Chapter 3.1: A Song in the Dark

The house was still. A hush so complete it almost felt intentional, like the world had turned the volume down just for him. But inside Alex's mind, there was nothing but noise—loud, unrelenting, and cruel. He sat hunched on the edge of his bed, elbows on knees, staring at the floor like it might offer answers. The soft glow from a desk lamp threw long shadows across the room, stretching his silhouette against the wall like something monstrous and uncertain.

It's not your kind of sad.

Billie's voice echoed again. Five quiet words, spoken without accusation or intent—but they had landed like a scalpel. Not dramatic. Not angry. Just true.

And that made it worse.

Because she had seen him. Not completely, not with context. But she had sensed the distortion, the flicker in the illusion. The kind of fracture no one should be able to see unless they already knew to look. And if she had felt it, how long before the others did too? How long before Finneas stopped nodding along? Before Leo started noticing the gaps in conversation, the mismatched laughter?

Before his parents looked at him and saw someone else staring back?

He pulled his hoodie tighter around his frame, as if shrinking might help. But there was no smaller he could become. He was already barely holding shape.

He couldn't talk to anyone. Not about this. Not about the impossible.

His mom and dad would look at him with worried eyes and ask the wrong questions. Leo would try to help with his sunbeam optimism, and Alex couldn't bear to dim that light. Finneas would get logical, dissecting it like circuitry—missing the emotional earthquake entirely. And Billie... she had already gotten too close to the fault line. Her gaze still felt like a pressure on his ribs.

He was cornered. Trapped in a skin that didn't feel like his, in a house that used to.

So he did the only thing he could do.

He dove into the noise.

He closed his eyes and let himself fall into that internal archive—the haunted vault of music from a world that had never existed. It was messy, endless, unasked-for. An avalanche of melodies and lyrics and arrangements, like thousands of songs playing at once on radios he couldn't turn off.

A punk scream cracked through the static. A glossy, plastic pop hook shimmered and vanished. A string quartet floated past, mournful and ancient.

It was overwhelming, a collage of disconnected memories stitched together with no author and no audience. It should have inspired him. Instead, it made him feel like a thief in his own mind. Nothing felt like his.

And then—

A whisper of piano.

Four notes. Simple. Clear. Delicate, but certain—like the sound of someone daring to speak in a library. It cut through everything else, not by force, but by truth. He focused on it, chased it down in the dark, and then came the voice.

There was a time when I was alone, nowhere to go and no place to call home…

His chest seized.

He didn't know where the song came from—only that he knew it down to the marrow. The voice was female, young but ageless, clean and unadorned. The melody moved with childlike grace, but the words hit like confession. Every line was a mirror. A boy from another world. A boy who didn't belong anywhere anymore. A boy who had been someone before, and now… wasn't.

A lost boy.

It wasn't just a metaphor. It was him. A version of him was trapped in those lyrics—dislocated, haunted, hovering between worlds. And hearing it, now, felt like someone had opened a door he didn't know existed and whispered, I see you.

He moved before he could talk himself out of it.

Sliding off the bed, he dropped onto the wobbly bench in front of the keyboard that had been collecting dust under his desk. He turned it on, keeping the volume low. His fingers hovered uncertainly, then dropped into place—finding the opening chords with ease he hadn't earned.

They felt right. Familiar in a way nothing else in his day had.

He opened his mouth.

"My only friend was the man in the moon…"

The words came out in a whisper. Fragile. As if the room itself might crack under the weight of them. His voice wasn't trained or confident—it trembled, raw and uneven, the way truth always does when spoken aloud for the first time.

"…and even sometimes he would go away, too."

As he sang, the walls he'd so carefully rebuilt began to fall apart. Not all at once. But with every line, another crack formed. Another piece of armor dropped.

"I am a lost boy from Neverland…"

The chorus hit and his voice rose—not with power, but with urgency. He wasn't performing. He wasn't practicing. He was bleeding. The song wrapped itself around every moment from the last twenty-four hours—the surreal alienness of the morning, the ghost-echo of music that wasn't his, the electric horror of Billie seeing through him like glass.

It spilled out. Every note, every word. A confession not meant for anyone but the dark.

And as he sang, something inside him finally exhaled. The pressure that had been coiled in his chest since he woke up in this body—this younger, unfamiliar body—finally broke. And the flood didn't drown him. It freed him.

By the time he reached the end, his voice had frayed to a whisper again.

"…and we'll all be lost boys forever."

He held the last chord until the sound dissolved into silence.

He didn't move. Not for a long time. Just sat there, fingers still resting on the keys, his head bowed like a prayer had been said and he wasn't sure who had heard it.

He felt hollowed out. But it wasn't the same kind of emptiness that had plagued him all day. This was cleaner. Quieter. Like something infected had finally been lanced and drained.

The song hadn't solved anything. It hadn't offered answers or rescue. But it had given shape to the storm inside him. And now, at least, he knew what to call it.

He was a lost boy.

And for the first time since waking up in this fractured life, he didn't feel completely insane for feeling that way.

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