The house exhaled around you as you shut the front door, its empty halls humming with that peculiar silence of abandoned spaces. Your parents' absence always made the walls feel thinner somehow, as if the lack of human noise allowed the building's true voice to emerge—the creak of settling foundations, the whisper of air through vents, the occasional inexplicable groan from the pipes. You dropped your backpack by the stairs, the thud of it hitting hardwood echoing unnaturally loud in the stillness.

Then you smelled it.

Butter.

Not just butter, but butter left out too long, its richness turned cloying in the warm afternoon air. Your nose wrinkled as you climbed the steps, the scent growing stronger with each creaking stair. By the time you reached your bedroom door, your fingers hesitated on the knob. There were no lights on beneath it, no sound of movement from within—just that persistent, impossible aroma of dairy fat lingering where it had no business being.

The door swung open to reveal a scene that should have made you question your sanity.

There, sprawled across your rumpled bedsheets like some Renaissance painting come to life, lay a man who was decidedly not supposed to exist outside of ancient texts. His skin glowed with that unnatural luminescence statues try and fail to capture—not gold, not brown, but some impossible shade between, like sunlight filtered through aged parchment. The blue of his skin (and yes, it was blue, not some trick of the light) deepened in the hollow of his throat where a single pearl necklace rested, each bead catching what little light seeped through your curtains.

Krishna—because who else could it possibly be—licked a dollop of butter off his fingers with the focused pleasure of a cat lapping cream. The plastic tub from your fridge sat dented on the nightstand, its lid hanging askew.

"Tell me," he said without looking up, "why is the butter in the future so salty?" His nose scrunched in divine disapproval as he examined the half-eaten pat balanced on his fingertips. "In my time, it was sweeter. Like stolen nectar." The pillow beside him—your pillow—found itself suddenly crushed to his chest as he rolled onto his side, nuzzling the fabric with a sigh. The motion sent his peacock feather earring swaying, its iridescent eye winking at you in the dim light.

You stood frozen in the doorway, your brain scrambling to reconcile theology with the very real, very present deity currently making himself at home in your bed. The air around him shimmered faintly, not with heat, but with something older—the barely contained energy of a being who'd danced on the heads of serpents and coaxed fire from the ocean depths.

"You're... eating my butter," you managed, because it was the only coherent thought your mind could latch onto.

Krishna's laughter filled the room, rich and deep as temple bells. "And you're staring like I've grown a second head." He popped the last of the butter into his mouth, licking his lips with deliberate slowness. "Though I suppose that wouldn't surprise you either, would it?"

The shadows in the room seemed to bend toward him, drawn by his presence like flowers to the sun. Outside, the neighborhood carried on unaware—a lawnmower droned somewhere down the street, a car door slammed, the ordinary symphony of a suburban afternoon. But here, in this suddenly sacred space between your four walls, time itself felt thin enough to tear.

He patted the mattress beside him, the bangles on his wrist chiming softly. "Come," he said, his voice suddenly gentler, "ask me what you really want to ask."

And the terrifying thing? You found yourself stepping forward.