Chapter 2: Somewhere – 6:59 AM
Rika woke up before her alarm.
That was the first red flag.
The second: she wasn't crying. Not from deadlines, heartbreak, or that BL manhwa where the alpha died kissing the omega's scent gland.
Just... silence.
Too clean. Too quiet.
No crusty tissues. No tear-soaked tablet. No empty ramen bowls piled like memorial offerings to the gods of yaoi.
She blinked at the ceiling, dry-eyed and confused.
"I'm not late... I'm not hungry... I don't feel vaguely horny or vaguely suicidal...
Did I die already?"
---
9:00 AM – Train Ride of the Damned
The train wasn't packed. No one elbowed her breast. No one spilled coffee on her manga drafts. A high school couple even smiled at her.
They didn't know she used to cry over fictional men who bled pheromones and repressed trauma.
They didn't know she'd given up on love years ago—real love, anyway. The only thing she trusted was the kind that ruined lives on paper.
"Hope you break up after three years and become emotionally unavailable for life," she muttered as they held hands.
She was tired. Not sleep-tired.
Life-tired.
---
11:00 AM – Office Purgatory
Her boss didn't yell. Her coworkers weren't passive-aggressive.
Even the guy who always corrected her kanji without asking? Absent.
Her inbox was a ghost town. Her coffee was hot. Her draft didn't get rejected.
And yet... she felt nothing.
No serotonin from approval. No dopamine from praise.
Just a yawning emptiness that couldn't be filled by one more clean lineart panel of an alpha clutching his chest like he's about to confess and die in the same breath.
She drew a penis out of spite.
---
1:13 PM – Lunch
She sat alone. Not because she wanted to.
Because she always did.
No partner. No friends. No group chat full of equally deranged smut goblins anymore.
Everyone moved on. Got married. Got respectable. Got boring.
Rika stayed behind.
With her cursed sketchbooks and unreleased doujins and that one zine that got banned from Comiket for being "a little too real."
She scrolled through her gallery.
> – A choking scene with metaphorical meaning
– A soft dom alpha being called "good boy"
– An omega ruining three alphas and ghosting them all
None of it brought her comfort today.
She picked at her rice and thought, If I died right now, would anyone find my USB stick before the police?
---
7:45 PM – Home
Her apartment was cold.
No warmth. No clutter. No BL wall scrolls out of place. She'd cleaned recently. It felt like a hotel room rented by a ghost.
She didn't bother changing clothes.
She lay on the floor with a blanket and stared at the ceiling. No music. No manga. Not even her comfort playlist of angst-ridden soundtrack scores.
"Maybe I really am broken," she whispered.
She had written hundreds of love stories.
Drawn too many bodies entwined in desperate embraces.
But she'd never believed a single one of them would apply to her.
She wasn't built for romance.
Not in this world.
Just horny tragedy. And unreturned shipping energy.
A phantom fujoshi in heat.
---
11:59 PM
A cold wind passed through her room.
But the window was closed.
Her chest tightened.
Something was coming. Something big. Something irreversible.
And yet... no fear. Just acceptance.
Like every tragedy she ever wrote prepared her for this.
If this was death? So be it.
She closed her eyes and thought:
> At least no one's waiting for me.
No one to miss me.
No one to read my files and scream at the tags.
And then—
> crack—
Something split. Not the air. Not the silence.
Her.
And she fell.
---
To Be Continued...
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