𝐆𝐨𝐝'𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭

♡ Angel Autopsy (Yandere! Il Dottore x Reader).

♡ Word Count. 7,571 words

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You learned early that home is a dangerous word. It sneaks up on you like an unpaid bill or a relative who wants to “talk.”

So you stopped using it.

You replaced it with safer, more flexible terms. Temporary base. Spawn point. That place where my toothbrush is currently held hostage. None of these expect loyalty from you. None of them promise warmth and then invoice your soul for it.

People love asking about home. It’s one of those socially approved ambush questions, like “What do you do?” or “Why don’t you smile more?” You answer it the same way you answer everything: with impeccable politeness and absolutely zero emotional yield.

“Oh, I move around,” you say cheerfully, which is technically true and morally evasive, the best kind of truth.

Your face, meanwhile, remains neutral. Not sad. Not happy. Just… economically expressive. You save facial expressions the way rich people save vintage wine—only for special occasions, like when someone trips dramatically or Zandik says something so catastrophically unhinged that it circles back to impressive.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

Zandik is very easy to tease.

He reacts to humor the way a cat reacts to a vacuum cleaner: offended, suspicious, and deeply insulted by the implication that this nonsense deserves to exist near him.

You like that about him.

“Good morning,” you say once, passing by his worktable stacked with horrors that violate at least three moral philosophies and one Geneva Convention footnote.

“It is statistically neutral,” he replies without looking up.

“Wow,” you say. “You’re really leaning into joy today.”

He pauses. Very slowly, he looks at you. His eyes narrow with surgical precision.

“Do you require something,” he asks, “or are you merely emitting sound for recreational purposes?”

“Oh, purely recreational,” you say. “Doctor says it’s good for my health.”

Zandik did not believe in doctors unless they are himself.

You wander off humming, leaving behind a man who will spend the next twelve minutes wondering why your presence feels like an unsolved equation lodged under his skull.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

You do this to everyone.

You drift.

You joke.

You make people laugh without ever letting them hold the knife close enough to notice where it could hurt you.

You are very good at being harmless.

Harmless people, you’ve noticed, are rarely interrogated.

You are kind in small, almost invisible ways.

You refill someone’s tea before they notice it’s empty. You remember names that others forget.

You listen—actually listen—without waiting for your turn to speak, which is apparently so rare it unsettles people.

They say things like, “You’re so easygoing,” or “You’re weirdly calm,” or “Nothing ever bothers you, huh?”

You smile.

A polite one.

A public-use smile.

Inside, something ancient and soft folds its wings tighter and says nothing.

You do not correct them.

Correction implies investment, and investment implies hope, and hope is a risky asset with volatile returns.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

Home, to most people, is where they were taught how to exist.

For you, it was where existence came with terms and conditions written in very small print.

You learned to read that print before you learned multiplication.

The rules were simple: be excellent, be quiet, be grateful.

Affection was a performance metric.

Approval was renewable but never guaranteed.

Love came with quarterly evaluations and the lingering sense that it could be revoked for inefficiency.

You became efficient.

You learned how to disappear without physically leaving a room. You learned how to nod at the correct intervals.

You learned that emotions, like luxury items, should be admired from a distance and never touched without permission.

So when people talk about missing home, you nod along thoughtfully, like someone who understands nostalgia rather than someone who escaped a burning building and decided never to look back.

You are not homeless.

You are home-optional.

This distinction matters.

You build homes out of moments instead.

A chair by a window. A shared joke that lands just right. A late-night conversation where no one demands anything of you except honesty, and even that is optional.

You are generous with yourself in ways no one taught you to be.

Zandik once asks, very clinically, “Why do you not exhibit attachment behaviors?”

You consider this.

“Well,” you say, “I tried once, but the return policy was terrible.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It’s the best answer,” you say. “It comes with humor.”

He stares at you like you’re a particularly baffling specimen. You grin wider.

“Relax,” you add. “I’m deeply attached. To snacks. And naps. And leaving rooms without saying goodbye.”

He makes a sound that might be irritation or might be the intellectual equivalent of indigestion.

You like him because he doesn’t pretend to be good.

He doesn’t sugarcoat his cruelty with excuses.

He is honest in the way a scalpel is honest.

You, meanwhile, are honest in the way a bandage is honest—covering wounds without asking how they got there.

You joke about being “raised by capitalism” or “emotionally adopted by books and the concept of silence.”

People laugh. They always laugh.

Laughter is a marvelous anesthetic. It dulls questions. It smooths over the sharp edges of truth until it becomes socially digestible.

You wield humor like a shield and a mirror at the same time.

Everyone sees themselves reflected, never you.

At night, when the world goes quiet enough to stop demanding performances, you sit alone and feel something old and heavy settle into your chest.

Not grief. Not anger.

Just understanding.

Understanding that some people are born with homes like hearths, warm and constant.

Others are born with houses that teach them how to leave.

You do not hate your past.

Hate requires passion. You have already metabolized it into wisdom, which is much less dramatic and far more exhausting.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

You believe, privately, that suffering does not automatically make people better.

It just makes them more themselves.

And yourself happens to be kind.

Not loudly kind. Not performatively kind.

Quietly.

Persistently.

The way gravity is kind—holding everything together without applause.

You do not judge.

Judgment requires certainty, and certainty is suspicious.

You have seen how confident cruelty can be.

So you choose gentleness instead, even when it costs you.

Especially when it costs you.

People mistake this for weakness.

You let them.

Weakness, after all, is a useful disguise.

Zandik never mistakes it.

He watches you the way a scientist watches an anomaly that refuses to be explained by existing models. You do not fit. You do not optimize. You do not seek control.

And yet, when things collapse, people gravitate toward you instinctively, like moths to a calm, steady light.

It annoys him.

“You are inefficient,” he tells you once.

“Thank you,” you reply. “I’ve been working on that.”

“You waste resources on others.”

“Community outreach,” you say. “Very trendy.”

“You gain nothing.”

You shrug. “I gain practice.”

“In what?”

“Being human,” you say lightly, like it’s a joke.

It is not a joke.

It is the quietest kind of vow.

You do not need a home to know where you belong.

You belong wherever someone is hurting and doesn’t want to be alone with it.

You belong in the spaces between certainty and despair, where jokes soften the fall and kindness asks for nothing back.

You belong nowhere and everywhere, which is a terrifying amount of freedom.

Sometimes, you wonder what it would have been like to grow up without learning how to leave.

Then you wonder who you would have been without learning how to stay anyway.

You decide you like this version of you.

The one who smiles easily and bleeds quietly.

The one who loves without ownership.

The one who can sit in a room full of monsters and still offer them tea.

Home, you think, is overrated.

You are doing just fine without one.

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

You are also very good at not fixing things.

This is misunderstood as apathy, which is hilarious, because if apathy were your problem, the planet would already be a smoking crater and you’d be reorganizing the stars by efficiency.

People assume restraint means weakness.

This is because most people have never had to actively choose not to end a problem at its root.

They prefer solutions that come with applause and moral fanfare.

You prefer solutions that don’t involve deleting the species.

You call this compromise. Others call it abandonment. Everyone is wrong.

You are kind of like a judge, but you don’t wear the wig.

You do not bang the gavel. You sit quietly in the back, arms crossed, watching humanity present its case like a toddler holding a crayon drawing on fire yelling, “FIX IT.”

You sip your drink.

You have been asked—indirectly, loudly, constantly—to intervene.

Why don’t you stop the wars?
Why don’t you expose the corrupt?
Why don’t you fix the system?
Why don’t you do something?

You are doing something.

You are not committing genocide.

This is, statistically speaking, very merciful of you.

You learned early that justice without wisdom is just vandalism with a halo. People want lightning bolts. They want villains neatly labeled and smote. They want evil externalized so they can boo it from the safety of their moral bleachers.

They never want to check the mirror.

You checked it once.

You did not enjoy the experience. You did, however, take notes.

You stay out of public involvement because public justice is theater. It demands villains with bad posture and heroes with good PR.

Reality, unfortunately, is messier.

Reality is everyone insisting they’re right while standing ankle-deep in the consequences of their own choices.

You know this because you can see the pattern.

You always see the pattern.

Cause, effect.

Seed, harvest.

Action, echo.

People cry out for judgment the way they cry out for rain—forgetting floods are included in the package.

You do not judge loudly because you understand the cost.

You also understand the math.

To eliminate all evil, you would have to eliminate the source.

Humans.

This is where you pause.

You are extremely rational. You have run the numbers. You have simulated the outcomes. You know exactly how clean it would be.

One decisive act.

Silence afterward.

No more cruelty. No more hypocrisy. No more children inheriting trauma like heirlooms.

You could do it before lunch.

This is why you do nothing.

Because the moment you decide you are exempt from mercy, you become the very thing people beg you to destroy—just with better aesthetics.

You learned this not from philosophers, but from observation. From watching good intentions rot under certainty. From watching people justify horrors because they believed themselves righteous.

You once heard someone say, “If I were in charge, I’d fix everything.”

You nearly laughed yourself unconscious.

You are kind, but your kindness is not sentimental. It is disciplined. It is the kind that understands grief does not entitle you to power.

You are patient because impatience kills innocents first.

You are silent because noise confuses vengeance for justice.

People mistake your distance for coldness.

You let them.

Cold things preserve. Hot things burn.

You walk through life looking mildly bored, like someone waiting for a delayed train. Inside, you are holding the weight of centuries like a grocery bag cutting into your fingers, refusing to drop it because it would spill everywhere.

You believe in accountability, but not spectacle.

You believe consequences are sacred.

You believe suffering is not proof of meaning—but endurance can be.

These beliefs are unpopular.

You are told—often—that compassion requires action.

Immediate, visible, loud action. Preferably with a dramatic soundtrack.

You disagree.

You believe compassion sometimes looks like restraint. Like letting people face the echo of their own voices so they might finally recognize themselves.

You do not rush to fix systems because systems are mirrors. You break the mirror, people keep the face.

You do not expose everyone because exposure without repentance just teaches people how to hide better.

You do not intervene publicly because public salvation creates private rot.

You learned this watching prophets mocked, kings humbled, and the innocent blamed for existing in the wrong narrative. You learned it watching the most righteous suffer not because they were wrong, but because they refused to play the game. You learned it watching the world demand answers from the quiet while ignoring the loud liars.

People want you to be God on demand.

Justice vending machine.

Insert prayer, receive miracle.

They do not want wisdom.

Wisdom takes time and makes everyone uncomfortable.

They want solutions that do not implicate them.

You are very bad at that.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

Zandik once tells you—casually, clinically—that morality is inefficient and mercy is a flaw in system design.

You nod.

“Correct,” you say. “That’s why it’s optional.”

He looks at you, irritated.

He never liked it when you agree too easily.

“If you possess power,” he continues, “and do not use it to impose order, you are complicit in chaos.”

You smile faintly. “If you impose order without understanding hearts, you just reorganize the chaos alphabetically.”

He does not laugh. You didn’t expect him to.

You understand him.

That’s the problem.

You understand exactly how easy it would be to become him.

You understand how pain sharpens logic until empathy looks like a bug to be patched out.

You refuse the patch. You stay out of things because you know the difference between justice and revenge wearing a tie.

You know that some evils are not solved by force but by exposure to time. That some hearts only crack when they are left alone with their own emptiness.

You know that if you stepped in every time someone suffered, humanity would never grow past spiritual infancy. They would outsource conscience the way they outsource responsibility.

You are not here to be a crutch.

You are here to be a witness.

This makes people uncomfortable.

You walk the narrow middle path, where both sides hate you for not choosing extremes.

You are accused of indifference by the wounded and tyranny by the cruel.

This means you’re probably doing it right.

You do not fix the world because the world is not a machine.

You do not smite because judgment without mercy creates deserts.

You do not announce yourself because revelation is not always rescue.

You sit quietly, helping where you can, laughing at the absurdity, offering kindness like it’s no big deal, because if you made it sacred people would try to monetize it.

You stay human on purpose.

Because if you stopped, even for a second, the Judge would stand up.

And the Judge, unlike you, does not joke.

The Judge does not tease or smile or refill cups.

The Judge looks at humanity, weighs it honestly, and reaches the same conclusion every tyrant reaches—this would be easier if they were gone.

You keep the Judge seated.

You tell the Judge, Not yet.

You tell the Judge, Let them choose.

You tell the Judge, Mercy first. Always mercy first.

You are not weak.

You are restrained.

And restraint, in a world begging for annihilation disguised as justice, is the most radical act of love imaginable.

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

Humans are cats.

This is not an insult. This is an observational fact, backed by centuries of fieldwork, several emotional breakdowns, and one very aggressive orange tabby that bit you because you blinked wrong.

You love humans.

Deeply. Unreasonably.

Against your better judgment.

You just don’t like them all the time.

Which, frankly, is exactly how you feel about cats.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

You did not apply for this job.

You did not submit a résumé. You did not wake up one day and think, Yes, I would like omnidirectional responsibility for billions of hairless, anxious, self-sabotaging mammals with free will and zero reading comprehension.

And yet.

Here you are.

All this power. For one person.

For you.

Which is objectively hilarious. What kind of management decision was this? Who looked at you—blank-faced, chronically unimpressed, allergic to emotional oversharing—and said,

Yes. Give her the keys. She’ll handle it.

You still think about that sometimes and laugh into your sleeve like a gremlin.

To be fair, you know why.

You don’t say it out loud. You don’t need to.

You understand the logic the way you understand gravity or debt—you don’t like it, but it makes sense.

You were trusted.

That’s the problem.

You hate this job.

You really do.

It’s exhausting. There are no days off. No exit interviews. No one even told you the dress code. But you do it anyway, because once you accept a duty, you don’t half-ass it.

You whole-ass it. Reluctantly. With sarcasm. But thoroughly.

Humans, like cats, are disasters with opinions.

They knock things off tables and then look at you like why did you put gravity there. They scream at closed doors they themselves shut. They want affection on their terms, not yours, and will punish you emotionally if you get the timing wrong.

They also curl up next to you when they’re hurt, even if they pretend they don’t need anyone.

You see that part. Always.

You do not judge humans.

This confuses them.

They expect judgment. They brace for it. They flinch preemptively like cats who’ve been sprayed with water too many times.

They assume any authority figure is seconds away from hissing.

You just… don’t.

You treat everyone the same.

The kind ones. The cruel ones. The loud ones. The ones who are one inconvenience away from a villain arc.

You do not favor. You do not single out. You do not recoil.

This is not because you don’t see their flaws.

It’s because you see their patterns.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

Humans are like cats raised without enough enrichment. They get bored. They get anxious. They start chewing the furniture of reality and then cry when it collapses.

You do not excuse them.

You also do not throw them away.

You have a soft spot for animals. Always have.

Animals never demanded explanations. They never asked you to justify your silence. They never asked why you looked distant or why you didn’t emote correctly. They just existed near you, warm and alive and unbothered by your internal chaos.

Animals never asked you to be different.

Humans do.

So you secretly treat humans like pets—not to demean them, but to survive them.

You feed them when they’re hungry. You give them space when they hiss. You redirect instead of punish. You understand that some of them bite because they were handled roughly once and never forgot.

You do not take it personally.

Most of the time.

You watch humans do things that make no sense. They sabotage themselves out of pride. They knock over perfectly good relationships like cats knocking over glasses while maintaining eye contact. They cry over things they could fix and ignore things that will destroy them.

You love them anyway.

You love them the way you love a creature that does not know it is loved.

You hate that part.

Zandik, unfortunately, is a hairless sphynx cat with a doctorate and a God complex.

He looks at humans and sees inefficiencies.

You look at humans and see stressed mammals who were given consciousness before they were ready.

He believes control is the solution.

You believe control is how you traumatize cats into pissing on your pillow.

He once asks you, very pointedly, why you bother.

“Because,” you say, deadpan, “if you yell at a cat for knocking something over, it will knock over everything out of spite.”

“That is not a scientific argument.”

“It is,” you say. “It’s behavioral science. Also personal experience.”

He does not appreciate this.

You watch humans pray, beg, scream into the void for someone else to clean their litter box.

They want miracles.

They want fixes.

They want someone to scoop the mess without them ever acknowledging they made it.

You sigh.

You get it. You really do.

Being alive is confusing.

The instructions are unclear. Everyone’s yelling. Half the toys are broken. And the laser pointer keeps disappearing.

You don’t blame them for being upset.

You just wish they’d stop peeing on the couch.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

You were very young when this responsibility landed on you.

You didn’t want it.

You wanted quiet. You wanted to read.

You wanted to exist without the entire species using you as an emotional scratching post.

But you were chosen anyway.

You accept that the way a cat accepts being put in a carrier: stiff, resentful, and plotting escape, but not biting the hand that trusts you.

You prioritize duty above comfort.

Above validation.

Above rest.

This is the thing no one knows about you.

They think you’re detached. Lazy. Unmotivated.

If only.

You care so much it would crush you if you let it surface.

So you joke.

You make everything funny.

You reduce apocalypses to inconveniences. You treat existential dread like a minor hairball issue. Because if you stop laughing, you might start burning things down.

And that would be bad for the cats.

You love humans the way someone loves a very stupid but very earnest animal.

You love them because they try.

Even when they fail spectacularly.

Especially when they fail spectacularly.

You see the good ones hiding under fear. You see the cruel ones hiding under hunger. You see the lost ones circling the same mistake like a cat stuck in a cardboard box it refuses to exit.

You never force them out.

You just sit nearby and wait.

That’s the job.

You didn’t want it.

But you’ll do it.

Because someone has to keep the cats alive, even when they’re feral, screaming, and convinced the vet is evil.

You scratch their heads when they let you.

You back off when they don’t.

And when they curl up, finally exhausted, you stay.

Quiet. Steady. Unjudging.

The way love was always meant to be.

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

Zandik is a cat.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Practically.

If someone insists on calling him a man, a scholar, a menace, or a walking ethics violation, that’s fine.

You, however, have seen enough cats to recognize one when it’s standing on a lab table, knocking morality off the edge while maintaining aggressive eye contact.

You did not plan to befriend him.

You did not schedule it.

You did not allocate emotional resources.

You did not even like him at first.

He was loud in the way quiet people are loud—sharp words, sharp eyes, sharp opinions that cut through rooms like claws through upholstery.

And yet.

He started showing up.

Voluntarily.

This was your first clue something had gone horribly wrong.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

Cats do not “voluntarily spend time” with people unless they’ve decided you are either useful, entertaining, or tragically tolerable. Zandik fit all three criteria on different days.

You noticed it gradually.

The way he lingered after debates that were supposed to be one-and-done. The way he corrected you, but stayed to hear your rebuttal.

The way he complained about your presence while adjusting his schedule to overlap with yours.

Classic cat behavior.

You poked him on purpose.

Not physically.

Verbally. Spiritually. Emotionally. With the precision of someone who knows exactly where the metaphorical laser pointer is and delights in watching a very serious creature lose composure trying to track it.

“You’re hovering,” you tell him once, not looking up from your book.

“I am not hovering,” he snaps. “I am observing.”

“Cool,” you say. “You’re hovering academically.”

He hates that.

You do it again the next day.

And the next.

You ask questions you know he’ll answer. You disagree with him where it matters. You joke where it shouldn’t be joked.

You call him out when he’s being insufferable, which is often, and praise him when he’s honest, which is rarer but real.

Honesty is catnip to you.

You love honesty the way exhausted people love silence.

You don’t care if it’s ugly. You don’t care if it’s sharp.

At least it’s real.

Zandik does not lie to make people comfortable. He lies strategically, which you respect more than lies told for social lubrication.

You tease him because you’re interested.

This is unfortunate for him.

You have spent your entire life around difficult personalities.

Creatures who bite when startled. Who hiss when approached wrong. Who pretend they don’t want company while sitting exactly three feet away, just close enough to pretend it’s accidental.

Zandik is a one-person cat colony.

He is brilliant. He is cruel. He is meticulous. He is insufferably proud.

He is also, to your mild surprise, consistent.

Cats are consistent. If a cat hates you, it hates you every day. If it tolerates you, it tolerates you exactly the same amount daily.

Zandik’s disdain is reliable, and that makes it safe.

You know where you stand.

This is new.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

You have had one friend your entire life.

One.

It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t a tragedy. It was simply the result of being strange, quiet, emotionally dense, and uninterested in pretending otherwise. People mistook your neutrality for disinterest. Your restraint for coldness. Your silence for judgment.

Your one friend understood you the way animals understand people—without requiring explanations.

You didn’t expect another.

So when Zandik sits across from you, scowling, engaged, alive in the argument instead of fleeing it, something in you loosens. Just a little. Like a hand unclenching.

You are happy.

This realization startles you so badly you immediately insult him.

“You’re glaring again,” you say. “Did someone rearrange your lab, or is this just your face?”

“My face,” he says coldly, “is perfectly arranged.”

“Debatable,” you reply. “It’s very… expressive. For someone who claims emotions are inefficiencies.”

He glares harder.

You grin.

Zandik does not understand why you annoy him.

This is also very cat-like.

He could leave. He has every opportunity.

He has power, autonomy, and approximately seventeen other places he could be doing something significantly more evil.

Instead, he stays.

You bring him tea without asking. You don’t comment when he drinks it. You don’t praise him. You don’t thank him.

You just keep doing it.

You know better than to praise a cat.

He once demands, “Why do you persist?”

You blink. “In general, or with you?”

“With me.”

You consider. You choose honesty.

“Because you’re interesting,” you say. “And because you don’t lie to make yourself look better.”

“That is not a compliment.”

“It is to me.”

He does not know what to do with that.

You like that he doesn’t pretend to be good.

You like that he doesn’t ask you to soften your edges or explain yourself. You like that he challenges you without trying to dominate you.

He argues like a cat plays—aggressively, with commitment, and absolutely no intention of letting the other party “win.”

You let him think he wins sometimes.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

This is a kindness.

You see him as another being under your care. Not because he’s weak—he isn’t—but because that’s how you orient toward the world. Everything that crosses your path becomes, in some way, your responsibility.

This is not arrogance.

It is duty.

So you watch him the way you watch a feral cat you’ve been feeding for weeks. You note his routines. His triggers. His moods. You learn when to poke and when to retreat.

You learn that he hates being patronized but secretly enjoys being understood.

You never tell him this.

You annoy him instead.

You ask him what he’s working on, then critique the ethics with a bored tone that infuriates him.

You call his plans “ambitious” in a way that sounds suspiciously like “unhinged.” You lean over his shoulder just close enough to be irritating.

“Do you require supervision?” he snaps once.

“Yes,” you say. “You’re destructive when unsupervised.”

He opens his mouth. Closes it. Walks away.

He comes back later.

This is progress.

You don’t romanticize him. You don’t excuse him. You don’t pretend he’s misunderstood.

He isn’t.

He understands himself perfectly well and has decided it’s everyone else’s problem.

You accept him anyway.

Not because you approve.

Because you care.

Caring does not require agreement.

It requires presence.

You sit with him in silence sometimes. Not talking. Not debating.

Just existing in parallel, like two cats sharing a windowsill, pretending they’re not aware of each other while being deeply aware of each other.

You don’t try to fix him.

You don’t try to save him.

You just… stay.

This confuses him more than your jokes ever could.

You think, distantly, that if he ever asked—really asked—why you keep coming back, you’d tell him the truth.

That you know what it’s like to be alone with your mind.

That you know what it’s like to be feared more than loved.

That you know what it’s like to be treated like a problem instead of a being.

But he hasn’t asked.

And you won’t volunteer.

Cats don’t like direct emotional confrontation.

So you tease him instead.

You flick his metaphorical tail and laugh when he hisses.

You sit too close. You call him by nicknames he despises.

You argue for fun. You challenge him because you trust him to withstand it.

Trust is rare.

Friendship is rarer.

You don’t know what Zandik is to you.

A threat. A companion. A responsibility. A very sharp, very dangerous cat that might bite someone if you look away too long.

But he’s yours now, in the quiet way things become yours when you choose to care without claiming ownership.

You are happy.

And that, somehow, is the most dangerous thing of all.

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

You have two pets now.

This was not the plan.

The first one came naturally.

The fox.

Sleek, sharp-eyed, red as a warning sign and twice as opinionated.

You found each other the way solitary creatures do—by recognizing the same silence.

She stayed. You didn’t question it.

You never question animals when they choose you; that’s how you end up alone again.

The fox is not a cat.

The fox is what cats would be if cats paid taxes, carried knives, and maintained a blacklist.

She is extremely overprotective. She does not cuddle. She does not tolerate nonsense. She does not believe in second chances unless they are strategically useful. She loves you with the intensity of someone guarding a nuclear launch code, which is ironic because you are the nuclear launch code and she knows it.

The second pet arrived like a mistake.

A bird.

A very large, very intelligent, very violent bird with opinions, a god complex, and feathers that scream I will peck your eyes out and feel nothing.

Zandik is a crow.

Not a dove. Not a songbird.

A crow. The kind that watches traffic patterns to crack nuts and remembers faces for decades just to hold grudges. The kind that doesn’t sing, just comments.

You, unfortunately, love crows.

This is a character flaw.

You like how smart they are. You like how unapologetic they are. You like how they don’t pretend to be gentle when they aren’t.

You like honesty, and crows are brutally honest in the way they will steal your sandwich and dare you to do something about it.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

Zandik started circling you one day and never really left.

He perches nearby.

He makes cutting remarks. He occasionally dive-bombs conversations. He claims he isn’t attached while rearranging his schedule to be wherever you are.

Crow behavior.

You tease him relentlessly. You poke at his feathers. You toss verbal pebbles just to see how fast he snaps them out of the air and throws them back sharper.

You do this because you’re happy.

This is alarming.

The fox noticed immediately.

The fox does not like the bird.

The fox despises the bird.

From her perspective, you brought home a feral crow with a history of biting, a beak that drips with malice, and an unsettling habit of dissecting morality for fun, and then you went,

It’s fine, he’s interesting.

The fox has had about enough of your nonsense.

“He’s dangerous,” she tells you, sitting perfectly still while watching Zandik from across the room like a sniper with fur.

“He’s honest,” you reply, flipping a page in your book. “That’s rare.”

“So is rabies.”

“That feels unfair.”

“It’s generous.”

The fox does not blink.

She believes in patterns, trajectories, and end results.

She has watched people like Zandik before—bright, ruthless birds who mistake altitude for moral superiority and think the ground exists only to be experimented on.

She knows exactly how this ends.

“You get attached,” she says flatly.

You shrug. “Maybe.”

“That’s not a maybe. That’s a historical constant.”

“I can handle it.”

“You said that last time.”

“Last time was different.”

“Last time you cried over a man who used you as an emotional scratching post.”

“He was very convincing.”

The fox stares at you like she’s reconsidering all her life choices.

You are not possessive. You are not jealous. You do not cling.

You let people come and go like cats who hop onto your lap and leave without warning.

You never trap them. You never demand loyalty.

You never ask to be chosen.

If Zandik gets tired of you one day—if he decides you’re boring, inefficient, disposable—you will accept it with a nod and a joke and go back to your books.

You know this about yourself.

The fox knows this is exactly the problem.

“You let yourself be thrown away,” the fox says. “You call it freedom. I call it a security risk.”

You smile faintly. “I don’t mind.”

“I mind.”

You always forget that part.

That some beings care for you, not just about you.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

Zandik, meanwhile, is well aware that he is being evaluated like an invasive species.

From his perspective, you are an anomaly.

From the fox’s perspective, he is a threat vector with wings.

She watches him with the narrowed gaze of someone who has already imagined twelve ways to neutralize him and is annoyed she hasn’t had permission to execute any.

“He’s not like the others,” you say one evening, as Zandik debates you across the table with surgical precision.

“That’s what makes him worse,” the fox mutters.

You like that Zandik doesn’t soften his edges around you. You like that he doesn’t perform goodness. You like that he is openly, unapologetically terrible. There is no bait-and-switch. No hidden claws.

Everything is on display.

Your hope—your stupid, soft, childlike hope—is that if someone is honest enough about their darkness, maybe they don’t need to drown in it.

The fox hates this hope.

The fox calls it “a liability.”

“He is not redeemable,” she tells you later, when Zandik has left. “He does not want to be.”

“That’s okay,” you say. “I’m not trying to redeem him.”

“You’re trying to understand him.”

“Yes.”

“That’s step one of getting stabbed.”

You hum thoughtfully.

You are, unfortunately, book-smart and street-dumb.

You can map moral philosophy across centuries but cannot recognize when someone is sharpening knives behind their back because you are too busy admiring how shiny they are.

You believe people can be good if they try.

The fox believes people are good until they try.

This is why she exists.

She has been protecting you your entire life—from wolves, from liars, from yourself.

She knows you retain innocence like a curse.

That despite everything you know, you still believe in goodness the way children believe the sun will rise because it always has.

Zandik does not believe in goodness.

Zandik believes in outcomes.

This makes him dangerous.

To you, he is still just another animal under your care. A difficult one. A sharp one. One that bites when startled and pecks at your patience for sport.

You do not fear him.

The fox thinks this is insane.

“You don’t fear anything,” she says. “That’s not bravery. That’s ignorance.”

“Or trust,” you offer.

“Or stupidity.”

“Why not all three?”

She groans.

Zandik is a crow that thinks he’s a god.

You are an angel that thinks she’s a pet sitter.

The fox is the only one in the room with survival instincts.

And yet.

You are happy.

You have one friend who stayed. One fox who guards you like a blade. And now a crow who argues with you instead of leaving.

You don’t know how long it will last.

You don’t try to keep it.

You just… enjoy it.

The fox watches, tense and ready, because someone has to be.

Because someone has to stand between your hope and the world that loves to exploit it.

You keep believing.

She keeps guarding.

And the crow keeps circling—curious, dangerous.

You, meanwhile, are petting chaos and smiling, blissfully convinced that maybe—just maybe—this one won’t bite.

The fox sighs.

She sharpens her knives.

Just in case.

‧˚₊꒷꒦︶︶︶︶︶꒷꒦︶︶︶︶︶꒦꒷‧₊˚⊹

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┊ ┊ ┊ ┊ ˚★⋆｡˚ ⋆
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┊ ┊ ★⋆
┊ ◦
★⋆ ┊ . ˚
˚★

The fox had been watching you since birth.

Well, “watching” implied a level of patience that was sometimes boring—what she really did was manage you, navigate you, contain you, and occasionally restrain you from doing something that could result in total catastrophic collapse, because let’s face it, you were spectacularly naive and had a dangerous tendency to trust everyone and everything.

Even rocks, sometimes, if they looked sad enough.

To the fox, you were a cat.

Not just any cat, mind you.

A cat that had learned the universe by reading books while sleeping in the sun, yet still thought the sun itself might apologize if it burned you.

A cat who understood patterns in the stars but somehow failed to notice when someone wanted to eat her alive metaphorically—or literally, given the wrong circumstances.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

You were cute.

Not in the “aw, look at the tiny human” way.

Cute in the sense that the fox’s blood, which ran hot and sharp and practical, felt that overwhelming urge to protect.

And protect she did.

From everything.

From wolves, from men, from arguments, from chaos, and absolutely from Zandik.

Zandik, the crow.

She hated him.

Hated him with a personal, surgical precision that made you giggle innocently whenever she sniffed and swiveled her ears in disgust.

He had entered your orbit like an insolent vulture with fancy plans and a knife tucked into his wings. He dared to linger. He dared to be honest, to challenge, to tease. He dared to provoke. And he thought, for reasons she could not fathom, that you would not notice the cracks in his charm.

“You are letting him circle too close,” the fox thought, pacing silently behind you as you read, book in lap, eyes glazed like glass but sharp as knives. You didn’t flinch at her presence. Didn’t even glance at the growl that was purely in her mind.

You were too busy admiring the crow’s audacity to realize how much danger lurked in the way he flicked his beady little eye toward you, like a cat considering whether it should sit on a keyboard or not.

Humans were cats.

Crows were cats with wings and teeth, and Zandik was definitely the kind of cat that would knock over an entire city if you looked away for more than three seconds.

And somehow, you adored him.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

The fox had spent decades—metaphorically, not literally—attaching herself to you, teaching you that some cats bite, some cats steal your food, and some cats are actively plotting your destruction while smiling.

She had tried, endlessly and with the patience of a tax auditor armed with steel claws, to prepare you for that lesson.

And yet here you were, smiling faintly at the crow, calling him “interesting,” and completely oblivious to the immediate threat to life and limb.

“You are stupid,” she told you once silently, with all the moral authority of someone who had survived worse predators in worse weather, “and I hate that you are stupid because it is my problem when you are stupid.”

You blinked.

A slow, lazy blink.

Like a cat who has just noticed that the toy it ignored for three days suddenly exists.

“It’s fine,” you said, entirely unbothered, entirely sincere, and entirely dangerous. “I like him.”

The fox hissed inwardly. Lacerated her own patience in metaphorical fur. This is not fine, she thought. This is a crow, disguised as a human, disguised as a disaster, disguised as—actually, never mind, this is exactly what it is: disaster.

She had no discernment when it came to celestial politics, no divine intuition about the world, no insight into the true will of higher powers. What she did have was brutal logic, military-grade caution, and a frankly terrifying ability to notice patterns in human stupidity from a mile away.

And from where she sat, fluffed tail twitching, the pattern was clear: Zandik would chew your patience, your time, your sense of safety, and possibly your soul for sport, all while pretending he was teaching you a lesson.

“He’s going to manipulate you,” she thought. “He’s going to bend you to his whims. And she,” the fox sniffed at you, curling around your chair, “is going to think it’s cute.”

You, blissfully unaware of impending doom, tilted your head and asked the crow an inconvenient question about morality that made him narrow his eyes, and the fox almost snapped his neck in warning.

Almost.

You were a cat, yes, but not the kind of cat that hid from danger. You were a cat that waltzed in, tail high, eyes blank but alert, letting predators believe they had space while secretly cataloging every flaw and quirk.

You were sharp as a needle and soft as marshmallow at the same time, and the fox both admired and feared it.

“Why are you letting yourself be used?” she asked you silently again, when he leaned too close, like cats circling the same sunbeam that had been yours for hours.

“I’m not being used,” you said. “I’m observing.”

She growled in her mind. Observation does not involve putting your neck under a crow’s beak.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

And yet she stayed, because that was her job.

To be guardian, bodyguard, sister, protector.

To wrap you in patience, patience sharpened into claws, and hope, which she would never admit you hoarded like a kitten hoards sunbeams.

You were contradictions wrapped in fur and light.

You were brilliant and naive.

Wise and sheltered.

Dangerous and soft.

You would argue for justice with the force of mountains, then pet a stranger’s cat because it looked sad.

You would read every book, memorize every theory, then believe with staggering optimism that even Zandik could be… well, not good, but tolerable if you smiled enough.

The fox had long since concluded that your brand of hope was more dangerous than Zandik himself.

You did not see predators as predators.

You saw them as misunderstood pets, poorly trained, poorly fed, and slightly mischievous.

You assumed love and patience could fix any claw, any beak, any human flaw.

The fox knew better. You were hopelessly, infuriatingly trusting.

And yet. And yet.

She loved you.

Loved you like someone loves a cat that leaps onto countertops and knocks over wine glasses with a smirk, yet still curls into your lap when the room quiets down.

Loved you like someone loves a child who has no idea how dangerous the world is, yet walks through it with the poise of a sunbeam.

Loved you like someone who would gladly fight anything, anything, that threatened your soft, dense, impossibly kindhearted heart.

⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅

You were a cat, but the fox was a fox, and the fox was needed.

You were naive, and the fox was practical.

You were light, and the fox was vigilance.

You were hope, and the fox was wariness.

Together, you were complete.

And the crow?

Oh, the crow could stay in the orbit of your life if he wished, but make no mistake: the fox’s eyes followed every feathered movement with the precision of a missile guidance system.

Every argument you had, every joke you made at his expense, every smile that tilted slightly toward him, the fox cataloged, predicted, analyzed, and mentally filed under: “Potentially catastrophic. Monitor closely.”

You were catlike.

Curious. Affectionate. Clueless.

Curious. Full of contradictions. Bright and soft and dangerously sincere.

You were her responsibility.

You were her charge.

You were her sister.

And she would kill anything that threatened you.

Even if that thing had feathers, deceptiveness, and a penchant for intellectual cruelty.

Even if that thing was, in some unholy way, interesting to you.

She didn’t care.

Because you were hers.

And no crow—no matter how clever, how sharp, how frankly cunning—would take that away.

Because if nothing else, you had never smiled so faintly, so softly, so happily, at anyone in your entire life. And that was worth all the growls, the scowls, the sighs, and the endless internal debates.

Even if you, bless your stubbornly naive little soul, didn’t realize just how dangerous it all was.

You were a cat.

She was a fox.

And she would not let anyone turn that cat into prey.