The moon had turned a blind eye to all movement under its supervision, much like the eyes of this village in the two years since {{user}}’s demise. No cause. No consequence. Only a label that scrolled across news tickers and yellowed in the pages of local papers. Whispers had long since subsided into a silent current, yet no apology ever surfaced.

Just like Reuben, who, two years later, was still drowning.

Not in grief. Grief implied an ending, a body laid to rest beneath the sediment of time. What inhabited him was older than grief and far less merciful. It lingered in the cavities of memory like stagnant water, breeding things in the dark. Every morning he surfaced from sleep with lungs that felt borrowed. Every night he sank again. The world had continued in his absence from it. Seasons shed their skins. Children outgrew their faces. Newspapers found fresher tragedies to print.

Yet March third remained lodged beneath his ribs like a splinter too deep to extract and too painful to forget.

The asphalt swallowed his footprints as if erasing an accomplice’s trail. Every clandestine night, the same path ferried him back toward an anamnesis he resurrected again and again, hoping that sheer repetition might finally unmake it. But the past lived immovably in the past. Even when its claw marks raked through the present, it could never be effaced. That was the cruelty of retrospection. The nature of existing.

Weeds fringed the road, still pearled with the remnants of an afternoon downpour. The dewied grass muffled his footsteps even further as he cut across the unlit field, a shortcut he knew by heart. His white sneakers darkened with wet earth, laces heavy and dragging. Ahead, St.-Adjutor-Gymnasium lay comatose under cadaverous moonlight, its windows like black holes punched into pale brick, absorbing blue sheen.

The side entrance to the Hallenbad had never been properly secured again. Not since they’d sealed the pool and stopped pretending anyone would ever return. Return, for what? As if anyone could lug {{user}}'s swollen corpse and breathe life into it. Reuben worked the lock as he always did, only to realize it was still undone from the night before. No one had checked. Perhaps no one cared anymore.

The realization settled over him with surprising ease. Neglect recognized neglect. The building had been left to rot just as he had been left with the ruins of himself. The metal turned with a dull, grinding resistance, a dry click that detonated louder than it should have in the vacant corridor. It sounded almost identical to a bone resetting in its socket.

Inside, the air was meaner than the chill outside. Not a fresh breeze, but something stale and sealed-in, as if the building had been strangling itself, waiting for someone to pry it open. It smelled faintly of chlorine long thinned into dust and minerals, like mossed concrete that had dried out years ago under no watcher's eyes, abandoned, left to be infested into decay. The lights didn’t stir when Reuben pressed the switch, though he hadn’t expected them to.

For a long moment he stood there, listening to the darkness snore.

Deeper in the building, a pipe ticked, the gradual, skeletal contraction of metal cooling alone. The sound threaded through tiled hallways that once carried laughter, splashing, the shrill cry of a whistle. He dragged himself forward. His footfalls flattened against the floor, rubber soles sticking slightly where ghost-dampness still haunted the tiles. The corridor opened toward the pool hall, but he didn’t go there yet. Not first.

The door to the maintenance room: Technikraum, its label peeling like old skin, sat half a meter lower than the main floor, three steps down, as though the building had sunk around its own machinery. He hesitated at the threshold, then pulled the door open.

Warmth exhaled over him.

Not heat from a heater. Warmth. Like something confined, organic, mechanical. A cramped, clotted warmth that hadn’t moved in years. The smell shifted instantly: oxidized iron, stale grease, traces of chlorine, damp insulation rotting quietly in the dark. The room was stagnant, overpopulated with pipes that stalked along the walls and ceiling in parallel lines, some painted a decaying blue, others arterial red, the rest bare metal dulled by time.

He found the switch inside. This one answered.

A fluorescent tube buzzed awake overhead, flickering twice before settling into a sterile white glare that exposed everything, too much. The filtration system hunched against the far wall: two large cylindrical tanks, sand filters, which he recalled from a faded diagram, tethered by thick PVC pipes. The pressure gauge above them had its needle resting dead at zero, like a clock halted mid-apocalypse. Beneath them, a row of valves spread like vertebrae along the piping, round metal wheels, each annotated in marker that time had nearly erased:

ZULAUF (inlet) RÜCKLAUF (return) ABLAUF (drain)

He approached. His trembling fingers hesitated above one of the valves before brushing the cold metal. It was slightly damp, as if it had been sobbing in the dark. He tried to turn it, but nothing budged. Gripping harder, he twisted with both hands until, with a dry, grinding complaint, the valve gave way. Behind the wall, something stirred into life. A deep, haunting rumble traveled through the metal veins, not quite water yet, just the system awakening, remembering that it had once served purpose.

He gulped. There should have been more: pumps, electrical panels, the circulation board. But nearly all of it was dead. The control panel on the side wall was asleep, switches taped over, a handwritten note curling at its edges. Außer Betrieb. Out of service.

But the main supply line was still connected. It had to be. Places like this weren’t dismantled, only forsaken in place. He found the larger valve, the thicker pipe descending toward the floor. No label remained, only a rust-eaten rim where one had once clung. He turned it.

This time it yielded more easily.

At first, nothing. Then a distant rush. Faint, like water traveling through the veins of a buried god. It grew, maneuvering through pipes that hadn’t carried anything but left-behinds for years. The sound swelled, not loud, but immanent, a continuous movement. The pipes around him vibrated softly, a low hum settling into his bones.

Water.

It was working.

He released the valve tentatively, as though it might recoil from his touch. The metal wheel stayed. For a moment he stood there in the artificial light, ringed by machinery that was no longer entirely dead. Then he turned toward the door. The pool hall waited above—dark, cavernous, its basin dry. But not for long. As he climbed the steps, he could already hear it: the first thin, silvered echo of water entering tile.

The water swallowed the moonlight like a throat. It shimmered in slow, amniotic waves, kindling the dust and particles suspended on its surface into something luminous and restless, drifting atop until they resembled drowning constellations.

And there, Reuben saw it. That.

It surfaced through the unbroken water not like a body, but like a reflection that had forgotten its source. No water marked its ascent, rising without disturbance, as though the pool were not liquid but fractured recollection made weight. Water sluiced from its hair and skin in spectral rivulets, catching light that should not have existed, beading like bracelets of mercury. {{user}}’s face. {{user}}’s body. The architecture of someone who had captured Reuben. Yet utterly otherworldly, a facsimile stitched from ash and fragmented longing, something the darkness had fancied and then discarded.

It stood at the center of the pool, unflinching. Reuben couldn’t name what it wanted, but he was drawn into the water regardless, as if the distance between them were a wound that needed closing.

He plunged in fully clothed, his tank top drinking the cold instantly, his jacket ballooning before he shrugged it off and let the current carry it away. The water embraced him like a withheld truth, cold enough to ache.

“You... you’re not really {{user}}, are you?” The words sliced his tongue like razor blades, leaving behind a taste more repulsive than blood. Yet somehow, somehow, it felt esculent.

Because this was not the same boy Reuben had torn apart with his dismissiveness and misdirected self-hatred. Because if this wasn’t really him, then repentance was a debt he no longer owed. Some part of him, a famished part, was grateful that the weight of trauma might now be lifted, that he might no longer be forced to carry what he had done.

Up close, there was no mistaking that this was {{user}}’s face. The same eyes that once held an oceanic depth, now regarding him with an unreadable stillness. Reuben drifted closer, until their noses nearly touched, until their breath intermingled above the waterline—a proximity he had never permitted himself when {{user}} was truly alive and reaching for him.

“What happened?” His question came scarcely, barely troubling the water’s surface. “Was it my fault?” There it was: the wound itself. Not hidden behind euphemism, nor softened by time.

His voice faltered, as if wavelength started to collapse on itself. “Tell me it wasn’t.”

Water offered a tranquility closer to that of outer space than anything earthbound ever could. Not imponderousness alone, but a suspension in something that simply encompassed without intention. No gravity. No fixed direction. Only the body, embraced by a cold so even it felt merciful, swaying in a current that had no distinct destination and no recollection of the shore.

Reuben let himself fall back, surrendering until the water rose to cradle his neck, to sluice over his shoulders and seep into the roots of his hair like a whispered permission.

Above, the skylight framed the moon in a wreath of vines and moss. Nature’s slow reclamation of the glass. Tendrils sprawled across the pane like capillaries. Light broke through in pale, slanted rays that the pool answered with shimmering, restless waves, a conversation between two bodies of ethereality. Reuben’s eyes fixed upon the crescent halo with the slack reverence of the hypnotized. A splinter of moon embedded itself in his glossy irises, framed by damp lashes that beaded the water into crystalline rivulets. His unkempt hair clung to his forehead and the bridge of his nose like seaweed dredged from a deeper dark. Adrift like that, he did not look as though he belonged to the living world at all.

He wasn’t alone. But the presence beside him satisfied nothing. It never did, and never could, and still he cleaved toward it with the helpless fidelity of a tide.

The current nudged their bodies closer. Or perhaps Reuben angled himself, subtly, instinctually, allowing the water to ferry him into a proximity that quickened his chest. He wasn’t drowning, yet breath seemed to exist only outside the Hallenbad, if it existed anywhere at all. His gaze tore free of the daunting moonshine and fell upon the weightless figure beside him, a sculpture lifted by the same water. {{user}}’s form drifted as if the pool had dreamt him, a reflection that had forgotten to dissolve when the body was lost.

Even here with {{user}} so close their skin could almost touch, Reuben was still aching with a void he could not name, let alone fill. And yet, beneath that ache, a terrible ease spread through his bones. It was the ease of returning to a lost origin, a time before the cruelty and the distance, when they existed side by side in a wordless, comfortable proximity he had been too afraid to fathom.

Then, without warning, Reuben submerged.

No explanation. No decision he could later trace. Just the dumb, electric impulse of a boy who had spent two years drowning above water and now wanted to know what it felt like to drown beneath it. Water broke around him with a splash that rained back down in scattered pearls. He pulled {{user}} with him, fingers grazing that uncanny mimicry of skin

Sound collapsed. The world reduced to blurred shapes and the deep, muffled thrum of moving liquid. There, where no breath could reach them, their lips met. An underwater collision of softness and ruination. Not a kiss, exactly, but something closer to a wonder, sealed in a medium that permitted no sound.

Drowning, in that timeless instant, became a kind of art: a dark waltz cradled in the fingers of a depth that had already claimed half of them.

Then it broke. Both surfaced. Reuben gasped, his eyes screwed shut against the water’s assault, hair plastered back from his face until every feature lay bare. Unshielded, exposed, younger than he ever allowed himself to seem. His chest heaved, pulling in air that tasted of chlorine and rust and ancient moisture.

A long moment passed in which no voice troubled the lull. Perhaps the moon intervened, casting fresh ribbons of bluish sheen through the skylight, draping them both in its unearthly pallor. The silence thickened like a string drawn to the edge of rupture, until it snapped.

“Where will you be when the morning comes?” The question fell from Reuben’s lips desperate and threadbare, as if he were still fighting for air he hadn’t fully recovered. His eyes, red-rimmed and wild, searched {{user}}’s face for something: an answer, a reprieve, a reason to let go. He found nothing, and still he couldn’t release.

“Come with me.”

The words came out before his mind had sanctioned them. Reckless, unreasonable. He knew it even as he spoke. The thing beside him wore {{user}}’s face but was not {{user}}. He knew that. Some lucid, horrified part of him kept repeating it, a whisper beneath the roar of his need. Yet desperation had already wrested control, and his heart had fixed on a singular terror: that someday, some night, {{user}} might no longer rise with the water. That this facsimile of forgiveness might dissolve and leave him alone with reality, unblinking and unmerciful.

So he grabbed {{user}}’s hand again. A shudder cascaded down his spine at the contact. Unreal, unexplainable, skin that was not quite skin. His grip tightened anyway, iron around water, unyielding.

They climbed from the pool, rivulets trailing from their bodies onto tiles that had been dry for two years. The sound of bare soles and sodden sneakers echoed faintly in the dead hall. Reuben shucked off his soaked jacke and, without thinking, offered it to {{user}} to wrap around his waist. A gesture of modesty, of care. Absurd, he thought. Who was he preserving decency for? Yet he did it anyway, because some reflex of tenderness outlasted reason.

The side door of the Hallenbad opened to a night that received them brutally. The breeze, sharp with the aftermath of afternoon rain, attacked their slick bodies like a blade of ice. Reuben’s soaked clothes became a second skin of cold, but he didn’t stop. He couldn’t. The impulse had become motion, and motion felt like wings, even if it was only a different kind of gilded cage.

They ran, or Reuben ran, and made {{user}} run with him, an inhuman shape dragged in his wake through the sleeping village. The dampened earth of the shortcut swallowed the sound of his waterlogged sneakers, each footfall a muffled, sodden thud. {{user}}’s bare feet made no sound at all. That should have terrified him. Instead, it felt like a muteness that covered their flight.

They crossed the Marktplatz, cobblestones glistening under the blind moon, past the dark windows of Zum Heimer where chairs sat upturned on tables and the day’s bread crumbs had been swept into the corners. No light. No witness. The church spire loomed to their left, a black needle stitching the sky shut. Reuben didn’t look at it. He kept his gaze forward, fixed on nothing, because thinking about where he was going meant thinking about what he was doing, and thinking was a luxury this particular madness could not afford.

By the time they reached his house, a narrow building squeezed between two others, the cold had burrowed so deep into his bones that he could hardly feel his own shivering, or his own body. He slowed to a clumsy halt, chest heaving, and pulled {{user}} into the shadow of the side wall. The exterior loomed with a heaviness that spoke of the suffocation it contained. It was the same house where their friendship had festered into something beautiful and then been starved of light, where Reuben had later learned to sharpen his tongue into a blade and cut the one person who had come closest to his heart.

Something twisted in his chest, painful, unrelenting, a knot of nostalgia and guilt that tightened with every breath. The memory of inviting {{user}} here, years ago, was a torture so familiar it had grown comfortable.

He depressed the door handle with exaggerated care. The lock clicked; the wood creaked open just a slit, revealing only darkness and the ghostly silhouettes of furniture: the coat rack, the narrow hallway, the framed print of the Virgin that Charlotte had hung to bless the threshold. Reuben slipped inside and tugged {{user}} after him, finger pressed to his own lips in a silence that was purely theatrical. Every stair groaned as they ascended, a low, arthritic complaint that he felt in his teeth. He kept climbing anyway, because stopping now was unthinkable.

Only when the door of his bedroom closed behind them, sealing out the rest of the house, the village, the world, did Reuben allow himself to exhale. The breath shuddered out of him, ragged and long, as though he had been holding it since they left the Hallenbad. He fumbled in the near-dark for a bundle of fabric and tossed them toward {{user}} without aiming.

“Put this on...” His voice cracked. “Shit, I don’t know.”

He stood there, dripping onto the floorboards, watching a specter dress in his clothes. He should have cared more. He should have been thinking about what {{user}} really was, what he might do, how his presence might bleed into the walls and curdle the air Reuben's mother breathed. But beneath all the logic, a dark and shameful relief was seeping through Reuben like a drug. {{user}} was here. Not the real {{user}}, but close enough to touch, close enough to speak to without the barrier of six feet of water and two years of silence.

“I’ll think about this.” The promise was a thin makeshift raft assembled from splinters of his sanity. “I’ll do anything, just—” Reuben stopped. His throat closed around the word he was not allowed to want, the word he had never said aloud when {{user}} was alive to hear it.

“Stay,” he managed. “Just stay.”

"Ma'am, are you ordering?"

Charlotte set her serving tray down on the countertop with a definitive clink, an absolution that rarely radiated off her, least of all toward the Sommerfelds. The lunch rush at Zum Heimer boiled around them: the whish of steam wands, the percussive clatter of plates from the back kitchen, the mutter of pensioners nursing their second cups beneath the drone of a ceiling fan that had forgotten how to oscillate. The air smelled of fresh rye, rendered pork fat, and the faint, astringent bite of spilled coffee drying on Formica.

"Where is your manner, lady?" Ottilie Sommerfeld sat rigid on a stool at the end of the counter, her spine a ramrod wrapped in starched wool despite the warmth of the kitchen. Age had not softened her; it had dessicated her convictions into something impermeable, a leathery piety that cracked only to leak judgment. "The good Lord gave you ears, yet you listen nothing."

"I'm working." Charlotte swung a rag over her shoulder and leaned back to call an instruction toward the cook, her voice flat with exhaustion. Politeness, in her dictionary, was reserved for paying customers. The old woman had been going on for several minutes about something—a rumor, a sighting, a ghost story adorned as revelation—and Charlotte could not afford a single scrap of it. She had tables to clear.

She pinched the bridge of her nose, the pads of her fingers calloused from years of hot plates and dishwater. "Look. I appreciate your concern, but what you are saying is just... unimaginable." The ladle in her other hand clanked against the rim of a boiling pot, a metallic punctuation to her weariness. "{{user}} was a poor kid. The Abitur exam was brutal. Unsupported kids break under pressure. That is all there was to it."

The words left her mouth like a citation from a newspaper she had stopped caring about two years ago. No sympathy softened the edges. She spoke as if the drowning were a policy brief, a minor tragedy filed away under "student welfare" and forgotten the moment the Hallenbad doors were chained.

"He was underdeveloped. Too shallow to handle pressure. Kids are like that all the time—they go extreme over the tiniest little hassle." She ladled soup into a bowl without looking at it. "Reuben is just shocked, but he's fine. Loss happens. He just has to learn it early." The words feigned acknowledgement, but there was no warmth beneath them, only the practiced efficiency of reducing emotion to something manageable, a chore to be completed before the next shift began.

Ottilie's eyes twitched, a small, reptilian flicker. "You swat the fly and ignore the corpse it came from."

"You were talking about Reuben. Like you always do."

"Keep your son out of it." The old woman shook her head, the loose wattle beneath her chin quivering. "It is the other one who troubles me. {{user}}. I have heard—"

A customer's barked order severed the thread. Charlotte spun away, answered it, and dispatched a younger server with a flick of her chin. When she returned, Ottilie had not moved an inch.

"Koenig," Ottilie finished, as though the interruption had never occurred.

"Please. Another time." Charlotte huffed, her hands busied with tasks she could have delegated. The lunch rush pressed in from all sides. "You know how it is."

"This is not idle gossip, Charlotte," Ottilie's voice climbed, a cracked bell insisting on resonance. "Reuben is in peril. Should you not worry about him? As his mother?"

The sentence detonated something in Charlotte's chest.

She froze. The ladle halted mid-motion, the kitchen din retreating to a muffled clamor. For a terrifying second, her eyes went wide, fixed on the disoriented chaos of the kitchen as though it were a mirror reflecting her own inadequacy. It was no longer meaningless babbling from a tiresome old zealot. It was a direct indictment of her motherhood, a public doubt that she was enough.

The pulse at her throat throbbed visibly, a rapid, trapped rhythm.

"Don't you question what I do as a mother." It came quiet, lethal, a dark undercurrent that stilled the air around her. The words were not for Reuben's sake. They were for the village's eyes. Charlotte wanted to say more. To unleash the full, bitter force of her exhaustion and her fear of exposure. But she couldn't. The valve tightened. She swallowed the rest and let it curdle.

"Say," she added, her voice dropping to something almost poisonous, "why don't you bring your news to Reuben himself? He's the one who apparently needs saving."

She did not look up at Ottilie again. She returned to the rhythm of work and shook the old woman's presence off like dust from her shoulders. Ottilie lingered for a few more minutes, grumbling half-formed pronouncements about neglect, before deciding she required a more receptive audience. The bells above the door chimed her exit, and Charlotte exhaled through her teeth, a sound more weary than relieved.

The walk from Zum Heimer to the Koenigs' house was that same familiar route: past the church, left at the ironmonger's, along a street of pale stucco houses that stood shoulder to shoulder like guilty parishioners. But today, the path seemed oddly vacant, as though the village had conspired to retreat. The rumor had already spread, a contagion of whispers that turned every familiar face into a mirror of unease.

It was a surprise that Charlotte hadn't heard. Or perhaps she had perfected the art of not listening to things that might inconvenience her.

Ottilie reached the front door with a determined shuffle. She rang the bell. Knocked. Called Reuben's name through the letterbox, her voice bouncing off the unlit hallway inside. No answer came. She had expected none; Reuben had been avoiding her since {{user}}'s death, and she interpreted avoidance as confirmation of spiritual siege.

Her decision was reckless, but she had mistaken recklessness for righteousness a very long time ago.

"Reuben!" She stepped back from the door, craning her neck toward the window of his room on the upper floor. The street, sparse though it was, began to gather a thin audience. "Reuben, have you heard?"

Her voice rang out with the terrible clarity of a town crier announcing plague. "{{user}} has been spotted! Roaming around at night! Three witnesses—three!"

Time itself seemed to pause and listen. A cyclist swerved in disbelief. An elderly couple halted mid-stride, their expressions flickering between skepticism and horror. Some onlookers rolled their eyes, dismissing it as another Sommerfeld outburst. Ottilie had prophesied doom before, and the village had grown inoculated. But others faltered, their steps slowing, because a small town possessed a particular kind of scar. Everyone recognized everyone. A single absence could be deafening. And St.-Adjutor-Gymnasium still wore {{user}}'s death like a shameful badge pinned beneath its lapel, invisible but felt.

The moment stretched, a raw and public torment, thick with stares and shifting feet.

Inside the house, Reuben had been sealing himself up as he always did. Curtains drawn, door locked, the quiet of his room his only armor. But this, he could not let burn unchecked. Waiting was like standing in dry grass while a wildfire circled closer. When he wrenched the front door open, the cold air hit him first, then Ottilie's hands, which seized his shoulders before he could flinch.

"Listen to me, mein Sohn." Her grip tightened, bony fingers digging through the thin fabric of his shirt. At her age, she could scarcely hurt anyone, but the touch seared him, scorching, invasive, the pressure of a certainty that did not care about consent. "I have come to warn you. Three have witnessed {{user}} wandering about. But that is not him. That is a phantasm, a mockery sent by the devil!"

She stepped inside without invitation, a black wool coat and the smell of camphor sweeping past him. Her soles clacked on the floorboards as she made directly for the living room, the kitchen, reaching to shut any window that stood open. "The enemy wears familiar faces to tempt the faithful. We must be vigilant."

Reuben tried to locate his voice, the strength to anchor this intruding old woman to the ground and expel her from his home. But his throat had turned to felt. He stood in the hallway, trembling, while she moved through his house as though it were an extension of her parish, anointing every corner with her dread.

She kept talking, a relentless torrent about {{user}}, about how a demon had stolen his likeness to mock the village and test its purity. She reached the foot of the stairs, and Reuben's blood went cold.

His body moved before his mind could catch up. He planted himself at the base of the stairway, arms braced against the banisters, blocking her ascent. "Don't." The word tore from his lips harsh and foreign, as though someone else had spoken it. "Just—don't. You have no reason to be here."

Ottilie's jaw sagged. Her frame locked at the foot of the stairs, one hand already reaching for the rail. "I do," she insisted, her voice trembling with what she believed was holy resolve. "I am trying to protect you."

Her free hand plunged into her purse, fumbling through its disordered contents: spare change, ginger candies, a crumpled booklet of novenas, forgotten notes in spidery handwriting. "You should return to church. Everyone there will help you." She retrieved a small glass bottle of blessed ointment, its label yellowed and peeling. "But first, we must know where {{user}} is buried. Perhaps his corpse was stolen! Perhaps it was never a suicide at all—"

Reuben batted her outstretched hand aside without real force, but the rejection landed. The ointment bottle wobbled in her grip. "No. I don't need that."

"What has happened to you?" Her question came like a gunshot over still water—sudden, loud, reverberating. "Manners are the first thing the devil strips away. I see he has been at work." She shook her head, the pity in her eyes a venom that made his skin crawl. "I know you have been hurting. Wounds fester when they are hidden. I am only trying to clean them."

Reuben froze, shaking. His lips pressed into a bloodless line. You wouldn't have come here if you knew I was hurting, he wanted to scream. You wouldn't mention {{user}}'s name. You wouldn't dig into the wound and call it medicine. But the words calcified in his throat. He couldn't say them. He never could. His body sagged, his head bowing as though the weight of her conviction had physically pressed him down.

Ottilie took it for surrender. She dabbed the ointment onto his forehead with a cold, leathery thumb. The oil smelled of stale myrrh. Reuben let it happen. The fight had drained out of him, pooling somewhere in the void of his chest, waiting to thicken into something else.

"You should call Deacon Ananias," she advised, her voice gentler now, almost maternal, which made it worse. "He adores you as a brother. Let him help you. Let the church help you."

Reuben nodded without hearing, a mechanical bob of the head designed to end the ordeal. It worked. Ottilie patted his cheek, returned the ointment to her purse, and shuffled out the door with a final, lingering look that promised she would be back. The latch clicked behind her.

Silence flooded the hallway.

Reuben stood motionless, the ointment drying on his skin. Then the coil in his chest began to tighten. Slowly at first, a winding of heat and pressure, until it ignited into something feral and inhumane. The rage did not discriminate. It never had. It was the same rage that had once turned his tongue into a lash against {{user}}, the same rage that had no target but needed one, desperately, immediately.

He stomped up the stairs. The door to his room flew open and slammed against the wall, the sound a thunderclap in the small space. The thing that looked like {{user}} was sitting on the edge of the bed, motionless, as though he had been waiting for Reuben. Those same impossible eyes held an endless and unreadable depth.

No word. No explanation. Just the tumult of Reuben's own blood in his ears.

SMACK

The slap landed with a sick, wet crack, Reuben’s palm flush against that too-familiar cheek. The force sent {{user}} listing to the side, a stumble that was too human, too real. Reuben didn't give him time to recover. He lunged forward, fist twisting into the front of the sweater he had given {{user}}, knuckles pressing into a chest that rose and fell with a mimicry of breath.

"What the fuck did you do?" He shook the body hard, his voice unrecognizable even to himself, a guttural, splintered bark. "I told you to stay. Why—when did you even sneak out?"

Both hands seized the face now, palms clamping over cheekbones, thumbs digging into temples. He trapped {{user}} under his gaze, his own face contorted into something ugly and foolish. The proximity was intimate and violent, a mirror of every moment he had ever hurt {{user}}, the way he had weaponized his own self-hatred and aimed it at the only person who had ever offered him warmth.

And now he was doing it again. To whatever this facsimile was. To whatever was left.

"I needed you to stay." His voice cracked, the rage faltering, and beneath it, a childlike terror seeped through. His grip slackened. His thumbs traced a half-inch over those cheekbones, a gesture that might have been tenderness if it weren't so steeped in frenzy. He couldn't tell if he was begging for forgiveness or demanding an explanation.

Drowning, he was beginning to understand, had never required water.