The following morning, Stella sat in a room that reeked of antiseptic roses and oxidized breath—floral formaldehyde and metal ghostsong.

  The soft electric murmur of machines whispered in the corners like half-remembered lullabies. This was her morning orchestra—plastic lungs wheezing, IV bags twitching, LED vitals blinking in Morse-code prayer. A symphony written for the dying.

  A nurse stood beside her: a living statue daubed in warmth, face painted with an artificial gentleness. Smile stretched to its endpoints. Clipboard braced like a shield. Voice dipped in saccharine.

  Nurse(sweetly): "Good morning, princess," the woman sang, peeling back the bedsheet like unveiling a corpse at a wake.

  Princess. Stella loathed that word. No, she despised it.

  It tasted like expired sugar and diluted pity. Like adults putting on theatrical kindness because they couldn't stomach the raw truth—that she was small, sick, and slowly rotting beneath fluorescent halos.

  Cold electrode pads latched onto her ribs. A pulse oximeter clamped her finger, a little vice of light monitoring life as it flickered inside her. The nurse tapped her wrist—softly, like she feared breaking porcelain.

  Nurse(gently): "Small sting," she murmured, threading the needle through skin as if she were cross-stitching silk.

  Stella didn't flinch. But a grunt bled through clenched teeth.

  Pain was an old acquaintance. She'd memorized its footsteps. But knowing the rhythm didn't stop the dance from hurting. Familiarity doesn't grant immunity—only endurance.

  Nurse(chirping): "How are we feeling today?" the woman asked, pen poised like a guillotine above the paper.

  Stella blinked slowly. Like a snowflake dissolving mid-air, she thought. A life too delicate for landing.

  Stella(softly): "I dreamt—" Her voice faltered, cleaved in two by the echo of Somebody. She couldn't finish. The memory was a thorn pressed behind her eyes.

  The nurse paused. Her smile thinned. Her pen moved. Another box ticked. Another moment archived.

  Stella(thinking): "They write me down like I'm weather." "Like I'm just a passing cloud pattern on someone's clipboard. A human footnote. A living symptom."

  When they left, they left behind silence and bandages.

  She sat there—stitched back together. Barely

  ? ? ?

  At least there was one thing she could still look up to. Not joy—no, joy was too extravagant a currency for a girl like her. But lesser pain. A space that didn't cradle her, yet didn't cut her either. Not comfort, but neutrality. And in this life, neutrality was divine.

  The garden, fashioned as a balm for the slowly dying, had become her sanctuary. It did not heal. But it hushed. It was not holy. But it did not lie. And in its quiet, Stella could taste a pale kind of freedom—thin, bittersweet, unpromised.

  She opened the door.

  Light poured in like warm water, soaking every edge of the scene. Grass shimmered a verdant green—too vivid to be real. Sky spilled blue like enamel glaze. The sun didn't burn—it wept gold onto her skin.

  The air was crisp, clean, and cool—each breath filled her like a question unanswered. It didn't erase her illness. But it blurred the outline. And that, perhaps, was enough.

  This was what the garden was made for: To lull the broken into forgetting they were terminal. To mask death in perfume and color and song.

  She stepped onto the path.

  There it was—her bench. Old and whitewashed, it swayed gently from iron chains latched to the elder tree behind it. The paint had peeled in places, revealing raw wood beneath like veins beneath bruised skin.

  The wind passed through her hair, combing it with invisible fingers. She walked with the rhythm of something not yet dead— not too slow, not too eager. Breathing in step with life's pretending.

  From cold concrete to the soft kiss of grass, her bare feet met the world. Dampness greeted her soles like a whispered blessing. It almost felt like freedom.

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Almost.

  But no, this beauty was her illusion. Her flame-in-a-jar. Her tender lie. The garden was her candle in the mausoleum. Her mercy in a place that named mercy after morphine.

  Birds sang. Trees exhaled. Flowers reached toward nothing.

  She turned the corner by the sycamore—

  —and froze.

  Someone was already there.

  For a tenth of a breath— Stella glimpsed it. The unquantifiable. The fulgurous immensity behind Somebody's eyes. A force too wide for language, too ancient for shape.

  But it vanished before her soul could wrap around it. Gone. Like waking from a dream you didn't know you were dreaming. And in its place, the curtain fell.

  On the garden bench, where the sunlight poured like molten gold, a boy sat— Unmoving. Ungrasped by shadow. He wore the same wan-white robe stitched for the terminal, but Stella had never seen him before.

  Not in the halls. Not in the whispers. He was new.

  Yet he radiated familiarity like a scar you forgot how you earned.

  His gaze— A slab of obsidian will. Cold. Monolithic. His eyes stared not at the world, but through it. Not vacant… But untouched.

  That look—

  Stella's thoughts turned inwards, cycling through the slideshow of a life she'd abandoned: School days, chalk-dust afternoons, the sound of laughter that grated like sandpaper.

  She'd hated it. Every second. Every smile.

  And the color of that hatred— that unspoken gold that clung like guilt to memory—

  Came from him. This boy. This stranger whose eyes carried the same weight as her worst hours.

  Though Stella nursed that ember of hatred, it was not the kind that scorched—it did not calcify her heart or hollow out her gaze the way his did. Her eyes, despite everything, still held their innocence. And with that innocence came curiosity—fragile, yet persistent.

  She lingered behind the old tree that neighbored her usual bench. Its bark pressed against her palm like the skin of time. Peeking from behind it, she stole a glance—wanted to confirm he was real, that this ghost she half-remembered wasn't just a mirage conjured by morning light.

  But when her lashes fell and rose again in a blink, her refreshed vision carved something cruel into clarity.

  His eyes—those terrible, unblinking eyes—were staring back.

  Predatory.

  Like a beast that had just scented breath.

  The boy's gaze sank into her like twin spears of gold, and her body reacted before her mind could catch up— Blood surged, then stilled. Heat and ice colliding in the narrow cathedral of her chest.

  She had forgotten this sensation.

  Fear. Not the sterile dread of slow illness. But the primal, animal kind—the fear of being seen.

  She ducked.

  Her back met bark. She pressed into it like she could vanish into the grain, lungs drawing in air that refused to soothe.

  Her breathing stayed quiet.

  But not steady.

  And in the invisible spaces between her ribs, something had begun to shake loose.

  Stella tried to remember him. Not by choice—by instinct. The brain's last-ditch effort to name the fear before it devours you.

  But the boy's face was murky. His features shimmered like oil on water, ungraspable. Only fragments surfaced—jagged, loud, cruel.

  Her thoughts clawed backward— deeper, deeper— until her ears twitched.

  Step. Like a clockhand cracking forward. Measured. Meaningful. Not a walk. A countdown.

  Step. The sound threaded through her spine like a needle dragging fate. Not thunder. Not haste. Just inevitability with shoes on.

  Step. Her fingers clawed bark. Nails bit wood like memory biting bone. A reflex—primal, ancient. The body remembered what the soul had exiled.

  Step. The hallway. The lockers. The crash of books. His laughter—high, chalky, and too proud to be human.

  A ritual performance: He knocks them loose. She kneels. Gathers. Smiles. "I'm clumsy." Every day. Same play.

  Not bullying—choreography. Abuse rehearsed until it becomes theater.

  Step. The janitor's closet. Five hours of darkness. Mop water soaking through socks, through skin, into spirit.

  Shadows grew teeth. The air began to breathe.

  When they found her, she smiled. "I fell asleep." She always lied. Lying was a survival language.

  Step. Silver strands coiled around his fingers. He tugged them, called her "White Rat." Bleached. Frail. Soft. She never fought back. Not once.

  That's what made it fun.

  Step. Others joined. Laughter multiplied. Cruelty became currency.

  And Stella—quiet, strange, still—was affordable.

  "Why do they do this to me?" "What did I ever do to them?" "Can't they see… I just want to exist?"

  Step. She had a friend once. A girl. Warm voice. Kind eyes.

  She doesn't remember the name.

  Because to sit beside Stella was to burn with her. Guilt by gravity. One week of association was enough to incinerate.

  The girl vanished. Didn't say goodbye. Just escaped the flame.

  Step. Eventually, the system noticed. Letters. Meetings. Whispered concerns.

  Then one day— in class— the teacher asked:

  "Who did this to her?"

  Every hand rose. Every eye turned. A thousand knives, all sharpened with silence.

  Jin. That was his name.

  She despised the phantom lurch her heart gave at his name—like a wound rehearsing its pain.

  And in this unfortunate situation he was the perfect scapegoat. One boy to damn. One boy to bury.

  And everyone else got to walk away.

  Final step. She curled inward. Shrinking. Folding. Disappearing.

  If she just didn't look— he might not be real. He might be a leftover nightmare, a phantom limb of fear.

  Don't see him. Don't make him real.

  Silence stretched. No longer passive—surgical. She felt his shadow stretch across her like ink across a death certificate.

  Not just seen— Read.

  Her breath hitched. Tied into a noose behind her teeth.

  Then:

  A voice. Low. Familiar. Not angry. Not sorry.

  Just hollow. A voice too empty to hate. A voice that sounded like someone who'd been eaten too.

  Jin (quietly): "Still hiding?"