It takes three days before the nurses agree to let me walk.
Three days of physical therapy, of relearning how to move limbs that forgot their purpose, of forcing atrophied muscles to remember what strength feels like.
By the end, I can shuffle across my room without collapsing. It's not much. It's enough.
"I need some air." I tell my father this while gripping the IV pole like a lifeline, my legs trembling beneath the hospital gown. "Just a short walk. The nurses said it's good for recovery."
Mark looks up from the magazine he's been pretending to read. "Do you want me to come with you? I can push a wheelchair if you get tired."
"No." The word comes out sharper than I intend. I soften it with a weak smile. "I just need a few minutes alone, clear my head, you know?"
He doesn't know, he can't know. But he nods anyway, that worried crease between his eyebrows deepening as he watches me shuffle toward the door.
Finding Simon's room takes twenty minutes that feel like twenty years.
The hospital is a maze of identical corridors, and my body protests every step. The IV pole rattles against the linoleum, my legs shake with the effort of staying upright.
Twice I have to stop and lean against the wall, waiting for the dizziness to pass, waiting for my heart to stop hammering so hard it feels like it might crack my ribs.
But I keep moving. Because somewhere in this building, Simon is awake. Simon knows. And I can't spend another hour lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering what expression will cross his face when he sees me.
The door to his room looks like every other door I've passed. Same pale wood, same small window, same plastic number plate. But when I reach it, my hand freezes inches from the handle.
On the other side is the answer. The question that's been screaming through my mind since I woke up, since the nurse said he woke two days ago, since I realized that forty-eight hours of consciousness means forty-eight hours of remembering.
Does he know?
My hand trembles over the handle. I could turn around, walk away, give him more time, give myself more time, delay this confrontation until we're both strong enough to survive it.
But I've been hiding for three years. I'm so tired of hiding.
I push open the door.
Simon is sitting up in bed, staring out the window. The afternoon light catches the angles of his face, sharper now than before—he's lost weight, just like me, his body paying the price for twenty-seven days of neglect.
He looks thinner, paler. The golden tan from hours at the gym has faded to something sallow and sick. But he's alive. So painfully alive that looking at him makes my chest constrict.
He turns at the sound of the door. His eyes find mine. And his expression goes perfectly, terrifyingly blank.
"Hey." My voice comes out hoarse, cracked from disuse and fear. I try to smile. It feels wrong on my face. "I just found out you were awake. I had to come see you."
Simon says nothing, just watches me with those flat, guarded eyes.
I shuffle further into the room, gripping my IV pole for support. "Are you okay? I mean—obviously not okay, none of us are okay, but... how are you feeling? The nurses said you woke up two days ago."
"I'm fine." Two words. Clipped. No warmth, no relief, no Gordon, thank God you're alive. Just... nothing.
Something cold slithers through my stomach.
"Have you heard what's happening?" I press on, desperate to fill the silence. "With the other players, I mean. The nurse told me 137 people are still unconscious. The number keeps climbing. They don't know why some of us woke up and others didn't."
"I heard."
That's it. No follow-up. No questions about my recovery, no shared horror at the tragedy still unfolding, no acknowledgment that we survived something together. He's looking at me like I'm a stranger.
Worse—like I'm something he wants to look away from but can't.
The cold in my stomach spreads into my chest, my lungs, my throat, my mouth is dry. I try to speak, but my voice comes out cracked, barely audible. "Did you hear me? At the end?"
Simon's jaw tightens. His eyes, always so warm, are flat and guarded now. Cold in a way I didn't know they could be.
"Yeah." The single word is a blade. "I heard you."
My knees nearly buckle. I grab the door frame to stay upright, the IV pole clattering against the wall. "Simon, I can explain…"
"Explain what?" His voice stays low, controlled. He doesn't shout. Somehow that makes it worse. "How you've been lying to me for six months? Explain how my best friend pretended to be a woman so he could fuck me in a video game? What part of that needs explaining, Gordon?"
The name sounds different in his mouth now. Harder. Like a weapon instead of a greeting.
"It wasn't—" I stop. Start again. "I didn't plan it. When I made the avatar, I never thought we'd end up matched together. And when we did, I should have told you, but we clicked in a way we never had in real life, and I couldn't…"
"Couldn't give up the lie that was working so well for you?" He laughs, but there's no humor in it. "How long, Gordon? How long were you doing this?"
"Six months." The confession scrapes out of my throat. "Since the beginning. Since the first match."
"Six months." He repeats it slowly, letting each syllable land. "Six months of conversations, of matches, of me telling Kira things I've never told anyone, opening up to her in ways I couldn't with my own family, falling in love with someone who didn't even exist."
"She did exist." The words tumble out before I can stop them. "Everything Kira said, everything she felt—that was me, that was real. I wasn't performing, Simon. I was finally being myself, just in a body you were allowed to want."
"Allowed to want?" Something cracks behind his eyes, there and gone. "You think you had to trick me into…"
"You're straight. You've been straight every day of the three years I've known you."
The word tastes bitter on my tongue.
"You've spent a thousand hours at the gym telling me about women, asking my opinion on women, treating me like your wingman while I stood there dying inside because the only person I wanted was you."
Simon's face contorts. For a moment I think he's going to yell, going to let the anger finally explode, but instead he pulls it back, controls it.
When he speaks again, his voice is ice. "So your solution was to manipulate me. To create a fake person, build a fake relationship, and use everything I told you in confidence to get closer."
"That's not…"
"I trusted you." The crack in his voice is worse than any shout. "I trusted Kira with things I've never said out loud—my fears, my insecurities, the parts of myself I've spent my whole life hiding because they didn't fit the person everyone expected me to be."
His hands fist in the hospital blanket. "And now I have to live with the knowledge that my best friend was on the other end of every confession."
I don't defend myself, I can't. Because everything he's saying is true, and defending myself would mean pretending it isn't.
"I'm sorry." The words are pathetically inadequate. "Simon, I'm so sorry. I know that doesn't fix anything, I know I don't deserve your forgiveness. But I need you to understand—I wasn't using you. I was loving you. In the only way I thought I could."
"That's not love." His voice drops to something quiet and terrible. "Love doesn't lie. Love doesn't manipulate. Love doesn't build a relationship on a foundation of deception and then act surprised when the whole thing collapses."
The accusation lands like a physical blow. I absorb it. Let it settle into my bones alongside all the others.
Silence falls between us again. Simon stares at the window, jaw working, hands still clenched in the blanket. I stand in the doorway, too weak to move, too broken to pretend any of this is okay.
Finally, I ask the only question that matters.
"Was any of it real?" My voice barely carries across the room. "What you felt with Kira—what we had in the game—was any of that real? Or was it just... the game? Just code and neural feedback and a lie you believed because I made you believe it?"
Simon's face contorts. The mask slips, just for a second, and I see something underneath—something raw and wounded and so confused it hurts to witness.
"I don't know what was real and what was the lie."
The admission sounds like it's being torn from him.
"I don't know what I actually felt versus what you made me feel. That's the problem, Gordon. You took something that might have been genuine and poisoned it with six months of deception. And now I can't trust any of it."
He turns to look at me. His eyes are wet.
"I need you to leave." The words come out quiet, exhausted. "I need to not look at your face for a while."
My throat closes around every response I want to give. Every apology, every explanation, every desperate plea for understanding.
Instead, I nod, turn, shuffle back into the corridor on legs that can barely hold me.
The door clicks shut behind me, and I stand alone in the hallway, drowning.