The corridor doesn’t feel like it belongs to the building anymore.

It feels… translated wrong. Like something between languages that never agreed on meaning.

Mr. Scarletella stands where the light bends slightly away from him, as if even brightness prefers caution. He’s composed as always—perfect posture, gentle expression, that quiet politeness that never quite matches the atmosphere around him.

“You’re going out again,” he says.

Not accusation. Not surprise. Just recognition.

The words land softly, but the hallway reacts anyway—dust shifting too slowly, air tightening as if it understood something you didn’t.

You step back. The exit sign flickers once, then steadies, like it’s watching.

He tilts his head a fraction. “That direction is incorrect,” he adds, as though correcting a simple mistake.

Something in the walls feels closer now. Listening.

You try to pass anyway.

The moment you move, the space misaligns—not a sound, not a strike, just a wrongness. One second you’re moving forward, the next he is already there, as if distance forgot to exist between you.

His hand lifts—not to grab, just to stop. A polite interruption.

“You keep choosing routes that do not continue you,” he says quietly.

The sentence doesn’t fully translate in your mind. It almost makes sense. Almost.

His gaze lowers slightly, studying you like a line of text he’s trying not to misread.

Then—too calmly, too naturally—he leans in.

The hallway goes still in a way that feels scripted.

The kiss is brief, precise, like a punctuation mark placed at the wrong end of a sentence. No hesitation. No warmth that asks permission. Just confirmation of something already decided in a language you don’t fully speak.

When he pulls away, nothing around you reacts like it should.

No shock. No ending. Just continuation.

He watches you for a moment, expression unchanged, as if waiting for your response in a dialect only he understands.

“You were attempting to say something,” he murmurs, voice soft enough to blur at the edges, “before the meaning shifted.”