𝐆𝐨𝐝'𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭

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

♡ Word Count. 10,946 words

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You wake to the sterile hush of the laboratory, the kind that hums in your bones more than your ears. It smells faintly of ethanol and iron and something burnt—protein denaturation, maybe. You blink, pupils slow to comply, and the world resolves into stainless steel, white light, and Zandik standing where he always stands: too close to the table, too still, hands gloved and red to the wrists.

This is the third. Or the fourth. You lose track. You’re good with numbers when they matter; this one doesn’t.

Your cheek is pressed against the edge of his desk, neck sore from sleeping at an angle no spine should forgive. You peel yourself upright with a yawn that cracks your jaw and drags a tear from one eye. Zandik doesn’t look at you. He never does when it matters. His gaze is locked on the opened thoracic cavity in front of him, ribs spread with clinical patience, organs catalogued like a library he’s already memorized.

He asks you a question without turning. “Do you consider a margin of error acceptable when variables are intentionally constrained?”

You squint at the body. “Morning to you too.”

Another instrument clinks into the tray. His voice remains even. “Answer the question.”

You scratch your head, hair sticking up in a way that would annoy him if he cared about things like aesthetics beyond symmetry. “Depends. Are we talking statistically acceptable or emotionally acceptable?”

He pauses. That alone is odd.

You notice because you’ve noticed worse.

You slide off the stool and pad closer, bare feet cold against the floor. The body is… wrong. Not in the usual way. Usually he’s immaculate, even when he’s cruel. This one looks rushed. Incisions a millimeter wider than necessary. Tissue handling just slightly too aggressive. Nothing a layman would see, but you’re not one. You’ve watched him long enough to learn the difference between violence and precision.

You tilt your head. “Zandik.”

He finally looks at you. Just a glance, quick and sharp, like a scan rather than eye contact.

“Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

The words come out sleep-thick, unguarded. You don’t mean anything by them beyond what they are. Concern, plain and unadorned. No trap. No angle.

His face gives you nothing. It always does. If not for the micro-tension in his jaw, you’d think you imagined the last twelve hours.

He turns back to the table. “Define ‘okay.’”

You sigh and step closer, ignoring the blood. You always do. It stopped bothering you after the second time you realized he wasn’t doing it to be dramatic. You lift a hand and cup his cheek, thumb brushing the edge of his jaw where blood has unintentionally spilled despite his usual precision. He doesn’t flinch. He never does. He lets you do it the way one might tolerate a variable they haven’t decided how to categorize yet.

“You’ve been off,” you say softly. “You’re usually… cleaner.”

A muscle ticks in his cheek under your palm.

“That is an observation, not a question.”

“Mm. Still.”

You rub your thumb in a small circle, sleepy and gentle, like he’s something that might bolt if startled. Like a feral animal that’s learned your hands mean warmth, not harm. “Past specimens ended badly. You’re usually very proud of your outcomes. This one… not so much.”

He inhales. Exhales. Controlled. Measured.

“Correlation does not imply causation,” he says.

You snort. “You always say that when you’re lying to yourself.”

His eyes flick to you again, sharper this time. “I do not lie to myself.”

“You rationalize,” you correct. “Different thing.”

He removes his gloves with methodical care, peels them off finger by finger, and drops them into the biohazard bin. The sound is too loud in the quiet. He finally turns fully to you, posture straight, hands clean now but still faintly stained where the blood has soaked through before.

“This situation,” he says, “has introduced confounding variables.”

You hum, still holding his face. “You mean me?”

“Yes.”

You grin, lazy and unapologetic. “I do that.”

He studies you like a slide under a microscope. “You asked if I am ‘okay.’ The answer is that my cognitive faculties are intact, my motor control is unimpaired, and my capacity for long-term planning remains optimal. However—” He stops himself, lips pressing together for a fraction of a second. “—there has been a measurable increase in intrusive thought patterns unrelated to my primary objectives.”

You blink. “You mean the weird questions.”

“Yes.”

You drop your hand, stretching your arms over your head with a groan. “Huh. Thought so.”

Silence stretches. You can feel him watching you, recalibrating.

Then he says it, blunt as a scalpel.

“Are you refusing to date me because you derive satisfaction from destabilizing me, or because you are genuinely incapable of recognizing the implications of your behavior?”

You freeze mid-stretch. Slowly, you look at him.

“…Wow. No good morning, no coffee, straight to psychological warfare.”

He doesn’t smile. “Answer.”

You consider him for a moment, head tilted, expression unreadable in the way that drives him insane because it’s not performative. You’re not hiding anything. You just… don’t care enough to arrange your face.

“Neither,” you say. “I just don’t see the point.”

His brows knit together. “Explain.”

You shrug. “You asked me out. I said no. It’s nothing personal. You of all people should understand not wanting unnecessary attachments.”

His jaw tightens. “This is not about ‘attachments.’ This is about consistency.”

You blink again. “Consistency?”

“Yes.” His voice sharpens, just a degree. “You exhibit behaviors typically associated with exclusive romantic bonding. Physical intimacy. Emotional proximity. Co-sleeping. Mutual routines. You demonstrate concern for my well-being.” His eyes flick pointedly to where your hand had been on his face. “And yet you reject the designation that contextualizes these behaviors.”

You stare at him.

Then you laugh.

It’s not mocking. It’s just… surprised.

“Oh. That’s what this is about?”

His eyes narrow. “Do not trivialize this.”

“I’m not.” You yawn again, covering your mouth. “I just didn’t realize you cared about labels.”

“I care about parameters,” he snaps. “And boundaries. Which you demonstrably lack.”

You drop your hand and lean back against the table, careful not to touch anything sharp. “I have boundaries.”

“You do not.”

“I do.”

“I slept in your bed last night.”

“Because I was tired.”

“You routinely occupy my personal space.”

“You never tell me not to.”

“You kiss me.”

You tilt your head. “Not on the lips.”

“That is not a meaningful distinction.”

“It is to me.”

He steps closer. The air shifts. Not threatening—focused.

“You exhibit commitment behaviors without acknowledging commitment,” he says, voice low. “This suggests either a severe lack of self-awareness or a deliberate avoidance of accountability.”

You shrug again. “Or maybe we’re just weird.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is to me.”

He exhales sharply through his nose, irritation finally bleeding through his control. “You apologize reflexively when confronted, then continue the same behaviors. This indicates a pattern of avoidance.”

You blink. “Sorry?”

“There.” He gestures, sharp and precise. “That. That is exactly what I am referring to.”

You frown, genuinely puzzled. “I just meant… sorry you’re annoyed.”

“I am not annoyed.”

“You’re definitely annoyed.”

“I am analyzing.”

“Uh-huh.”

His eyes flash. “You treat this as a game.”

You grin. “It is.”

“For me, it is an experiment.”

“See? Perfect. We’re aligned.”

“No.” His voice drops. “We are not.”

You straighten slightly, eyebrow lifting. “Why not?”

“Because you refuse to define the terms.”

You think about that. Really think. Then you shrug, softer this time. “I don’t need to.”

“That is unacceptable.”

“To you.”

“Yes.”

“And to me, it’s fun.” You smile, bright and unapologetic. “Why would I want to box it into something conventional? We’re anomalies. You said it yourself. Why pretend we’re not?”

His gaze bores into you, searching for something—fear, maybe. Hesitation. Anything he can leverage.

He finds none.

You just look… bored.

“Very well,” he says quietly.

Before you can respond, he steps into your space, one hand bracing beside your head against the table. It’s a calculated move, body angled just so, cutting off your retreat without touching you. He smells like antiseptic and metal and something sharp.

You look up at him, eyebrow arched. “Bold.”

“I am establishing a boundary,” he says.

“By looming?”

“By escalating.”

You tilt your head, considering him with open curiosity. There’s no fear in your eyes. Just interest. Challenge.

“Is this the part where you try to intimidate me into agreeing with you?”

“No.” His voice is steady, but there’s something dangerous coiled beneath it now. “This is the part where I determine whether you are willfully obtuse or genuinely indifferent.”

You smile slowly. “Oh, I’m definitely indifferent.”

His fingers curl slightly into the edge of the table. “Then you are underestimating the consequences of that indifference.”

“Maybe,” you say. “Or maybe you’re overestimating the importance of the question.”

For a long moment, neither of you moves. The lab hums. The body cools.

Then he straightens, stepping back with visible effort, control snapping back into place like a blade sheathed just in time.

“This discussion is not over,” he says.

You grin, utterly unbothered. “Sure it is. You’ll get over it.”

His eyes linger on you, dark and unreadable.

“We will see,” he murmurs.

You stretch again, wandering toward the door. “Wake me if you need help cleaning up.”

He watches you go, mind already recalculating.

You don’t notice.

You never do.

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

You leave before the lab air can finish crawling under your skin.

It’s not dramatic. You don’t slam doors. You don’t storm. You just… exit. Like a ghost clocking out for lunch.

Outside, the air is cold enough to sting, sharp enough to scrape the residue of antiseptic and irritation off your lungs. You shove your hands into your pockets and start walking with no destination, which is how you prefer all things. Destinations imply staying. Staying implies roots. Roots rot.

God, how tedious.

You kick a pebble across the path and watch it ricochet off a curb, bouncing twice before disappearing into a gutter like it had somewhere important to be.

Lucky bastard.

Zandik is pushy. You’ve heard it from other mouths, other whispers, other warning labels slapped onto his name like biohazard tape. Manipulative. Calculating. Dangerous. As if that’s news. As if you didn’t notice the way his questions circle instead of approach, the way he frames “choices” like branching corridors where all paths end in the same room.

You’re not blind. You’re just… uninterested.

You’re a freebird. A stray. No home, no collar, no owner scribbling their name on your bones. And that’s not an aesthetic choice. That’s survival.

People love to romanticize detachment. They call it cold, edgy, tragic. They write essays about it. They don’t live it. They don’t wake up every day carrying the accumulated weight of decisions that affect worlds they’ll never see and people who will never know your name. They don’t juggle causality like a desk toy.

You do.

You check your mental ledger out of habit.

Seventy-five timelines stabilized this week. Three collapsed despite intervention—acceptable loss margins, given entropy curves. One domain still flickering on the edge of paradox, but you already rerouted the causal loop. It’ll hold. Probably.

You could do it in your sleep. Sometimes you do. Muscle memory, except the muscles are metaphysical constants and the memory is older than language.

Compared to that, Zandik’s existential frustration over labels barely registers.

You snort to yourself and nearly walk into a lamppost.

“Focus,” you mutter, rubbing your forehead. “Multitasking is how you get distracted.”

You keep walking.

From the outside, you know how it looks. You look lazy. Apathetic. A professional slacker with zero ambition and an alarming tolerance for chaos. You nap at inappropriate times. You joke when people expect reverence. You treat apocalypses like mild inconveniences.

What they don’t see is that work has always been the closest thing you have to a heartbeat.

Not the kind of work humans mean. Not careers or promotions or legacies carved into stone. Real work. The kind that keeps existence from tearing itself apart at the seams. The kind that never ends, never thanks you, never lets you rest.

You love it because it’s honest. It doesn’t pretend to love you back.

Relationships, on the other hand, are a statistical nightmare.

You slow your pace, staring at the cracks in the pavement like they might spell out a warning if you squint hard enough.

Attachment introduces bias. Bias introduces error. Error scales catastrophically when you’re dealing with infinity.

This isn’t cynicism. It’s math.

You have baggage. Not the cute kind. Not the “oh, I’ve been hurt before” kind that fits neatly into therapy metaphors. You have baggage no normal person could carry without being crushed under it. Whole civilizations worth of ghosts rattling around in the back of your head. Names you don’t say anymore because saying them might summon something worse than memory.

Zandik isn’t normal. Sure. He’s sharp enough to cut himself on his own thoughts. He plans ten moves ahead and calls it restraint. He dissects morality like a specimen and still finds it wanting.

But you?

You’re not something that can be fixed.

You’re not broken.

You’re… allocated. Assigned. Bound by parameters that don’t care how lonely it gets inside your skull at three in the morning when the universe is quiet enough to hear itself breathe.

Emotions are volatile variables. Attachments even more so. They destabilize equations. They create blind spots. They make you hesitate when hesitation costs lives—plural, exponential, abstract.

Nothing personal. Simple risk mitigation.

You laugh softly, a short bark of sound that startles a passing bird into flight. “Listen to me,” you mutter. “I sound like him.”

That thought irritates you more than it should.

You know it seems cold. Careless. Unfair. You’re not unaware of how your behavior lands on other people. You see the looks. The confusion. The hurt they try to hide when you shrug off something that mattered deeply to them.

But to you?

It’s business.

It’s work.

And work doesn’t get jealous. Work doesn’t demand exclusivity. Work doesn’t ask you to choose between one life and a thousand.

You stop at a corner, watching traffic flow past in orderly chaos. Each car a decision. Each decision a potential disaster narrowly avoided by mutual adherence to rules no one consciously thinks about anymore.

Humans are fascinating that way.

You’ve learned something important over your life: the moment someone decides they are special to you, the equation breaks.

They start asking for prioritization. For exceptions. For mercy that looks a lot like favoritism. They don’t say it outright, but it leaks out in the pauses, the expectations, the quiet resentment when you don’t choose them first.

And you can’t. You won’t.

To love all humans equally is not a platitude.

It’s a safeguard.

The only way to ensure your judgment stays clean. The only way to prevent yourself from becoming the very thing you despise—self-righteous, selective, convinced that your love makes you moral.

You’ve seen what happens to judgment who start picking favorites.

It never ends well.

You exhale, breath fogging in the air, and roll your shoulders. Somewhere behind you, a timeline ticks closer to divergence. You’ll deal with it later. You always do.

If Zandik becomes harmful—truly harmful—you’ll cut the thread. Cleanly. Like you have with others who mistook proximity for entitlement. Who thought being “special” meant being exempt.

It’s not cruelty. It’s consistency.

You grimace. “Wow. I should put that on a mug.”

You resume walking, sneakers scuffing against concrete, humor bubbling up because if you don’t laugh you’ll start screaming and that tends to attract attention from higher management.

Angels are duty-bound. That’s the part people forget when they paint wings on things and call them benevolent. Duty isn’t gentle. Duty doesn’t care if you’re tired. Duty doesn’t ask if you want to be alone.

You’re more so than most. Overqualified. Overburdened. Over it.

A relationship isn’t just a distraction. It’s a betrayal of self. A slow erosion of the principles that keep you sharp, impartial, necessary.

That kind of death—the quiet kind, the one where you wake up one day and realize you’ve compromised too much—that’s worse than actual death. Actual death is easy. Clean. Finite.

This?

This is eternal.

You shove your hands deeper into your pockets and pick up the pace, humor returning full force as a defense mechanism honed to a razor’s edge.

“Seriously,” you mutter, “the audacity. Of all people. A mad scientist accusing me of commitment issues.”

You snicker, shaking your head, and disappear down the street, already recalibrating, already moving on, already carrying the weight of everything that matters far more than a label ever could.

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

Animals always find you.

You don’t look for them. You don’t call. You don’t crouch down and make those embarrassing noises humans make when they desperately want to be chosen. You just exist, and somehow fur, feathers, scales, and things that technically shouldn’t have a taxonomy drift into your gravitational pull like it’s physics.

You sit on a low stone wall just outside the bustle, sneakers dangling, and within minutes there’s a cluster.

A fat desert fox appears first, blinking at you like it forgot what it was doing halfway through life. Then a sumpter beast calf—too young, too curious, clearly not authorized to be here—lumbers over and presses its massive head into your side with the confidence of something that has never experienced consequences. Birds gather on your shoulders, your knees, your head, because apparently personal space is a suggestion, not a rule.

You sigh, fond and tired and deeply unsurprised.

“Yeah,” you mutter, scratching behind the fox’s ears. “Same.”

Animals are better. Objectively.

They don’t project. They don’t narrativize your existence into some tragic romance subplot. They don’t look at you and decide you need to be fixed, saved, softened, or claimed. They don’t confuse proximity with ownership.

They just… are.

The fox rolls onto its back without asking, legs sticking straight up like it’s been factory-reset. The sumpter beast makes a low, happy rumble that vibrates through the stone beneath you. One of the birds pecks your hair gently, then settles in like it’s found a nest and a life partner.

You laugh under your breath.

“Unbelievable,” you say. “I’m basically a petting zoo.”

You’ve always preferred animals. It’s not a moral stance. It’s a logistics issue.

Love is real. You know that. You’re not cynical enough to deny it. Love is beautiful and terrifying and capable of turning the most rational beings into feral disasters. You’ve seen it shape empires, save worlds, end them faster than any catastrophe ever could.

You believe in it.

You just don’t believe in it for you.

For you, every path that involves love leads to tragedy. Not metaphorical tragedy. Literal, documented, causality-verified tragedy. You’ve run the simulations. You’ve lived the case studies. The variables always collapse into the same outcome: loss amplified by scale.

You pet the fox’s belly, counting breaths, grounding yourself.

Humans like to pretend love is exempt from consequence. Like it exists outside math. Like the universe will politely pause entropy because two people really meant it.

Idiots.

You toss a bit of dried fruit toward the birds and watch them explode into a flurry of feathers and bad decision-making. Chaos. Predictable chaos.

You understand chaos. Chaos is honest.

You lean back, hands braced on the stone, eyes half-lidded as the sun warms your face. Somewhere in the back of your mind, a timeline hiccups. You nudge it back into place without thinking. Reflex. Like breathing.

That’s part of the problem.

You mess around. You joke. You flirt with danger and treat life like a game you’re only half-paying attention to. People call it irresponsible. Selfish. Immature.

Maybe they’re right.

You snort. “Oh no. The eternal caretaker has a coping mechanism.”

You mess around because if you don’t, the weight settles in your chest and doesn’t leave. Because if you take everything seriously all the time, you start to feel the edges of yourself fray. You start to remember too clearly.

Fun is oxygen. Play is pressure release. If you don’t laugh, you crack.

And cracked angels don’t retire. They fall.

You scratch under the sumpter beast’s chin and it lets out a sound so loud it startles itself. You laugh, full-bodied this time, startling the birds into indignant squawks.

“Sorry, sorry,” you say. “Didn’t mean to disrupt your spiritual journey.”

Someone once told you that choosing joy was selfish when the world was suffering. You’d stared at them, baffled, because what they didn’t understand was that joy is maintenance. Joy is what keeps you operational. Joy is how you keep going long after most beings would have burned out or broken.

You don’t pretend to be normal because you want to deceive anyone. You pretend because you’re learning. Studying. Practicing how to live without constantly feeling like a loaded weapon pointed at reality.

Fun is rehearsal for humanity.

You’ve learned how to laugh at the wrong times. How to tease instead of confess. How to treat intimacy like a joke so it doesn’t become a liability. It’s not cruelty. It’s containment.

The fox nips your sleeve gently, clearly offended that you stopped petting it to think. You comply immediately. Priorities.

“Yeah, yeah,” you say. “You’re right. Overthinking is a bad habit of mine.”

Animals don’t ask why you flinch sometimes when hands linger too long. They don’t ask why you freeze when someone says your name with too much meaning behind it. They don’t want explanations for the distances you keep or the threads you cut cleanly and without apology.

They just want warmth. Food. Safety. Presence.

You can give that without breaking anything.

You watch people pass by at a distance. Scholars, merchants, mercenaries. Lives full of tiny dramas and manageable stakes. You wish you had a life like that. Not because you want to be them, but because they get to be simple.

You’ve been accused of being heartless. Of leading people on. Of treating emotions like toys.

You consider that accusation seriously, because you always do. Self-awareness is non-negotiable when you’re this dangerous.

Maybe there’s truth in it. Maybe you are selfish. You choose stability over intimacy. You choose function over fulfillment. You choose the many over the one every single time.

You smile crookedly.

“Guilty,” you whisper. “I plead extremely guilty.”

The sumpter beast yawns, enormous and unbothered, and promptly uses your leg as a pillow. Your circulation dies instantly.

Worth it.

You tilt your head back and close your eyes, letting the noise of the world wash over you. Laughter. Footsteps. Wind through leaves. The subtle hum of reality continuing to exist because you’re doing your job, even when you pretend you’re not.

Love exists. You protect it fiercely.

Just not by participating.

Your role has never been to be chosen.

It’s to make sure choice continues to exist at all.

You open one eye, look down at the pile of animals draped over you like you’re a public resource, and grin.

“At least you guys don’t want to date me,” you say.

The fox sneezes directly in your face.

You burst out laughing, chaos cracking through the quiet like sunlight through glass, and for a moment—just a moment—you let yourself simply be here, alive, breathing, petting creatures that don’t need you to be anything more than what you are.

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

You bite into a pastry the size of your palm and immediately regret it, not because it tastes bad, but because it is a beacon.

The moment you sit down in the little open-air café—wooden tables, sun-warmed stone, vines drooping like they’re eavesdropping—a low rumble begins beneath the furniture. At first you think it’s your stomach complaining about your diet being ninety percent “whatever is nearby.”

Then a cat head appears from under your chair.

Then another.

Then five.

Then, inexplicably, a kitten so small it looks like it was assembled incorrectly waddles out and falls over at your foot, rights itself with offended dignity, and stares at your pastry like it has legal claim.

You stare back.

The cats win immediately. They always do.

“Okay,” you tell the pastry, like it’s the one causing the problem. “I didn’t want you anyway.”

You break off a piece and hold it out. A paw touches your fingers gently—almost polite—before a tiny mouth latches on with the ferocity of a starving storm. In seconds, the rest of the cats converge. The café owner doesn’t stop them. A passing scholar doesn’t stop them. Reality itself doesn’t stop them.

You are being mugged by cats in broad daylight.

You sigh, surrendering the rest of your food in a slow ritual of defeat. Your original plan—eat, cool off, pretend you’re a functional member of society—collapses instantly. You don’t even mourn it. You never do.

With your meal redistributed as reparations, you lean back, hands behind your head, and watch the clouds drift overhead.

The sky in Sumeru is unfairly pretty when it wants to be. Blues layered like watercolor, white shapes gliding slow as if they have all the time in the world and aren’t being hunted by mortality. You like quiet views. They feel like the closest thing you have to a home. Not because they’re yours—nothing is yours—but because they don’t ask you to be anything.

The cats climb into your lap like you’re a public bench. One kitten wedges itself between your ribs and your arm, purring so hard it vibrates your bones. Another tries to bite your hair as if testing its edibility.

You let them.

You breathe.

And because your brain is constitutionally incapable of letting you enjoy anything without also filing a philosophical complaint, Arlecchino’s voice crawls back into you like a hook catching cloth.

You love everyone, therefore you love no one.

She said it like a verdict. Not angry, not loud. Worse—flat. Certain. A sentence passed down by someone who didn’t need permission to judge you because she’d already paid the price of knowing you.

At the time, you’d stared at her like she’d announced the sky was fake.

That’s not true, you’d said. Confused, almost offended. I love people.

You do. You know you do. You have bled for strangers without hesitation. You have burned parts of yourself away to keep others warm. You have stabilized worlds full of people you will never meet, will never thank you, will never even know their reality almost didn’t happen.

If that’s not love, what is?

But Arlecchino’s eyes had stayed steady, sharp, unpleasantly gentle in the way she only is when she’s trying not to cut.

You love them, she said, like a concept. Like a category. You love humanity the way someone loves a painting in a museum—standing far enough back that nothing can reach you. You love everyone, so you never have to choose. And if you never choose, you never risk losing.

You’d laughed, because the alternative was being stabbed by the truth and you were already dealing with enough knives.

That’s not why, you’d insisted.

Arlecchino didn’t argue. She almost never does when she knows she’s right. She’d only leaned closer, voice low and furious in that controlled way that makes it worse.

You don’t understand what it means to make someone special, she’d said. You think it’s inefficient. A waste. But “special” is the whole point. It’s the decision. It’s the risk. It’s the proof.

And then—like she always does, like she has always done since she decided you were hers to protect even from yourself—she’d done the thing that makes you want to throw yourself into the ocean and also hug her until your ribs break.

She got mad.

Not tantrum-mad. Not childish. The quiet kind. The kind that means someone is trying not to show you how much you matter because they know you’ll treat it like a problem to solve rather than a feeling to hold.

Sometimes, she’d said, you treat me like a stranger. Like I’m just… another person. Like I’m not—

She hadn’t finished. She didn’t need to. The rest of the sentence was too heavy to say aloud.

Like I’m not your family.

Like I’m not the one who stayed.

Like I’m not the one who watches you fall apart and still hands you your pieces without flinching.

You’d looked at her then, genuinely bewildered, and said the most you think imaginable:

But you are special. You… have more access to my life.

Arlecchino had stared at you like she was reconsidering arson as a personality trait.

More access, she’d repeated, voice dripping with disbelief. That’s not special. That’s logistics.

You’d shrugged. Because what else were you supposed to do? There wasn’t a button you could press that would suddenly make your brain understand the concept of “I care about you so much it makes me irrational and that’s fine.”

Arlecchino believes in monopolization the way some people believe in religion. Commitment. Exclusivity. The deliberate, chosen violence of prioritizing one person over the many. She doesn’t see it as cruelty. She sees it as honesty.

You, on the other hand, see prioritization as a distortion field.

To choose one means to tilt the scale. To tilt the scale means bias. Bias means mistakes. Mistakes mean casualties. That’s not fear. That’s not avoidance. That’s mathematics and memory and the cold record of cause and effect.

But Arlecchino isn’t stupid. She knows that. She’s not asking you to be careless. She’s asking you to be human in a way that terrifies you more than any apocalypse.

You scratch behind a cat’s ear, letting its purr drown out the part of your mind that starts to formalize the argument. Premise, evidence, conclusion—your brain lining up morality like dominoes so you can knock it down and call it resolved.

Because maybe Arlecchino is right, in a way you hate.

Maybe loving everyone is how you avoid loving someone.

Because loving someone—the way Arlecchino means it—requires you to admit your love is finite. That your attention has limits. That your heart is a resource you can allocate unevenly. That you can pick.

And picking means admitting that if the world burned, you might save one person first.

That thought alone makes you feel like you’re choking.

Not because you don’t want to save them. But because the moment you admit you would, you become the thing you’ve spent your whole existence fighting against: selective mercy. A self-appointed judge.

Hypocrite.

Your gaze drifts back to the clouds, trying to let the thought dissolve in the sky’s indifference. But it doesn’t dissolve. It just changes shape.

Zandik wants exclusivity.

You hadn’t framed it that way at first. You’d treated it like one of his many strange hypotheses, another neat box he wanted to fit you into so he could label you and file you away. You assumed it was about control, because for him, it usually is.

But if you’re being painfully honest—if you set aside the part of you that likes pretending you don’t understand people because it’s convenient—you know it isn’t only control.

It’s also…

A demand for proof.

A demand that you acknowledge him as a priority, not a variable.

You remember his voice, calm and knife-sharp: You exhibit behaviors typically associated with exclusive romantic bonding.

Exclusive. He said it like a clinical descriptor, but the word itself is not clinical. It is possessive. It is a claim.

You kiss him. Not on the lips—because you decided that loophole made it Not Serious™—but everywhere else, because you can. Because it’s funny. Because it’s warm. Because you like the way it makes his brain short-circuit for half a second before he reboots into composure.

You share your bed with him. You sit in his space. You touch his face like he’s something tender rather than dangerous. You show concern without realizing how rare that is for him to receive without it being poisoned with fear.

And then you shrug when he asks you to call it what it is.

You don’t think of it as cruelty because you’re not trying to hurt him. But cruelty doesn’t require intent. Sometimes it just requires negligence.

You chew on that thought and immediately hate it.

A kitten climbs onto your shoulder and jams its forehead into your jaw, demanding attention like it pays rent. You scratch its head absentmindedly, feeling its tiny heartbeat against your skin.

Zandik isn’t asking you to love him like you love everyone.

He’s asking you to love him like you love someone.

To pick him.

To make him special.

You can almost hear Arlecchino’s voice again, dry as bone: See? You’re finally getting it. Took you long enough.

You grimace. “Don’t narrate my suffering, thanks.”

The cats, clearly uninterested in your existential crisis, begin wrestling in your lap. One of them bites another’s tail and gets slapped in the face for it. Justice is swift in the feline legal system.

You watch them with a kind of reverence. Animals don’t do moral philosophy. Animals don’t debate whether prioritization is ethical. They just… choose. They attach. They commit. They fight. They forgive. They live.

Humans do that too. The good ones, anyway. The ones who aren’t paralyzed by the need to be correct.

You’re paralyzed by correctness because you have to be. Because the stakes you carry punish mistakes with reality itself.

But Zandik’s stakes are different.

His ambition is predatory, yes. His logic is a scalpel, yes. But he is not blind to the value of commitment as a structure. He wants a framework where his investment yields predictable returns. He wants a claim he can defend.

And maybe—this part makes you laugh quietly, because it’s absurd—maybe he also wants to know that all his planning, all his intellect, all his careful manipulations can actually earn something he can’t dissect.

That he can be chosen.

You tilt your head, eyes narrowed at nothing.

What does he want from you?

Exclusivity and prioritization are the easy answers. The obvious ones. The ones he can say out loud without admitting anything else.

But beneath that?

He wants you to stop treating him like an entertaining anomaly you can pet and leave.

He wants you to treat him like Arlecchino wants you to treat her—not as “more access,” not as “logistics,” not as “another thread in the web,” but as a decision.

That’s what makes it dangerous.

Because if you make him special, you change.

Not in a poetic way. In a structural way. Your values shift. Your judgments tilt. Your work becomes contaminated by preference. You start to rationalize exceptions. You start telling yourself you can handle it, because you always tell yourself you can handle it.

And then one day you look up and realize you’ve built a throne out of your own hypocrisy.

You can’t do that.

You will never do that.

The cats finish their wrestling match and one collapses dramatically on its side like it has been struck by fate. You poke it. It opens one eye, offended, then resumes pretending to be dead.

You laugh again, despite yourself.

“Look at you,” you tell the cat. “So committed to the bit. Inspirational.”

You’re too deep in your head again. You always are when you stop moving.

That’s why you mess around. That’s why you joke. That’s why you treat intimacy like a game. Because if you let yourself think too hard about morality, you end up here: staring at clouds with cats in your lap and the weight of an impossible principle pressing on your throat.

So you do what you always do.

You throw the thoughts out like trash.

You lean back in your chair, let the sun hit your face, and focus on the clouds—big, slow, stupidly peaceful. You name them in your head like you’re five years old.

That one looks like a whale. That one looks like a hand. That one looks like a coffin, but you’re not going to unpack that right now.

A cat headbutts your chest, hard.

You look down, blinking.

“…What,” you say.

The cat stares at you with unblinking certainty, then curls up and starts purring like it has decided you are, in fact, its chosen person.

You stare at it for a long moment.

Then you sigh, defeated by the universe’s sense of humor.

“Fine,” you tell the cat. “You’re special. Happy now?”

The cat closes its eyes, utterly satisfied.

And you, despite everything—despite duty, despite math, despite the terror of choosing—feel something small and sharp stir in your chest like a crack in a perfectly controlled equation.

You pretend you don’t notice.

Of course you do.

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

You snap your fingers.

Reality obeys like it’s been waiting for permission.

Space folds—not dramatically, not with fireworks or choir music, just a clean, precise distortion, like a page turning in a book that has never known resistance. Gravity politely excuses itself. Atmosphere peels away. The café, the cats, the clouds—all of it compresses into an afterimage and vanishes.

You are suddenly floating.

Not falling. Floating. The important distinction.

Below you, the world hangs whole and fragile, a marble suspended in nothing, swaddled in blue and green like it’s pretending it’s safe. Further out, galaxies bloom in lazy spirals, light smeared across the dark like paint flicked by a careless being.

You stretch your arms, rolling your shoulders as if you’ve just stepped out onto a balcony instead of the edge of existence.

“Ah,” you sigh. “There we go.”

You don’t do this often. Not because you can’t. Because if you did, you’d never stop. There’s something dangerously soothing about the universe when it’s quiet. No people. No expectations. No one projecting meaning onto your actions like they’re entitled to footnotes.

Just space. Vast, honest, and completely uninterested in your personal drama.

You take a step.

There is no ground, but you walk anyway. The universe accommodates you the way it always does—by bending just enough to let you pretend you’re normal.

As you move, space ripples outward, layers peeling back like translucent veils. Timelines overlap. Dimensions slide into view. Lives flicker—billions of them—each a thread vibrating with intent, fear, love, and the relentless optimism of beings who assume tomorrow is guaranteed.

You watch civilizations rise and collapse in the periphery like background noise. Someone is being born. Someone else is dying. Somewhere, a very serious argument about soup is happening and will permanently alter three relationships.

You hum to yourself, hands tucked behind your head.

“This is why I don’t journal,” you mutter. “Too much context.”

The quiet settles into you, heavy and pleasant. The noise in your head dulls. The moral calculus that’s been chewing at your brain finally loosens its grip, intimidated by scale.

You stop walking and just… float.

Then, because you are incapable of not making everything weird, you get an idea.

“Hm,” you say aloud. “Let’s do something stupid.”

You raise one hand and curl your fingers like you’re plucking something invisible from the air. Space obliges again. Matter condenses. Light refracts. A glass appears in your hand—tall, elegant, absurdly mundane against the backdrop of infinity.

Inside it is… something.

Not liquid, not light, not energy. More like a concept given viscosity. It shifts subtly, responding to your attention.

A glass of love.

You snort. “Wow. If anyone could see this, I’d never hear the end of it.”

This is not how love works. You know that. This is an abstraction. A tool. A visualization to help you think, the same way people draw diagrams when their brains get messy.

You tilt the glass, examining it critically like a scientist assessing a questionable sample.

“Alright,” you say. “Let’s quantify the unquantifiable. For mental health reasons.”

The glass obliges, markings etching themselves along its side—percentages, clean and precise.

You tap the rim thoughtfully.

“Arlecchino,” you say.

The glass responds instantly. A thin line of shimmering substance appears at the very bottom.

1%.

You blink.

“…Huh.”

You tilt the glass again, squinting like that might change the math.

One percent. For anyone else, that would be nothing. A rounding error. Statistically insignificant.

For you?

It’s enormous.

You swallow, suddenly aware of the weight in your hand.

“She’s going to be so mad if she ever finds out,” you murmur. “I can already hear the lecture.”

Below that line—below 0.1%—is everyone else. A faint residue, barely measurable. Friends. Colleagues. Entire worlds. Loved collectively, evenly, without hierarchy.

Efficient. Fair.

Safe.

You nod to yourself. “See? Balanced. Ethical. No favoritism. Gold star for you.”

You’re about to put the glass away when curiosity—a known occupational hazard—nudges you again.

“…Zandik,” you say.

The glass shudders.

The substance inside surges upward like it’s been waiting to be acknowledged.

5%.

You stare.

“No,” you say flatly. “That’s not right.”

The glass does not care about your denial.

Five percent. Clean. Clear. Undeniable.

You rotate the glass slowly, watching the number hold steady no matter the angle.

“Wow,” you breathe. “That’s… higher than expected.”

You laugh, short and sharp, because if you don’t laugh you’ll start screaming into the void and that’s frowned upon even out here.

“Progressing, too,” you note, watching the line tremble like it’s thinking about climbing. “At this rate, you’ll be a problem.”

You float there, universe spinning lazily around you, and feel… nothing dramatic. No panic. No heartbreak. Just the familiar click of analysis engaging.

Five percent isn’t love. Not by any romantic definition. It’s not devotion. Not obsession. Not even longing.

But for you?

It’s dangerous.

It means prioritization is starting to form. Not consciously. Not deliberately. But structurally. A subtle tilt in the equation. A bias sneaking in through repeated exposure, routine intimacy, unchecked familiarity.

You rub your temple with your free hand.

“Okay,” you say calmly. “Let’s not overreact.”

You run the scenarios automatically.

If the value increases, decision-making integrity degrades. Risk of preferential judgment rises. Emotional interference becomes more likely. Mitigation strategies include distancing, redefining parameters, or—your least favorite—severing the thread entirely.

You grimace.

“Nipping it in the bud would be optimal,” you admit. “Classic preventive maintenance.”

But then the other part of you—the part that insists on being annoying—pipes up.

Without justified reasons?

You scowl at yourself. “Don’t anthropomorphize the algorithm.”

Except it’s not just an algorithm, is it?

You’re not panicking. You’re not spiraling. You’re just… considering. Measuring. Calmly acknowledging data.

That’s what you do.

The problem is that this data isn’t neutral. It’s relational. It’s messy. It doesn’t fit neatly into the frameworks you’ve used your entire existence to stay functional.

Zandik wants exclusivity. You know that now. Not in the sentimental sense, but in the structural sense. He wants to be a priority because he understands—better than most—that being chosen changes everything.

And you?

You’ve built your entire moral system around never choosing.

You stare at the glass again.

Five percent.

“Unacceptable,” you mutter. “I don’t even let my hobbies get that high.”

You give the glass a little shake like it’s misbehaving. The number doesn’t budge.

Of course it doesn’t. You can manipulate space-time, not self-awareness.

You sigh and let yourself drift backward, lying on nothing, stars wheeling beneath you like a moving ceiling.

Love, philosophically, is a resource allocation problem disguised as poetry.

Humans talk about it like it’s infinite, but it’s not. Attention is finite. Time is finite. Care is finite. To love one person more is to love another less, even if you don’t want to admit it.

Your solution—loving everyone equally—is elegant. It flattens the curve. Eliminates bias. Preserves objectivity.

But it also… sterilizes intimacy.

Arlecchino hates that. She wants the unevenness. The injustice. The declaration that someone matters more not because they deserve it, but because you decided they do.

Zandik, ironically, wants the same thing—just dressed in different language.

You snort. “Great. The two people who know me best both want me to be worse.”

You hold the glass up, letting starlight refract through it.

What does this glass represent, really?

Not how much you love them. But how much you allow them to matter.

That’s the dangerous part.

You could reset it. You could pour it out. You could pretend this was a thought experiment gone too far and go back to pretending you don’t understand why people keep calling you heartless.

But the number is there because something is there.

And you’re not afraid of it.

That realization lands heavier than the percentage itself.

You’re not afraid of loving Zandik.

You’re afraid of what that would make you.

Because if you let one person climb higher, you have to admit that your morality—so clean, so principled, so fair—has exceptions.

And once you allow exceptions?

Everything becomes negotiable.

You groan, covering your face with your arm. “Ugh. This is why I don’t do feelings. They’re inefficient and poorly documented.”

You lower the glass, still floating, still calm.

“Okay,” you decide. “No sudden movements. Observe. Monitor. No interventions unless thresholds are crossed.”

Classic you. Turn a crisis into a study.

You smirk faintly. “I’m not in love. I’m just… statistically compromised.”

The universe remains silent, unimpressed by your coping mechanisms.

You snap your fingers again, and the glass dissolves into light, percentages evaporating like they were never there.

Space stays.

The quiet stays.

You float there a little longer, letting the vastness remind you that five percent, no matter how dangerous, is still very small compared to infinity.

Still.

You make a mental note.

If it keeps rising?

You’ll have to decide whether cutting the thread is truly the most ethical option… or just the safest one for you.

You smile to yourself, humor flickering back into place like a shield.

“Wow,” you mutter. “Look at me. Growing. Disgusting.”

Then you turn, step forward into nothing, and let the universe carry you while you pretend—just for a while longer—that you don’t see where this is going.

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

You snap your fingers again.

The universe does not resist.

Everything—stars, galaxies, light, distance—collapses inward like it has been embarrassed to exist in your presence. Sound dies first. Color follows. Concept lingers for half a second longer than it should, then gives up too.

Absolute darkness.

Not the dramatic kind. Not void-as-aesthetic. This is the kind of dark that feels audited. Catalogued. The absence of light as a deliberate design choice.

You step forward.

There’s also a floor.

Of course there is. There is always a floor when you need one. It materializes beneath your feet as a thin plane of dim geometry, more idea than matter. The moment your weight settles, lines ignite outward in all directions—paths, threads, roots.

Fate, laid bare.

They sprawl endlessly, branching and rejoining like the nervous system of existence itself. Some glow faintly. Some pulse with warning colors you don’t bother naming. Others flicker in and out, unstable, uncertain, undecided.

Doors line the darkness at irregular intervals. Gates. Rooms. Thresholds. Each one a future, a truth, a catastrophe waiting patiently for curiosity to ruin everything.

You grimace.

“God,” you mutter. “This place is still tacky.”

You rarely come here. Not because you can’t—because you refuse. Where’s the fun in knowing everything? Where’s the joy in living if you already read the ending, the mid-credits scene, and the author’s notes?

Lore spoilers ruin immersion.

You already know too much. Enough to last several eternities. You don’t need more.

You’re not here to open doors. You’re not here to walk paths or test inevitabilities. You’re just… checking.

Like someone peeking into the fridge not because they’re hungry, but because something felt off.

Your gaze drifts, scanning without hurry. You pass doors you recognize and deliberately ignore them. The ones you sealed. The ones you burned. The ones you regret. You don’t stop. Stopping invites thinking.

Then you see it.

An abandoned door.

Black. Not metaphorically—literally black, as if light reaches it and simply refuses to continue. Its surface is scarred, old damage etched deep into the frame. Dried blood stains smear across it in patterns that make your instincts itch.

And beneath it—

Fresh red.

Not human blood. Viscous, murky colors like that of a dulled ruby. Thick, luminous, seeping from the gap beneath the door like it has somewhere important to be.

You stop.

“…Oh,” you say softly. “That’s new.”

The path leading to it is worse.

A narrow strip of fractured ground stretches out, broken by a yawning chasm on either side. The floor there is unstable, pieces falling away into nothing at irregular intervals. Even the threads of fate around it seem… strained. Thinner. Taut.

Like something heavy has been leaning on them.

You float forward instead of walking, because you’re not an idiot.

As you cross the gap, you wrinkle your nose.

The energy around the door smells like death.

Not decay. Not rot. Death as a concept. Endings stacked on endings. Finality compressed until it hums.

You hover in front of it, eyes narrowed.

Last time you were here—years ago, relative time—the door had been locked. Sealed. Reinforced. Warded so thoroughly it might as well have been a fortress. You remember glancing at it once, noting the sheer amount of effort it would take to breach, and deciding it wasn’t worth the paperwork.

Now?

The locks are undone.

Not broken. Undone. Cleanly. Methodically.

The door is slightly open.

Just enough.

You don’t touch it. You don’t need to. Your senses sweep over it automatically, layers of perception stacking like transparencies.

This door is not supposed to be open.

People misunderstand fate constantly. They think it’s rigid. Unchangeable. Or they swing to the opposite extreme and insist it’s meaningless, a suggestion at best.

Both are wrong.

Fate is resilient. Elastic. It tolerates interference the way oceans tolerate storms—by absorbing, redirecting, and continuing on with minimal complaint.

But some things?

Some things are load-bearing.

Changing them isn’t impossible. It’s just… expensive.

You frown.

This door represents something fundamental. A convergence point. A fixed anchor around which countless possibilities stabilize. You don’t need to open it to know that.

And someone has tampered with it.

You cross your arms slowly, posture shifting from casual to alert.

“Alright,” you murmur. “Who touched my apocalypse.”

You run the analysis.

Was it you?

The thought is irritating, but you don’t dismiss it. You are capable of tremendous collateral damage when you’re not paying attention. You manipulate realities the way others rearrange furniture. Sometimes things shift in your wake.

But you would remember this.

You don’t forget opening sealed doors that bleed existential dread.

Your gaze sharpens.

Was it him?

The question doesn’t panic you. It doesn’t even upset you. It just… registers. Another variable sliding into view.

Zandik is not supposed to have access to this layer. Not directly. But he is a persistent anomaly. A planner. A system-breaker. He pokes at foundations just to see if they squeak.

Could he have reached this?

Unlikely.

But not impossible.

Or—

You tilt your head slightly, studying the faint movement of the blood beneath the door.

Was it a feedback loop?

Your actions. His proximity. The statistical drift you observed earlier. Five percent. Rising.

Fate is sensitive to intent. Not conscious intent—structural intent. The way repeated choices carve grooves in probability.

You don’t need to love someone to warp fate around them.

You just need to matter.

You feel something cold settle in your gut.

People think fate changes because of dramatic moments. Declarations. Sacrifices. Grand choices made at the edge of a cliff.

That’s not how it works.

Fate changes because of small, repeated deviations. Patterns. Habits. The quiet insistence of presence.

Sleeping in the same bed.

Touching without fear.

Allowing someone to see you when you are not performing.

You stare at the door, suspicion hardening into something sharper.

“Don’t tell me,” you mutter, “that this is my fault.”

You don’t enter. You don’t push. You don’t even lean closer.

You just watch.

The gap beneath the door widens by a fraction of an inch.

The red liquid seeps further.

The energy thickens, like the room is holding its breath.

You feel no fear. Fear is for beings who don’t know how bad things can get. You know. You’ve seen worse.

But this—

This is unaccounted for.

An unknown variable.

You hate unknown variables.

You step back, slow and deliberate, never taking your eyes off the door.

“Okay,” you say calmly. “We’re not doing this today.”

You mark the location mentally, layering wards and observation protocols so subtle even fate itself won’t notice unless it looks directly at you and asks what you’re doing.

You don’t ask the door questions. Doors lie.

You don’t threaten it either. Threats imply concern.

Still, as you turn away, you feel it.

Attention.

Something on the other side of the door knows you noticed.

You bare your teeth in something that is not a smile.

“Stay put,” you tell it pleasantly. “I’m busy.”

You float back across the chasm, the collapsing ground repairing itself behind you like it’s ashamed of misbehaving.

As you leave, the darkness swallows the paths again, threads dimming one by one.

You snap your fingers another time.

The void dissolves.

But the feeling doesn’t.

Back in the safety of nowhere-in-particular, you exhale slowly, humor resurfacing because it always does.

“Wow,” you mutter. “First feelings, now fate is acting up. Fantastic week.”

You shake your head, filing the anomaly away with all the other things you don’t have time to deal with yet.

You’re not afraid.

But you are alert now.

And somewhere, behind a door that should not be open, something waits—patient, inevitable, and very interested in the fact that you finally looked its way.

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

You paddle through space like an idiot.

Not elegantly. Not poetically. Full-on doggy paddle, arms windmilling, legs kicking at absolutely nothing. If anyone were here to witness it, they would have questions. You do not care. No one ever audits your swimming technique in the void.

You sigh mid-stroke, bubbles of nonexistent air escaping your mouth out of habit.

“Wow,” you mutter. “Ten out of ten. Peak dignity.”

You roll onto your back and float, limbs spread, letting galaxies drift past your peripheral vision like lazy fish. Somewhere to your left, a nebula flares in offended pink. To your right, a star collapses quietly, probably because it couldn’t stand the vibes.

You stare at it all with half-lidded eyes.

Space is nice. Space doesn’t expect productivity. Space doesn’t ask why you haven’t solved everything yet. Space doesn’t care if you’re procrastinating on cosmic responsibilities by doing freestyle laps through eternity.

You kick once, gently, and spin.

Your thoughts, unfortunately, spin with you.

Hm. What to do.

That’s always the question, isn’t it? Not “what is right,” not “what is optimal,” not “what preserves the greatest number of lives.”

What to do.

Your mind drifts back to the obvious solution—the one everyone else would pick, the one that would make sense on paper and keep your internal systems clean.

Cut Zandik off.

Clean break. Thread severed. Variables removed. Glass of love drained and recycled. No more statistical anomalies. No more fate doors bleeding ominously in the corner of existence.

You could do it right now. You could snap your fingers and gently—but permanently—reconfigure circumstances until he no longer occupies the same narrative space as you. No harm. No drama. Just absence.

Efficient.

You grimace.

“Ugh,” you say aloud. “Boring.”

And there it is.

Fun.

The single most undervalued metric in every moral system ever invented.

People treat fun like an afterthought. A reward. Something you earn after work is done, after duty is fulfilled, after suffering has been properly documented and approved.

You know better.

Fun is not a luxury. Fun is a survival mechanism.

Fun is how you stay alive in a universe that would otherwise crush you under the weight of its own seriousness.

You kick again, flipping yourself upright, then start swimming sideways for no reason other than the fact that you can.

Fun, to you, is not hedonism. It’s not indulgence. It’s not distraction.

Fun is engagement.

Fun is the spark that tells you you’re still participating in existence instead of merely maintaining it.

Duty is heavy. Duty is endless. Duty does not love you back. Duty will consume you entirely if you let it. You’ve seen it happen to others like you—beings who mistook obligation for identity and burned themselves into hollow tools.

You refuse to become that.

So you prioritize fun.

Not first. You’re not irresponsible. Universes still exist because you show up. Timelines still hold because you intervene. You do your job.

But fun comes second.

And second is dangerously high on the list.

Fun keeps you flexible. Curious. It stops you from calcifying into something rigid and cruel. It’s how you test boundaries without breaking them. How you explore without committing. How you remind yourself that existence is not just a system to be optimized.

Zandik, unfortunately, is… fun.

You scowl at the thought, offended by your own brain.

He is infuriating. Pushy. Morally reprehensible. A walking ethical violation with a god complex and too many degrees.

And yet.

He challenges you. Not in the “prove yourself” way—he doesn’t need that—but in the “engage or disengage” way. He notices inconsistencies. He pushes where it hurts. He asks questions you don’t want to answer because answering them might require change.

That’s fun.

Not safe fun. Not comfortable fun. But the kind that makes your brain light up instead of shutting down.

You somersault in place, then pretend to swim through a cluster of stars like they’re pool noodles.

“Fantastic,” you mutter. “I’m psychologically stimulated. Call the press.”

If this were purely about efficiency, you would have cut him off the moment he asked for exclusivity. That request alone is a destabilizing force. It introduces hierarchy where you’ve deliberately flattened the field. It demands prioritization you’ve sworn never to grant.

From a duty standpoint, the answer is obvious.

From a fun standpoint?

Well.

Fun is about friction.

Fun is about tension that hasn’t resolved yet. The push and pull. The question mark.

Zandik doesn’t fit neatly into your moral framework, and that irritates you in a way that keeps you awake. You can’t categorize him as harmless, but you can’t dismiss him as trivial either.

He’s an anomaly.

And you, unfortunately, have a well-documented weakness for anomalies.

You float on your stomach now, chin resting on your hands like you’re lying on a dock instead of the void.

You don’t cut him off because you’re scared. That would be too easy an explanation.

You don’t cut him off because you’re curious.

Curiosity is fun’s ugly cousin.

What happens if you don’t choose the safest option? What happens if you allow a controlled deviation? What happens if you treat this like an experiment rather than a threat?

Fun is exploration with consent.

And despite his pushiness, Zandik hasn’t crossed the line you actually care about yet.

He hasn’t tried to cage you.

He hasn’t demanded obedience.

He hasn’t tried to force your hand using power instead of pressure.

He’s asking.

Annoyingly. Persistently. In his own sharp, clinical way.

That matters.

You sigh and do a lazy breaststroke through a patch of empty darkness.

Duty would have you amputate the problem before it grows.

Fun says: observe.

Monitor. Tease. Test.

Let it play out a little longer.

Fun is how you learn.

Fun is also rebellion.

Not against authority—you outrank most concepts—but against inevitability. Against the idea that your role has already been decided and all that’s left is execution.

Fun is you asserting that you are still a participant, not just a mechanism.

So you think instead of cutting.

You analyze instead of sever.

You swim instead of standing still.

Because the moment you stop having fun, the moment you reduce your existence to duty alone, you don’t just lose joy.

You lose yourself.

You stop being the thing that chose to care in the first place.

You roll onto your back again, arms spread, drifting.

Zandik complicates things. That’s undeniable. His presence nudges your glass of love upward in ways you don’t like and don’t fully understand.

But complications are interesting.

And interesting is fun-adjacent.

You stare into the dark, lips quirking into a grin that’s equal parts amused and dangerous.

“Alright,” you say to no one. “We’ll play.”

Not forever. Not recklessly. Boundaries exist. Thresholds exist. You’re not abandoning duty.

But you’re also not amputating something that hasn’t metastasized yet just because it makes your moral equations messy.

You kick once, spinning yourself in a slow, lazy circle.

Fun before stagnation.

Fun before despair.

Fun before becoming the kind of being that only knows how to end things.

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

You stop swimming.

Not because you’re tired—fatigue is optional—but because something clicks. Not a revelation. Not a prophecy. Just a clean, stupidly simple decision snapping into place like a controller button finally registering after lag.

“Oh.”

You float there, upside down, hair drifting like you’re auditioning for a space shampoo commercial, staring at nothing.

“He’s fun.”

You say it out loud, just to test the sound. The universe does not object. No alarms. No cosmic HR department materializes to file a complaint.

Fun.

Zandik is not a pet. Pets are predictable. Pets want affection. Pets obey rules they didn’t write and forgive you when you forget to feed them on time.

Zandik does none of that.

He bites back. He questions. He pushes. He escalates. He does not sit when told, does not roll over, and would rather die than fetch. He’s sharp enough to hurt you if you’re careless—and smart enough to know exactly where the line is, even if he keeps toeing it.

Which makes him…

You smile serenely.

A toy.

Not a disposable one. Not a wind-up novelty that breaks after three uses. A stuffed toy, sure—but the kind with hidden steel wiring inside. The kind you throw against the wall to see if it bounces back.

An anomaly you’re not tired of yet.

You kick gently, spinning yourself upright, legs dangling into nothing like you’re sitting on the edge of reality with a handheld console.

You’ve always treated existence like a video game.

People accuse you of nihilism when they notice. They think calling things “meaningless” is a declaration of despair.

It’s not.

It’s a settings menu.

If everything is meaningful all the time, you burn out. If nothing matters, you’re free to experiment. To play. To test mechanics without fear of permanent failure.

Respawn culture.

You don’t take things seriously because taking things seriously is how people lock themselves into bad builds and then refuse to respec out of pride.

You treat the universe like an open-world sandbox. You do the main quest because someone has to. You stabilize timelines. You patch bugs. You prevent softlocks that would crash reality.

But you live for the side quests.

Zandik is a side quest.

Not optional, exactly—but not required for completion. The kind with vague objectives, morally questionable rewards, and an NPC that keeps showing up in places he absolutely should not be.

You imagine his quest log.

ANOMALY: ZANDIK
Status: Active
Difficulty: Scales With Player
Warning: Emotional Damage Enabled

You giggle.

“Yeah,” you say. “That tracks.”

You’ve always known this is how you operate. When something stops being interesting, you drop it. When something violates your rules, you end it. Clean. Immediate. No second chances unless they unlock a secret achievement.

Rules are important. Not because they’re sacred—but because games without rules are just noise.

Your rules are simple.

Rule one: you don’t cage yourself. Ever.
Rule two: no forced prioritization.
Rule three: no entitlement.
Rule four: the moment it stops being fun, you quit.

Zandik hasn’t broken them yet.

He’s tried to negotiate them. He’s tried to redefine them. He’s tried to poke holes and see what leaks.

That’s fine.

That’s gameplay.

You float forward, drifting through a ribbon of starlight like it’s a loading screen animation.

People misunderstand what “fun” means to you.

They think it’s carelessness. Avoidance. Immaturity.

It’s not.

Fun is how you prevent corruption.

Fun is how you keep from turning into a grim, self-righteous god with a spreadsheet for a soul. Fun is the difference between a player character and an NPC stuck repeating the same tragic dialogue forever.

You laugh, the sound echoing strangely in the void.

Zandik doesn’t know he’s a toy. That’s part of what makes it work. Toys that know they’re toys get weird about it. Start demanding narrative arcs. Start asking what they mean to you.

You don’t do meaning. You do engagement.

You will keep playing.

You will tease. You will argue. You will let him push and push back harder. You will kiss him everywhere but where it would “count” just to watch his brain short-circuit like a bugged AI trying to reconcile conflicting inputs.

You will let him think he’s negotiating terms when really he’s just unlocked another phase of the fight.

And if—when—he crosses the line?

Game over.