I wanted to break him.
I wanted him to feel even a fraction of the emptiness he left in me.
I imagined a thousand ways to punish him—
to make him understand that love isn't just about charm, soft words, or fleeting attention.
That devotion isn't measured by who you choose to save,
or who you abandon when their world collapses.
I remembered all the times I had been broken.
The nights I lay shattered, bleeding, desperate, and reaching for him.
And he…
he never came.
He never saw me.
He never saved me.
But her?
Her he saved countless times.
Every fall, every mistake, every moment of weakness—he was there.
Like a knight with a crown I'd never been given.
Like someone who knew exactly how to make her see him as a hero.
And I…
I had been invisible in those moments.
I had begged silently, clawed at the edges of his attention,
and found only absence.
I wanted to scream at the universe.
I wanted to make him see the weight of what he had done.
The cruelty of being cherished in one life, and ignored in another.
I wanted revenge—not in a dramatic act, not in fire or words—but in the sharp, quiet justice of truth:
I would remember.
I would survive.
And I would never be his to save—or to break—again.
Even in my darkest thoughts, even in the fantasies of retaliation,
there was one cruel clarity:
love isn't fair.
And sometimes the people who call themselves heroes are only heroes to the ones they choose.
And I…
I had been nothing more than a shadow he left behind.