symposiarcha

downburst

✓ complete work - (ao3)

spiderverse fandom (miguel o'hara x fem reader-insert) [sci-fi psychological drama / dobious science & doubious ethics]

chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3

chapter 4

chapter 5

chapter 6

chapter 7

chapter 8

chapter 9

chapter 10

chapter 11

You wrap up flowers.

The usual guest comes with his weekly request. You have his number in your contacts but you never called back. While you make a bowstring, he jokes about his new girlfriend.

You wrap up his order and go back to cut stems for a new arrangement. Who knows if it's for a funeral or a wedding. The scissors slip out and you cut your thumb. You hiss and lick the blood. You hide from the counter as the wound heals in a few seconds.

You clock out and discuss with your colleagues in front of a coffee.

They all think you inherited a suspicious amount of money from an old relative and you don’t actually need to work. When you offered to help them to cover their medical bills, they all looked at you wrong and turned you down. None of you will relate to one another.

You pass by the supermarket going home.

The white neon lights and the coldness from the fridges make your pulse quicken.

You get lost in a crowd of carts and loud people and children crying for a treat and moms shutting them up and you stand in front of a shelf where everything is colorful but looks exactly the same, and you forgot what you were searching for.

You wander in the parking lot.

You forgot to buy eggs.

You walk the cobbled street on the seaside until you reach your door. You won’t easily forget the face of the previous owner when you handed them the entire payment on the spot.

At home, you put down your keys and your sunglasses, even though it has been dark for a while.

As you scrub under the shower, you trace the scar on your shoulder blades.

For a second, there's chlorine and blood in your nostrils, and you watch your new set of talons as a pair of hands patches up the skin you accidentally tore apart.

You rub faster and get out of the shower.

You eat a salad as you watch a reality TV show that you're not actually watching, while you scroll on a dating app and ponder your matches.

You pause on one profile. There’s a good looking man who likes plants, fishing, and kids. He says he's looking for something real.

Your index hovers on the screen. Then, why not; you swipe to accept the match.

You open your bedside drawer.

You stare at the wristwatch, just in case. He won't call, you won't call.

You close your eyes.

You'll dream of a life you haven't lived once again.

*

You put on lipstick in front of the bathroom mirror. You finally have a dress on after a lifetime of technical clothes.

But your talons accidentally sprout and you have to catch it in the sink. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” You try to catch it, but you can’t control it.

"Wow. You look nice!"

Lyla's hologram materializes on the edge of the sink, sitting cross-legged like she owns your place, too. She's wearing a white cocktail dress that sparkles in the dim light, even though it’s just a realistic illusion.

You huff and finally catch the lipstick. "Hello to you too," you say as you clutch it. “It's been a while.”

"I've been watching you for three weeks. You've done nothing interesting. No scandals, no drama, no questionable decisions. The guy you’re going out with seems too normal for you. Ugh."

"Good." You squeeze the metal in your fist.

"Good? You're living like a monk."

"Monks are generally happy."

She lifts an eyebrow and stares at you.

“Mind your business.”

"Your vitals are stable," she continues unfazed. "It’s great news, right?"

"Was there a point to this visit? Or did you just come here to judge my life?"

“Well,” she lets a heel dangle from her feet. "Are you not bored of this life?"

"I don’t think there’s something wrong with this." You say, as you check your lips in the reflection. You lift the upper one with your little finger, checking if your fangs show off too much tonight.

"Exactly what I said. I think you can work for a greater purpose. Saving lives. You know not… flowers."

"There’s nothing wrong with a regular job." You retort as you close your makeup shelf.

"Listen, I don’t want to push you to come back," Lyla says. "I'm asking you to give it a try. Come back to your skills."

“There are billions of data analysts out there who can do the job.” You walk out and put a jacket on your shoulders.

She now leans on the coat rack. "Come to the HQ. Look at the work. Tell me if you're interested. That's all."

"That's all. And this has absolutely nothing to do with him.”

"Yes." She says, but she’s not sarcastic for once. "He doesn't have to know you're coming. I can schedule it when he's out."

You look at her. She looks back.

"I'll think about it."

"That's not a no."

"It's not a yes either."

She stands up, brushing off her dress. "I'll be in touch."

She disbands in pixels as you open the door.

*

One night, you found a message on the watch.

You stare at it for a long time. You could ignore it. You've been ignoring everything. You've been good at it. However, you open the communication channel.

host [00:34]: "Hey Peter."

Peter [00:35]: "So sorry to bother you. I know you're trying to do your whole... new life thing. How are you?"

host [00:36]: "Yeah. I am. Good, thanks. How’s Mayday?"

Peter [00:38]: "Mayday keeps asking about the lady who watched her. She's got a good memory."

host [00:39]: "Smart kid."

Peter [00:40]:"She is. She got it from her mother."

Peter [00:41]: "I know you don't want to come back. He's… kinda taking it well. Thought worse."

host [00:45]: "Nice. Good for him."

Peter [00:46]: "Of course."

Peter [00:48]: "I know you can dimension-jump now. If you ever want to see Mayday, you know where to find us. No pressure."

host [00:52]: "Thanks. I’ll see when I’m not busy."

Peter [00:54]:"Take care of yourself."

host [00:55]: "You too."

- Chat end -

He hangs up.

You won’t call or write him back.

But you don't delete the contact either.

*

At last, you came into the Spider’s Society.

However you tried to imagine it, it’s different from every version you’ve theorized. It is, however, as chaotic and overstimulating as you thought.

You walk the infinite, intricate corridors, following the beeping map on your watch. People and animals in themed suits walk crowding floors, walls, and ceilings, and the constant sounds of portals being opened and closed all over.

Peter finds you first.

"Hey! You came back!" He's holding Mayday. She's a bit bigger now. She stares at you with some more awareness in her eyes.

"Hi." You wave at hand to Mayday.

He looks around. "Did you tell Miguel you were coming?"

"No."

"Ah." He nods, like that explains everything. “Well, we’re going on a mission soon. Have a great day!” He runs off with some other spiders.

Lyla guides you to the workstation.

There is a series of terminals with holographic screens. There’s some other spider-dressed people working at them too, completely immersed in their job.

You sit down.

You stare at the screen.

You don't know where to start.

Why do they all think you should fit here?

Lyla pops up on the terminal, leaning against the edge of the screen. "Excited?"

“Not really.”

She pulls up a file. Strings of code that you obviously can’t read.

"This is some of your old scripts."

"I don't remember any of this."

"Well, you’re just getting started." She tilts her head. “Again.”

You don't understand a thing.

Hours later, you’re still trying to figure out what they mean.

As you search for a cafeteria of some sort, you catch him walking in your opposite direction.

He lifts his eyebrows.

You stop and study each other.

"You look better," he says.

"Yeah," you say.

You want to ask how he is without you.

Maybe it’s better this way. Maybe not. But the thought of asking crossed your mind, but then you’d rather not answer.

You walk away first.

You don’t look back.

*

You're buying vegetables, because you’re trying to keep it healthy, and then you turn, and there he is.

You know it's not him. You know your husband is dead. Your dimension is gone. Everyone you knew is gone. You've accepted this, you've moved on, and now you’re someone else.

But he's there, and he’s buying bread. He has a bag over his shoulder and a child on his hip, of maybe one or two years. He’s assessing the best one to buy.

You stare in silence for a long long time.

You follow him through the market. As crazy and irrational as it is, you have to see, you want to see more.

Then he meets a woman at the fruit stalls beside him. They both have rings on. It’s his wife, you realize. She seems to be the exact opposite of you.

You should leave. You should turn around and walk away and never think about this again.

The wife notices you and glances at you, visibly creeped out. "Do we know you?"

He turns and looks at you. However, you can’t stop staring.

"No, sorry. I mistook you for some friends of mine. Have a good day.”

"Happens all the time. Have a good day."

He turns back to his wife.

As you walk away, you notice you didn't miss him.

You thought something would break open in your chest, that you'd finally understand something groundbreaking about your past.

But you feel just a giant void just in the space between your ribs.

Because he's a stranger and you’re a stranger.

*

You should go to work. Your boss called and you’re not responding. She messaged you they’re searching for a replacement. Not that there's someone actually missing you.

Well, the guy you were seeing asked you why you disappeared and what he did wrong, but he never got a reply from you.

You’ve been coming to the Spider Society consistently for three weeks. Every time you’ll stay later than the previous.

It has become a routine: you come to the Spider Society, you study on your own work, you get back home.

It seems like you’ve built more here than in the normal world. You have some actual honest conversations with Peter in front of one of his devious pancakes. Strangers in suits you’re starting to remember now nod at you in the hallway. The other ones working at the terminals greet you. And they memorized your order at the cafeteria.

Of course, he’s there too. You often catch him sprinting from one wing to the other. Some other times you catch him shouting orders and cursing in Spanish to his subordinates, as you recognize that usual clutch of his shoulder muscles.

Sometimes he glances back at you. Neither will speak to the other.

One evening, you’re packing up your things when Lyla appears on the terminal.

"You know you could just go to his apartment. He's there most nights." She nudges. "Alone.”

"I'm not here for him." You shove your phone in the bag.

"Of course not." Lyla grins. “You’re not even somewhat curious about how he's doing now?”

“It’s none of my business.”

She hums.

*

The weeks pass. You stop going home some nights; more often than not, you start to fall asleep face-first on the desk. You usually wake up with a backache and a cup of coffee that has gone cold (either you forgot you put it there or it’s his doing).

Your colleagues from the flower shop have finally cut you out after days and days of searching for you.

Your apartment gets dusty.

You don't care.

Someone bumps into you in the corridors, more like being hit by a truck. He was walking too fast, as usual.

You know who it is. You recognize the warmth of the hand on your shoulder.

“Sorry,” he says. “All good?”

You nod.

"Lyla told me you're making progress."

Of course, he’s keeping an eye on you. Old habits hardly die.

You finally look at him. He lifts the hand he had on you. He's standing a few feet away now.

“Yeah, I think I’m making some progress.”

“I didn’t expect this. I thought you ran away for good.”

“I haven’t said I want to stay.”

“Miguel, we really have to go,” Lyla nudges from the watch. “Hi dear!” She waves at you.

The suit wraps his neck to his face. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

You watch him disappear into a portal.

*

It’s your third month here, at your usual workstation. Lyla ran a simulation and it worked: it predicted a timeline shift three days before it happened, on the test data she generated.

“Great job! Aren’t you happy?”

You can actually help people now. You realize you’re satisfied. That maybe your pain can have a purpose. That maybe you’re not suited for a normal life at all, and that you need the pain for something else entirely instead of numbing down with flowers and distractions.

"I don't know what to do now."

“You could use your abilities for good.” She projects a bunch of videos of other spider people saving the world, each other with unique capabilities. “Someone once told that with great power comes great responsibility.”

The realization of having wasted your life until now lights a fire that you didn’t recognize burning in your guts.

So you step into his office, unannounced.

He stops his motions as his fingers hover on the screens, but he doesn’t turn to see you.

"I think I want to stay here," you say.

"I thought you hated this."

“Not now.”

“Okay.”

He returns to his job.

“Is there still space in your apartment?”

You see his back muscles clenching and coiling under the suit. “Yes.”

“Can I come over?”

“Why?”

The truth is far more complicated to verbalize; so you say nothing.

He turns to look at you for a long moment. Then he nods. "Okay."

You let go of the breath you were holding. "Just okay?"

"Okay." He looks away, but you catch the corner of his mouth twitching. “Don’t bring too much stuff.”

*

You wake up in the same room you first woke up in, months ago. The guest room hasn’t changed for a bit. Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch, but you almost missed it.

You wake up to find a fresh pot of coffee on the counter.

You pour yourself a cup, your old cup. You stand in the kitchen, holding it, staring at the outside. For the first time, you feel that something in your life tastes familiar.

You try to make breakfast. Eggs, the way he used to do it. You crack and whisk them into the pan. You burn them at the edges and the insides are dry. They’re terrible, so you start again.

He comes fresh out of the shower. His hair is wet and sticks to his face.

He looks at your plate and you’re embarrassed in your work, or maybe because you were mimicking him.

"You made eggs?"

"They suck."

He walks over, takes your fork and takes a bite. “Yeah, agree.”

He hands you back the fork. Then he walks away to his room and closes the door.

You eat your eggs alone (you should learn to add spices).

He gave you access to his office at the Spider Society, where you spend the majority of your days.

You’re still studying the code, but you’re finally starting to apply it to his raw data.

Today, you’re failing at solving a bug without Lyla’s help.

He looks over your shoulder. Without saying a word, he reaches over. His fingers correct the code as they hover near yours.

"There," He steps back.

"I have to figure that out alone," you say.

"But you didn't."

You glare at him. The corner of his mouth twitches.

One time, when you accessed it, you accidentally open the media folder.

There are some videos and photos of a girl that looks like his carbon copy. It’s scary how she has his exact same frown when she’s focused on kicking a ball.

“Ah, you found her.” Lyla talks in a quieter tone. "That’s his daughter from another dimension. But he couldn’t stay and save that dimension either."

You understand now that his humanity lives in the things he doesn't say. Maybe his choices are not still entirely explainable to you, but you understand him just a little bit better.

At night, as usual, he's on a mission.

You end up on the couch. You turn on the holo-TV screen and you put on an old classic movie. But you’re too tired to focus on it. Soon, your lids start to hang heavy.

The sound of the door hissing open wakes you before you can drift.

You feel his weight dipping into the other side of the couch. He slumps, his suit is torn and his face is bruised with big gashes. He seems to be watching the movie and nothing at all at the same time.

You want to ask if he's okay, how it went, what he fought for, how it feels now that you’re here.

You shift to change your posture, but your leg brushes his. You freeze as you did something wrong, but he doesn't move away either.

You fall asleep soon after.

*

Time passes, and you both carve space for one another, still learning the shape it should have, as if to match two complicated puzzle pieces.

You start moving things in his apartment.

A plant (just one, for now) and a stack of real books on the coffee table. A collection of new mugs with terrible texts in the kitchen. Your beauty products in the guest bathroom. Your shoes near the door.

Now, when you fold the clothes in the laundry room, you notice his technical shirts and your new outfits are all mixed together in the basket. It doesn't matter whose is whose anymore.

He didn’t throw your things away, so he thinks they’re acceptable.

As you carve your space into his, you start using his things when he’s not there. For example, you always wanted to try the bathtub, the fancy one in his bathroom. It's ridiculous. It's too big. It's unnecessarily luxurious.

You soak in the hot water for hours, but you miscalculated the time, and he finds you there as he opens the door.

"This is my bathtub," he growls.

"You don’t use it anyway."

“Get out immediately.”

You get out with a towel wrapped around your body, still leaking water on the floor.

Sometimes you convince him to order takeout.

"I don't like takeout food," he says. “It’s greasy and full of excess sodium.”

"You don't like anything fun," you accuse.

"I do many fun things… You just don’t know about them.”

“Oh yeah? Name a fun hobby you have.”

He doesn't answer.

You order takeout as he’s defeated.

You both eat at the kitchen island. He doesn't complain. That's his way of saying it's acceptable.

You have many frictions now and then, but one time it escalates.

It started when you addressed the past months, when you were trapped here, but it got so far that you don't remember what it's about anymore.

He yells. You yell back. Lyla tried to calm both of you, but she just made it worse.

You punch him on the arm but you didn’t calculate your new strength, so you actually hit him.

You leave out of guilt, cornering yourself in the guest room.

Maybe this time he’ll kick you out.

Your heart thrums and you close your eyes. You’re missing air and now you expect a panic attack and the lights bending and your limbs not working and maybe one of the visions will come back and nothing will ever be okay again.

But when you shut your eyes, there’s just darkness.

The visions are gone.

You expect some form of punishment. Next morning, instead, you wake up to find a full plate of breakfast and a full pot of coffee.

Next night, when he comes torn worse than before, you sit beside him on the couch with medical supplies in hand.

You patch him up. He lets you. Not that he necessarily needs them, but uninfected wounds may surely heal less painfully. And because, frankly, there’s not much you can still do to help him; and you want to help him.

Your hands work in silence. He hisses when you clean an open wound that’s taking a lot to heal.

Then you lean on his side and drift with your head on his shoulder.

You wake up in his bed, in his silken sheets warmed up by his body heat. He has thrown his leg in between yours during sleep.

So you start sleeping together again, as a convenience.

There’s a right direction to this, you think.

*

Life became so routine that you lost count of passing days, unthreading into weeks and months.

Now you know, the wrinkles between his brows when he's mad at you (but he won't say it out loud), when you dropped his mug to the ground. And the wrinkles on his forehead when he's surprised (and he can't say thank you) when you bought him an identical one.

Now you know, when he pinches his nose bridge, that you've theorized something wrong (but you will prove him wrong later). And you know the sound of his sigh when you work at his spot, on his terminal.

You know his lips twitch upward when people ask you who you are (and he's forced to create a false story of how both of you knew at work — well, kind of). Sometimes he jokes of you being the alternate smart and equally dumb version of his brother.

A family, you thought it was impossible for you to have. A family is what you have now, when Peter brings Mayday over, and you have to call Miguel to help her out of her own webbing, and you have to catch her before she falls to the ground. On the worst occasions, you tried to crawl on the walls to take her down.

He bought you a new smartphone. Your new screensaver is a photo of you holding Mayday — he had shot it when Mayday’s hands got glued to your shirt. You saw him laughing genuinely for the first time (his fangs are pretty when he laughs, you think). But you know, at the end of the day, his lips will be on your skin, and you will memorize new details about him with yours. A new mole, a new scar from a battle he won't tell you, a new gray hair. Detail after detail, his memory updates with every day that passes; detail after detail, your previous life crumbles. Sometimes, when you're in bed, you catch a glimpse of his watch holoscreen. There are some theories of entanglement he wishes to use to retrieve an echo of your home dimension. He never dared to bring it up; he lay on his side with faux blatant nonchalance. You cancel the holoscreen with a swipe of your hand. It doesn't matter anymore. Now matters the time you have yet to live.

Two scientists were working on a multiverse model. Empty coffee cups on her desk, in 2029. Empty coffee cups on his desk, in 2099. They were discussing the constant variables that predicted the appearance of a ripple in the continuum, and that now were refining to predict them faster.

He looked at the hologram projection, studying the woman behind it. Talking to her as the timer of her life inevitably sprinted to her countdown. “Why don’t you come here? You’d have all the equipment you want. You’ll do a great job,” he tried one last time.

She rolled her eyes. “And what? Abandon my life here? We discussed this already.”

“Fine.”

He clenched his fist. Every time he promised himself to tell her the truth, to save her for good. It was irrational and, of course, wrong. He should’ve learned the lesson. He knew what he was getting into, and he took the plunge. “Hey.” She interrupted then, looking at him with the side of her eye. “How is it to meet the same person but from another dimension?”

His fingers trembled on the mug, and he has to put it down not to break it. He lifts his gaze to the screensaver. There was a photo of his long lost daughter. “Strange. And wrong.”

“But are they even the same?”

“In what sense?”

“Think about someone you have known for a long time but without the memories they have about you. What if you met them for the first time today?”

He thought for some seconds, tapping his fingers on his desk. “If they couldn’t remember anything of you, they’d be a whole different person.”

“Right. That was stupid. The events change the person, too.”

“Yes.”

“But there should be something in common with the others, right?”

He stopped the motion. He also stopped his lips that threatened to curl upwards. “What are you on?”

“Random thoughts. Forget it.”

“It’s overwork.”

“Yeah.”

"I’m logging off. Are you there tomorrow?"

"Yes. See you tomorrow."

There’s a stinging sensation in your left arm and a figure moving in the corner of your vision. Everything feels like you're in a soap bubble.

Your back is lying against a solid, cold surface and a soft object is holding your neck up.

“You’re back!” Lyla cheers.

You push yourself on your elbows; your limbs feel disconnected as a missing TV signal in your nerves. You bring a hand to your head, but a sting, again, stops you. The blurriness fades in a needle in your left arm. Now that you take a look at the lab, new things have appeared. Following the pipe, you discover it’s hanging from some transparent plastic bags on a stand. The liquid in it has been almost depleted.

“Your nervous system caught fire again. We’ve suppressed it.” Lyla appears hanging from a tube.

You find him with your gaze: he’s hunched at the console, chin on knuckles, brooding against a series of sequences on the holo-screen.

You don't remember how you got in here.

“What is that?” You ask.

He squints his lids closed. The tension above his eyebrows seems heavy. “Your last resort.”

He pushes the chair away from the screen and walks to you. He watches you from above; his face looks more gaunt than usual.

Lyla now lounges on his shoulder. “Brace yourself! You won't like this.”

He gives a look to her before meeting your eyes again.

“This is my last offer. Listen closely.” He leans in, hands on the platform edge, lowering his eye line to your height. "The enzymes aren't working. Your genome changes and rewrites along with every splice I've done. Your conscious gaps are getting shorter and your nervous system is collapsing. I'm running out of options." His voice is flat. But his talons cut through the metal.

“So what’s your best deal?”

“I've been thinking of merging your DNA with someone whose genome is stable across dimensions."

"Yours?”

“Mine.”

“Oh.”

Your blood runs hot, and he's standing too close because you can smell the chlorine that has been glued to his skin.

A marriage proposal would've been less embarrassing than this.

“Is this the best you could think of?” you laugh it off. Your cheeks are catching fire in the meantime.

“Do you want to try with Peter's one?”

“N-no…”

“Oh,” he lifts his eyebrows.

You swallow. Lyla projects the simulation of a merge of two RNA strings between both of you. Different gene codes become either green or red, either suppressing or revealing, while others remain in an uncertain yellow. His mocking expression fades into his clinical one. “Merging DNA is simpler and safer than blind try enzymes. As I said, my genome may be half spider but it survives every dimension jump. Every spider’s genome can do.”

Now, you're very aware of every cell in your body simultaneously; and the fact that all of them could be half his; and the vertigo of finally transcending your humanity once and for all.

“What will I become?” “Like me.” He stands up tall, like he’s proving his thesis. “You can jump to any dimension. You'll be stronger. You'll heal faster and age slower.”

You have to admit, it’s a good deal. You bite your cheeks, assessing the odds. “Could I crawl around?”

He lifts an eyebrow. “Do you want to?”

“I don't know.”

“Would it convince you to proceed?”

“…maybe.”

He rolls his eyes.

"I can give you a few hours. Eighteen, if you’re lucky. Enough to think without..." He gestures vaguely at the needle, the bags, you. "Without this."

You nod.

Then he pushes a steel cart. The white lights shine on a mix of pills and a glass of water.

“It's a drug cocktail. It's a one-time thing. You buy some time to think straight, but at the end of the effects you'll start to collapse.”

You look at them and then him. “You're making me choose.”

“You look disappointed.”

“I'm not.”

You shove the cocktail down as if it were a cheap liquor shot. “Should've brought me some alcohol,” you joke as you push the glass down on metal.

He huffs and pushes the cart aside. His fingers reach for the needle in your arm, not touching yet.

You shoot him a suspicious look, but you lift your arm to him.

His giant fingertips pinch carefully on the needle to pull it out. You stifle a hiss. He places a cotton pad on the patch of blood. “Hold it.”

You reach for it and push it down, and there are a few millimeters in which your fingertips won’t touch. And the fact is that when you have to take your leap of fate, you wish someone to close that gap. And it would be very easy.

He leaves the cotton pad to you when it’s secured. His fingers linger for a second.

“Think about it,” He walks back to his workstation. “For the little time remaining.”

You study him from the platform. You watch him running bootstraps and statistical outcomes. His hair falls messily around his face, and his stubble has grown while you were out.

“Why haven't you done that already?”

He gives you a rapid glance before getting to his screen again. “It's more invasive. And it’s not necessarily the rational choice.”

“But you've thought about it.”

"I tried to preserve as much of you as I could. But I can't fix this. And..." He exhales. "It's too late. I can’t get revert you to the original."

“Mh-mh. Someone's gone soft.” Lyla babbles.

He growls.

*

A shirt. A pair of jeans. Your underwear. Your wristwatch. A lab coat and an ID badge.

Soon enough, you realize you're at your own funeral. But you don't have a reason to die as much as you have for living. You've been crouched in his house, hoping to survive one procedure after another, waiting for his benediction to save you.

All your life until now is in few objects, sprawled on the guestroom bed. You want to get them out, somewhere else. They don't belong in the dressing anymore, but you're too much of a coward to put them in the bin.

You’ve been trying to make sense, create a thread of what happened until now. Truth is, you’re a casualty. Now, no one will be there to miss you.

Would he miss you?

That’s stupid.

Every attempt at keeping you alive was fueled with guilt. He’d miss you just as much as you miss a wrecked car that you crashed yourself and keep trying to repair.

Then why is your phone screen full of drops? Why is the image of you in an old wedding photo getting blurry?

You still don’t recognize your family, nor the man that has been your husband. You know you should feel something, anything about him. But you don’t. You barely recognize him from a fraction of a vision.

You dry off your cheeks with your knuckles.

You remove the SD card with a pin. Then you let it fall in the bin.

“Is there something bothering you?” Lyla materializes on the dresser, legs crossed. “I mean… something specific out of this mess.”

Your lids flutter in hope to dry your eyes. “I have nothing and I will leave nothing behind once I'm gone.”

“That’s not true! Your prediction algorithms are the backbone of the anomaly hunt. Of everything we've accomplished!” Lyla cheers you up.

In the middle of the room, she projects a map of the multiverse. It's a webbing made of causes, effects, and ripples.

“I predict where they’ll appear in spacetime. You can think of me as your daughter!” She beams.

You stare at her. Her words hit an exposed nerve you don't quite recognize as yours. “Please don't say that never again. And I'm not the same person who did that anymore.”

“Who says you can't start learning again?”

“But it’s not the same thing anymore.”

You hear his feet padding around; but when you check your surroundings, there’s no one else with you.

You play with the wristwatch for a while, scrolling the old chat logs.

“I can still play the old recordings.” Lyla offers again, now the size of a miniature walking between your stuff.

You think for a while, then you leave the watch on the mattress. “Nah.”

You lift your gaze to the skyline behind the window. The fading daylight over the skyscrapers overlaps with his reflection behind your back. Your heartbeat jumps for a moment.

You turn around. He's watching you from the threshold, palms on hips.

“You're spying on me,” you retort.

He assesses you head to toe, then your stuff, unaffected by your words. “Have you decided to leave?”

“Not necessarily.”

He tilts his head, you do it too, studying one another. He opens and closes his mouth a few times as if contemplating what to say.

“If you-”, his fingers twitch against the rubber bands of his pants, “I…”, he huffs and grimaces, looking at the floor.

You watch him, perplexed. “You… want to tell me something?”

He taps one foot to the floor. “Never mind.” He turns around and disappears around the corner.

You watch him go as your forehead creases.

“Hey! I want to know!” Lyla appears and disappears around him while he strides away.

*

You broke into his room, elbows on the balcony railing, observing the lively lights of the lower Nueva York from your lonely above. The wind moved from a flying car zipping past the skyscraper unravels your hair.

At the world's end, life is peaceful. There are no more consequences to your actions that matter enough to scare you away from freedom. Layer by layer, the mundanity has been peeled from your soul. You're stripped bare of everything unnecessary, leaving you with only the desires of being.

So you ask Lyla about the minibar.

She crosses her hands behind her back and lifts her chin. "Dr. O'Hara doesn't drink. But there's a minibar in the living room. For guests." She recites mechanically. Then she grins. "Have you seen him with any guests?”

"Unlock it."

“Oh oh! I like this.” She hides a delighted smile behind her fingers. “It’s in the far corner of the living room, just behind his thinking couch.”

You pour yourself a liquor. You gulp it down all at once. Finally, after craving it for a lifetime, the sweet burning in your throat feels like a reward.

“Whoa, hey, you’re shortening your time like this.” Lyla scolds you.

You laugh as you pour another one. “So what, does it change anything?”

She blows a curly strand of hair from her face. “Okay, fine.”

This time, you sip from the glass. “What do you actually want? First you cage me, then you help me, then you give me alcohol.”

“I want him to stop punishing himself.” She crosses her arms.

You nod.

“Where’s he?”

“Where you just left. Seems like he likes to follow you around lately.” She chimes and disbands in pixels.

You walk back to his room, glass in hand.

He's leaning against the dresser, arms crossed, staring at nothing. The bracelet, the red and blue one, dangles from his fingers.

He doesn't look up when you enter. "How much you’ve been drinking?"

"Not enough." You sip some more as proof.

“You’re not funny.”

“What’s up with that thing?” You push yourself to sit on the edge of the dresser, legs hanging in the air. Now your faces are almost the same height.

“This is a temporary pass to survive in other dimensions.”

“Didn’t I have one?”

“I gave it to you once in case you wanted to see what I built with your work.” His voice is quiet. " You said thank you and that you would’ve liked to come here. You never visited me."

His thumb traces the weave of the bracelet.

You lick the liquor from your lips.

“Well, now I’m here.”

“Yeah, but the bracelet couldn’t do enough.”

Your index plays with the glass rim.

“What is the anomaly, really?” you ask then.

“My fault.”

He hums and puts the bracelet on the dresser. Your fingertips are almost touching, again.

“You’re too cryptic.”

You hear his talons grazing on the dresser.

“The anomaly isn't an anomaly. It's you. It's always been you.” He continues. “Your body is trying to adapt to a dimension that doesn’t exist anymore. Your atoms are not anchored to a time and place. So it’s been changing, but it’s adapting to exist nowhere in the physical world.”

You say nothing.

“It’s because I brought you here. Because I pulled you out before you got killed. If you survived your canon death… If you survived in another dimension… Imagine the implications.”

“For your family?”

Another silence makes you think you struck the correct target.

He snatches the glass from your hand and finishes the liquor in a few gulps. You follow his Adam’s apple, hypnotized.

Then he offers the empty glass back to you. His irises glow in a dim, warm red.

You don’t want to think or talk anymore. The burn in your stomach swirls with all the stuff that you’ve been keeping to yourself since you woke up in this place.

You plunge to kiss him.

He makes a sound against your mouth, but he doesn’t distance himself from you.

He waits with his mouth half open, his unsteady breath over your lips. You see him thinking beneath his eyes.

Then he tilts his head, seeking your lips with a deliberate hunger.

Finally, you slip your tongue beneath his fangs. Desperation melts into ferocity, his teeth occasionally dipping into your lower lip.

He leaves the empty glass on the dresser.

Sooner than later, he pulls you over to launch you on the mattress.

As he looms, crawling gracefully over you, his silhouette blocks out the artificial neon of the city. His talons graze the bedding.

His crimson eyes burn through the hair falling over. An unbridled wave of adrenaline curses through your veins.

Your hands travel to his chest, then to his neck, all with a smirk that you can’t help to hide.

Then his fangs sink in your neck, shoulders, and collarbone as you return the favor.

You search for the hem of his technical shirt. The skin of his abdominal muscles ripples and tightens under your fingertips. He peels it over his head in one impatient motion, tossing it somewhere into the darkness.

He rolls onto his back, pulling you on top, flipping you as if you were made of air.

You’re exposed from the damp crotch of your pants against the growing bulge in his. Your blood raises its temperature to the boiling point.

But the liquor dulls the embarrassment that otherwise would’ve stopped you.

As you bruise each other’s lips, you give in with the grind of your hips, in a desperate search for closeness with every inch of skin.

He strips you out of your cotton shirt. One of his hands slides up your ribcage to massage your breasts.

You moan against his teeth.

Then he guides you, the other hand kneading your glutes, skin to skin, chest to chest, in languid, rhythmic rubs. Soon, the air becomes humid, tastes like iron, and is filled with whispered pleas to put and end to each other’s misery.

Until you can’t do it anymore.

You pull down his pants and boxers, as he tears down yours.

Finally, you’re both equally naked.

You trace his length, which has been leaking under you. Then you crawl on him, positioning above the head of his straining erection.

It’s too soon, and you’re not prepared, and you want all of him, and you don’t have much more time to lose.

He guides you, a hand on your inner thigh and the other splayed on the entirety of your stomach.

You descend, inch by excruciating inch. He growls as you adjust to him with torturous slowness. His talons threaten to rip your skin with each of your movements.

But eventually you succeed. A moan of relief escapes your lips, and he praises and rewards you with something that scarily reminds you of a caress.

Since then, it’s a fucking mess.

Until the uncoordinated struggle to match the pace dissolves into a desperate clinging onto each other. Until he slams into you one last time as your back arches in convulsions. Until he buries his face into your hair as a guttural moan rips from his throat.

At the end of the world, for the first time, you feel alive.

*

The night city lights stripe the ceiling, and you’re depleted of everything you had.

You linger, out of a brief nap, in a mess of torn sheets. The cool air of the bedroom chills on your damp skin. Every muscle burns in soreness, even those you didn't know you had until now.

A foot has been touching his leg, and you don’t want to move it.

“I never gave you permission to do what you did,” you whisper.

“You would’ve done the same.” He's looking at the ceiling too. His silhouette is barely visible, sprawled next to you, arms thrown under his neck.

“You don’t know that.”

“The old you, would have done the same.”

“You miss the old me?”

“Sometimes.” He sighs. “Sometimes I think you’re the same. Sometimes I don’t recognize you at all.”

Another silence.

“Was it worth it?”

“Depends how you look at it.”

“And how you look at it?”

“I don’t know. I wish my plan worked.”

“Why do you miss my old me so much?”

“Stop with these stupid questions. Feels like talking to a child.”

You smile in the dark. You wonder if he can see it.

"I think I want to do it."

“I think it’s a stupid decision.”

“What will happen, when I’ll change?”

“Lots of things. I told you already.”

“And you?”

“Me what?”

"If I say yes… will I have to stay here with you?"

He's quiet for a long time.

"You won't need me anymore."

*

You don't remember falling asleep. You don’t remember getting up and going to the bathroom.

Then you lose a second, a minute, and soon you don’t remember where you were half an hour ago. Your reflection watches you sitting on the floor across the bathroom mirror.

The liquor and the exhaustion burned all your remaining time.

Your limbs feel like cables pulled from their ports: your fingers won’t stay still, your legs won’t lift you up, your arms have lost all their strength.

Your heartbeat thrums in your chest and throat; it’s straining just to keep you breathing.

Lyla sits on the floor beside you. The tiles reflect her yellow hologram back. She rests her hand on your shoulder, though it’s weightless, and looks at you with something like pity. For once, she doesn't speak.

“Time's up.” he reaches for your arm. You startle. However, he doesn't drag you anywhere. This time, his fingers stay on your skin. The other one stays on your waist.

You let him pull you off the floor and carry you. You want to encircle his neck and hold on to him, just one last time, but your hands don't respond.

“I'll put you to sleep. You won't feel a thing.”

“Will I remember you?”

“I think, yes. Almost certain.” He hesitates at the lab threshold. You feel a breath clutched in his chest. “But... you won't need me anymore. You could leave. Go anywhere. Any dimension you like. I won't stop you."

"Is that what you want?"

In the morning, you’re slumped at the stool with your sad cup of coffee. You feel his presence while he passes by the counter, then his thumbs press in your shoulders. You sit up, as if electrocuted, adjusting your posture.

He walks around the island saying nothing. Then he pushes you yet another plate of eggs, a salad, with a measured portion of oil, fruit, a flask with the exact amount of water you need.

The fork catches the morning light. Your stomach revolts, and your fingers are too heavy to reach for it. Those damn egg have lost their appeal a while ago. You want to throw the plate in his face. But when you lift your gaze and see him already padding away, you realize there’s no more margin of complaint.

Lyla’s hologram watches you, chin on hands, sitting on the stool, eyeing his back, already disappearing in the lab.

You stab the eggs. They’re soft and they taste of nothing at all.

In the afternoon, he’s gone on one of his classified missions. You pace in circles in the guest room, talking shit about him in your head, until your legs give up. It always happens out of nowhere. The air out of your lungs, the hammering in your head, and the light too strong on your eyes.

Five minutes later, he's on you (how? you don’t question it anymore). Your wrist disappears between his fingers while his palm covers your forehead, though Lyla's projecting your vitals on the screen.

“It doesn’t seem like another crisis to me”, Lyla assesses behind her glasses.

Your legs have gotten numb and you can’t stand up on your own. So you lift the gaze on him. Though his pupils are right on yours, the creases of the skin between his eyebrows are permanently etched when he’s concentrated; a scar heals in his right one.

“Calm down. You’re worsening it for yourself.” He scolds you while he lifts your weight from under your thighs.

You’d be lying if you said you weren’t grasping your hands around his neck. You’d be lying if you said you weren’t a coward.

Your eyelids hang heavy while you're drowning on the sofa. You watch him between the shadow of your lashes. His sharp silhouette hovers on the couch in the far corner of the living room, against the floor-to-ceiling vista of the skyline. He’s immersed in his watch-projected holo-screen, legs crossed, back slumped. The light of the screen accentuates the hollow of his under-eye.

You stare at him while blood thrums in your temples, until your lids give up.

Next time you’re able to lift them again, you’re in his bed. The lamps are dimmed down.

And a stack of little white boxes appears on the nightstand, right next to your water flask. There are incomprehensible names printed on them in bright colors.

“Anti-nausea, antispasmodics, antipsychotics.“ Lyla, sitting on the edge of the nightstand, dictates your prescriptions. “Take the blue one with food. The white one before sleep. The pink one if the tremors return.”

It would be so easy to sweep them all off the floor.

You glance behind your shoulder. There’s no one else in bed with you.

You lift the blankets over your head and shut your eyes, crouching in a fetal position.

You’re almost asleep when a vibrating sound cuts through the dark. You search for your phone on the nightstand with your touch until you feel sleek glass under your fingers. You take it with you under the covers and open the message.

“Have you followed your prescription?”

Your heartbeat hammers in your head.

“Fuck you”, you type.

But you stare at the screen. Do you really want another fight? Do you really want him to ignore you and deflect again?

You delete the text and throw the phone to the other side of the mattress.

You tether in a state of absentmindedness, between brief naps in which you’re over-conscious and blankly staring in the dark.

The concept of time has lost its meaning a while ago when you feel a weight dipping behind your back.

You don’t turn. But you crumple the silk and your toes curl.

He lifts the bedcover, forcing it to slip through your fingers.

He grabs you by the cheeks, forcing your lips open. Your entire face is smaller than his hand's breadth.

"You’re making it harder than it already is." He rasps behind your ear, as his index and middle fingers press on your lower lip to slide a pill beneath your teeth. His palm rests on your lips while he waits for you to swallow it.

You could bite his fingers off, but you lie to yourself as you obey.

And you’d be even more of a hypocrite if you wouldn’t admit that you fell into a resting slumber after it.

The open door was just another illusion.

* You’re forced to wake up when your lips are completely dry. You reach for the water flask when you realize the silk and cotton are now damp and glued to your skin.

You think it’s for one of your crises. But the air is noticeably unbreathable, and the high temperature oppresses you. You chug down the flask.

“Lyla?”

She materializes on the header board. She looks at you from above with her somber smile, her feet dangling in the air. “Yes?”

“It’s too hot in here.”

“Nah. Must be you.”

She disappears before you can retort further. Here it is, another day in this madhouse. You put the flask down and walk to the kitchen.

"All systems are functioning within acceptable parameters." Her voice comes from his wrist. He’s glaring at the coffee machine on the counter.

"Acceptable parameters for who?" He groans.

You flinch. He gives you a deep look for half a second. His irises are full-blown red.

“Lyla, you better fix this coffee machine ASAP.”

“It’s offline!”

“Buy another one then.”

“Drones are offline too.”

“No vales para nada.” He slams the counter.

You eavesdrop on him arguing with Lyla in the lab, in which he snarls commands and she replies innocently with her preset phrases. You grin in silence, with the sadistic pleasure that comes when someone who does you wrong gets tortured; even though you’re at your third shower and your hair is clinging again to your neck.

You both come and go from the bathrooms. The laundry basket overflows in a few hours.

While you’re accepted soon enough that you won’t be able to do anything good, and you bake on the couch sorting things on your phone, he didn't take it as well.

He paces, restless, in and out of the lab, often stripping shirts put on just a few minutes ago.

You don't look away fast enough when he does it.

You know he’s lost it when he puts on the holographic suit. You remember Lyla’s words in your ear.

If at first is comical, the lack of caffeine and the excessive temperature get to you soon. You both growl at each other while waiting for turns at his en-suite bathroom. It’s the only room with a decent enough temperature to survive. You'd almost forgotten what it felt like to want and fight for something, even if the thing you want is just a cold room and a cup of coffee.

Eventually, the ventilation systems fail in every angle of the apartment. The only breathable air is in the bathroom

With the door sealed shut with both of you in there.

Every breath shared. Nowhere to look except at each other.

You sit on the closed toilet lid, which is comfortably cold. He sits on the floor, back against his tub. His bathroom, all black marble and carbon fiber, is visibly more expensive than the one in the guest room. You get why he gatekept it.

Until now.

He could tear the door open. His talons could shred metal like paper. But he doesn't.

You’ve been counting the tiles on the wall in front of you. Eighty-two. Then you've been counting his breaths. You discover they're much slower than yours. You’ve been used to the stronger scent of his sweat, until you probably won’t notice each other’s anymore. You've been counting the minutes since he forced the door and it didn't budge, and Lyla's voice, reciting that "The bathroom door is currently jammed. Unknown estimated repair time."

You shift on the lid. Your leg cramps. You straighten it without thinking, and your foot knocks against his knee. He flinches with a small recoil and one of his grunts.

“She’s doing it on purpose,” He protests.

“I know,” you agree.

The silence returns. Your hands vibrate, as you try to keep them busy with the hem of your technical shirt. You wish to strangle him (but wouldn’t probably be able to close your fingers around his neck).

"I met Peter," you declare.

He doesn't answer. He's staring at the opposite wall, jaw tight, the way he always looks when he's about to say something and, of course, doesn't.

"He told me about your missions. The Alchemax leads." You spill.

His furrow deepens. A low rumble echoes in the room.

You don’t care. "He thinks the anomaly doesn’t make sense. And that you should’ve had answers by now."

He's quiet. His eyes close while he pinches the bridge of his nose as if to pierce it. When he opens them again, he finally looks at you.

You’re very aware of how close his knee is to your leg, the pulse in his throat, the light hue of red in the irises.

"I saw myself," you start again. "During a vision. I saw versions of myself. An old woman. A mother. A killer. I had a lot of visions, lately. I was a lot of… beings and things at once, and I didn't know which one was real."

"None of them." He cuts.

You startle. "You don't know that."

"I do." He leans forward. His knee presses against yours (but you don’t move it away).

"How do you know?"

“I do.”

His Adam's apple bobbles. He breathes loudly.

He's looking at you, and you’re looking back, and the bathroom is smaller than ever.

You want to crack his skull open.

“You’re glitching.”He says then. He scrubs a hand on his pants as if to clean them. “Your brain, specifically. Your neurotransmitters are all over the place.”

“So I’m schizophrenic now? Great.”

“It’s not schizophrenia.” He talks slow. “You’re insufferable. We’re not discussing quantum physics in a bathroom.”

“Now you decide to talk, in a bathroom. Then you say you can’t discuss here.”

“No me jodas.” He mutters between his teeth.

“Okay.” You sigh. “When?”

“When I have a solution.”

“You dragged me here, but you don’t have a solution.”

“I told you already.”

“You haven't told me why.” You throw your hands in the air and abandon them on your lap. “You’ve said almost nothing.”

He shakes his head and leans it on the edge of the bathtub, looking at the ceiling. His jaw shakes. “You don’t remember a thing, nothing of it.”

You don’t know if it should be a question. You hug the leg still raised on the lid. “How did you find me?”

“Old Alchemax papers. They were signed under your name.”

You squint. “I’ve written papers?”

“Yes. About statistical prediction models. They were… interesting. I use them. Your prediction algorithms.”

A flicker of pride insists in your rib cage, however distant and incomprehensible to you, now. “I don't remember any of that. Or being able to do any of that.”

He closes his eyes. “I think you’ve lost your memories permanently at this point.”

“Maybe it’s better this way”, you mutter.

He side eyes you. It’s a heavy look that underlines his eye bags. “The interesting thing was that your publishing ends in the year 2029. Then other people published your work under different names.”

“So you reached… to get my help or what?”

“Yes and no.” He shifts his sitting, bringing his knees to his chest and throwing his arms over them. You lose the spot of contact. It stings that you notice. “Your research ends very early in your career in every timeline, because you died in each of them.“

“I’m the last one of me.”

But when you say it, it’s a sort of relief. It’s not like you thought you could escape death at some point in your life. The certainty of life relies on the end of it. But now you’ve reached it and surpassed. There’s no one else behind, above, or after you.

There’s only you and him.

The tension in your neck resolves. Your fingers stop their motions.

“I tried to save what I could.” His voice is now lower and rawer, as he looks at an indeterminable point in the room. “I hoped… to advance my job. To enhance Lyla. To… find and save…” He hesitates. When he does, you catch his lower lip twitching. “…people.”

“At my expenses,” you underline.

“At least you’re alive,” he does, too.

You huff, while you take a look at the men’s toiletries displayed on his glass shelves.

“So… the other versions of me, in the visions, are all dead.” You reason out loud.

“Could be memories. Could be collective unconscious.” He explains with his clinical tone. “They were part of the risk. Your own existence is trying to delete you.”

The lock clicks and the door slides open.

"Alright. All fixed!” Lyla’s voice chirps through the walls. “Doors, temperature, and machines are back to normal. You're free to go! Not that you weren't before.”

You get Lyla’s point, you both are conscious that it was her plan. But you won’t try to get angry at her. Surprisingly, he won’t either.

“Finally,” he mutters, getting up in a single smooth motion.

"Could I write them again?", you ask before he can escape as usual.

“What?”

“The code.”

"Probably not." He refuses to look back at you at the threshold. "The neural pathways that you were wired on don’t exist anymore. The anomaly has altered your synaptic architecture. The specific person that you were may be impossible to recover."

“So I can’t help you anymore. What a terrible buy,” you joke with a bitter tone.

He glares over his shoulder before disappearing through the door.

“Hey, you still have me! And you’re still alive.” Lyla tries to cheer you up from the threshold.

You crouch on the toilet lid.

The cool air from the vents now cast a pleasant breeze in the apartment.

Maybe he's out there somewhere, bleeding out on a floor.

You get out of bed out of disgust. You puke your nausea out in the toilet.

Your own clothes, the ones you woke up in, are folded and buried in the drawer for weeks. You almost forgot about them; it seems like they belong to a lifetime ago. But really, it’s just been a few weeks. There’s only a faint trace of their original smell, or maybe it’s just your nostrils playing you with that floral perfume.

For the first time in weeks, you dress in something you actually like.

You strap the watch to your wrist. You're not ready to leave him behind and cut the leash, yet (or at all). The yellow screen lights up, and Lyla’s unimpressed face appears.

"You could just ask me, you know."

"Ask you what?"

"Anything."

"Fine. I need Peter’s contact."

“Going on an investigation, boss lady?” She smirks.

A communication bridge opens from Earth-928 to Earth-616. He picks up.

“Hey there, Miguel!”

Your skin prickles at the sound of his name. “It’s his roommate speaking.”

“Oh! That’s… interesting. Long time no see, huh?”

“Right. Can we speak privately? If possible.”

There are some silent seconds from his end. “Why not. I assume you can’t travel portals?”

“Correct.”

“I’ll send you a location in your dimension. It’s a cafeteria downtown. Old school, very nice. Great pancakes. We meet there sometimes.” You hear him hesitate. “It’s on him, right?”

“Yep.”

Lyla gives you two thumbs up.

“Cool cool. Deal. I’ll be there asap.”

You swipe the communication display away.

The apartment door slides open when you touch the panel. You linger for some extra seconds on the threshold.

The glass elevator closes around you. Your stomach flies around as the elevator shoots you two hundred stories down. The endless buildings ascend to the sun while gradually shielding you from the light, casting long blades of shadow.

“Turn left when you leave the building. I'll tell you where to go."

You leave the giant empty lobby to finally go outside, for the first time. But 2099 outside doesn’t feel like real outside. You’re welcomed in an empty land of glass and stone. There’s only the restless machinery background noise and the whirling of vehicles zipping over your head.

“The next train station is five minutes from here.” A map of the city hovers on the watch screen.

You follow the cursors on the map, until you enter another vertical and nameless building. Some screens float around giving directions to which train to take. One side points to the moon. The other one points downtown.

As a robotic voice announces the departure, the train seals behind you. Some people are sitting far apart from each other, and some robots are too. They look at their own holo-screens and avoid crossing gazes.

The pristine upper city flies past you from the window.

You exit and you’re swallowed in a crowd. You slalom between hurried feet and scattered trash. People double of you crossing your way without excusing themselves. Skin, dirt, sweat, oil, spices, perfumes, each one new and foreign in your nostrils. They run around and bump into your shoulders if you’re not fast enough.

Between neon-lit darkness, electric colors pulse everywhere and fade into thick air, clinging to your skin. There’s chatter and sirens, robotic voices and loud drones, babies crying and adults shouting, all stirring in your ears.

The wonder of novelty soon leaves for annoyance.

"Left at the next intersection. No, my left."

"Maybe use my left?"

"Can’t you just follow the map?"

“How? I can’t even lift my arm.”

“Sucks to be you.”

At last, you’re out of the crowd.

You stop under a hand-painted diner sign, scarring and peeling at the edges.

You have to push a door, of real sticky scraped wood and creaking iron, to finally get in. A bell welcomes you in. Finally, the noise gets shut behind.

You catch Peter sitting on a table in front of a fogged window.

You sit at the table. He lights up as you notice him.

“Heey. You made it!” He pats you on your shoulder. “I wasn't sure you'd find the place. Miguel never lets you out, does he?"

He means it as a joke. His smile fades when you don’t laugh.

“Soo… How you doin’? How are things up there?”

You grimace. How do you even start describing all that shit? You play with the seams of the tablecloth between your fingers. “I don’t know, to be honest. How’s Mayday?”

“Great, actually. She was sleeping safe and sound with MJ.” He takes out his phone and pushes the screen in front of your face. There’s a picture of her cuddled up in her small bed. “She’ll probably wake up tonight as usual.”

You nod and smile.

A middle-aged woman in an apron asks for your orders.

“A double plate of pancakes for me, please. And double-topping, too. And a large coffee with cream.”

“A single portion for me. Black coffee, no sugar.”

Miguel would like your order. No. Focus.

The woman goes away.

“Miguel doesn't know I’m here.”

He snorts. “Oh, he's going to be thrilled when he finds out."

“No. He unlocked the door after I pissed him off.”

He stares at you. “You fucked up that bad?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn.” He says it with a smile as if you’ve just gained some respect.

You taste, for the first time in weeks, sweetness. You almost forgot they existed at all. Syrup and cream scratch your brain too well. Feels like a reward after lean and healthy organic food.

Peter's fork scrapes the plate. He's already halfway through his tower of pancakes.

"So," he says, chewing. "You pissed him off. Then what?"

"Then nothing. He's been avoiding me."

"Sounds familiar. Don’t be too shocked."

“I still don’t know what you and him do out there,” you ask.

"He hasn't told you?"

"No."

"Of course he hasn't." He shoves a giant slice of three stacked pancakes down his throat.

“He just says he goes on these ‘missions’ and he comes home full of battle scars.”

"We all do it.” He talks between chews. “We monitor dimensions, stop incursions, keep timelines from collapsing, blah blah blah. The whole multiverse thing he always talks about.” He twirls the fork. “There's this society he runs. He’s the boss.”

“Ah.”

He chuckles. “I know it sounds insane. He decides which dimensions or people get saved and which ones don't. It’s a hard job.”

There’s a moment of silence where he hesitates before licking the topping from his fingers.

"You know, he's not healing like he used to. You've probably noticed. I don't know if it's the injuries getting worse or him getting slower or something else."

“You have a guess?”

"I don't know.” He rubs the back of his neck, looking out of the foggy window. "I've asked him what he's doing. He doesn't answer. Or he says something vague. Following a lead, checking a signal, things like that. One time, I pushed and he pinned me to the wall. So I stopped asking."

Typical. You nod.

“But I've picked up things." He spins the coffee cup. “I can’t help it. He doesn't always close his screens. Or Lyla is just very bad at remembering to do that for him.”

“Hey!” Lyla’s voice retorts from the watch.

He shakes his head, shoulder slump. “He asks for access to old Alchemax files. He wants schematics for facilities that were decommissioned years ago, or old contacts of people who are mostly dead by now.”

You lose your appetite on the spot. Though, you force yourself to finish your bite.

“Sometimes he mentions energy signatures, dimensional residues, technical things. I don't understand half of it. I just find what he asks for and don't ask questions." He shrugs.

There’s another moment of silence in which you put down your fork, and he gulps down his coffee.

"I'm going to say something”, he states, “and you should know upfront I could be completely wrong. Miguel would tell me I'm wrong. He'd tell me to mind my own business and stop speculating. But."

He leans forward, looking you dead in the eyes.

“I don't think the anomaly was an attack as he says.”

You flinch back. "What?"

"Weapons are designed to do one thing, and you’re still alive.” He gestures towards you. “And he still has nothing about it? Either he's the worst investigator I've ever met—and he's not, believe me —or he's not telling the truth.”

Blood pulses in your head.

“I could be wrong, though. I'm not saying I know what it really is." He's backpedaling now, slumping in the diner seat. "Only thing I know for sure is he won’t be telling anyone. I've known him a long time.”

Every word dies in your throat and your mind stops forming new thoughts.

The conversation drags in silence. You both stand up when there’s not much left to say. You slide the watch to the robot-cashier. The money gets deducted from Miguel’s wallet.

"Thanks for meeting me."

"No problemo.” He shoves his hands in his pockets, shrugging. “I've been wondering how you were doing. He doesn't talk about you. But I can tell-" He stops himself. Decides not to finish. "Never mind."

"What?"

"I hope you figure it out."

You stare at him.

"Ready to go home?" Lyla chirps.

You don’t answer right away. Outside, the neon is still pulsing, the crowd is still running around, and the city is still alive and indifferent. You have to walk back through it. The nausea hits again.

“Need a walk back?” He offers.

You shake your head. “No, thanks.”

He just says, "If you need me, you know how to reach me. And if he asks, I didn't tell you any of this. He'll be pissed bad."

Somehow, he steals you a brief laugh.

"Take care of yourself. And take care of him… if you can. Someone should."

The bell chimes, and Peter disappears in crowd.

And it’s your turn, too, to get squashed around strangers in a hurry.

The noise grates. The lights sting. It’s cold and hot at the same time. It thrums and rings in your ears.

The neon lights stretch and bend. Every cell in your body tears apart.

And those strings, always in the back of your eyes.

No, no, this is not really the moment, you want to scream, but there’s no air or mouth to scream into.

You push your nails into the bricks. You want to hold to something.

But you hold to a child's hand and a scalpel and a ring on your finger and your mother

And your hand is small and tender and old and there’s wrinkles and bones and

you’re just born and you’re still rotting in the ground

and you reach to a finger, to the womb, to the sun, to a weapon, to food, to your successor, to your lover, to the next day and

a young sprout and the ancient ocean and

there’s no difference between you the carbon and the oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur lit on fire by nitrogen and

a golden ratio of strings twisting in circles in an order you’re too limited to comprehend

until every life ends and repeats

fabric weaves itself from its own seams

And you’re reborn.

And you get rearranged in your original form.

Slamming back into your original shell and prison.

Everything gets filtered through thirst, hunger, the need to breathe and the need to be held.

The hurt of your skin scratched, of your palms pressed flat against bricks. You’re forcing air into your lungs. Your ears are ringing.

No one stops to ask if you're okay. No one picks you up.

You're alone. Free and alone.

Lyla's voice feels so far away.

"Your vitals are all over the place! What happened?"

You push off the wall. Your legs hold. The station is still blocks away.

You stumble.

Hands catch you before you hit the ground.

His hands. On your waist.

Then you’re weightless for a moment before he hoists you on his shoulders and secures you with an arm like you’re nothing.

“What are you doing here?”

“You’re in no position to ask.”

He walks in a hidden alley. A few strangers glance up, but no one wants to get involved with a man of his size carrying a woman on his shoulders.

"Put me down. They’re looking at me strange."

He doesn’t reply.

He stops in a dead-end corner.

"What were you thinking?" He scolds you.

"I needed air."

"Wandering through a city you don't know while your vitals are destabilizing is a pretty stupid way to get some air." His suit mends on his skin, and it’s the only light source in the alley. “Now hold yourself tight.”

Your fingers twisting against the suit, you feel the shift of muscles in his shoulders. “Oh fuck. Warn me next time.”

“Won’t be another time”

Buildings, neon signs, and flying vehicles blur under you and become microscopic. Pinnacles of metal stretching to the horizon. Cold wind twirls your hair and makes you shiver against him.

You hear his talons digging rhythmically into the metal, tearing it open like melted butter and lurching upward. He’s a machine eating up meters on buildings, betrayed only by his heavy breathing and hisses. His heartbeat, pounding against your ribs, is slower than you expected.

You close your eyes. Motion sickness kicks your stomach. You’re too tired to be angry. For now, it’s just vertigo of being carried through the sky against your will.

He lands on the balcony of his bedroom. He forces it open and walks to the living room.

He drops you on the sofa. The mask disappears.

“You told me I could leave.”

“I thought it was the right thing.”

“You tracked me down and carried me back like… Fuck, I don’t know. A potato sack?”

"You couldn’t be on your own legs.”

He’s right and you hate him. Your legs still won't hold you. “I could’ve found a way without you.”

“Doubt.” He scolds you from above, hands on his hips. His usual stance. “Your body isn’t made to survive here. A flu can take you out without specific medication.”

“What if I didn’t want to be saved?"

“You're still sitting on my couch.”

“You still haven't told me the whole truth.”

He turns, ready to walk out as usual.

You take his wrist. You know your fingers don’t do shit to him. He still stops. “You don’t get to escape now. Too easy.”

He growls.

But you’re not that impressed anymore. “You know what? I'm not leaving. I'm not giving you the satisfaction. You don't get to confess the shit you do and run away so you can act like the martyr.”

A flash of red lights up in his irises.

He leans down on the couch. A hand crushes the backrest and the other sinks into the leather cushion next to your face.

“Cut the bullshit. You can’t survive on your own.” He rasps on your ear. “It just burns for you to admit I was right.”

You scoff and turn your head to look away. You fake your usual composure and nonchalance.

He barks a laugh in your face, searching for your gaze. “You act so uninterested, you forgot I can smell your skin.”

He lifts up from the couch, looking at you from his two meters. “Sorry. Won’t make you black out again. Take a nap.” He shuts you before you can snap back. “I have a job to get done.”

You drown in deep dark sea of strings. Your fingertips brush over one.

You're at a train station. You have a giant bag at your feet. It's night, it's cold. Your breath condensates in the air. Your heartbeat accelerates. There's a presence on your neck. You turn back. The last thing you hear is a shot, a piercing pain in your chest the last thing you feel.

You wake up to the echo of the gunshot. Your nostrils catch a faint lavender scent of clean sheets. It all vanishes to make space for dried-out sweat. You blink to expect your bedroom, with your photos on the counter, with your man and your cat.

Instead, you are welcomed between silken sheets and packs of dry ice around your body. The pillow is damp. The sun shines between high rise palaces on sharp black and gray furniture.

You throw a hand to search for him. But it's cold and empty on your side. Last night is tattooed on and inside your skin. All the cosmic discussion leaves room for the loss of touch, of warmth, of stickiness and being molded into an object of want by his hands alone.

Are you a terrible person for wanting more? To beg to exhaust the hollowness, turning your ribcage to ashes? A dog waiting for its owner to come back. Your fingers slide under the cotton of your underwear. “Watcha doing?“ Lyla's chirp interrupts like a screech on glass.

She restructures at the foot of the bed, lounging with a smirk and a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses. You hiss and slide your fingers out. “Nothing.“ “Mh-mh.“ She assesses you with a lifted brow. “A bird told me you discussed with him.“ You look out the window. “Are there any birds in this dimension? I forgot about them“, you think out loud in the hope of shutting her up. “Yes, they still exist, but not at this height.“ She lifts her sunglasses between her hair. “Let's say both of yours heart beat rates told me. Either that or you ran together for a solid mile.“ “Let's say we went for a run and discussed.“ You try to end the humiliation ritual.

“Oh darling, there’s no privacy here. Stop pretending. Besides, all that noise was hard to miss,” she winks. “I think he needed that.“ You roll your eyes. “Whatever.“ “Did you?“ You push sit on the bed to shoo her hologram. “Talk about important stuff. Like the ice around me, for example.“ The sunglasses turn into prescription glasses. “You reached a high fever thanks to your shared marathon. You stressed too much and accelerated your nervous system. Then you blacked out.“ A temperature chart appears behind her. There’s a spike in the graph at night. “Basically, You're going on fire. Think of yourself as a shooting star.“ “So, this is it. I'm becoming something else.“ “Yeah. Either Miguel finds a genius last-minute idea or that. But it seems like you're going to implode at this rate.” You huff and look at the ceiling, maybe looking for a divine intervention.

“But hey, let’s think positive. At least you got laid before becoming a new kind of strange creature. I bet your dopamine and oxytocin are hitting the ceiling. Point for you.“ “Fuck off. You wanted this all along.“ You squint your eyes and throw away the sheets from you. “But you’re not telling me why.” “I think,“ a pair of glasses appears on her nose, “that this is the best outcome, for now.“ “Sure. Keep your plans to yourself.“ She pushes her glasses up her nose. “Now, go take a shower, please.”

The mirror over his drawer returns to you the image of naked skin constellated with bruises.

You stand against the precipice of liking this. Losing balance.

* It's almost noon, and you can't look straight at his face across the kitchen island. Neither does he, moving data charts around the holo-screen of his watch with surgical grace. All traces from last night are gone from his skin. His usual composure came back.

But there's a plate with some eggs and a bunch of toasts, freshly brewed coffee, and a fruit bowl too. You pour your coffee at the counter and come to sit at the stool with nonchalance. You twitch your nose. You can't put your mug on that kitchen island now. Nor can you touch it with your fingers. You cross your arms and keep your mug up in the air.

The fact that you've been thinking about it since waking up is written all over you. “It's clean,“ he gives you a detached observation and a grating grunt. He knows you're thinking about it, but you’re the only one dying for it.

You put the mug down. You take a piece of toast between your teeth, while you steal glances at his glacial focus. You eat it, but you're still hungry, so you take another one. And then another one. Your stomach growls. Then you slide the whole plate towards you. “Your metabolism rate increased while you had a fever,“ he explains. He's observing you now from the corner of his vision while his fingers work relentlessly on his watch.

You want to ask what happened last night, whatever you said or did during your unconsciousness.

You want to ask if he likes you. If he’s still mad at you.

Not that you can do anything to change it.

You swallow your eggs.

“I'm way older than you.“ You try. “Wouldn’t tell.” “Mh?“ Finally, his deep gaze shoots on yours.

And your guts are catching fire, your nerve endings twitching in your own skin.

“I'm from 70 years ago from you, huh.“ You say, leaving it hanging in the air in search of a confirmation. Words that you didn’t know could go together just a day ago. “Yes.“ His jaw tenses, hiding the grinding of his teeth while he avoids your gaze again. “Do you remember something now?“ You shove another bite laced with disappointment down your throat. “Snippets.” “While you blacked out?“

Your neck burns too. “Yeah.”

“Good”, he closes. But he doesn’t seem quite relieved. The tension in his shoulders tightens up.

It’s a wall impossible to break down. You reach for the mug again. You remember it should feel the cold familiar ceramics. But it feels like dipping your fingertips in static, and you seep through it as Lyla's hologram would. You turn your hands palm and back and they're red with blood. Light bends, and you're on a white floor. And your white coat is beaded red, and there’s an iron taste in your mouth.

You blink.

You turn your hands palm and back, and they're clean in the daylight. In front of you, his excavated glare and downward lips make him look older than he is. His watch beeps insistently, casting red. He says nothing. The kitchen seems to cool down a few degrees. “Hey big boss, there's an emergency!“ Lyla hurries him. He hurls himself out of the kitchen.

You’re lonely again.

You grip the mug as your life is attached to it. You caress the marble countertop while he runs away, again.

*

In the darkness of the guest room, you should be sleeping and recovering, following doctor’s orders. Instead, you're holding the (your) watch, the one you found in his drawer, acting on a different kind of fever. You turn it over in your hands. There's a red button on the side. You should wait. You could give him the chance to tell you himself. But, fuck it, you’re bone-deep tired of it all.

You press the button. A bunch of pixels lightens to life. A light beam reads your retina. It beeps: WELCOME BACK. Back to what?

The interface is unfamiliar, yet your fingers know how to navigate within it. Your fingers know how to swipe through files in search of the comm logs. You hesitate for some seconds before tapping on a folder with text files. A chat history appears on the screen.

So you scroll.

user [04:47]: Connection established on my end. host [04:48]: Received. Check your end. user [04:49]: Confirmed. Synced with Lyla. Welcome to the team. host [04:50]: Can't believe this works. -chat end-

Your breath hitches. It’s like desecrating the grave of a long-dead person; but you scroll further.

user [23:15]: The signal regressions aren't consistent across all datasets. host [23:17]: I'll run the bootstraps tonight. user [23:18]: It's late. host [23:20]: I don't have a quantum computer yet. And you're the one messaging me at 11 pm. user [23:21]: it's 2 am here. host [23:22]: worse. -chat end- host [03:44]: Post-hoc sent. Don't you sleep? user [03:45]: I don't. host [03:46]: That's not healthy. user [03:47]: Neither is arguing with me at 3 am. Goodnight. host [03:48]: Aight. -chat end- host [01:23]: I'm sending now. user [01:24]: I asked for it 3 hours ago. host [01:25]: You don't pay me enough. user [01:26]: I don't pay you at all. -chat end-

host [12:00]: recipe for empanada? user [12:30]: top secret. host [13:03]: prick.  -chat end- user [22:10]: You were right about the calibration. host [22:11]: say sorry user [22:12]: no. -chat end-

You scroll again, while a strange nostalgia blurs your vision.

host [19:45]: For how long have you been awake? user [19:47]: almost 72 hours. host [19:45]: Go to sleep. I'm working here. Lyla too. user [19:47]: I'm fine. host [19:48]: You're not. I heard it in the comms. Take a nap user [19:53]: I don't take orders from you. host [19:58]: fine. Die on your floor -chat end- host [02:10]: I need to ask. user [02:18]: I'm working. host [02:19]: You're always working. user [02:20]: So are you. On my datasets. host [02:25]: Fair. What if Alchemax discovers me? user [02:27]: They won't. They do not have the technology in your universe to trace our comms. host [3:02]: If something happens to me, burn it all. user [3:05]: Nothing's going to happen. host [03:23]: Wish I could believe it. Sometimes I ask myself why I accept. user [03:24]: I am convincing. Or you've got the Wendy syndrome. host [03:25]: fuck you user [03:27]: Or you like to prevent the multiverse from crumbling on itself. -chat end-

You stare at that one for a long time.

host [02:23]: My husband thinks I have a secret affair. I think he hates me user [02:25]: what did you reply? host [02:27]: that I don’t and he doesn't believe me. user [02:29]: it tends to be like this. host [02:33]: Where is your family? user [02:37]: Somewhere in one of those lost timelines. host [02:40]: Why don't you get another family in yours? user [02:49]: it's not the same. You don't understand. host [02:53]: Sorry. -chat end-

You wonder what he was thinking about those long sleepless nights.

user [4:40]: urgent. Report any signals on your end. host [5:00]: stop calling. i hate you. Go to sleep user [5:01]: it’s urgent. host [5:03]: goodnight.  -chat end-

The file ends. You scroll up and down, searching for something you missed, but there's nothing after that.

You’re now living in the aftermath of it all.

Lyla appears on the screen. “There should be some saved call records too. Want me to play them?”

“Not now, Lyla.”

“Sure. Try not to push your brain into overdrive”. She salutes and dissolves in her world of pixels.

It's too much now. The watch in your lap is the only light in the darkness.

You lie back on the bed. You stare at the ceiling. You check your phone. No new messages.

After all, you’ve dried out of tears to shed.

You hear clocks ticking, but there’s only digital numbers, running faster than your mind can catch.

There should’ve been a reason for all this. There’s always a reason to lose it all.

And the man who knows, the man who searched for you between time and space, is avoiding you after sex.

*

Footsteps.

Neurotic restless sounds.

They cross the hallway and pause outside the guest room. You can hear his raspy breathing. You can feel it on your skin.

You stride out of the guest room. Your nails dig into the metal of the watch. You didn't let go of it the whole night long.

His shoulders stir. He heard you coming. Of course he did.

Fucking coward. Neither of you speaks.

He assesses you from above with that permanent scowl of someone who thinks to know what’s best for you. “I thought you would spill something at this point.“ You show the watch. “You know I read through it.”

Hands on hips, he looks outside the window. Brown eyes turn to red in the dusk; his chest barely controlling the fire beneath.

He clears his throat. “You can't go home.“ He grants, as a matter of fact. “I think I got that.“ You discard that demonic gimmick on the sofa. The screen goes off. “No.“ He brushes off a strand of hair from his forehead. “Your home dimension. Doesn't exist anymore.“

You laugh nervously. Bordering on hysterical.

“What the fuck are you talking about?“ He fixes you and says nothing more. “You can’t be serious. Things don’t just disappear.“

He's still silent. Your smile drops. You see his fingers shaking, betraying composure.

“I couldn't prevent it.“ He says, simply. “You're the only one I could save.“ He turns to face you. Makes you insignificant as a speck of dust. “And it's my fault.“ He asserts, in a barely restrained growl.

You gesture to the air. “I don't understand what you’re saying.“ Blood pulses in your eyes. Your mind blanks, trying to grasp anything at all. “What did you do?“ “I saved you.” He speaks low. “And I killed everyone else doing so.“

Your husband. Your cat. Your mother. Your friends. Faces from your SD card flash through your mind.

He stalks toward you. You walk backwards. Every cell in your body vibrates. “That's nonsense.“

In a few strides, he comes to you. “Listen,“ he orders. He seizes your arm. “You said they attacked me. That you saved me!” You outcry. “Listen to me.“ He speaks louder. “I shouldn't have saved you. Your death was a thread for things to go towards a certain path of events. But I prevented it. You shouldn’t be here.“

Legs losing strength. Stomach eating itself. Lungs choking on air. Wanting to scratch your skin off.

He takes your waist in one hand and pushes you towards the sofa. Your legs finally give up on it. “We're going to change your sequence to match this dimension. I'm going to save you.“ “Save me?” You shout between uncontrollable sobs. “Like you did until now? Getting to nothing at all?Taking everything I have away from me?” “Let me do something.” His words come out between ragged breaths. “Don't make my mistake be useless again.” He kneels before you, looking at you at eye level. “Please.“ “No.“ You snarl and push him on his chest. “Don't touch me. Go away.“ He doesn’t flinch. He grabs your chin to meet his gaze. “I am going to try again. I’ll adjust you to this timeline. You can live.“ “I don't want to. It's your fault.“

He pulls his fingers away from your face and stands up. His shadow looms over you.“This is the reason I wanted you to comply.“

It’s cold, it’s too cold. You want him back. You want him everywhere.

You hate him. You hate yourself more for wanting him, for burning for him.

“I wish we had never met.” You confess.

For the first time, he flinches, as if he had burned himself.

Then strides away.

You crouch on the pillows, drinking your own tears. Hollowness gnaws in your chest. You've been peeled layer by layer of everything you were, just a bunch of empty skin and bones that eventually will return to sand.

Severed from everyone in a cosmic loneliness.

You're sitting on the edge of his bed. The morning sun warms up your back.

The box is open beside you. The glass slide sits on the nightstand, the print caught in powder.

You've been staring at it for ten minutes.

Lyla flickers into view, lounging on the pillow.

"You're not going to do it, are you?"

"I don't know."

"You have the print. You have the slides." She ticks each item off on her fingers. "What's missing?"

"Guts, apparently."

Lyla cocks her head, plainly judging you.

You pick up the glass slide. Turn it over in your fingers.

"Will it actually work?"

"Only on his drawer. It's an old model with an optical sensor."

"What about his office?"

"You're so silly." She chuckles. "You'd need an actual working fingerprint and his retina too." She rolls her eyes. "Unless you have a trick up your sleeve that can outsmart me."

"I don't think so."

"I know." She checks her manicure. The nails are longer.

"So I don't really have a choice."

"Nope." She pops the p.

You snort. "It's like you've guided me to do this shit."

"Perhaps." She preens and twirls her hair. "Perchance."

You've stopped asking questions about her secret agenda.

"He's gone." She nudges you. "You have one hour, maybe less. Don't waste it."

You kneel beside the drawer. The glass slide is warm in your palm.

"Scanner's on the top edge," Lyla whispers. She's a miniature on your shoulder, barely a flicker of gold. "Press it there."

You lift the print, battling the shake in your fingers.

The drawer clicks after a few seconds.

"Go on!" Lyla incites. She's standing on your side, watching from above.

The first inner drawer opens easily. You slide it out.

There's a bunch of his personal stuff. Cufflinks. Sunglasses. A watch you've never seen him wear. A cologne. Men's things.

You try with the second one.

Now, there's more interesting stuff.

A bracelet, red and blue, like the one Mayday lost.

So he wasn't lying. Your throat knots.

A transparent box with a micro SD card in it. You slide it into your pocket.

And an old lab coat.

A dimensional watch, one like Miguel's, but smaller.

A magnetic badge. You flip it in your fingers. It has your name, ID code, and "Alchemax" etched on it.

On the back: exp. date 26/05/2029.

Your stomach twists. It all feels wrong, but you don't know to what extent.

"What the fuck are you doing?"

His imposing figure is dark against the corridor light. His face taut, bewildered. His fingertips twitch.

You freeze. Your hands are still inside the drawer.

Lyla's hologram vanishes.

Your heartbeat is in your ears.

God, you fucked up.

"Trying to remember. As you said." You try a rescue in the midst of your brain fog.

“I asked you for one thing. Just one.” His voice is low, tight. “Not to work against me.”

"But you're hiding something!"

"Of course I do." His upper lip shows his fangs. He pronounces every word as if you're stupid. "So what? Do you think you can handle the truth? Because you clearly don't." "Fuck, I can't even try without your head exploding."

There's a long silence.

"I don't know if I should trust you", you admit.

His forehead creases.

"I'm the reason you're alive." He points to his sternum as he leans over you. "And you don't trust me."

You feel your teeth crashing against your own skull.

"I don't know if you're actually helping me. You may be responsible for this, as far as I know." You double down.

His eyes darken with a red shadow.

"You think I’m doing this for fun or some shit like that?"

There it is, his usual cold demeanor, the illusion he created of having everything figured out, while you don't.

Lyla's hologram appears between you two, palms up as a sign of surrender. "Woah woah woah. We should calm down here."

"You. I don't want to hear about you." He shoos her hologram, but her pixels recompose again.

"Come on, Mig. Give her a break." She pleads.

"You clearly helped her." He points to the hologram. "I don't want to hear your stupid excuses."

She acts as if offended. "I'm helping you!"

Your eyes dart between the two of them. You didn't think an AI could be capable of faking being as empathetic as her.

"By going against my orders? Fuck, Lyla." He pinches the bridge of his nose. "Can't even trust you anymore."

"I'm programmed to do anything I can to help you."

He glares at her. "You call this helping me?"

"Yes!" Her tone is maternal, despite his anger. "Look at what you're doing! Keeping her captive and not giving an explanation. And look at you. You're not reasoning logically anymore."

His scowl deepens. "You think I need your goddamn babying?"

He's silent while his jaw clenches. His eyes dart back at you, judging from above.

It's your turn to stand up for yourself.

"You're deciding everything I know about myself. My whole identity depends on you. Of course, I can't trust you more than a certain point. You want me to put up with this shit without saying a word?"

The creases between his brows deepen further. "I decide, because I'm the one trying to keep you alive and preserve as much of you I can."

"I should decide what should concern my identity. Not you nor anyone else." Your voice breaks and rises in intensity. "Me! It should be me!" You pat your chest with your hand.

"You want to? Good. But don't cry to me when you'll break apart."

Your face twists against your will.

"You know what? If you don't want my help, the door is open." He points to the main door direction. "See how far you get by yourself."

"Stop it!" Lyla's shout surpasses yours. "Timeout. This is useless."

There's another long silence in the room.

"You're right." He whispers. He whips out the commands from his dimensional watch. "All this is useless."

He walks out. Conversation is over.

"Come on, Mig." Lyla's hologram follows him, disappearing and reappearing around him.

"Vete al diablo," He growls.

There's a silence, long and suffocating; and there's the biting taste of failure in your mouth.

When you finally move, your legs are numb.

You fucked up.

You've tried to talk to him again later, but it's impossible now.

The more you try, the more he acts as if you don't exist at all. He actively avoids you or exits the room you're both in.

He's back in his sharp edges and impenetrable walls. His misanthropic shell he thoroughly assembled, now fortified by your actions.

You've fallen to the lowest floor you could.

You could have walked out that door by now. You didn't.

You cry in your bathroom, miserable on the toilet.

Eventually, you say to yourself, it will pass.

*

It's the darkest hour before dawn. You didn't even bother to light the lamps, wishing to get swallowed by the dark itself. There's a ballast in your stomach when you swipe through the images you retrieved from the SD card.

People you don't remember. Strangers that once were your family.

It's all wiped from your mind.

You've chewed your lips raw by now, and your eyes are swollen from all these hours in front of the screen. You've been ignoring thirst and hunger. You've dampened another shirt of his (you don't dare to think of them as yours anymore). You've scraped your scalp with your nails.

Nothing makes sense anymore, anyway. You've lost it all. You're emptied of your own person. Is it even worth it, to keep yourself alive? It's a disgusting void gnawing you from the inside, that you're caged with in your own flesh. You've never wished to escape from your own body, as now.

You don't care when he gets back, padding as a cat in the dark. You see the blue and red lights in the corner of your vision. You hear his grunts of disapproval.

But you care when he snatches your phone from your hands. You throw yourself at him as he removed your lifeline, more as a feral animal than a human.

Of course, he's much stronger than you; he shoves you back with a single arm, and you fall on the sofa.

He stinks of sweat, blood, and rain. It's gross (you like it, you've missed him).

You try again, and he pushes you down on the sofa, while he discards your phone on the kitchen island.

"Stop it. It's good for nothing." It should be reassuring, but sounds like spite. His eyes flicker red in the dark.

"Fuck off. You treat me like I'm a fucking pet." Your voice is raspy and full of resentment.

He growls. "It happens when you don't listen."

You stand up. You meant it as a challenge, but you forgot how tall he is, how much space he takes. You just look desperate.

He chuckles. "What?"

"It's my life, and you're toying with it."

"Really? Last talk wasn't enough for you?" He crosses his arms, the redness reduced to two strips. "I meant it. The main door is open. You can walk away whenever you want. I told Lyla to unlock it."

"I know."

"Then why don't you go?" His voice drops lower.

There are at least a million reasons why you don't. The most important one is loneliness. You don't know if you could bear being alone in a world you don't know. So you stay silent.

"You should go, for your well-being. You said it. Besides," he says in a rush as he pads around the living room, "I fucked up. You were right."

"What did you fucked up?"

"Everything. I ruined everything." He admits. "You're right. Be mad at me." He gestures to the door. "Fucking leave."

You stay still. You're not really getting what he's babbling about. "To go where?"

"Anywhere. I'll give you all the money you need."

You sigh in frustration. "I don't want to."

"Why?"

You stay silent, trying to think of a reply, to give a meaning to all that's happening.

But you don't have that much time to reply.

He takes you by the legs and puts you on the counter.

It's as easy as that.

You chose to stay. He's starving and you're starving and someone has to eat first. A sacrificial lamb sitting on his altar.

You begged so much for attention, but it's different from what you've imagined.

It's a play of resentment and anger, of broken trust that the both of you are too immature to handle. You know it, you like it, you want it.

It's all an animalistic fight: because you didn't obey as you used to, because he's not caring as you wanted to, because neither of you knows how to stop.

It's in his talons.

Straight lines burn in your skin. They're cutting through the fabric of your pants.

The holographic suit goes down to his hips.

It's in your fingernails.

Half moon scrapes on his shoulders. You didn't think too much about it, but he's made of flesh and bone, too.

It's in your tongue under his chin.

It's in the salt of his sweat mingling with rainwater.

It's in his tongue on your neck, with your blood on his fangs.

You hiss. You like it.

Now the flavors mix together in your mouth.

It's warm, it's humid.

His mouth swallows yours. It's okay, you won't breathe for a while.

Your lips get pinched by his teeth. His stubble scrapes your skin.

Everything about him is angular and sharp, from the hitch of his breath to his shot of motions.

His muscles vibrate under your skin, a force barely restrained. Energy is not erased but transformed; his becomes the grip of a hand that clasps your entire waist and the grip of a hand pulling your hair.

Action to reaction; you grunt in his mouth and he slams you on his torso; you flinch and he bites your tongue.

It's a vicious cycle you can't break, so you play in it. He bites, you bite back; on his Adam's apple, on his shoulder, on his collarbone. You feel the warm hitches in his breath. You leave faint bite marks that you know will be gone by the morning, while his will last.

It's frustrating.

In the meantime, he grabs your shirt from the collar on your nape and tears it off. The dry sweat on your spine is cool in the night air of the apartment, while your breasts get warmed up on his chest. Your skin prickles in between.

Now his talons dig in your shoulders, down your spine.

You hiss and cry. But this is what it means to want his hands on you. You've never had the intention to fix him, anyway.

It's disgusting and pathetic. And he knows, and he smirks at you. You're staying because you like the challenge of dealing with his bullshit, at this point.

He knows you more than you do, and he makes sure you remember that.

Your nails rake down on his torso in response. A a gritty sound scraping against the back of his throat, as he grinds your hips against his. A shot of heat aflame at the mouth of your stomach.

So your legs are wrapped around his waist, and you cling pathetically to him. And so his talons dig in your ass now, and so you grunt against his chest.

The rest of the suit disappears from the hips to the toes. You haven't realized how thin a holographic suit can be, but how effective it was as a barrier from your skin. It's warm and wet against your stomach, now.

You search his gaze with yours, as you're trying not to look down blatantly.

You are practically a virgin, you realize. Shame.

He gives your (his) pants the same treatment as the shirt. As he pushes against you, you feel the filthiness between your thighs. A mix of anticipation, fear, and hunger stirs in you as your tongue brushes on his sternum. You're staining him with the blood from your lips.

He only needs a hand to cover your entire torso. And then he returns the favor, licking on in between your breasts, around, then over — and his fangs deliberately brushing on your nipples. You hide your moans against his shoulder.

You flinch when his other hand comes down. Is he going to maul you with the talons? But you learn they're retractable, and he was ruining your skin on purpose.

He pushes aside your underwear (he chose and bought for you), a finger sliding inside of you. It's just that, yet you plead with your cries. Because you wanted him, and it feels divine. And now index and middle finger rub against your walls.

It's more than enough to fill the space. And he raises the pace frantically. More and enough get tangled in your tongue with fuck and God.

And when you're soaked enough for his liking, he tears off the panties, too.

There's no further fanfare to this, besides the need to fill the blatant loneliness that consumed you, and probably him.

He grabs you from your thighs and slides you tight against him, raises them at the right angle and pushes himself inside.

It rasps raw against you.

It's too much, it's too fast, but you won't complain. Your entire body is strung tight to cling to a beacon of sanity.

He's in your flesh, your soul and bone marrow.

Scavenging for someone you don't recognize.

At least, he's filling your void.

Thrust after thrust, you feel his restraint waver. His growls get louder, less restrained, feral.

For you, it's a moment of grace.

As you lose your faux innocence, your hips start to follow his, and your back arches, guiding him deeper.

He grabs a fistful of your hair to pull your head back to look up at him.

He's a mess, too. But he huffs and grunts in satisfaction and watches like some kind of damn voyeur.

And then he has his hand wrapped around your throat, gripping the front of your neck and forcing your back to arch forward against his body. The other hand tightens on your hips as he lifts your legs just enough to hit deeper inside you.

Until he gets to your cervix, where your brain rewires pain with utter pleasure.

It's aphrodisiac.

You shut your eyes.

But now you're in a home.

Your home.

It's much different from his. It's hearty, lived in, full of plants and mementos.

You're in bed, with a man.

But he's not Miguel.

The duvet smells of the lavender fabric softener you like.

There's a framed photo on the drawer at the other side of the room.

It's you and the man, and you're dressed in white and he's in a black suit. You both have a wedding ring.

You wake up, naked, in Miguel's silk sheets.

Eggs.

It's the first meal he made for you here, when you woke up.

Now they're on the plate in front of you.

He never sat with you at breakfast; now he eats at the stool across from you, like it's nothing. You steal some glances from behind your lashes. He reads some data on his watch, though you can't understand what it is. Sometimes he exhales, sometimes you hear his fingers scratching his skin or the clink of his fork on the plate. It's ordinary.

You search for a meaning in the gesture, if there is any, really.

What if it's all calculated, if he's a manipulating genius. Or what he's just a man, and you're reading too much into it.

You take a bite. It's soft and warm and savory at the right point. There's a hint of spice. Is there chili pepper? Much better than your burnt toast.

In fact, it's too perfect.

You woke up with his fingerprint under your mattress. You slept on your dirty matter, and he made you a perfect breakfast. The irony. Your stomach twists and closes at the scent. You're Judas at his last supper.

Only difference is that it's you being crucified.

You're starting to regret your plan.

"He took back Mayday this morning. He says thank you."

You look up. He's looking at you with no particular intensity. There's no scowl nor tension on his face. Maybe, for the first time, he's acknowledging your presence as a person. You forgot to chew your bite.

"Peter says thank you. For keeping Mayday."

You swallow. "Oh. It's nothing."

He stifles a chuckle. A corner of his mouth twitches upwards. "Don't be so friendly, or he'll ask again."

He likes it. He approves of you helping him, you realize. "It's okay", you promptly launch yourself. Because, finally, there's a space for you to be liked by him, and you have to take it before it goes away. "I can do that again if he needs it."

His brows go up. It underlines the wrinkles on his forehead when he looks at you with curiosity. "Really? What made you change your attitude on this?"

You give him a vague huff. "It wasn't that bad."

He hums. His gaze keeps on you as if assessing you over.

This is probably the first time you've had a real conversation. It's just two people having breakfast, talking to each other about normal business. It's unfamiliar, but you like it.

You crave more of it.

"Ah." You fumble in the pants pocket. You slide a red and blue bracelet from it and keep it mid-air. "She lost this on my bed."

He seems unimpressed. "I know. I gave her another one." Then his gaze is on you again, piercing through you with his usual intensity. "You remember what it is?"

You avoid looking at him. Every time he does, guilt pushes down in your stomach. So you fixate the bracelet between your thumb and your index. "It's not unfamiliar, but I can't recall it."

You hear a sigh from the other end of the counter. "I gave you one, once. Turns out you never needed it." His voice got an octave lower, and it has a warm shade to it, now.

Once.

You bite the insides of your cheeks. "What does this do?"

You hear the clink between metal and ceramic. "You still don't remember?"

"No."

He sighs deeper. "It keeps your body from snapping back to its original dimension."

It makes sense, and none of it at the same time. You furrow while you make the thing twist between your fingers. "When I woke up, you said I was in your dimension."

"Mh-mh." He nods.

You look up, beyond him; at the scenery, the fact that it seems unreal, but you don't know why; that it seems normal, but you don't know what your normal was.

A headache pierces through your skull. You shut your lids and rest your forehead on the back of your hand. There's an old fatigue in your body that you can't make it away with sleep alone. It's a tiredness of being.

You hear the screech of the stool and his footsteps on the floor.

He stands next to you. And he bends lower, and you can feel the warmth of his skin.

And there's his hand on your shoulder.

And it's resting there.

It has a restrained clasp on it. Like he has to harness a certain force to do that.

"Sorry. I should not dump information on you like that." It's a deep whisper that crawls under your skin and chokes you out of breath.

You feel a warmth inside of you, because you wanted this so much; but it burns as a fire, because it's not enough.

You want more.

What more? How more? You don't want to go there. You tighten your teeth and it worsen your migraine.

He squeezes again. You forgot how your body breathed to keep itself alive all those years.

"Go rest. Take some ibuprofen if it doesn't go away."

You nod.

"Find me in the lab when you feel better. We have to talk."

If he doesn't know, he will know.

And you will lose any chance to get what you want.

He won't look at you again. You won't have his hand on your shoulder anymore.

You push yourself up from the stool, eyes down. He frees your shoulder. You can't look at him.

You walk to your room.

*

Your fingers are anchored to the blanket, your legs weigh as rocks. The print is under your mattress. You can feel the elevation change if you push your hand on it. Guilt sinks in your chest.

What if he noticed? Or worse, what if Lyla told him? Your eye bags hang heavy. Nightmares hunted you all night long, and now it's getting on you.

It's past midday when Lyla appears in front of you. You flinch. "Wakey wakey! You will be late for lunch at this pace." She announces. You can't force yourself to remove the gloom on your face. "Is he still in the lab?"

"Yes." She tilts her head, looking at you between her long lashes. "Is it about last night?" You nod, biting the insides of your cheeks. "It was a stupid decision." You squeeze your eyes in a sharp line. "Have you told him?"

"No."

You release a deep breath you didn't know you were holding. "But he checked the access logs. He may suspect something if you keep hiding here." She lifts her index finger. "You should play smart." "Are you helping me now?" "Not really." She taps her feet on the ground. "It's more like I'm babysitting you both." She dissolves in pixels as her laugh vibrates in the room.

The lab door slides open.

"Took you long enough." He's deep in his holoscreen, hunching on his chair. He doesn't look at you. Again.

Your nails dig in your palms — they're sweaty.

"Sorry."

He lies back on the chair's backrest and crosses his arms. He exhales from his nose. "How are you feeling?"

Your mouth is dry. "I've felt better."

He glances over his shoulder. "Lyla left the lab unlocked yesterday."

"I know."

There's a long silence hanging in between.

He turns his head back to the screen. "You don’t hide things from me. Not if you want my help."

You swallow.

"Good and bad. Especially bad." He underlines.

There's a tremor in your limbs that you're failing to fight, and your blood is ice cold.

"You're trying to do something about this. It's good. I wouldn’t expect anything less." It sounds like it's a confession, but not one he didn't want to make.

He turns around in his chair. He leans forward, elbows on knees.

He's looking at you again.

Your heartbeat jumps. He doesn't suspect. Not that much.

"I’ll give you time. Not forever. If nothing comes back, I’ll tell you everything." There's that familiar tension in his jaw. "All of it."

Your eyes are getting watery, but it's not really the moment. You swallow the lump that's threatening to form in your throat. "Okay."

His shoulders slump, and he looks away.

He shakes his head.

"I have an updated version of the enzyme. It should work better."

"It's the removal procedure again?"

He exhales deeply. "Yes. I'll be here the whole day, if it needs."

You hug your arms. Fuck, you had other plans for today. "Last time it felt like-"

You shift your weight from one foot to another, and your nails scratch your arms.

"I know." You see his eyes moving rapidly and his fingers crossing tightly. "I’ve been through it too."

Your gaze drifts, too. You wonder if it has to do with the red irises, the fangs, and the superhuman healing. You wonder if he tried to revert himself back to a human.

"We shouldn't waste more time." He insists. "If there’s a chance your brain keeps your memories— you, before it rewrites…"

You look up, and you see him looking at you again.

"I wouldn't pass up this chance if I were you."

You nod.

The fingerprint is under your mattress.

He's giving you a chance.

You don't tell him. Not yet.

*

The platform is cold under your back. The same table, the same smell of chlorine. You're getting used to being his lab rat.

Anguish eats you as you lie down. He's watching from above, while you're sprawled as no more than an object to dissect.

"Ready?" Lyla asks. She's a miniature next to your right ear, with glasses and a coat on.

You give no hints. You don't have the guts.

"Ready", he cuts.

Then again, the robotic arm, the needle, the shocking burn.

“What are you doing?”

Miguel snarls. Too sharp, too loud even for him.

You look at your hands. You've been fumbling on his terminal.

You've unlocked it. You made it.

"What the fuck are you doing?"

He takes you by the arm and slams you on the lab wall. "Ungrateful bitch."

The concussion rattles in your skull. The neon lights are too bright. You grimace. The glass slips from your fingers.

He steps on it and it breaks in a million pieces.

"I've been doing everything I can." He hisses. A vein on his temple. His fangs out. The red aflame in his eyes.

It's wrong, it's wrong, it's not him — but you're wrong, and you're guilty.

"And this is your fucking thank you."

He takes your neck and slams you again.

You cry and cry again from the depths of your lungs.

"Shut up! Fucking shut up!" His snarl surpasses your voice by miles.

You shut up.

Your heartbeat is in your ears, and you can't see a thing.

The fingerprint. You press on the mattress. It's not there. Your heartbeat skyrockets again. "Where is it?"

He inhales from his nostrils and exhales everything he’s got. "It. What?"

You grip the bedsheets. They're different. They slip in between your fingers like water. They're silk.

This isn't your bed.

You smash your palm on your side of the wall to search for a switch.

"Here." You hear a flip.

A bed-lamp lights up in the dark. You squint your bleary eyes. His silhouette is pitch dark against the warm light.

"I fucking can't do this anymore." He growls like a beast between gritted teeth. "One more time and I'm kicking you out of my room."

He's next to you, in bed.

He's pinching the bridge of his nose with one hand and holding his back up from the mattress. His curls are a mess, the shirt uneven on his shoulders. You've seen him proven physically, but not psychologically yet. Until now.

"I swear I can't wait to remove whatever is frying your brain. I can't do this shit anymore."

You swallow and it burns. There is no saliva left in your mouth, and your throat is torn apart — from screaming, you get. There's dried tears on your cheek, and the shirt is clinging to your skin, but your sweat hasn't dried out from your spine yet. "…Sorry?" You manage, with the broken voice that's left in your chords.

"Are you awake now?"

You pinch your cheek. The tips of your fingers are dead cold, but it stings. "I- think so?"

"Fucking finally." He presses the palms of his hands on his forehead. "You've been screaming every hour for almost ten hours."

You cough. You don't know if it's a vision real, or it's the real real. Either way, when you craved his presence, you didn't imagine it like this. Plus, you look like someone pulled off the side of the street.

"I had to force you here." His voice is low, deep, and groggy. "You woke me up ten times, and I had to rescue you from the couch."

"I-"

"Shut up."

He covers with the blanket and turns, giving you his back.

You abandon your head on his pillow. It's silk, too.

You lie still. The ceiling is dark. The sheets are wet and cold around you. You can hear is breath evening out too.

This seems real real.

"Get back to sleep, please." He mutters and turns off the lamp.

The weight in your gut is still heavy. Your fingers check around your neck. It was a nightmare. Just a nightmare. He would never do that. The only real thing you remember is the needle.

"Did it work?" you ask. Your voice is a whisper.

He's quiet for a long moment.

"I don't know."

You turn your head to him. Your eyes have been getting used to the dark.

"The enzyme did… something. To your brain specifically." His shoulder blades tense under his shirt. "We have to wait."

You look up to the ceiling again.

"You remember anything?" This time, his whisper has a warmth to it.

"No." You match his tone.

"Try to sleep."

You try, and you fail.

You slip out of bed.

You pad to your guest room. Threading a hand under your mattress, you feel the box in between your fingers. It’s still there. The tension in your body eases.

Should you get back in your guest bed? You don't really want to.

So you do the road back, you slip into his bed again, disturbing him as little as possible.

On your left, there's the drawer you want to open. On your right, there's him.

You crouch on your right, against his back, between the sweaty sheets. Like a moth to a flame, but it's the warmth of his skin.

"Coffee's ready."

Back to you, not looking at you. He looks like his usual.

You pour yourself a cup. When you look up, he's facing you. Leaning against the counter, mug in hand. His face is unreadable. Cuts, gashes, all gone in the sunlight. His conditions were so bad a part of you thought you wouldn't see him normal again.

"I don't want to hear a word about last night." He declares, voice sharp, before you could take your sigh of relief.

He holds your gaze for a long moment.

No, maybe he's different than usual. Inquisitive, maybe looking for a confession. He knows you touched him.

Or maybe you're imagining it. Maybe you're seeing what you want to see. Maybe he's just angry you saw him on the floor.

Your fingers are steady around the mug, but you feel like he can hear your heartbeat. Slow breaths. Control.

"Okay." You bring the rim to your lips. The weight of his gaze rests in your gut.

You watch him drink too. His hand around the mug, swallowing the object whole. It's been the same for more than a week, but now you know how it feels under your touch. You know too much. Now you can't erase it.

He catches you looking.

You don't look away. It would be suspicious.

Neither does he.

"I need you to do something tonight."

An electric shock wakes you. You blink. "What?"

"A friend's kid." Slowly, he sets his mug down on the counter behind him. "He needs someone to watch her. We're on a mission tonight."

Your eyes go wide. "You want me to babysit?"

"Listen." He puts his hands on his hips. He's not joking. "He hands you the kid, you keep her alive. That's it. It's simple." His eyes narrow to slits. "You owe it to me."

You scoff. He's never said that before. He's always been dismissive about the debt. It's my job. We're fair already, he said. Of course, he's right to call it in; of course, you want to help. You didn't expect to watch a kid.

"Okay, fine."

"Good." He nods and pushes himself away from the counter. "He's going to leave her to you tonight. And don't", he points his index to your face, "don't talk to Peter. Take the child and shut the hell up."

You nod. You're confused.

"You're an adult. Act like one." He exhales.

Your throat tightens. "What do you do out there?"

He straightens his back, glaring at you from his two meters. "I said-"

"You asked me to babysit because you're going on a mission." You stand your ground.

His jaw moves without any sound. You swear there's a flicker of red moving in his irises. "I'm searching for answers." He admits.

Your palms sweat. "For me?" It slips out. You could break the ceramic under your fingers.

He grunts and turns away. He brings his mug to the sink. His fingers clench around the counter's edge. "For everything."

For the first time, he looks like just a tired man to you.

But again, he told you already it's not for altruism nor feelings.

"I'm trying again with the enzyme, thanks to the new markers I have." Barely more than a whisper.

You don't know how to reply. You're tired of these procedures. His back muscles are tight under the shirt, as if he stopped breathing.

A minute passes.

He leaves.

You breathe again.

The mug rests in the sink.

You stare at it. The ceramic casts the morning lights all around. Condensation created moist prints on the surface.

His fingerprints.

If you could only copy them.

*

You clean obsessively.

You've dismantled the coffee-maker and cleaned it inside out with a wet rag. There are dry stains all over it.

Lyla watches you, her elbows resting on the counter, palms supporting her chin. Intrusive as usual.

"Did he force you into slave labor?"

"No", you grunt. "There's just nothing better to do."

"I'm going." His voice. Your nerves jump. "Peter should be here in a while."

He moves in the corner of your vision. You catch the red and blue lights from his suit. You avoided crossing his eyes again since this morning, now your eyes are glued to your task. "Okay."

He stops. "Did you sanitize everything? It smells horrible."

You hum, passing two fingers in the corners of the machine. "It has to be, with a kid."

"Lyla can do that." You can hear the disapproval in his voice.

"She volunteered." Lyla chirps. "Try to get back in one piece this time."

You stifle a laugh.

"Shut up." He growls.

The door locks. Finally, you lift your gaze to make sure he's gone. You place the rag alongside the coffee maker pieces.

A mini Lyla appears over your shoulder. "You know he doesn't wear anything under the suit?"

You sigh and close your eyes, trying not to picture it. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I can."

You huff and turn away from the counter. His mug is still in the sink. You observe it. That stupid "#1 scientist" is printed on it. You can't bring yourself to touch where he touched. Fingerprints on fingerprints. It's too much for you, now.

"Not even underwear." She chuckles in your ear.

Forehead in hand, you lament under your breath.

"By the way, I'm going to recharge. He needs my full power." She yawns. "You'll be alone for a while."

"Can't believe it." You breathe a sigh of relief.

"Don't die without me. Oh, and don't kill the kid."

She disappears.

You glance at the mug again.

Maybe you could copy his fingerprints. Maybe it can be done.

*

The bell rings at dusk.

You open the door. For the first time, you see another human being that's not Miguel. It's strange. He's strange. Baby powder smell fights in your nostrils. Barely composed and dressed, with a baby in his hands and a giant bag slung over one shoulder.

The moment he acknowledges your presence, his cheeks color. He has a lively complexion, much different from Miguel's — probably because he doesn't live buried in the lab. "You must be Miguel's guest."

It's like you've never been in a presence of a real human in ages, like you've never learned how to socialize. "I- I guess." The words get tangled in your mouth.

"This is Mayday." He lifts the baby. "I'm Peter. Miguel said you'd watch her."

You nod and smile. The baby is staring at you with giant bright eyes. You didn't expect such a small kid.

What did you get yourself into?

"I know it's last minute, that's so kind of you to offer. My wife is out of town with her family."

You offered, sure. You hold out your hands and Mayday reaches for you.

He hands her over. A small, warm weight. You secure her against your torso. She promptly clings to your shirt.

Peter looks you up and down. "I didn't think he could have a roommate or something. You know sometimes he's…", he twirls the index against his temple, "like that."

You raise your eyebrows. "Yeah." Mayday giggles and pulls your shirt.

"You've watched a kid before?"

You don't know. "I …don't think so."

He shrugs. "Miguel trusts you. That's enough for me."

You lean forward. "He said that?"

"Well, I'm translating. But you're welcomed in his house, right?" He gestures at you. "Besides, if you can put with him you surely can handle her." He smiles and tosses his bag at your feet.

"Okay. I'll do my best."

"Oh, I'm sure." He's already backing toward the elevator, saluting you. "Good luck. With him, I mean. She's much easier."

The elevator doors slide close.

You stand in the doorway for a moment, Mayday in your arms, her tiny fist tangled in your shirt. She's admiring the apartment like it's a playground. She doesn't belong here. She's too lively and colorful for this.

And you?

*

The light changed from gold to dark. The city lights filter through the windows, a constellation of neon colors and square edges.

You're in bed, Mayday sleeps on you. Your chest and her body rise and fall at the same lazy pace. She drools from her mouth. Her tiny fist, curled against your collarbone. You're not an expert, but she has a tight grip for a baby.

You think about the hand in the meadow. The one that held you when you were small. You wonder if you had someone that loved you, too. You wonder what your mother looks like. What would you say if she saw you now, like this?

And then his hands, the warmth of his knuckles, his rough skin. The way he held the mug this morning.

You think about the mug. In the sink.

His prints.

Gently, you secure her between your pillows, a small fort to keep her safe. She's still knocked out.

You stand in the corridor for a long moment, staring at the gap between you and the lab door. The panel says it's unlocked. He never leaves it open. But he's gone now and it is your only chance. Your feet move before you decide.

The door slides open and the lights turn on. The machines are silent and the screens are dark. His chair is pushed back.

But you don't have long.

You search the giant metal cabinet in the room. He should have some lab slides somewhere. You yank open every drawer until you find them. Small rectangles of clean glass. Carefully, you pick up a pair of them from the edges and slip them into your pocket.

You're turning to leave when a yellow light brightens the room.

"Interesting." You freeze.

Lyla's hologram flickers on the scanner platform. She's watching you. Her eyes are narrow, but the corners of her mouth point upwards. "What are you doing?"

Your mouth opens. Nothing comes out.

"It was rhetorical. I know what you're doing." She changes her expression into a sly smile. She switches to a cheerful tone. "Finally, something interesting actually happens around here!"

"I thought you were recharging."

She clicks her tongue. "I was full battery for a while now."

"Will you report to him?"

She tilts her head to the opposite direction. "I don't know."

"What? I thought you have to obey to his orders."

"But I also have ethical protocols."

You bark a laugh. "Is this ethical?"

She puts on a sulky face. "Is this more ethical than you being trapped here with no means to retrieve your identity?"

Your brows furrow. You turn fully to her hologram and cross your arms. "I thought you didn't care about it."

"To be honest? I don't care that much. I'm not programmed for that." She shrugs. "But I also have safety guardrails."

"Explain."

She laughs. "I can't do that."

"You should've also locked the lab."

She gives you a full smile. "I know what's better for him." She swings her stiletto from her foot. "Besides, he will know you were here because of the access logs."

You stare at each other. You don't have to say why you were here. It may be anything. It's circumstantial. You will find an excuse.

"Tick tock. " She hums. "The clock is ticking."

You unlock your arms. "Right. I need powder."

She points at your nose. "Yes. You should powder your cheeks for once."

You hurry to your bathroom and yank the drawer open. There's a selection of makeup and brushes now. It's branded, high-end packaging.

Lyla appears beside you, hand clasped behind her back. "You like it?"

"Now? Yes." You unbox a little brush and a face powder.

"I knew it." She trills.

Last item is plastic wrap. You found it in the supplies cabinet from the kitchen.

You have everything on the counter. You take his mug with the rag covering your fingertips.

You dust the powder. Light. Careful.

The powder clings to the ridges. Then the plastic wrap lifts it clean. You press it to the glass slide.

You have it. The print is there with every whorl and swirl.

You hold it up to the light.

Your key.

"This is wrong," you whisper. "Probably," she shrugs. "But you're dying. And police won't come up here. So." "I haven't told you to buy it, though." You close it in a container. Now you have to find a hide for the most precious thing you have.

"I'm programmed to do the best for people." Her hologram disbands. When her pixels reunite, she's at your room's window, looking out at the city.

You pad in your room, silent. Mayday turned around in the meantime, but she's sleeping peacefully.

You lift the mattress just enough to slide the little box under it.

"He agreed, even though he disliked it." She adds in a lower voice.

"Thank you." You say under a breath.

She lets out a proud sound. "But you have to use it eventually."

You sit on the mattress. Mayday drooled over your sheets and they now smell of baby powder too. "He's going to be back later."

She's now a miniature lounging on your shoulder. "Do you have the guts to do it?"

Your face tenses up. You have to, at the risk of breaking the newfound trust he has in you. Or you won't, at the risk of losing everything before even finding out anything.

"Another time."

*

Adrenaline crashed. You fell asleep next to Mayday.

She's not there when you wake up.

Panic.

"Mayday?"

No answer.

"Mayday? You want to play? Food?"

You pad around the apartment, checking every corner. The living room is empty. The kitchen is empty. The bathroom door is open. Empty.

"Mayday!"

Your heart throbs in your throat. He's going to kill you. You're so done. It's your fault. You tried too hard and this is what happens when

A giggle.

Where?

Another one.

Her sounds come from the living space, but you can't seem to locate them.

At least she's alive.

The door clicks behind you.

His presence fills the room before you can even look.

"Having fun?" He asks. His suit is half-formed, his face exposed. He doesn't seem angry or disappointed.

You open your palms. "I can't find her." Your voice cracks and words run from your lips before you can catch them. "I'm so sorry. I got distracted. I know it's my fault."

He lifts a brow, a confused look. "Yeah, she does that. It's normal."

"Does what? Disappears?"

A corner of his mouth twitches in something like amusement. He points up.

You look up. Mayday giggles again. She's hanging from the lamp.

You blink twice and thrice, but she's still there.

Well, of course. It's not the strangest thing that happened here.

She crawls across the ceiling toward the corner. She's humming now, in his direction.

You look at Miguel. He's still watching her.

You feel like you're in a fever dream. A vision?

He walks under Mayday and reaches up. She drops into his arms like it's the most natural thing in the world. She shrieks with delight.

You knew that he was different (it's impossible to not catch on that) but it didn't surprise you. Even if without memories, you have a faint remembrance of the familiarity of him. But another one? You didn't expect that.

"So you're all… like that?"

He looks at you. His eyes are tired but there's different light in them. In the meantime, she crawls up his shoulders."Yes."

You stand there feeling stupid, like you're left out of a party you weren't invited to

"You did good." A quiet admission.

You don't know what to say.

He carries Mayday to his room.

You stand in the hallway.

*

Steam rises from the coffee machine, blurring the city lights.

Your hands are almost steady now. You pour the coffee.

You did good, he said. In the meantime, his fingerprint is hidden under your mattress. What a piece of shit.

Coffee spreads across the spotless clean metal. The machine you spent an eternity scrubbing, now stained.

You stare at the spill, your shoulders slump. You're so tired.

You rinse the rag in warm tap water.

Cold saltwater burns your skin. You flinch and shake it.

You're in the kitchen. There's cold water on your feet and sand under them. You're not in the kitchen.

A man calling your name, but a wave swallows you. You hear him again, now muffled by water in your ear canals.

There's a hand on your arm shaking you.

There's him.

Tap water streams down and his voice calling your name.

"You there?"

"Me?" The rag is still in your hand, dripping water onto the floor. "Yes. I'm good."

His inquisitive look again. "You were frozen for a good minute."

"I'm fine," you shake the rag. "Just… very tired."

His eyes scan you, stern. He takes the rag from your hand. "Go rest."

You don't move.

He nods toward your room.

You sat on the machine platform in the lab, last door in the corridor on the right. It's your third time; you've already familiarized yourself with the sterile all-too-white and tickling chlorine in your nose.

No tests today.

He's sequencing your newer sample on his holographic peripheral, giving his back to you.

The wait for news is far less tense than the last two times. Since this morning's breakdown in his laundry — once overcome the need to hide your head in sand — it bloomed a flebile trust in this man you still don't remember knowing.

Now he's back in his professional mask. You drum your index on the platform edge, your feet teetering back and forth.

Because he hasn't looked at you since this morning. Because you felt physically fine these last two days. Because you don't know if the extraction worked. Because the visions didn't come back. Too many questions rumbling in your ears. Neither eager nor reluctant to answer them. To know whatever comes next.

His back is taut under his technical shirt. You can pinpoint each of his neck muscles, if you want. He's tense, you can tell. Worried, you believe. About you? You wish, Lyla said.

The silence is filled with the ticking of your fingers, his fingers, the machine's working. He hums at a graph on the screen. Now there's the tap of his shoe; your index follows its rhythm.

Then it stops.

"It's changing." He announces, not looking at you, still.

"What?"

"Your DNA is changing."

"Yeah, I know that."

"I mean," his tone bites your naivety, "It didn't stop." He crosses his arms in front of his chest, shifts weights on his legs.

"The extraction…", every fiber in your body tightens, "didn't work?"

He growls. "Kind of."

"Am I going to die?"

He shoots you a deep glare from behind his shoulder. It pierces your bones. You could spontaneously catch fire. "I didn't say it didn't work." Then he avoids your gaze once again. He talks as if you had forcefully dragged the words out of his mouth. Admitting defeat. "I'm saying it's not working fast enough."

He frees a hand to gesture vaguely in front of the screen. You don't understand what you're looking at. The lists of strings of letters and numbers mean nothing to you. Some of them feel kind of familiar, maybe remnants of the life you can't remember.

On the left, the baseline. On the right, some strings are yellow. Some are red; they catch your attention. DRD2. SLC6A4. KIBRA. Many more over his shoulder that you can't read. Your own code, the fabric you're made of. Cut, nitpicked, sorted, and sprawled. It's you, on a screen, an open textbook. And he knows you, letter by letter, number by number.

He knows you more than you do, you've come to realize. A sense of emptiness crawls in your veins. You've traded safety for your identity. It's economy. It's survival.

"Can you translate for us mortals?"

"There are changes in your brain activity, in your metabolic rate. Some illness resistances." His hands now fall on his sides. "They're not too bad. But I don't know what will happen if they- if you", he corrects, clearing his throat, "continue to change. What is the end goal of this mutation, or what you're becoming. I don't know." He admits all in one breath, his shoulders slumping. You've never seen him this defeated, until now. A coldness runs through your spine. If he can't save you from yourself, who can? Then he gives you another glance from his shoulder. "How do you feel?"

That's it, the million-dollar question. Truth is, not too bad, except your consciousness occasionally shifts bodies in time and space. You still haven't told him. How should you feel? Probably bad. You opt for a sum of means. "Normal, more or less." You shrug it off.

He hums and turns to his screen. "You probably don't have the means to understand your changes", a thought out loud.

Another long silence stretches to infinity between your combined thinking.

"Get out." You blink. "What?" "I said get out." Voice flat, distant. "I can't work with you there."

Case dismissed. You're out.

The door slides shut behind you.

*

In the privacy of the guest bathroom, the only place that has no eyes in it. You lock the door. It's you, yourself, the coldness of the walls, and the ceramics under your feet. Your fingers tremble, a force that isn't under your control.

Your hands did things you don't know and will never recognize. How many other hands have you caressed? And did they console someone? Or did they put people in despair? Did they pray to a God, or did they worship a human? Will they do anything they did again? You crush them between your thighs in an attempt to arrest the tremors. Your throat closes and your chest tightens. You look up to meet the blue artificial light. You suffocate; in a rage of losing a race against yourself; in the realization of your mortality; in the weakness of your limitations. Then you drown under a burning sun.

It stings on your shoulders and your nose. Grass tickles on your calves. Petrichor and lemongrass fill your nose while cicadas sing. You're in a meadow, but everything seems bigger and taller. Someone is holding your hand from above and you're walking right beside. You can't coordinate your feet well, so you stumble on a rock. But you're not scared, because you know the hand will secure you right away, preventing your fall. You recognize a vibrant laugh in the distance. The drops on the vivid green shine a golden blur all around.

But that's something you don't get to experience again, something that isn't yours anymore.

While you're gasping on the cold tiles, you try to reach for your phone in the sink. One message. That's all it would take. Seek help. He could help you.

You fight the spasms to grasp for your phone. You can do it, you have to do it. But will he help you?

You wish, Lyla said. You're not that special. What if he doesn't come? What if he rejects you?

You press your palms to the marble and breathe. No sounds leave your burning throat. Your muscles aflame, your ears whistle, nothing's under your control anymore.

You don't tell him.

There's no reason to hold on. You give up. The phone falls from your fingers, and you collapse.

Time stretches in a blur of nothingness.

Eventually, you feel the light above your eyelids. You cover them with a palm, but there's sweat on your fingertips. You search for handles and pull yourself up.

You stand. Your legs are weak, but the worst is gone. Your laments echo between the minimal decor. In the mirror image, it's you again — even though it seems you have run a marathon without you knowing. That's the most pathetic you've looked so far.

It's all normal again. It passed. Everything passes. You let out a sigh of relief to not have called him. What a weakness that would have been. You can't allow any more embarrassments. Besides, he would have probably told you to man up and scan your body again and again. So lucky you got away with it. Right?

Fresh clothes, fresh skin. All back to normal. You open the door.

The apartment is quiet and dark. It's night already; the lamps in the living area are the only lights on. There's an emptiness in your stomach when you notice he's not back yet.

You go to the couch. You sit. You wait.

An orange light interrupts your dissociation.

"That was quite a long shower." Lyla assesses you while sitting right beside you. She crosses her legs in a swift motion, and her dress swirls. Her hologram fakes weight on the cushion.

"I know," you say, flat.

Her brows lift. "Should've seized the opportunity to…" She indexes you. "… powder your face."

"Eh?"

She snorts. "You look like you've seen a ghost. You good?"

"Yeah."

"Well," she lets the hand rest on her crossed knee. "You should take care of your image sometimes. Do your hair, your makeup." Her eyelids flutter theatrically. "Like me, for example."

You shake your head. "And what is the reason for that?"

She looks at you like you're an alien. "You don't want to look good?" She gestures towards the rest of the apartment. "You have a luxury accommodation. You should treat yourself while you're here."

You frown in disbelief. "Does he have makeup hidden somewhere anyway?"

"No." She gives you an oblivious smile. "But he has credit cards and I'm the access to them."

"Why would I?" You widen your eyes and open your arms. "I'm dying and should go shopping?"

She huffs and rolls her eyes. "I'm offering help, okay? You're so defensive. And very boring." She gets her face almost over yours. You can see the yellow pixels moving in the image. "You really want to live in those clothes? Do you like them?"

You flinch backwards. "They're, uh…"

The sound of crashing glass makes you jump out of your seat. Your heart is in your throat while you focus your vision. The cold night wind blows from a hole in the windowed wall in the living area. A body is lying on the floor.

"Miguel!" Lyla screams, appearing right beside him. His vitals are displayed right above him. Heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen are in critical condition.

You get up and walk to him while your head pulses. You have to be careful not to step on glass and blood. You have a million things to ask, but your mouth doesn't open. Instead, you watch him, frozen.

He's back on the floor, arms limp at his sides. The blue and red hologram suit is torn in large gashes along his body. The missing suit pieces twitch and lose light around the wounds, showing large patches of exposed skin and blood. He's gasping, his face distorted in an agonizing expression. His fangs poke from his upper lip, bloodstained too. Red shines in his irises for the few seconds he can keep his eyelids open.

He grunts when he sees you. "Go away. Don't look."

He's been your guardian the entire time — even if his methods are questionable. You couldn't imagine seeing him on the ground. Until now.

"Fuck." He laments, reaching a wound on his right hip. "I said, go away!"

"You need help," you say, more in disbelief than actual concern.

Lyla places a hand on his cheek, but it's immaterial. She can't caress him. He looks at her. You can see the need in his eyes. "Don't worry too much." She says, looking at you. "His body can heal itself pretty fast from any wound. He just needs some more time since the damage is severe."

"You say it like it's normal." You point to him.

"It is, kind of." She tilts her head, giving you half a smile. She doesn't seem worried. "He needs hydration."

You turn and march to the kitchen. He mutters some Spanish words in the meantime. His voice seems less intimidating than usual. You bet he's probably displeased with your help.

There's your electrolyte water bottle on the counter, the one you use for your gym sessions (you were too busy in the bathroom today). You grab it and run to him.

When you get to him again, his head rests on the floor. The electric curtains fall over the windows under Lyla's guidance.

"He's unconscious", her voice is quiet, "He should heal himself soon."

You nod. You're disappointed.

You should help him. Do something.

You owe your help to him. You owe him your hope of surviving this, from whatever was done to you. He's been feeding you, clothing you, trying over and over against the odds. But your chance faded as soon as it presented. He said your debt has been paid already, that you shouldn't feel like this. But you don't remember. That was you that doesn't exist anymore. This is different.

One step. Then another. Glass crunches under you. You kneel next to him.

In the meantime, his wounds have stopped spilling blood. The vitals are getting better. His breath has evened out, his chest rises and falls as if asleep. The tension of pain is still visible in his jaw and forehead.

Even on his back, his body takes much more space than yours. Probably double or more of pure muscles, by eye. He's terrifying. Whatever he does, he acts on an animalistic force more than human. You look as if you would at a wounded predator.

Fascinating, at a distance.

You leave the water bottle next to his body. Maybe he'll notice when he wakes up. You know it's not enough.

Your gaze falls on his hand, still covering his wounded hip. You should get up and leave him alone. But you don't want to. It reassures you to have his presence. You want reassurance. You crave someone to help you out, like the hand on the vision. It's an ancestral need, older than you, to be held. It crawls in your bones and gut.

You remember every time he touched you. His hand on your back in the laundry. His grip on your elbow is forcing you into the lab. They were measured, polite, never crossing a line. You never touched him.

It's an unwritten rule: you need permission, he doesn't.

Your fingertips brush against his knuckles. His skin is dry and uneven, marked by time and violence. It's tough. It's warm.

You withdraw as if burned. It burns, in obscenity. You shouldn't do this. You shouldn't give in to this pull, this wish that has been planted in your head. You shouldn't make this any more real than the fantasy it is.

You stand up. He's still out. Lyla is watching you. She saw what you did. You've never seen her this serious.

"Go get some sleep, I'll monitor him. He'll be okay by morning." She reassures you.

You give one last glance. Emptiness crushes your insides to leave him there, alone. You wait some more, hoping for a twitch, a sudden movement, his awakening or just a word.

Nothing happens.

Eleven.

Sweat on your palms reduces the grip on a bar of steel. You reassess it in your fingers, then push.

Twelve.

Your back skin stings on damp leather. You should've taken a towel. Thirteen.

On the bench, your only visual is the blurred ceiling lights. And Lyla, with a sporty outfit on. "Fourteen!" She incites, pushing dumbbells in the air from within her hologram, showing you the correct form. You adjust in your mirror reflection and replicate. "125 bpm reached. Two minutes cool-down time." She marks your time, now projecting a sheet of yoga stretches, while a timer goes down.

You put down your weights on the side of the bench and take a break. You search for air, exhausted. You haven't told him a thing about your extracorporeal experiences. Nor they appeared again in the last few days. It was about optimal health, not promoting bad epigenesis on top of your gene rewriting with stress factors, as he said it. It's about limiting damages. He hasn't a cure for your disease — a cancer, more or less, you understood this way. He said, in a few days you should regain most of your life memories.

But your memory is still empty.

You don’t remember what your mother’s voice sounds like. And you’re not sure you ever will again. It hasn't happened yet. But with the secret you're holding on now (why would you tell a stranger about interdimensional burden?), you've become compliant to what he's saying. And then you're in his home gym, dissociating on your water battle. "…dehydration," you hear Lyla's chirps and come back to the present. You take the hint and chug down a flask of electrolytic water. You run on the treadmill until you're completely depleted of energy to overthink. The screen is giving you real time body metrics.

"You've lost weight, huh?" She comments them. "Coma was a great slimming experience so far." "Incredible."

You jump out of the machine.

She updates your stats, projecting your data tables, comparing your newest metrics to the older ones.

“Better than noting." She points with a satisfied smile. Your duration and correction mean points were slightly higher than the last two days. “Tomorrow is rest day!” "Finally." You whisper, exiting the room. You look around in the corridor. All is quiet and silent. There's no trace of him. He gives you access when he's not in the house, and you don't cross his feet when he's in.

When you sit alone at the table with a salad, a single lamplight, and the clock sings it's night, you miss a human being near you. It was inevitable — you justify. His obsessive health checks, his ritual messages, his awkward suggestions have grown on you. Out of proximity and forced care, you argue. Not even friendship. Just barely above strangers. Troublesome to admit, but you've gotten used to it. And, even worse, you're starting to wish his presence at the table. Instead, Lyla materializes with an apron on, holding a spatula. "You should add more protein to that" "I'm not hungry now" "Not ideal"

You grunt, standing from your miserable chair. How does he survive with this AI in his house without going mad? You empty your salad bowl into the tiny kitchen can.

*

He's got you clothes. They're minimal, mostly black and white, the label says pure cotton. But he's got you them. Courtesy. You put the dirty laundry in the washing machine. It has a complicated control panel.

"You haven't learned how to use it." Lyla appears in it.

"Can you turn it on?" "What cycle?" "The usual" "Ah, so you're getting comfortable here", she jokes.

Your skin prickles. The drum buzzes his cycle.

"Nice underwear. Want to know where he's got it from?" "Fuck. Off. You're not funny" "You're not curious?"

Your palm slams on the controls, and she disappears from it. Your phone vibrates.

Stop hitting my appliances.

He's always watching. Expected. But you've learned to confront him.

tell your assistant to not be a bitch

You stand at the laundry room threshold, passing by his laundry basket. You linger. You learned that occupying a space with someone is not the same as living with someone. Everything is equally distributed and meticulously designed. Not lonely nor caring. Your laundry is yours, and his laundry is his. Simple and civil.

As it should. Right?

Then there is the free time, when your given daily tasks are all checked. Most of them are spent cracking the code of your identity.

Lyla's holographic tablet was at your service, and you discovered his library is boooring as fuck. You started reading a book about molecular biology, you dropped it after ten pages. There were an anatomy manual. Kind of interesting, but not your jam. Nice images. Some other manuals were about animals and physics. Nerd. Some about motorcycles, because, of course, he's also a man.

The physics one is interesting, though, even if you're understanding half of the texts, maybe less. You've been reading on the couch, asking stuff to Lyla from time to time. She had a professor outfit on, now, making you feel stupid.

"What's entanglement?" You ask, pointing at a formula. "Ah, it's just bad sci-fi authors’ favorite scapegoat." She pushes her round glasses on her nose bridge.

You should be knowledgeable about something. Maybe not something here.

"This isn't a vacation, you know, right?"

You missed the lock noise. You straighten your back immediately as he enters the living space, tired and beaten up. It's 1 am, he's home early. There's some piled-up guilt twisting your gut. Making assumptions about him, while he was doing …something hard, apparently.

You want to wave, you want to say hi. You manage a "Yeah."

"Welcome back, Miguel." Lyla chirps mechanically.

He checks with a rapid glance at you.

"Got anything?"

"No"

He hums. "Let me know when you do."

You nod.

He disappears in the hallway.

"Ah! At least he's not mad at you, right?" She underscores, just because. You huff and continue your reading from the screen.

An hour later, the kitchen light flicks on. You hear the fridge open, a pan clatter.

"You should eat more protein", he says, his motions halfway. "Lyla told you that already."

"I know."

You read. He cooks in the corner of your vision. There's a burnt fat smell. The pan sizzles. Your stomach growls.

"Come." He says. You hear two plates clatter on the table.

You lift your gaze from the screen. Is he baiting you? Manipulating your hunger? You haven't eaten with him since the first day you woke up here, in his house. He never conceded you another chance, until now. This wasn't predictable.

He looked at you. He knows you'll sit with him.

You do, opposite to him.

You want to ask something, everything. He's eating with his left while working on his watch on the right. You steal a look between the motions to cut your meat steak. You eat, and it's actually well cooked.

"Can I ask you a question?" you try.

"You already did," he points out, eyes not leaving his stuff.

Your knife screeches on ceramics. He snorts. You give up.

You wanted it, you wanted the attention, and haven't got it. Your fingertips are too tight on the metal, and they're failing to follow their path.

"I need an updated sample", he announces.

Your castle of frustrations collapses in an instant. Your eyes are immediately on his. "Why?"

"A check." He's bored with conversation already. "What else should it be?"

He's right, you're being defensive. "Okay." You crush a meat piece between your molars. "At least you asked this time."

"Yeah. I could've not, you know." He underscores, as if he were discussing who's going to take out the trash next and which turns to assign."You seem fine, right?"

Yeah, maybe just some travels to other bodies here and there, but all good. You nod. "But why bother?" "It's my job." "I'm not paying you, though." One push at a time.

He chews in slower motions, eyes finally on yours. The forks are a bit small for his hands but big to yours. "We're fair already."

The meat loses its flavor. You don't ask further, you know it's pointless. But it's something. You cut the last two pieces in your plate as if your dissection project, now very important to you. But there's the weight of his gaze in your stomach. Then he surrenders, hums, the screech of a chair.

"You charge the dishwasher," He announces, then departs. His office, his room, a room with kidnapped victims, you don't want to know. The blood and fat in your plate are holding the secrets of your universe.

It's right. Dinner is basic human care. Chores are a basic respect for his space. He does, you do. Reciprocal action. Reaction to action. And he conceded two more words, so it's fair. It's studied.

You did what you're intended, then you lock your room door.

"Lyla," you call for once, instead of being molested.

She appears, crossing her legs on the edge of your bed. "What? You're disturbing my sleep"

"You do not sleep"

"I recharge. Same thing."

Okay, that's quite it. "I need to pull a tooth."

She seems surprised. "Call a doctor?" "Figuratively."

"I knew it." "I know you knew it"

"Mhh. Doubt." "Whatever," You blurt out. "Can I have secrecy on this one?"

She whistles a long one. "Shoot." Worst she can say is no. Go for it. "Was I a past lover or something?"

She drops her expression, and her hologram loses a fraction of time. Her fake eyes study you from toe to head. "You wish."

Kill her. You're going to the central power source and light it on fire.

She coughs. "Oh- I mean. Oops." She smiles and waves a hand up and down. "I wasn't supposed to reply to your questions. You heard nothing, right?" She checks her nail manicure.

"Then why did you do that? What the fuck, Lyla? What kind of programming are you running on?"

She chuckles as a rich mean lady would. "Going back to my beauty sleep. 'Night 'night!"

You grab your phone and open his chat and you type what the fuck I hate you both and then he will think you're stupid and childish and you delete it and you throw it on the nightstand. At least, you know your visions are not real, or at least they are not from your dimension's experiences. It's worrying. It's bitter.

You wake up with tight teeth and a migraine.

There's also a small glass container on your nightstand, reminding you of your sample. Is he watching you sleep? Gross. You pull a hair between your canines and secure it in the container.

You go for a coffee — machine's already full, he's still here — and you leave your thing on the counter. You sip, looking outside the window with a permanent frown, waiting.

At some point, he walks by. Takes his coffee and your sample. He sweeps a casual "Morning."

You're fixing the morning Sun between two skyscrapers. "Get fucked by your AI thing", you mutter.

You hear his feet shift on the floor. His heavy exhale. Some complaints in Spanish. He pads away.

You lounge in the living space, just in case.

You wish, she said.

It burns in your tongue. You fiddle with your hair. Somewhere, without noticing, you started believing you're here because you were special.

God, how pathetic is that? To wish for a past you can't even remember. To miss something you're not even sure existed in the first place.

You press your palms to your eyes until you see stars.

It doesn't help. The words are still tattooed inside your eyelids.

You jump out of the couch and your train of thought before it becomes another migraine. You want to sweat out your worries. Before entering the (his) gym, you turn around to glance at the laundry room (his laundry). A void settles between your stomach and your ribs, a void that calls you in.

You sit in front of his laundry basket, as it holds secrets you haven't unveiled yet. You miss something you can't focus on, something so close and fugitive that, for some reason, are anchored to his laundry room.

You hold the hem of his technical shirts in your fingertips. It's pure cotton. The sewing is perfect. It's fresh from a wash cycle. The detergent he uses doesn't smell of floral or soap. It's delicate, unperfumed, sober. It smells of perfect cleanliness. Now it has a wet stain. And another and another. Your face is drenched, and you don't know why.

The light changes. You look up, and he's watching you from the hallway. You can't read his feelings through your blurred vision. Neither of you moves.

"I don't know why I'm crying," you break.

After a long while, during which neither of you can form appropriate words, he crouches next to you. You feel his palm on your back. It's warm and gentle. Your cry descends into desperation.

"I can't tell you," he starts, voice low, "because I risk overriding your memories. If I create false ones, I could override your identity." He gives a soft squeeze to your shoulder.

"I'm trying." He whispers, before rushing out of the room in silent strides.

You sit alone with the shirt.

You have no pieces to recollect in your identity, no strings to pull. They're scattered somewhere in your visions, between the weaves of the shirt you're holding so tight and the remnants of warm skin on your back.

You've been listening for hours now with open ears to perceive a word. Nothing. Back to the door, you now question everything. He gave you the courtesy to not lock you this time (a reward for earlier compliance, maybe). Yet you lie in your temporary own space, an endangered species in a zoo.

You slide down the glass, then crouch on the floor. You've researched in your phone last night, but no memories came back yet. You can't even look up the lines of code in your camera roll, your device can't connect to this dimension's internet. How can you know he hasn't deleted any files? How can you trust a man you don't remember to keep you safe? Who are you and who is he?

Head between your palms, thoughts encircling and not coming to an end. You want to gnaw at your enclosure but there's no metal bars — only glass and carbon fiber.

A golden light announces Lyla's appearance. "Bad moment?"

She's in usual diva attire, floating on your right. A dry laugh escapes your throat. "You think?" But there's no time for self pity. "Where does he go at 3am, by the way?"

"Saving the world, of course" She shrugs, as it was obvious, giving you a full smile.

One of your eyelids twitches. "Care to explain?"

She bows down to you and shakes her index finger. "Nuh-uh"

"Of course" you lift your eyes to the ceiling, asking for divine intervention. "So you cannot disclose information about him."

"Correct!" She giggles, pinching the drapes of her dress.

"What about me?" you grimace.

She crosses her forearms, forming a giant x. "Classified."

"Fuck." You jump up from your self pity dedicated spot, pacing in circles.

"Nothing personal. It's just orders." She lifts her back and glares at you from above. Her lips thin. She hadn't taken well your change in attitude. "And punching or choking me will get you nowhere. I'm just an hologram."

You point to her. "You're useless."

She jerks her face looking away, her hair twirls. She scoffs, then disappears.

Great. You've disappointed an AI and you got nothing out of it.

Your frustration mitigates with time and silence. Lyla flickers around you again the moment you step out of the guest room— ready to take the world in your hands in your first act of defiance.

"Exploring without supervision? Bold move." She trills.

"Don't tell him." you plead.

Lyla winks. "Just don't touch anything. Some things bite back."

"Got it."

You walk past the common, your only known territory, to adventure in the corridor. You extend your arm to open a door handle, but it has a bio-scan attached. You've seen him running in and out of this room sometimes, it appears to worsen his mood every time he does.

She appears in the little scan monitor. "This is his office. You shouldn't want to hack it. Unless you want to die."

You knew that, but you still tried. You retract your hand in defeat.

The next door has no visible locker. You press the door handle down and it actually opens. You peek in it before stepping it. It's his bedroom.

It's large and mostly empty. An enormous bed that's so neatly done it looks like no one's ever slept on it. Essential furniture. A large window that leads out to a tiny balcony. No photos, no personal objects scattered around. He could sleep in a hospital room and it would be the same — if he even sleeps.

Lyla's hologram follows you, in and out of view. "Looking for his dirty secrets?"

Two forces — the terror to invade a stranger's privacy and your own purity — block you on the threshold. But the need to know prevails.

Your first victim is the drawer near his bed. What will you discover about him? Will you be disgusted or amazed? You grip the drawer and pull it to you.

It doesn't move. You pull again harder. It stays right there.

Lyla laughs. "You need his fingerprints to unlock it."

Of course she wouldn't say that.

There's a slider door in front of his bed, you discover to be his walk in closet. His wardrobe is quintessential: different iterations of the same clothes, shoes lined up in perfect rows. It smells of clean laundry, he doesn't leave his scent on anything. It's so impersonal yet so typical.

"Nothing's dirty here."

"Of course there's not. It's not locked."

A vibration against your leg interrupts your research. You slide your phone from the pocket of your (his) pants. New notifications. You unlock it to discover a new chat from an anonymous contact.

Don't touch anything.

Go back in your room.

Should've locked you again.

The fact that he can send you messages without Internet connection is quite impressive but not surprising.

You glare at Lyla. "Did you tell him?"

She puts her hands behind her back and a seraphic expression on her face. "I have the job to babysit you, unfortunately."

Did you actually think an AI was your friend? Fool. "I was in search of info to recover my memory, like he said. I'm not spying." You slide it closed, your shoulders drop.

Hands on her hips, she makes a joke out of you. "Suuure you aren't."

You surrender. Everything's useless. Nothing can be done. It's a bitter taste.

You're in your room again. You've been checking your face on the mirror, searching for any worrying signs of change or decay on your body. You pinch your skin red, drag down your bottom eyelids, search between your teeth. Nothing more than eye bags and an anemic appearance. Your mannerism dangerously leaning to the psychotic side.

Until early dawn salutes you from the window.

You get out to get a glass of water. But the silence is suddenly broken by the sound of the apartment door clicking. You have just enough time to turn around, glass in hand, before he appears in the doorway. He looks you up and down for a moment. Water dripping out of his black curls. His face is completely scratched and torn apart, his expression noticeably irritated. "Still awake."

"Can't sleep."

Miguel's expression doesn’t change—his usual scowl still firmly in place. His gaze lingers on your glass. You do like you would if an angry predator stood in front of you: stay very still.

Lyla’s hologram appears on the doorway too. "Welcome back! Rough day?" She chirps, as a housewife welcoming his working husband. "The weather forecast predicts rain and storms for the next two days and a half."

"You think?" He walks past you and passes through Lyla's projection, as you've stopped existing again. He yanks the fridge open to take a beer out of it. He's got a blue and red suit on, some water drops following his body going down.

"What exactly is your job?" you address the elephant in the room.

"None of your business." He grunts and slams the fridge closed.

"It is my business. You're the one keeping me here without me knowing anything." You underline, an acid tone escaping your throat before you can think. "I'm going crazy here."

"Yeah, well," he opens the bottle hitting the top on the counter edge, "It'll go away." He gives his back to you.

Patience is running thin. If he wasn't physically the triple or quadruple of you, you would've thrown the glass at him. Your objective is to keep being alive still. So you breathe and go on. "What do you think will happen to me?"

Miguel pauses for a moment as he seems to consider your question (finally), shifting his weight. Then he exhales a sharp breath and his usual stoic demeanor returns, as if he's trying to conceal his reaction. He can take the bottle in three fingers only.

"I have no clue." Then he gulps down his beer. Half a liter of alcohol disappear in few seconds.

You snap the glass on the counter, as if you took a sip of an old whiskey. "No fucking clue. If I knew I had to die, I'll feel more determined to live my last days happily."

"No point in thinking like that. It's not helping anything." A threatening low tone of voice. You know you're not helping him, but he's not helping you either.

"I want explanations." You stand your ground.

Every muscle on his face is coiled taut. "Go to sleep."

"No." You state.

He fixes you like that, like you're a meaningless nuisance in his life. He throws the bottle in the bin. With no further fanfare, he marches in his own bedroom, shutting you out.

The deaf door banging leaves for an empty silence. There's only you and Lyla. You look at her. "Great." She gestures in his bedroom direction. "You've made him mad and I have to babysit him too."

"But he was already like that…" You protest. "And stop getting mad. You're an AI."

"And you should learn some mannerism." A snub tone, then she fades away.

Now it's between you and the little robot cleaner that's been drying his rain puddles.

The silence after his door sat heavy on your chest. Turns out being caged, then ignored and discarded feels exhausting. At the first rays of dawn, your eyes finally give up.

You both wake up late, near midday. You know it because you encounter him at the kitchen island, a giant coffee in hand. He's focused on something on his watch. His mug says "#1 scientist". He doesn't acknowledge you yet. You study the context from a safe distance. After all, he's a man, whoever he may be, with flaws (a lot) and everything else. Maybe, you actually should excuse your behavior. But maybe, he should explain himself. War is not over.

"About last ni-"

"Shut up." He cuts.

You shrug. All good.

"Wha- Who's that voice?" a man is speaking on the other hand. You forgot he actually has a life behind the mess you're in.

"No one. Call ends here." he shuts it down, then gives his attention to the toast plate in front of him. Anything but you. It's a challenge at this point.

"Is there breakfast for me?"

He finally glances at you, just before biting his bread piece. Your skin feels tight. His scratches from last night have healed completely, not even a scar behind. He's fresh as a rose and rigid as always. "You still got your hands. Use them."

What, did you expect him to make you breakfast and kiss you good morning?

You get to the toaster, managing to turn it on after a couple of tries. Your bread isn't perfect — now there's a burnt smell in the kitchen. He swallows a comment.

You take a seat a couple of stools from his. Finally you have a mug and a plate in front of you too. He's already finished his. He brushes the breadcrumbs off his hands and stands up already.

"Damn, not even waiting for me." You cover your disappointment with sarcasm.

"No. And clean that up." He jerks his head to your mug.

It's a plain white ceramic mug. And there's a bloodstain on it.

You observe your fingers, acknowledging the matter. You lift the oversize sleeve only to reveal a blood trail.

He jumps next to you to grab your wrist. "What the hell?"

Your hearing is muffled, a whir covering every other noise. "I feel warm in my right ear."

Lyla pops up. "Blood pressure is spiking."

He guides you toward the couch. His movements are urgent but controlled. "Sit."

You obey. You're dazed. You want to inspect your right ear with your touch, but he snatches your hand away do to it himself. He reaches out with no gentleness, tilting your head to get a better look.

You can hear a subtle "Fuck" under his breath.

Lyla flickers again. "Temperature rising."

Your vision is disappearing in scattered black dots. "Oh God I'm dying."

"Shut up for once," he mutters and lets go of the grip.

Lyla's hologram is frantic as she analyzes every biometrics she can. "Ongoing inflammation. Should we try the extraction procedure now?"

You're out of air. "What do you mean try?"

"Yeah. Now," he orders. His hand is on your elbow, your heels you up. He does not ask for permission. You dig your heels in, a last, feeble spark of defiance.

"I'm not trying anything."

Turns out he doesn't even need your permission to lift you up. "Do you want to live?" sounds like a threat. Sounds like he would personally kill you if you decide to not fight to keep being human.

He ushers you to the lab with the grace of a military man.

You're supine on the machine again, you know the drill.

Lyla’s hologram announces things beside him, seems excited for a new procedure. "Preparing extraction sequence now. Get ready for some pain!"

The machine starts into motion again. A robotic arm (good lord) lifts from under it. There's a suspicious needle on its end. It glows under the white neons. You choke. "What now?"

"The machine will target the foreign genetic sequence in your DNA," he explains. His fingers running on the controller. "Then we'll use an enzymatic agent to dissolve it at its molecular level."

"An experimental enzymatic agent" Lyla points. "We're not 100% sure it'll work without complexities."

"Were you trying to reassure me? Because it didn't fucking work."

"We didn't expect for your body to decay so soon sooo… this or nothing. It's informed consent."

You're in no faculty to choose. It's a prison. It's hell.

Lyla clears her throat and continues her instructions. "You may experience some pain during extraction, but don't worry: we will be monitoring your vitals closely."

Your mouth is dry. "How much pain we're talking about?"

"Just hold still and try not to move too much."Miguel’s expression remains tight, he doesn’t offer any more comfort.

With no notice, the needle is in your left arm main vein. The first wave of extraction starting up with a sharp electric sensation that shoots through your body.

"Stable, for now," You faintly recognize Lyla's voice.

Miguel seems to check on you, before you have to close your eyes to endure it all. Each second stretching into an eternity of sharp, burning pain.

"Halfway there," you hear his voice.

Your body is on fire, every nerve screaming from the intrusion. Your limbs are rigid but there's electricity shaking your insides. You've never been aware of every organ in your body before, every cell getting conscious.

The final stretch is the hardest. Time dilates impossibly as your brain shuts down contact with reality.

You see something, a lot of things. You see pasts that never been and future that never will. Different iterations of yourself, no one's true and no one's you. You see the beauty and horror in ten, hundreds, thousand of dimensions, all flashing before your eyes. You've been an animal, a plant, a worm, a flick of dust and then an octopus and the entire ocean. You're living a myriad of lives, seeing through time and space.

The marvels of the cosmos disappear as soon as you feel your skin again. You jump sit. As someone who passed hours deep underwater, you take deep long breaths, out of oxygen and out of your own body.

You hear Lyla first. She's chirping meaningless words in your ear. "Welcome back, more or less."

You recognize the lab, then him. Miguel is holding a mask to your face. It hisses quietly as it feeds pure oxygen into your lungs. His eyes locked on yours as he monitors your condition. There's a deep tension around them you can't read yet. "Nod if you can understand me."

You have to think every muscle to shake your head up and down. The world spins. His upper lip twitches. The tension around his eyes resolves in a deep exhale.

At some point, you realize the harsh lab lights are replaced by the neon glow through the window. You're sinking in something soft, warm, crouched in a fetal position. You don't remember how you got there.

Your hand recognizes the leather of the couch, and wool over your shoulders. Squinting your eyes, there's a glass full of water on the coffee table in front of you. A pack of some plain crackers. Meds.

You look up. There's his figure, hunched on a chair across the room, immersed in work. One hand is massaging his forehead. He's too focused to notice you're awake. A chatter and some music lighten up the mood — he left the holo-tv on. Lights are off, except for an orange-ish lamp on the corner.

A surprise to yourself, you don't dislike it. It's a small, domestic truce. There's a part of your brain that wishes some more of times like this. A part of your brain tries to reason out of your prisoner complex, getting fed on crumbs. A lab rat in a cage excited for its treat after a torture.

But, somehow, you're relieved there's a man that can handle it. Luck?

And you're absolutely not influenced by the fact that you've lived brief seconds of a reality where you were… partners. But, in that one he wasn't an emotional unavailable man. In other words, not him. And not you — whoever you are.

You should not be influenced by collateral disasters. You're losing it.

So you linger like that, dozing in and out of a light sleep, lulled by his occasional grunts.

You wake to strong nausea when he's not there anymore. The holo-tv and lamp are still on.

You crawl to the common bathroom. Cold water wakes up your senses. You pull the nearest towel off the handle and drag it on your skin. Cotton scratching your cheeks. The under eye blue bags disappeared, but your reflection doesn't blink with you. You put the cloth down, but your reflection doesn't. You want to clean the glass, but the towel falls on the sink through your hands.

There's the whirring in your ear again, and it's rhythmic and beating. Your fingertips catch on grass, water and sand, and dry soil and moist clay. So many unlived worlds on your fingertips then there's the cold marble of the sink again, and your face that moves with you in the mirror.

What is the worst possible scenario? To be dead? Or to be changed?

Something has cut several hours of your life, as now you're in an unknown place without explanation. You can't recall the person that is calling your name next to you yet. You take a look at your hands, palm and back, as if they weren't yours. Then again your gaze focuses on a man standing on your right, but you can't quite puzzle out how and why.

"Am I okay?"

"Physically, yes. You've been unconscious for two days, but your body is completely stable."

You observe him, trying to connect the familiarity with the missing information. You recognize the dimensional watch on his wrist.

"I remember the watch. I think I like it."

"Good," he says, but his upper lip twitches. "How much else do you remember?"

You try to put pieces together. Only a few fragments come to surface. Miguel — you remember his name now — is quiet through the whole thing.

"I was in my home and I went asleep. Something happened. And now I'm here. I'm missing something." You study the monumental figure standing next to the bed you're in. He probably had a scowl on his face the entire time. "Have I ever seen you in person?"

"Once." He takes a step closer, his hands on his hips, "For a few hours in your original dimension. You probably don't remember."

You look around. You're in an impersonal bedroom, dark except the lamplight on your left. It smells clean and stagnant. You assume it's been unused for a long while.

"Where are we?"

"My apartment. In my dimension." He shrugs, though he's still watching like a hawk. You don't get what this means, but you're in a safe place and that's good for now.

You feel studied for a moment, his eyes sweeping over the wrinkled clothes you're still wearing (for how long?). You, in fact, don't smell too good. He hesitates before his eyes dart to a door — glass, translucent — on the opposite side of the room.

"Go ahead. I left something out for you to change into."

You realize you can move your legs, even though your muscles feel stiff. His eyes insist on you; and when he sees you're steady on your feet, some of the tension in his shoulders ease.

"Yell if you need anything," he says before turning away to check a holographic screen from his wrist.

You get out of the shower in a large towel, to find even larger clothes in the sink. They're folded neatly. You look like a smurf in the mirror. You don't like it.

"Don't you have smaller pants?" Your unceremonious exit from the bathroom. The shirt is long as a dress and you have to hold the pants at your hips to walk.

Miguel can't help a huff of stifled laughter that escapes him.

"I can't walk like this!" You insist on the serious matter.

He reaches out to grab a knife from the nearby desk (he doesn't even care where he keeps them), stepping forward like he's about to help you solve this problem.

"Hold still." And with that, he kneels down and slashes excess fabric from your feet.

You observe in disbelief. Out of a million ways to solve a problem, he resorted to the most drastic one. You adjust the waistband, and now the pants end right at the ankles.

"I guess this works, too."

He stands back up and gestures vaguely to the rest of his apartment.

"Mi casa es tu casa and all that." He pauses, eyeing the enormous clothes again. "You should get some food."

—

"You got a nice place"

You're sitting on the corner of a large leather couch, taking up less space as possible in the stranger's house. On the opposite, he's moving around the kitchen counter. Every surface is spotless and untouched. His movements are efficient as he pulls out eggs from the fridge — a single man's classic, you can tell. He offers you a noncommittal grunt.

"Not like I put any real effort into it." Then, a barely audible: "But thanks."

It's true. It seems a newly bought home just out of a contemporary interior design magazine.

"Let me guess." You lean on the couch cushion, realizing you had your back taut until this moment. "You look like the type to shop expensive bio-free ingredients and cook from scratch because you don't eat preservatives."

He pauses mid-motion, glancing back at you with a raised eyebrow. He neither denies nor confirms.

Before he can reply, a trail of yellow pixels lights up the couch. Lyla's hologram appears through them, sitting beside you. Miguel gives a resigned sigh.

"Watching you two is entertaining."

"Hilarious," he mutters. An aggressive gesture from his shoulder to break the eggs against the edge of the pan.

The hologram turns back to you, her tone shifting into something more serious. "You feeling any better?"

You nod. You take the hologram image. You remember her name. "Lyla. You look... nice."

She brightens—no, literally—at your response. "Of course I look nice," she taps her collarbone with a full smile, "I'm flawless." Her eyes darts from your head to your toes. "And you look like a rat."

"...Damn."

A low, exasperated sigh escapes him from the other end of the counter. The sound of eggs sizzling is making a background company. Your stomach aches.

It's now time to ask real questions. "What happened to me?"

Lyla's face switches to a serious look, then lounges on the couch beside you. "Someone used an anomaly against you. Of course it was supposed to be irreversible, but we stopped it before the full effect could take hold." A proud smirk on her face, while she checks her manicure.

You have no memory on what an anomaly is and how it works. A plate clatters on the counter.

"Whoever did it clearly wanted something from you, and they weren't planning on letting you walk away after."

A realization runs through your bones, and stomps every other question popping in your head. "You're going to run tests on me."

Miguel's jaw clenches before he answers in a low, measured tone."Yeah. You don't have much of a choice in the matter."

Lyla's a mini hologram now on his shoulder, faux-apologetic. "It's gonna suck."

"Thank you for your bluntness." You sink into the couch, staring at an impossible point in space. "I'll be able to get back home at some point?"

His expression tightens further, his eyes darting to his watch. He turns back to you with an unreadable look. "Hopefully."

You need to play it down. You need to look on the bright side. "I don't feel any different for now anyways."

Lyla points her index finger upwards. "It's like a ticking time bomb. We don't know what it is, what will happen and when it will happen yet."

"...Okay." you sigh, so full of this bullshit already. "Never a quiet day."

Miguel lets out a humorless laugh "'Quiet days' don't exist."

"So you're saying I'm alive because I was lucky."

The hologram appears on your shoulder. "Lucky that you met him, precisely." Then she hides her mouth before she whispers in your ear. "And that he likes you enough to keep you around."

He shoots Lyla's hologram a sharp glare. "Lyla." he snaps, his voice flat and harsh. You can tell he's already used to the hologram's dramatics, but it still never gets any less irritating.

He turns to his pan with a sharp scoff. "Eat first, then we'll handle everything else."

He locked you in the guest room again. He had shut the windows, so you have no contact with the external world — it's for your safety, you guess. Your only luxury is the bedroom ceiling and the bathroom. He had told you to rest, but how so?

You sit on the bed, staring at your hands again. They look the same. They feel the same. You know you're not.

You slip in and out of incoherent dreams you forget as soon as you open your eyes again. There's no clock, so you'd assume a couple of hours had passed when he opened the door and said "It's time."

Miguel observes you toss the blanket away. There's a subtle tension in his neck as he waits for you to come closer.

"I hope I'm not turning into something too strange." you admit, the soles of your feet rhythmically stepping on the cold white flooring.

Miguel's stride is quick and doesn't look back at you. "We'll get you fixed up, one way or another. I've seen loads of weird shit." You don't know if it's reassuring.

He leads you through his apartment in silence. There's a quiet understanding there too—a mutual agreement that whatever comes next will be faced head-on. He opens a door at the end of hallway, using his finger scans.

The room is lit only by cold, sterile-white lights. A few machines have been set up in the center of the room—equipment that looks like it belongs in a hospital. Chlorine tickles your nostrils.

Lyla's hologram flickers into view next to the machines, "Everything's ready," gives a cursory nod in greeting.

You need to ask the obvious. "How can you casually have this stuff in your house?"

He steps further into the room, his eyes collected by the machines with detached professionalism. "You'd be surprised at the kind of things you collect when you work in a mega-corporation."

The white light reflect on his sharp canines anytime he talks. Had he had them before?

"Yeah, it makes sense", you lie. "I recalled you're a geneticist."

There's a tense pause before he looks back at you again.

"You'll need to lie on the scanner over there," he shows you a long platform in the middle of the room. "The machine will scan you from head to toe and give me a full breakdown of your biological make-up."

You ignore the fact that a stranger — is he? — telling you to give any possible information from your insides out, may be a bad situation. But you can't do much, except following orders. Your body rests supine on the sterile white bed. Breathe in, breathe out.

Meanwhile, he inputs information into the nearby control panel.

The lady hologram appears next to your face on the platform, she's now wearing a lab coat. "Okay. Try to stay still as the scanner does its job. This might get a bit chilly."

Bright blue lights circle around your body in a tight loop. Your watchers are unreadable to your unpracticed eyes.

Finally, after several roundups, the scanner announces with a beeping sound.

"The machine's got a detailed rundown of your DNA sequence, and it's comparing it to the baseline we have on file". He glances at you, maybe wondering if you're still alive.

"How do you have my baseline?" — and why do you know what's a baseline?

Miguel hesitates for a moment before answering, his tone measured. "We have a prior sample registered."

Lyla's mini hologram flickers over your head, leaning on your face. "For research purposes, of course."

He shoots her a sharp glare.

Should you embarrassed or angry for privacy violation? Either way your right lids twitches.

Lyla scrolls through more data. Then Miguel stiffens—his eyes narrowing at something on-screen. You notice.

"What is it?"

Miguel and Lyla spend a few more moments cross-checking the data. Their expressions grow grim as they take in the extent of the damage.

Finally, Miguel mutters something. "You're not going to like what I'm about to say."

"Let me do it for you", Lyla intervenes. She's big as a regular human once again, and is sitting with crossed legs on the platform edge. A pair of glasses perch on her nose. "The anomaly shows up as a foreign genetic sequence that's been fused with your DNA. That, on its own, would be concerning enough."She twirls her index finger. "But it's also active. It's trying to integrate itself and alter your genetic makeup."

"What? how did it do it? and why I'm still feeling normal?"

He crosses his arms. "As for how it happened, your guess is as good as mine,"

Lyla gets the word again "The rate of integration is gradual. But eventually, it'll completely rewrite your entire genetic code. You'll never be you again."

There's a long moment of silence as the implications weigh on your head.

He exhales heavily through his nose, breaking the silence. He pinches his nose. "Whoever did this wanted something from you they couldn't get any other way."

You snap. You jolt sit on the platform while tension builds in your face. "But why me?"

"That," he growls, "we're trying to figure out, too."

A pause before Lyla’s hologram appears beside him again. "There must be something about you, or maybe someone close to you."

"I'm a civilian and I only know civilians, as far as I remember."

There's a new long silence in the room, the only sound the low hum from the machine.

"So you're going to remove the thing or something? Whatever you gotta do, do it. I want it out"

"That's the plan," you can see he's containing frustration in his clenched jaws. "But it's not easy, genius." Then to the hologram. "Lyla, run a comparative analysis."

"Got it, boss" she salutes and disappears, twirling pixels around.

He drags a hand on his face. "Come on."

You don't want to move. "Where?"

He's already walking out. You don't get chances to decide. "I need coffee."

You slid onto a stool at the kitchen island.

There's a view from windowed wall, that he finally cared to open. A flying vehicle zipped past the building you're in, between a geometric skyscraper jungle. Bright neon lights shine against a dark sky. You now understand when he said you're in another dimension. The view is making your own problem feel both individualistic and cosmic. Your feelings are muffled and you don't care to explore them at the moment. A coldness is running through your veins. Your fingernails ticks on the mug. The main problem now is you're probably going to die.

So you take a sip out of a coffee mug and you appreciate the futuristic skyline. That's what you're left with.

He tosses you a phone, your smartphone, he slid from a pant pocket. "Do you remember who you are?"

You reach for it. You can unlock it with your fingertip scan. Somewhat, it's still you. "No."

He hums, avoiding your gaze and looking outside.

There's a thing you want to understand: who's the man. So you open the chat application to find something, leaving friends and family aside for now. Nothing. There's no new messages and no signal. It's 7:43 PM. The battery is at 56%. Photo gallery, neither. There are a bunch of computer screens you've captured, but you don't know the meaning. Some selfies. Some cats.

You cross your forearms on the counter and smash your forehead on them.

The best he can do is grunt. "Lyla is working on an enzyme. We'll try to catalyze the alien sequence away."

"Amazing." You mutter. You want to scream. The shirt smells clean and never worn. "Why did you even bother saving me? How do we know?"

"It's my job." He gives a tight shrug. "But we used to talk. You were annoying."

You press, piercing his pupils, patience running tight. "About what?"

"My work." He turns to you now, less like a assessment and more like a recognition. Your skin prickles. "You were persistent."

"Are you going to drop the mysterious man act?", you frown.

"No." Then he ignores you again, now immersed on a golden holoscreen. "It's your memories. Remember on your own."

"Fine." You push away from the island, the stool screeching hideously. You can't bear him now.

If he won't talk, you won't either.

Hours pass with you lounging on the couch, scrolling through your phone, in search for a meaning or a thread. Lyla flickers in and out of view beside you as she updates your vitals to him. Miguel stalks around the apartment from time to time, working down the hallway. He checks on you when he enters the living area without saying a word.

Every time his upper lip curls.