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You sigh, shifting in the swivel chair of your current room in Jane's house. You're all using it as a base and meeting point while waiting for the heroes destined to come save you. Everything about this place is strange. You'd much rather be in your ruined apartment right now, despite the discomfort you felt there too—at least it was a familiar kind of unease. Here, everything is new, and you force yourself to imagine it's okay. That Cal is here. That the cream-white walls are actually a more grayish tone and are covered in posters and things you recognize. Jane and Roxy went out to explore Roxy's planet. Rox is handling the change of scenery much better than you are, even though it's not her house.
And there's Jake. You don't know where Jake is because he left a few weeks ago and still hasn't come back. He didn't even bother to send word or at least answer your questions about when he'd return. Needless to say, you're about as depressed about it as humanly possible.
Today was a full day, too much for you, and all you wanted was to sleep, but you feel bad and can't even manage something as simple as that. At the same time, you did practically fuck all. Earlier, the girls tried to get you to go with them, but you refused, saying you'd just ruin the fun. Roxy tried to protest, but Jane said that if you weren't feeling well, you could just stay home.
You're acting like you've already broken up. It's very dramatic of you to act this way, but you couldn't give less of a fuck about that.
Just the thought of having to greet them and talk to them again when you're feeling like such shit honestly seemed like a horrible idea. You didn't want them to see you as the wreck you probably are. Permanent dark bags under your eyes, tired gaze, messy hair, a bit pale from lack of food due to a lack of appetite and will to eat.
You found yourself thinking about hours ago. Isolation seemed like a tactical choice, and you spent the afternoon at the water's edge, the sun reflecting off the blade of your katana as you fished in an almost meditative silence.
Fishing was an exercise It was to help you calm down a bit, but it was just wearing you down, ending with the consumption of the raw fish, prepared right there on the spot. You were so tired you couldn't muster any motivation to prepare it with the same surgical precision you normally have. You were just seeking the simplicity of basic survival to quiet the mental noise.
Everything was quite peaceful. No sea monsters came near the shore, so you didn't have trouble with any kind of fight—though you almost wish you had. Maybe the struggle would have provided a better distraction, because the hole in your chest only seemed to grow as time passed. Returning home, everything seemed to remain as before, and this calmness froze your spine.
Back to the present moment: the room is dark, except for the light from the laptop screen that would hurt your eyes if your black lenses weren't protecting them. It displays his last message, sent four hours and thirty-two minutes ago.
GT: Hey, I'm going to head out for a bit to clear my head. You must know well how an adventurer like me simply can't stay in one place for too long doing nothing.
GT: I was feeling just a tad stifled already! *adjusts tight collar to breathe.
GT: But don't you worry, friend. I'll see you tomorrow morning. ;)"
The smile felt like a knife it's "old chap" or some other stupid nickname he decides to call you, always. Even now, after months of officially dating. The word hung in the air of the improvised room, heavy and ironic, and you felt it as a physical weight on your chest—a compression that made every breath a calculated effort
Your posture is rigid against the chair, the fingers of your left hand hovering over your pants, clenching. The question burns in your throat, a shard of glass you swallowed and now want to expel at any cost: *Did I do something wrong?*
The anxiety was a living animal, writhing in your stomach. It whispered, low and persistent, cataloging every possible flaw. You can almost see him on the other side of the screen, vibrating on his own frequency—a frequency of purely platonic affection. Does he even love you? You're almost certain he does, but not in this way, the one you need. And you think he doesn't even know this "way" exists, or that it's missing.
Was it something you said? You replayed every conversation, every ironic joke that might have been misinterpreted. Maybe your calculated distance, your persona of someone inaccessible and in control, had finally worked too well.
Maybe he had noticed the emptiness and pathological neediness behind the facade and was now quietly, politely retreating, waiting for you to realize it was time to give up.
Was it something you *didn't* do? You didn't show affection like others did. Your gifts were functional. Your words of endearment, when they emerged, came wrapped in layers of irony or were too simple, as if they'd been compressed into a single word disconnected from your vocabulary. You built a robot for him once, one that would help him get stronger by training and protecting him. Jake thought it was incredible, but you saw the quick spark of confusion in his eye before the look of wonder over the low-quality camera, back when you were still centuries apart. As if he really didn't expect that from you.
The robot, named Brobot, was a lot like you, because even if it was selfish, you still had the desire for him to remember you even when you weren't around—feeling your presence, but never being enough.
The worst possibility, the one that made your stomach turn, was the simplest: maybe the problem isn't you. Maybe it's him.
But that didn't make sense. Jake was warmth. He was open arms. He was overflowing verbal affection. With everyone.
With Jane, with Roxy, with that weird green sprite with glasses and a chaotic pompadour whose name you can't even be bothered to remember. Jake's affection was democratic, universal. And what you felt for him was anything but.
The pain started as a physiological distortion, a reading error in the system you usually called a body. Initially, you attributed the nausea to the weight of the realization that Jake really couldn't stand you anymore, convincing yourself that your esophagus was just closing up against the bile of resentment.
It was specific, sharp, and painful. It was wanting to know every secret thought, every night fear, every silly dream of his. It was wanting to be his safe harbor and someone to share your true self with, not just another friend on the imaginary list in Jake’s mind.
But then, the sting changed; it stopped being psychological pressure and became a physical perforation, an invisible hook pulling your guts from the inside out.
You leaned forward, eyes fixed on the dark pixels, trying to process why the anxiety now seemed to have teeth. Your analytical mind sought a logical flaw. Stress shouldn't have caused this sudden fever, nor this spasmodic contraction that made your stomach feel like a battlefield.
At the peak of a searing pang, the memory emerged, sharp and cold as a knife's edge: the shimmer of scales under the afternoon sun, the texture of the still-pulsing fish you had consumed by the river, the stupid self-confidence of one who judged himself above the laws of biology. The diagnosis assembled in your head with the speed of code being compiled: Anisakis simplex.
You weren't just suffering from unrequited love; you were hosting an invader that, unlike Jake, had nothing gentle about it. The worm was there, ignorant of your iron defenses and your sarcasm, digging its own path through your gastric tissue. The irony was corrosive: you had spent months trying to figure out how to get under someone’s skin, only to end up being devoured by something that had achieved the feat with brutal ease.
The guilt and the parasite were now indistinguishable; both dug into the gastric epithelium with the same blind persistence. That day when you had tried to hold his hand longer and he had gently let go to point at an exotic bird in the sky—the worm gnawed deeper.
Dating was supposed to have been the solution. The label that would legitimize the whirlwind you felt. But it solved nothing. It only made the disconnection more painfully obvious. Before, you could have blamed the ambiguity. Now, the ambiguity had an official name, and it hurt more. Being together didn't bring you closer; it only illuminated with brutal clarity the abyss between what you felt and what he was capable of reciprocating.
Your finger trembled over the "enter" key. Sending the message was a risk. It was showing vulnerability; it was dismantling the facade. What if it was the last straw? What if, upon finally seeing the depth of your need, he retreated for good? The possibility was a knot of ice in your stomach. Better the purgatory of this "almost" than the hell of definitive rejection.
The room was silent, but inside your head, it was white noise. You were Dirk Strider. You built robots, unraveled systems, mastered coding languages. Why couldn't you decipher this? Why couldn't you fix the only system that mattered?
With a sharp movement, you pulled your hands away from the keyboard and buried them in your hair. The message would not be sent. Not today. You would swallow the knot, you would let the worm gnaw at your insides a bit more, and you would hope it died in your stomach acid before a gastric perforation occurred.
Tomorrow, you would wake up, you would put on your armor of sarcasm, you would meet Jake with a casual greeting and a dry joke. You would watch his bright eyes, his unassuming smile, and you would love him in a way he would never understand.
You would pretend, for him and for everyone else, that everything was under control. Because sometimes, the only thing you knew how to do was not let anyone realize that you didn't know anything at all. The screen, still open on his smile, finally darkened due to inactivity, leaving you alone in the dark with the silent echo of the question you never asked.
The world tilted to the left. The hum of the laptop fan became a deafening roar, the only sound in your fading hearing.
You collapsed forward, but the movement was slow, almost graceful in its agony. Your face met the desk with a dull thud, but the pain of the impact was nothing compared to the internal fire caused by the invader.
In the final millisecond of consciousness, the bluish light of the screen reflected off the lenses of your triangular shades one last time. Jake’s face, frozen in a crooked-toothed smile in that profile picture, was the last image processed by your cortex before you passed out.