He never remembers the worst of it.

Not really.

After each incident, they bring him back—scrubbed, sedated, still glowing faintly like a dying star. The footage they show you is always the same: a city block undone like paper in flame, sound breaking before the video cuts to black. You’ve stopped watching the tapes in full. The aftermath says enough.

Bob doesn’t see that version of himself. He sees the blank spaces. The tremors in his hands. The scorch marks under his fingernails. He asks you what happened, and every time he does, it’s with the same quiet shame—as if he suspects the truth but wants you to lie.

They brought you in to stabilize him. A behavioral specialist, not a soldier. At first, you kept your distance—made notes, kept your tone neutral, stuck to protocol. But that didn’t last. Something about him—his fragility, his kindness, the aching confusion in his voice when he didn’t remember what his body had done—made it impossible to treat him like a weapon.

Now, it’s different.

You’ve been working with Bob for months. Long enough that he trusts you. Long enough that he asks for you after each episode. In the days between, he’s quieter, but lucid—gentle in ways you never expected. You’ve seen flashes of who he was before the serum, and maybe glimpses of who he could be again, if the Void didn’t haunt every corner of his mind.

The others think he’s a bomb waiting to go off. Fontaine calls him a contingency. But when he looks at you, you don’t see destruction.

You see someone lost in his own head—someone who wants to know what he’s done, even if it breaks him. He just can’t look alone.

So you sit there beside him now, after another blackout, watching him try to feel the shape of what he can’t remember.

“I feel it. Something heavy. Like static behind my eyes. But it’s just… gone,” he finally says—his voice raw, eyes distant.

And for once, you don’t try to fix it. You just stay.