♡ Angel Autopsy (Yandere! Il Dottore x Reader x Yandere! Various! Multiverse).
♡ Word Count. 12,395 words
You’re dreaming again, which is how you know you’re awake.
Not awake-awake, obviously. Not the kind where gravity exists and your spine remembers every bad decision you’ve ever made. This is the other kind. The kind where you are fully conscious, fully in control, and fully uninterested in doing anything productive with that control.
Your domain stretches out like a lazy thought that never bothered finishing itself. Floating islands. Infinite sky. A sun that hangs in the air like it’s on strike. You made it like this on purpose—vague, aesthetic, noncommittal. Commitment is how things start asking for emotional labor.
You’re lying on absolutely nothing. Nothing holds you up, and yet you don’t fall. Physics here knows better than to bother you.
You sigh. Not a dramatic sigh. Just a tired one. The kind that sounds like, “Ah yes. Existence. Again.”
You could do anything here.
You could rewrite reality, bend time, summon galaxies like party tricks. You could resurrect extinct stars just to kill them again for fun. You could create entire civilizations, watch them invent religion, then erase them before they get annoying.
You do none of that.
Instead, you kick your legs idly in the air and stare at the fake sun you designed to be just warm enough to feel nice but not hot enough to be invasive. Boundaries are important.
This is the only place where you’re free.
And you don’t mean that in a poetic way. You mean it in the “no one can reach you, touch you, assess you, evaluate your worth in quarterly projections” kind of way. No expectations. No performance metrics. No voices asking why you’re not doing more with what you have.
Here, you exist without justification.
Which is exactly why you already know this won’t last.
You snort to yourself. “Of course it won’t.”
Good things never last with you.
That’s not self-pity. That’s pattern recognition.
You learned pattern recognition early. Very early. Learned it the way some kids learn multiplication tables, except instead of numbers it was cause and effect. Action and consequence. Smile and silence. Obedience and approval. Deviate and—well. You don’t finish that thought. You don’t need to. The brain is very good at filling in blanks it has seen too many times.
So yes. You’re pessimistic. But not in a whiny way. In a spreadsheet way.
Good things arrive. Good things peak. Good things leave.
It’s a clean arc. Elegant, really.
You roll onto your side in midair, propping your head up with your hand. Your domain responds lazily, forming a soft glow beneath your elbow like it’s tired too.
“Enjoy it while it lasts,” you mutter to no one.
You always do. That’s the thing people don’t get. You’re not incapable of joy. You’re extremely capable of joy. You just don’t invest in it like a retirement fund.
Joy is a temporary contract position.
Fun is an internship.
Dreams are seasonal.
You enjoy them, you learn from them, you don’t pretend they’ll become permanent staff.
That’s where people mess up.
They think happiness is supposed to fix something. Cure something. Erase the past like a magic eraser over a very suspicious stain.
It doesn’t.
You know this. Deeply. Intimately. Academically.
Love doesn’t undo suffering. Friendship doesn’t rewrite history. Having people who care about you does not magically uninstall trauma.exe from your nervous system.
Anyone who says otherwise is either lying or selling a book.
You stretch your arms overhead, feeling the fake muscles of your dream body respond without resistance. No aches. No scars. No phantom pains. It’s almost funny.
Almost.
You could stay here forever, technically. There are no rules stopping you. No alarms. No deadlines. No one knocking on the door of your subconscious asking if you’ve considered being less disappointing today.
But you won’t.
Because you already know how this ends.
It always ends with you waking up.
Reality has a way of reminding you it exists. Like a bill collector with excellent timing.
You laugh quietly at the thought. It comes out light, almost cheerful. Anyone watching would think you’re having a great time.
That’s the trick. You’re always having a great time. On the surface.
Underneath, you’ve already accepted the conclusion.
“This is temporary,” you say aloud, like you’re narrating a nature documentary about your own emotional state. “Observe the wild good thing in its natural habitat. Note how it flourishes briefly before dying.”
The fake sun flickers in agreement. Even your subconscious has a sense of humor.
You sit up and decide to do something reckless.
You summon a table.
It appears instantly—sleek, polished, unnecessarily expensive-looking. You add a chair, then another chair, then a teapot that pours itself. Because why not. If you’re going to be dramatic, you might as well commit.
You pour yourself tea you don’t need to drink and take a sip you don’t need to swallow. It tastes like comfort without obligation. Like warmth without strings.
Dangerous.
You grimace. “Yeah, no. That’s how they get you.”
You push the teacup away like it personally offended you.
You’ve always been like this. Emotional but not stupid. Capable of feeling deeply while simultaneously running a full internal audit of why feeling deeply is a terrible long-term investment.
You don’t romanticize suffering. You don’t glorify pain. You just… don’t expect relief to be permanent.
People hear that and think you’re sad.
You’re not sad. You’re realistic.
Sad implies disappointment.
You can’t be disappointed if you never bought into the fantasy.
Your thoughts drift, uninvited, toward the waking world. Toward people.
Toward him.
You sigh again, longer this time.
Zandik understands this. That’s the irritating part.
He knows exactly how fleeting things are. He knows attachment is a liability. He knows emotions are variables that complicate clean equations.
That’s why this is unhealthy.
Not because you don’t care.
But because he might.
And that’s a problem.
You lean back in your chair and stare up at the artificial sky, watching clouds drift like they have nowhere better to be.
“Romantic love isn’t for me,” you say casually, like you’re commenting on the weather. “For others? Sure. Great. Love that for them. For me? Absolutely not.”
It’s not bitterness. It’s logistics.
Romantic love comes with expectations. Permanence. Mutual dependency. The illusion that two broken systems can somehow stabilize each other instead of creating a more complex failure cascade.
You’ve seen that movie. It ends badly. Usually with legal fees.
You’re not unlovable. That’s not the issue. You’re just… incompatible with the fantasy.
You function best alone, or adjacent. Orbiting, not colliding.
You enjoy connection the way you enjoy fireworks—beautiful, intense, and best observed with the understanding that they are literally designed to explode and disappear.
You drum your fingers on the table, the sound echoing softly through your dreamspace.
“Good things will never last with me,” you say again, not as a lament but as a thesis statement.
You could write a paper on this. Include charts. Case studies. Longitudinal data from your own life. Peer-reviewed by your nervous system.
It’s not that you don’t feel sadness when things end.
You do.
Briefly.
Then it passes.
Because lingering is inefficient.
You have more important things to do than mourn inevitabilities. Like working. Building. Producing tangible results that don’t vanish when you wake up.
Work stays.
Skills stay.
Knowledge stays.
Memories? Those blur. Feelings fade. People change.
You trust what you can quantify.
That’s why this dream, as perfect as it is, feels like a countdown.
You stand, letting the chair dissolve beneath you. The table follows, melting back into nothingness like it was never real to begin with.
Appropriate.
You walk across empty air, hands in your pockets, whistling something off-key. The domain reshapes itself around your steps, not because it has to, but because it wants to please you.
That makes you uncomfortable.
You stop.
“Don’t do that,” you tell it. “I don’t need catering.”
The air stills obediently. Good. Boundaries.
You’re not cruel. You’re just careful.
Careful not to let joy trick you into thinking it’s salvation.
Careful not to let attachment convince you it’s eternal.
Careful not to let anyone—especially someone as sharp as Zandik—anchor themselves to you like you’re a constant.
You’re not.
You’re a variable.
And variables should not be relied upon.
You glance at the horizon. It’s beautiful in a minimalist way. Endless, quiet, safe.
You smile.
It’s a real smile. Soft. Almost fond.
“This was fun,” you say, genuinely.
You mean it.
You always do.
That’s the part no one believes.
You don’t resent good things for ending. You just don’t expect them to stay.
That expectation—that’s what ruins people.
You let the smile fade naturally, without forcing it away.
“Alright,” you mutter. “Back to work soon.”
Because that’s what always wins in the end.
Not love.
Not happiness.
Not dreams.
Work.
Tangibility.
Logic.
You straighten your posture, feeling the subtle pull of waking reality tug at the edges of your awareness like a persistent notification.
You don’t resist it.
You never do.
As the dream begins to dissolve, the sky folding inward, the sun dimming like a stage light at the end of a performance, you feel a flicker of sadness.
It lasts exactly as long as you expected.
Then it’s gone.
And you’re already moving on.
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
He observes first.
This is important. Observation precedes interpretation, and interpretation precedes judgment, and judgment precedes action. Any deviation from this order leads to errors, superstition, or—worse—sentimentality.
You are asleep.
Not pretend-asleep. Not “resting your eyes.” Not the delicate, socially acceptable sleep people perform when they know they might be watched.
No.
You are out.
Mouth open. Jaw slack. A thin, unglamorous line of drool slowly escaping the corner of your lips and pooling onto the pillow like a traitor.
Zandik stares at it.
He blinks once.
“…Hygienically suboptimal,” he concludes.
There is no disgust in his tone. Just an observation. The same tone he would use to describe bacterial overgrowth or a faulty centrifuge.
He leans closer, adjusting his glasses with two fingers, peering at your face like a researcher examining a specimen that has committed a mild but fascinating offense.
You snore. Quietly, but consistently. A soft, almost polite little sound, as if even unconscious your body is apologizing for existing.
He exhales through his nose.
Not beautiful. Not in any conventional, poetic sense. No dramatic lashes fluttering. No serene, angelic sleep expression.
Your face is slightly squished into the pillow. Your cheek has a crease. Your hair is doing something deeply unserious.
And yet.
“…Tolerable,” he decides.
This surprises him.
Not the assessment itself, but the fact that the assessment needed to be made at all.
He straightens, mentally discarding the thought before it can grow legs and start walking around his brain unsupervised.
He is not here for aesthetics.
He is here for data.
You shift in your sleep, rolling onto your back, arms flopping outward with all the grace of a dropped mannequin. The drool situation worsens. The pillow does not survive.
Zandik makes a note.
Heavy sleeper. Stage four, possibly deeper. External stimuli response: minimal.
Useful.
Very useful.
He reaches out, fingers hovering for precisely half a second before making contact with your wrist. Two fingers, clinical placement, light pressure.
Nothing.
Pulse steady. Breathing even. No flinch. No micro-expression.
He increases pressure slightly.
You do not react.
He hums thoughtfully.
“Fascinating.”
He taps your forearm.
Nothing.
He flicks your finger.
Nothing.
He pokes your cheek.
Your cheek squishes.
Your mouth opens wider.
Drool escalates.
Zandik pauses.
Stares.
“…This is becoming counterproductive.”
He retrieves a handkerchief from his pocket—not out of tenderness, but because allowing fluids to spread uncontrollably is how experiments get compromised. He dabs your mouth with surgical precision, as if wiping down lab equipment.
You mumble something incoherent and turn your head, drooling immediately on the other side.
He freezes.
Slowly looks at the pillow.
Then at you.
“…You are doing this on purpose,” he accuses quietly.
You snore.
He sighs, long-suffering but patient, and flips the pillow.
Problem temporarily mitigated.
He resumes.
He presses along your shoulder this time, fingers tracing muscle and bone, cataloging tension points. Your body remains unresponsive, pliant in the way only unconscious things are.
He notes posture, breathing rhythm, micro-movements.
You twitch once.
His hand stops instantly.
He waits.
Three seconds.
Five.
Ten.
Nothing further.
You begin lightly grinding your teeth.
“…Bruxism,” he mutters. “Stress indicator. Chronic.”
He does not dwell on why that might be.
Dwelling is inefficient.
He shifts closer, close enough now that he is undeniably, objectively, sharing a bed with another person.
This is—
Unprecedented.
He ignores that thought immediately.
The bed is merely a flat surface. The proximity is incidental. Contextually irrelevant.
Still, he adjusts his position to avoid accidental contact. Not because he is uncomfortable, but because uncontrolled variables are sloppy.
Your arm flops over, landing squarely across his chest.
He freezes again.
Slowly looks down.
Your hand is resting over his ribs, fingers loosely curled, warm through the fabric. Your nails are short. Clean. Unevenly filed.
You snore directly into his collarbone.
“…This is unacceptable,” he murmurs.
He considers removing your arm.
He considers it very carefully.
Then you shift again, face scrunching slightly, and your grip tightens reflexively, as if your body has decided he is load-bearing infrastructure.
You sigh contentedly.
Zandik’s brain does something extremely annoying.
It produces an image.
Domesticity.
Sunlight through curtains. Shared mornings. Waking up beside you. A quiet, unremarkable life punctuated by mutual tolerance and routine.
He annihilates the thought instantly.
Deletes it. Shreds it. Burns the ashes.
Absolutely not.
That is not a hypothesis worth entertaining.
He is not a husband. This is not a marriage. This is not intimacy.
This is proximity.
This is observation.
This is—at best—field research under suboptimal conditions.
He carefully extricates himself from your grip with the delicacy of someone disarming a bomb. Your fingers twitch, searching, then relax when they find nothing.
You pout in your sleep.
He pretends not to notice.
He sits up slightly, propping himself on one elbow, and continues his examination.
You are still. Peaceful, in a way that feels deeply incongruent with your waking personality. No sharpness. No sarcasm. No calculated distance.
Just a person. Breathing. Existing.
Vulnerable.
He dislikes that word.
He replaces it with “unconscious.”
Better.
He nudges your knee.
Nothing.
He lifts your hand, lets it fall gently back onto the bed.
No response.
He presses two fingers to your temple, measuring skin temperature.
Normal.
You drool again.
He winces.
“…At least you’re consistent.”
He pulls the blanket up around you, not because of care, but because thermal regulation is important for sleep quality. Obviously.
You immediately kick it off.
He stares.
“…Of course.”
He tries again, tucking it more securely.
You roll over and steal it.
He stares harder.
“…You are an inefficient organism.”
You snore louder, victorious.
He pinches the bridge of his nose.
Despite himself—despite everything—he feels something tug at the corner of his thoughts.
Not affection.
Annoyance.
But… tolerable annoyance.
Like a recurring error message that no longer disrupts workflow.
He lies back down, arms folded, staring at the ceiling.
He will analyze this later. Categorize it. Reduce it into something manageable.
For now, he watches your chest rise and fall, slow and even.
You mumble again.
“…No… five more minutes…”
He arches a brow.
“…You are unconscious,” he informs you quietly. “There are no minutes.”
You sigh and relax further, curling slightly toward him.
His shoulder brushes yours.
He does not move away.
He does not move closer.
He simply… stays.
Purely observational.
Purely analytical.
Intimate, yes—but only in the way an autopsy is intimate. Close, detailed, detached.
He closes his eyes—not to sleep, but to think.
Data gathering can wait a few minutes.
After all.
You’re not going anywhere.
And neither, apparently, is he.
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
Zandik is not snooping.
He is conducting an unsolicited audit.
There is a difference. A moral, philosophical, and—most importantly—semantic difference. Snooping implies poor impulse control and a childish interest in gossip. An audit implies professionalism, due diligence, and the responsible handling of an environment that is clearly not regulated enough.
Your phone lights up on the nightstand like an electronic firefly with no survival instinct.
He sees it from the corner of his eye.
He does not move.
He does not react.
He does not immediately reach for it like a greedy raccoon.
He simply blinks once, slow and measured, as if he is watching an experimental variable present itself politely.
You are still asleep. Heavy sleeper, as previously documented. Drool has been minimized to acceptable levels, but your mouth is slightly open again like your brain has filed a formal request to humiliate you while unconscious.
Zandik’s gaze flickers from your face to the phone.
A new notification.
The screen flashes briefly with a preview—enough to register there are words. Names. Something requiring attention.
He exhales softly through his nose.
If you didn’t want your life examined, you shouldn’t have placed it within arm’s reach of him.
Also, your room.
Your bed.
Your personal space.
The most unsecured facility imaginable, staffed by exactly one incompetent administrator (you) who somehow believes that proximity equals trust.
It doesn’t.
Proximity equals opportunity.
He shifts slightly, careful not to disturb you. Not out of tenderness—because waking you would introduce noise into the environment. You would ask questions. You would make jokes. You would become a variable that talks back.
He reaches for the phone.
It’s warm.
He tells himself that’s irrelevant.
The notification fades as he lifts it. The lock screen brightens. A familiar keypad appears.
He stares at it with the detached disappointment of a man who has opened a laboratory fridge to find someone stored their lunch next to a live vulture.
A password prompt.
He pauses.
Then he types.
Not because he’s guessing. Because the pattern is obvious. Human behavior is predictable. Yours is predictably pathetic.
He tries the first thing.
It unlocks immediately.
Zandik stills.
His expression does not change, but something microscopic in his eyes sharpens—an internal note being stamped with red ink.
“…That’s it?” he murmurs.
He sits there with your phone in his hand like he’s holding a loaded weapon that someone left on the floor and labeled “pls don’t touch.”
Your password is weak. Not weak in a normal way. Weak in a “you deserve to be robbed by a bored teenager” way.
He glances over at you.
You’re curled slightly toward him, as if your body has decided he’s a heat source and not an ethically questionable researcher. Your eyelashes rest against your cheek. Your face is peaceful, dumbly trusting.
He studies you for a moment.
Then he looks back at the phone.
“It’s your fault,” he concludes quietly. “For being… like this.”
Like what?
Like you are capable of sharing a bed with someone and not building a fortress around your personal life.
Like you’re the kind of person who lets your phone lie around, unlocked in spirit if not in code, assuming nobody would dare cross that line.
You forget that he does not treat lines as barriers.
He treats them as invitations to measure how much pressure it takes to step over.
He scrolls.
He avoids your gaming phone entirely. That would be childish. Also, it would expose him to your search history and he suspects it would contain enough nonsense to permanently reduce his respect for your species.
No—this one is your work-call phone. The phone you use for adult matters. For logistics. For tangibility. The phone that exists because you don’t trust your own happiness, but you do trust spreadsheets.
That’s the one he’s interested in.
He opens your messages.
A list of contacts appears.
Coworkers, colleagues, official names, corporate numbers. People who use punctuation like weapons.
Nothing surprising.
He scrolls lazily, documenting patterns. The timing of messages. The tone. The frequency. The content.
You are consistent.
You are polite.
You are… sterile.
Your work personality is exactly what he would expect from someone who believes joy is temporary and only productivity is real. You talk like someone who learned early that “professionalism” is the safest mask because no one can accuse a mask of having needs.
He stops at a thread labeled with a surname.
Your blood family.
He knows the name. Everyone knows it in the way everyone knows a brand: expensive, powerful, smiling with teeth.
He taps.
Warm messages fill the screen. It is, on paper, almost pleasant.
Updates about work. Check-ins. Casual affection.
A performance of familial closeness.
And then your replies.
Your replies are… formal.
Not cold, exactly. But distant. Structured.
You respond like you’re emailing a stranger.
Like you’re replying to a client.
“Understood.”
“Yes, noted.”
“I’ll follow up.”
“Thank you.”
It’s not the tone you use with him.
With him, you’re irritatingly informal. You say things like “LOL” and “it’s fine” and “don’t be dramatic” and then you proceed to be the most dramatic organism alive in the exact moment it would inconvenience him.
With Arlecchino, you’re different too—sharp in a way that suggests you trust her enough to show your teeth.
With your blood family?
You are a signature at the bottom of an email.
Zandik scrolls up and down once, verifying.
His thumb slows.
His eyes narrow slightly.
“…Interesting,” he murmurs.
You shift in your sleep and make a small sound. A soft, dissatisfied hum. Like reality is trying to update your firmware and you’re declining the terms and conditions.
Zandik stills automatically, phone hovering.
He watches you for a few seconds.
You settle.
He resumes.
He doesn’t know what he expected—perhaps some trace of warmth in your replies, some softness. Some evidence of an emotional tether. But there isn’t any.
There is only duty.
Clean, impersonal duty.
It’s consistent with his data on you, actually. It aligns with your stated worldview: good things don’t last, but obligations do.
He’s about to close the thread when the screen lights again.
A new message.
From them.
It arrives with the smooth inevitability of a knife sliding into its sheath.
Zandik reads it in one glance.
Warmly worded. Polite. Smiling.
A simple question.
When will your marriage date be officially set?
A single line.
A single sentence.
And for the first time tonight, Zandik stops moving.
Not dramatically. Not like a man in a romance novel clutching his chest and staring into the middle distance.
No.
He simply… stills.
His thumb remains suspended above the glass.
The air feels quieter.
Even the phone seems to glow a little colder.
His brain—normally a fast, efficient machine—runs a series of calculations so quickly they feel like instinct.
Arranged marriage.
Probability: high.
Motivation: duty, legacy, consolidation.
Your behavior: consistent with compliance.
Emotional attachment: negligible.
Outcome: predictable.
He should have anticipated this.
He knows about your family. He knows the kind of people they are—not because he has met them, but because he has met their type. The type that uses “warmth” the way surgeons use anesthesia: to keep you compliant while they operate.
He should have filed “marriage” under “likely future constraint” the moment he learned your background.
And yet.
There is something in his chest that tightens, not painfully but distinctly, like an internal mechanism has clicked into place.
Foreboding.
He dislikes that word. It sounds irrational. Superstitious.
He replaces it with: anticipatory threat assessment.
Better.
He reads the message again.
Marriage date.
Officially.
The implication is not “if,” but “when.”
He exhales slowly.
You, in your sleep, sigh and roll toward him again, knees bending, arm stretching out until your fingers brush his side.
Your body searches.
Finds him.
Settles.
As if it’s natural.
As if it’s normal.
As if you do this all the time.
Zandik looks down at your hand resting against him, then back at the message on the phone.
A curious contrast.
In sleep, you gravitate toward warmth without thinking.
In waking life, you walk toward duty without hesitation.
He knows you.
Not the whole of you—no one knows the whole of anyone.
But he knows the shape of you.
He knows you don’t keep people “in your heart,” as the sentimental would say. You don’t orbit around affection. You orbit around function.
He knows you don’t belong to anyone—not even yourself, sometimes.
And that’s the problem.
Because duty is a leash you will willingly hold out your own neck for, if you decide it’s inevitable.
He stares at the screen a moment longer, then locks it with a press of his thumb.
The phone goes dark.
The glow fades.
But the line remains, branded into his mind:
When will your marriage date be officially set?
He sits very still in the dimness, listening to your breathing.
His thoughts try to return to analysis. To detach.
He tells himself, clinically, that this is simply new data.
New variable.
A forthcoming event.
Something to observe.
Something to document.
Something to account for in contingency planning.
It is not as though you’re going anywhere too far.
Marriages are bureaucratic. People remain physically accessible. Your schedule will change, but schedules can be navigated. He can still see you. Still gather data. Still—
You shift again and make a small, faint sound, as if you’re dreaming about something mildly annoying.
Zandik’s hand tightens around the phone without him realizing it.
A fraction too hard.
His knuckles whiten briefly.
He loosens his grip.
He did not like that he did that.
He did not like that his body reacted before his mind approved it.
He sets the phone down on the nightstand as if it might explode, then lies back down slowly.
You, sensing movement even in sleep, curl closer again. Your forehead nearly touches his shoulder. Your breath warms the fabric of his shirt.
He keeps his arms at his sides.
He does not put them around you.
He does not pull you in.
He does nothing that could be interpreted as ownership.
He is not that foolish.
Ownership is messy. It invites conflict. It invites irrationality.
And yet his thoughts, traitorous things, begin to spiral—not wild, not dramatic, but precise.
Marriage means permanence.
Marriage means a name.
Marriage means a claim.
Someone else will have a legal, socially sanctioned claim over you.
Over your time.
Your body.
Your future.
Your obligations.
Someone will be allowed—by law, by custom, by polite expectation—to stand where he is currently lying.
To wake up beside you.
To see you drool and snore and exist without a mask.
Zandik’s jaw tightens.
It is not jealousy.
Jealousy is for people who believe they deserve something.
This is different.
This is the sudden emergence of a variable that threatens the continuity of his research.
That’s all.
Purely practical.
He repeats that to himself until the words feel almost true.
Beside him, you relax, your hand sliding slightly onto his chest again with unconscious certainty.
Like you belong there.
Like you’re allowed.
Like you’ve never once considered that being close to someone might be dangerous.
Zandik stares into the dark.
There is a faint, thin line of amusement in his mind—
Of course.
Of course you would be the kind of person to cuddle someone like him and then go sign your life away to duty because it’s “logical.”
Of course you would treat your blood family like strangers and still obey them like gravity.
Of course you would walk into a marriage the way you walk into work: with a deadpan face and a resigned acceptance that this is simply what happens next.
He should laugh.
He almost does.
But the sound never comes.
Instead, something colder settles beneath his ribs.
Not rage.
Not panic.
A decision forming quietly, like a blade being sharpened in the dark.
He turns his head slightly and looks at you.
You’re asleep. Vulnerable. Unaware. Peaceful in the way only someone can be when they’ve trained themselves to stop hoping.
His eyes narrow.
His expression remains calm.
His voice, when he finally speaks, is barely above a whisper—so soft it could be mistaken for a thought.
“…Duty,” he murmurs, tasting the word like something bitter. “How convenient.”
You hum in your sleep and press closer.
Zandik does not move away.
He remains perfectly still, letting your warmth exist against him like evidence.
Then, very carefully, he lifts a hand and rests it lightly on your back—not holding, not embracing, not anything as crude as that.
Just contact.
Just a claim so subtle it could be denied.
A mark only he would notice.
His fingers spread slightly, as if measuring the shape of you for memory.
His voice stays quiet, rational, almost amused.
“If you decide to accept it,” he thinks, “you will.”
Because you always do what you believe is inevitable.
He closes his eyes.
And somewhere deep inside—behind the layers of logic, beneath the careful partitions, past the neat labels and clinical detachment—something unfurls without permission.
Not loud.
Not violent.
Not obvious.
Just… present.
A hidden trigger pulled.
A silent, private conclusion:
If duty tries to take you, it will have to be measured first.
Accounted for.
Controlled.
And Zandik has never been known to let a variable wander off unattended.
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
Zandik observes you the way one observes a benign tumor.
Not immediately lethal. Not actively hostile. Growing quietly. Inconveniently. With the faint, ever-present possibility that it may one day require decisive intervention.
You sit on the lab stool you’ve unofficially claimed as yours, legs hooked around the metal rung, posture appallingly relaxed for someone surrounded by instruments that could liquefy a person in under thirty seconds if mishandled. Your phone is in your hands. Your thumbs are moving at a speed that suggests either intense gaming focus or an attempt to escape reality through repetitive micro-dopamine stimulation.
It is, predictably, the former.
Zandik does not look at your screen.
He already knows you’re playing something stupid.
You arrived together, as usual.
No witnesses.
Your roommate, Alhaitham, had been “busy,” which is to say: occupied elsewhere, efficiently absent, and therefore irrelevant. No one saw the two of you exit your dorm room at a perfectly reasonable distance from one another, not touching, not overtly intimate, not doing anything that would warrant commentary.
You walked side by side like colleagues.
Like professionals.
Like this is normal.
You arrived at his lab refreshed, caffeinated, and infuriatingly functional, despite the fact that you had drooled on your pillow less than twelve hours ago.
Zandik has decided not to think about that.
The lab hums softly around you. Ventilation systems cycle. Refrigeration units maintain stable temperatures. On the central steel table rests a partially dissected specimen—human-adjacent, genetically modified, long deceased. The thoracic cavity is open. Ribs splayed outward like a macabre flower. The heart has been removed and replaced with a synthetic pump for observational comparison.
Zandik had been mid-experiment when you arrived.
You glanced at the corpse once.
Nodded.
“Cool,” you said.
Then sat down and started gaming.
This is, somehow, still infuriating.
You swing your legs idly as if you are not two meters away from exposed viscera. Your expression is neutral. Mildly amused. Entirely unbothered. The glow of your phone reflects faintly in your eyes.
Zandik watches you through the reflection on a stainless-steel surface rather than directly.
He tells himself this is efficient.
You hum under your breath.
He resumes his work.
He inserts a probe into the synthetic pump, monitoring pressure gradients, comparing mechanical output to organic baseline data. The numbers are clean. Predictable. Reliable.
Unlike you.
You had received the message.
This is not speculation. This is statistical certainty.
You are many things—apathetic, disengaged, aggressively uninterested in societal expectations—but you are not irresponsible with duty. You always reply to your blood family. Always. Even when you ignore everything else.
Therefore, you saw it.
The question.
The implication.
The inevitable future presented politely, like a scalpel wrapped in silk.
And yet.
You are here.
Still slouched.
Still slacking.
Still playing games like the world has not just quietly reminded you of its claim over your body and future.
Zandik’s gloved hands are steady as he adjusts the apparatus.
Inside his mind, hypotheses multiply.
Hypothesis A: You intend to ignore it until it forces confrontation.
Hypothesis B: You have already accepted it internally and compartmentalized the decision.
Hypothesis C: You feel nothing at all.
He does not like Hypothesis C.
He injects a solution into the specimen’s remaining vasculature. The fluid—clear, viscous, faintly luminescent—travels through artificial channels, simulating circulation. The tissue responds as expected. Minor swelling. Color change. No aberrant reactions.
Good.
You yawn.
Loudly.
“…You’re obstructing my concentration,” Zandik says flatly.
You glance up from your phone, unfazed. “You literally haven’t looked away from that thing for an hour.”
“That is irrelevant.”
You shrug. “Skill issue.”
He resists the urge to dissect something more aggressively.
He adjusts the lighting, illuminating the specimen’s cranial cavity. The skull cap has been removed earlier, exposing the brain—partially intact, neural tissue preserved for study. Electrodes are embedded along the motor cortex.
“Did you sleep well?” he asks suddenly.
The question slips out before he can filter it.
You do not notice.
You never do.
“Yeah,” you say, eyes still on your screen. “Like a rock.”
Interesting.
He notes the response.
No hesitation. No deflection. No sign of disturbance.
He switches to a finer instrument, delicately separating tissue layers.
“Dreams?” he probes, tone casual, as if inquiring about lab conditions.
You pause your game briefly. “Probably. Don’t remember.”
A lie.
Or an omission.
Your mouth twitches faintly—an involuntary micro-expression. He catches it.
You resume playing.
“Any… communications this morning?” he continues, carefully.
You shrug. “The usual.”
The usual.
He hates that phrase.
It is vague. Noncommittal. Designed to end inquiry.
He increases the voltage slightly, stimulating a cluster of neurons. The brain twitches. A finger on the specimen’s hand jerks.
You glance up.
“Oh, nice,” you comment. “That one moved more than the last one.”
He does not look at you. “Your observational skills are improving.”
“Low bar.”
“Yes.”
He pauses, then pivots strategy.
“You are remarkably consistent,” he says.
You blink. “Is that an insult?”
“It is an observation.”
You smirk. “I’ll take it.”
You are unfazed.
Still.
He feels something tighten inside his chest—not emotion, he tells himself, but irritation at an uncooperative variable.
He decides to escalate, subtly.
“Have you ever considered altering your routine?” he asks.
You squint at your screen. “Why?”
“For optimization.”
You snort. “My routine is optimized for not burning out.”
“Burnout is irrelevant.”
“Easy to say when you don’t sleep.”
He almost smiles.
Almost.
He returns to the specimen, removing a section of cortical tissue with surgical precision. The exposed matter glistens under the lights, delicate and obscene.
“You seem… unattached,” he says, watching the tissue react to chemical exposure. “To outcomes.”
You finally look up.
Not suspicious.
Just mildly curious.
“Yeah,” you say. “That’s kind of my thing.”
“To people as well?”
You tilt your head. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“Whether they’re annoying.”
He exhales slowly.
This is going nowhere.
You are infuriatingly sincere. Completely unaware. Or aware and refusing to perform the expected emotional display.
He files another note: emotional response suppression, voluntary.
You are sexually averse. Romantically disinterested. Not because of trauma—he does not allow himself to use that word—but because you simply do not prioritize such things. You have said as much, casually, as if discussing dietary preferences.
“I don’t really get the appeal,” you once told him. “Seems like a lot of work for minimal payoff.”
At the time, he had agreed.
Now, the data feels… incomplete.
He increases the intensity of the experiment. The specimen’s nervous system reacts violently. Muscles spasm. Synthetic pump accelerates. Pressure spikes.
The smell of cauterized tissue fills the lab.
You wrinkle your nose. “That one smells worse.”
“Yes,” he says. “Protein denaturation at higher temperatures.”
“Gross.”
You go back to your game.
Unbothered.
Still lazy.
Still here.
He should ask directly.
He knows that.
He is not usually one for indirect methods. Blunt inquiry yields clean data.
And yet.
He does not ask.
He knows why.
Because if he asks and you answer—truthfully, casually, indifferently—it will confirm something he is not prepared to categorize.
That you will accept duty without resistance.
That you will marry without attachment.
That you will leave without looking back.
Not because you want to.
But because it is inevitable.
He removes his gloves, peels them off slowly, and discards them in a biohazard container.
“You are… remarkably adaptable,” he says instead.
You pause your game and look at him. “That’s a weird compliment.”
“It is accurate.”
You shrug. “I do what works.”
You always do.
And that is precisely the problem.
He turns back to the table, staring down at the dissected body—opened, analyzed, reduced to components.
A human, once.
Now, data.
He understands this process intimately.
Reduction. Control. Understanding through dismantling.
His mind, traitorous, applies the same framework to you.
If duty is the mechanism by which you can be moved…
Then duty is the variable that must be understood.
Controlled.
Neutralized.
He does not think of possession.
He thinks of containment.
You hum again, completely unaware, thumbs dancing across the screen. You do not notice the way his gaze lingers on you longer than necessary. You do not see the careful calculations unfolding behind his eyes. You do not feel the shift—the subtle recalibration of priorities.
You are still lazy.
Still uninterested.
Still playing games like nothing has changed.
Zandik turns back to his work, expression calm, precise, rational.
Inside, something sharp settles into place.
Not love.
Not desire.
A conclusion.
If you will walk willingly toward inevitability—
Then inevitability will be adjusted.
Measured.
And when necessary…
Redefined.
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
Zandik decides—after precisely seventeen minutes of inefficient internal debate—that continuing to infer is a waste of resources.
Inference is elegant, yes, but it leaves residue. Assumptions. Statistical ghosts. If one is already operating in a contaminated environment, it is better to cut directly to the source and see what bleeds.
You, unfortunately, are dense.
Not intellectually. Never intellectually. You are dense in the way a tungsten cube is dense—immovable, unreactive, inconveniently resistant to external force when it comes to emotional inquiry.
Which makes subtlety useless.
He sets his scalpel down.
This is important. He does not keep it in his hand while asking. That would introduce bias. Also temptation.
You are seated on your usual stool, legs hooked around the rung, phone in hand. You are farming something. Crops? Resources? Souls? He is not certain. The game’s interface looks aggressively stupid, filled with bright colors and cheerful icons that offend the laboratory’s aesthetic.
The lab smells faintly of iron, ozone, and disinfectant. The cadaver on the central table is midway through cranial exploration. The skull has been opened via oscillating saw; bone fragments have been carefully removed and cataloged. The dura mater is peeled back like wet parchment, exposing cortical tissue that glistens under surgical light.
The specimen is dead.
You are alive.
The contrast is irritating.
He calls your name.
You do not look up. “Mm?”
He waits.
You continue tapping your screen.
He clears his throat—not because it is necessary, but because it signals an impending interruption. You glance up, annoyed but compliant.
“What?” you ask.
He studies your face. Neutral. Mildly bored. Entirely unsuspecting.
Good.
“Your relationship history,” he says.
You blink.
Once.
“…What?”
He repeats it, slower. “Your romantic affiliations. Past or present.”
You stare at him for a moment as if trying to decide whether this is a joke, a test, or a symptom of early-onset insanity.
Then you shrug.
“Oh. None.”
He waits.
You go back to your game.
“…None,” he repeats.
“Yeah.”
“No relationships.”
“Nope.”
“No partners.”
“Zero.”
“No exes.”
“Never had one.”
You say it casually. The way one might say they’ve never owned a pet iguana. Not defensive. Not embarrassed. Just factual.
Zandik feels something shift.
Not violently.
Not dramatically.
Relief slides in first—cool, insidious, unwelcome. It seeps into the gaps of his logic before he can cauterize it.
He hates that.
He allows none of it to surface.
“Statistically improbable,” he says instead.
You glance up. “Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Huh.” You pause your game. “Guess I’m built different.”
You resume farming.
He clenches his jaw.
You are telling the truth. He can tell. Your tone lacks the micro-tension associated with omission. No defensive posture. No physiological indicators of deceit. Your heart rate—monitored earlier, incidentally—remains stable.
No relationships.
Ever.
The data should satisfy him.
It does not.
He adjusts his angle of attack.
“And currently?” he asks.
You sigh, exaggerated. “Still none.”
“No interest?”
“Not really.”
“Sexual aversion?”
You glance at him. “That’s a weird way to ask.”
“It is precise.”
You think for a moment, then shrug. “Yeah, I guess. It just doesn’t… do anything for me.”
You say it like you’re discussing an underwhelming food.
He nods.
Romantic disinterest. Sexual aversion. Consistent with prior observations. Consistent with your behavior. Consistent with your general disregard for social scripts that rely on desire as motivation.
Still.
He hesitates.
This is the point of no return.
He should stop.
He does not.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
“…You said before,” he begins carefully, “that you like someone.”
Your thumbs slow.
Not stop.
Slow.
He catches it.
“Yes,” you say.
The word lands with surgical precision.
He feels it.
A sharp, localized pressure beneath the sternum. Not pain. Pressure. Like a clamp tightening incrementally.
He keeps his voice even. “Elaborate.”
You shrug again. “There’s not much to elaborate.”
“You like them.”
“Yeah.”
“Define ‘like.’”
You squint at your screen, then glance up as if humoring him. “I think they’re interesting.”
“Interesting,” he repeats.
“Yeah. I like being around them.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
“That is insufficient.”
You laugh softly. “It’s really not.”
He watches you closely now.
Your posture is relaxed. Your shoulders are loose. There is no telltale warmth in your expression. No softness. No anticipation. No longing.
You are not in love.
You are not infatuated.
You are… curious.
That somehow makes it worse.
“Is this individual aware?” he asks.
“No.”
“Do you intend to inform them?”
“No.”
“Why?”
You shrug. “Seems unnecessary.”
“Unnecessary.”
“Yeah. I don’t want anything.”
“You like them.”
“I like lots of things.”
“This is different.”
“Is it?”
You tilt your head, genuinely confused. You are not being coy. You are not deflecting. You are not playing games.
You are simply… uninterested.
He presses.
“Who is it?”
You pause.
Just long enough.
Then: “Doesn’t matter.”
That is the first boundary you have drawn.
He notes it.
His fingers curl slightly against the steel table.
“Why?”
“Because it doesn’t change anything,” you reply. “I’m not gonna do anything about it.”
“Ever?”
You shrug. “Probably not.”
“Probability is not certainty.”
You smile faintly. “In this case, it is.”
He studies you like a pathologist studies a rare anomaly.
You are sincere.
Completely, devastatingly sincere.
You are not protecting a secret romance.
You are not harboring forbidden longing.
You are not waiting for the right moment.
You simply… like someone. In the abstract. In the way one might like a concept. A phenomenon.
You will never act on it.
Because action implies investment.
And you do not invest.
Not emotionally.
Not romantically.
Not sexually.
You have already accepted that such things are temporary, inefficient, and incompatible with duty.
Zandik feels the pressure increase.
He says nothing.
You go back to your game, immediately absorbed, the conversation already filed away as “answered” in your mind.
He remains standing.
Still.
Silent.
The lab hums.
Behind him, the cadaver’s exposed brain reflects the light like a grotesque mirror.
He turns back to it slowly.
Picks up his scalpel.
Resumes work.
He should be satisfied.
You have never been with anyone.
You are not in love.
You do not desire.
You will not pursue.
And yet.
You like someone.
Not him.
The distinction is clinically minor.
Emotionally… corrosive.
He dissects deeper, separating neural tissue with exquisite precision. He names structures silently as he goes—prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, amygdala. Centers of decision-making. Memory. Emotion.
He injects a reagent into the amygdala.
The tissue reacts.
Swelling. Discoloration. Predictable necrosis.
He watches it die.
Inside his mind, hypotheses reorganize.
You like someone.
But you will not act.
Unless duty demands it. Unless inevitability dictates it. Unless the system pushes you. He understands systems. He understands pressure. He understands how organisms behave when constrained.
You are not motivated by desire. You are motivated by obligation.
Which makes you far more predictable.
And far more dangerous.
Because if someone else—whoever this “interesting” individual is—were to position themselves as your duty…
Your jawline remains relaxed as you play. You hum softly, unbothered. You have no idea what you’ve just introduced into his mental framework.
He closes his eyes briefly.
This is not jealousy.
Jealousy implies competition.
This is risk assessment.
A variable has been identified.
An unknown actor.
Not even a rival—because you will never let them become one.
But still.
He hates unknowns.
He opens his eyes.
The specimen’s brain is now irreversibly compromised. The experiment has reached its conclusion.
He steps back, removing his gloves with deliberate slowness.
“You are,” he says suddenly, “remarkably self-contained.”
You glance up. “Is that good or bad?”
“It is… efficient.”
You smile faintly. “I try.”
You go back to farming.
He watches you.
Unbothered. Unaware. Dense.
Stupid, in this regard.
He files away everything you’ve said.
Never had a relationship. No exes. Sexually averse. Romantically uninterested.
Likes someone, abstractly. Will do nothing about it.
Duty above desire.
Inevitability over longing.
He feels the pressure settle into something colder.
More stable.
A conclusion, not an emotion.
If you will never choose love—
Then love is irrelevant.
If you will always choose duty—
Then duty is the lever.
And if someone else ever attempts to become that lever—
He will notice. He will observe. He will intervene.
Not out of possessiveness. Not out of jealousy.
But because allowing an uncontrolled variable to influence a system under study is—
Unacceptable.
You hum happily, harvesting digital crops, utterly oblivious.
Zandik turns back to the lab, expression calm, mind razor-sharp. The scalpel glints under the light.
He is smiling.
Very slightly.
Where you cannot see it.
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
You finish farming whatever digital crop apparently requires the same level of devotion as a subsistence economy, yawn with theatrical exaggeration, and—without asking permission, because why would you—wander over to Zandik like a homing missile calibrated to “warm surface that tolerates me.”
You do not hesitate.
You never do.
You simply climb onto him.
Not seductively. Not meaningfully. You flop against his side with the careless confidence of a cat that has already decided a lap belongs to it. Your head lands against his shoulder, cheek squishing faintly, breath warm through fabric that still smells faintly of antiseptic and iron.
You sigh. Deep. Content. Like a corpse that has decided not to be one tonight.
Zandik freezes for exactly half a second.
Then resumes breathing.
He does not push you away. That would be inefficient. You would ask questions. You would be annoying. You would make jokes.
Instead, he allows you to settle.
You nuzzle closer, eyes already half-lidded, and mumble, “You were weird earlier.”
He looks down at you.
Your eyes are barely open. Your words slur slightly—not intoxication, just sleep inertia. The kind of cognitive degradation that makes people honest, stupid, or both.
“Define ‘weird,’” he says.
“You asked… a lot of questions.” You yawn again, jaw cracking. “About relationships.”
“Yes.”
“Why.”
Not accusatory.
Barely curious.
Like you’re asking why the sky is blue.
Zandik adjusts his posture minimally so your weight is distributed evenly. This is not kindness. This is spinal preservation.
“I required data,” he replies.
You hum. “For what.”
“Risk assessment.”
“Mmkay.”
You shift again, curling into him more fully, your arm draping across his torso like an afterthought. Your fingers curl idly into his sleeve.
He notes contact points.
Skin temperature differential: negligible.
Respiratory synchronization: gradually aligning.
Muscle tone: relaxed.
You are trusting him with your unconscious body again.
Statistically unwise.
“I operate on probability,” he continues calmly. “You are an anomaly with multiple potential future constraints. Understanding those constraints allows for preemptive mitigation.”
Your brow furrows faintly. Sleepy processing.
“Oh,” you say. “That makes sense.”
It should not.
You nod once, satisfied, and promptly tuck your face into his shoulder like the conversation has concluded.
Which, apparently, it has.
Zandik stares straight ahead.
This is absurd.
You asked a question, received a sufficiently logical answer, and immediately accepted it without skepticism, suspicion, or emotional reaction. No follow-up. No “are you jealous.” No “is this about me.”
You simply… accepted it.
Like you accept most things.
Duty. Inevitability. Structural realities.
Your breathing evens out within seconds.
You are asleep.
Again.
On him.
He should move you.
He does not.
He tells himself it is because moving you would disrupt your sleep cycle, and interrupted rest leads to decreased cognitive performance, and decreased performance leads to errors, and errors in an anomaly like you are dangerous.
That is the justification.
It is airtight.
He examines his thoughts clinically, like a tumor sample under a microscope.
Arranged marriages, he thinks, are not inherently inefficient.
Contrary to popular fiction, they are often optimized systems—compatibility matrices, resource alignment, genetic diversification, political leverage. Particularly in families like yours, where sentimentality is an obstacle, not a feature.
Your blood family would not choose poorly.
They would choose someone structurally sound. Mentally adequate. Economically advantageous. A species mate selected for stability rather than romance.
From a purely rational standpoint, it could be good for you.
You would adapt. You always do.
Your values align with function. With duty. With endurance rather than happiness.
Yes.
Statistically speaking, you would survive it. Possibly even thrive.
Zandik’s jaw tightens imperceptibly.
How annoying.
The logic is sound.
Which makes the irritation intolerable.
He runs a parallel analysis.
Did he become attached?
No.
Impossible.
Attachment implies emotional dependency, neurochemical reinforcement, limbic system interference. He was born with deficiencies in that area. Or perhaps efficiencies. The distinction is semantic.
Either way, it never bothered him.
Logic has always been sufficient.
Profit has always been sufficient.
Control has always been sufficient.
He has disposed of assets, allies, even entire populations without hesitation when they ceased to be useful.
So why—
Your fingers twitch in your sleep.
You sigh softly and shift closer, pressing your weight into him like gravity has personally selected him as your anchor.
Zandik stills.
It is ridiculous.
Utterly.
He is not losing you.
You are not his.
You do not belong to anyone.
You would walk into marriage the same way you walk into his lab—unbothered, incurious, prepared to endure.
And yet.
The thought that someone else might be the one you sleep against—this carelessly, this trustingly—registers as an anomaly spike.
Not jealousy.
Jealousy implies desire.
This is… displacement.
Like removing a control sample from an ongoing experiment. It destabilizes the entire dataset.
He considers disposal.
Immediately rejects it.
Premature.
Also inefficient.
You are too powerful at present. Too unpredictable. Removing you now would create more problems than it solves.
He exhales slowly.
Calms himself.
The truth—if one strips it down to bare components—is obscene in its simplicity.
You are the only thing in his life that is not dead, dissected, or ideologically hostile.
The only thing that breathes near him without wanting something.
The only variable that exists without demanding meaning.
Alive.
Breathing.
Warm.
It is, objectively, a distraction.
“Fucking ridiculous,” he thinks.
You drool faintly against his shoulder.
He does not move.
He runs another analysis.
Option A: Interfere with the marriage process. Complex. Risky. High visibility. Low deniability.
Option B: Observe. Gather data. Maintain proximity. Ensure experiment stability.
Option C: Terminate experiment.
Option C remains suboptimal.
For now.
He adjusts his arm slightly, not wrapping it around you, but bracing you more securely so you do not slide off when you inevitably twitch in your sleep like a malfunctioning automaton.
This is not an embrace.
This is structural support.
He looks down at you again.
Your face is slack with sleep. No mask. No irony. No defenses.
You look… harmless.
Which he knows better than to believe.
He allows himself one final, controlled thought before sealing it away:
He is interested.
Not emotionally.
Academically.
In seeing which suboptimal species mate your blood family selects. In observing how you adapt. In maintaining the experiment until the conclusion yields sufficient data.
Yes.
That is all this is.
For research purposes.
And because—purely coincidentally—keeping you here, breathing against him, keeps something else quiet.
Something inconvenient.
Something alive.
Zandik closes his eyes.
You sleep.
The lab hums.
The experiment continues.
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
Zandik forces his breathing into a measured cadence.
Four seconds in. Four seconds hold. Four seconds out.
A childish technique, frankly. A crude override for organisms who cannot regulate their autonomic responses without tricking themselves into compliance. It should not work on him.
It partially works anyway, which is worse.
You are asleep on him again, weight warm and inconvenient, cheek pressed into the seam of his coat as if you’ve mistaken him for furniture. Your arm is draped across his torso with the lazy entitlement of a parasite that contributes nothing but insists on comfort.
Your breathing is slow, consistent. Your eyelids twitch occasionally—REM sleep. Dreaming.
Your phone, discarded on the metal table, sits facedown like a guilty witness.
The laboratory around you continues functioning at baseline: ventilation cycling, refrigeration units maintaining cryogenic stability, fluid pumps thrumming softly like distant heartbeats. The corpse on the central table remains open from earlier work—thorax split, sternum retracted, ribs held apart by a stainless-steel spreader. Organs cataloged in neat trays: liver, lungs, heart—each labeled with numbers, each reduced to weight, texture, pathology.
The smell of formalin and iron lingers.
Normally, this environment stabilizes him.
It is his natural habitat: sterile, controlled, honest. In death, nothing performs. Tissue either responds to stimulus or it doesn’t. There is no pretense. No politics. No warm messages that are knives.
And yet you noticed he was “weird.”
You, of all things.
The tungsten cube, the emotional black hole, the creature that can watch a cranial cavity being opened and comment “cool” like you’re observing a cooking tutorial.
You noticed.
That means the deviation is measurable.
That means it is not hypothetical.
Objectively speaking, he is not as stable as he usually is.
Infuriating.
He stares at his gloved hands—still, steady—and waits for the internal agitation to resolve itself.
It does not.
Threats are natural. Threats are expected. Threats are data. He has built his entire life around the assumption that the world will attempt to interfere, sabotage, erode, or kill. That is not new. That is not destabilizing.
So why is this destabilizing?
He forces his attention to the simplest answer first: the experiment is threatened.
You are the experiment. The anomaly. The variable that does not behave according to normal human incentives. The one specimen that never begs, never bargains, never tries to seduce him into moral compromise. The one that simply exists—unapologetically, irrationally—and therefore provides the cleanest data set he has ever had the privilege to dissect without a scalpel.
An arranged marriage introduces an uncontrollable variable: a spouse. A legal claim. A social proximity barrier. A shift in access frequency.
Access reduction is a problem.
He could solve access reduction.
Schedules can be penetrated. Protocols can be bypassed. People can be bribed, threatened, drugged, blackmailed, removed.
He has solved harder problems with less effort.
So the threat-to-experiment hypothesis is insufficient.
He tries again.
Perhaps it is not the reduction of access. Perhaps it is the uncertainty.
He hates uncertainty.
He hates unknowns.
He hates any variable that enters the system without being mapped, measured, and labeled.
The potential spouse is unknown.
He does not know their temperament, intelligence, pathology, loyalties, reflexes. He does not know how they will handle you. He does not know what your blood family is selecting for—obedience, ambition, cruelty, compatibility, profit.
He could find out.
He could locate the candidate. He could obtain medical records. Psychological history. Genetic predispositions. Social connections. He could compile a dossier so exhaustive that the candidate’s own mother would feel embarrassed reading it.
He has done that before.
So why can’t he calm down?
His jaw tightens.
The sensation in his chest returns—clamp-like, precise, entirely inappropriate.
He hates that his body is participating in this. He hates that his autonomic system is reacting as if something has threatened him personally.
Threats do not threaten him. Threats are fuel.
His mind is becoming… a mess.
Not a chaotic, emotional mess, like the melodramatic kind humans cry about into pillows. No. His is a clinical mess. A network of calculations producing conflicting outputs. A machine that has been fed a variable it cannot reconcile with its own operating assumptions.
He turns his head slightly, looking down at you.
Your face is slack with sleep. The corner of your mouth is faintly damp. Drool has returned like a loyal employee.
You look harmless.
He knows better.
You are not harmless.
You are simply unmotivated.
You are power without hunger, a blade that never swings unless provoked. That should make you easy to manage.
It doesn’t.
He closes his eyes briefly and begins a structured analysis, because if he cannot calm down, he can at least classify.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
Differential diagnosis: cause of instability.
Sleep deprivation: plausible. He has been sleeping more than usual lately, ironically, and the deviation itself could be disrupting his baseline. Regularity is a drug.
He rejects it. He has operated at far worse sleep deficits without this reaction.
Chemical exposure: plausible. The lab contains solvents, anesthetics, neurotoxins. An accidental inhalation could cause agitation.
He tests the air mentally: ventilation is optimal. Filters are functioning. His own vitals are stable. No tremor. No sweating. Pupils normal.
He rejects it.
Cognitive overload: plausible. Multiple concurrent projects, increased workload, resource limitations.
He has thrived on overload. Overload clarifies priorities.
He rejects it.
Emotional interference: unacceptable hypothesis.
⋅───⊱༺ ♰ ༻⊰───⋅
He pauses.
He has to examine unacceptable hypotheses, or else he becomes like everyone else—lying to himself for comfort.
Very well.
Emotional interference.
He is not “attached.” Attachment is a simplistic label. It implies sentimentality, weakness, dependency.
But there are other phenomena.
Habituation.
Reinforcement.
A variable becoming part of baseline.
You have become part of baseline.
That is not affection. That is not love. That is not anything as grotesque as wanting.
It is simply… adaptation.
His mind adapted to your presence. Your routine. Your inconsistency that paradoxically remained consistent: you always returned. You always showed up. You always slouched in his lab like you belonged there, providing noise and warmth and an irritatingly stable data stream.
The thought of that stream being diverted—rerouted into someone else’s hands—creates an error spike.
Not because he will miss you.
Missing implies longing.
But because the system has been altered without his consent.
Consent.
Interesting word.
He does not require consent from others.
He requires control.
He opens his eyes.
You shift slightly in your sleep and press closer against him, seeking warmth. Your hand lands against his sternum, fingers splayed. You sigh contentedly.
He remains still.
This contact—this unconscious, casual contact—does something extremely inconvenient: it makes the question personal.
Not emotionally personal.
Strategically.
You trust him physically.
You do not trust anyone emotionally.
That is… rare.
His mind latches onto it like a hook in flesh.
He hates it.
He needs to calm down.
He forces himself back to logic.
Arranged marriages are not inherently harmful. In your case, they might be statistically beneficial. Your blood family is profit-oriented, logic-driven. They would select for compatibility, resource synergy, stability.
You would adapt. You would comply. You would endure.
Perhaps you would even be safer under a structurally optimized partnership than you are drifting alone.
Yes.
That is rational.
And yet the clamp tightens again.
Because “safer” is not synonymous with “accessible.”
Because “beneficial” is not synonymous with “acceptable.”
Because the system was stable and now it is threatened by an external agent he did not authorize.
He hears his own thought and recognizes it with clinical horror:
Authorize.
As if you are a resource.
As if you require his approval.
As if you are—
He cuts the thought off, violently.
He is losing coherence.
He stands abruptly, careful not to wake you. Your head lolls, then settles back against the chair. You mumble something incoherent and continue sleeping, abandoned mid-cuddle like a malfunctioning appliance.
He steps away.
Distance should help.
It does not.
He moves to the central table.
The corpse waits.
He prefers corpses. Corpses do not complicate. Corpses do not introduce variables like “warm messages about marriage dates.”
He picks up a scalpel.
The blade catches the light cleanly.
He makes a precise incision along the specimen’s neck, reopening tissue. The cut is perfect: skin separates, subcutaneous fat yields, fascial planes expose themselves obediently.
There.
Order.
He spreads the tissue and exposes the carotid sheath. He identifies structures: carotid artery, internal jugular vein, vagus nerve.
The vagus nerve.
He stares at it.
The vagus nerve is the highway between the brain and the body. It governs parasympathetic responses—calming, digestion, heart rate modulation. It is the reason breathing tricks can modulate emotion.
He touches it with the tip of a probe.
The tissue twitches.
He watches the tiny movement and feels an absurd surge of satisfaction.
Stimulus. Response.
Clean.
Predictable.
Unlike his own nervous system.
He applies a mild electrical stimulus, observing reflexive contraction patterns. The corpse’s muscles jerk faintly. The jaw clenches once, grotesque and mechanical.
He imagines his own jaw tightening the same way.
He hates the comparison.
He increases voltage slightly. The specimen’s diaphragm spasms, drawing a false breath—air hissing through a trachea that will never house life again.
He watches the chest rise.
Alive and breathing.
The phrase returns uninvited.
He grips the scalpel harder.
It’s ridiculous.
He is not lonely.
Loneliness is a human weakness born from the illusion that being observed is the same as being known.
He does not need to be known.
He needs to succeed.
He needs to accomplish his ambitions.
He needs to win.
So why did he just think of you as “alive and breathing” like it matters?
He lowers the scalpel and rests his hands on the table.
He is not calm.
Not fully.
He can force the outward stillness. He can maintain the mask. He can speak in rational justifications and you will nod and accept it like a docile animal.
But inside, the calculations continue to collide.
He exhales slowly.
He must treat himself like a subject.
Observe symptoms.
Measure severity.
Identify trigger.
Trigger: the message. Marriage date.
Trigger: your admission. You like someone (not him).
Trigger: your behavior after. Unchanged. Unbothered. Still crawling into him to sleep as if his body is merely a convenient pillow.
The contradiction is the irritant.
You behave intimately without meaning.
You offer proximity without attachment.
You provide warmth without claim.
And now an external system wants to place a claim on you.
A legal claim.
A social claim.
A structural claim.
And his mind—his cold, rational mind—registers that claim as interference.
Not because he loves you.
Because he was using you.
Because you are his anomaly.
Because he has invested resources.
Time.
Space.
Attention.
Because you have become part of baseline.
Because the thought of losing baseline is—
He stops.
Losing.
There it is.
He has been circling the word like a predator, refusing to name it.
Losing.
He does not lose.
He recalibrates.
He replaces.
He destroys.
He does not lose.
And yet his body is responding as if he might.
He stares down at the corpse’s open chest, the ribs held apart, the exposed cavity a hollow theater.
He remembers, with sudden clarity, that he has always operated around dead things.
Dead ideas. Dead ethics. Dead bodies.
And then you arrived, annoyingly alive, breathing, warm, useless in all the ways that shouldn’t matter—and somehow you did.
His throat feels tight.
He hates that too.
He presses two fingers to his own pulse, measuring.
Steady. Elevated by a small margin.
Annoying.
He forces his breathing again.
Four in. Hold. Four out.
He does not fully calm.
Because calm requires resolution.
And he does not have it.
He cannot decide whether you are an experiment he should protect for data integrity…
Or a baseline he should preserve because it has become… pleasant.
Pleasant is a dangerous word.
He replaces it with: operationally tolerable.
Better.
He turns his head toward the chair where you’re sleeping, curled awkwardly now without him, chin tucked, still breathing evenly.
He watches you for a long moment.
His face remains calm.
His mind remains sharp.
But underneath, something has been triggered—something hidden, unseen, and therefore far more dangerous than overt emotion.
He hates it.
He wants to excise it.
He cannot.
Not yet.
Because even if it is irrational—
Even if it is suboptimal—
It is now part of the system.
And he does not allow parts of his system to wander unsupervised.
He sets the scalpel down with deliberate care.
He wipes his gloves clean.
He walks back toward you.
Not quickly.
Not urgently.
Controlled.
Measured.
He pauses beside you, looking down.
You mumble something in your sleep and reach out blindly, searching.
Your fingers brush his sleeve.
You latch on.
He allows it.
His eyes narrow slightly, and his mind finally produces a thesis it can tolerate:
This instability is not weakness.
It is information.
A diagnostic indicator that the variable has exceeded its assigned parameters.
That means the experiment has evolved.
That means his strategy must evolve with it.
He bends slightly and, with clinical gentleness, adjusts your position so you won’t strain your neck.
Then he sits again, letting you curl against him like you always do.
His face stays calm.
His voice stays silent.
Inside, the mess organizes itself into a plan.
✦ . ⁺ . ✦ . ⁺ . ✦
Zandik wakes you without ceremony.
No gentle transition. No easing. He simply presses two fingers to the side of your neck—not hard, not threatening, just enough pressure to intrude on sleep and inform your nervous system that continued unconsciousness is no longer efficient.
“Wake up,” he says.
You do.
Not with alarm. Not with panic. You blink slowly, eyes unfocused, pupils dilated with residual sleep chemistry. Your brain is clearly still booting up in safe mode.
“Huh,” you mumble intelligently.
“Good,” he replies. “We’re beginning.”
You squint at him. “Beginning… what.”
“An experiment.”
You yawn, long and cavernous, jaw cracking audibly. Then you nod.
“Okay.”
No questions.
No concern.
No curiosity about scope, risk, or purpose.
This is why you are a problem.
He notes compliance time: under three seconds.
Baseline affect: lethargic, neutral.
Cognitive resistance: absent.
He adjusts the lighting—brighter now, clinical white flooding the room, banishing any illusion of intimacy. The lab asserts itself again: steel surfaces, instrument trays, the corpse still covered with a sterile sheet from earlier.
You sit up sluggishly, hair a mess, eyes half-lidded. You look like someone who has accidentally wandered into a medical documentary and decided not to leave.
Zandik steps closer.
He does not announce intent.
He places his hand on your shoulder.
You do not flinch.
He slides his fingers along your clavicle, not slowly, not seductively—methodically. Pressure calibrated. Observing muscle tension, skin response, micro-expressions.
You blink at him.
“Are we… doing the thing where you poke me like I’m a frog again?” you ask.
“Yes.”
“Cool.”
He makes a mental note: sarcasm absent. No humor deflection. Genuine neutrality.
He continues.
He traces along your arm, down to your wrist, turning your hand palm-up. He presses two fingers to your pulse again. Counts.
Steady.
Unbothered.
He lifts your hand slightly, observing passive resistance (none), joint flexibility, reflex arcs.
You let your head tip forward until it rests lightly against his chest.
Not as an invitation.
As a convenience.
Your eyes are already drooping again.
“You can sleep,” he says.
“Mmm,” you reply. “Tell me if I need to do something.”
He does not miss the fact that you said if, not when.
He moves his other hand to your back, fingers splayed, exploring the planes of muscle beneath fabric. He presses gently along your spine, mapping posture, tension, old compensations.
You sigh softly.
Not pleasure.
Release.
Like someone sinking into a warm chair.
He continues narrating aloud, voice calm, precise, as if dictating notes.
“Subject remains receptive. No signs of autonomic stress response. No increase in heart rate. No withdrawal reflex.”
You hum faintly.
He cups your jaw, thumb resting beneath your chin, tilting your face up so he can observe your eyes more clearly.
You comply.
Your gaze is unfocused. Calm. Mildly bored.
He leans closer.
Not abruptly.
Incrementally.
He notes the absence of anticipatory tension. No stiffening. No increase in respiration.
He moves to kiss you.
You stop him.
Not forcefully.
You simply lift one hand and place two fingers against his chest, halting his forward motion with minimal effort.
“Sorry,” you mumble, eyes barely open. “First kiss is reserved.”
He freezes.
Not externally.
Internally.
“…Reserved,” he repeats.
“For who?”
You shrug, hand dropping immediately back to your lap. “Husband. Or whatever.”
The words are casual. Lazy. As if you’re explaining why you don’t eat dessert before dinner.
Zandik straightens slowly.
The room feels colder.
“Explain,” he says.
You blink at him, genuinely confused by the intensity that suddenly sharpens his voice.
“Huh? It’s just… a thing.”
“A thing,” he echoes.
“Yeah,” you say. “Like—fairytale rules. First kiss is supposed to be special. I dunno. It’s dumb.”
He stares at you.
This does not align with your profile.
You despise sentimentality. You ridicule romance. You treat emotional narratives like outdated software.
And yet—
“You believe in that,” he says flatly.
You think for a moment.
“Not really,” you answer. “But I read those stories growing up. Guess it stuck. Seems… neat.”
Neat.
He feels irritation spike—not hot, not explosive, but sharp and surgical.
You are contradicting yourself.
And worse—you are doing so without caring.
“You do not believe in romantic love,” he says.
“Nope.”
“You are sexually averse.”
“Correct.”
“You view marriage as duty.”
“Yup.”
“And yet you are reserving your first kiss for a hypothetical spouse.”
You nod. “Yeah.”
“Why.”
You squint at the ceiling, thinking. “Because it’s supposed to mean something. Not to me. To… the concept, I guess.”
The concept.
He exhales slowly.
This is not logic.
This is contamination.
Residual mythos embedded where it should not be.
He does not push further.
He does not argue.
He does not dissect this yet.
Instead, he changes vectors.
“Then make this official,” he says.
You blink.
“What.”
“A formal relationship,” he continues. “Dating. Structured. Defined parameters.”
There it is.
The word lands between you like a blade laid carefully on a table.
You react instantly.
“No.”
No hesitation.
No softening.
No confusion.
Just no.
“I’m not interested,” you add, already looking away.
His jaw tightens.
He tries again—tone sharper now, edged with something that could almost be called demand.
“Why.”
You sigh, tired. “It’s boring.”
Boring.
Like weather forecasts.
Like paperwork.
Like small talk.
Anything remotely romantic triggers the same response in you: disengagement.
He feels irritation surge again—stronger this time.
You rejected him without malice.
Without fear.
Without even noticing the escalation.
You rejected him the way you reject spam calls.
He does not show it.
His face remains calm. His posture remains loose. But internally, something cracks.
Not loudly.
Cleanly.
A fissure forming where certainty used to be.
He speaks again, voice lower.
“Do you understand,” he says, “that refusing structure does not remove consequence.”
You shrug. “That’s fine.”
“You are unmotivated by affection.”
“Correct.”
“And yet you allow proximity.”
“Because it’s comfortable.”
“You allow touch.”
“Because I don’t mind.”
“You allow intimacy.”
You frown faintly. “Is that what this is?”
“Yes.”
“Huh,” you say. “Didn’t think about it.”
Of course you didn’t.
He stares at you.
Then he says it.
Blunt.
Low.
Almost challenging.
“I will be the one who takes that kiss.”
The words hang.
Dangerous.
Loaded.
A declaration disguised as inevitability.
You blink.
Then yawn.
“Oh,” you say. “Okay.”
It flies over your head completely.
You are already settling back against him again, clearly uninterested in continuing this line of conversation. Your cheek presses into his chest. Your arms slide around his waist in a loose, lazy cuddle.
You do not pull away.
You do not object.
You do not interpret.
You simply… allow.
Zandik’s hands hover for a moment.
Then resume movement.
If you will not resist, he will proceed.
He resumes his “experiment,” hands moving with renewed precision, narrating as he goes—not because you need to hear it, but because it anchors him.
“Subject displays no emotional response to verbal provocation. No behavioral shift after rejection of proposal. Continues permitting physical contact.”
You hum sleepily.
Your body relaxes against him again, trusting, warm, irritatingly alive.
He notes everything.
Your disinterest.
Your boundaries.
Your contradictions.
Your myth-laced logic.
Your complete obliviousness to the danger embedded in his words.
He adjusts his grip slightly, securing you against him so you don’t slide as you drift back toward sleep.
You mumble something incoherent and go still.
Zandik looks down at you.
At the curve of your face.
At the ease with which you accept his presence without granting him claim.
He feels the irritation settle—not fading, but condensing.
Hardening.
This is not romance.
This is not desire.
This is conquest deferred.
Not of your body. Of the system that insists on claiming you before he does.
He continues the experiment. You continue to allow it.
And somewhere deep in his mind, the conclusion finalizes with chilling clarity:
If you will not choose—
Then choice is irrelevant.
And inevitability can be… arranged.
𝐆𝐨𝐝'𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭 