The Unveiling
"WOW Ishita, you've got it bad. You actually like Abhimanyu this much?" a guy from the back row sneered, a sinister, smug look stretching across his face as he leaned against a desk.
"Yep, I love him! You think I'm afraid to admit it?!" Ishita barked back, her voice cutting through the classroom air like a razor blade. She stood tall, her shoulders rigid, defying the entire room.
"I mean, weren't you guys literally raised as siblings? Seems kind of wrong..." another guy spoke up, chiming in from the side with a judgmental, mocking tone.
"Like I care what any of you think!" she snapped, firing a lethal glare in his direction.
"Why are you going this far to defend Abhimanyu anyway? What's the big deal?"
Throughout this entire, escalating confrontation, I had just kept entirely silent. I had desperately wanted to step in earlier and tell Ishita that I was completely fine, that the words of these seasonal bullies couldn't pierce my armor. But looking at her now, I realized it was already too late to simply quiet her down. For the first time, seeing the frantic, protective fire burning in her eyes, I truly understood the architecture of her behavior.
She had her own deep-seated trauma. She was utterly terrified of losing me—or perhaps, paralyzed by the fear of being left behind by me all over again. Maybe that was the hidden, driving reason she had orchestrating her transfer to this exact campus in the first place: just to find her way back to my side.
"He saved my life in a horrific traffic accident a long time ago!" Ishita yelled, her voice growing raspy as the raw emotion threatened to choke her. Her face turned a furious, vibrant red. "The impact of that accident left a massive, devastating scar on his face! He was only wearing those bangs and hiding away because he was trying to shield the world from it! He is such an incredibly kind, hardworking, reliable guy, who has been quietly keeping all of his immense pain to himself this entire time...!"
The classroom went dead quiet, the spectators pinned under the weight of her confession.
"To me, Abhimanyu is the coolest man in the entire world!" Ishita declared, her lower lip trembling as her eyes began to pool with heavy, angry tears. "If any of you pathetic cowards want to give him a hard time, you'll have to go through me first!"
As the tears finally spilled over her lashes, my father's old, unyielding words suddenly repeated with echoing clarity inside my mind.
*Don't you ever dare let down a woman who stands up for you or cares for your life, Abhimanyu.*
That memory was the final circuit breaker. Pushing my chair back, I got up from my desk and stepped forward, placing my steady palm firmly onto Ishita's shoulder. Her entire frame was trembling violently from pure, unadulterated anger.
Even with my hand grounding her, she tried to keep charging forward, the words tumbling out. "So... what I'm trying to say is...!"
"Enough, Ishita," I said, my voice dropping into a low, calm cadence that immediately cut through her frantic momentum.
"Abhimanyu..." she turned her head, her deep eyes wide and swimming with unshed tears. "I don't care what they say about me... but I do care about you..."
Letting out a slow, heavy sigh of absolute exasperation, I reached up with my hand. In one deliberate, sweeping motion, I brushed my heavy bangs completely back, exposing my face to the harsh fluorescent lights of the classroom in its absolute entirety.
"See? It's all completely healed up," I said, holding my school bag high in my other hand as I faced the crowd dead-on.
The scar they had been weaponizing was nothing more than a faint, faded silver line. But it wasn't the absence of a disfigurement that made the entire room collectively gasp. It was the facial structure that had been hiding beneath the fabric of my hair.
"Abhimanyu?!" a girl near the front row gasped, her phone slipping an inch from her fingers.
"...That face," a second girl squealed, her voice instantly hitting a high, frantic register. "Isn't that L... the Lelouch?! The underground idol producer and legendary model?!"
"It's actually him! It's the real deal!" a guy whispered, his smug expression instantly evaporating into pure, unvarnished shock.
"So the actual reason you were hiding your face all semester... was because you didn't want to be recognized and mobbed by everyone on campus..."
A heavy murmur rippled through the rows of desks like wildfire. Even if doing this meant completely exposing my real identity and fracturing the quiet college life I had meticulously built for myself, I harbored absolutely zero regrets. At the end of the day, I had managed to successfully protect Ishu—the girl who had just willingly laid everything on the line to defend my honor. I wouldn't allow her fiercely loyal heart to be crushed, and I certainly wouldn't act in a way that would make my parents ashamed of the man they raised.
Granted, this sudden reveal was undoubtedly going to make logistical things a little more troublesome moving forward with the media feeds...
I turned back to Ishita, my expression softening as I grabbed her arm and gently pulled her behind the protective perimeter of my frame. *I'm completely okay with whatever crazy plan you come up with next, or whatever else you want to do,* I thought, locking eyes with her stunned face. *But I will never let anyone in this place hurt my precious little sister.*
"We're leaving," I announced to the room, my voice ringing with a cold, absolute authority that brooked no argument.
Without waiting for a single response, I firmly pulled Ishita out of the classroom, my heavy bags hooked securely in my other hand. Every single guy and girl in the room remained completely frozen in a state of absolute, paralyzed shock. Not a single person possessed the courage to move, let alone chase after us as the classroom door swung shut behind our exit.
Echoes in the Rain
The chaotic shouting echoing from the second-year wing immediately caught my attention. As a senior and the designated leader of the campus anti-ragging committee, it was my baseline responsibility to shut down any form of intimidation before it escalated into something structural. I walked down the corridor and stopped just outside the classroom doorway, blending into the gathering crowd of onlookers to observe the situation.
I silently listened.
Inside the room, a fierce, trembling girl was standing up against her own classmates, fiercely defending a guy who sat quietly at his desk. As her raw, passionate words cut through the room, the immediate reality around me began to blur. I was suddenly, violently pulled back into the depths of my own past.
Memories of *her* flooded my mind. Her radiant, smiling face... her warm, vibrant, sunflower-like personality... the effortless way she used to look out for me and care for my well-being when the world felt entirely dark.
A heavy wave of exhaustion crashed over me. Lately, the relentless pressure of my responsibilities had left me running on empty; I hadn't managed to get a single night of proper rest in weeks. Realizing the committee files could wait, I decided to leave the campus grounds for good that afternoon. I desperately needed a change of air to refresh my suffocating mood and clear the static from my head.
A short while later, I was out on the coastal highway. I drove my Bentley slowly along the edge of the sea area, dropping the retractable roof to let the elements in. I caught the rhythmic rush of the wind and watched the heavy, dark storm clouds gathering low over the horizon. The deep, primeval roar of the incoming ocean tides combined with the gloomy, overcast weather created an unforgettable atmosphere.
Yet, even without my conscious awareness guiding the steering wheel, my hands had instinctively navigated the vehicle toward the exact same beach where I held those beautiful, haunting memories with her.
Suddenly, the sky broke, and a heavy rain started to lash the coast. I pulled over to the shoulder of the road, quickly bringing the Bentley's roof back up to lock out the downpour. Enclosed in the quiet luxury of the cabin, I just sat there in the silence, watching the water sheet down the windshield while playing a playlist of her absolute favorite songs through the speakers.
By the time the torrential rain finally ground to a halt, day had completely dissolved into night. The full moon hung high in the cloudy sky, appearing and disappearing behind the shifting dark vapor like it was playing a silent game of hide-and-seek with the earth.
Deciding to clear my lungs, I stepped out of the car to look across the glistening, wet sand of the beach before heading toward the nearby temple to offer a quiet prayer for her safety.
But as I approached the stone perimeter, I spotted a lone figure walking directly toward my position. The guy was entirely drenched from head to toe, his clothes heavily stained with fresh mud. His hair was a wild, messy ruin, and I could even see thick traces of grit and mud matted into the strands. The yellow streetlights above us were swarming with thick clouds of nocturnal flies, their buzzing wings cutting through the heavy air; the visibility was so poor that a person could barely see five steps ahead of themselves.
*He must have slipped and crashed hard into a deep, muddy puddle on the staircase,* I reasoned, taking note of his disheveled state.
As our paths crossed beneath the dim light, I stopped and asked him, "Are you alright?"
"Umm, yeah!" he muttered quickly. He kept his chin tucked firmly into his collar, looking straight down at the wet concrete, not daring to look me in the eyes for even a fraction of a second.
A strange, sudden friction sparked in my mind. Looking at the silhouette of his face under the buggy streetlight, I felt a faint, lingering sensation that I had definitely seen him somewhere before.
I didn't press him with any further questions. Respecting his privacy, I simply stepped aside and continued my walk toward the stone entrance of the temple, while he kept moving forward, disappearing into his own path in the dark.
I stepped into the quiet sanctuary, prayed to God for her protection, and finally turned back toward my car to begin the long drive home.
The Blueprint of a Pawn
"Kuu... let's play together! But don't bring Leo with you. He's an outsider, and we won't play with him," a little girl, barely four years old, chirped, her voice dripping with the casual cruelty only children can muster.
"Yeah! Besides, he's a boy, and his hair is completely white like a grandpa's," another toddler chimed in, pointing a chubby finger toward the far edge of the dirt.
In the dream, I slowly turned around.
The playground stretched out infinitely, an endless expanse of gray sand beneath a bruised, stagnant sky. Sitting entirely alone in the center of the sandbox was a single child, quietly sifting dirt through his small fingers. He wore faded, badly torn clothing that hung loosely off his fragile frame. Even from a distance, the shock of stark, snowy-white hair was unmistakable. It was Leo. The exact Leo from the deepest archives of my childhood.
A heavy, suffocating scent suddenly invaded my senses—the sharp, chemical sting of phenyl and medical bleach, thick enough to burn the back of my throat.
Driven by an unshakeable urge, I walked toward him across the clicking sand. I reached down, my hand trembling as I tapped him lightly on his small shoulder.
Slowly, the child rotated his head upward to face me.
The moment his striking, crystal-blue eyes locked onto mine, the irises fractured. The brilliant blue was violently swallowed by a sudden surge of deep, pressurized crimson. Thick, dark blood began to pour from his sockets, tracking down his porcelain cheeks like tears. Then, the skin along his hairline split open, a heavy sheet of blood cascading down his forehead, followed instantly by a torrent of crimson erupting from his lips, staining his teeth.
"Karuna... let's play," he rasped.
The voice didn't belong to a child. It was a wet, gargling echo. He dragged his body out of the sand, rising to his feet with a sickening, structural crunch. His jaw hung loosely at an unnatural, broken angle, his lips torn apart. His left leg was violently inverted, the bone bent sideways at an impossible fracture, dragging uselessly against the dirt as he began to limp rapidly toward me, reaching out with blood-soaked hands.
"Leo!!!"
I screamed, my voice tearing through my throat as my entire body jolted violently forward.
My eyes snapped wide open, my chest heaving as I gasped for air. The terrifying imagery shattered into dust, leaving me staring at a stark white ceiling. I looked frantically around the space. There was no sand. No blood. No broken boy. It was just an exceptionally quiet, empty room, the rhythmic, metallic drip of an IV line ticking beside the mattress. A cold needle was taped securely into the back of my hand, the clear tube running up to a plastic bag.
I was in a private V.I.P. suite of the luxury metropolitan hospital.
"It was just a dream..." I whispered, a long, ragged sigh of absolute relief escaping my lips as I let my heavy head fall back onto the pristine pillows.
Then, the sudden, rhythmic click of heels echoed from the doorway. The wood swung open, revealing my mother and my primary manager stepping into the room. The moment they noticed I was conscious, my manager immediately spun on her heel to alert the attending medical staff.
Within minutes, the chief doctor entered, executing his standard, polished routine. He checked the monitors, flashed a penlight into my eyes, and delivered the exact predictable lecture I had memorized over the years: *Rest more. Stop overworking the schedule. Eat macro-balanced meals properly.* He turned to my mother, dropping his voice to discuss the physiological toll—mentioning my highly irregular sleep cycles and erratic menstrual periods due to systemic stress.
My mother immediately stepped closer, her face softening into an exquisitely crafted look of maternal concern as she reached down to hold my cold hand.
But my mind wasn't processing a single syllable of the medical data. It was locked onto one coordinates. Leo.
"Mom... I want to meet Leo," I said, pitching my voice into a weak, pathetic murmur, expertly executing the role of a frail girl sitting on the very precipice of death. "Please... just let me see him."
My mother didn't flinch. Her expression remained flawlessly natural, without a single micro-expression of guilt or worry surfacing on her skin.
"Oh, sweetie," she said smoothly, gently stroking my hair. "He was incredibly worried about you. The very moment he heard you had collapsed from pure overwork on the set, he desperately wanted to clear his schedule and catch a flight here. But he suddenly got locked into a massive international campaign gig. He's arguably tracking a heavier schedule than you are right now, darling. You know how the industry is."
"Really...?" I murmured, lowering my eyelids to hide the flash of cold calculations running behind them. "Then... it's fine. Where is Dad? Is he outside?"
"He's completely buried under office files at the ministry, sweetie. Being a high-ranking government employee isn't an easy life," she replied seamlessly.
"Okay," I whispered, letting my chin drop, looking entirely dejected to satisfy their narrative.
But beneath the mask of the submissive, broken idol, a cold, clinical blueprint was already taking structural form inside my mind. I was going to uncover the absolute, unedited truth about seven years ago, no matter the cost.
To execute this, I needed to achieve three consecutive operational objectives:
1. Secure a mandatory medical leave of absence from the agency.
2. Compromise and extract the personal information archives held by my manager.
3. Establish total surveillance on my aunt's corporate movements and financial ledgers.
I chewed on the variables as I stared at the IV line. I couldn't assume my mother was innocent; she had actively participated in suppressing the narrative of Leo's catastrophic accident for nearly a decade. My manager was clearly a primary accessory to the cover-up as well.
Directly confronting my mother or my aunt was a losing strategy. The moment I cornered them with questions about Leo, they would instantly weaponize my multi-year corporate contract against me. In a worst-case scenario, the board would simply engineer and leak a massive, manufactured romance scandal with another high-profile celebrity to destroy my leverage and force me back into compliance. My mother would easily counter by organizing an endless circuit of private high-society dinners, inviting her influential friends to micro-manage my time until I had zero breathing room left to investigate.
Therefore, my aunt and mother were off-limits for now. That left a single, viable breach point in the wall. My manager.
And I already possessed the perfect leverage to break her.
She was the sole handler who had remained anchored to my side for the last seven consecutive years. In this cutthroat industry, a mid-level manager doesn't survive alongside a top-tier Dior representative for that long without keeping a few dark secrets tucked safely up her sleeve to keep herself afloat. She had data. She had the old files.
*She is going to become my very first pawn in this game,* I thought, my expression turning entirely cold as I looked out the large glass window toward the sprawling, indifferent city below, slowly taking a sharp, deliberate bite of an expensive, imported Kashmiri apple.
The glittering cage was finally unlocking, and I was about to turn the keepers into the prey.