He was as quiet as an abandoned stadium overgrown with vines. Haunted, not by the crowd, but by the lack of noise — every vine being a whisper of what it once was.

The silence crept through the rusted bleachers, winding its way back to him, to his mind. Broken echoes encased his thoughts and he longed to elude them, but they settled in the hollowness of his chest. He couldn’t breathe. It was all too much, and all he could do now was to sit there, watch as nature claimed everything it touched.

The vines simply shackled him to the silence. He couldn’t move, yet his mind still wandered.

A clock ticked with absolutely no rhythm as his thoughts scraped alongside each other like rusted gears begging for oil. They were useless.

The shadows in his mind didn’t move, didn’t speak either. Just waited patiently for him to lose his sanity. The silence that fed his insanity wasn’t empty—more like it was pulsating, waiting to be broken once more.

The vines breathed for him, tightening just enough to remind him he was still there, still alive. He didn’t want to stay, though. Yet, he stayed, even though the wind—unsure of its welcome—hesitated at the gate.

No footprints made themselves known. No voices stirred the silence like sugar in a cup of tea. He thought that maybe the angel boys would come back for him. That they might descend through the broken roof beams like light cutting through dust. And that maybe their laughter, sharp but sweet this time, would echo through the concrete.

But luckily, no one came.

It was sort of upsetting for him, though. He remembered how they used to laugh once—light and airy. But now, the wind held nothing but the cold.

The vines remembered also. The silence didn’t, though. And the memory of wings he never saw, but felt, haunted him. He swore he could feel them brushing against his skin like pine needles.

And sometimes he imagined one of them still sitting beside him in all this madness. Knees pulled to his chest, halo’s cracked, face smeared with ash. Not speaking, only watching and waiting.

What was the angel waiting for? Was it for him to break? Disrupt the silence? Or was it to intimidate him? Make him think he wasn’t alive anymore, wasn’t real.

_Was he even real?_

_Were any of them?_

Maybe he’d made them up. If that was true though, why does he remember the feathers left in the dirt, a glimpse of something unearthly?

_Was it all in his head though?_

The angel with him never moved, nor did it touch him. He was as still as a statue. The weight of his presence bent the metal seats and filled the air with something nostalgic. Not that he really knew what the scent was. Just that it wasn’t grief, nor was it love. It was that quiet sort of ache—that kind that comes from knowing things you shouldn’t.

The scent twisted into his thoughts like smoke—unable to hold or forget. Forcing him to remember the smell of burnt feathers and unforgivably the thought of who he once was.

But now, he couldn’t remember their faces, only how the light bent itself around them. And the air held a hush, as if it was waiting for a confession. Of what, though? We don’t know, and neither do they.

All he did know was that they were once here. That they were still _somewhere._ And that maybe, in the silence, they were governing the ruin—or maybe becoming it.