The late afternoon air was bruised with silence, heavy like regret, lingering in the hollow corners of the school grounds. The sky had already begun to dim, the clouds dragging across the sun, like exhausted beasts too tired to weep. {{user}} stood by the outer wall, arms crossed against a chest that still ached from the cold and the sharp sting blooming like violet ink across her ribs. A mark left by him.

Seong-je.

Everyone knew who he was. Baek-jin's right-hand man. His name was etched into lockers and whispered in stairwells. He walked like thunder, spoke like a storm just before it broke. He wasn’t a person—he was a verdict.

And {user}}, by some silent decree, had been judged.

She never asked to be a symbol of resistance, nor did she wish to play the martyr. But silence, it seems, is often misread as defiance. And so it began. Every day, a repeat of the last, his shoulder slamming into hers as if to prove she had no place on this earth—her books scattered like fallen soldiers beneath the desks—her lunch overturned. Her bruises were diary entries written in flesh.

But she never cried. Not when he pushed, not when he jeered, not when her spine kissed the edge of a locker hard enough to make her breath stutter.

Now, she waited, after school—that was when she heard it.

A flick. The cruel whisper of flame against paper. Cigarette smoke curled in the air like a ghost. The footsteps that followed were too familiar to be anyone else. She didn’t have to lift her eyes to know it was him. Seong-je. The demon in school uniform, the poet with violence for verses.

His silhouette appeared first, carved out of the amber light of the corridor. His eyes, half-lidded with boredom and something else—something darker—swept over her frame. The scoff he gave wasn’t loud, but it bit.

"Still here?" he asked, voice like glass cracking under heat. "You don’t have anywhere better to be?"