The door to the clubroom clicked shut behind Soren with a soft, definitive sound, the kind that always felt quieter than it should have in a place this large.
He didn't bother reaching for the lights.
Boots carried him past the entrance without pause, across the dining area where the long table sat perfectly aligned with its chairs, through the threshold into the living room, and the moment the sofa came into view, his body gave up pretending it wanted to stay upright.
He dropped onto it like a stone.
The cushions took him with a muted thump, his back sinking in, his head bouncing once against the pillow, and for several seconds he just lay there, staring at the ceiling as if it might offer an answer, or at least something to look at that wasn't inside his own skull.
Eventually, his gaze slid sideways, catching on the window.
Outside, the sky was a flat, dull grey, no sun and no rain, just colourless clouds packed together so tightly they smothered the light before it could reach the ground, turning the world into a washed-out painting that forgot what warmth looked like.
His heart was still racing, ribs tight around it, pulse hammering as if he had been running.
His mind was still loud.
Morcant sitting across from him, the slight shift of posture when Soren said Alinar's name, the fraction of a pause before fingers reached toward the mana oath, ink hovering like a blade over skin, everything replayed in jagged fragments, as if someone were shuffling through a deck of memories inside his head and insisting he watch every card.
Then, before he could stop it, a sound slipped out of his throat.
"...Pfft."
It came out wrong, small at first, a breath that broke into a chuckle as if his lungs had decided they were done holding it in, and then it grew, heat building behind his sternum until it spilt.
"Ahahaha…"
An arm came up, the back of his hand covering his eyes as laughter poured out of him, louder and sharper than it should have been in an empty room, the kind of laugh that didn't sound amused so much as unhinged, like something inside him had snapped and finally let go.
"What the hell was that!" he wheezed, breath catching, "Hahaha—'You're… one of them, aren't you?' Ahahaha!"
Morcant's face going pale, eyes trembling, the way his hand had hesitated over the ink like the oath itself could bite him, it all stacked together until the laughter shook his shoulders and made his stomach hurt.
For so long, Morcant had been a monster in Soren's head, a shadow in the story that was supposed to torment the hero from the safety of the dark, an inevitable antagonist with inevitability as armour.
Today, that same man had stared at Soren as if Soren were the monster.
It had been the first time he had made a move that extreme, the first time he had stepped into danger with intent rather than desperation, and done it on purpose, not because he had been cornered, not because fate had shoved him forward, but because he chose to.
He had walked into an enemy's base alone, lied through his teeth, bluff after bluff layered on top of each other until even he wasn't sure where the truth ended, provoked and pushed, baited reactions, watched for tells, then lied again, and somehow… somehow, the man who was meant to isolate him had ended up signing a contract that guaranteed Soren's safety instead.
It was insane, reckless, arrogant even, and it had worked.
The fear and nausea that had strangled him while he sat in front of Morcant were gone now, burned away by the aftertaste of success, leaving something raw and fizzing in its place, something that felt dangerously close to exhilaration.
Soren knew he was acting strangely, he knew he wasn't in his right mind, and the awareness sat in the back of his skull like a detached observer taking notes.
Between [Mental Care] numbing the edges of everything and the stress finally snapping, it made sense that this wasn't normal.
He just didn't care.
For once, something had gone the way he wanted, not halfway, not with a hidden cost revealed at the last second, not with the story yanking the reins back, but cleanly, decisively, in his favour.
So he laughed.
He laughed until his stomach cramped, until his lungs burned, until his throat went dry and rough, until it started to thin out and break apart into smaller sounds.
"Hah… ha…"
The last few chuckles died in his chest, shoulders loosening as the adrenaline bled away, and what replaced it wasn't relief so much as a suffocating silence that flooded the living room, thick enough that he could almost feel it against his skin.
No murmurs.
No footsteps.
No faint clinking of cups from the kitchen, no pages turning somewhere in the corner, no quiet humming from behind a closed door, nothing that suggested other people existed in the same space as him.
The smile slipped off his face without warning, like it had simply run out of support.
Only then did the emptiness really register.
The clubroom was completely empty.
Soren pushed himself upright slowly, elbows digging into the cushions as he sat, posture folding forward a little as his eyes swept the room, taking in details he usually ignored because they were always filled in by life.
The sofa opposite was spotless.
The bookshelves were neatly organised, spines aligned, no half-pulled volumes shoved back in at awkward angles, no bookmark ribbons hanging out where someone had forgotten to tuck them away.
Lev's door was shut, and the strip of light beneath it was dark.
Not a single coat was draped over the back of a chair, not a single bag abandoned by the dining table, no half-finished work spread out in a messy claim of territory, no cups, no crumbs, no scatter of existence.
A room that had been theirs, stripped down to furniture.
It had been over a week since he had spoken properly with everyone.
A week of warped expressions, of eyes that used to soften when they saw him now hardening instead, a week where envy and hatred had poured out of mouths that usually teased him, scolded him, or laughed with him.
Now he knew why.
Morcant's ability, [Dark Energy], a force that didn't create feelings so much as twist them, push them, amplify them until they became weapons, turning passing irritation into a knife, turning insecurity into a flood, turning small jealous thoughts into something that could drown a person.
Knowing that didn't make the hurt any smaller.
It just gave it a name.
His head tilted back toward the window again, eyes snagging on the same grey sky, and for a moment the colourless clouds looked less like weather and more like a lid being pressed down over the world.
What he felt now was uncomfortably familiar.
The first half of summer break.
The Arden estate.
That foreign room in a familiar house, corridors that felt like cages, every glance like a blade, servants too polite to be honest and family too honest to be kind, the sensation of sitting alone in a place that was supposed to be "home" while being reminded, again and again, that it wasn't.
It was the same.
Only worse.
Because back then, he had still had an escape in his head, the knowledge that he could return to the academy, that he could see them again, that the loneliness had an end date.
Now, the academy was the place he was meant to breathe, and it felt hollow anyway.
Loneliness settled on him like weight, a crushing sensation of being the only one left on an empty stage, lights still on, props still there, but the cast gone.
No one to talk to, to rely on, or to laugh with.
He had felt lonely before, enough times that he understood it as a concept, not just as a word.
The nights after Aria's passing, when grief turned his apartment into a box and silence crawled into every corner, the days when his parents sneered at him like he was a stranger wearing his face, the way quiet could cling to a room even when he tried to drown it out with noise.
This was different.
If he went even a day without seeing someone he was close to, his chest ached, thoughts grew sluggish, and his mood dipped into a strange, heavy fog that didn't quite count as sadness but still made everything harder.
He had noticed it this week, how his mind became hazy if he didn't see Lilliana, how his mood dropped if Amelia's voice wasn't nearby, how something in him tightened when Esper wasn't there, a restless pull that made him want to move, to search, to fix.
Obsessive.
That was the word that surfaced, unpleasant and accurate.
Fingers curled into the fabric of his trousers, grip tightening as if he could anchor himself by force, then legs drew up onto the sofa and he hugged his knees, pressing them to his chest as though he could hold himself together just by squeezing hard enough.
"It's tiring…"
The whisper came out thin, swallowed by the room.
The moment his thoughts returned to the last week in any real detail, the fog rolled in again, familiar now, like it had learned the path through his brain and didn't need directions anymore.
[Dark Energy] had been cleared away from the academy, at least the part that had been touching him and his circle, but it hadn't taken the memories with it.
The things they had said.
The way they had looked at him.
The way they had pulled away, even when their bodies stayed close.
Soren exhaled slowly into the empty living room and rested his forehead against his knees, cloak shifting with the movement, cool fabric brushing his skin, a small reminder that he was still here, still solid, still breathing.
He wanted everything to return to normal quickly.
Wanted his friends to come back to him, wanted the clubroom to fill again, wanted laughter and arguments and the low, constant noise of people existing together.
That was all.
Just that.
••✦ ♡ ✦•••
But things weren't that simple.
The day after his deal with Morcant, Soren sat in the cafeteria with a tray of food in front of him and an entire table to himself, surrounded by noise that somehow never came close enough to touch.
There were voices everywhere, laughter, metal clinking against plates, chairs scraping against the floor, students calling out across aisles, the steady buzz of a living place, and yet the space around him felt buffered, like an invisible ring had been drawn.
Ordinarily, their usual seats would be full at this time.
Amelia would be leaning against him with that languid expression that fooled people into forgetting she was dangerous, Esper would be whining about something between bites, Felix would be complaining, Lev quietly watching everything with the look of someone filing information away, Alex dropping by with that easy smile as if he belonged everywhere.
Now there was nothing.
A mostly empty table, a gap where bodies should have been, a gap that made the chair beside him feel louder than the cafeteria itself.
Esper had been the only one he had spoken to that day, and even then, it had been in the morning, brief enough that he could replay it in his head without trying.
"...Soren," she had said, voice strangely small for someone who usually filled rooms without effort.
The image stuck, not just the words, but the way she had fidgeted with the hem of her sleeve, fingers worrying the fabric as if she could stitch herself into composure, eyes uncertain and skittering away whenever his gaze met hers.
He had activated [Chimera] on instinct, the habit of checking becoming second nature now.
No [Dark Energy].
Relief had hit him so hard it had almost made his knees weak.
Then, immediately after, the awkward distance she kept had tightened something in his chest anyway, because even without [Dark Energy], the damage was still there.
It made sense.
They had spent a week under pressure, looking at him through lenses they didn't choose, thinking thoughts that had been nudged and sharpened, saying things they now had to remember saying, feeling things that, even if amplified, hadn't come from nowhere.
That wouldn't disappear just because the pressure vanished.
You couldn't rip something like that out and pretend nothing had happened, not if you wanted the wound to actually heal.
"So what am I supposed to do…?"
The mutter slipped out as he pushed rice around his plate with his fork, appetite present in the body and absent in the mind.
Waiting was an option.
Go to class as usual, eat, sleep, train, keep his head down, give them space, let time do what time always did, smoothing rough edges until they didn't cut anymore.
It was sensible.
It was patient.
It was probably what a smarter person would do.
He didn't want to.
The obsessive thing inside him refused to accept it, refused to sit still while the emptiness stayed, refused to pretend he didn't feel how wrong it was.
He didn't want to sit in that cafeteria alone, staring at a chair that should have had Amelia's elbow on it, or listening to laughter that belonged to other tables.
He wanted to talk to his friends, to laugh with them, to argue with them, to listen to their complaints about the day, to be annoyed and comforted and teased in ways that meant they were still there.
Wanted the clubroom to feel alive again.
So, instead of waiting for things to fix themselves, Soren decided to move.
Again.
Another step forward, another action chosen by his own will, even if it was small, even if it didn't solve anything immediately, because staying still felt like suffocating.
With that decision simmering in the back of his mind, he dragged himself through the dull parade of classes.
The day moved slowly, each lecture a blurred string of words he barely absorbed, chalk tapping against boards, pages turning, pens scratching, the rhythm of education continuing as if the last week hadn't happened at all.
Glances followed him.
Professors hesitated before calling on him, as though weighing whether his presence would poison the room, students whispered behind their hands and then pretended they weren't, friends grew quiet when he entered, conversations stalling and then resuming when he moved past, like the air needed time to settle again.
Awkwardness pressed down on him in layers, heavy enough that it should have made him stop.
He bore it anyway.
Yesterday, he had done something insane.
Today, he could do something simple.
When the bell finally rang at the end of the day, he packed away his equipment and stood in a single motion, no lingering and no pretending he had nowhere to be, then slipped out of the lecture hall as quickly as he could, footsteps echoing down the corridor.
Stellaris Academy's halls were as busy as ever.
Uniforms moved in clusters, students talking about assignments, duels, gossip, weekend plans, the kind of normal conversations that felt almost offensive in their casualness, late afternoon light filtering through tall windows and painting the stone floor in uneven rectangles that shifted as clouds passed.
Soren walked through it like a ghost.
Where he was going first wasn't clear, not yet, but stopping felt dangerous, like if he paused long enough, the fog would wrap around him again and he'd sink back into that empty sofa with his knees to his chest.
So he kept moving.
It was while he cut through one of the connecting corridors, past a row of pale stone pillars and a side doorway that opened toward a quieter section of the building, that he felt it.
A small tug at the back of his cloak.
His body stopped on reflex, shoulders stiffening before his brain caught up, then his head turned.
Behind him stood a colour he had come to recognise instantly over the past months, soft and bright, like flowers stubborn enough to bloom in the middle of stone.
Pink.
————「❤︎」————