The sound of the door closing behind Detective Lisa echoed through the small apartment. Rose stood in the silence, the weight of the conversation lingering in the air, thick like smoke. The detective had come and gone, but her words—those questions, that name—hung around her like a suffocating fog.
Casimir.
She couldn't shake it, couldn't stop wondering. The name felt wrong, like it belonged to someone she should know, someone from the past. But she didn't. And that was the problem.
Rose moved across the room, her feet padding softly against the worn carpet. She passed the record player, the empty whiskey bottle still sitting on the coffee table, its amber contents long consumed. She reached the low, scratched-up table where the cracked photo frame sat, face down. She hadn't noticed it at first—too distracted by the conversation—but now it caught her eye.
"Well...Well..." She muttered.
With a sigh, she picked it up, running her fingers over the sharp edges of the broken glass. The frame had seen better days. She'd never bothered to replace it, even after all these years. This photo was taken 12 years ago.
The photo inside was faded, curling at the edges, but still recognizable. It was of her and Kazou—before everything fell apart. Before they'd become strangers to each other. In the picture, they were smiling, arms around each other, standing outside the lab in the sun. It was taken the month before the massacre at the lab, when they were still boyfriend and girlfriend, still hopeful.
Rose carefully slid the photo out of its frame, the thin paper crackling in her fingers. She hadn't looked at this photo in years. Years of pretending it didn't matter, trying to bury the memory of Kazou beneath layers of alcohol, smoke, and the bruised remnant of a life she no longer wanted to remember.
But here it was. Staring her in the face.
Her thumb ran across the image, tracing the outline of her younger self. Her smile was genuine then, unburdened. She had been full of promise, full of dreams about the future. Kazou had looked the same—his eyes bright, his face open, his love for her still a quiet, constant thing. She could almost feel the warmth of that day, the way the sunlight had wrapped around them both.
Now, all that was left was the broken glass, the shattered frame, and the echoes of what had gone wrong.
She set the photo down on the table in front of her and reached for the bottle of whiskey, her hands trembling slightly. She poured herself another drink, the liquid splashing into the glass, the sound comforting in the stillness.
For a long moment, she just stared at the photo, her thoughts racing. Her mind kept circling back to what Lisa had said—the name...
Casimir.
Who was he? If he was really important, why hadn't Kazou told her about him? Why had Kazou kept so much of his life hidden, even from her, the person who had once been closest to him?
She didn't understand. She never had.
Kazou had always been wrapped in his own world, wrapped in his sense of duty to fix the past, but all she wanted was to feel free, to feel as if the past had nothing to do with the present. That had driven them apart in the end. She had realized, too late, that she wasn't in love with him. She was in love with the idea of freedom.
Rose picked up the photo again, holding it with both hands this time. She turned it over, her eyes scanning the back, as though expecting to find some hidden message or a clue that would explain everything. But there was nothing. Just the faint smudge of her fingerprints, the remnants of a past life.
Her fingers lingered on the edges of the photo for a moment before she put it back into the frame, the glass now absent, the frame cracked and worn.
Kazou had always been too focused on the past, he couldn't fix it. And she had always been too lost in herself to see it.
Now, she wondered if it was too late for him—too late to fix whatever had been broken, whatever had caused him to turn into the man who couldn't save anyone, not even himself.
Her throat tightened as she placed the frame back on the table and sat back down. She stared at it for a long time, the silence stretching out before her.
She had loved him once. In some distant part of her, she still did. But that wasn't enough anymore.
Kazou was lost. And no matter how many drinks she had, or how many cigarettes she smoked, the truth would still sit there, heavy in the room, like an unanswered question.
What had happened to him?
She drained her glass, and the burn of alcohol did nothing to ease the ache in her chest.
The world outside was still, the soft hum of the city carrying through the rain. Rose stared at the broken photo again, the only piece of him she had left.
And for the first time in a long time, she didn't know whether she wanted to find him, or whether it was better to leave him in the past, where he belonged.
"Maybe I should talk to Kazou in person... Who was Casimir to him? Did I know Casimir? Is it something my mind just wants to forget?"