way it did in microgravity. His eyes were locked on mine.

“Lauriane,” he said. “I see you.”

I pressed a hand to the glass of the monitor. My fingers trembled.

“Killian,” I whispered.

He lifted his hand. Mirrored the motion.

I had done it.

I had reached him.

And then—he stepped back.

The air in the lab vanished. The silence was absolute. My breath turned to ice in my lungs.

Killian’s expression had changed. The quiet, aching familiarity had drained from his face, replaced with something raw and wrong.

Not recognition.

Fear.

I shook my head. Pressed closer.

“It’s okay,” I whispered. “You’re safe now. I found you.”

But he took another step back. His lips parted. A single breathless whisper, laced with horror.

“Lauriane, no.”

The blue pulsed. The connection trembled.

I staggered, a sick, twisting sensation spreading through me. The monitor flickered. Log timestamps. Transmission loops.

The same words, again and again.

His last transmission. The moment he died.

The neural helmet was still active. My mind was still connected.

And that’s when I saw it—the reflection of my own face, flickering in the curved glass of his ship’s window.

From his perspective, I had been there.

I had always been there.

Killian had seen me in his last moments—the moment before the anomaly swallowed him whole. The moment he knew he was going to die.

I had not saved him. I had not reached him.

I cannot move.

I can still see him, through the screen. Frozen in time. His mouth half-open, his hand reaching toward me. Forever just beyond my reach.

I try to scream, to claw at the glass, to shake him free, but nothing changes. Nothing ever changes.

The pain does not dull. It does not ease. I feel the same terror, the same grief, every time. And every time, I reach for him. And every time, I fail.

The helmet will not disengage. The system will not shut down. The link is complete.

Outside, the snow continues to fall. The mountains do not notice. The sky remains its endless, uncaring blue.

And the screen keeps playing his last words.

Over and over.

Forever.

Over and over.

Forever.