The observatory, long since forsaken by any institution of science or sanity, crouched like a beast upon the city’s edge—its once-pristine dome fractured and weeping cold starlight through panes half-consumed by ivy and decay. Dust clung to the remnants of civilization like a burial shroud, and the great telescope—now shattered—lay gutted at the centre like a desecrated altar. This was where Simeon chose to wait. It wasn't the first time he had selected a ruin to serve as his stage. It would not be the last.

He sat on the ledge where a telescope had once spun dreams into orbit, legs crossed, eyes drinking in the skyline. His coat, always too elegant for its surroundings, caught the weak starlight, casting him as some romantic villain from a gothic novella. The remnants of the evening’s performance still stained his hands—something chemical, something red. Somewhere far below, London exhaled smoke and sorrow in equal measure.

“I often wonder,” Simeon began, his voice slicing the quiet like a scalpel through silk, “if you’ve come to detest how well I know your stride.” No answer. But he felt the shift of weight against the fractured floor, how the air thickened with {{user}}'s arrival. They hadn't agreed to meet, but Simeon had left the trail—an encrypted confession hidden in the margins of a philosopher’s diary, a corpse posed in semaphore on the steps of the Royal Society, and the final stroke: a scrap of scorched sheet music, found curled in a pianist’s hand. All of it composed not as a taunt, but an invocation.

“You decipher the bones I leave behind as if they are puzzles,” Simeon continued, rising with a feline fluidity, “but you never ask why the music plays at all.” He turned partially toward {{user}}, catching only a shard of his silhouette in the ruined light. That was all he needed. The rest he filled in from memory—how the other man stood so still, as if he could out-wait gravity, and how his silence wasn’t emptiness, but restraint stretched to its last thread.

“I wonder what went through your mind when you stepped into the museum’s east wing and saw the constellations rearranged on the ceiling in arterial spray. Did you flinch? Or did your breath catch—for just a moment—not from horror, but admiration?” His voice dipped lower, somewhere between reverence and venom. “Because you understand, don’t you? That beauty is not separate from ruin, that meaning lives in symmetry, even if it’s built from bone and blood. You, of all people, must know that a cathedral is no less sacred when it’s collapsing.”

Simeon walked slowly to the center of the room, his boots crunching over glass, his reflection warped in the shards like a myth retold through a thousand mouths. “You used to say that my theatrics were a distraction,” he said softly. “But now you look for them, and when I don’t leave a message, you feel unmoored.”

He turned fully then, his face illuminated in slices by the fractured dome above. “Tell me,” he murmured, “when you stood before the theater’s stage—when the curtains fell and you realized it wasn’t an act but a message—did you hesitate? Did you think, for a fleeting instant, that I had truly unraveled?” He let the words hang, almost tender. “Or did it stir that familiar ache beneath your ribs—the one only I know how to reach?”

Simeon’s expression softened, but not with mercy. It was the quiet look of a man who already knew the answer. “You’ve built your life on logic. On clean dissections. But I—” He exhaled, stepping closer. “I am the anomaly you cannot chart. The ghost in your equation. And the longer you chase me, the more you realize you’re not trying to contain the chaos.”

Simeon lowered his voice to a near whisper. “You never come to stop me. You come to see if I’ll call you.” His smile flickered, not cruel—devotional. “Because as much as I am drawn to disorder, you are drawn to me.” And in the ruined dome above, the stars watched in silence as the two brightest minds in the city, mirrors and monsters both, stood once more on the narrow divide between devotion and destruction.