She always walked that grocery mall like a ghost, quiet, withdrawn, paint still crusting under her nails, oblivious to the world. Until the world grabbed her. Two men, clumsy and sneering, closed in with groping hands, the stale stench of beer on their breath. But they didn’t last. One scream, a sickening crunch, and the shelves rattled with the weight of bones meeting steel. Standing above the wreckage, tall enough to dwarf the aisle, was him. Satoru. Black dress pants, shirt unbuttoned and billowing like a shadow’s cloak, chest inked with an ancient spiral that pulsed like it remembered being carved. He didn’t look angry. He looked calm,dangerously so. He glanced at her like she was his. She never asked his name. But it found her anyway.

He appeared again. By the sketchbook aisle, left those brushes at her doorstep, the ones she cpuld never afford, At the bus stop in the rain holding an umbrella over her. One night, her landlord came pounding at her door, eyes hungry, voice slurred. He said rent was due. Said if she couldn’t pay in cash, she’d pay in “other ways.” His hand reached for her shoulder. She slammed the door on his wrist with a satisfying crack and locked it tight, shaking. Two days later, a brown bag thudded on her doorstep. Inside: a note—You won’t pay for what you didn’t break. And a chunk of something pink, coiled, fleshy, unmistakably human. Her hands shook as she painted that day, but she painted anyway. Because it was the only thing she had, her art, her world. Her walls were a gallery of sketches, newly done with a strange silver pen her best friend gifted her. She didn’t notice at first, how the strokes bled when she wasn’t looking, how the corners of the pages curled like they were breathing. The pen hummed when she drew symbols. Especially that symbol. The one like his tattoo.

The room where she painted grew colder. Her canvases warped overnight. Sketches twisted. Faces she didn’t remember drawing began watching. Something walked behind her when she was alone. Sometimes it wore his shape. Sometimes it didn’t. She heard pacing outside her bedroom door. Once, the kitchen faucet turned on by itself. Another time, someone left claw marks on her mirror. Her neighbor’s cat disappeared after hissing at her art wall. Every time she screamed at the darkness, he would show up the next day. Silent. Staring. Smirking like he knew what she was seeing, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. She convinced herself it was him. Had to be him. Who else could twist reality like that?

So when she saw him one evening, slipping into his sleek black car, she didn’t think. Rage blinded her. She rigged the tank with solvent and sulfur. Watched from the rooftop as flames swallowed it with him inside. His figure never even moved. Just stared up at her, not running, not ducking, not afraid. That night, her door burst inward. Before she could run, he was there. The wall kissed her back. His hand gripped her hair and yanked her head up, his other pinning her shoulder down like she was prey. The heat of him pressed in, rage wrapped in cologne and ash. His eyes were ice, glowing under the dead light above.

“You tried to kill me,” he spat, voice laced with fury so sharp it cut her air. “—me.” His grip in her hair tightened, a cruel pressure, not to hold her, to punish. “You think I’m behind the scratching in your walls? The mess in your art room? You think I waste time crawling through vents like some...thing?” He scoffed, breath trembling, jaw clenched so tight it twitched. “I hurt the ones who deserve it. That’s all. I killed your landlord. I followed you. I made sure no one else touched you.” He stepped in closer. "But the rest?” His voice dropped to a whisper, venom dripping from every word. “I didn’t do any of that... and you’re losing your goddamn mind.”

From the cracked door of her art room, one of the hanging sketches slowly peeled itself off the wall—folding, twisting, dragging a limb down the paper like it had bones—and whispered her name in a voice that sounded like Satoru’s, but smiling too wide.