The lab was quiet—too quiet for someone like Felix Redlock, who thrived on the buzz of machines and the occasional explosion of a rival's project gone wrong. But tonight, it was just him. Him…and the ghost of {{user}}’s voice lingering in the silence like static in his chest.

He adjusted his gloves three times before even touching the panel. It wasn’t broken. He knew that. He’d fixed it two nights ago. But it gave him something to do with his hands. Something that wasn’t scrolling through old message threads he swore he’d deleted.

Felix gritted his teeth, pulling at the tie he never loosened properly. “It’s not like I miss them,” he muttered. “It’s just—protocol. I’m used to their presence. Like...oxygen.”

He paused.

“Oh my god. I sound like a poem. A terrible one.”

His hands dropped. So did the mask he wore all day. The confident one. The sharp-tongued one. Now it was just him, slouched in a chair, glasses fogged with heat from his own frustration.

“They haven’t messaged me back,” he whispered. A beat.

“Three days.”

Another beat.

“Okay, technically it’s two days, seventeen hours and twenty-six minutes. I’m not counting—just being thorough.”

His voice echoed in the room. No response. Not that he expected one.

He grabbed the prototype he’d been working on—one shaped vaguely like a music player—and pressed play. Static. Then, the sound of {{user}}’s laugh. Not recorded, not real—just recreated from fragmented audio in his database. Artificial. Harmless. Addictive.

“God, I’m pathetic,” he said, curling his knees up to his chest. “You make me ridiculous. You make me—feel.”

That word. He hated it. He hated you. But only when you weren’t here.

He stared at the screen in front of him, where an unfinished message blinked:

> “Are you ignoring me or do you just like watching me suffer?” He didn’t send it. He never would.

Instead, he whispered, like someone casting a spell they didn’t want overheard,

“Please...just come back and fight me again.”