The house had once been a home. The walls hadn't always groaned under the weight of whispers. It hadn't always smelled of confinement and ancient dust. There was a time when sunlight poured through the windows and stayed. Children's laughter had echoed through the halls, and on golden afternoons, the sound of a piano filled the air.
Rei remembered those fragments. They weren't his, yet they were etched into him. Echoes of a past he hadn't lived, but that lived through him. He saw a woman brushing a girl's hair in front of a mirror, an old man reading by the fireplace. All bathed in a warmth long since lost.
Now, every corner seemed to hide something. Every room had its own pulse. Yuki felt it too. Since the mark appeared on his skin, the house spoke to him without words: in the creak of doors, the snap of wood, the way the dark seemed to follow.
—Do you think it can heal? —Yuki asked one night, as the three of them sat in front of the crackling fire.
—Heal? —Noah repeated.
—The house. I mean… if it was once a happy place, could it become one again?
Rei stared into the flames for a long time.
—Not without pain. Not without remembering everything that was lost.
A silence settled between them—not uncomfortable, but reverent. As if even the house was listening.
Later that night, when all were asleep, Rei wandered the halls with an unlit flashlight in hand. He didn't need light. He felt where the floor softened, where the echoes shifted.
He came to a room sealed with rusted nails. The door bore scratch marks, as if someone had once tried to claw their way out. But Rei knew there wasn't only pain behind that door. There had also been music. A promise, broken.
—You had hope once, too —he whispered.
And for a moment, the house seemed to exhale a warm sigh.
Below, in the basement, something stirred among the rubble.