404: Reality Not Found

Chapter 1 - The Boy Behind the Screen

My name is Y/N L/N, and I'm sixteen years old.

People say sixteen is "the beginning of everything."

For me, it's the beginning of the end, or at least an end.

Mum died a few months ago. The only person who knew how to calm the storms in my chest, how to speak to me softly when the world seemed to scream. The only one who kept the shadows in my head from swallowing everything else whole.

She's the only one who could've stopped me.

Stopped me from becoming... whatever I am now.

But this is where my story begins — in the slow rot of an ordinary afternoon, the kind that promises nothing but disappointment, bruises, and the scratching noise inside my skull that never quite goes away.

—

School was the same as always; loud voices, slamming lockers, the faint smell of misery and teenage sweat. I walked with my head down, waiting for the day to end. It never ended fast enough.

On the way to the exit, a force slammed me into a wall so hard my teeth rattled. The corridor was empty — that after-hours deadness where everything echoes just a bit too loudly.

"Look who's trying to leave," a voice drawled.

Julie.

Long blonde hair. Dark eyes that always looked half-lidded with boredom or cruelty — maybe both. Her lips were twisted into a self-satisfied smirk.

Her pet shadow, Ethan, stepped out of the empty room beside me, cracking his knuckles. "The weirdo."

They thought they were terrifying. In truth, they were simply pathetic. Little tyrants ruling over the equally pathetic.

I wasn't scared of them. Not anymore.

"Why can't you motherfuckers just leave me alone?" I asked, my voice low, tired, shaking with something that wasn't fear at all.

Julie giggled. "Because otherwise it wouldn't be fun:"

They squared up. I mirrored them. My heart was beating too fast, a strange electricity twisting through my veins. The world felt slightly separated from me, like a film I wasn't fully part of.

Julie lunged first. I dodged, grabbed her wrist, twisted, shoved. She collided with Ethan. He stumbled and they both fell.

A small victory. A small chance.

I bolted.

Footsteps pounded behind me, but I was faster — or maybe just more desperate. I didn't stop running until the world around me quieted, the shouts fading, the buildings thinning into rusting metal and splintered wood.

The port.

I froze, breath catching.

The abandoned port stretched before me — a carcass of rotting planks and forgotten water. A place I avoided. A place my mind refused to forget.

Water used to be my safe place. Swimming team, medals, competitions and the like, proudly encouraged by my Mum. But that one afternoon — the bracelet, the boys, the cold hands pulling me under — shattered everything.

I swallowed and stepped onto the fragile wood, the creak beneath my feet echoing loudly. Too loudly.

My fingers traced the bracelet on my wrist — Mum's bracelet. The one she pressed into my palm with fragile fingers before she died. The same bracelet that had once sunk beneath these waters while I had screamed for help.