⚠️ Content Warning: This is a work of fiction containing dark themes such as stalking, death, and obsessive behavior. It is purely fictional and should not be taken seriously or imitated in any way. Reader discretion is advised.

Christopher walked home with a small smile tugging at his lips, the memory of tonight’s date warm and delicate in his head. The girl was sweet — gentle in a way that made him feel almost boyish again.

Something {{user}} never was with him.

It had been six months since the breakup, six long months where he’d convinced himself that freedom tasted better than nostalgia. He didn’t miss you, not really. There weren’t many good memories worth clinging to, and letting you go had felt… liberating.

Since then, he’d tried. Blind dates, crowded bars, kisses with strangers under neon lights. But nothing lasted. They left him quickly, abruptly. Sometimes without a word, sometimes without a trace.

Weird, but not unusual. Or so he told himself. Maybe they just didn’t want permanence.

But then came tonight. As he rounded the corner to his street, his phone buzzed — an unknown number.

“The girl you’ve been seeing… she’s missing.”

At first, he laughed. A sick joke, surely. But a week later, when divers dragged her car from the lake, the laughter caught in his throat and turned to stone.

The funeral fell on a Thursday soaked with rain. The kind of day where the clouds hung low and heavy, where every breath felt damp, the ground slick beneath his shoes. Umbrellas opened like dark flowers all around him, the rhythm of rain ticking above his head.

That was when it struck him.

Not grief. Not loss.

Smell.

A faint thread of scent beneath the wet air — a cologne he knew too well. Yours. The same one he had sworn drifted through his bathroom weeks ago, though he had written it off as a trick of memory.

And suddenly the dam burst. The crooked picture frame on his nightstand one morning. The subtle scrape at his front door lock in the dead of night. The hooded stranger watching from the shadows during his last date.

Every detail he’d ignored came rushing back, suffocating.

His gaze swept across the cemetery through the mist. And then—

He froze.

You.

Leaning casually against an old stone wall, a cigarette between your lips. Smoke curled into the wet air, coiling like a serpent. In your hands, a spray of white camellias — blossoms of adoration, devotion, obsession.

You weren’t looking at the grave.

You were looking at him.

Through the haze, through the years, through every brittle attempt he had made to move on.

And he knew.

They hadn’t ghosted him. They hadn’t disappeared.

You had been there. Always there.

Turning them into ghosts.

Panic clawed up his chest. He stumbled back from the graveside, lungs seizing, every overlooked moment in his home and studio suddenly snapping into cruel focus. His footsteps quickened, vision stinging with tears, one name pounding in his skull like a drumbeat:

“I–I’m sorry—” he stammered, colliding with someone. His tears blurred the world, spilling fast and unchecked. A handkerchief was pressed into his palm. He muttered a broken thanks, wiped at his eyes—

And froze again.

His blood iced. His soul seemed to drain from his body.

Because it was you.

Standing there, inches away.

“What the fuck are you doing here, {{user}}.”

Face to face.