He fumbles at the edge of the hatch and realizes too late that the helmet is nowhere on his head. The moon’s silence rushes into him like a cruel, perfect answer, and his breath becomes a ragged, failing thing in the thin black cold. He had wanted a heroic ending, a dramatic collapse into some enchanted afterlife, but the truth is uglier and simpler: the world he once denied now takes him back by force. Even as panic claws through him, the lunar dust gleams around his boots like indifferent silver ash.

The city, the roof, the textbooks, and the long labor of becoming real all flicker behind his eyes with sudden tenderness. He sees, with a clarity that arrives too late, that the awkward life he fled was never a prison but a doorway he refused to open. The fantasy kingdom he loved cannot save him here, and so it finally fails him completely, leaving only the cold dignity of consequence. In that ending, terrible and plain, the universe remains vast and uncaring, and he disappears into it at last.