When Isaac finally returned to college for the first time in over two weeks, the air felt different.
The campus was the same on the surface: students clustered in small groups, laughter echoing near the courtyard, the usual rush of people hurrying to their next lecture.
But as he walked through it, bag hanging off one shoulder, he felt eyes on him.
Stares lingered longer than usual.
Conversations dipped when he passed.
Whispers followed in his wake, too low to catch every word, but clear enough in their tone.
— That's him…
— I heard they live together, right?
— Wow, I still can't believe she'd do that…
He clenched his jaw and kept walking.
'Is this seriously all it took?'
A few lines on a blackboard.
Some printed photos.
That was all it took to rip through everything people thought they knew about Aria.
To turn her from the girl who always smiled and joked with everyone into a rumour, a scandal, an easy topic for people to pass around when they were bored.
It made his chest ache.
Not just because they were talking about her, but because of how quickly they believed it.
How fast they decided what was true.
He kept his head down, not out of shame, but because he knew that if he started looking people in the eye, he might say something he couldn't take back.
He wasn't here to argue with them.
He was here for answers.
The corridors inside the main building were quieter.
The fluorescent lights buzzed faintly overhead as he made his way to the faculty offices, the soles of his shoes clicking against the linoleum.
He stopped in front of a familiar door.
Knock. Knock.
"Professor, it's Isaac," he called.
There was a rustle of papers, then a voice from inside.
– Come in.
Creaakkk—
The door swung open on slightly stiff hinges.
"Hello, Isaac, glad to see you're back," the professor said without looking up.
He sat behind his desk, surrounded by stacks of paper and open files, pen moving across the page in quick, practised strokes.
His eyes remained on whatever he was grading, not sparing more than a cursory glance in Isaac's direction.
"Did you have something you wanted to talk about?" he asked.
"Yes…" Isaac replied.
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him, feeling the room shrink slightly around them; he took a breath, steadying himself.
"Do you have any idea who wrote those things about Aria before your lecture?" he asked.
His voice came out more controlled than he felt.
The professor finally paused his writing.
He set his pen down and leaned back slightly, but still didn't fully meet Isaac's eyes.
Instead, he looked somewhere near his shoulder, as if hoping that would be enough.
"No, I'm sorry," he said after a moment. "By the time I got there, it was already done."
Isaac's fingers curled slightly against the strap of his bag.
"I see…" he answered.
He had hoped, foolishly, maybe, that the professor might have seen something.
A student standing too close to the board.
Someone lingering nearby with a stack of papers.
Anything.
Instead, all he got was that same polite distance.
"Will Aria be with us today?" the professor asked, picking up his pen again. "The Dean of Student Affairs wants to have a word with her."
Isaac shook his head.
"No. She's… she's not coming in."
The professor hummed in acknowledgement, already turning his attention back to the papers on his desk.
If he had an opinion about that, he didn't voice it.
Isaac stood there a moment longer, waiting for a follow-up question that never came.
Some offer of support.
A suggestion.
A hint that someone on staff was going to actually do something about what had happened.
Nothing.
He turned and left the office.
The door shut softly behind him.
'What a waste of time,' he thought bitterly as he walked back down the corridor.
He had come for answers.
Instead, he had only confirmed what he had already suspected.
No one knew anything.
Or if they did, no one was saying.
••✦ ♡ ✦•••
"Isaac–!"
The voice cut across the courtyard, pitched high and urgent.
He kept walking.
He didn't recognise the voice, and he wasn't in the mood to talk to anyone.
His steps were brisk, his focus narrowed to a single goal: get home.
He needed to get back to Aria.
She hadn't left her room in what felt like forever.
Two weeks, more or less, since the day of the blackboard.
Two weeks of limping meals, hollow words through the door, and sometimes no sound from her at all.
It had gotten bad enough that she hardly even ate anymore.
Half-finished plates would sit untouched outside her room when he came back from work.
Sometimes the food hadn't been moved at all, only growing colder as the hours passed.
Showers had become rare.
He noticed that, not because he was keeping track, but because the sound of running water in the pipes overhead had been one of the small daily noises of their shared life.
Now, most days, the pipes stayed quiet.
'What can I do?' he thought, frustration and helplessness knotting in his chest.
She had been the one who saved him, offering him a place to stay, covering the rent when he couldn't.
She had been his anchor when his family had made home feel like a trap.
And now, when she needed help, when she needed someone to pull her out of the hole she had been pushed into, he felt useless.
"Isaac! Don't you dare ignore me! Look at me!"
The voice climbed higher, sharper.
He stopped walking.
Annoyance flared instinctively, sharp and hot, as he turned his head.
"What?" he snapped.
The girl standing behind him smiled widely.
Too widely.
It took him a second to place her, but when he did, his stomach lurched.
It was the girl who had confessed to him months ago.
The one who had grabbed his hand behind the building.
The one whose eyes were just a little too bright, whose smile had been just a little too fixed.
Now, up close, that brightness had curdled into something worse.
Her gaze latched onto him like hooks.
"Isaac…" she breathed, as though his name itself was something to savour. "Won't you look at me now?"
She stepped closer, ignoring the distance he instinctively tried to put between them.
"The nuisance is gone," she continued sweetly. "So we can finally be together, can't we?"
Isaac froze.
Her words ran through his head twice before fully registering.
— The nuisance is gone.
His mind snapped to attention.
Aria, shut away in her room.
The car.
The blackboard.
The accusations.
"So we can finally be together."
He stared at the girl in front of him, his heartbeat thudding in his ears.
"'The nuisance'…?" he repeated slowly.
His voice dropped, the last note flat and sharp.
"Was it you?"
The question hung in the air like a blade.
For a brief second, he saw it, the instant she realised she had his full attention.
Her face lit up, the kind of brightness that had nothing to do with happiness and everything to do with obsession finally being acknowledged.
"Yes!" she said, as if she had just been praised. "I did it all for you, Isaac! Everything, every little thing."
Her eyes shone with feverish pride.
"I'm so glad you've finally noticed," she said, taking another step toward him. "But now we can be together, right?"
Something in him snapped.
There was no slow build of anger.
Isaacs's fist moved faster than his thoughts, connecting with her face.
Thud!
The impact jolted up his arm, rattling his shoulder.
It was an action he would've never done if he were in his right mind.
There was no justification for throwing the punch; he hated himself for doing such a thing, as he didn't want to stoop to the girl's level, and yet he had already done so.
He should have ignored the girl and just walked away, yet he couldn't.
She stumbled back and fell, hitting the ground with a dull thump, one hand flying to her cheek.
She wiped the blood from her nose with a trembling hand.
Then she smiled.
"Hehe~" she giggled, the sound thin and breathy. "Even when you hurt me, it feels like love."
She tilted her head, eyes wide and glassy.
"It means you're finally seeing me, right, Isaac?~"
Isaac staggered back a step.
Bile rose in his throat, sour and burning.
The girl in front of him had ruined Aria's life.
She was the reason Aria's car had been vandalised, the reason her reputation was in pieces, the reason her parents looked at her with disgust through a phone screen.
All of it.
Her fault.
"Why? Just… why?" he managed, his voice low and rough.
Her giggle lingered in the air, light and wrong.
"Ehehe~ I did it all for you, I did it so we could be happy! Everything was for you…" she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
His hands curled into fists again at his sides.
"Why would you do such a thing?" he demanded, anger finally spilling into his words. "Are you fucking sick?"
"You're all I ever think about…" she breathed.
Her eyes shone with a feverish glow that made his skin crawl.
"Every single second… ever since the first moment I saw you in that magazine, Isaac."
Magazine.
He remembered then.
The part-time modelling work.
The ad that had gone around campus for a while.
His face in the corner of a page, the kind of image people glanced at once and forgot.
She hadn't forgotten.
The girl looked up at him with eyes filled with madness.
She terrified him.
"I can't stop…" she continued, her voice dropping to a whisper that was somehow worse than shouting. "I can't get you out of my head. You're my everything… I love you…"
She lay on the ground, giggling again, the sound broken.
Mud clung to her clothes.
Blood from her nose dripped down over her lips and chin.
The bandages wrapped around her wrists had come loose, slipping down to reveal scarred, uneven flesh beneath.
It was all on display.
A grotesque show of how deep her obsession ran, carved into skin and bone.
She reached for him, fingers clawing at the air until they found his leg.
Her hand latched onto his trousers, gripping his calf.
He looked down at her with a disgusted expression he couldn't hide.
"You're fucking insane," he said.
He didn't raise his voice.
He didn't need to.
The words were flat, stripped of anything but raw revulsion.
He didn't want to be standing here anymore.
He didn't want to hear her voice or see the way she looked at him, like he was some salvation she'd decided she deserved.
He just wanted to leave.
To go home.
To get back to Aria and the quiet apartment that had become his entire world.
"Isaac, you need me…" she whispered, fingers tightening around his leg. "I will always love you, no matter what you do… I'll never let you go…"
He tore his leg away from her grip, more forcefully than he intended.
His chest heaved.
Every breath scraped against his lungs.
He turned away from her, refusing to look back as she lay there on the ground, giggling through blood and dirt and unravelled bandages.
All he could think about was Aria.
Her locked door.
Her shaking hands.
All he wanted now was to get home, to see her, to protect what little they had left.
But as he walked away, the stalker's words clung to him like rot, seeping into the cracks of his thoughts, refusing to let go.
————「❤︎」————