You never should have taken his hand.

It had seemed so harmless then—warm, steady, the kind of hand you instinctively reached for in the dark. It had offered everything you craved: stability, assurance, maybe even love. But now, in the chilling clarity of hindsight, you saw it for what it had been.

A lure.

The smile that accompanied it, all soft curves and practiced ease, replayed in your mind like a haunting echo. It hadn’t just been charming—it had been constructed. Precise. Engineered to dissolve your walls. And those eyes… brown and deep, full of stories and strange kindnesses. They’d promised sanctuary. Now you realized they’d only ever reflected what you wanted to see.

It had all been a performance. A calculated deceit, staged with surgical precision.

All you’d wanted was someone to lean on.

All you’d wanted was freedom—the simple, intoxicating possibility of choice.

But freedom, it seemed, was a privilege reserved for the ordinary.

And you were anything but.

You were an error in their code. A variable no one could control. In the eyes of those who pulled the strings—Fate, Builderman, the ones who locked doors and wrote laws—you were not a person. You were a threat. A deviation. An anomaly wrapped in flesh and heartbreak.

The cold bite of metal now dug into your wrists, the cuffs rigid and unyielding. You could feel the precise ridges pressed against bone, the sharp tremble of every tiny movement met with resistance. Chains—thick, matte black things—wound around your limbs like serpents coiled just tight enough to remind you they could strike harder. Each breath pulled against the weight of them, shallow and ragged.

Above and around you, humming with malicious vigilance, the cameras blinked. They followed your every flinch, every shift of expression. Cold, glass eyes with no souls behind them. You tried not to blink first.

And beyond the reinforced glass wall separating you from the freedom you’d tasted only briefly, they stood.

Builderman, upright and unnervingly still, stood like a monolith carved in judgment. His posture rigid, arms crossed over his chest, gaze sharp enough to flay skin. Beside him, a contrast of agitation and guilt: Shedletsky.

You recognized his unease immediately—the way his wings twitched, one feather out of alignment. He couldn’t keep still. His hands moved without purpose, his eyes flicking from you to Builderman and back like he was watching something irreparable unfold in real time.

“They’re not dangerous,” Shedletsky said, and though his voice was measured, it cracked slightly at the edges. “They’re just… scared.” There was something raw in the way he looked at you—as if willing your chains to vanish through sheer will.

Builderman’s jaw tightened. His tone, when it came, was as sharp as shattered obsidian. “Really?” he said, each syllable a cold, deliberate strike. “You say that after the information you gave me? After everything they’ve done? What they are?”

He stepped forward, hand slicing through the air like a guillotine.

“They could wipe out the entire population of Robloxia if they so pleased.”

The air chilled. The fluorescent lights above you buzzed louder, as if reacting to the weight of the accusation.

Shedletsky bristled. His wings flexed wide, feathers ruffling with restrained fury. His brows pinched together as he snapped, “You… don’t understand them.” He took a sharp step forward, voice lowering into something feral, protective. “Not like I do.”

His knuckles whitened against his sides. In that moment, he no longer looked like the admin you once shared laughter with, or the man who whispered hope into your scars. He looked like someone on the brink—caught between loyalty and consequence.

And still, the chains remained.