Ethereal | Twilight |

008

Sora stayed in bed, the morning light slicing through the blinds and painting his russet skin in soft gold. The sheets clung to him, damp with sweat, wrapped around the solid muscle of his thighs and the ridges of his abdomen. His skin burned warm—like a furnace under the surface—each breath leaving his chest slow and heavy. Even lying still, he looked powerful. His broad shoulders rose and fell, arms thick with tension, jaw set like stone. The air around him shimmered faintly with heat, but he didn't move. Not yet.

He was in just his boxers, stretched across the mattress like he belonged to it. The taste of yesterday still lingered on his tongue, dry and metallic, but it was background noise now. Everything else felt louder. His heartbeat. The creak of the floor outside his room. The quiet voices. Sam must've said something—had to. His mom wouldn't be pacing like that if she didn't know.

He leaned forward, knees pressed together, elbows digging into his thighs. The burn under his skin never faded, and sitting still only made it worse—like everything inside him was boiling, trying to claw its way out. Two fingers slipped into his mouth, not from thought but habit. He'd been doing this more lately. When everything felt too loud, too full, he searched for something to fixate on. Something he could control.

His tongue shifted, guiding him to the inside of his cheek where the skin had split the night before. He'd chewed through it in his sleep again. The flap was still there—bloated, soft, barely hanging on. He pinched it between his nails. Pulled. It peeled away like the skin of a bruised fruit, slick and stringy, strands of it sticking before snapping free.

The blood came fast, warm and viscous, tasting of oxidized metal and curdled cream. It pooled beneath his tongue, coating the roof of his mouth with a bitter, sour film. He didn't react. Just sat still, eyes locked on a blank spot on the wall in front of him, unmoving, like staring long enough might make it disappear. Then he swallowed, slow and detached, the fluid slipping down his throat and settling like stone in his gut. No flinch. No thought. Just motion. A small, quiet thing he could control.

By the time he woke, the house had already succumbed to a silence so dense it felt carved into the walls, not simply filling the space but shaping it, humming low and steady beneath the floorboards like the distant growl of something ancient and caged. It wasn't peace. It was pressure. The kind of silence that doesn't come from the absence of noise but from the coiled presence of something left unsaid for far too long, something that hung in the air like humidity, thick and unrelenting. Her door was closed, but her silence wasn't. It reached him anyway, humming along his spine with the persistent throb of a low-grade migraine, almost imperceptible, yet impossible to ignore.

He moved through the kitchen without thought, following the muscle memory of mornings like these. The coffee had been left too long on the burner and had turned acidic, clinging to the inside of the mug like oil slick on concrete. He drank it regardless, welcoming the bitterness as if it might cauterize something inside him. Across from the couch, her bottle lay on its side like a relic of the night before, the label wrinkled, its open mouth glinting beneath a sliver of light like a wound still bleeding into the room.

Outside, the air bit harder than it should have. The wind curled around his body with something more than cold—something almost sentient. He stepped into the clearing without hesitation, peeling off his clothes with the mechanical precision of ritual, as if shedding his human skin would somehow cleanse him of whatever still clung to his ribs. He draped each piece of clothing over the same branch he always used, the one thick enough to hold everything he didn't want to carry anymore, the bark smoothed over from months of repetition, months of choosing to become something else. The chill crawled across his skin like it had fingers, mapping the bones beneath muscle, learning the architecture of his body before it broke.