Ethereal | Twilight |

009

Sora held his ground the way a soldier answers to an order carved into his bones, not out of loyalty, but resignation, his footsteps dragging him into the suffocating familiarity of the school like a condemned man returning to the site of his execution. The hall stretched before him in sterile repetition, rows of lockers lined up like caskets, polished tile reflecting overhead lights too bright for his hungover eyes, and though it hadn't changed, he had.

 This was the corridor where he had once seized a boy by the collar and driven his face into the dented metal, not because he wanted to, but because something inside him had clawed to the surface and refused to be denied. That dent was still there, shallow and rusted at the edges, ignored by everyone except Sora, who saw it the way one sees an old scar that no longer bleeds but still burns, the memory of force embedded into steel.

He didn't need to look around to know they were watching him. The air itself thickened under the weight of attention, heavy with silent judgments and whispered speculation, the kind of glances that sliced rather than strayed. He felt it burrow beneath his skin, those unspoken questions and half-formed accusations, carried by the mouths of students who hadn't known him at all, yet had decided they understood exactly what he was. Violent. Unpredictable. Changed. His name passed between them like a warning, a story whispered at lockers and lunch tables, the latest addition to a list of boys who had grown into their bones too fast, whose bodies spoke of power they shouldn't have, whose eyes no longer softened, whose silences stretched too long to be normal, too hollow to be safe.

They had called it a steroid cult, something laughable and absurd, because it was easier to blame chemicals than to face what truly trembled beneath the surface. Boys shedding their humanity like old skin. Limbs stretching into something stronger. Something darker. Sora had all the traits they feared most. Height that made teachers blink twice. Muscle that clung to his frame like armor. Rage that simmered just beneath the surface, always waiting to be provoked. Silence that spoke louder than words ever could. The kind that made people step out of his way without understanding why their heartbeat stuttered in his presence.

It was humiliating. Not because they were wrong, but because they didn't know how close they were to the truth. They hadn't seen him curled up on the floor of his bedroom, nails dug into his scalp, trying to keep himself from coming apart. They hadn't watched his reflection distort in the mirror, face foreign and too sharp, something that looked like him but wasn't. They hadn't watched him vomit bile into the toilet, fists braced against the porcelain as the shift gutted him from the inside out. They didn't hear the bones creak at night or feel the heat bloom beneath his skin like a fever with no cure.

He walked through the stares like he didn't feel their sting, lifting his chin with a defiance that wasn't confidence but necessity. His eyes swept over the crowd like floodlights, empty and distant, trained not to linger. It was a performance. He had to pretend their looks didn't unravel him. That his skin wasn't buzzing with the ache of being perceived, judged, and stripped bare in a place where he used to be invisible. 

The withdrawal didn't help. It curled beneath his skin like worms beneath topsoil, twitching, restless. The drugs had stopped giving him anything useful. His body, now warped by the shift, rejected them like spoiled food, barely letting the numbness settle before yanking it away again. Even when the high came, it burned out too quickly, leaving him raw and trembling, like a nerve without a sheath. Seconds of silence, then hours of crawling inside himself, trying to escape a body that no longer listened, no longer obeyed.

The bell rang too loud, too early, its shrill cry digging into the softest parts of his skull, and though he didn't move, didn't blink, his knuckles twitched at his sides, the tension curling down into his palms like claws trying to push through skin. He didn't wince, but he wanted to. Every sound was sharper now. Every smell more potent. Every look more suffocating. It was as though the world had been turned up in volume, color, weight. All of it demanding more than he had to give.