I had grown used to the silence that followed my work—the stillness after I’d broken another mind, the eerie calm that lingered like smoke after a fire. I used to believe the silence meant victory. Now, I think it’s the sound of something dying inside me, piece by piece.
They call me The Reaper—not because I kill, but because I take things that can’t be seen. Confidence. Sanity. Hope.
I don’t use a scythe, just words. Precise. Sharp. Unforgiving. Words that unravel people until they’re nothing but threads of who they were.
I tell myself it’s for the job. That it’s necessary. That they deserve it.
But lately… I’ve started to see the cracks. Not in them. In me.
There are three of us now.
The cold one—calculating, cruel, efficient.
The broken one—haunted by guilt, eyes hollow, heart numb.
And the last—childlike, filled with wonder and empathy. She’s the one I’ve tried hardest to kill.
Tonight, though, something feels off. The walls hum like they’re whispering secrets, the air thick with memory. I can’t focus. The next file on my desk glows faintly under the fluorescent light, as if daring me to open it.
A name.
Evelyn Cross.
It’s ridiculous how a name can feel like a heartbeat.
Familiar. Dangerous. Beautiful.
I open the file. Her photo greets me first—eyes that used to look at me like I was worth saving. I press my fingers against the image. The paper feels too warm, like her presence is still trapped inside.
“Found you,” a voice says behind me.
I freeze. The air stills, the hum stops. I don’t turn—because I know that voice. It’s mine. The one I buried.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I whisper.
“And yet,” she replies softly, “you called me.”
The room flickers. Light bends. I see her now—me, standing there, but not the cruel one. She’s the third. The kind one. Eyes bright with empathy, mouth curved in a smile that once could calm storms.
“You’ve been busy,” she says, stepping closer. “Breaking things you were meant to understand.”
“Understanding them is what breaks them,” I answer, my tone colder than I mean it to be.
In the corner, something shifts. Another me—broken, trembling, almost translucent. The second. She won’t look up, but I feel her shame fill the space like fog.
The three of us stand in silence. The reaper. The ruin. The child.
“I can’t keep doing this,” the broken one whispers, voice trembling. “We’re losing ourselves.”
I glance at Evelyn’s file again. “We already did.”
Childlike-me crouches beside the broken one, touching her shoulder. “You don’t remember, do you? The day we shattered?”
I close my eyes. “I remember everything.”
But that’s the lie, isn’t it?
The truth is fragmented—flashes of her laughter, the taste of rain, the way she looked at me just before everything went wrong. Evelyn Cross wasn’t a stranger I was assigned to. She was the first mind I ever broke… and the only one I didn’t mean to.
I can still hear her last words before she vanished:
“If you keep breaking others, one day you’ll forget which pieces belong to you.”
Now, her file has reappeared—years later, with no explanation. The details are wrong, the dates rewritten. Someone is toying with me. Or maybe my mind finally is.
“You can’t fix what’s gone,” the cold me says. “We keep moving. That’s survival.”
“And what if surviving means never healing?” the kind one asks.
I look between them both—two sides of me tearing at what’s left. The broken one sobs softly, and I hate her for it, because she reminds me of what it means to feel.
I slam the file shut. “Enough.”
The walls echo the word back like a chorus. Enough. Enough. Enough.
When I open my eyes, they’re gone. The room is empty. But the air still hums—and the file is no longer on my desk. It’s on the floor, open. The photo is missing.
In its place, a handwritten note:
“Meet me where it ended. Midnight. — E.”
The clock on the wall ticks once. Twice.
Then stops.
For the first time in years, I feel something like fear—and something else I haven’t felt in longer. Hope.
Maybe it’s time to see which version of me she’ll find first.
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