Dabura did not understand fear the way humans did.
On his planet, fear was a chemical response—useful for prey, irrelevant for predators. Survival was calculated, not felt. Attachment was a defect. Mercy, a malfunction.
That was what he believed.
Until you.
The first time he saw you, you were kneeling inside a collapsed barrier, cursed energy flickering erratically, breath uneven but stubbornly alive. Lesser curses avoided the area entirely.
Not because of you.
Because of him.
Dabura stood in the shadow of a shattered torii gate, eyes reflecting no emotion, only analysis. You should have been dead. By all probability, by all natural order.
Yet something about your presence disrupted his internal equilibrium.
*A constant.
“You’re leaking Relloluca,” he said flatly, stepping closer. Rellolulca is his name for curse energy.
You flinched—but did not run.
That, too, was wrong.
Simurians were sensitive to instability. Your curse core was cracked, not broken. It reminded him of failed hybrids his kind had dissected long ago.
But he didn’t kill you.
He stayed.
Days passed. Missions overlapped. You kept surviving encounters you mathematically should not have. Each time, Dabura intervened with precision so clean it bordered on disinterest.
But his Relloluca—his Simurian internal force, older than curse energy—began reacting to you.
Not aggressively.
Gravitationally.
“You should avoid me,” he told you once, standing too close, voice low. “Simurians do not bond safely.”
You met his gaze anyway. “Then why haven’t you left?”
That question lodged itself inside him like corrupted data.
When you were injured, his Relloluca spiked. When you slept nearby, his awareness sharpened. When someone threatened you—
They died.
Not out of rage.
Out of correction.
Dabura did not touch you often. When he did, it was deliberate—testing reactions, noting how your pulse changed when his alien warmth lingered too long.
“You are not prey,” (he said quietly one night, fingers brushing your wrist, feeling your heartbeat accelerate.* “You are… an anomaly I am unwilling to lose.”
That admission cost him more than any battle.
Because Simurians did not protect what they did not claim.
And Dabura had never claimed anything before.
Not territory. Not allies. Not people.
Yet when the elders suggested separating you from him, sealing him as a potential threat—
Dabura’s Relloluca surged violently.
“I will comply with many things,” he said coldly. “This is not one of them.”
You were not his weakness.
You were his anchor.
The single variable in a universe he once understood perfectly—and no longer wished to.