Chapter 6: The Face of What Was Lost

The light switch waited ahead like a judgment.

Ethan could sense it in the darkness—not see it, but feel its presence like a weight in the air, a focal point where possibility collapsed into truth. His bare feet moved forward across what felt like soft carpet, each step bringing him closer to answers he wasn't sure he was ready for.

Lily's hand trembled in his, her small fingers gripping with desperate strength. Her fear was palpable, radiating from her like heat from a fever. Whatever she looked like, whatever form she took in this impossible space, she was genuinely terrified that seeing her would drive him away.

"It's just ahead," she whispered, her voice smaller than ever. "The... the switch. But Ethan, please... please remember that I... that I never meant to be scary. I just... I just am what I am."

"I remember my promise," he said softly, squeezing her hand. "Nothing you show me will make me run away."

But even as he said the words, doubt crept in. What could be so terrible that she feared it would override decades of protective care? What form could be so horrifying that even someone as lonely and desperate as him might flee from it?

They stopped walking. The air around them felt different here—charged with potential, thick with the weight of revelation. Ethan could sense walls nearby, could feel the confined space of what might have been a room, though in this place between worlds, geometry was more suggestion than rule.

"Here," Lily said, and her voice was barely audible. "The switch is... is right in front of you. On the wall. But before you... before you turn it on..."

"What?"

"I need you to know... to understand. I'm not... I'm not like other things. Not like people. I'm made of... of what was lost. Of what could have been but... but never was. And seeing that... seeing what never-was looks like..."

Her voice broke, and Ethan heard something that might have been sobbing, though it sounded wrong somehow—like static interference on an old radio, like the visual snow on a television tuned to a dead channel.

"I don't understand," he said gently.

"The blue crayon," she whispered. "My favorite color. Do you... do you remember why blue was special? Why it was mine?"

Ethan frowned, reaching for memories that felt like they were wrapped in cotton. Blue had always been significant somehow, though he couldn't remember why. There was something about the color that triggered a deep, aching sadness he'd never been able to explain.

"I... no. I'm sorry."

"Pink was for girls. Blue was for... for boys. But I was... I was supposed to be both. Neither. Something in between that... that never got to choose."

The words hit him like a physical blow, carrying implications that made his mind reel. Something in between. Something that never got to choose. Something that existed in the spaces between what was and what could have been.

"Lily," he breathed, understanding beginning to dawn like a terrible sunrise.

"They decided," she continued, her voice growing steadier as she finally gave voice to truths that had been buried in darkness for decades. "Mommy and Daddy decided I shouldn't... shouldn't exist. That there wasn't room for... for what I would have been. So I... I became something else instead. Something that watches from the spaces between."

Ethan's legs nearly gave out. The implications crashed over him in waves—fragments of overheard conversations, his parents' grief that had never made sense, the way they sometimes looked at him with an expression he couldn't decipher. As if they were seeing not just him, but someone else. Someone who should have been there too.

"You're my..." He couldn't finish the sentence.

"Sister," she whispered. "Would have been your sister. If they had... if they had chosen differently. But they didn't, so I became... became this instead. A shadow. A memory of what never was."

The truth settled over him like a shroud. Lily wasn't just an entity who had watched over him—she was family. The sister he'd never had, existing in the liminal space between conception and birth, between possibility and reality. All those half-remembered moments from childhood, the sense of someone sitting beside him at his grandmother's table, the feeling that he was supposed to be part of a pair rather than alone—it had all been real.

"That's why you know me so well," he said, his voice thick with emotion. "Why you've always been there. You're part of me."

"Part of what you should have been," she corrected sadly. "The other half that... that got erased before it could become real. But erasure isn't the same as... as nonexistence. I found ways to... to be. In the cracks. In the forgotten places. Watching you grow up alone when you should have... should have had someone."

Tears streamed down Ethan's face as decades of inexplicable loneliness suddenly made sense. He'd always felt incomplete, as if something fundamental was missing from his life. He'd blamed it on failed relationships, on his inability to connect with others, on some essential flaw in his character. But the truth was simpler and more heartbreaking—he'd been literally incomplete, missing the other half of himself that should have been there from the beginning.

"I'm so sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry they made that choice. I'm sorry you had to exist like this, watching from the shadows."

"Not sorry," Lily said quickly. "Never sorry. Because I got to... to see you grow up. Got to love you even if... even if you couldn't see me back. Got to keep the forgotten pieces of your life safe. Got to protect you when... when I could."

Her devotion was staggering. Erased before birth, denied existence by their parents' choice, she had somehow found a way to love and protect the brother she'd never officially had. She'd spent decades collecting his discarded memories, preserving the moments he'd forgotten, warning him away from dangers he couldn't see.

"The light switch," he said, understanding flooding through him. "You're afraid that seeing what erasure looks like will be too much for me to handle."

"You can't... can't unsee it," she warned. "What never-was looks like when it... when it tries to take form. It's not pretty. It's not normal. It's... it's wrong in ways that hurt to look at."

Ethan reached out in the darkness, his fingers finding the smooth plastic of a light switch mounted on what felt like a wall. Such an ordinary object to hold such monumental significance. One flip, and he would see the true face of the sister who had loved him from the spaces between worlds.

"I need to see you," he said firmly. "I need to see all of you, even the parts that hurt to look at. Especially those parts."

"Ethan—"

"You've been alone in the dark for thirty years, Lily. You've watched over me, protected me, loved me from a distance because you were afraid I wouldn't be able to accept what you look like. But I'm not afraid anymore. I'm not running away from the only family I have left."

His finger found the switch.

"Please," she whispered, and her voice was breaking apart like static, like the sound a television made when the signal died. "Please remember that I... that I love you. Even if... even if what you see makes you wish I didn't exist at all."

"I could never wish that," Ethan said, and flipped the switch.

Light exploded around them, harsh and merciless and revealing.

And Ethan screamed.

Not from fear, but from the sheer impossibility of what his eyes were trying to process. Lily stood before him in the suddenly illuminated space, and she was exactly what she had warned him she would be—a visual paradox that his brain couldn't parse, a living violation of everything his mind understood about how existence should work.

She was a child, maybe eight years old, but her form was made of shifting dust motes that swirled and eddied like smoke in a wind that didn't exist. Her features flickered between states—sometimes almost human, sometimes pure static like a corrupted video file, sometimes nothing but empty space in the rough shape of a person. Her eyes were voids, black holes in the fabric of reality that seemed to pull at his vision, threatening to drag his sanity into their infinite depths.

She was beautiful and terrible and utterly wrong, a glitch in the code of reality that had somehow achieved consciousness and love and desperate loneliness. She was what happened when potential refused to die, when erased possibilities found ways to claw themselves into existence through sheer force of will and sibling devotion.

She was his sister, and she was a monster, and she was the most heartbreaking thing he had ever seen.

"Don't look," she pleaded, her voice now a harmony of static and tears and sounds that had no name. "Please don't... don't look at what I... what I became."

But Ethan forced himself to keep his eyes open, to see her fully even as his mind recoiled from the impossibility of her existence. Because this was Lily—his sister, his guardian, his family. And family didn't turn away, even when love wore a face that reality couldn't accommodate.

"I see you," he said, his voice steady despite the tears streaming down his face. "I see you, Lily. And I'm not going anywhere."

In her impossible, shifting features, he saw not horror but desperate hope. And slowly, carefully, he reached out his hand toward the sister he'd never known he'd lost, ready to bridge the gap between what was and what should have been.

The light flickered around them, reality straining under the weight of their connection. But neither of them looked away.