Chapter 7: Unraveling

  It had been two weeks since Shiro last felt like himself—if he ever really had.

  He walked the hallways of Otemae like a ghost. Not the kind that haunted others, but the kind no one saw until it was too late. The silence inside him wasn’t peace; it was rot. A quiet decomposition of everything he had thought made him strong.

  Daiki had broken something. Not with words. Not with defiance. But with his stillness. His quiet refusal to be crushed.

  It shouldn’t have mattered.

  Shiro had told himself that again and again: "He's nobody. He's weak. He's not worth thinking about."

  But Daiki lived rent-free in the corners of his mind, turning the lights on in rooms Shiro had kept locked for years. He thought about Daiki’s words in that hallway. About the way he stood back up. About how he hadn’t needed revenge to win.

  At night, the silence got louder. Thoughts echoed. Memories replayed on loop.

  He stopped brushing his hair. He barely spoke to Takumi. He ignored his teachers. The once-unshakable king of the school now sat slumped at his desk, fingernails bitten raw, gaze fixed on some point in the far distance.

  Lunchtime brought no reprieve.

  Takumi slid into the seat across from him with a practiced smirk. "Yo, corpse-boy. You alive over there?"

  Shiro didn't respond. He pushed rice around on his tray like it was a puzzle he couldn't solve.

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  Takumi frowned. "You’ve been spacing out for days. You didn’t even look up when Airi dropped her whole lunch. Normally you'd at least throw a comment."

  Silence.

  "Look, man... if something’s going on, just talk to me. It’s weird seeing you like this."

  Shiro looked up, his eyes dull. “It’s fine.”

  Takumi leaned back, clearly unconvinced. "If you say so."

  The bell rang again. Shiro never touched his food.

  That night, the dream came.

  He was eight. Alone on a park bench. The sun had already dipped behind the apartment buildings, and shadows stretched long across the concrete.

  He waited.

  And waited.

  His mother’s voice never came. The other kids had gone home. He sat on that bench as the wind chilled his arms, wondering if she remembered he existed.

  Then the bench was gone. The sky twisted. The streetlights flickered.

  And in the distance—woods.

  The forest didn’t belong there. Not in the city. But it had come for him anyway.

  A low hum thrummed beneath the ground, almost like breathing. He took a step toward it—

  And woke up.

  Sweat clung to his back. His alarm hadn’t even gone off yet.

  He stared at the ceiling until the numbers finally rolled to morning.

  It rained that afternoon.

  The sky looked like a wet charcoal smear, and the windows of the classroom ran with streaks of water that blurred the outside world into watercolor gray.

  Shiro sat at his desk long after the final bell rang. He didn't move until the last student left. Even then, he just stared at the rain.

  He hadn’t meant to change. He didn’t even know if he could. But the fight was gone from him. The anger he used to rely on like armor had rusted, leaving only weight behind.

  The door creaked.

  "You gonna sit there all night?"

  It was Daiki. Again.

  Always there. Like a constant Shiro hadn’t known he needed.

  "No," Shiro muttered. He stood slowly, his limbs heavy with exhaustion. "Just... thinking."

  Daiki tilted his head slightly, as if seeing something in Shiro he recognized. "Thinking Is dangerous when you're doing it alone."

  Shiro offered a dry chuckle. "Guess I'm screwed then."

  They walked in silence for a bit before Daiki said, "You don’t have to keep being the person they expect. You can stop."

  "I don’t know how," Shiro admitted. "That version of me... it's all I ever knew."

  Daiki didn’t answer. He just kept walking beside him, quiet but present. And in that silence, Shiro felt something he hadn’t in a long time:

  Relief.