METANOIA

1.LUIS

as it was again coming home I felt Numb.....

after mom my world was shutter and never felt this much of loneliness as much as I feel now...

and never appreciate the presence of my dad because he never appreciated me he always praise Kevin my step brother after mom my dad remarried a woman but she also died and her son Kevin used to live with us. I hate it him because he became my dad's favourite my dad never paid attention to me even if I got hurt. even he wasn't surprise that I got my powers. yes, I got the power of healing and destroying but my dad never appreciated that he always praise Kevin... as I entered the mansion I saw my Dad his face was red out of anger

"where were you!?" he asked me with the anger

"I got late I missed my bus-*thud*"his first met my cheeks and made a sound as he slapped me..

"you are such a useless child why do you even go to school I got your complaint is that really do at school? I feel shame calling you my son and your fighting and at least you fighting with your own brother over what!??"

he asked me

our standing there with no emotion in my eyes I was standing there like a statue..

"why can't you be like Kevin I am so proud of him i have never heard his complains I wish you would that like your mom"he said that out of anger

I know he said but that hurted my eyes went dark I didn't realise he was my father but my fist met his cheek I don't need to do that but he said that to my mom he need nothing about my mum how was she like what she don't like he never ever paid attention to my mom.... it hurted me that he said this not because he said that me but he mentioned my mom and you he was my dad but I couldn't let him say any bad words about my mom

"see one more word about my mother I will kill you bastard"I said

but guards approach me before I could do anything.

" it's better she(mom) is in heaven better to be in there then living with you... you never loved my mom do you in cared about her once"

I said

as both of the guards has held my both of the arms with strong grip.

"that's how you talk to your father like this huh!???"he said

as he signal guards they carried me me to the basement and pushed me into that dark room my father took out his belt as usual and started beating me like as he used to do whenever he used to get drunk in my childhood...

......

as the night went to long the next day in school I was sitting alone in the classroom as Kevin approach to me handing me a ontiment

"here apply this I know he has beaten youu up again"he said

I couldn't hold my anger i grab his collar

"what do you think of yourself are you becoming a hero infront of everyone

.. after that incident??!! really what do you think of yourself becoming a hero in front of everyone and being that kind little s**t"I said in anger

he chuckled darkly and said"oh really brother do you think I am being The Hero no I can't be you the one"*smirks*

"that was right about your mother and you you both are piece of s**t don't create the same because I won't be the one getting a trouble...

think wisely Luis has won mistake and your expelled from this school"

I felt anger building up in me more than I could think of I knew that he can feel my eyes are getting golden because I was trying to spell the magic but I got interrupted as the teacher and to the room

"Luis get out of the class you expelled for one week get out of here and leave kevin's collar"the teacher yelled at me

my eyes went normal I left his collar.

I walked out of the class I sat down in the store room so nobody could find me..

I check the time it was 2:30 pm as I saw the wallpaper.. I chuckled I saw my friends my only way of escaping from this cruel world....

because of them I felt alive again

When I checked my phone…

the screen lit up, and I couldn’t help but smile.

It was them—my best friends.

My comfort place.

The only ones I truly have in this world.

Everybody knew Luis.

He wasn’t just anybody—Luis carried a power that could kill anyone, anytime. That power made him both feared… and deeply alone.

One evening, his phone rang.

Ian (on call): “Dude—hey Luis, what’s up?”

Luis (smiling faintly): “Yeah… good. What about you?”

Ian: “Nothing. Just the usual.”

In the background, laughter and chaos. Noah had just broken Kash’s bicycle.

Yosh (furious): “You i***t! You ass—!”

(He gets cut off as Noah stammers an apology.)

Noah: “Dude, that was a mistake!”

Luis chuckled softly, trying to forget the weight in his chest.

It was Monday. 14th. Ordinary—or so it seemed.

Then… he saw it.

A light. Far away. Strange. Flickering. Calling.

Luis (whispering): “Wait… what’s that?”

The others didn’t notice, but Luis felt it. Something beyond this world. Something pulling him in.

Luis (nervous, into the phone): “Hello? Dude… hello, are you there?”

A voice cracked through the static.

Voice: “HELLO, LUIS?”

Luis froze. His heart raced. Then—without thinking—he ran.

Ran toward the light.

Toward the unknown.

12:00 AM. A lonely street. Luis stumbles forward, rubbing his temples.

Luis (muttering):

“Great. Midnight, no phone signal, and I’m lost. Perfect. Just perfect.”

Out of nowhere, a blur rushes at him. WHAM! He’s slammed to the ground. A mop handle digs into his chest as a girl straddles him like some unhinged warrior.

Luis (choking):

“Wha—HEY! What are you doing?!”

Chloe (screaming):

“Stay back, demon! You’re not fooling me with your… your handsome face!”

Luis (bewildered, coughing):

“Excuse me—handsome face?! Lady, you’re literally beating me to death with a mop!”

Chloe (squinting, refusing to move):

“It’s past midnight. Strangers don’t just appear out of thin air at this hour unless they’re ghosts. Or—worse—main characters.”

Luis (groaning, confused):

“…Main characters? What are you even talking about?”

Chloe (dead serious):

“Don’t play dumb. You look exactly like the type. Broody eyes, tragic aura, messy hair—ugh, straight out of some cheesy novel!”

Luis (offended):

“Messy hair?! Lady, I’ve been fighting for my life here, thanks to you! And I don’t even know what aura you’re talking about—I didn’t sign up for this!”

Chloe (tilting her head, dramatic gasp):

“…Wait. So you’re not here to haunt me? Or to sweep me into some destined love story?”

Luis (exasperated, trying to push her off):

“The only sweeping that’s happening is you hitting me with that damn mop! Now will you please get off before people think I’m in some weird midnight wrestling match?!”

Chloe blinks, then slowly climbs off him, brushing dust from her pajama pants. Luis sits up, glaring but catching his breath.

Chloe (muttering, embarrassed):

“…Fine. But you can’t blame me for being cautious. Midnight strangers are always suspicious.”

Luis (sarcastic):

“Oh, absolutely. The logical reaction is always to—what? Jump on them? Call them a ghost? Beat them up with cleaning supplies?”

Chloe (snapping back):

“Hey! That mop saved me from a pigeon once, okay? It’s a weapon of justice.”

Luis (rubbing his forehead, muttering):

“…Unbelievable. I get attacked by the Mop Avenger at midnight.”

Chloe (grinning, crossing her arms):

“You’re welcome. Without me, you’d probably still be wandering around looking lost and mysterious.”

Luis found the book by accident, thumb sliding under the cracked dust jacket as if the thing had been waiting for his hand. It was small, cheap-bought, the kind of thing that could be hidden inside a drawer for years and still feel like a wound when opened. He didn’t mean to read aloud—he didn’t mean anything anymore—but the words came anyway, rough and surprised at the edges like a voice that had been held back too long.

“Kevin the starboy?” he read, and the name scraped his throat. The air in the room seemed to tighten. Kevin’s face in the poster on the wall—faded, smug, impossibly lit—caught the light and looked back at him like a dare.

Chloe’s laugh cut through him. “Like I said, I made you. I own you,” she said, the sentence flung like a coin. She was always half-show, half-provocation, as if the world were something you could pin to a wall and step around. Her hands were busy with nothing. Her eyes were cool with the kind of certainty that had once been a comfort and now felt like a verdict.

Luis stopped. For a second there was no sound but the book breathing in his hands. He turned the page. The paper whispered. A tear slid out of him so quietly that for a moment neither of them noticed. It tracked clear and hot down his cheek and then fell, a small, obscene thing, onto the margin where Kevin’s name lived.

“Mom, why did you do that?” he said, voice raw and small as a child’s. The question was not to his mother—she had been gone a long time—but to everything that had shaped him, to the time and place and people who’d folded him into a thing he didn’t recognize. He looked at Chloe with a flatness that frightened him: no tremor, no pleading, only a hollowed-out stare that might have been carved.

Chloe’s smile tried to be lighter. “You know I made you,” she repeated, as if repeating it could prove it. “You should be grateful.”

Grief came first, sudden and animal: a cold hollowness that started in his belly and rode up under his ribs. The book was a ledger; every sentence a charge. Pages mapped out old betrayals in blunt little sentences that named him and counted what she’d taken. He had been a child when she wrote them—he felt that now—small, malleable, pressed into shapes for her amusement and left with the bruises.

Guilt followed, insidious and sticky. He saw ways he had made himself available for this: the times he had laughed when she called him by nicknames that sounded like ownership; the times he had capitulated to keep the peace; the quiet moments when he had looked away from the truth and let other people decide it for him. The memory of himself as an accomplice — a boy who winked at cruelty because it was easier than the alternative — made his stomach turn.

Anger rose like a tide and then a deliberate, controlled flame. He remembered the years of small erosions: the jokes at his expense that landed with sharp edges, the intentional forgettings, the way she had trimmed the world down for him until there was no room to breathe. It coiled in his hands around the book; paper felt like something fragile and yet lethal. His voice, when it came, was not the wounded smallness of before. It was flat, clipped into knives.

“What have I done to you, huh?” he said, each word a stone. “Do you even hear yourself?” He stood and walked to the poster. Kevin’s eyes—painted perfect—met his. “You made me.” He looked back at Chloe. “You made me into what I am now. You pulled the strings, you wrote the lines. And you think that gives you the right to… to write me into a monster for your story?”

Chloe tilted her head as if listening to a different station. A smile flitted, then died. “I gave you shape.”

“Shape,” he echoed, the syllable like a slap. The room closed around them—the cheap rug, the poster, the book with its spidery type. He could smell the dust that clung to cardboard and the metallic tang of something older, something that had clotted between them like dried blood.

Tears blurred his vision, but they were mixed with something bitter. “You made me,” he said again, but this time it was a confession and a condemnation at once. “You made me so I would belong. You made me so I would serve your story. And when I broke—when I stopped wanting—what did you do? You laughed and you wrote it down. You made me the villain in your ledger.”

Chloe’s hands went to her mouth, not from shock so much as to steady herself. “You’re overreacting,” she said, but the words were threadbare. She had always been good at undercutting things—minimizing, reassigning blame, folding the world into a version that made her the necessary center. But tonight her voice did not steady him. It frayed.

He slammed the book shut. The sound was loud in the small room, fuller than the power of the two of them, and it echoed like something falling in a house that had been empty too long.

“You deserve—” he started, the sentence jagged and incomplete. His hands shook now; the shake was not just from fury but from the fierce, combustible mix of grief and a guilty recognition of the violence in himself. He felt the urge to make the world answer in equal measure. It was a thought that scared him because it felt pure and honest and wrong, all at once.

“You deserve to know what it is to be broken,” Luis said, the words falling out like final coins. “You deserve to feel the weight you’ve given me.” He didn’t say the rest aloud — the part about killing, the part that was an impossible line over which he could not truly choose to step — but the threat sat in the air like a heartbeat. It hummed.

Chloe’s face shifted. For the first time in the argument she looked small, and not from fear but from the dawning comprehension that her hand in his story had consequences that reached further than her vanity. The defenses she’d worn like armour began to slip.

“Luis,” she whispered. The name was tentative, as if she was testing it for the first time. “I—”

“You made me,” he said again, and there was no less pain in it than before. The room seemed to hold its breath. Outside, a car passed and then the street returned to its indifferent hum. Inside, two people were left with a book and a ledger of hurt, and the knowledge that between the pages something had been born it would take both of them a long time to understand.

Grief softened the edges of his anger a fraction, and in that softened place guilt lodged, small and cold. He thought about the choices he had not made—the apologies he had swallowed, the hands he had not held when he needed to be held. He thought of the possibility of repair and of how thin and dangerous that thread felt.

He set the book down on the table, with a gentleness that contradicted the violence of his words, and for the first time the rage in him was accompanied by a weary, aching hope. Not of reconciliation; not yet. But of recognition—of both what had been done, and what could be undone, if anyone was brave enough to try.

Chloe watched him, and in her eyes something unmasked and human appeared: regret, maybe, or the beginning of it. It did not absolve her. It did not close the wound. But it was a point of light in a room that had gathered night.

Luis picked up the poster as if it were a relic and turned it away. He had been shaped, yes. But he was not only a thing to be owned. The book lay between them like a map of their shared crimes, and in its margins, beneath the ink, there were still unwritten pages.

Luis (rolling his eyes):

“I wasn’t mysterious. I was just lost.”

Silence for a beat. They look at each other. Then Chloe suddenly bursts out laughing. Luis can’t help but chuckle despite himself.

Luis (softening):

“…You really thought I was a ghost?”

Chloe (smiling sheepishly):

“Hey, in my defense—you showed up like one. Creepy timing. Bad hair. Confused expression. Total ghost energy.”

Luis (mock glare):

“…If I were a ghost, you’d be the first person I haunt.”