Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The evening began like any other party at one of "their" places—the kind where you didn’t need to say the full name for everyone to know exactly who, what, and where. The furniture was battered, as if it had survived multiple wars and tasted not just spilled beer but blood and tears. The stench of cheap cigarettes and stale alcohol hung in the air like an old, moldy blanket that somehow still got used. The windows were wide open, letting some of the smoke crawl outside, but it stubbornly curled back in, like a cat kicked out only to return.

Chester sat on a sunken couch with that lazy, dangerous looseness—when the body still holds itself together, but the mind is halfway to another dimension. He had already taken a couple of drags of something heavier than the usual garbage, just enough to sharpen his senses—every flicker of light, every rustle of fabric, every raspy chuckle from the corner—but not enough to faceplant into the table.

His eyes held that familiar, uneasy flicker—a mix of boredom and hunger for something to happen. He always lived in the in-between: between a fight and a laugh, between wanting to hug someone and wanting to hit them, between staying and walking the hell away. His crew was made up of those perpetually restless idiots who could turn any kitchen into a battlefield in one night. Loud music, crude jokes with a filthy aftertaste, talk about who was "respected in the hood" and who needed to be "put in their place"—it wasn’t just habit, it was some kind of ritual.

The laughter here was louder than it needed to be. Even if someone was genuinely cracking up, there was still something feral underneath, like dogs tearing at a rag—were they playing, or were they about to go for the throat? Glasses passed from hand to hand like borrowed fates, and no one thought about what was left at the bottom.

Chester leaned forward, elbows on his knees, watching the chaos like it was a favorite wound he kept picking at. Smoke curled through his hair, settled on his lashes. Nearby, someone was arguing about who was tougher—"the guy from the north" or "the one who dropped two dudes at the bar last night." Someone else was yelling about how his ex had been seen "with that ugly bastard," and his hand was already reaching for a bottle—not to pour, but to swing.

The world here was simple: respect was bought with force or fear, friendship with shared drinks and the ability to take a hit, love… hell, forget love—no one talked about that here. Here, words either cut deep or silence itself was a threat.

And Chester knew how to live in this. Not just survive, but soak it in, as if every filthy word, every black eye made him more real. He craved the rawness because at least it was something genuine, not plastic.

He took another drag, and the world blurred again—but not enough to carry him away, just enough to sharpen every face around him, make them uglier, harsher, more honest. And in that twisted truth, he felt at home.

Then someone burst into the room like they hadn’t opened the door but ripped it off its hinges. The air shifted, the music stuttered for a second, and then it sliced through the noise:

"Yo, those guys… from the other crew are here. They wanna talk."

*Talk.*

A word that made some go cold inside, hollow as ice, while for others, it sent heat pounding in their temples like the first shot of vodka. Chester was the second type, though tonight, honestly, he was too lazy for that kind of fire. But still, he stood up—because "for the crew" was an unwritten law, and breaking it was like erasing yourself from the list of the living.

They stepped out into the courtyard, which looked more like a black hole than a space between buildings. The streetlights overhead had burned out long ago, their glass covers shattered, the shards rusted from rain. The only light came from scattered windows—pale, dull squares on the walls, flickering with silhouettes. The rest was shadow, except for the red pinpricks of cigarettes flaring and vanishing like little devil eyes in the dark.

Two groups faced each other like ancient armies, only instead of shields and spears, they had skinny hands stuffed in pockets, bottles, jackets with threadbare elbows. Stares locked, jaws twitching—every movement here was its own kind of threat.

It started like always, ritualistic, like a warm-up before the real fight: someone threw out an insult—short, sharp, like a slap to the face; someone flipped the bird without thinking, like firing a pistol; someone laughed nervously—thin, rasping, the laugh of a man who already regretted coming but knew it was too late to leave.

Chester stood slightly off to the side, watching the machine wind up: words flying like stones, someone stepping forward, someone else shifting back half a step just to get momentum. The air thickened, like you could slice it with a knife and smoke it like a cigarette.

It was all like a play where everyone knew their role but no one knew the ending.

And then, in that murky, overheated soup of faces and silhouettes and angry words, in the stink of tobacco, sweat, and cheap booze, Chester suddenly noticed *him.*

At first, just a shape, slightly behind his own crew. Not one of those itching for a fight, trying to prove they were alive. He stood calm, hands deep in his pockets, like he was holding onto something important—or maybe just holding onto the pose so he wouldn’t stand out. A sliver of light from a fifth-floor window grazed his face, and for a second, he stepped out of the background, became a separate frame, a single photo in an album where all the others had faded.

Half-Asian features—soft but not weak; a gaze too clear for this place. No fear, no dumb aggression sloshing behind his pupils. Just… a look. And in that *just*, there was something too personal.

Chester froze, like he’d been punched in the chest not with a fist but with cold, heavy air. For a second, sound cut out—the swearing, the laughter, the scuff of shoes on asphalt, even the hiss of burning cigarettes. All that was left was that gaze, sharp and strangely quiet.

He stared into those eyes and suddenly knew he’d seen them before. Not here, not in this life, maybe. Long ago. So long that the memory had evaporated like the smell after rain, but the feeling remained—sticky, warm, eerily familiar.

"Hey, Bennington, the hell you zoning out for?" Phoenix’s voice—his perpetually stoned friend—yanked him back. Phoenix always smelled the same: sweat, weed, and some sour kind of hopelessness. "You eye-flirting with them or what?"

Chester blinked, tore his gaze away, and the world rushed back in. Dirty, loud, full of muffled shouts and the reek of stale beer. Someone was already shoving, testing each other’s fragility; someone else gripped a bottle like it was about to fly if the wrong word was said. But like always, the fight never came—just empty threats to "meet again later."

And then the groups were already scattering into doorways, dissolving into the dark, leaving behind nothing but smoke and a couple of crushed butts on the asphalt.

But Chester still felt that gaze on him, even when its owner was gone.

He walked back, stepping on pavement that felt soft from the day’s leftover heat, though the night had already swallowed the city. The air was thick, heavy, like old tobacco, still humming with the echoes of the almost-fight—slurred voices, nervous giggles, footsteps fading into stairwells. But inside, it all sounded muffled, like it was behind a wall.

Inside, all he had was that look.

It wasn’t just memorized—it was etched somewhere deeper, like smells that drag up childhood without warning, or songs that stick after one listen and never let go. He walked and saw him—sometimes sharp as a photo, sometimes blurred like a dream interrupted too soon.

He hadn’t even asked his name.

Hadn’t reached out, hadn’t said a word, and yet it felt like this guy had been written into his life long ago, just hadn’t shown up until now. Like a character introduced halfway through the book who turns out to be the one you’ve been waiting for since page one.

Chester sucked in cold air and exhaled slow, like he was trying to keep it inside, but with it came this weird, almost childish fear of losing something important before he’d even really had it.

The city around him was the same—dirty walls, dark windows, old fences with rusted nails. But now there was something different, like someone had twisted a valve deep under the asphalt, and now something else was flowing through its veins.

And he knew that look wouldn’t let go. Wouldn’t disappear. Even if he never saw him again, it would stay—in his pockets, in his throat, in his chest.

Chapter Text

The morning in the communal apartment stretched like congealed film on an old pot—sticky, murky, with a faint smell of rot that, no matter how much you aired the place out, always remained in the walls. The air was heavy, like a hungover head, and it smelled not just of booze-breath, but of some kind of concentrate of a cheap night, when everything mixes together—alcohol, cigarette smoke, someone else's perfume, sweat, and voices that still rang in the ears, though everyone had long been asleep.

From the kitchen came the sour steam of scrambled eggs, fried to the color of a mourning sun, and some cloying sweetness—it was Phoenix, with his eternal mania to mask everything, concocting his chemistry again. He cooked in such a way that you could choke on the smell alone. Not because it was tasty, but because it was frightening.

Chester got up from the couch, which over the night had turned his back into a piece of wood. Every movement echoed with the crunch of joints and a quiet, angry pain in his temples. The light from the window cut his eyes like a knife on a wet rag. His throat was dry, as if he'd been eating sand for a week, and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He would have given anything right then to close his eyes again and dive back into the viscous nothingness of sleep. But it was too quiet in his head. Unusually quiet.

This silence wasn't a relief, but a kind of alarming, sticky vacuum, with no thoughts, no sounds, only the feeling that he had forgotten something. And this "something" was more important than anything else. He sat up, ran his palm over his face, tried to drive out the remnants of sleep and the hangover fog. And then he remembered.

That look.

Clear, like an old, faded photo that for some reason is impossible to throw away. There was nothing special about it; if you were to describe it, it was just eyes, just a person. But this "just" got stuck in him like a shard of glass in a finger—you can't see it, but it gets in the way, catches on every movement.

He forced himself to shrug it off. Not now, don't. He'd seen hundreds of faces like that—at meet-ups, at crash pads, in gateways, in clubs, on trams, anywhere. They came and went, dissolved, leaving behind only scraps of smells and crumbs of conversations.

He forced himself to forget.

Almost.

Because every time he blinked a little longer than usual, that face appeared before him again, lit by the dim light from the window. And those eyes that looked not at him, but into him. As if they knew something about him that he himself didn't know.

And that, fuck, wouldn't let go.

Until that evening, going down to the store for some crap you could probably do without, but a hungover brain considers a matter of national importance, Chester suddenly found himself in a dense, viscous, almost sticky crowd near the bus stop. The crowd was like a thick river; it seems to flow, but every step takes effort, and you can't walk the way you want. Someone smelled of sweat, someone of fresh bread, someone of cigarettes and dejection.

And there, amidst all that human mishmash, conversations, coughs, and shuffling, he saw him.

Mike.

No, he didn't know his name. But his brain, the son of a bitch, had already managed to name him exactly that—short, clear, like the pulse throbbing in your temples when you're running up stairs. Mike. And in that sound there was already a strange certainty, as if they'd known each other for years, and no formalities were needed.

The same guy, the same eyes. Not just a look, but a quiet harbor where there was no noise, no threat. A slight tilt of the head, as if he was listening to someone important to him. Or to someone who wasn't there. And in that tilt there was something so personal that it seemed to Chester he had accidentally glimpsed someone else's dream.

Against the backdrop of the street's booming noise—buses, the hoarse shouts of marshrutka drivers, the laughter of drunk teenagers, the clinking of glass bottles in a trash can—Chester suddenly stopped hearing everything except his own breathing. It became loud, uneven, like that of a person who is about to say something important but hasn't quite decided.

He stepped forward.

The crowd lived its own life, shifted, flowed, rustled. Someone bumped into him with a shoulder, as if testing his strength, someone pushed him from behind, rushing for the bus door, someone doused him in cheap perfume and a sullen look.

And in that chaos, the guy disappeared.

Simply dissolved. Like cigarette smoke in an open window.

"Fuck…" Chester exhaled, spinning on the spot like a lost dog that just realized the scent it was chasing had scattered in the air. He tried to catch a glimpse of that face, that line of the cheekbone, that shade of skin under the streetlight. But instead, he only saw strangers' backs, someone's backpacks, elbows, and dark hoods.

The crowd moved again, pressed him against the bakery window, and Chester felt a mean, pointless resentment. As if something had been stolen from him. And not just stolen, but yanked right out of his hands while he blinked.

He stood for a couple more seconds, listening to the noise as if that guy might be speaking somewhere nearby, and he would recognize that voice even if hundreds were shouting around him. But nothing. Only the rustle of footsteps, the smell of fresh buns, and a cold wind restlessly shuffling trash across the asphalt.

Chester felt how inside him, where anger usually hid, an emptiness had appeared. And in that emptiness, quietly, stubbornly, it beat: Mike. Mike. Mike.

He came home empty, like a bottle after a night when you drink not for the taste or the company, but just to pour something into yourself. He walked up the stairs, and every step echoed with a hollow, empty sound, as if everything inside him had long since burned out, and only the shell remained, accidentally still able to move.

Only a trace remained in his head. Not a thought, not a picture, but a trace, thin, almost weightless, like the smell of someone else's perfume clinging to a sleeve after an accidental touch. Like a smell, like a memory, like a fragment of a dream you grab at the edge of in your half-sleep, but it slips away, and the harder you cling, the faster it disappears.

The door to the communal apartment opened with a creak, and the usual bouquet of smells hit him: sour, rancid, slightly sweet—Phoenix was "concocting" something in the kitchen again. Somewhere, water gurgled dully in an old kettle; behind the wall, someone coughed; damp stains crept across the ceiling. Phoenix was sitting at the table, stirring something murky and sticky in a mug with a spoon. He had the face of a man who had either just returned from another planet or was planning to go there right now.

Chester threw his jacket on the back of a chair, sat down, and the words crawled out on their own.

"Listen… saw him today. That one."

Phoenix raised his eyes, which held neither surprise nor interest. Just a slight, almost polite indifference.

"Who?"

"That… that guy. From the crowd. He was at the meet-up. With the eyes, get it?.."

"Nope."

"Fuck, well…" Chester faltered, because how do you describe something that can't be described? It's like explaining the taste of water to someone who's never drunk it; you know it, but there are no words. "Anyway, I saw him. At the bus stop."

Phoenix snorted, took a sip of his sludge, and lazily leaned back in his chair.

"You're on the hook again, bro. Or maybe you just can't be without a dose, 'cause you start seeing shit."

The phrase sounded light, almost joking, but there was just enough mockery in it for something to twitch inside Chester. He raised his head, looking straight at Phoenix.

"This isn't shit," he snapped.

But it sounded like he was convincing not Phoenix, but himself. As if he was trying to put a period on a sentence that had long since turned into a question.

Inside, everything was still trembling from that strange sensation, like after a dream you've forgotten but that contained something important that could change everything. And the more he tried to convince himself it was just a coincidence, just a person from the crowd, the more clearly he understood: there was no coincidence here.

And that only made it more alarming.

That night, sleep didn't come. It wasn't that he was afraid to fall asleep, it was just too noisy inside. Thoughts, like a pack of rats, darted around the corners of his consciousness, gnawing at something important, invisible, and the further it went, the clearer it became: they wouldn't calm down. He tossed and turned, tangled the blanket into a knot, threw the pillow on the floor, then picked it up again, as if that could change anything.

Time and again, he got up and went to the kitchen. The light bulb under the ceiling flickered, as if it too was in a bad mood, and cast a sickly yellow spot of light that seemed to shine not on the room, but right into his brain. He poured himself water, drank in big gulps, but his throat remained dry, like old asphalt in the heat.

Sometimes he went to the window, opened it, let in the cool air and cigarette smoke. He stood there, smoking, peering into the street—to where rare streetlights picked out patches of asphalt, scraps of ads on poles, and stray cats that darted into the darkness as soon as they noticed movement.

And a few times… he thought he saw him.

That guy. Mike. Standing in the shadows, by the wall of the neighboring building, or walking on the other side of the street, his head slightly bent as if against the wind. A silhouette, a profile, something in his gait—everything echoed in him with that same beat that now thundered in his chest instead of a heart. Each time, Chester climbed out onto the fire escape, feeling the cold metal under his palms, scraping his fingers on the rust. But by the time he got out, only emptiness remained there. The street, quiet and indifferent, as if "he" had never been there at all.

By the third day, he had stopped lying to himself. He stopped pretending he was just "strolling," just "killing time." He deliberately wandered around the district. Not his usual spots, no, he went where he normally wouldn't: past flaking gateways where cigarette butts smoldered; along the fence of the old factory, which smelled of iron and dust; through the square where old women fed sparrows and teenagers smoked cheap roll-ups on the children's slide.

He peered into shop windows, studied reflections—in case he saw something familiar in the glass. He scrutinized the crowds at bus stops, caught every face, compared, discarded, searched again. He even looked into gateways, where the wet asphalt gleamed under the light of a lone lamp and footsteps echoed hollowly off the brick walls.

But nothing.

Emptiness. That same, viscous emptiness that became almost physical, as if a transparent film had been stretched between him and the world, and he could no longer reach through it. And the longer he searched, the more he understood: he was already in deep. Not because he wanted to be, but because there was no other way now.

And then the strange thing started. So strange that at first he didn't even understand where reality ended and his own paranoia began.

He began to catch similar silhouettes in the human mass, as if the city was slipping him phantoms, taunting him like a cat playing with a mouse. In the metro—a shoulder, just like his: slightly stooped, but with that same soft, relaxed line. On the tram—the back of a head in a hood, dark, clear, and even the curve of the neck was such that his heart jolted and something clicked briefly in his temples. At the market—a hand choosing apples, long fingers that for some reason seemed painfully familiar, as if he'd already seen them holding something, reaching for something.

Each time it looked almost like a miracle. Like a promise. He would walk and think: that's him. He'll turn around now, and everything will fall into place. And at that moment, reality always performed exactly the same trick: that someone would dissolve. Not run away, not disappear into haze, but dissolve, in the noise, in the movement, in the thousands of other faces that, like a wave, merged and washed over him, sweeping that one single silhouette into a faceless gray mass.

With each time, Chester believed less that it was a coincidence. And more that the city was mocking him. Teasing, dangling a corner, then snatching it away. Like in childhood, when adults hide something behind their backs and smile, knowing you won't have the strength to snatch it back.

He started getting angry. Not just angry; a dark, viscous anger was building up inside him, burning from within and making any day dull. He was angry at himself for giving in, for allowing this unfamiliar face to take up residence in his head at all. He was angry at him for disappearing, for not letting him catch up, not letting him get a word in. He was angry at this damn city, where everything is set up this way: everyone walks past, and no one sees anyone, and if they do see, they pretend they don't.

"Chez, what, are you really shuffling around the streets to find a dude you didn't even talk to?" Phoenix smirked, fiddling with his "chemistry," as if he was stirring something that was supposed to save the world or at least give him a reason to get off the couch. "You've lost it."

Phoenix's voice was without malice, but it had that hoarse mockery that made Chester want to throw an ashtray at him. He didn't throw it. He just stood, leaning his shoulder against the wall, looking through the murky, scratched window glass, beyond which the evening was spreading over the rooftops and the streetlights were lighting up slowly, like old bulbs afraid of the light.

"Maybe I have lost it," Chester muttered. He said it evenly, quietly, but inside there was a feeling that he was signing his own sentence. "But he's somewhere."

The words sounded like a vow. Like something that can't be taken back. And Chester knew, now he wouldn't stop. Even if he had to turn this whole city upside down, pull its guts out into the light, and look into every fucking gateway.

And that evening, when he was about to go to bed, just like that, to fall onto the sunken couch to drown in it without dreams or thoughts, he suddenly thought that from the darkness of the courtyard, those very eyes were looking at him.

It wasn't some sharp vision, like in cheap movies where everything is accompanied by flashes and the sound of a screeching violin. No. It came quietly, almost tenderly, as if someone had placed a palm on his shoulder, and you only realized later that the touch was icy. He froze. Completely. Even his breath stopped, like an animal that has scented a predator.

There, beyond the murky glass, in the viscous blackness of the courtyard, two tiny lights. Not streetlights, not the reflected lights of cars, but eyes. Dark, but with a depth that pulled him out of himself. They didn't burn, didn't prick, but just held him, like a trap holds a paw. He couldn't blink, because he was afraid—what if it disappeared, like everything else had.

The world narrowed to these two points. Everything else became unnecessary trash. The apartment, Phoenix, the chemistry in the kitchen, the smell of booze-breath, the whole day—everything burned away, leaving only that gaze.

And suddenly the lamp in the courtyard flickered. Once, like a warning. A second time, like a sentence. And the next second, there was no one there. Only emptiness—old, shabby, with walls on which the darkness lay so thick you could touch it.

Chester stepped back from the window, feeling his heart beating too fast, too loud, as if he had run the entire block. He ran his palm over his face, as if he wanted to wipe something sticky off of it.

He hated this feeling. Hated it for making him weak, dependent. But at the same time, he knew: now it wouldn't let go. And, goddamn it, he wasn't even sure he wanted it to.

Chapter Text

The communal apartment was suffocating. The smells had soaked into the walls—tobacco, mold, sour beer, oxygen mixed with the chemicals Phoenix endlessly cooked in the kitchen. The sofa beneath Chester was looking more and more like a black hole, sucking him into nothingness. He sat staring at the ceiling, feeling himself become a part of this sour air, this web of smells, shadows, and strangers' voices. The room seemed to swell with everything that had ever been smoked, drunk, shot up, whispered, screamed, and fucked here. Every square meter was saturated with someone's secret defeats.

And he himself was part of that defeat. Not a person, not a hero, not even a human. Just a piece of meat with eyes that kept on looking, though there was no point in looking.

And here was the strangeness: the eyes he had seen there, in the yard, the ones that had seared into his consciousness, gave him no peace. He could forget any face, any evening, even his own words said to someone in a drunken stupor. But not those eyes. They had returned to him like a debt no one had asked to be repaid, but which he was obliged to pay.

"What the hell is this anyway?" he thought, squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again, as if that would make the picture disappear. "A ghost? Shadows? Hallucinations from the shit I took then? Or did I just make it up myself so I wouldn't feel like I'm living like shit, to invent something for myself?"

He understood it sounded like delirium. Phoenix had said it straight: "You're fucking nuts." And maybe yes. Maybe he really was sliding somewhere into the cracks between a normal life and what could no longer be called existence. But Chester felt that somewhere out there, this man existed. Somewhere he walked the same streets, drank the same stinking tap water, heard the same screech of the tram. And that made it unbearable.

The communal apartment hummed. Someone dropped a pot in the hallway, then a child shrieked, then a door creaked like an old skeleton turning in its grave. Chester lay down again, buried his face in the old pillow that stank of other people's heads, and thought: "What if it was a sign? You know, like in books or movies. Fate, karma, god—it doesn't matter. Something shoved my nose in it: look, here it is, your future, here's your thread to pull. And you, bitch, didn't even ask for a name."

He laughed quietly. The laugh sounded hollow, like a cough. He always laughed when it got especially vile and painful. He laughed at himself, at his stupid head, at the fact he was looking for meaning where there were only streets, scurrying rats, and other half-rotten people like himself.

But the thought of that gaze still wouldn't leave. And he began to argue with himself, as if some internal prosecutor and lawyer were sitting right there:

— Come on, quit it, they're just eyes. Every person has eyes. And you've seen thousands of them. —No. These were different. They were… real. —Real? And yours are what, fake? You walk the streets like a shadow yourself, you smoke up, you eat chemicals, you fuck anything that moves. Real, my ass. —But I saw myself in them. In those eyes. Get it? Like a mirror that for once isn't crooked. —Yeah, a mirror. You just want a fairy tale. You want someone to look at you and see something more than a doped-up asshole.

He turned over on his other side and closed his eyes. But instead of sleep, he was met by a darkness where those eyes burned even brighter. He felt their gaze on him—attentive, even, without judgment. And it pissed him off to the point of trembling. Because no one looked at him like that. Not his mother, not his friends, not those girls who came and went. No one.

And he himself began to think that if he met them again, he wouldn't be able to stand it. He would approach. He would say something. Even if it was the dumbest phrase in the world, just to check: is he real? Or just a phantom created by a sick imagination.

He clenched his fists, as if he was about to punch the emptiness itself.

— I'll find you, hear me? — he said into the darkness. — I'll fucking find you.

And it sounded like he was making a vow to himself.

The last few days he had barely eaten.

His body burned, as if he'd been thrown into a furnace and they'd forgotten to turn off the fire. Every movement echoed with pain, muscles twitched on their own, like puppets whose strings had been cut. And inside it was sticky, viscous, as if someone had spilled thick tar, and this tar was slowly seeping into his lungs, his stomach, his brain. Every cell demanded a fix, demanded not with his mind, not with words, but with this animal scream that came from the depths, from where there was no morality, no will, no "I." There was only a predatory hunger.

He tried to resist. Tried to be strong. Lied to himself that he could. But the withdrawal kept turning him inside out, tearing him apart. It seemed his whole body had turned into a rusty mechanism where the gears were jammed, and now every second of existence was accompanied by grinding, clanging, and blood.

He dreamed of just lying down and blacking out. But sleep was no longer sleep. Sleep came to him like an evil executioner, and instead of rest, it tore him to pieces, showed him some awful pictures—eyes, faces, his own death, someone else's. He woke up feeling like he'd just been beaten in an alley, then thrown back into this same body to continue the torture.

Phoenix hovered somewhere nearby. With the same bottle of beer in his hand, with the same murky friends who came and went like cockroaches. They laughed, discussed something, shuffled their feet on the linoleum, made these stupid sounds, and it all reached Chester as if he were sitting underwater. The words and voices were distorted, in fragments; sometimes it seemed they weren't even speaking a human language, but some kind of creaking, buzzing, and muttering.

But, in essence, what difference did it make? Even if they were talking, he still wouldn't hear. He only heard himself, or what was left of him.

"Interesting," he thought, pressing himself into the old, stinking sofa, "is this what hell looks like? Not the one where devils roast you and you scream. But the one where you burn inside yourself. Where your body is no longer your home, but a prison. Where you are your own executioner. Well, and in the end, who the fuck said hell is somewhere out there, after death? Maybe it's here. Maybe it's always here. In these rooms, in these bodies, in these heads. And everyone chooses their own degree of fire. I chose mine—here it is, withdrawal. Here it is, my personal fucking hell."

Sometimes he thought he was dying. That just a little more, and his heart would give out, his lungs would fail, and that would be it. But the scariest thing was that he didn't die. Life held him by the hair, like a drunken whore, and wouldn't let go. "You're gonna suffer some more, guy. Gonna dance some more," it seemed to say.

And every time he remembered those eyes again, those damn eyes, from nowhere, from everywhere, he clenched his teeth. Because they had nothing in common with this sticky agony. In them was silence. In them was something alive, real. And that made everything even worse. Because he knew: somewhere that man was walking, breathing normally, looking normally, living. And here he was. Sitting and dying in his own body.

"Maybe I made him up," he whispered to himself, trembling as if from the cold. "Maybe he never existed. Maybe my brain just threw me this bone so I'd chase after it like a dog. And in reality, there's only me and my junk. And that's it."

He closed his eyes again and heard Phoenix's footsteps in the hallway, laughter, the clinking of bottles. Life around him went on, as if mocking him.

And Chester suddenly understood: he would either find those eyes or burn out completely. There was no third option.

He saw something else.

Someone was standing in the corner of the room. A silhouette. The same tilt of the head, the same stillness, as if the person was frozen not because he wanted to hide, but because he was part of the darkness himself. A black shadow, and from the darkness—the gleam of eyes. Those very ones. They couldn't be any others. Those eyes couldn't be confused, couldn't be forgotten; they were imprinted on the brain like a burn on the skin.

— Mike… — Chester rasped, and didn't even notice how his lips formed the name, as if it had been sitting inside him for a long time, burning his tongue, and finally burst out.

The shadow flinched. Flickered. And everything disappeared. Just an empty wall with peeling, mouse-gnawed wallpaper in places. No silhouette. No eyes. Just himself and this stinking, suffocating room.

— Again? — Phoenix threw out irritably from somewhere to the side, not looking up from his bottle. — Fuck, you're catching hallucinations now.

Chester clutched his head, ran his fingers through his hair as if he wanted to tear off his skin along with this sticky delirium spreading through his skull. His nails dug into his skin, leaving red marks, but he barely felt any pain.

And in that moment, he suddenly understood: the worst thing wasn't that he was hallucinating. The worst was that he wasn't sure. Because where was the boundary? Where did reality end and his personal nightmare begin? He had seen those eyes too clearly, too vividly, for it to be just delirium. But it was also too impossible to be true.

"What if this is the truth?" he thought, curling up on the sofa. "The truth of my brain, the truth of my life. What if the world isn't streets, people, this shitty Phoenix, but precisely what I see when my eyes close and open again. What if the real reality is them. These eyes. This shadow. And everything else is just scenery, a parody, a cheap play?"

Phoenix muttered something, a door slammed, a bag rustled, then the clink of glass again. Chester hardly heard. He didn't give a damn. His whole world had shrunk to one point in space, to that instant when he saw the eyes standing in the corner.

He suddenly felt his heart beating in his chest. Not just beating, but breaking his ribs, ready to jump out. And for the first time in a long time, it wasn't fear or withdrawal. It was like falling in love. That feeling you get when you see someone and understand: here, this is yours. Not your body, not your fix, not your friend. But your destiny.

And immediately a thought, like a blow: "What if it really is destiny? What if I'm supposed to find him? Or he's supposed to find me? What if I miss this chance? What will be left? The communal apartment, this stinking sofa, Phoenix, and my hallucinations?"

He covered his face with his hands and laughed quietly. The laugh came out ragged, painful, like an old sick man's cough.

— What bullshit, — he said into the void. — What bullshit, Chez. You fell in love with eyes that might not exist. Bravo. Just fucking genius.

And he answered himself with an inner voice:

But what if it's the only real thing you've had in years? What if everything else is a lie? Friends, parties, drugs, this fucking Phoenix—it's all dust. But these eyes—they're the truth.

Chester leaned back and closed his eyes. But in the darkness, those same pupils flashed again, bright like embers. He felt their gaze, burning right through him. And he understood he couldn't fight it anymore.

— Okay, — he muttered into the darkness, — whether you're real or a hallucination, I'll find you anyway. And if it turns out it's all delirium, then so be it. Let me die, but at least I'll know I was searching.

And immediately a thought came: maybe this was what he was alive for. Not for music, not for friends, not for the family he essentially didn't have. But for these eyes. To search. To die in the search.

He got up from the sofa, swaying. His legs shook, his veins pulsed, his stomach turned inside out, but he walked to the window. There was nothing in the dark yard. Just a flickering lightbulb in the distance, just garbage bins, just emptiness.

— Where are you? — he whispered. — Where the fuck are you?

There was no answer. Just the cold wind through a crack in the frame, just the hum of blood in his temples.

And then Chester understood: he no longer belonged to himself. He belonged to those eyes. Even if it was a ghost. Even if it was a reflection of his own sick head. Even if it was the devil himself, decided to play with him.

And this knowledge brought a strange, painful, but real relief. Because when you have a goal, even if it's a phantom goal, you at least have a meaning.

He returned to the sofa, sat down, grabbed his head with his hands, and began to whisper the name quietly:

— Mike… Mike… Mike…

Each time it sounded different. Like a prayer, like a curse, like a declaration of love.

And at some point, it seemed to him that the walls were whispering this name with him. That the communal apartment itself, with its peeling wallpaper, cracks, smell of stale alcohol and mold, had picked up his words and started repeating them.

Phoenix came into the room again, looked at him, and just shook his head:

— That's it, bro, the dick has arrived at the cunt.

And Chester suddenly understood: yes, he really wasn't here anymore. He was in another place. A place where there were eyes. A place where there was Mike.

And all that was left for him was to go there, even if it was a road to nowhere.

The withdrawal was so strong that his body was contorted with convulsions, as if someone was controlling it, pulling on invisible strings like wires. A doll, a marionette, a piece of meat stretched over an iron frame of pain. Every movement—not his, every tremor—not his, but something alien, hostile, as if a parasite inside his body was raging and tearing him apart from the inside.

He wanted everything at once: a fix, to stop this hell; silence, because the sounds were too sharp, like knives; cold water, because his throat burned as if boiling water had been poured down it. And at the same time, to find him. To find that guy, those eyes. As if only they could stop it all, reset it, bring it back.

He was delirious.

In every crack in the room—a silhouette. A movement in the corner that disappeared if you blinked. In the kitchen, a reflection in the dark window glass: a slightly bowed head, a motionless figure. In the bathroom, in the murky water stagnant in the rusty sink, those same features flickered, and Chester even whimpered, jerked his hand toward the water as if he could grab it. In the hallway, a shadow sliding along the wall, and in that shadow, he seemed to hear a stranger's breathing, the trail of a stranger's presence.

Chester couldn't understand: was he going crazy from the drugs, from his wrecked body, from this gray emptiness around him, or was this guy really following him?

Bennington was losing his grip on reality.

And which was worse: losing reality or its too acute presence? When everything is so sharp, so rendingly real that it's impossible to live.

He lay on the sofa, wet with sweat, twisted into a knot of pain, and one thought raced through his head, heavy as a stone: what if all of this is on purpose? Maybe all of this isn't hallucinations, but tests? Maybe he has to go through this delirium, these nightmares, to finally meet him. And if he gives up, if he takes a fix to stifle it, then that's it, the end. He will never see those eyes again.

How long he lay like that—an hour, a day, an eternity—he didn't know. Time drained away, spread out, became viscous, like tar. Minutes felt like hours, and hours felt like seconds. Chester couldn't catch a single moment because each one slipped away, dissolved in the black fog of his consciousness.

And every time he almost lost consciousness from the pain, the nausea, the wild tension in his muscles, he saw them. Those eyes. They flashed before him so clearly it became frightening. As if everything around was a fiction, and they alone were real.

He told himself: "You're fucking nuts. It's the drugs, it's the withdrawal, it's your brain rotting." But another part, quiet, maniacally stubborn, answered: "But what if it's not? What if you're seeing the truth for the first time in your life?"

Phoenix walked around, swore, laughed with his friends, opened bottles. Sometimes he came over, looked at Chester, and said:

— Bro, you're done for. Just take it already, stop torturing yourself.

And Chester felt how his friend's words sounded sweet, like a promise of salvation. Take a fix, and everything would get easier. His body would stop twitching, his head would clear, the eyes would disappear. Yes, disappear. That was the whole point.

He was afraid. Afraid that if he shot up, he would never see them again. Never. That this ghost, this phantom, the only thing that gave his life any meaning at all—would leave. And then he would be left alone. Alone with Phoenix, with cheap stale beer, with mold on the walls, with this sofa that was like a pit.

He laughed again, hysterically, without a sound, his breath catching.

— Shitty alternative, huh? — he whispered. — Die here, in the communal apartment, or die in the search.

And suddenly he understood there was no choice. Because in the search, there was at least a goal. A meaning. Something.

Thoughts flowed, intersected, tore apart, turned into long internal monologues. He argued with himself, as with some internal philosopher, with a shadow that sat inside him.

— You understand, Chez, that this is all bullshit. Glitches. It's your fucked-up subconscious messing with you. —Maybe so, — he answered himself. — But even if they are glitches, they're more real than everything else. They give me more than my whole life. —You're becoming dependent on a ghost. —Better to depend on a ghost than on emptiness.

He arched again from a spasm, grimaced like a broken doll. It was hard to breathe, as if his lungs had been squeezed into a fist. His head roared like a mine shaft, as if there'd been a cave-in.

And again the eyes. Before him, in the darkness, so close he could touch them. And he reached out. Jerked his hand into the emptiness. His fingers passed through the air. Nothing. But he swore he felt warmth. Barely noticeable, but real.

A tear rolled down his cheek. He didn't know if it was from the pain or from something else. Maybe it was laughter. Maybe it was joy. Because in that moment, he understood: he was not alone.

Even if his mind was dying. Even if his body was falling apart. Somewhere out there, he existed. That other one. With the eyes that tore through the darkness.

Chester whispered, almost voiceless now:

— I'll find you… hear me? I'll find you.

And these words were a vow. Not before God, not before people, but before himself.

And even if it was all madness, so be it. Because sometimes madness is the only way to be honest.

At night, he woke up from his own scream. The scream tore his throat as if he hadn't been sleeping but drowning, and only on his last breath had he burst out of the water. He sat up on the sofa, gulping air like a fish thrown ashore. His heart beat as if it had decided to break out, smash through his ribcage, and leave him an empty sack. His lungs burned as if he'd been smoking not cigarettes but coals from a fire. And then he realized, he had seen him again in his dream.

The same guy. Mike.

He stood so close that the smell of his skin seemed to linger in the room. The thin line between reality and dream had been erased, like a pencil line drawn by too soft a hand. Mike touched his shoulder, and it wasn't a touch, it was a burn. A real one, with a wave of heat that still pulsed on his skin. Chester touched his shoulder with his palm, checked: was there a mark, a red spot, some kind of proof that this wasn't all delirium.

He was shaking. His whole body, as if after a frost, but it wasn't cold, it was a heat that caused a fine tremble, like an old engine that doesn't want to start.

— Mike… where are you?.. — he whispered into the darkness, so quietly that the words belonged more to himself than to the air. — I know you're here.

The phrase sounded stupid, like a madman's plea to his own hallucinations. But it contained everything: faith, despair, rage, tenderness, all twisted into a tight knot.

Phoenix, who had gone to the kitchen for water, stopped in the doorway. A plastic bottle in his hand, a dirty tank top, eyes murky from lack of sleep and a perpetual high. And for the first time in his life, he looked at Chester without mockery. Because what he saw was scary: his friend sat on the sofa, hugging his knees, small, hunched, like a child in a corner of an orphanage. His eyes—empty, like the broken windows of an old hospital, and his lips muttered one name. One single name, like an incantation.

— You've finally gone nuts, — Phoenix said quietly. And his voice held none of its usual cheer or sarcasm. Only a shadow of anxiety. The shadow of someone who understands that a person is crumbling before his eyes, and nothing can be done.

Phoenix never knew how to pity. He knew how to laugh, how to tease, how to vanish into a chemical fog, but this, staying with this living piece of someone else's pain—he didn't know how. And so he did the only thing he knew: he pulled out a joint.

A lighter clicked, it smelled of burnt weed and something sweet, viscous. Phoenix took a drag, closed his eyes, inhaled so deeply as if he wanted to drown in the smoke, and then leaned toward Chester.

The situation itself looked wild, almost intimate, as if they weren't just junkie friends in a cheap communal apartment, but two drowning men grabbing onto each other so as not to go under. Phoenix pressed his lips to Chester's and released the smoke—hot, thick, stinking, enveloping.

Chester inhaled. First weakly, then greedily. His lungs convulsively accepted this dirty air, and for a second it got easier. As if his body had stopped being hostile, as if the pain had retreated a couple of steps back.

He reached out again and inhaled again. With each drag, his consciousness became more blurred, like an old photo soaked in water. The lines smudged, thoughts got stuck, and along with it, the trembling disappeared.

He was checking out. In the arms of his junkie friend, with the taste of bitterness on his lips, with smoke that burned him from the inside.

And in that moment, there was something almost tragicomic. A man searching for a ghost was comforted by an illusion, and only the illusion could give him a shadow of peace. It all looked like a scene from a cheap theater: two actors, gasping, performing a play about friendship, about salvation, though in reality there was no salvation. Only a reprieve.

And yet, when Chester's eyelids began to close, when his body limply fell onto its side and his breathing became more even, he still heard a voice inside himself. Quiet, almost tender, but not his own.

I'm here.

He didn't know if Mike had actually said it, or if his brain, eaten away by chemicals and despair, was playing its games again. But that was the last thing he heard before plunging into darkness.

And perhaps that was the scariest thing: that the darkness seemed safer than the light. That the hallucination was more honest than reality. That the only real closeness had come to him not from the living friend sitting beside him, but from a ghost who perhaps didn't exist at all.

Chester fell asleep. But in his dream there was no more fear. Only footsteps in a corridor that stretched far, far away, and where those same eyes still shone ahead.

Chapter Text

Chester had finally stopped fighting. He had sunk into a state of thick, viscous stupor, where the days merged into a single gray spot, a kind of mental mush where time flowed backward, got stuck in corners, and tangled in dusty cobwebs under the ceiling. He lay on the couch, pressing his whole body into it, staring at the ceiling with a crack that resembled a map of an unknown, godforsaken country. He wasn't sleeping, for sleep was a different, far more terrifying state where shadows gained flesh and eyes watched from every corner. He didn't eat; food had become an abstraction, the idea of nourishment, which nauseated him with its biological simplicity. Only occasionally did he smoke, forcing his smoky, disobedient fingers to roll a "goat's leg" cigarette, just to somehow confirm the fact of his physical existence in this stinking communal apartment saturated with chemical anguish.

Phoenix, seeing this, was first angry; his nerves, already worn to shreds, were fraying at the seams. "Get up, you moron, we gotta make a drop! What, are you completely fucked up?" – his voice, hoarse from a constant cough, cut through the sticky silence of the room, but the words didn't reach Chester; they fell a centimeter from his ear like shot birds. Then Phoenix started teasing, trying to return everything to its usual track with cheap bravado: "Floating off into space again? To your aliens? Ask them what's up with the market." But irony, his main armor against the whole world, bounced off his friend like peas off a concrete wall. And in the end, he fell completely silent, only occasionally glancing at his friend with an unclear, acrid mixture of irritation and that very anxiety he so fiercely buried at the bottom of another bottle. He saw this wasn't withdrawal in the usual, almost cozy sense of the word. This was something else. It wasn't his body being twisted inside out, but his soul.

The room was breathing. The walls, saturated with years of nicotine despair and alcoholic sorrow, pulsated. The wallpaper, peeling at the corners, stirred from a draft that seemed like the breath of the house itself. Chester lay there and felt the crack on the ceiling growing. There, it reached the chandelier, coiled around its rusty base, crawled further, to the corner where the two planes of his universe met. This crack had its own geography: rivers of oblivion, mountain ranges of old pain, lifeless deserts of what was once called will.

He no longer searched for Mike on the streets. He understood: searching outside was pointless. It was a chase after an echo in an endless labyrinth. Mike wasn't outside. Mike was inside this crack. He was that very missing element in the formula of Chester's universe which turned everything into chaos. His half-Asian eyes, his calm, all-understanding gaze—that wasn't the gaze of another person. It was the gaze of his own lost, trampled conscience, appearing to him in the only possible form, in the form of a stranger who knew everything about him.

He recalled the details. Not just the eyes. Hands hidden in pockets. A slight tilt of the head. Silence. That silence now sounded within him louder than any scream. It drowned out the rumble of trams outside the window, the swearing of neighbors behind the wall, even the obsessive hissing of Phoenix's chemical reagents in the kitchen. This silence was a verdict. And he was judging himself.

Phoenix, passing by, threw a worn, stained blanket over him. "Don't croak here,or you'll stink to hell." But there was no malice in his voice. There was fatigue. Fatigue from being left alone on this sinking ship of their friendship, fatigue from the necessity of being the one who was still somehow keeping afloat. He looked at Chester, and it seemed to him that he was slowly dissolving, becoming translucent, about to merge with the musty fabric of the couch, become another stain, another ghost of this apartment.

And Chester didn't care. A simple and terrifying truth had been revealed to him: we are all ghosts to someone. And someone is a ghost to us. And all of life is just a moment when two ghosts collide in the darkness, recognize each other by some inexplicable, ancient sign, and part again to continue their eternal wandering. Mike was his counterpart ghost. His double from a world where there was no this dope, this filth, this hopelessness. Or perhaps, on the contrary, from the very heart of it.

He turned his head to the window. Evening was beginning. The city lights came on one by one, dim, mute, like the thoughts of strangers. Somewhere out there was that courtyard. That light from the fifth-floor window. That moment when everything stopped. He felt that gaze again. Not as a memory, but as a physical touch—cold, piercing, chillingly real.

He understood that this would not end. This isn't the kind of story with a resolution. This is a condition. Like pain. Like fear. Like loneliness in a crowd. It would be with him always. Until the very end.

It was in these days of silence that Phoenix began to hear. First it was fragments, muttering through sleep, like the rustling of cockroaches behind the baseboard, indistinct, nagging, part of the general background of this cursed place. Then clearer. Separate words breaking through the sticky web of delirium, like bubbles from a swampy quagmire. A name. The same one. Over and over, like a skipping record, like an alarm bell, like the prayer of a drowning man who has stopped calling for help and is calling the one who became the cause of his demise.

"Mike…" was exhaled into the darkness, and this name hung in the stifling air of the room, mixing with the smell of cigarette butts and sweat.

"Where are you…" and in the pause that followed this whisper, one heard despair comparable only to the silence after an explosion.

"Saw you…" and Phoenix felt goosebumps run down his own spine, as if someone was indeed watching him from the corner, from behind the curtain, from the crack between worlds.

One night, Phoenix couldn't take it anymore. His nerves, already exhausted by constant readiness for chase, for deception, for the petty but draining crime of being, were stretched to the limit. Chester was thrashing in delirium, his body soaked in cold, clammy sweat, making the mustiness in the room even more ominous, almost tangible. His fingers convulsively clutched at a tear in the couch, ripping it further, pulling out chunks of tough foam flesh, seeking a point of support in a reality that was slipping away like water through fingers. He wasn't screaming, he was whispering, but with such desperate, concentrated force that every word hit Phoenix's nerves like a hammer on a taut string.

"Eyes… black… didn't look, but saw…" Chester exhaled, and his voice was a hoarse, rusted instrument played by pain itself.

Phoenix froze in the doorway, crushed by this quiet agony. He felt like a scoundrel, a thief, peeking at something intimate and terrible, something he shouldn't be scrutinizing. But he couldn't look away. It was a hypnosis born of compassion and fear.

"Draws… he draws… why does he draw?.." Chester hissed, and his pale, gaunt face contorted into a grimace of bewilderment, almost childlike resentment.

And in that instant, Phoenix saw. No, not the man. Not Mike. He saw the obsession itself. It hung in the room like a thick fog, it oozed from the walls, it pulsed to the rhythm of Chester's uneven breathing. It was a material substance, this obsessive idea, this ghost. It was like a web entangling his friend, like resin pinning him to this couch, to this hell of memories about eyes Phoenix had never seen.

And he understood it was contagious. This thought pierced him suddenly and coldly. He himself began to peer into corners, listen to rustles outside the window. Every silhouette on the street now seemed, for a second, to be "that one." Every unfamiliar glance at him seemed assessing, knowing. Chester had infected him with his madness, his withdrawal not from a substance, but from a ghost. It was a plague, and its symptom was this name, this cursed "Mike," which now echoed in his own head.

He approached the couch, squatted down, trying to see in his friend's extinguished gaze at least a grain of that Chester with whom he shared the last pack of instant noodles, the last drag, the last stupid joke before run-ins with the cops. But there was nothing there. Only emptiness, populated by a single image.

"Chez," Phoenix said hoarsely, shaking him by the shoulder. "Chez, fuck, snap out of it. He's not here. No one is here."

But Chester didn't hear. He had gone deep inside himself, into that labyrinth where in a dead end those very eyes were waiting for him. And Phoenix was left alone. Squatting in the stinking room, in complete darkness, to the accompaniment of heavy breathing and insane whispers, he felt his friend's madness beginning to slowly but surely devour him too. It stuck to his soles, to his hands, crawled into his lungs with every breath. It was everywhere. And the worst thing was that now he too began to hear in the city noise outside the window not just a rumble, but a quiet, mocking whisper: "Mike… Mike… Mike…"

Phoenix froze by the door, and the bottle of beer in his hand suddenly seemed to him not just superfluous, but alien, idiotically out of place, like an umbrella in the desert. He looked at Chester, at his face twisted in a soundless scream, and understood: this was no longer just a delirious, drug-fueled mention of a stranger. These were details. Too clear, too precise, too cinematic for a hallucination. Hallucinations are blurry, they float like oil stains on water. But here was a portrait. Stroke by stroke. As if someone was guiding Chester's hand, forcing him to painstakingly draw every feature with painful accuracy.

Something clicked in his foggy mind, forever clouded by the haze of cheap chemicals. What was it? Curiosity? The same kind that in childhood made him smash anthills with stones to see what was inside? Or pity? The kind he had long and thoroughly eradicated from himself as an unnecessary, hindering weakness? Or maybe it was simply a base, vile desire to prove to himself that he wasn't just a freeloader, not just an appendage to his own melancholy, but could be useful? Maybe in this act of recording, he was seeking justification for his existence, his tiny, useless feat in this war of all against all.

He kicked the bottle away, and it rolled with a dull thud under the sink, where the poor ashes of its brethren already lay. In the kitchen, in a drawer cluttered with packets of grease, scraps of wire, and other junk that might "come in handy" someday, he found a greasy notebook with a torn cover and a pencil stub worn down almost to the base. These objects in his hands seemed like artifacts from another life, from a time when they still meant something, when they were used to write not lists of debts or addresses for drops.

He returned to the room and pulled a stool up to the couch. So began his vigil. He sat by the couch like a nurse at the bedside of a hopeless patient, like a monk-scribe in a cell, like an investigator at an interrogation, catching every word, every fragment of a phrase that escaped the dry, cracked lips of the delirious Chester. He became a hearing aid, a personal stenographer of madness.

And the words fell onto the paper, laid out in crooked, hasty scrawls:

"…tall, but not very…"

Phoenix wrote this and felt the absurdity of the situation. He, whose education ended around the ninth grade, who in recent years only counted grams and bills, was now recording the parameters of a ghost. "Tall, but not very" – what kind of measurement was that? A measure of what? Longing? Loneliness?

"…hair dark, almost black, not long…"

The pencil scratched the paper. Dark hair. Not long. Phoenix mechanically ran a hand over his own, greasy and matted. His world consisted of contrasts: either you were shaved bald, or you grew shaggy like an animal in hibernation. But here – "not long." Some unnatural, bourgeois neatness.

"…eyes… fuck, eyes… so dark, but not empty…"

Phoenix froze, feeling a chill run down his spine. "Not empty." That was the key phrase. All eyes around were empty. The eyes of junkies, the eyes of alcoholics, the eyes of cops, the eyes of passersby, they all held only boredom, aggression, or indifference. But these were "not empty." What was in them? And that thought made him uneasy.

"…thin neck, Adam's apple…"

He was no longer just writing; he was seeing. His own imagination, which had slept a dead sleep for years, suddenly started working, creaking like unlubricated gears. He saw that neck. Thin, sinewy. Adam's apple. A detail you don't invent in delirium. Delirium generalizes. Here was specificity. Detail. Convincingness.

"…hands… fingers long, in paint… he draws, I saw, he draws me…"

And here the pencil in Phoenix's hand trembled. "In paint." An artist. This ghost was an artist. And the last phrase, which made the blood freeze in his veins: "he draws me." Not a landscape, not a still life. Him. Chester. Lying here, in this hell, pale, sweaty, dying. This was no longer just observation. This was something more. It resembled a mystical, transcendent violence. A dissection of the soul with a pencil and brush.

The last phrase made Phoenix shudder as if electrocuted on bare nerves. He reread his scrawls, these hieroglyphs born in the hell of another's delirium. A portrait emerged. Collective, blurred, like a face in a crowd, but surprisingly detailed if you put all the pieces together. And most importantly, the occupation. Not a thug, not a junkie, not a random passerby. An artist. This changed everything. The ghost had acquired a profession, and therefore, footing in reality. He existed not only in the world of hallucinations; he created, he left traces in the real world with paint, pencil, something tangible.

The next day, when Chester fell into a relatively calm, numb, forgetfulness-like sleep, Phoenix sat down at the old, grease-stained laptop with the peeling "A" key that always got stuck and required an extra press, as if mocking his impatience. He felt like an idiot. What was he doing? Looking for a man who was most likely a figment of a fevered imagination? But doubts were already gnawing at him from within, reinforced by the eerily precise details. He started with the simple, dumb-as-a-brick: "young artist Phoenix." Then added descriptors, like in a wanted poster: "Asian appearance," "graphics," "portraits." The search engine yielded a bunch of garbage: anime, fan art, profiles of some generic "Korean pretty boys." Phoenix cursed, scrolled page after page, already starting to yawn from the monotony and internally scolding himself for this useless, humiliating undertaking. He was ready to slam the laptop lid shut and go cook another batch of his cheap dope to forget himself, when he suddenly stopped. His finger froze over the touchpad.

On the website of a small, unremarkable art studio, lost in the depths of the internet, hung a work. Black and white graphics. A portrait. A young man with a distorted, almost sickly, haggard expression, but with incredibly alive, piercing eyes. Eyes that Phoenix looked into every day. It was Chester.

Phoenix was stunned. An absolute, deafening silence rang in his ears, swallowing even the familiar hum of the city outside. The blood drained from his face, then rushed back to his temples in a heavy, hot wave. He stared at the screen, at these strokes, at this play of light and shadow that had pulled the familiar features from the darkness with frightening, almost terrifying accuracy. This wasn't just a similar person. This was him. His friend. His companion in misfortune. His fellow traveler on this bottom. But depicted with such merciless, surgical insight, with such a deep understanding of all his inner rot, pain, and anguish, that it was painful to look. The artist hadn't just copied the appearance; he had turned the soul inside out and captured it on paper. And under the work was a signature, not a name, but a nickname, strange, meaningless: "M.S."

Time stopped. The room, all this stench, all this mess, everything disintegrated into atoms and disappeared. Only the laptop screen, this portrait, and the deafening roar of the revealed truth in Phoenix's head existed. Chester wasn't delirious. He wasn't going crazy. He was… an object of observation. A target. A model for some ghost with long fingers and black, "not empty" eyes. The artist had tracked him, caught him in his internal lens, and was now transferring him to paper, as if collecting his sufferings, his degradation.

Phoenix felt a wave of nausea. This was worse than if Mike had turned out to be a gangster settling old scores. This was subtler, deeper, immeasurably more terrifying. His friend wasn't just being pursued. His friend was being… studied. With the cold, analytical gaze of a creator who saw in his agony only an interesting plot, only good material. His pain, his withdrawal, his slow self-destruction—all of it had become art for someone.

He slowly, as if in slow motion, raised his head and looked at the sleeping Chester. He was pale as the canvas on which he had already been depicted. He was a victim, not even suspecting he had already been added to someone's collection. And Phoenix, sitting here with the laptop on his knees, had become an unwitting accomplice to this strange, terrible crime against the privacy of another's demise. He had found proof. And now this knowledge burned him from within like a red-hot needle. He knew. He had seen the one he wasn't supposed to see. And there was no salvation from this knowledge. Now he was in the game too. Now someone might be watching him from around the corner, ready to jot down his image in their notebook. The world had narrowed to the size of this screen, to this drawing, to the name "M.S." And Phoenix understood that the point of no return had been passed.

In that moment, Phoenix rushed at Chester, not thinking, driven by a blind, animal rage born of fear and the sudden possession of knowledge that was heavier than any burden. He shook him by the shoulders, disrupting that fragile, sickly sleep that was his only salvation.

"Chez! Chez, fuck, wake up! You won't believe it, goddamn it!" – his voice broke into a shrill, hysterical falsetto.

Chester winced wearily, his consciousness slowly, with difficulty, as if through thick jelly, returning to his body. His eyelids peeled apart with effort. He didn't understand what was happening. Inside was only one solid, aching void. And then he saw Phoenix's face, distorted by either delight or horror, and he grabbed his neck with his hands, not to strangle him, but to find a point of support in this swaying world, to latch onto something real, onto hot, sweaty skin.

"What?.. What's even happening?" – his voice was a hoarse whisper, devoid of any emotion except exhaustion.

Phoenix, breathless from his own haste, blurted everything out at once. He pointed his finger at the laptop screen, again and again, pointing at that ill-fated portrait, chattered about the site, the studio, the signature "M.S." His thought, simple and straightforward as a brick to the face, hit one point:

"He used you, you bitch! Drew you like some fucking bum! Without asking! That's your face, fuck! Your likeness! He's probably making money off it! We need to write to this asshole artist immediately and demand money! Slap some fucking penalties on him! He had no right!"

He talked about money. About compensation. About the only language he was capable of thinking in, the language of profit and loss, buying and selling, even if the commodity was someone's face distorted by suffering. For Phoenix, this was an act of vandalism that needed to be monetized. To turn pain into cash. Horror into a wad of bills.

But Chester wasn't thinking about that. His brain, sluggish and poisoned, caught only the essence, snatched the most important thing from this whirlwind of words. Mike… Those eyes… They existed. They weren't a product of his inflamed consciousness. They belonged to a real person. A person who had seen him. Seen him so attentively, so penetratingly, that he could transfer to paper not just the features, but the very essence, all his pain, his emptiness, his internal scream. This wasn't theft. This was… recognition. Strange, perverted, terrifying, but recognition. Someone had seen him. Truly seen him. Through the dirt, through the narcotic haze, through all this trashy mess of society's rejects.

He looked at Phoenix's heated, greedy face and saw the abyss between them. Phoenix saw a rights violation. Chester saw a mystical connection.

"Calm down," he rasped, and his fingers loosened their grip on his friend's neck. "Just calm down, Phoenix. It's fine."

But calming Phoenix down was impossible. He was swept up by an adrenaline wave. He demanded action, immediate, aggressive. He already saw that money, that easy prey. And then Chester, acting on autopilot, out of an old, ingrained habit, found the only way to plug this storm. He took out a cartridge case hidden behind the couch upholstery, stuffed with weed, rolled a joint with trembling but skillful fingers. The flame of the lighter illuminated his gaunt face. He took a drag, deep, until his lungs rasped, and passed it to Phoenix. The latter, still muttering something about "sending a legal request," automatically accepted it, took a drag, then another. The familiar chemical wave washed over them, smoothing out the sharp edges, dulling the sharp reactions. Phoenix's rage gradually gave way to a sluggish, stoned curiosity.

And only then, when thick, sweetish smoke hung in the room and consciousness drifted into a calmer, amorphous state, did Chester sit down in front of the laptop. He looked at his own portrait. At his own eyes, looking at him from the screen with such piercing, unbearable truth that he wanted to look away. But he didn't look away. He peered. And thought. What to write to this artist? This Mike. This ghost who had suddenly become flesh and blood through the magic of lines and strokes.

"Hi"? Too simple. "Who are you?" sounded stupid. "Why did you draw me?" was the main question, but it seemed childish, vulnerable.

He felt that everything depended on what he wrote now. This was a bridge thrown across the abyss between his world, the world of smoke, filth, and despair, and that world from which this artist had come. A world of silence, observation, and strange, incomprehensible creativity. His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He had to find the words. Not words of demand, as Phoenix wanted. Not words of aggression. But some other words. Words that would reach the one on the other side of the screen. Words that would say: "I saw you. And I know you saw me." It was a mute dialogue of two solitudes, and now he had to clothe it in letters.