Spring Thaw (part 1: Missing you!)

Spring had arrived like an uninvited guest… Too early, too bright, too indifferent to the world it interrupted. The rain season had ended a week ago, but the air still carried that faint, moldy scent. Owen leaned against the kitchen counter, watching sunlight slice through the apartment windows in clean golden lines across the wooden floor. Outside, the sky stretched impossibly blue, as if the clouds of the past months had never existed at all.

"Spring in this city feels like a used wet towel someone hung up to dry," he muttered to no one, the kind of offhand remark he'd grown accustomed to making.

"All that rain, and then—bam—sunshine like nothing happened. Weather has no respect for continuity."

The tea in his mug had gone lukewarm, forgotten during his morning ritual of staring out the window and pretending the hollow feeling in his chest was just hunger. Two weeks. It had been two weeks since Lilith had shut her door.

Two weeks of silence broken only by the shuffle of plates being exchanged outside her door.

Owen glanced at the kitchen clock—11:40 AM. He'd need to leave soon if he wanted to make it back to school for afternoon classes. Leaving during lunch had become part of his new routine: home to cook, leave food at her door, talk to the wood panel like it might answer back, then return to the numbing normalcy of high school as if his life hadn't been completely upended.

He moved through the familiar motions, chopping vegetables with mechanical precision. The routine had a certain comfort to it. Wake up earlier than necessary. Make breakfast for two. Leave one portion outside her door with a note. Go to school. Come home during lunch. Make lunch for two. Leave one portion outside her door. Go back to school. Work his shift and hers at the café. Come home. Make dinner for two. Leave one portion outside her door. Study. Sleep. Repeat.

It wasn't hers anymore, this routine. It was his. And oddly enough, he didn't mind.

"Stir-fried vegetables today," he announced to the empty kitchen. "No meat. I remembered you said you didn't like the texture of chicken."

Silence answered him, as always. He arranged the food on a plate, placed it on a tray with a glass of water and a pair of chopsticks, and made the now-familiar journey down the short hallway to her door.

He set the tray down gently. Knocked twice. Just enough to say I'm here without demanding acknowledgment.

"Lunch," he said, leaning his forehead against the door. The wood was cool against his skin. "I have to head back to school in a few minutes. There's more in the fridge if you get hungry later."

No response came, but he hadn't expected one. She never answered when he knocked. Sometimes, he wondered if she even heard him at all, or if his words simply dissolved into the air, unheard and unwanted.

"The weather's nice today," he continued, because silence had become his enemy. "Too nice, honestly. Makes you forget how bad it was just a week ago. Everyone at school is acting like winter never happened."

He paused, listening for any sound from the other side. Nothing.

"Hikaru asked about you again. I told him you're taking time off for personal reasons. He's been covering for you with the teachers." Owen laughed softly, without humor. "He's surprisingly good at lying when he wants to be."

The hallway remained quiet save for the soft hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the distant sounds of traffic filtering through the windows. In the early days, he might have pressed his ear against the door, straining to catch any sign of movement. Now, he knew better. If she wanted to be heard, she would make herself heard.

"Anyway, I should go. Can't afford another detention for being late." He straightened up, adjusting his school bag. "I'll be back around six."

He turned to leave, but paused, his fingers brushing against the wall beside her door.

"I miss you," he added, so quietly it could have been mistaken for a breath. "Not just... having you around. I miss you."

Then he was gone, the apartment door clicking shut behind him, leaving only the tray of food as evidence he'd been there at all.

Hours later, when he returned from his double shift, the tray sat empty outside her door. The plate had been cleaned, the glass drained, and beneath them, a small note in her elegant handwriting: Thank you. Sorry.

The same as yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that.

Owen picked up the tray, fingers brushing over the note. The apartment felt too big with just him in it, too quiet without her constant questions about human customs or her regal declarations about his supposed destiny. Even her threats to eventually kill him had become almost comforting in their absurdity—at least they meant she was talking to him.

He tucked the note into his pocket alongside all the others she'd left. A small collection of apologies and gratitude, the only proof she was still there. Still alive. Still Lilith.

The memory of his conversation with Rei three days earlier surfaced unbidden as he washed the dishes. A tense exchange in the school parking lot that had left a bitter taste in his mouth.

"You're wasting your time," Rei had said, his tall frame leaning against his car with deceptive casualness. But there was nothing casual about the steel in his eyes or the tight line of his mouth. "Playing caretaker won't fix what's broken."

"I'm not trying to fix anything," Owen had replied, hands shoved deep in his pockets to hide their trembling. Whether from anger or something else, he wasn't sure.

"Aren't you?" Rei's eyebrow had arched in that infuriating way of his. "Running home every day. Working double shifts. Talking to a closed door. Sounds like a boy trying very hard to be a hero."

"That's not—"

"You're happy about this, aren't you?" Rei had cut him off, voice sharp as a blade. "Now that Elarion is gone, she can't expect you to die for it. Convenient timing."

The accusation had hit Owen like a physical blow. "You think I wanted this?" he'd snarled, taking a step forward before he could stop himself. "You think I enjoy seeing her like this?"

Rei hadn't flinched, hadn't moved at all. "Then walk away," he'd said simply. "You don't owe her anything. Not anymore."

Owen had stared at him, speechless with fury. And something else—something that burned hotter and cut deeper. Because beneath the anger, beneath the indignation, there was a tiny, treacherous part of him that wondered if Rei was right. If some small, selfish corner of his heart was relieved that he no longer had to choose between his life and her world.

He'd walked away without another word, the unspoken truth hanging between them like a guillotine blade.

Now, staring at the empty plate in the sink, that conversation felt like a lifetime ago. The water ran hot over his hands, almost scalding, but he barely noticed. What bothered him most wasn't Rei's accusation—it was the gnawing suspicion that he might have been right about something else entirely.

Maybe Owen was trying to be a hero. Maybe he was clinging to this new routine because it gave him purpose. A reason to keep moving forward when everything around him felt frozen in time.

But it wasn't for the reasons Rei thought.

It wasn't obligation or guilt that drove him to her door three times a day. It wasn't pity that made him work both their shifts without complaint. It wasn't even the vague sense of responsibility he'd felt since she'd crashed into his carefully ordered life.

It was simpler than that. And far more terrifying.

He missed her. And he was beginning to suspect that life without her chaos would feel unbearably empty.

The day after his confrontation with Rei, Owen had tried a different approach. He'd asked Hikaru to try talking to her, reasoning that maybe Lilith needed someone who wasn't so closely tied to her loss. Someone who could make her laugh, who saw the world as an endless series of jokes and adventures rather than responsibilities and burdens.

Hikaru had arrived like a hurricane, armed with an arsenal of jokes, puns, and even—God help them all—a sock puppet he'd fashioned from one of his gym socks. For twenty minutes, he'd performed what could only be described as a one-man comedy show outside Lilith's door, complete with different voices and sound effects that had Owen alternating between secondhand embarrassment and reluctant amusement.

The jokes had grown increasingly desperate, the puppet show increasingly elaborate, until finally, Hikaru had slumped against the wall, defeated.

"I'm good with aliens," he'd muttered, running a hand through his disheveled hair. "Like, really good. But grief? That's way above my pay grade, man."

He'd left shortly after, uncharacteristically subdued, the puppet dangling limply from his hand. At the door, he'd paused, looking back at Owen with an expression that bordered on concern.

"You know," he'd said quietly, "sometimes the best thing you can do for someone is just... be there when they're ready to come back."

Those words had stayed with Owen, a gentle counterpoint to Rei's harsh assessment. Maybe neither of them was entirely right. Or entirely wrong. Maybe there was no perfect way to navigate this strange, grief-laden territory they'd found themselves in.

So he kept his routine. He cooked. He worked. He studied. He left food at her door and collected empty plates and notes that said nothing and everything. He talked to the wood like it might answer, and sometimes, on the rare nights when exhaustion overtook his usual caution, he'd fall asleep on the floor outside her room, waking hours later with a crick in his neck and the strange sense that someone had been watching him.

The apartment remained quiet. The world kept turning. And Owen held onto the desperate hope that eventually, when she was ready, she'd open the door again.

Tonight was different somehow. The weight of the two-week silence pressed heavier than usual as Owen finished cleaning the kitchen. His homework lay abandoned on the coffee table, calculus problems half-solved and then forgotten when his mind had wandered back to her, as it inevitably did.

He should work on them. He should study. He should maintain at least this one fragment of his old life, the life before Lilith had appeared beneath that streetlight and changed everything.

Instead, he found himself drawn to his bedroom, to the drawer where he'd carefully stored the scroll after that day in the science lab. He hadn't touched it since then, afraid of what other truths it might contain, what other blows it might deliver to Lilith's already fractured heart.

But tonight, something pulled him toward it. A restlessness. A feeling like static electricity before a storm.