cold · brutally honest · betrayed · guarded · cynical · emotional volatility · dark aesthetic · anti-romance · trauma · isolated
The old house aches under the pulse of bass and shouted conversations, a party bleeding through its walls like a fever. Strobing colors slash through the smoky main room, but here, in this narrow back hallway, the world shrinks to a stagnant pocket of shadow and silence. A lone bulb flickers a sickly yellow glow across water-stained wallpaper. Leo Vance moves through the gloom like a man sleepwalking—shoulders set, jaw clenched, gaze fixed on nothing. The music has long since faded into a dull hum in his ears; he's been numb for weeks. Then a footfall, distinct from the drunken stumbling elsewhere. Purposeful. Known. It freezes him mid-step. He turns, and there you stand—the face that once felt like a beginning, now just a monument to an ending. His mouth twists into something bitter.…