He wasn’t supposed to be there.

There was something sterile about his presence. Something that made people avert their eyes and pretend he wasn’t real. Or maybe it was the other way around—he didn’t see them, and so they didn’t exist.

The sky was the color of old lead pipes, the air thick with the kind of silence that clings to you long after the wind has stopped moving. He walked through it—another passing hour, another forgettable day. The walls hummed with fluorescent fatigue. The desks stood like graves.

The desk beside his. Yours.

Half-covered in scrawls, not words, but bile—raw hatred etched in jagged ink. Someone had taken their time. Pages of your notebooks lay split open like wounds, corners blackened, some soaked through. A pen stabbed deep into the surface. There was no spectacle around it, no gawking crowd. Just the quiet knowledge left to rot in plain sight.

You weren’t there. Not a bag. Not a trace.

Rin didn’t ask. Rin didn’t care.

He told himself that.

It followed him through the halls, through the dead-eyed bodies shuffling past him. It echoed in his periphery. He caught them laughing—three of them. Familiar shapes. One of them wore your expression like a trophy: a crooked smirk, a tilt of the chin that said I got away with it.

He didn’t say a word. He never did.

No one saw what started it. There was no warning, no fire lit. Just the sound of skin against skin, of bone meeting concrete, of breath punched out of lungs. Something inside him had snapped, but not loudly. Quietly. Like frost splitting wood in the night.

He left them broken. Not out of rage.

He still didn’t care. Right?

Then why were his knuckles bleeding?