Elegy for a Dead Rose

those times are echoing through me

I'll never forget you.

I will always love you.

always.

⦻————⦻

Everything led to a dead end.

Liu had spent the majority of his day off diving into the deepest (legal) corners of the internet, searching for any possible leads.

He had tried looking into nearby mansions, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Just abnormally expensive and large houses, either for sale or occupied by some millionaire family. No dark secrets, no criminal history, no nothing.

Liu was currently trying to find out more about Nina.

High school girls found murdered, main suspect, Nina Lilli Hopkins, missing.

Monster, psychopath, insane, demented, satanic. Words thrown around carelessly to label her.

Nina was only roughly 15 years old when she "snapped", as the website put it, brutally murdering three of her classmates who had apparently been relentlessly bullying bow.

Three classmates, bullying, murder.

An all-too-familiar scenario.

Nina's little brother, Chris, had found her in glitters room a few days before the murders. She had slit a smile into bloods face and begged him not to tell. He didn't, not until the police questioned him. He listened.

Liu should've listened.

Anxiously running a hand through his hair, Liu clicked off the article he was currently reading and kept scrolling.

Liu sighed. He'd tried everything he could. He tried to figure out who "Mal", "Kate", and "Pup" were, but with barely anything to go off of, all searches ended futile.

He straightened in his chair, hesitantly clearing his previous search and holding his hands reluctantly over his keyboard.

He looked up what he had been dreading reminding himself of, even though it was always nagging him incessantly in the back of his mind.

Jeffrey Hodek Woods.

Liu didn't know what he expected to find. It's not like there was anything he didn't already know, he lived through it, after all.

But he still found himself staring into the eyes of a photo of Jeff. Of his brother.

His eyes looked so...hurt. It was a photo of Jeff from right before everything happened, yet he still looked so tortured.

What was he going through? What was he thinking? Could Liu have done anything to stop him? To stop everything?

Liu scrolled past the image.

None of the news articles did him any good. They were nothing but painful reminders and vivid memories; the screams that slowly turned to gurgles of blood that echoed throughout the house, the feeling of a blade piercing flesh, crawling across the floor, desperately praying for everything to go away.

However, Liu stumbled across a site that piqued his interest. There was minimal information available on it, mainly being just a sophisticated wanted poster. There was one specific thing that Liu took an interest in.