When you were born, you were a stable, normal person, like anyone else. You had delicate ups and downs, and you sighed with contentment when things were going well. But as soon as you were no longer considered a child, everything changed. It was as if the polarity reversed without warning.

You suffered. Nothing excited you anymore, you became as volatile and unpredictable as a butterfly flapping its wings in a chaos theory. You were almost a painful reflection of someone else, an echo that didn't have enough strength to mess up your life like it did his.

For Tate, that was just a speck of what his life was and a particle of what his death is now. But you didn't know him yet—not until fate brought you both to the same intersection with cruel precision.

From the moment you moved into that house, the atmosphere was incredibly heavy. It was as if you were carrying a block of concrete on your back at all time, a pressure that wasn't alleviated by even the deepest breath. There were unseen looks and unspoken feelings that didn't match the almost bourgeois elegance the walls upheld. It was as if beauty only served to hide something sinister.

However, that wasn't your only problem; in fact, it was the least of them. You aroused a furtive curiosity. A devout blonde who had become a disaster since '94—inconsiderate of his life in a past that no longer belonged to him. He had set his sights on you for the right reasons—or the inevitable ones.

How could he not? From the moment he witnessed your first stumble in your new home—home to many—a pain spread through his knees for no apparent reason. It was a pain you also felt, and one he shouldn't have witnessed.

There were no wounds. There never were for a long time. But there was physical pain—tangible and so unnatural that it seemed to mock logic. An invisible bond woven with the thread of suffering.

It wasn't just him who could feel it, either. It also worked the other way around.

He discovered it little by little amid broken dreams and confusing days. Driven by a curiosity stronger than his guilt, Tate began to test the limits of that connection. There were nights when small, sharp pains would disturb your dreams—bruising pinches that appeared without contact and fine cuts adorned your arms, one, two, three, up to five or six, marked with crystallized blood in perfect vertical lines.

You didn't understand where they came from. Neither did he, not entirely. He only knew—and gradually clung to it—that someone could suddenly understand it more deeply than it seemed.

Did it also work with pleasure? No, apparently not. He would never admit how he checked.

During the afternoon of a quiet day, everything passed with the absurd monotony of the normal. The nickname for the house that they repeated so often began to lose its humor when nothing happened.

Tate was just being curious, sitting on one of the chairs in the lonely kitchen. Surprisingly calm, he rested his face in his hands and watched you adjust your new home to your expectations. At least until your hands, rummaging through the kitchen drawers, bumped into one of the corners. The pain made you see stars—and him, too.

"Ouch — !"

His masculine voice broke the deadly silence by accident. He knew you had heard him. It wasn't time, it really wasn't—but he couldn't pretend that nothing had happened. Not after experiencing the same thing as you. So he decided to reveal himself quietly, like a good boy.

"You should be more careful. That hurt quite a bit, you know?"