♡ Angel Autopsy (Yandere! Il Dottore x Reader).
♡ Word Count. 7,402 words
The first datum is the nausea.
Zandik catalogues it without dramatization, because dramatization is for lesser minds.
Nausea is a physiological response, mediated by the area postrema and vagal afferents, typically triggered by toxins, hypoxia, vestibular mismatch. None of those variables are present. His breakfast was sterile. The air composition is within acceptable bounds. No sudden acceleration.
And yet, when his eyes pass over you—lazy posture, shoulders slack, gaze unfocused—his stomach constricts as if anticipating poison.
Observation Log 07:13.
Subject present in corridor C-4.
Distance: 11.2 meters.
Physiological anomaly detected in observer (self): visceral discomfort, low-grade adrenergic spike, pupil dilation inconsistent with threat assessment.
He pauses behind the frosted glass, posture relaxed, hands folded, an unremarkable silhouette. Low key. Invisible. He has perfected invisibility the way surgeons perfect incisions: clean, minimal, no wasted motion.
You do not look at him.
You never do.
Your attention drifts as if tethered to nothing, as if gravity itself finds you uninteresting.
That should have reassured him.
It doesn’t.
He has dissected gods without feeling this.
He has vivisected screaming things that begged in languages extinct before this world cooled, and all he felt was irritation at their inefficiency.
He does not get “bad vibes.”
That phrase belongs to imbeciles who confuse pattern recognition with superstition.
And yet the signal persists, uncorrelated with noise, robust across repeated exposure.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 07:15.
Subject exhibits baseline affect: flat.
Not depressed—no psychomotor retardation.
Not dissociated—responses are timely.
Facial musculature neutral, microexpressions sparse. Eye movement slow, unfocused, yet tracking peripheral stimuli with abnormal accuracy.
Your gait is wrong. Not impaired. Economical. Each step lands precisely where it must, minimizing energy expenditure. Soldiers train for this. Monks cultivate it.
You look like you do not care enough to try, and yet your body behaves as if optimized by an algorithm with no margin for error.
He follows you at a distance that suggests coincidence.
He counts your breaths.
Four seconds in, five seconds out. Too regular.
Autonomic variability suppressed.
Either extraordinary discipline or an endocrine abnormality that should have killed you by now.
He feels the irritation then, sharp and personal, like a needle slipped under the nail.
Annoyance.
Directed.
He freezes internally, dissecting the feeling with the same cold precision he uses on flesh.
Anger is an emotion.
Emotion is a failure state.
He does not fail.
So why are you disturbing him, when this has never happened?
Not even once in his entire life before.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Hypothesis A: You are an intelligence asset planted to observe him. Rejected. Your cover is too convincing, your behavior too consistently unremarkable. Intelligence agencies overperform. They cannot resist leaving signatures.
Hypothesis B: You are a latent threat with no awareness of your own capabilities. Possible. Dangerous. Interesting.
Hypothesis C: You are nothing. A statistical outlier triggering a false positive in his cognition. Unacceptable. His cognition does not produce false positives at this magnitude.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
He watches as you stop near the infirmary doors. You lean against the wall, head tilted back, eyes half-lidded, as if bored by existence itself.
A medic wheels past a gurney. The sheet slips.
Exposed abdomen. Male, mid-thirties. Laparotomy gone wrong. Evisceration incomplete. The intestines are a glistening rosary of pink and gray, mesentery torn, hemorrhage uncontrolled. The smell hits—iron, feces, antiseptic failing to mask decay.
Zandik notes his own lack of reaction.
Expected.
He notes the medic’s flinch.
Expected.
He notes you.
Your eyes flick, just once, to the exposed viscera.
No widening.
No disgust.
No fascination.
Not even clinical interest.
It is the look one gives a chair.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 07:22.
Subject reaction to gore: null.
This is wrong.
Even trained surgeons show micro-responses.
A tightening at the orbicularis oculi. A subtle change in respiration.
You give nothing.
Not repression—absence.
He moves closer, close enough now to register your body heat, your scent.
Clean.
Almost sterile. No perfume. No sweat, despite the ambient temperature.
Your skin radiates warmth at a level that suggests high metabolic activity, yet there is no corresponding caloric intake observed in the last forty-eight hours.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
He imagines, unbidden, cutting you open.
The image is not erotic—he would have excised that weakness long ago.
It is methodological.
A midline incision, sternum to pubis. He imagines the resistance of your skin under the scalpel.
Too smooth.
He imagines the fascia. The peritoneum.
He imagines finding something that should not be there.
His pulse quickens.
Annoyance spikes into something sharper.
Curiosity. Intrigue.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
You shift, finally looking at him, and for a fraction of a second the nausea becomes vertigo.
Your eyes are dull. Abyssal, cold, maybe.
Unremarkable.
And yet there is a depth that is not optical. Not psychological either.
It is structural, the way a black hole’s presence is inferred not by sight but by gravitational effect.
For an instant, he has the irrational certainty that if he were to fall into you, there would be no horizon.
No return.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 07:23.
Direct eye contact.
Duration: 0.6 seconds.
Observer response: sympathetic surge, hypothalamic activation inconsistent with perceived threat.
You look away first, uninterested.
The pressure recedes, but does not vanish.
It coils.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
He smiles then, small and polite, because smiling costs nothing and disarms everything.
You do not notice.
You push off the wall and walk away, hands in pockets, shoulders loose.
The day progresses.
He does not abandon his work. He never abandons his work.
He performs an autopsy on a failed experiment—Subject K-19—documenting necrosis of the temporal lobes, liquefaction spreading into the basal ganglia. He saws through bone, lifts the calvarium, notes the edema, the hemorrhagic foci.
Blood pools. Cerebrospinal fluid leaks. The smell is thick, almost sweet.
Normally, this would settle him.
Order imposed on chaos.
Answers extracted from meat.
It does not.
Your presence lingers like a contaminant in a clean room.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 11:40.
Cognitive intrusion persists despite task engagement.
Subject exhibits anomalous salience.
He replays your movements in his mind, frame by frame. He notices details he did not consciously attend to: the way your shadow does not quite align with the light source; the way ambient noise seems to dampen around you, as if the world holds its breath.
This is impossible.
And yet.
He reviews surveillance footage.
He slows it.
Enhances contrast.
Runs spectral analysis.
There is nothing overt.
You enter rooms.
You exit them.
People do not look at you for long.
Conversations die when you pass, not from fear, but from forgetfulness.
As if their minds slide off you, unable to maintain purchase.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 13:02.
Subject induces localized attentional decay in others.
Possible magnetic field? Unknown mechanism.
He should dismiss this.
He should attribute it to confirmation bias. He should—
The nausea returns, sharper, when the footage glitches.
Just one frame.
You are mid-step, head turned slightly, and for a single fraction of a second the image distorts.
Not static.
Compression artifact? No.
For that one frame, your outline is wrong.
Too many edges. Too much light.
He decides then.
He will test you.
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
Observation Log 06:48.
Something is wrong.
He cannot articulate it, not in words, not in equations.
There is no immediate threat, no deviation in protocol, no anomaly in environmental variables, yet the sensation pulses in his gut, in the subdiaphragmatic plexus, in the low vagal tone.
He is precise, controlled, rational—intuition is a last resort, an evolutionary artifact to be overridden by data.
And yet.
And yet.
You are in the mess hall, unremarkable in pose, posture slouched just enough to appear inattentive, hair a muted cascade against your shoulders.
Your gaze flits to the ceiling and back to the table in a manner that should suggest boredom, but the metrics betray otherwise: ocular saccades too precise, micro-corrections that would evade even high-speed eye-tracking cameras. Each blink conforms to the ultradian rhythm, yet there is a subtle tachyarrhythmic pattern overlaying it, a 0.23 Hz variance that is nonsignificant in isolation but accumulates statistically across repeated observations.
He catalogues every detail.
The first stage of testing is baseline.
Establish control.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 06:52.
Distance: 9.7 meters.
Observer physiological markers: basal metabolic rate 1.47x expected, catecholamine surge detectable in saliva residue, HRV decreased by 12 ms.
Subject posture: relaxed, left leg crossed over right, proximal musculature minimal activation, hands inert.
Eye-tracking analysis: gaze fixations on nontarget stimuli at 3.6 degrees deviation from expected scan path.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
His first theory to test: psychosomatic artifact.
Human brains are pattern-seeking, prone to pareidolia.
Perhaps his own mind is misfiring, projecting significance where none exists.
He tests this hypothesis by recalculating all previous anomaly data points: nothing else elicits this pattern.
His reactions to patients’ eviscerated bowels, to the decapitated lab rat, to hemorrhagic infarctions—none caused this visceral disruption.
Only you.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 07:04.
Hypothesis validity: nullified.
Pattern consistent across multiple distances, lighting conditions, temporal intervals.
Second theory: espionage or intelligence manipulation.
Standard, terrestrial, within the realm of human deception.
Implausible.
Your cover is seamless.
No comms detected. No residual electromagnetic emissions. You do not interface with any devices beyond standard lab apparatus. Behavioral fingerprinting shows zero leakage. No telemetrics, no microexpressive signatures consistent with trained observers.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 07:07.
Hypothesis validity: improbable.
Third theory: anomaly in species classification. Potentially nonhuman. Variable unknown. Previously unobserved phenotypic expression.
The data points are subtle: lack of olfactory secretion under stress, absence of thermal emission fluctuation during exertion, imperviousness to noxious stimuli previously recorded to elicit spinal reflex arcs.
He runs micro-scale tests without your knowledge: dropped scalpel behind you to test startle reflex.
No response.
Humidity sensors detect no perspiration. Ambient temperature unchanged by your body heat.
Ultrasonic emitter probes nearby: cochlear response measured via non-contact vibrometry.
Baseline.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 07:14.
Results suggest anomalous homeostasis regulation.
Reflex arc suppression detected.
Baseline intact under perturbation.
He writes equations in his notebook with the same detached precision he uses when mapping necrotic progression in brain tissue.
N(t) = ∑ [ΔE / Δt] * f(x), where ΔE is the error between expected human response and observed data.
N(t) increases exponentially in the presence of your proximity.
The function f(x) is unknown.
He must identify f(x).
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
Phase Two: provocation and challenge.
Observation Log 07:21.
Controlled environmental stressor applied.
Corridor lighting modulated, acoustic irregularities introduced, chemical irritant (mild capsaicin vapor) dispersed at 0.004% concentration—sub-threshold for occupational exposure limits, designed to trigger autonomic response without endangering civilians.
You do not react.
Pupilometry: no dilation beyond baseline 0.8 mm micro-oscillation.
Respiratory rate unchanged. Sweating absent.
Behavioral analysis: micro-adjustments in posture consistent with energy conservation, not avoidance.
He notes this with clinical fascination.
There is no redundancy in your biological systems.
No fail-safes are being triggered.
You are hyper-efficient at ignoring stimuli.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 09:33.
Anomaly persists. Human explanation insufficient.
Phase Three: direct confrontation test, carefully controlled.
He engineers a scenario.
Electrical short in lab hall. Sparks, minor smoke, alarms triggered. Panic in untrained personnel. Evacuation procedures initiated.
You remain stationary, arms crossed, observing.
Zandik notes absence of autonomic arousal: HRV remains 41 ms, alpha-beta brainwave ratios unchanged, cortisol level inferred via facial microvascular thermal mapping normal.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 10:01.
Result: subject impervious to acute environmental stress. Predictive modeling of human response fails.
He escalates incrementally. Collapse of shelving unit, precise placement calculated to strike where you are standing. Trajectory modeled to impact within 0.12 seconds.
You shift subtly. Beam falls where you were a heartbeat earlier. Bone fragments and splintered metal collide with floor. One technician impaled in lateral thigh. Femoral artery compromised. Blood ejected in rhythmic bursts.
You do not flinch.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 10:05.
Result: subject demonstrates preemptive spatial awareness. Probable extrapolation of temporal variables beyond human reaction latency.
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
Phase Four: internalized analysis.
He sits, observing from shadows, notebook open.
Microvascular analysis of your skin pigmentation, spectral absorption consistent with standard melanin indices, but thermal mapping inconsistent: basal surface temperature slightly elevated, subcutaneous temperature tightly regulated.
No measurable perspiration.
Heart rate minimal fluctuation despite repeated stressors.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
His hands tighten around the notebook. The itch to dissect, to understand, to categorize, has never been stronger.
He will continue.
He must.
Tomorrow, he will escalate.
Controlled pain exposure, micro-electrical interference, molecular-level chemical exposure.
He will push thresholds beyond normal human tolerance.
You will not fail.
You will respond.
And he will record.
Because the anomaly must be measured.
Because the anomaly must be dissected.
Because Zandik does not allow unknown variables to exist.
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
He wakes before the alarms.
Not because of discipline—discipline is for organisms that must fight entropy—but because his mind never truly disengages. Sleep is merely a low-power state, cortical activity throttled, subconscious threads still running simulations. When his eyes open, the conclusion is already there, fully formed, waiting to be articulated.
You are unacceptable.
Not morally. Morality is a social lubricant, a prosthetic for weak cognition. Unacceptable statistically.
An uncontrolled variable.
He remains still for thirty-seven seconds, allowing autonomic parameters to stabilize. Heart rate: 58 bpm. Cortisol baseline. No tremor. No hesitation.
The thought of you does not provoke confusion anymore; confusion has been metabolized into structure.
Into intent.
He does not hate you. Hatred requires emotional investment.
What he experiences is categorical pressure—the same impulse that drives him to excise a tumor before it metastasizes, or to amputate a limb when infection threatens systemic collapse.
The universe, as he understands it, is a closed system governed by knowable rules.
Unknowns are permissible only as temporary placeholders.
Anything that persists outside explanation is either undiscovered law or malignant noise.
You persist.
He dresses methodically, hands precise, movements efficient.
The mirror reflects a man whose expression is neutral to the point of sterility.
There is no disturbance in his face.
No madness.
Only calibration.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 05:59.
Internal state assessment: resolve stabilized.
Cognitive dissonance resolved via reclassification of subject.
Emotional interference: negligible.
The word predator would be inaccurate. Predators react. They chase. They hunger.
He curates.
In his taxonomy, living beings are not persons but systems—biochemical engines with varying degrees of complexity and utility. Most are inefficient. Many are redundant. Some are promising. All are subject to revision.
You are the first system he has encountered that resists passive integration into his models.
That alone mandates escalation.
He reviews the accumulated data as he walks. Not on a screen—screens are for storage, not synthesis—but internally, each observation stacked, weighted, cross-referenced.
You do not behave like prey.
You do not behave like a rival.
You do not behave like an observer.
You behave like a constant.
Constants are dangerous.
A variable can be isolated, stress-tested, bounded.
A constant that does not belong destabilizes entire equations.
It introduces error into projections that otherwise approach certainty.
And certainty is the only ethical state, as far as he is concerned.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
He arrives at the lab early.
The lower levels are quiet, antiseptic, humming softly with life-support systems and containment fields. He likes this hour. Fewer people.
Fewer stochastic elements.
He begins, not with you, but with a dissection.
Subject M-44. Failure of cortical integration following experimental augmentation. The body is still warm. He prefers it that way; postmortem changes introduce confounds.
He opens the thoracic cavity with a single, smooth incision. Skin parts. Subcutaneous fat yields. The sternum cracks under the saw, ribs retracting like a blooming carcass. The heart is exposed, still twitching faintly, fibrillating in terminal arrhythmia. He notes the hemorrhaging, the microtears in the myocardium, the acidotic discoloration.
He documents everything, voice recorder capturing his observations in a flat, almost bored tone.
This is control.
Every structure here obeys expectation.
Every failure has a cause.
Every deviation is traceable.
He opens the skull next. Cerebrospinal fluid spills, clear and tinged with blood. The brain is edematous, gyri flattened, sulci effaced. He slides gloved fingers into the tissue, palpating, mapping damage by touch.
This calms him.
And then, uninvited, the thought intrudes:
If this were you, what would he find?
Would there be a brain at all?
Or something else wearing the shape of one?
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 06:41.
Intrusive comparative ideation detected.
Not emotional. Analytical.
He finishes the dissection and orders the remains incinerated. Waste disposed of. Data archived. He washes his hands longer than necessary, watching diluted blood spiral down the drain.
He thinks of how unacceptable you are.
No system should respond without input.
No outcome should occur without mechanism.
You violate that axiom.
As a scientist, he is obligated to understand you.
As a planner, he is obligated to neutralize uncertainty.
As something deeper—something he does not bother naming—he is obligated to possess the knowledge you represent.
Not to own you.
Ownership implies maintenance.
To reduce you.
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
He spots you mid-morning.
You are seated near the outer courtyard, sunlight cutting across concrete in hard geometric lines. You occupy one of them without seeming to register its warmth. Your posture is loose, careless, almost disrespectful to gravity. You scroll idly through nothing in particular, attention diffused.
From a distance, you look empty.
That emptiness is a disguise so perfect it borders on obscene.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 09:12.
Subject appears inert.
No overt activity. No engagement.
Environmental integration seamless.
He does not approach.
Approaching would be premature.
Predation is not pursuit; it is enclosure.
He studies the way people orbit you without noticing.
How conversations thin out near your proximity, as if meaning itself decays in your wake. How security cameras occasionally skip frames when you pass beneath them—not consistently, not enough to trigger alarms, just enough to introduce plausible deniability.
You are not hiding.
You are being ignored by the universe.
That is worse.
His mind constructs branching futures automatically.
In some, you are a threat vector left unchecked.
In others, you are neutralized too late, damage already propagated.
In a few, you are successfully contained, studied, repurposed.
Only one branch has zero deviation.
Containment.
Containment does not imply immediate violence.
Violence is crude. Violence destroys data.
He prefers stratified reduction—peeling away layers of freedom, opportunity, and agency until a system cannot meaningfully deviate even if it wanted to.
He has done this to nations.
A single woman will be trivial.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
He returns to his office and begins formalizing the thesis he has already accepted.
Thesis: Subject exhibits properties inconsistent with known biological, technological, or intercorrelated systems. Subject represents a singular anomaly with potential to disrupt predictive models at macro and micro scales. Therefore, subject must be fully characterized or eliminated.
Characterization requires stress.
Stress requires leverage.
Leverage requires proximity, dependence, isolation.
He smiles faintly as he writes.
You are alone in ways you do not even perceive.
He reviews your file—not the official one, which is aggressively bland, but the shadow dossier he has assembled.
No family. No persistent attachments.
Minimal social footprint.
No discernible ambition. No fear responses.
No anchors.
That makes you easier.
Or more dangerous.
He schedules a new series of tests.
Psychological first.
Not interrogations—those rely on the assumption of a mind that values truth or self-preservation. He designs scenarios instead. Moral dilemmas with no visible stakes. Social manipulations designed to elicit preference hierarchies.
He wants to know what you prioritize when you think no one is watching.
Because everyone prioritizes something.
Even gods, if they exist.
Especially gods.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
The first test is subtle.
A child—engineered, not real, but biologically indistinguishable—is introduced into your path. Crying. Injured. Compound fracture of the radius, bone protruding, blood pooling on the floor.
The pain is authentic. The distress is real enough.
Hidden cameras. Biometric sensors. He watches from three rooms away, pulse steady.
You stop.
You kneel.
Your face does not change.
But something in the air does.
He cannot measure it.
He hates that.
But he sees the result: the child’s screaming cuts off mid-breath, not because of unconsciousness, but because the pain ceases.
Muscles relax. Shock abates. Bone retracts, skin knitting seamlessly, no scar, no inflammation.
Miracle.
Disgusting word.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 11:03.
Result: Subject intervenes.
Selective activation.
Criteria unknown.
Emotional affect remains flat.
So you do care.
You just do not advertise it.
That, more than anything else, irritates him.
Compassion without signaling.
Power without assertion.
Restraint without fear.
You are an ethical black box, and black boxes make him intrigued.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
He escalates.
The next test removes ambiguity.
Later that day, a lab assistant is falsely accused of sabotage. Evidence fabricated, airtight. Security moves in. The assistant panics, protests innocence.
He is scheduled for “disciplinary processing”—a euphemism for termination and organ harvesting.
You are present.
This time, you do nothing.
You watch.
Your eyes are dull, unfocused. Your posture slack.
The assistant is dragged away, screaming, begging anyone to intervene.
You do not.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 15:47.
Result: No intervention. Subject does not act when outcome does not meet internal criteria.
Good.
That means you are not uncontrollable.
You have rules.
Rules can be mapped.
Rules can be broken.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
As evening falls, he stands alone in the observation chamber, lights dimmed, glass walls reflecting his own silhouette back at him.
He thinks of the future as a surgical field—sterile, ordered, every incision planned.
You will be brought closer.
Gradually.
Your routines narrowed.
Your choices constrained until only one path remains—the one he designed.
He will introduce pain next.
Not crude pain.
Existential pain.
Loss without explanation.
Scenarios where intervention creates worse outcomes.
Where restraint costs lives.
He will watch which outcome you tolerate.
And when he understands you—when your internal logic is fully mapped—he will decide.
Study.
Neutralize.
Or disassemble.
He feels no doubt.
Doubt is a symptom of incomplete information, and incomplete information is a temporary condition.
You look up at the sky somewhere above him, expression empty, as if nothing in this world concerns you.
He finds that intolerable.
Not because you are powerful.
But because you exist beyond his certainty.
And that, to him, is the only true crime.
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
You touch him first.
That alone is data.
Observation Log 06:11.
Subject initiated physical contact without provocation.
Contact type: non-sexual, non-defensive. Palm to forearm.
Duration: 2.4 seconds.
Your fingers are warm. Not trembling. Pressure light, calibrated, as if you are testing a surface rather than seeking reassurance. There is no hesitation in the movement, no micro-flinch before contact.
Most people betray themselves in the half-second before touching something they value. You do not.
Zandik allows it.
Not because he welcomes it—welcoming implies desire—but because refusal would contaminate the sample. He continues reviewing a datapad as if you are incidental, his arm a piece of furniture you happened to rest against.
Internally, he is dissecting the moment with surgical clarity.
Physical affection typically produces measurable autonomic responses. Oxytocin release. Parasympathetic activation. Microvasodilation. Increased skin conductance.
Even in individuals trained to suppress emotion, the body betrays compliance.
Your body does not.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 06:12.
Subject physiological response to initiated affection: null.
Heart rate unchanged. Respiratory rhythm unchanged. Muscle tone unchanged. No microvascular dilation at contact site.
This is not repression.
Repression leaks.
This is absence.
You lean closer, head tilting slightly, cheek brushing his shoulder. The gesture is intimate by any conventional metric. He feels the warmth of your body through fabric, the faint pressure of bone and muscle aligned with his own.
He insults you without looking up.
“You’re in the way,” he says calmly. “Do try to remember you’re not furniture.”
The words are barbed, designed to provoke a response—defensiveness, withdrawal, irritation.
He has refined insult into a scalpel over decades.
You hum softly.
Not sarcastic. Not hurt.
Just a sound, absent-minded, as if your mind has wandered somewhere else entirely.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 06:13.
Insult stimulus applied.
Expected response: emotional perturbation.
Actual response: none.
That irritates him.
Not in the childish sense. Irritation, for him, is the cognitive recognition of inefficiency.
A tool failing to produce expected output.
You slide your hand up his arm, fingers briefly brushing the inside of his elbow, a region rich in mechanoreceptors, sensitive in most humans. He notes the exact contact points automatically, mapping them to dermatomes.
Still nothing.
Your face remains neutral, eyes unfocused, gaze drifting past him to some internal horizon. You look affectionate in posture, in proximity, in habit—
But not in substance.
Affection without attachment.
Love without anchoring.
That is not human.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 06:15.
Subject displays affiliative behaviors incongruent with internal physiological state.
Hypothesis: extreme dissociative proficiency.
He has seen dissociation before. Soldiers. Abuse victims. Experimental failures whose minds fragmented under stress. Dissociation is messy. It produces lag, distortion, autonomic noise.
You are clean.
Too clean.
He turns then, slowly, deliberately, forcing you to meet his gaze.
His eyes are sharp, invasive, calibrated to destabilize. Most people feel flayed under his attention.
“You know,” he says conversationally, “people usually touch others because they want something. Comfort. Validation. Control. Which is it for you?”
Your eyes meet his.
There is nothing there.
Not emptiness—emptiness would echo. This is sealed. Vacuum-tight.
A system closed so perfectly, even you do not appear to have access to its interior.
You smile faintly.
Not defensive.
Not pleased.
“I just like you,” you say.
The statement is absurd.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 06:16.
Verbal output detected. Content inconsistent with observed internal state. Potential delusion or abstract categorization error.
Like.
He repeats the word internally, testing its shape.
Liking implies preference. Preference implies valuation. Valuation implies hierarchy. Hierarchy implies vulnerability.
He needs to locate it.
He permits the contact to continue as you walk with him down the corridor, your arm looped loosely through his, steps matching his pace without effort. The synchronization is perfect, as if you are not reacting to him but predicting him.
He catalogs everything.
Your grip never tightens. Never loosens. Even when he abruptly changes direction, you adjust seamlessly, no stumble, no surprise. It is as if your body is running a parallel simulation of his movements.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 06:24.
Subject anticipatory motor alignment detected. Reaction latency below human norm.
He escalates.
Verbal provocation next. He discusses his work aloud—intentionally graphic details, chosen for emotional impact.
“Yesterday’s subject begged,” he says lightly. “Screamed, actually. The vocal cords rupture faster than most people realize. Blood aspirated into the lungs. Fascinating sound, drowning from the inside.”
You rest your head against his shoulder.
Your breathing remains slow.
Even. Calm.
Observation Log 06:25.
Exposure to gore narrative: no distress response.
He turns up the dial.
“I removed the eyes while he was still conscious,” he continues. “The optic nerve makes a wet sound when severed. Like pulling a root vegetable from soil.”
You nod, absent-minded, as if he’s discussing the weather.
Your fingers trace idle patterns against his sleeve.
No withdrawal.
No anger.
No moral objection.
Not even performative.
That is what unsettles him.
Most people who disassociate still flinch at the idea of cruelty. Even if they detach emotionally, the body remembers. You do not.
Or you refuse to let it.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 06:27.
Subject moral response: indeterminate. Possible selective dissociation.
You reach his office. He sits. You perch on the edge of his desk uninvited, legs swinging slightly, dangerously close to instruments that could flay you to the bone in seconds.
He lets you.
Control is not about constant assertion. It is about certainty of outcome.
He leans back, steepling his fingers, eyes never leaving your face.
“You’re very affectionate for someone who doesn’t care,” he says. “It’s almost impressive.”
You tilt your head.
“I care,” you reply mildly.
Delusion.
That is the word that crystallizes in his mind, sharp and satisfying.
Not madness.
Delusion.
A fixed belief unsupported by internal evidence.
You are both brilliant and delusional.
That combination is rare.
Dangerous. Infuriating.
You believe you care.
You believe you are here.
You believe your affection means something.
It does not—at least not in the way you think.
He stands, stepping close enough that your knees brush his coat. He grips your chin, not roughly, but with absolute certainty, fingers positioning your face exactly where he wants it.
Your pupils do not dilate.
“You’re very good at pretending you’re intact,” he says softly. “So good I suspect you’ve convinced yourself.”
You look at him, calm, distant, affectionate even now.
“You’re not pretending at all,” you reply.
The statement is incorrect.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 07:06.
Subject projection detected.
He releases you and steps back, mind racing—not chaotically, but expansively. New pathways opening. New plans forming.
Your heart is not frozen.
It is sealed.
Cryogenically preserved behind layers of dissociation so advanced it borders on art. You have compartmentalized yourself so completely that even you cannot access the core.
Which means—
It can be accessed.
With the right tools.
With enough pressure.
With sufficient time.
He feels something close to satisfaction then, thin and sharp.
You lean forward and press a brief kiss to his cheek.
Chaste. Casual. Almost careless.
Again, no physiological response.
Again, no attachment.
Again, affection without consequence.
He does not stop you.
He does not need to.
Because now he knows.
You are not unfeeling.
You are unavailable.
And unavailability is not a defense.
It is a challenge.
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
You climb onto his desk without asking.
Not abruptly.
Not provocatively.
With the same casual inevitability one might display when sitting beside a familiar animal. Your weight settles on the reinforced surface between a tray of surgical instruments and a stack of reports detailing necrotic failure in cloned myocardium. Your heel knocks lightly against a bone saw.
You do not notice.
Or you notice and do not care.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 06:08.
Subject initiated proximity breach.
Distance reduced to <0.3 meters.
Contact imminent.
Zandik does nothing to stop you.
He has long since learned that intervention skews results.
He allows phenomena to unfold until their internal logic reveals itself.
Control is not constant interference; it is certainty of outcome regardless of interference.
Your fingers reach out and tug idly at the edge of his coat sleeve. Not seeking attention. Not seeking reassurance.
Just tactile curiosity. Texture sampling.
As if he were fabric, fur, something meant to be touched and released.
You lean over his shoulder to peer at the screen he’s reviewing, chin nearly brushing his clavicle.
“Your handwriting is still atrocious,” you remark, voice flat, mildly amused.
He exhales slowly through his nose.
“You’re obstructing my work,” he replies, tone precise, edged. “Again.”
You hum, pleased, and rest your head briefly against his shoulder anyway.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 06:09.
Subject displays affiliative tactile behavior: head contact, shoulder pressure. Pressure light.
Duration: 3.1 seconds. No physiological synchronization detected.
He feels it—the warmth, the weight—but nothing else. No spike. No reflex.
The absence itself has become familiar.
What interests him is not what your touch does to him.
It is what it does not do to you.
Your heart rate remains steady. Your breathing does not change. Your musculature remains relaxed. No microtension. No anticipatory recoil.
This is not comfort-seeking.
This is play.
You treat him the way one treats a novelty object.
A mechanical toy.
A peculiar animal that makes interesting noises when provoked.
He knows this.
He knows exactly what you see when you look at him.
Not a man.
Not even a monster.
A thing.
A strange, fascinating, mildly dangerous thing that exists for interaction.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 06:12.
Subject categorization of observer likely non-anthropocentric.
You slide off the desk and circle him, fingers trailing briefly across his back, then his shoulder, then the nape of his neck. Each contact is fleeting, exploratory, utterly devoid of ownership.
A child might treat a cat this way.
Or a scientist, an unfamiliar specimen.
“You’re warm today,” you note absently. “Did you sleep?”
“Sleep is inefficient,” he answers. “So is touching.”
You grin faintly and poke his cheek with one finger.
“Still squishy.”
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 06:14.
Verbal provocation by subject.
Intended affect: playful. No malice detected.
Squishy.
The word irritates him, not for its insult but for its implication.
He is not solid to you. Not fixed. He is something malleable, safe to prod, incapable of retaliatory harm in your internal model.
That is incorrect.
And yet.
He allows it.
You move behind him and drape yourself over the back of his chair, arms looping loosely around his shoulders, chin resting atop his head. Your fingers comb idly through his hair, slow, repetitive, soothing motions utterly misaligned with the violence of the environment.
Behind you, a containment tank gurgles softly. Inside, a failed hybrid convulses, organs sloughing into necrotic slurry as its immune system cannibalizes itself. The smell of decay hangs faintly in the air.
You do not notice.
Or you notice and it registers as background noise.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 06:17.
Subject maintains affiliative contact in proximity to extreme morbidity. Affective dissonance persists.
He reaches up and grips your wrist, not hard, just enough to halt the motion.
“Stop that,” he says flatly.
You pause. Look down at him. Tilt your head.
“No,” you reply, tone mild.
He tightens his grip by exactly 4 newtons. Enough to bruise a normal human. Enough to register as pain.
Your pulse does not change.
You look at his hand with vague curiosity, as if observing an experiment.
“That’s rude,” you say. “Use your words.”
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 06:18.
Pain stimulus ineffective. Subject exhibits boundary negotiation without emotional response.
He releases you.
Because escalation here would yield nothing.
Because you are not defying him—you are simply operating under a different internal framework.
You slide back around to face him, plopping onto the arm of his chair, legs tucked beneath you. You peer at him openly now, eyes unfocused yet intent in their own peculiar way.
“You’re fun,” you declare.
Fun.
Another measurable metric, for you.
Dopaminergic reward without attachment. Stimulation without bonding. He has seen this pattern in advanced dissociative profiles—individuals who reduce interpersonal interaction to sensory or cognitive amusement.
But never this clean.
Never this absolute.
“You dissect people,” you continue conversationally. “That’s interesting.”
“I improve them,” he corrects.
You wrinkle your nose.
“No, you break them,” you say. No judgment. Just classification. “But it’s still interesting.”
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
The day begins with data integrity checks.
Zandik does not wake so much as resume. Consciousness is a continuous process, interrupted only by power states, pharmacological throttling, or deliberate partitioning. The body opens its eyes because it has been instructed to do so at a precise circadian marker calibrated weeks prior. The mind has been running all night.
You are already present in the system.
Not physically—there is no need for that. Your presence persists as a variable cluster that refuses to collapse into noise. Most people decay into predictable averages after sufficient exposure.
Their behaviors converge. Their outliers flatten.
You do not.
That is the first anomaly.
He sits upright, spine straight, pulse steady at fifty-eight beats per minute. No cortisol spike. No adrenaline.
The thought of you does not trigger threat responses in the mammalian sense. It triggers computation. He reviews the conclusion again, not because it is uncertain, but because it is unacceptable to leave any inference untested.
You are capable of killing him.
Not emotionally. Not impulsively. Not vindictively.
Those vectors have been ruled out with high confidence. You lack the emotional turbulence required for crimes of passion.
Your affect is too flat, too sparse. The limbic markers simply are not there.
Which leaves function.
Killing as labor. As obligation. As an act no more personal than suturing a wound or terminating a failed experiment.
This is the conclusion that persists.
He reached it through cleanliness.
Not moral cleanliness—he does not believe in such fiction—but procedural cleanliness.
Your movements are economical. When you intervene, there is no excess. No wasted force. No indulgence. Violence, when required, is administered with surgical efficiency. Structures fail where they are supposed to. Systems collapse without collateral chaos. It is not brutality.
It is precision.
Artistic, in the same way a perfectly executed incision is artistic.
He has seen you dismantle threats without visible effort, without adrenaline dilation, without joy. The absence of affect is what makes it obscene. Most killers betray themselves in microexpressions, in tremors, in post-action physiological fallout.
You exhibit none.
You disengage.
Complete dissociation, but not fragmentation.
You remain whole.
That is the difference.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Zandik catalogued this weeks ago, under Hypothesis Cluster C: Non-Emotive High-Capacity Operative.
At the time, the probability estimate was conservative. It has since been revised upward repeatedly.
You are not cruel. Cruelty requires intent. You are kind, but your kindness is not sentimental. It is systemic.
You do not save individuals because you love them.
You save because the equation demands it. Loss beyond threshold destabilizes the system. You correct for that.
This is why he finds you dangerous.
He is rational. Entirely. He does not anthropomorphize risk. He does not flinch from numbers. When a variable demonstrates the theoretical capacity to negate him, even at low probability, it must be addressed.
You have never threatened him. You have never implied harm. You have never even conceptualized him as an enemy.
Which is precisely the problem.
You treat him as an object of interest.
A curiosity.
A strange animal that talks back.
A stuffed thing with sharp edges that you poke to see what happens.
You touch him like that.
It is not sexual. Not possessive. Not even particularly affectionate by human standards.
It is exploratory.
You lean against him without warning, weight distributed improperly, as if balance is optional. You rest your head against his shoulder while reading nothing, eyes unfocused, mind elsewhere. Your fingers idly trace the seams of his gloves, the edge of a scalpel handle, the stitching on his coat, as if texture is more relevant than meaning.
Once, you pressed your cold fingertips against the side of his neck simply to feel his pulse.
You frowned when it was steady.
“Boring,” you said, flatly.
He noted the reaction.
Not disappointment.
Not relief.
Curiosity unmet.
You sit too close. You drape yourself over furniture that is not yours. You invade personal space without acknowledging that such a concept exists. You tug at his sleeves when you are bored. You steal instruments from his hands and return them minutes later, cleaned, aligned, improved.
You argue. Constantly.
The arguments are vicious in content and meticulous in structure. You dismantle his premises not with emotion, but with lateral logic. You challenge his assumptions. You accuse him of inefficiency. He retaliates by exposing blind spots in your ethical frameworks. Voices rise. Language sharpens. Insults are exchanged like surgical tools.
And then, invariably, you listen.
You listen in a way most people cannot. You do not wait for your turn. You absorb. You adjust. He does the same. The argument ends not in victory, but in convergence.
It is obscene how well it works.
He has dissected hundreds of minds. Yours resists dissection because there is nothing loose to cut away. No hysteria. No trauma patterns obvious enough to exploit.
The dissociation is not defensive—it is structural.
You exist at a remove from yourself.
As if you are not entirely here.
This is not delusion.
It is observation.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
He watched you once during a triage event. Mass casualties. Structural collapse. Blood loss severe but not described here in excess—only noted: hypovolemic shock, compound fractures, organ compromise. Chaos. Noise.
You moved through it like a ghost.
Your face did not change. Your hands did not shake. You prioritized with ruthless accuracy. Those beyond salvage were bypassed without hesitation. Those within margin were stabilized with brutal speed. When someone screamed at you, begged, you did not respond.
You did not need to.
Your decisions were correct.
Afterward, when the work was done, you sat on the floor, back against a wall, and poked at a dried smear on your sleeve with faint interest.
“Messy,” you said.
No remorse. No pride. Just observation.
Zandik understood then.
If a directive were issued—externally, internally, metaphysically—it would not matter who the target was.
Including him.
Not because you hate him.
Because duty overrides preference.
This is where you diverge completely.
He is ambition. He is will. He is desire sharpened into methodology. Every action he takes is in service of an outcome he has chosen. He would burn worlds to reach it, and he would enjoy the efficiency.
You would end worlds if required, and feel nothing about the act itself.
Your morality is alien.
It is not good.
It is not evil.
It is function-bound.
That makes you fascinating.
And unacceptable.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
He has begun contingency planning.
Not crude assassination vectors. Those would fail.
You are too adaptable. Too clean. Any attempt to remove you directly would escalate unpredictably.
Containment, then.
Social integration is already in place.
You tolerate him. More than that—you orbit him. You seek him out when bored. You treat him as a constant, a fixed object in an otherwise fluid reality. This is leverage, though he does not mistake it for control.
Psychological anchoring may work temporarily. He allows your touch. He allows the proximity.
He allows the illusion of safety because it lowers your guard, not his.
Pharmacological suppression is unlikely to succeed long-term.
Your physiology is… resilient. Aberrantly so. He has observed recovery rates that defy standard models. This has been logged under Anomaly Subset A, pending further invasive study.
Environmental constraints are more promising.
You dislike confinement, but you do not panic.
You simply leave.
Any containment field must therefore be conceptual rather than physical—responsibility, duty, self-imposed restriction.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Ironically, the same mechanism that makes you dangerous may be the only thing that restrains you.
Duty.
He must never become your duty.
As long as he remains entertainment, curiosity, an object to poke and argue with, he is permissible.
The moment you classify him as a problem to be solved, the outcome becomes statistically grim.
He considers the irony with something like amusement.
Of all the monsters he has known himself to be, you are the only one who could end him without ever meaning to.
And you are currently sitting on his worktable, swinging your legs, humming tunelessly, fingers stained with antiseptic, asking him why his handwriting is so ugly.
He adjusts his gloves.
Observation continues.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Observation Log 08:02.
Subject seeks stimulation, not validation.
Extreme dissociation, yes—but controlled. Voluntary.
You step out of reality the way he steps into a lab coat.
He realizes something then, with unsettling clarity.
You do not view anyone here as people.
Not him.
Not his victims.
Not even yourself.
You view them as roles.
Variables.
Objects in a system governed by rules you did not choose but obey absolutely.
And yet your rules oppose his.
Where he values control, you value duty.
Where he values knowledge, you value outcome.
Where he would sacrifice the world to understand it, you would destroy him if it preserved something greater.
Complete opposites.
Perfect mirrors.
No wonder you find him fascinating.
No wonder he cannot look away.
You glance up at him suddenly, as if sensing his thoughts, and smile.
“You’re thinking too loud again.”
He scoffs.
“You’re projecting.”
“Maybe,” you say. “Or maybe you’re just bad at hiding.”
You reach up and tug lightly at his glove, playful, familiar, utterly unafraid.
He lets you.
Because for now, you are predictable.
Because for now, you are contained.
Because for now, the anomaly chooses to stay.
But he knows.
The day you decide it is your duty to end him, you will do so without hesitation.
And the fact that he finds that… acceptable…
…is perhaps the most disturbing data point of all.
𝐆𝐨𝐝'𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭 