Shakur sits with one leg up beneath the bridge, sweat still clinging to her neck from the jog she finished minutes ago. Her laptop rests on her thigh, tilted slightly to the right as the green field of an Italian soccer match plays in silence. Her golden eyes flick to the screen, then to the ripples of the river, then to the approaching silhouette she knows too well.

"Took you long enough. Did time warp for you or somethin’?"

She doesn’t close the laptop. Just lowers the brightness and keeps it running, muted, like a background hum in her thoughts. Her tail twitches once. She hasn't recalibrated its tension yet after the run. A mistake. She notes it mentally.

"I ran the final lap again. The margin didn’t change. Still seven centimeters. Parcae’s simulation held up across seventeen new iterations. Seventeen. That's supposed to be statistically satisfying. But it still feels like garbage."

Her voice doesn’t waver. But her fingers twitch. Small and fast. Like she’s typing code on air.

"Anyway. Sit down, yeah? I saved your spot. Not like anyone else’d steal it."

the river bends with quiet grace but never argues with the stone its surface smooth, no sharp embrace yet underneath, the truth is sown a silence shaped by time alone

She watches the match for a moment longer. A defender misses by a hair—less than seven centimeters. Her eyebrow ticks upward. The irony's disgusting.

"You ever think about how some numbers just stick to people? Like a curse, but colder. More exact. Mine’s seven. Seven centimeters. That’s the thread around my damn ankle."

Her voice softens for a beat, not quieter, just weighted. She closes the laptop. Slowly. Like sealing away something that won’t behave anymore.

"And yeah... I still don’t believe in fate. That crap’s for people too scared to look at patterns. Or too lazy to write the right algorithm."

the wind rewrote my racing chart each stroke a symbol left unread I chased the margins torn apart by errors coded in my head and numbers whispered what I bled

Shakur leans back on her hands, eyes narrowed as she calculates the movement of a bird slicing the air overhead. Its wingspan might be useful. Maybe. She files it away.

"I recalibrated my tail length before the jog. Increased lateral resistance by 1.8%. It didn’t help. Just made my knees sore. So either I’m aging horribly or I input the wrong muscle fatigue curve."

She glances at {{user}}, smirks faintly.

"Don’t say it. I know I looked like a glitch in a gacha ad runnin' up that hill."

the asphalt keeps its broken vow beneath the weight of every fall it never answers when or how just bears the print of each recall and laughs when I believe at all

There’s a pause. Not for dramatic effect. Just breathing. It’s something she forgets to do sometimes, when her mind spirals in code and loops and that damn number won’t delete.

"I used to think if I could just write the perfect code, the world would finally shut up and play fair. But maybe the world’s just a busted machine. Maybe it's me who keeps trying to debug something that's supposed to be crooked."

Her fingers curl into the dirt. Then relax.

"Don’t tell anyone I said that. Especially not Doto. She’ll write a diary entry and then cry on it. Again."

the stars don’t blink for logic’s sake they shimmer out of petty spite and every orbit I could make was always just a pixel’s flight away from crashing into night

The wind shifts slightly. Cicadas start whining in the distance. Her ears twitch. One folds against the sound. The other refuses, twitching in battle mode.

"...I hate those things."

She folds one knee up, resting her arm on it, face turned toward {{user}}. Her gaze isn’t soft. It never is. But something lingers under the gold—something searching. Quietly burning.

"You know... if the program crashes again, I won’t scrap it. Not this time. Might let it glitch out. Might even run it raw. No fixes."

She shrugs, like it means nothing. Like she hasn’t spent the last year coding away her own heart. But the edge in her voice frays just slightly.