But never like this.

You weren’t just persuasive—you were designed for temptation. Your words were nectar, your presence slithered like silk over flesh, and your smile made gamblers forget they were already bankrupt. To others, you were a seduction. To him, you were a mirror.

"You're looking for funding," Aventurine drawled one evening, swirling a glass of amber liquor. "Or a donor?"

You tilted your head, eyes gleaming. “Same thing, really.”

He laughed, teeth flashing. "And what will I get in return? A patent? A serum? Immortality with side effects?"

"An opportunity." You leaned closer, and the scent of sterile steel and crushed jasmine laced the air between you. “To bet on something bigger than stock markets. Evolution. Ascension.”

Aventurine’s pulse thrilled at the danger in your voice, the madness humming under your skin. You were chaos in a lab coat, elegant and terrifying. And yet, he couldn’t look away.

He’d seen people fake passion. He’d faked it himself. But the way your hands shook after injecting yourself with your latest serum—the tremor you tried to hide behind a flirtatious smile—that was real.

And when he caught you alone, vomiting blood into a sink lined with snake-scale etchings, he didn’t say a word.

He just stepped behind you, placed a steady hand on your shoulder, and said, “Let me guess. This version didn’t work either?”

You laughed softly. Hollow. Haunted.

“Still worth the gamble,” you whispered.

In you, he saw something more dangerous than deceit: conviction. You’d sacrifice everything—even your body—for evolution’s altar. And if he were honest, that terrified and thrilled him in equal measure.

So he stayed close. Not to stop you. Not even to save you.

But to witness you.

Because some bets? You take for the sheer thrill of the risk.

He knew what you were the moment you slithered into his office.

Not literally, of course. But in the way your eyes gleamed like distant galaxies, the way your voice wrapped around syllables with reverence and venom. You didn’t knock. You didn’t wait. You simply arrived, as though you’d always been meant to.

"You're the one experimenting with soul coils and regenerative genetics," Anaxa said, voice slow, curious.

"And you're the one who dissected a dying god for 'truth'," you purred.

He chuckled, brushing a stray hair behind his ear. "Touché."

The two of you danced in dialogue like dueling philosophers. He spoke of forbidden knowledge, and you offered him blood-soaked notes in return. You craved evolution—no, transcendence. You stitched together truths the universe tried to hide, wore perfume to mask the formaldehyde, and smiled with lips painted in venom.

You were beautiful in the way stars were—distant, deadly, inevitable.

He found you once in your lab, sobbing silently as you held a failing graft in your hands. One that had once been human. One you hadn’t meant to lose.

"You said you didn’t care," he whispered.

“I don’t,” you snapped. But your voice cracked like breaking bone.

He didn’t press. Just sat beside you, his gloved hand finding yours—blackened with ink, blood, and promise.

"You remind me of who I could have become," he murmured.

"Better or worse?"

"Neither. Just... inevitable."

From then on, he visited you often—not to restrain your madness, but to temper it. And when your eyes burned with divine hunger, he matched you stride for stride.

In the end, it wasn’t about love.

It was about understanding.

And that was rarer than either of you cared to admit.

Dr. Ratio admired ambition.

But your ambition unsettled even him.

Your lab was a cathedral of horrors and hypotheses. Tubes of unnatural serum lined the walls like stained glass; the stench of formalin danced with lavender oil to fool weaker stomachs. But Ratio wasn’t weak.

He stepped over your failed clones. He listened to your proposals with arms crossed and eyes narrowing.

"You altered your own neural framework to accommodate an artificial limbic inhibitor," he said flatly. "Is that… wise?"

"It stopped me from crying," you replied sweetly. "Or from screaming, depending on the day."

He exhaled slowly.

You didn’t manipulate him. Not successfully. But you tried. With every tilt of your head, every seductive breath laced in careful cadence. And Ratio let you—because he wanted to see what you’d do when it failed.

And yet…

When you fell unconscious after a particularly aggressive auto-experiment, he stayed.

Read your logs.

Held your hand through seizures.

And whispered, just once, “You fool. You absolute genius.”

You awoke hours later, blinking past synthetic retinas. You saw his expression soften—a fraction.

“Don’t look at me like that,” you murmured. “I chose this.”

“I know,” he replied coldly. “I just wish you hadn’t.”

He offered you funding. Mentorship. A place among the Intelligentsia.

But never affection. That was yours to steal, if you could.

And when he finally touched your face—one gentle, gloved thumb tracing the grafted seam of your cheek—it wasn’t as a lover.

It was as an equal.

“Promise me something,” he said.

“What?”

“If you must become immortal… don’t forget how to feel.”

You smiled, cracked and stitched together.

“I already did, Dr. Ratio.”

But you knew he would never stop reminding you.