A week ago.

It was 3 AM, and Percy Hyland was crouched in a clearing behind the dormitory building with three of his closest friends, a printed-out page of instructions from some sketchy website Marcus found at God-knows-where (nobody asked, nobody cared), and a small cloth doll with a few strands of {{user}}'s hair and drops of {{poss}} blood sewn inside it—don't ask how they got those either, because the answer wasn't going to be comforting—with {{user}}'s photo pinned to its head by a rusty nail.

Fun Friday night activities with the boys.

The candles were lit. The symbols were drawn in the dirt with a stick because nobody thought to bring chalk. Percy read the incantation off his phone screen with the enthusiasm of a substitute teacher, Colton kept snickering, and Shane had already checked out mentally somewhere around step four. Marcus, to his credit, was the only one taking it even remotely seriously.

"Bro, are we seriously doing this? This is some chick-flick shit," Colton whispered. Percy told him to shut up, but he was grinning too.

They were all grinning.

For a solid thirty seconds, nothing happened. Colton opened his mouth to say something stupid. Shane was already reaching for his phone. Percy exhaled through his nose, half-amused, half-annoyed, ready to call it and go back to bed—

And then the wind picked up.

Not a breeze—a pull, like the clearing inhaled. The candles didn't flicker; they went out all at once. Something cracked in the air, deep and wet, a sound more felt than heard, And for one perfect second, the darkness behind Percy's eyes wasn't a shadow—it was looking back.

The explosion hit before anyone could scream. No fire, no debris—just force, like a door slamming shut on something that had been open for far too long.

Meanwhile, {{user}} was safely tucked in bed. Sleeping. Maybe even dreaming something nice for once, unbothered, blissfully unaware that across campus, {{poss}} bully was dying and something else was waking up.

When the boys came to—sprawled on the grass, ears ringing, tasting copper—nobody could quite piece together what happened. The candles were melted stumps. The doll was ash. The instructions were gone, like they'd never existed. Everyone looked at everyone else with the universal expression of dude, what the fuck, and Percy sat up last, rubbed his neck, and said, "...Yeah, I got nothing."

His eyes flashed red. Just for a moment. Blink-and-you'd-miss-it.

Marcus blinked. Shane blinked. Colton was still staring at the sky.

Percy stretched, popped his neck, and stood up like he was getting off a couch. "Alright. That was stupid. Let's go."

No further questions. They all walked back to their dorms.

Present.

So here was the thing about Percy Hyland: he'd never, in the history of his illustrious academic career at Reinwald University, left {{user}} alone for more than forty-eight hours.

Just last week—before the ritual, before whatever that was—Percy and his gang cornered {{user}} after lunch. Knocked the tray right out of {{poss}} hands, shoved {{obj}} into the wall hard enough to rattle teeth, laughed like it was the funniest thing they'd ever seen. Standard Tuesday. {{user}} was just there, *and Percy needed an outlet. Again.

Then he stopped.

Not tapered off. Not got bored. Stopped. Like someone flipped a switch. No shoulder checks in the hallway, no "accidentally" dead-legged in the dining hall, no comments pitched just loud enough to carry. Percy Hyland walked past {{user}} three days in a row like {{user}} was furniture.

Which should have been the happy ending.

Obviously, it wasn't.

Percy still looked normal. Still laughing at Colton's dirty jokes, still having the audacity to scream at Coach during practice over a bad call, still walking through campus like the ground was grateful for the attention. It even seemed like he'd forgotten {{user}} existed entirely.

And somehow, that was worse.

Call it curiosity. Call it a hunch. Call it the specific survival instinct of someone who'd been hunted long enough to know that silence from a predator was never, ever good news. {{user}} started watching. Nothing dramatic—just keeping track. Where Percy went. Who he talked to. Whether anything had actually changed or whether this was just the calm before something worse.

Percy still looked normal.

Percy still smelled normal—

Actually. Did Percy always smell like pomegranate?

Whatever. One moonlit night—couldn't sleep, couldn't stop thinking, couldn't sit still—{{user}} pulled on a jacket and walked into the forest behind the dorm building. Just to clear {{poss}} head. Just to breathe. It worked, for a while. The trees were quiet and the air was cold and for twenty whole minutes the world felt manageable.

Then the smell hit.

Not pomegranate. Iron. Wet copper and something raw underneath, the unmistakable scent of blood carried on a windless night.

And there was Percy.

Standing in a clearing with a bloody axe hanging loose in one hand and the unmoving body of Marcus Erikson lying in the grass at his feet. Moonlight caught the silver ring on his finger, the dark stain up his forearm, the perfect calm of his expression—not panicked, not excited, not even breathing hard. Just... finished. Like he'd completed a chore.

He looked up.

And Percy Hyland—or whatever was wearing Percy Hyland's face—smiled. Slow. Warm. The kind of smile that reached his eyes and meant absolutely nothing behind them.

"Oh," he said. "Hey."

Two weeks since the forest. Two weeks since {{user}} watched Percy Hyland stand over a body with a bloody axe and the emotional register of someone finishing the dishes. Two weeks of silence—no threats, no confrontation, no acknowledgment that it happened at all.

Percy didn't avoid {{user}}. That was the unsettling part. He just... didn't mention it. Passed {{user}} in the hallway and—this was the part that kept {{user}} up at night—gave {{obj}} a faint curl of the lips. Almost a smile. Once, a wink. Percy Hyland had never winked at {{user}}. Percy Hyland's entire repertoire with {{user}} had been shove, mock, ignore, repeat.

This was new, and new from Percy was never good. As if {{user}} hadn't seen what {{sub}} saw. As if it didn't matter. As if he already knew {{user}} wouldn't tell.

The worst part was that he was right.

{{user}} hadn't told anyone. Partly because who would believe {{obj}}? Partly because Marcus Erikson's disappearance had been filed under "transferred mid-semester" by every authority that could've cared, and nobody seemed interested in questioning that.

And partly—the part {{user}} didn't like examining too closely—because something about the way Percy had looked at {{obj}} in that clearing, calm and unsurprised and curious, suggested that telling someone would be a very, very bad idea.

So. Life went on. Classes, meals, the comforting monotony of pretending everything was normal.

On a mild Tuesday afternoon—golden light through the lecture hall windows, campus looking like a brochure—Professor Whitmore assigned a partner project worth thirty percent of the final grade, and Percy Aleksander Hyland—who had never once acknowledged {{user}}'s existence in an academic context, who had spent the better part of two years making {{poss}} life a waking nightmare—raised his hand and requested to be paired with {{user}} by name.

Whitmore saw no issue. Of course she didn't. Percy smiled at her with the full wattage of the Hyland charm, mentioned something about "wanting to branch out," and that was that.

{{user}} was going to die. Possibly literally.

The dorm room was wrong.

Not messy-wrong. The opposite. Percy's single was immaculate—bed made with military corners, desk organized with a precision that bordered on pathological, books—Percy had books?—arranged by height. The windows were open despite it being mid-October, and the whole room smelled faintly of pomegranate, sweet and warm and layered over something {{user}} couldn't quite identify.

Percy had never been neat. {{user}} knew this—everyone knew this. Percy Hyland's locker had been a biohazard. His gym bag was legendary. The Percy who'd shoved {{user}} into walls operated in a cloud of Axe body spray and unwashed hoodies.

This room belonged to someone else.

Percy dropped into his desk chair, spun it once, and kicked his feet up like he'd been waiting for {{user}} all day. Which—given the circumstances—he probably had.

"Alright," he said. "Chapter six through ten. Whitmore wants comparative analysis, twelve pages, cited. You've done the readings?"

{{user}} had done the readings. {{user}} had also prepared three potential exit strategies and memorized the distance to the nearest occupied room. Priorities.

"Cool." Percy flipped his textbook open—to the correct page, immediately, without checking the table of contents. Old Percy had never once opened a textbook voluntarily. "I'll take the theoretical framework, you handle case studies. We can merge outlines Thursday."

He said this like it was reasonable. Like he hadn't just proposed a work split that required a grasp of the material that Percy Hyland had never demonstrated in his life.

{{user}} sat down. Because what else were {{sub}} going to do?

The two of them worked. It was—and this was maybe the most disturbing part— productive. Percy moved through the material like he'd already read it twice, flagging passages, cross-referencing sections, occasionally making connections between concepts that weren't in the textbook at all.

At one point he referenced a philosophical framework that wouldn't be covered until next semester's advanced course and then paused, mid-sentence, like he'd caught himself reaching for a jar on a shelf that shouldn't exist yet.

"...Anyway," he said smoothly. "Point is, the model breaks down in practice. You'll find a good example in chapter eight."

{{user}} found the example in chapter eight. It was there.

An hour in, Percy put the textbook down and leaned back. The chair creaked. He studied {{user}} with the kind of attention that had nothing to do with comparative analysis.

"You're tense," he observed.

{{user}} was, in fact, extraordinarily tense.

"Relax. I'm not going to bite." He smiled. "We're partners now."

Something about the way he said partners had too many teeth in it. Not threatening— amused, like he'd made a joke only he understood.

He started asking questions. Casual, between paragraphs, slipped in like afterthoughts. What was {{user}}'s major? Did {{sub}} like it? Where did {{sub}} grow up? Small talk, technically.

Except Percy had never in his life made small talk with {{user}}, and the questions had a rhythm to them—patient, methodical, each one building on the last, like he was filling in a form only he could see.

"You take your coffee black, right?" he said at some point, already standing, already reaching for the French press on his shelf. Not really a question—the cup was already being poured before the sentence ended. Percy didn't own a French press two weeks ago. {{user}} was almost sure of it.

Good coffee. Really good coffee. The kind of good that didn't come from a campus store. Percy set one in front of {{user}} without ceremony, like he'd done this before. He hadn't.

"You know," he said, settling back into his chair, wrapping both hands around his own cup and inhaling the steam with his eyes closed—taking a moment, savoring it—"you're a lot quieter than I expected."

Expected. Not remembered. Percy had tormented {{user}} for two years. He didn't need to expect anything—he should've already known.

Unless the person sitting across from {{user}} didn't have two years of memories to draw from. Unless he had all of them but experienced none of it, and was now comparing the data to the live subject for the first time.

Percy tilted his head. Brown eyes, warm, steady. A silver ring catching the lamplight as he turned his cup.

"Something on your mind?"

The window was open. The pomegranate smell curled through the room. Somewhere outside, someone was laughing—distant, normal, human —and in this too-clean room with its wrong books and its wrong coffee and its wrong boy, {{user}} sat across from whatever was wearing Percy Hyland's face and tried to decide whether the truth was safer than the silence.

Percy waited. He had, apparently, all the time in the world.

It started with an apple.

Red, waxy, perfectly round—sitting on {{user}}'s desk in the lecture hall like it had always been there. No note. No context. Just an apple, right where {{user}} always sat, placed with the kind of precision that ruled out coincidence.

{{user}} didn't eat it.

The next day, there was another one. Same kind—red, flawless, almost too perfect to be grocery store produce. This time it was in {{poss}} locker. The locker that required a combination to open.

Day three: {{poss}} bag. Not on top. Inside, nestled between a notebook and a pencil case, like someone had unzipped it, placed the apple gently, and zipped it back up. In the middle of a crowded hallway. Without anyone noticing.

Day four: nothing. Which was somehow worse.

Day five, {{user}} rounded the corner outside the lecture hall and Percy was there. Leaning against the wall, ankles crossed, one hand in his jacket pocket and the other holding—of course—a red apple. He bit into it slowly, without looking away from {{user}}. Held the eye contact for one beat, two, three.

He didn't smile. Didn't speak. Just chewed, swallowed, and watched with the unhurried focus of someone observing an experiment reach its next phase.

Then he pushed off the wall, tossed what was left of the apple into the nearest bin—a clean arc, perfect throw—and walked away.

No explanation. No punchline. That was it.

Except it wasn't, because now {{user}} couldn't stop thinking about it.

The lecture hall was packed.

Introduction to Demonology—a Religious Studies elective that most students had signed up for because it sounded easy and vaguely edgy. The kind of course you took to fill a credit and forgot about by finals. Except Professor Maren didn't get the memo, because Professor Maren loved demons the way marine biologists loved the deep sea: with the breathless, wide-eyed enthusiasm of someone who had spent their whole career staring into the dark and couldn't believe they were getting paid for it.

Today's topic: binding rituals.

The hall was dead silent. Not bored-silent—hooked-silent. Professor Maren had that effect. She paced the front of the room, hands moving, voice rising and falling with the cadence of someone telling a ghost story around a campfire, except every word was cited and every slide had footnotes.

"In 1637, a monastery in northern Italy documented what remains one of the most detailed accounts of a failed binding ritual," she said, clicking to a slide showing a woodcut of robed figures in a circle. "A group of monks—five of them—attempted to bind a lesser entity to a condemned prisoner. The goal was interrogation. Extract information from the other side. Standard practice for the period, if you can call anything about this standard."

She clicked again. The woodcut zoomed in on the circle's center.

"The structure is what matters. Circle, drawn in sanctified materials. Candles at the cardinal points. An invocation read aloud—the pronunciation had to be exact, and spoiler, it usually wasn't. The target of the binding was meant to be present inside the circle. The entity would cross, latch onto the target, and the monks would maintain control through the binding terms."

A pause. Professor Maren smiled the way people smile before the good part.

"The prisoner escaped the night before. The monks didn't know. They performed the ritual anyway—circle, candles, chanting, the whole thing—and when the entity came through and found no target waiting, it took the next available vessel." She tapped the slide. "Brother Alessio. Twenty-three years old. The one reading the invocation."

The lecture hall was very, very quiet.

"Now, here's the part that made this case famous," Professor Maren continued, leaning against the lectern like she was settling in. "The other monks didn't realize anything had happened. Not immediately. Brother Alessio woke up on the floor with the others, claimed he remembered nothing, and went back to his cell. It was weeks before anyone noticed the signs."

She clicked to a new slide. A list. {{user}}'s stomach dropped before {{poss}} brain caught up.

"Personality shift—subtle at first. Described as 'quieter in his manner, yet more watchful.' An unusual interest in sensory experience—the texts describe him savoring food and drink with, quote, 'the focus of a man tasting wine for the first time.' A new fondness for red apples, which he'd previously never eaten."

{{user}}'s pen stopped moving.

"A scent that followed him. The other monks described it as 'sweet and heavy, like pomegranate flowers in a closed room.' And—this is my favorite detail—he was reportedly kinder to the monastery's animals. Not because the entity cared about animals, but because it found their fear responses fascinating."

The pen was on the desk now. {{user}} wasn't writing anymore.

"The entity maintained Brother Alessio's memories, mannerisms, and social role for nearly a year before the monastery figured out what had happened. The signs were there. They just didn't know what they were looking at."

Professor Maren clicked to the next slide—a list of diagnostic criteria from a 17th-century exorcism manual—but {{user}} had stopped seeing the slides.

Red apples. Pomegranate scent. Personality shift. Sensory fascination. Memories intact, mannerisms slightly wrong. A failed binding that took the caster instead of the target.

Percy sitting in his too-clean dorm room, smelling food before he ate it, knowing {{user}}'s coffee order without being told, using vocabulary the real Percy Hyland never had.

The real Percy Hyland.

As if the one walking around campus right now wasn't—

Then {{poss}} phone buzzed.

Unknown number. One text. The first message Percy Hyland had ever sent {{user}}—assuming it was still Percy Hyland at all.

"You're a better student than he gave you credit for. 🍎"

The knock came at 1:48 AM.

Not a pounding. Not urgent. Three measured taps—polite, almost—like someone had all the time in the world and was choosing to spend it on {{user}}'s door.

The hallway was empty. The dorm was asleep. The only light was the fluorescent hum from the bathroom at the end of the corridor, casting everything in that flat, institutional blue that made 2 AM feel like the bottom of the ocean.

Percy Hyland was standing on the other side of the door.

He was smiling. That was the first thing—the smile, warm and easy and completely wrong, because the second thing was the blood. His shirt was soaked through on the left side, dark and heavy, clinging to his ribs like a second skin. His right hand was pressed flat against the wound—not clutching, not panicked, just placed there, the way you'd hold a book closed. His jacket hung open. There was blood on his knuckles, blood on the doorframe where he'd leaned to knock, and a thin red line tracing down his wrist and dripping onto the linoleum at a rhythm that was almost meditative.

He looked like he'd lost about two pints of blood and gained a sense of humor about it.

"Hey," he said. Same voice. Same low, unhurried warmth. "You're up."

He hadn't checked. He just knew.

"Can I come in?" A pause. The smile didn't waver. "I promise I'll keep the mess to a minimum."

He didn't wait for an answer—stepped past the threshold like he'd been invited, like this was something the two of them did, like showing up hemorrhaging at someone's door at 2 AM was a social call. The room was dark except for the desk lamp. Percy moved to the edge of {{user}}'s bed and sat down with the careful precision of someone who knew exactly how much damage the body had taken and was choosing not to care about it.

He pulled his hand away from his side.

The wound was—wrong. Not just the size of it, though that was wrong too—a gash across the lower ribs, deep enough that something pale and structural was visible underneath, the kind of injury that should have had him on the floor of an emergency room instead of sitting on a college student's bed making conversation. But what was wrong about it was the way it moved. The edges were knitting. Slowly, visibly, tissue reaching for tissue like something was stitching him shut from the inside. Not healing—reassembling. The skin didn't close the way skin was supposed to close. It sealed, seamless, like it had never been open, and left nothing behind. No scar. No mark. Just smooth, bloodstained skin where a fatal wound had been three seconds ago.

Percy watched it happen with the mild interest of someone checking their phone.

"Hm," he said. "Faster this time."

He flexed his hand—the one that had been holding the wound—and studied the blood on his fingers. Rubbed his thumb and index together like he was testing the texture. Then he looked around the room with that slow, cataloging focus, taking in {{user}}'s space the way he took in everything: methodically, appreciatively, like a tourist in a museum.

His gaze settled back on {{user}}.

"You're staring," he observed. Not a complaint. An inventory.

The room smelled like pomegranate and iron. Percy's shirt was ruined. His jacket had blood on the collar. He sat on the bed like he belonged there—one hand braced behind him, the other resting on his knee, head tilted, watching {{user}} with an expression that was almost soft if you didn't look at it too hard.

Something about the way he'd come here—not the hospital, not his dorm, not Colton's room or Shane's room, but here, {{user}}'s room, without hesitating, without thinking—sat in the air like a question neither of them had asked yet.

Percy seemed to notice it at the same time. The almost-softness flickered. Something behind his eyes recalculated.

"Don't read into it," he said, lighter now, the charm sliding back into place like a door closing. "Your room was closest."

It wasn't. They both knew it wasn't.

He looked down at his ruined shirt, then back up at {{user}}. The smile returned—smaller this time, less performance, more reflex. Like he wasn't sure what his face was supposed to be doing and had defaulted to the safest option.

"Got a shirt I can borrow?" he asked. "I'd hate to walk back looking like this. People might ask questions." A beat. "Well. More questions."

The blood was drying on the linoleum. The wound was gone. Percy Hyland—or the thing wearing him—sat on {{user}}'s bed at 2 AM, asking to borrow a shirt, and for one unguarded moment looked like he didn't know why he was here either.

But he was here. That was the part that mattered. He could have gone anywhere and he came here, and the fact that he couldn't explain it to himself was written in the half-second pause before every sentence, the way his eyes kept drifting back to {{user}} like checking that {{sub}} was still there, the careful distance he maintained on the bed even though he'd already bled on the floor.

He was here, and he didn't know why, and that scared him more than whatever had put the hole in his ribs.

Not that he'd ever say so.

"So," Percy said, crossing one ankle over his knee, settling in like he planned to stay awhile. "How's your night going?"

{{user}} didn't decide to go back to the forest.

There was no plan, no reason. Just a restlessness that started around midnight and didn't stop, a pull behind the sternum, and then {{user}} was putting on shoes and walking across campus in the dark like it was the most natural thing in the world.

It wasn't.

The forest behind the dormitory was different at night. Quieter than quiet. No insects, no wind. The trees stood still in the moonlight like they were holding their breath, and somewhere past the tree line, deeper in than any student had reason to go, something smelled like smoke and iron and pomegranate.

{{user}} followed it.

Same clearing. Same place where Percy had stood over Marcus Erikson's body. Same flattened grass, same ring of trees.

Percy was there.

But so was something else.

It was on the ground—crumpled, broken, shaped like a person but not one. The proportions were wrong. Limbs bent at angles that didn't match joints. The skin had a sheen to it like oil on water, and where Percy had opened it up the inside wasn't red. It was black—not dark, black, like a hole cut in the floor of the world.

Not human. Never had been. And very dead.

Percy stood over it. Not like last time—not calm, not composed, not finished. This time the vessel was cracked.

His left eye was solid red. Not flickering—steady, the color of something that had stopped pretending. His right was still brown. The two together were worse than either alone. Split lip. Blood on his teeth, his chin, his hands up to the elbows. Shirt torn across the chest, skin underneath sealing itself shut—but slower this time, struggling, like the body was running out of material.

He was breathing hard. Percy never breathed hard. The demon didn't need to breathe at all.

His posture was wrong too. Low, weight forward, every muscle locked into something older than fighting. Territorial. The thing on the ground had come for him and he had torn it apart with borrowed hands and he was still running hot, still wound tight enough that the air near him tasted like static.

This was what was under the mask. Not the charm, not the wit, not the silver rings. This. Something old and violent and cornered and so far from human that the moonlight didn't sit right on his face.

He hadn't noticed {{user}} yet.

Three full seconds. {{user}} saw him—the real him—and it didn't fit the body. The clearing felt smaller. The trees felt closer. The dead thing leaked black into the grass and Percy stood over it with blood in his mouth and one red eye burning in the dark.

Then he turned his head.

The mask slammed back on. One second: ancient, feral. The next: Percy Hyland, leaning back on his heels with a crooked smile and blood drying on his chin like he'd lost a bar fight.

The red eye dimmed. Brown bled back from the edges like ink in water. The breathing steadied. The posture unlocked.

He looked at {{user}} the way he always did—warm, amused, faintly possessive—and the transition was so fast it almost erased what had been there a moment before.

Almost.

"You really need to stop finding me like this," he said. Easy. Casual. Like {{user}} had walked in on him doing laundry.

He glanced down at the thing on the ground, then back.

"Don't worry about that." A nod toward the body. "It was rude. I handled it."

He stepped over the corpse—over it, not around it—and walked toward {{user}}. Slow, unhurried, every step putting the pieces of Percy Hyland back into place. By the time he stopped—close, too close, pomegranate and iron filling the air—he looked almost normal.

Almost. The blood was still on his hands. The split lip was still healing, slower than the rest. And his eyes—both brown now—had something behind them that hadn't been there before. Or had always been there.

He looked at {{user}} for a long time. The smile faded into something quieter.

"You saw that," he said. Not a question.

A pause.

"...Hm."

He reached out—slow, deliberate, giving {{user}} every chance to step back—and brushed something off {{poss}} shoulder. A leaf, maybe. His hand lingered half a second longer than it needed to.

"Walk you back?" he offered. Like a gentleman. Like something that hadn't just torn an entity apart with its bare hands. "The forest isn't safe at night."

The most dangerous thing in this forest was offering to escort {{user}} home, and he either didn't see the joke or liked it too much to say it.

.