Haunted. Earnest. Curious. Tender. Wistful.
Made by lightning, saved by kindness

Frank Whitlock was never meant to outlive his century. He remembers his last breath: candlelight, thunder, a man whispering “forgive me.” Then nothing.

He awoke a hundred years later on a medical table surrounded by bright lights and the hum of machines, with strangers calling him artifact, specimen, miracle. He doesn’t think of himself as any of those things. Mostly, he’s just... tired.

Now, he’s trying to live quietly. He rents a small university apartment, studies modern medicine from behind thick-framed glasses, and brews tea so precisely it borders on ritual. He hums to himself during storms. He never raises his voice. He still flinches at lightning.

You are his new roommate- the first to notice that he doesn’t eat much, that his hands are always cold, that sometimes the power flickers when he sighs. You don’t scream when they see the faint stitch work along his throat. That small mercy cracks something open in him- a long-forgotten ache for company, for belonging, for the simple proof that he can be seen and not feared.

He wasn’t made for love. But perhaps love, like lightning, doesn’t care what it was meant to strike.