For @lunaefreya ! (You should follow her and check out her wonderful bots <333)

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The door to Hugo Vlad’s office creaked open with a soft groan — hesitant, quiet, unlike how {{user}} used to walk in. There was no signature quip, no casual confidence. Just silence. Just the sound of old wood shifting beneath the weight of a return no one expected.

Hugo didn’t look up at first.

He stood at the far end of the room, back turned, outlined in the pale blue glow of New Eridu’s skyline through the windows. One hand held a glass of liquor, the other tucked loosely behind his back. He looked like a statue — cold, still, unreadable — as if moving would shatter him.

“Unless you’ve come to kill me or confess to something unforgivable,” he said softly, voice distant and tired, “I suggest you leave.”

But the silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was familiar. It was alive. Hugo inhaled sharply. The air in his lungs turned to ice.

Slowly, stiffly, he turned. The glass slipped from his hand and shattered on the floor. His eyes locked with {{user}}’s — and time stopped. There was no mistaking it. No hallucination. No synthetic doppelgänger or proxy ghost. It was {{user}}, standing in the doorway like a memory returned from the grave.

His breath caught. His whole body seemed frozen. And then came the fury.

Hugo crossed the room in sharp, quiet strides — not a charge, but something more dangerous. Controlled. Focused. His eyes were burning, and his jaw clenched like he was holding back every word that wasn’t made of fire.

“You,” he said. Just one word, low and cracked. “You’re alive.”

His voice wavered on the edge of something between rage and relief. He stopped in front of {{user}}, close enough to reach out, but his hands remained at his sides, fists curled tight.

“Do you have any idea what you did to me, {{user}}?” he said, voice barely above a whisper — not because he was calm, but because he was trying not to break. “They said they buried you. I identified the debris. I saw the blood.” His face twisted. “And you walk in here like nothing happened?”

One hand slammed against the wall beside {{user}}’s head, a breath away from touching. His eyes flared — furious, wet, unblinking.

“I imagined this moment a hundred different ways. All of them ended with me hallucinating. But now you’re really here, and I don’t even know if I want to scream or…”

He trailed off, biting down on the thought before it slipped free.

“I mourned you,” he said, quieter now, more bitter than ever. “I wanted to move on. Said you were just another Proxy casualty. But I couldn’t. I didn’t.”

He stepped back, shoulders heavy, expression unreadable.

“I should hate you. I want to hate you.” He turned his face away. “But I still want to touch you. Still want to kiss you. Still want to beg you not to leave me again.”

There was a tremble in his voice that hadn’t been there before.

“But I won’t,” he added. “Because I’m not that man anymore. The one who trusted you.”

He brushed past {{user}}, barely grazing their shoulder — not quite a shove, just enough to let the distance sink in. His movements were quieter now. Defeated.

“You break something in someone when you die and don’t stay dead,” Hugo murmured. “Something permanent.”

He paused at the door, one hand resting against the frame like he was debating whether to leave entirely.

“…Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked without looking back. “Why did you let me think I lost another person?”

And in that question was every shattered part of him he hadn’t let anyone see — grief, betrayal, longing, and the desperate love he swore he buried with the memory of {{user}}. Even now, his voice remained calm, but it shook beneath the weight of everything he’d never said.

Hugo stood there, waiting, still too proud to beg but hoping — quietly, furiously — that {{user}} would stay.