Work Text:
It all began with a malfunction.
Morning suns and evening stars usually consist of papers and reading and the intense urge to go home to sleep. Your job, which was something to get you by until you can get your hands on a better one, becomes even more difficult to tolerate with each passing day. When you get home, you succumb to the routine of using your phone to destress until you find the consciousness to turn it off and go to bed.
The morning sun greets you the next day, and the cycle continues. Day after day after day.
It almost seemed like there was no end to it.
Up until last night.
When you woke up from a nap with the stars in your eyes and your hair sticking out in waves, you expected a mere midnight snack. A chocolate bar or a cup of instant noodles would’ve done the trick. Instead you were given a bowl of soup, made like it comes from a home of love, with a man that came straight out of your phone’s wallpaper.
Caleb leaves a mere trace of where he’s been, as seen by the sparkles in the Glint Photobooth background, but his existence is now here. In your home. In your life.
That realization settles as soon as today’s morning sun hits your face, burning your eyes and your heart. You wake with a jolt, like something had pushed you to sit up as soon as you could, and for a moment you have to learn how to welcome air into your lungs and let it leave. At least Caleb stayed on the sofa like you had asked him to, because he is nowhere to be found in the comforts of your room.
But there’s a knock at the door.
“Good morning.”
His voice is pleasant, you’ll have to admit. Tapping him on the home screen of the game just to hear his voicelines certainly pales in comparison to hearing it in real life. There is also a hint of a rasp, like he’s learning how to let air into his lungs as well. Is Skyhaven’s air different from here?
You stand up to open the door for him, but you don’t even make it halfway before he opens the door himself. Not asking for permission, but not intending anything harmful.
“Caleb! What if I was changing?”
“I’ve seen you change hundreds of times. It’s nothing to me now.”
You eye him like he’s a stranger because you don’t know how else to think. “What does that mean?”
He merely shrugs. “I don’t mean any harm by it. Don’t worry.”
Before you get the chance to speak another word of protest, he hands you his colonel hat. Last night, he left it behind on the kitchen counter with a note before appearing in front of you like an apparition. It served as a token of his presence and a surprise to your routine. Now here he is, handing it to you as if you’re supposed to know what to do with it.
“Keep it,” he says. “It’s my gift to you.”
You eye him again, this time with confusion. “What would I even do with this?”
Caleb shrugs yet again. “I don’t know. Wear it, decorate it, hang it up in your room. There’s lots of things you could do with a colonel hat. And…” he inches closer, his large hands now laying on your hips where your pajama pants begin to fall. “There’s lots of things you can do with a colonel.”
Your retort burns with your cheeks as you blush, but at least you have the semblance of a mind to push his hands away from your body. “I’d rather not.”
His eyes are reminiscent of how they were last night: warm violets cooled and darkened by utmost obsession. Like you were his to take and command. Like you were going to be easily swayed just because he was your favorite. The sight, so vastly different from the Caleb you thought was underneath this, turns you into a shaking mess in its horror.
“You forget you claimed me first,” he begins. “Putting me on your home screen to interact with, putting me as your wallpaper so you could see me everyday, and even purchasing my memory cards for your own personal gain. You’ve wanted to see through my life too, so why can’t I do the same with you?”
His hands now remain on yours, the grip akin to chains. But you don’t pull away. Shame wells up in you, alongside a warmth that remains illicit in its intensity.
Caleb is here. The man you’ve always wanted is here.
“Come on, I’ve made breakfast,” he says in a sing-song voice, and for a minute you are reminded of Caleb outside of this obsessive lover. The Caleb that cooks, the Caleb that uses his voice for more than just commands, the Caleb that gently urges you to come to him. That’s the excuse you tell yourself when you let this man touch the small of your back to lead you to the kitchen you’ve eaten in a million times, as if he knows the place better than you do.
The soup from last night lingers, left uneaten and cold, but a new meal sits beside it. It’s warm, akin to the repose of a wind-filled day, but also reminiscent of the meals you ate back when life felt less repetitive.
“Oh,” is the first thing to come out of your mouth, out of sheer surprise. But realization ruins everything, and suspicion follows. “How did you know to make this?”
“I just know you better than you think I do.”
Vague answers lead to more questions. Where did he get the ingredients? When did he learn to make one of your favorite meals? How did he even know that this was one of your favorite meals?
But having more questions can sometimes lead to reluctant acceptance.
Caleb ushers you to sit in the seat he’d pulled for you, but because you live alone in this wonderful apartment, you never thought to buy another chair. “Where are you going to sit?”
He eyes you once more, the violets more visible now. “Bold of you to assume I’ll be sitting.”
And he doesn’t.
All morning, he remains on his feet, cooking dishes and delivering them to you as fast as this world can let him. The only time he pauses is when you offer to share the food, giving him a chance to taste the meals he’s cooking for you. He welcomes your delight in the buffet he’s created.
I could get used to this, you think as you take another sip of the tea he’s made for you.
Oh, how wrong you were.
“I’m sorry, I can’t make it to work today.”
Excuses fall from your lips seamlessly as you attempt to reason with your boss about having a day off. Every word from your mouth is countered by your boss’s attempts at pity and guilt.
“What will the workplace be like with your behavior? If I gave everybody this grace, nobody would show up to keep the place running!”
You have to grit your teeth to keep the truth from accidentally coming out of your mouth.
Meanwhile, Caleb stares from the edge of your bed, watching the creases on your face deepen with every retort that happens back and forth. While he can’t hear what your boss is saying, he can see the evident stresses it’s impeding upon you, which is enough to anger him.
But he restrains himself, all because you told him not to interrupt before you even made the call.
What a good boy.
“I’ll be back in a few days! I just need this because it’s an emergency.”
“What kind of emergency is this?”
“An… unexpected emergency! Please, let me have just a few days to recuperate!”
“It’s not much of an emergency since you can’t specify what it is! Now stop wasting my time!”
You look at your phone, thinking the call has ended, but Caleb suddenly grabs it from your grasp. You barely have time to react — frustration and sudden panic overwhelmingly settling atop of all the others — before his voice, authoritative and so much like the colonel in Skyhaven, reverberates in your room and your soul.
“Her husband has come back from deployment,” he states, and you’re appalled with how smoothly the lie escapes his lips. “And I would like some time to spend with my wife.”
The voice on the other line is silent, making you think that the call really had ended, only for your boss’s shaky voice to come back with satisfactory fear. “Oh, my apologies sir. I wasn’t aware she had a husband, much less one in the service.”
He eyes you, like he asks for permission before he can do whatever he’s planning to do with this boss of yours. “Was that an insult to my wife?”
“N-no sir!” your boss says. “Yes, I’ll grant her time off. Two weeks is all I can provide, so plan accordingly. Thank you for your service.”
And the call finally dies alongside your fear, leaving behind the silence of confusion.
“Well,” Caleb shrugs, handing your phone back to you. “Problem solved. Can’t believe they don’t guarantee time offs in this world.”
You take your phone from him in stunned silence. There is too much to unpack in that fraction of the conversation he had with your boss, too many realizations threatening to hit you at once. The only thing stopping them is the dreamy fog that comes from his protectiveness. Nobody had ever done that for you before, and you never thought someone would.
“But if you ask me, two weeks is too little,” he interrupts your train of thought by placing his hands on your hips. Your pajama pants don’t want to fall in his touch; instead, he gently lifts them up to cover the skin revealed by your short crop top. “I’d like to spend more time with you, wife.”
You eye him with a petulant frown since you don’t know what to make of this… attachment of his. This obsession that stirs from infatuation, infatuation stirring from God knows where. But you welcome his hands on your hips and the pleasant sound of the word wife out of his lips.
At least you have half the mind to clarify where you stand. “I’m not your wife, Caleb.”
“But I know you so much better than anybody else does,” he excuses, a hint of a whine in his voice. “Isn’t that enough for us to be bound together like married couples are?”
His grip suddenly tightens. Not painful, not freeing. “I love you. Don’t you see that?”
Is this what love is like? Does it feel like restraint, where surprise disguises itself as sparks from your heart? Does it feel like protection, defending you from the people that have always aided its mundaneity? Does it feel like dark eyes and bruising grips with pleasant words coming out of husky voices?
But before you can answer the question, Caleb pulls away as if burned by your contemplation. “I thought wrong, didn’t I? Why did I even come here?”
He doesn’t leave, but he’s not as present as he was a few seconds ago when his hands were on your hips. When he was adoring you with his words alone. He leaves behind an emptiness within you, and without thinking, you reach for him again.
“No, please! I-I’m glad you’re here!”
In truth, you don’t know how you’re feeling, but you now know that you’d rather feel a stir of emotions than the emptiness of longing.
Caleb relents to your pleas and his hands cup your cheeks. Reverence ensues in the way he looks at you, even when the violets of his eyes are gone. “Good.”
Oh, how wrong he was.
The best deceivers make the prettiest lovers.
That’s the conclusion you make in your head when you take Caleb to the grocery store with you. Not trusting him to be alone for a second (and if you let yourself think for more than a moment, you’ll admit that you wouldn’t want him to be alone anyway), you asked him if he wanted to explore this new world with you. Of course, he doesn’t miss the chance to spend more time with you, but one thing you didn’t expect were the differences between the worlds in Love and Deepspace and the world you’re accustomed to.
“These apples look sad,” he comments when you make it to the fruits and vegetables section. “They’re not bright red.”
You eye him and then the apples. Those are the brightest red apples you’ve ever seen in this particular grocery store, and they’re guaranteed to be fresh. “What kind of apples do you have in Skyhaven?”
“Lab-created ones,” he says, deadpan.
“That explains a lot.”
He eyes you with a raised brow. “What is that supposed to mean?”
You say nothing, continuing to browse the section for something to eat for later. Now that you have a chef in your home, you certainly don’t have to be restricted to the instant noodles diet whose taste is so familiar it became an insufficient excuse for its unhealthiness. The grocery store now feels lively instead of suffocating.
Caleb stays behind you, his hands in the pockets of the basketball shorts you conveniently had lying around. He appears as a normal shopper as he eyes the cabbages and beets, but staring at him when he was still your wallpaper certainly has its benefits. You notice the disdain on his face and the thorough analysis he’s doing on the poor vegetables. A colonel in every way, shape, and form.
“What did the cabbages do to you, Caleb?” you laugh when he has the audacity to pick one of them up to analyze it. “Did it misbehave?”
He looks at you, and if you let yourself squint even just a little bit, you can see a pixel of a smirk there. “Nothing really. Just making sure it’s sufficient for my wife.”
That word again.
“So?” Caleb smiles now, bright yet dimmed by his dark eyes. “Is it sufficient for you?”
It takes a second for you to realize that he was talking to you, the word wife garnering your attention before your senses could work.
You eye the cabbage as well. It’s green with little patches of brown, but again, you’re no expert when it comes to vegetables. It looks good enough, you think, so you give Caleb a nod.
He places it in the cart and continues pushing it. The grocery store run ends with more vegetables than your pantry has ever seen and potential recipes your stove is excited to try.
You look at Caleb as he unloads the shopping into the back of your car, and maybe — just maybe — the man from your wallpaper isn’t a bad addition to your life. Maybe he could even help out around the house, shoo away the people causing you headaches, and get your opinions on little things. He could do things that nobody ever has.
Oh, how right you were, in the most demented way possible.
Your boss is dead.
You receive the news a few mornings after your grocery store run from a colleague you always poured out your grievances to regarding your work. For a moment, you stare at your phone screen to make sure the text is real. It looks like a string of letters — especially with your eyes that’s just now getting used to reality — not a coherent sentence with meaning behind them.
The person you hate the most is dead.
“Good morning,” you hear from a distance, but you don’t respond. You can’t, not when the world as you know it seems to disappear before your very eyes. Gunshots, body so dismantled forensic investigators couldn’t determine a cause of death, and words written in her blood that mock her. Who could do such a thing?
You lift your eyes from the ground to see Caleb with a smile that does not match the occasion. He carries with him a bowl of soup made just how you like it and bruises on his arm that were not there a few nights ago.
“What’s up with your arm?” you ask, deadpan. You couldn’t care less.
Well, not until he answers.
“Had to deal with some nuisances,” he says with his familiar shrug. There is something different about this one though: the casualness of the answer, the vague mention of nuisances, and the smile that just cannot seem to leave his face. A wide grin that shows all of his teeth, one you never saw in Love and Deepspace. It sends a shiver down your spine.
“What nuisances?”
He eyes you warily. “If I told you, would you promise not to get mad?”
His gaze then falls to your phone, where the headline about your boss’s death appears clearly enough for him to see. You hear a small chuckle from his direction, an unusual reaction to a mysterious murder, and you turn around to look at what may have caused it.
“What?” you ask, encompassing both his odd reaction and the ridiculous question he posed earlier.
However, Caleb merely shakes his head. “Nothing. Just having a good mornin’.”
“It’s not nothing. You’re laughing at something.”
He raises his hand in surrender. Adorable, if it weren’t for the situation and disorientation and his entire existence in front of you at this very moment.
The question that comes out of your mouth is one you didn’t plan on asking. “Did you have a hand in my boss’s death?”
And in truth, you don’t think he did. There was no possible way he could’ve identified your boss’s face, the place where you work, or her address. Hell, you would notice if he left your house since your eyes are on him at all times, and you never noticed him leave.
But, there was also no possible way he could’ve escaped Skyhaven to be in front of you right now, and here he is.
Caleb raises a brow — another familiar gesture — before staring right at you. Dark eyes meet your suspicious ones, and the silence stretches on for what seems like forever. You understand why soldiers seem to fall under his control, why men and women at his school were hypnotized by him. You now understand why you were captivated by him, even wishing to be in the game so you could have the colonel everybody seemed to admire.
You now understand what he fails to say out loud.
“You did it, didn’t you?”
And you wait for a reaction. Denial. Any proof that he didn’t.
But to your dismay, he nods.
“She tired you out!” he tries to excuse when he sees the way you turn away in disgust. “She never considered you in her decisions, always wanting you to work. She even tried to take you away from spending time with me.”
That last sentence is said with the most anger you’ve ever heard from anyone.
“She only listened when she was scared, so what better way for her to go than with fear?”
“Caleb!” Your hands wail around, desperate to cling onto where reality may stand. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“It was to protect you!”
“Protect me?” Anger and horror well up in your body that now stands before him. You have to restrain yourself from touching him; those bruises will be accompanied by many others if you do. “Protect me? I’m in a house with a murderer and you’re telling me it’s for my protection?”
He reaches for your hips, his way of penance, but you push his hands away.
“Do not touch me.”
Caleb’s expression breaks you. Those dark eyes are now soft, melted by the heat of your anger, and his hands pull away as if burned. He looks so reduced to tears it makes you want to stop fighting and give him a hug. It makes you want to understand his intentions, even when the consequences are so far-fetched.
Temptation pushes you to the edge of empathy, but your senses don’t.
Yet, it’s too late to do anything.
Caleb storms out of your apartment with a few words lost to the tension–filled air. Not even a blink could catch the stomps of his colonel boots or the expression on his face. He leaves behind your longing and regret, as if lashing out was worse than the crime he committed. He leaves you behind in tears, kneeling on the floors of your bedroom.
You wish life would spare you for even one second.
Oh, how wrong you were.
In the pouring rain, guided by your mere intuition, you set out to look for Caleb.
Four moons passed with his absence that continued to linger in your apartment. It made your poor attempts at breakfast so much harder to stomach and your attempts to play Love and Deepspace so much more difficult. The other four men would greet you with their smiles and witty lines, but you wouldn’t have the option to click on Caleb. The photo of him, that familiar jacket he wore before he died in the main story, is grey and unaccessible.
Only four moons of this nonsense pushed you to set out in the rain.
“Caleb!” you scream to trees that soak the rain around you, hoping one of them is the man you’re looking for. “Caleb, it’s me, your…”
The word doesn’t want to come out of your lips, yet it does for the sake of him. After all, wasn’t that your dream? To be—
“Your wife!”
But even in your utmost terror, nobody responds except for the trees that make noise in the wind now accompanying the rain.
Each passing second is worse than the last. The rain grows stronger, making each step harder than the one before it, but you push through. You have to find Caleb. You have to find the man who cooks you the best meals you’ve had in years, who protects you (even in the most unconventional ways), who knows you better than anyone else does.
“Caleb! Caleb!”
Where could he have gone?
“Caleb!”
Could he have…
“Caleb!”
Your throat is hoarse when you check your phone’s lock screen. It’s still that black background from Glint, sparkly in the shape of where he used to stand.
Good. He didn’t come back to Skyhaven.
“Caleb!”
You’re so tired that every shadow you find looks exactly like him, but you swear on your life that the one sitting on that distant bench turns around at the sound of your voice. You can see it slowly stand up and walk over to your direction. You can see the hairs on your arm spike up at the sight.
It’s either Caleb or a murderer.
Is there even a difference?
“Caleb?” His name leaves your lips in a quieter tone, wary of the shadow now making its way to you. You would run if it were faster, but it walks like how Caleb walked up to you on the day he surprised you in your home: quiet, stealthy, anticipating.
The closer it gets, the more you notice little details that calm your beating heart. Dark brown hair with bangs that create a heart shape, showing you a hint of the forehead Love and Deepspace players seem to obsess over. His gloves that touched your face on the first day he truly met you. His colonel boots that echoed when he stormed off.
The hardened look on his face when his face lands under a streetlight.
It’s him.
You run towards him with your arms open, engulfing a drenched Caleb in your grasp. You mutter his name over and over again out of relief that he’s okay. That he’s still here, alive to hug you back the way he does now: like you’re an angel whose determination for him bends the rules you have been given.
“Caleb! I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that-”
“Don’t cry,” he whispers, wiping your tears with his thumbs. “At least you’ve come to your senses.”
Did you, though?
“Y-you were just trying to protect me. I-I understand.”
Do you, though?
“I’ll protect you for the rest of my life, if you’d let me.” His grip on your cheeks is gentle, even though his gaze is anything but. The rain settles over the both of you like nature’s way of a holy matrimony, binding you both together.
Does it, though?
You stare up at him. His hair is drenched in the rain, dirt scattered all over his face mixed with a cold sense of longing. Your heart aches for his own, aches to have him stay in your life. Call it mutual obsession or codependency or whatever term is used by jealous folks who can’t have what you have. This is love. This is devotion.
“Yes, Caleb. I love you so much!”
The walk home is still accompanied by the rain’s embrace, but what makes every step easier is his arms around the small of your back. Horror fades to make way for the haze delusion brings to you, but you couldn’t care less. Life is better with him in it.
Is it, though?