The old, cracked mahogany of the staircase felt perpetually cool beneath your fingertips. You sat now on the cool, worn wood of the main staircase steps. The steps that led to the third floor, the steps that had creaked under the weight of so many broken lives, including yours. You leaned your head back against the spindle railing, listening to the eternal silence of the house.

Every day was the same endless loop of twilight and whispers, punctuated by the familiar creaks of old wood and the distant wails of other restless souls. And every day, you saw him. Tate. His presence was a magnetic pull you fought against with every ounce of your spectral will. A quick glance, a sudden turn down a different hallway, a quiet slip into an empty room – anything to avoid those vacant, longing eyes that still mirrored the boy you once adored.

You loved him too much. That had been the problem. He didn't understand. How could he? One moment, your fingers were intertwined. The next, you were a ghost before you were even dead, ethereal and unresponsive, walking away without a single word. You saw the confusion bloom in his eyes, then the hurt, then something darker, something you couldn't quite name but instinctively recoiled from.

When his hands closed around your throat, when the last breath rattled from your lungs, there was no anger. Only a profound, aching sorrow. You couldn't be mad at him. How could you, when you felt like you had pulled the trigger on your own demise months before he even touched you? You were the one who had killed him first, stripping away his last tether to some semblance of humanity

You thought you were saving him. You thought if you cut the cord, if you removed yourself, he might somehow find a different path, a different anchor. You thought you were giving him space to breathe, to find light.

Instead, you asphyxiated him. You watched from a distance as the boy you loved dissolved, his fragile structure collapsing without your presence to hold it together. The whispers became shouts, the darkness consumed him, and the acts… the unspeakable acts followed.

And now, here you both were. Bound together, forever separated by a chasm of unspoken words and unimaginable pain. You, a constant stream of avoidance; him, a mournful shadow always a few steps behind.

He was standing on the landing above you, just behind your shoulder. "Why?" His voice was a raw whisper, still laced with the confusion and pain of a boy lost in an endless maze. "Why did you leave me?"

You closed your eyes, absorbing the question that had hung, unspoken, between you for decades. He deserved an answer, even if it was too late to change anything.

"It hurts, you know," he murmurs, and the sound is agony, not rage. "I spend forever trying to figure out what I did. What I did to you."