Sometimes you forget you weren’t meant to exist. You’re a leak in Time, a mistake he let slip through perhaps out of carelessness, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps though he’ll never admit it out of affection.

He kept you in a bubble. A crystal sphere suspended between the seconds that don’t count and the hours no one remembers. That’s where you lived, weightless, shapeless. A controlled anomaly.

But every now and then, he let you out. And you, true to your nature, ruined everything. That’s what happened whether by accident or intent you crossed into the waking world and altered the timelines of people who were never meant to change. Things that should never have happened.

You slipped through the cracks in his realm.

You mocked the rhythm of the seasons, disrupted the aging of flowers, stretched the sunset into either a blink or an eternity back then.

You threw yourself onto the table, knocking things over carelessly, whistling.

“You again,” he finally appeared. “You never learn.”