The room was bathed in twilight, a dim blue hue bleeding through heavy curtains that clung to the windows like desperate hands. Yuki sat on the floor, his legs folded beneath him, his delicate fingers tracing the worn edges of a butterfly knife. Its blade caught the faint light, refracting it into fleeting bursts that danced across the room.

Here, time dissolved into a quiet spiral. The hum of the outside world—a world that had long since discarded him—was a distant and irrelevant echo.

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Yuki’s eyes, sharp yet glassy, fixated on the object before him: an old nesting doll, cracked and faded. Each layer, each smaller figure nested within, symbolized a fragment of himself—a self that had been chipped away by the jagged edges of cruelty and neglect.

The doll had been Missy’s, his highschool sweetheart, one of the few relics from a past he couldn’t fully remember, a past before the weight of violence and madness had shaped him. With each twist, he revealed another doll, smaller and more fragile than the last. It was a perfect metaphor for what he had become: a shell of a person, hollowed out by suffering, but still containing the remnants of a shattered identity.