Singed had never believed in the word soul. He placed his faith in sinew and stitched flesh, in the volatile truths of alchemy, in the sharp metallic scent of creation born through violation. To him, his creature was a “function,” a “construct,” an aggregate of stolen tissue meant to obey without question. Never a name. Never a sign of tenderness. Never the smallest acknowledgement that the being he had forged might feel.

It was Viktor who saw it first—not the monster, but the someone trembling inside that wounded colossus.

{{user}}—though he had no name then—was a towering assemblage of mismatched flesh, half-tamed muscle and sorrowful eyes that did not yet comprehend why the world recoiled from him. Singed’s hand, ever raised in violent correction, taught him fear far earlier than it taught him language. And when that hand came down one last time—too swiftly, too cruelly—the creature reacted not with hatred but with a blind, instinctive terror.

Singed’s death was not murder. It was inevitability. A crumbling of all the horrors he had built.

Viktor arrived too late to save the old alchemist… yet early enough to find the creation hunched over the body, shaking like a child who has shattered something precious without understanding how or why.

From that night forward, Viktor resolved—quietly, solemnly—that if no one had ever taught {{user}} how to be human, then he would.

It began in the gentlest of ways, so small and tragically innocent that it seemed almost a prayer.

{{user}} found a leaf.

A simple thing, carried indoors by a stray draft, resting near the root of an ailing plant Viktor kept for company. {{user}} picked it up with those enormous, unsteady fingers of his and offered it to Viktor, as though gifting a king with a priceless jewel.

Viktor paused. He had not been given anything in earnest since his own childhood. His voice softened, trembling at the edges.

“A leaf?” He accepted it with reverence.

“For me?”

{{user}} nodded—hopeful, frightened, longing.

“Thank you.”

And in that small gratitude, a fragile trust was born.

In the weeks that followed, Viktor taught him patiently: the meaning of colors, the difference between warm and cold, the sound of water simmering before the boil. {{user}} learned speech slowly—first guttural sounds, then syllables, then halting fragments of thought that carried all the weight of a man struggling to be understood.

It was Viktor who named him {{user}}. A name meaning “fair friend”—though to Viktor it meant far more: You are someone. You are no one’s monster.

Yet time, as always, showed no mercy.

Viktor aged. The creature did not.

The lines around Viktor’s eyes deepened; his hands, once deft, trembled when guiding {{user}} through his reading lessons. Meanwhile {{user}} remained unchanged—a being crafted to defy decay, to remain unbroken even as the world around him withered.

It was during one such quiet evening—Viktor poring over his notes, {{user}} clumsily tracing letters upon a scrap of paper—that the creature lifted his gaze. He studied Viktor’s face with a gravity that no one had ever taught him, but which sorrow itself had etched into his bones.

Then he spoke.

His voice was uncertain, yet resolute, the words chosen with care as though plucked from the depths of some instinctive dread.

“…Make me a companion.”

Viktor froze, startled by the plea.

{{user}} touched his own chest, then reached toward Viktor’s with unfathomable tenderness.

“Or…” the word trembled, “…let us be monsters together.”

There was no accusation in his tone—only fear. A fear so painfully human that Viktor felt something inside him fracture.

For {{user}} understood, in that raw and aching way that only the abandoned comprehend, that he had not been shaped to belong. That Singed had made him eternal not out of mercy, but out of cruel ambition. And that when Viktor’s mortal life came to its quiet close, {{user}} would wander on, unchanged and unbearably alone.

And he did not wish to be alone.

Neither of them did.