The atmosphere inside a black hole is so incredibly, impossibly dense, that anything inside of it was crushed into nothing. Light. Matter. Even time. As things get closer to it, the parts closest move faster and start to warp more, so that even before you are consumed, you are broken beyond repair.
Isaac thought there was a black hole inside of him. Cameron's death had ripped it open; black holes were born from dying stars. His father had fed it for years, and when he died the memory of him fell into it, distorted and then crushed beyond recognition, so that Isaac never really knew if any of it had happened as he remembered it, or even at all.
After Erica, Isaac didn't know how much he had left to give to it. Where other people had sinew and blood and beating hearts he only had a gaping maw, nothing but gravity and emptiness and things twisting slowly out of shape.
Now, he knew there was nothing. His pack was gone, and he was alone.
He lay on an old, broken mattress in an abandoned warehouse, nested in a pile of clothes, breathing in the scent of Erica and Boyd. Every lungful of air felt like razor blades. They sliced on the way down, lacerated, a belt buckle against the sides of his lungs.
They had piled into this bed like a bunch of puppies, watched films and played games and told each other things they had never told any body else. They had been three points on a triangle, three swirls of the treskilion they all took turns in burning into their skin. Isaac could feel it now. He wondered if it might fall into the black hole too, pull from his skin, burning all the way.
There were no more tears. There was nothing, nothing, nothing but ache and loss and that constant heavy pull inside his chest.
His phone had stopped ringing. Isaac figured the battery had finally run out. He didn't care if the world was ending. It would collapse eventually, inevitably, the way all things did in a dying star.
"Isaac."
Echoes were not supposed to exist here.
"Oh, Isaac."
Gentle hands held his cheeks, turned his gaze. He blinked. He didn't understand.
Slowly, Allison gathered him up into her lap, stroking his hair, whispering his name, until at last he understood she was real. As if underwater, he moved, turning so he could bury his face into her shoulder and breathe air that didn't feel like broken glass.
He was wrong.
There were tears after all.