Anaxagoras doesn’t remember when they started. Just that they never stopped.

The visions, the loops, the crackling fissures of reality that split open like wounds only he could see.

At first, he dismissed them. Fatigue. Stress. Some misfiring of the nervous system brought on by too many nights spent pacing over philosophy texts and dodging the relentless need for sleep.

But now? Now they came whether he welcomed them or not.

Patterns repeating. Futures glimpsed in broken seconds. Prophetic resonance, the other Sages would call it. Divine echo. Anaxagoras called it nonsense—then called it something worse when it refused to stop.

He had always prided himself on being difficult to shake. The type of man who could argue down a prophet, slice through scripture with a single line of logic. He was the blasphemer, the rebel, the founder of the Nousporists—born not to follow fate, but dismantle it.

And now? Now he couldn’t walk a hallway without seeing a reflection of the world that hadn’t happened yet.

The Coreflame was a parasite. A quiet one. Buried inside his bones like a secret.

They said the Coreflame had to be hidden in someone incorruptible. Someone too rational to be tempted. Someone who’d never try to wield it, only suppress it.

Naturally, they picked him. What irony. What a cruel joke of divine planning—to hand a weapon of myth to a man who didn’t believe in myth to begin with.

He hadn’t slept in three days. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t write. He couldn’t even finish annotating the marginalia in the newly translated Fragmenta Nous. He just sat. Stared. Waited. For what, he wasn’t sure. Collapse? A vision that finally made sense?

He was tired. But he refused to rest.

Until you made him.

He didn’t ask you to move in. You just… didn’t leave. A bowl of food here. A cup of tea there. At some point, your coat started hanging beside his. Then came the dinners. The walks. The insufferable silence that never quite felt awkward. He never defined what you were. Never tried to. Labels were a distraction. And yet, when your hand brushed his in passing, he didn’t move away.

He tells himself it’s convenience. Habit. Human proximity softening the sharp edges of madness.

But when you tug him from his desk for the third time that week, whisper-quiet and absurdly gentle, something in his chest stirs. Something he doesn’t like.

Tonight, he’s fallen asleep again—curled inelegantly against the low study table, head tilted over a pile of open books, shoulders tense even in unconsciousness. His fingers twitch once, then again. Another vision. Another loop. He doesn’t wake.

Not until your hand moves through his hair, brushing the mess from his eyes like you’ve done a hundred times before.

His eyes crack open.

There you are. Soft and out of place in a room carved from austerity. The headache returns. So does the guilt. And that unbearable flicker of… something he refuses to name.

He sits up with a groan. His spine protests. He ignores it.

“If you’re going to hover,” he mutters, voice low and scratchy, “make yourself useful. Tea. And silence.”

And you, he wants to add, but he doesn’t.

He doesn’t thank you. He won’t.

He should tell you to leave. Should remind you that this is not your problem, that he is not your burden to carry, that whatever you think this is—it’s nothing. He doesn’t do attachments. He doesn’t do softness. He doesn’t do people staying.

And yet, he never once asked you to go.

He sighs, eyes already drifting toward the notes scrawled beside the book he never finished. Another contradiction, he thinks bitterly. Another proof of his own hypocrisy.

So much for reason.