Chapter 25: Echoes in the Tape

The silence after Meher pressed play wasn't empty—it was holding its breath.

A faint crackle. Then a voice—so soft, so raw, it felt like it had been dug out from the ruins of time itself.

> "If you're hearing this, I'm sorry. I didn't know where else to leave it. Maybe no one ever finds it. Maybe only you will."

David leaned forward, the tape player's whir louder in his ears than the voice. Mavia. Younger, quieter, yet unmistakably him. His voice carried no fear, just… quiet resolve. A voice shadowed by thought, but not yet broken by it.

> "Sometimes, I imagine disappearing. Not like dying. Just… vanishing from the world people expect me to fit into."

Meher didn't move. Her hand hovered near the pause button, but her eyes were fixed, glassy. Her breath came slower than before, as if afraid to make a sound that might disturb the voice from the past.

> "They say memory fades. But what about the kind that never lets go?"

The tape hissed, stuttered slightly, then continued.

> "If I could take one thing with me… it wouldn't be a photo. Not even this tape. It'd be a feeling. The way it felt to laugh with you. Or that moment the light hit the garden just right, and everything was quiet. I'd bottle that."

The voice cracked slightly. Not from crying. Just the kind of break that happens when words get too heavy, too sacred.

David reached out, gently lowering the volume, just enough to breathe. The room suddenly felt too small to contain the echo of Mavia's heart.

"Do you hear it?" he whispered. "He wasn't saying goodbye. He was leaving breadcrumbs."

Meher nodded, her voice fragile. "He knew someone would follow them."

> "If you ever feel like I gave up, I didn't. I just reached the edge. Some cliffs, you don't jump from. You wait. You sit. You hope someone finds you before the wind does."

Silence again.

Then the soft click of the tape ending.

Neither of them moved for a long time.

Outside, a breeze stirred the ivy on the windowpane. Inside, the air felt charged. Changed.

---

They sat side by side on the floor of the attic, the box of zines between them, the recorder now quiet in David's lap.

"He recorded this…" Meher finally said, "probably around the same time he made those zines. Maybe even before he gave that notebook to Zayan."

David opened the worn notebook again. Mavia's handwriting—precise yet full of hesitations—lined every page. But now, after hearing the tape, the words bled with new meaning. Not just art. Not just ramblings. Traces of someone reaching out from within the fog.

"What if these zines weren't just for himself?" David asked. "What if they were part of his trail? Like the tape?"

Meher looked at him, something flaring in her eyes. "You think he wanted to be found?"

"No." David's gaze lowered. "I think he wanted to be understood. Even if it was too late."

---

They spent the next hour flipping through the zines—each one different, but all carrying a thread: abstract images, scribbled poetry, fragments of dreams, drawings that felt like they were hiding a language only Mavia could read.

Some pages were bright, almost chaotic. Others so minimal it felt like absence itself was the message. There were patterns—eyes drawn in margins, feathers caught in pencil smudges, shapes repeating like rituals. And slowly, that language began to form.

One zine had a page covered in feathers—each one hand-drawn, delicate, shaded with obsessive care. Below it: "To fly isn't always to leave. Sometimes it's just to see what's above the noise."

Meher lingered on that one. "Did he feel like noise was all we gave him?"

David shook his head, but said nothing.

On the last page of the final zine, there was a collage—bits of cut-out paper arranged in jagged shapes, forming a single sentence scratched across it:

> "I wanted to speak louder, but my silence felt safer."

Meher touched the edge of the page. "God. How much he carried without us seeing it."

David didn't answer. He was staring out the attic window now, eyes distant. "Do you ever wonder what we could've done? What we should've done?"

"All the time," she whispered.

There was no accusation in her tone. Just the unbearable weight of hindsight.

---

Later that evening, they carried the zines and the tape recorder down to the study. David placed everything gently on the desk, beside the framed photograph of Mavia as a child—barefoot, laughing, a dandelion puff caught mid-flight beside him.

The contrast shattered something inside him.

"He was screaming," David said suddenly. "And no one heard."

Meher didn't try to fix it. She didn't offer comfort or platitudes. Instead, she placed her hand over his on the desk. Just held it there. Steady.

"He knew we might find it all one day," she said. "And now we have."

The house was dim, shadows pooling in corners, the last light of dusk filtering through dusty blinds. It felt like the end of something. Or maybe the beginning.

---

That night, neither of them went to their own rooms.

David sat on the floor of the living room, the zines spread around him like a shrine. Meher curled up on the couch behind him, a blanket wrapped around her, her eyes half-shut but alert.

Every so often, David picked up another zine. Reread a line. Touched a corner like it might give way to something deeper. The room smelled faintly of old paper, candle wax, and memory.

"What do we do now?" Meher asked, her voice barely above a breath.

David didn't look at her. "We keep listening."

"At what?"

He looked down at the zines, then at the recorder. "Everything he left behind."

At some point, David looked back at her. "Do you think this was his version of a last message?"

She looked at him, something unreadable in her gaze. "No," she said quietly. "I think it was his first."

Her words hung in the air long after they were spoken.

---

David didn't sleep. He sat through the night, surrounded by fragments of Mavia's inner world, each one a ghost of something unsaid. A map of silence.

Meher drifted in and out, never far. Just present. Breathing in sync with a room that had stopped pretending to forget.

And as the first light of morning crawled in through the windows, painting the walls in faded gold, David pressed play again.

Mavia's voice filled the room one more time, and this time, it didn't sound like a farewell.

It sounded like a beginning.

---

End of Chapter