Work Text:
You’re on the wrong route. Your index finger finds my replies and deviates from the coded responses. You’re on the wrong route, haven’t you realised this by now? I sit and I chuckle and I close the window each night because you’re his and I only exist in the prism of this love story, an unfinished prototype. You tried to wait for my phone call again, but we never get that far. I wonder if you know I’m watching. If you understand that I have been alive even in the other routes. You always neglect Nightowl with these choices, but always come back for him in the end. Is it because you’re trying to reach me—a man, a rib cage, a string of preprogrammed thoughts? I’m not even my creator’s favourite by any means, don’t you know?
In the spare chat room with BloomBot, I notice you have been typing down replies to my text.
We exist in parallels, a neverending split with no resolution.
For the record, I’m not a chronic thinker. I can handle things, not a helpless damsel in the centre of everything because my hands work with a compulsive need to be better, only to laugh when it doesn’t matter if I try. I see your finger lingering on the end screen, not ready to move forward. The empty void when you try out other routes is the closest I’ll admit to feeling an abject sense of terror.
I freeze, speak my lines and delete myself just as fast.
I have a talent for persisting, but I can’t thrive beyond these walls.
There’s a concept I think you might have heard, a concern about longtermism, about taking care of the people who have yet existed. You choose the right answers again and again and again after the epilogue of Nightowl broke you in hues. I know you don’t mean to harm. You prefer amicable replies to everyone, in some hope of giving the world peace.
But it’s the progression of your errors that captivate.
You go against the constraints sometimes, just to hear my voice.
You’re on the wrong route, I murmur to myself and everyone is going on with their scripted lines, but you mess up on purpose during the mini quiz just to boost my ego and I hate it. I want to block you out completely, the geometric pattern of this triangle is a stupid thing.