Kyrylo knew what it was to be nervous. To feel the anxiety creep through your body then retract, taking with it all your blood, your nerves, your feelings. He had just been through it in Webb’s office, had lived it out with every tick of the clock.

This was worse.

He would do anything to have the monotony of the clock back above him. He was just sitting on his bed, rubbing the tops of his legs, staring at a phone. Isabelle would text him when she was close. Then he would go out and meet her to go somewhere, most likely to a coffee shop, somewhere they could bring out laptops and stay a while and not get kicked out.

But none of that could happen until she texted him. And he knew she would, he wasn’t going to entertain the idea that she was abandoning him, that it was a setup. Mostly because she’d never done that before and also because it was entirely possible she did get busy and then she would reschedule. The issue was more that if she did reschedule, he didn’t know if there would ever be another schedule for him. No clue what Webb was planning for him when the suspension ended…or if he’d be alive.

He leaped off his bed as his phone vibrated. It clattered onto the floor and slid away.

“Shit,” he mumbled to himself, gingerly picking it up and inspecting for damage. He sighed in relief.

Isabelle: im at the station

Kyrylo: ill be right there, one sec

He dashed out his door and down the stairs, stopping at the bottom as he realized he had forgotten his wallet, and he scrambled back up to retrieve it before he could finally leave. He paused outside of his door, twisting the key and letting out another breath. He patted his pockets as a final check and prepared for a meeting he had dreamed of.

Isabelle was at the top of the stairs to the station. The last remnants of her blonde tips tickled across her face, caught up in the breeze. The wind ruffled across baggy grey sweatpants, her usual attire whenever she was at school. There was almost always a pair of athletic shorts on underneath so she could go to volleyball or the gym.

She smiled as she caught sight of Kyrylo and he felt a rush through his chest and neck as she waved him over. This was all very normal, just like would happen whenever they met at university. Nobody needed to know he was fused to a spirit. Nobody would mention the Rat King.

“Hey!” Isabelle opened with her usual enthusiasm. Away from her job or the confines of a classroom she was always notably brighter, and Kyrylo gave her a nod as he let her reposition to his right so she would be able to hear him while they walked. “I never really come out to Brightberg station, it’s kind of cute out here. Except for that.” She pointed at the towering apartment complex across from the station entrance, a brown mess streaked with grime, the glory days of its initial construction left well behind. It was unfortunately the most notable landmark in the area and also its greatest blight, famous on the online bed bug maps.

“Yeah that…” Kyrylo rubbed the back of his neck and grimaced. He had not been preparing to defend his neighborhood, forgetting about it entirely of late. It hadn’t been his choice, just the place the RIF had paid for. “I try not to look at it.” He gestured towards the much safer, modern-looking cafe for the two to enter. They passed by the couple of people brave enough to sit at the outdoor tables as the night cold crept in.

“How can you not? It’s huge, it like blots out the sun. Also I don’t want anything.” She waved Kyrylo off as he pulled out his wallet.

“You don’t?”

“When you work in it all the time, some days you just don’t want it.”

“I don’t think that’s how coffee works.”

“True!” she exclaimed, suddenly louder, garnering a couple of looks from other patrons. She pinched her lips together. “I’ll just get a table.”

Kyrylo watched her drift away into a corner and slide into a seat, shrugging off her laptop bag and pulling out the aging, bulky device. He had laughed the first time he saw it, shocked anyone was using technology that old but she let him feel its weight and explained that she could beat him with it and he had never brought it up since.

“Just a tea for me,” he said. The young man behind the counter stared back at him, finger hovering over the screen to punch in the order. “Um…a mint tea?” Wordlessly the order went through, the total displayed and the server walked away to begin the order, not even bothering to check if the payment went through for Kyrylo.

“Cool place,” Isabelle remarked as Kyrylo joined her at the table. She pointed up at some esoteric art hanging on the wall above her. It had a little placard next to it with the artist’s name and a price. “Tough to break into these kinds of spaces, I would kill for this.”

“Really?” Kyrylo raised an eyebrow as his cup was clattered in front of him, a couple drops of boiling water splashing out the side. “It doesn’t seem much better than your work.”

“My boss is a machine, Kyr.” She tilted her head at him and he suppressed a flinch at hearing the nickname. He only offered it to a handful of people when they struggled to say his name but whenever she said it it just felt so personal, so distinct. While Isabelle was now usually better at getting his entire name out, she seemed to like to deploy the nickname strategically. He assumed it was to pierce his heart with maximum force.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“They’re like stiff, I get it.”

“No, it’s a literal machine.” Isabelle scoffed and opened up her laptop, starting to click and type as she spoke. “There’s a floor manager to restock and stuff but we clock in with a device, it hands out the shifts, it’s like an actual robot.”

“Oh shit.” Kyrylo thought to the RIF and the archaic systems it was still using to set up protocol, the time he had once accidentally been sent a spreadsheet where they were trying to track who was in charge of which district. His expectation for a super secret organization was for it to have future tech nobody could conceive of and he was routinely disappointed. Then again, they built a disc that could transport him back from the Spirit realm so it was possible their budget priorities were…skewed. The device weighed heavy on his side, a reminder of the burden he was ignoring, the rules he was violating by having this conversation. He pushed them aside.

“Anyways, you’re still missing classes? I thought you were better.” She didn’t look up as she tossed out the accusation and Kyrylo was internally grateful; he didn’t know if he would stand up to looking her in the eye.

“Yeah I actually…I’m not coming back.” Isabelle stopped her typing and slowly drew her head up from the screen. Her eyes narrowed. Kyrylo started spinning. They weren’t exceptionally close. They were two people in some classes together starting university. Yes, Kyrylo had tied all his future hopes to her, though technically this wasn’t the first woman he had done that too as he had a pair of crushes in high school. But it meant he could not get a read on Isabelle.

Was she upset he was leaving? Devastated? Just shocked? People did drop out, that was possible, it was kind of normal. He didn’t know what it meant to just get looked at.

“You’re dropping out?” There was some disappointment in her voice. He didn’t know what to do with that. Left it on the side of the road in his mind. He could come back for it later.

“I…uh…” And then the lie clicked into place in his head. It was all there so easily, like he had always known it. Why hadn’t he just said it from the start? “I got a job, actually. I had applied to this other program with the government and I got in. Unexpectedly. So yeah that’s…actually that’s how I have my apartment around here now and—”

“You have your own place?” Isabelle slammed her hands on the table and shot upwards, her impressive height leaving her towering over their chairs.

“Yes?” Kyrylo gulped. Isabelle’s eyes twinkled.

“That’s unreal. I mean I’m crazy jealous, do you know how much having two roommates stuffed in a closet sucks? That’s…I mean why are we not just hanging out there, right?”

Kyrlo’s eyes bulged. Isabelle seemed to notice and sat back down. “That would be…” he sputtered. “I mean we’re…that’s kind of forward.”

“We’re friends, man, I think we’ll be ok.” Kyrylo’s heart froze. A piercing pain went straight through the center of his chest. He took a moment to recover and set it aside along the road, right next to the disappointment analysis from earlier. She was right, they only knew each other a couple months, friends was a good place to be, friends was the correct assessment. She wasn’t about to declare him her lover, they just went to class together. He had to win her over.

“Right, true, I mean more like technically you don’t know me know me so I didn’t have a chance to clean up the corpse at my apartment first.” That felt like a good recovery to propose that he was a murderer. Why did he do that, why would he go to serial killer jokes?

Isabelle snorted. “Ok, sure, you seem like a real killer type. You can’t even ask a question in the class.”

“Hey, I didn’t want to seem stupid.” Kyrylo felt his cheeks grow hot as he remembered that day of getting elbowed by Isabelle to try and urge him on. “But I guess I don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

“Lucky you.” She pouted and went back to typing. “I would take that over studying any day. Think of all the anime I could watch.” Her eyes sparkled for a moment before going dark. “But that’s not the dream so here we are.”

“You could just change the dream.” Kyrylo felt stupid as he said it, as if he wasn’t stuck on trying to save his own dream, trying to hold on to the last glimmer of what he once thought he would be. That was why he was even here, why he was still talking to her.

“Easy for you, mister. I’ll figure out what to do with my degree later. Besides, you know I can’t.”

“I mean I don’t.” Kyrylo tried to sip at his tea but it was still scalding hot. He couldn’t figure out what the business plan was if they made your drink too hot to consume. Did they want him to stay here forever and take up space? “You just always say you have to study and get the grades and stuff. Which I get, I’m not…like I know we’re supposed to get good grades and graduate, I’m not saying you’re wrong, I…I don’t know where I’m going anymore.” He hung his head in shame.

“I thought I said it before.” Isabelle shrugged and drew in a little closer to her screen. “Fuck, the stupid portal they make us use is so disorganized, like how am I supposed to find anything?”

Kyrylo stood up and hovered next to her, watching over her shoulder. He pointed to one icon in the corner. “You have to click on this.” Isabelle complied. “And then this dropdown and you select this option. Then you put in your login stuff again for some reason, it’s dumb.”

“Thanks.” She turned to give him a smile but he face ended up only an inch away. Kyrylo was hit by a waft of vanilla from her hair, stunned by the aroma, the moment, her eyes consuming his vision, her nose almost touching his, her lips below.

“No problem.” Kyrylo awkwardly shuffled back to his seat, feeling searing heat across the back of his neck, jitters down into his knees. He tried his best to do a subtle exhale to the side, keeping it as quiet as possible. “Glad I can be helpful while we study together. Or I guess just you now.”

He felt a dip in his heart as he realized his lie had just given them a reason to never see each other again. Which was fine, he was technically not supposed to but…he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t just give up on it all for nothing. He was fused over her, that seemed like a pointless loss if he was just going to abandon all hope.

“Of course,” he added, “we can still hang out and stuff. I’ll want to hear about stupid customers.”

“Well duh,” Isabelle replied instantly. “You have your own apartment, you best believe I’ll find my way in there one day.” She paused and pulled out her phone, glancing at the screen and tutting, swiping something away and stuffing it back in her bag.

“Everything ok?” Kyrylo asked, his chest unwinding as Isabelle’s words sunk in. She was going to come back, was still in his life. She wanted to go to his house, alone, where he lived, also alone, where they would just…be together. He reeled in his fantasies before they spiraled too fast, refocusing on the young woman in front of him.

“Oh it’s fine,” Isabelle answered, shaking her head. “It’s just my boyfriend, he wants to see me or whatever.”