Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The sensation was not one of gentle awakening. It was a violent, instantaneous wrenching from the black, gnawing abyss of non-existence back into the sharp, cruel reality of consciousness. One moment, the feeling of countless tiny teeth shredding his flesh, the wet, hot agony of being consumed alive, the final, screaming thought of failure. The next, the cold, hard press of linoleum against his cheek and the sterile, antiseptic smell of a place far removed from nature.

Subaru’s eyes snapped open. He expected the ethereal white expanse of Echidna’s dream castle, or the snowy, somber grounds of the Sanctuary where he had last seen Emilia’s sleeping form. He was prepared for the familiar, agonizing loop.

This was not it.

He was in a hallway. It was unnervingly long, stretching into the distance in both directions until perspective blurred. The walls were a stark, clinical white, broken only by a continuous grey line running along the middle. Overhead, fluorescent lights hummed with a low, monotonous drone that grated on his already frayed nerves. There were no windows, no signs of an outside world, just the oppressive, sterile perfection of a man-made tunnel.

“What the hell…?” he whispered, his voice hoarse, tasting of bile and phantom blood. He pushed himself up, his limbs trembling not from cold, but from the deep, cellular memory of being torn apart. His familiar tracksuit was intact, unstained. A small mercy, but one that only deepened the terrifying confusion. This wasn't the sanctuary. This wasn't Roswaal's mansion. This wasn't anywhere he knew.

Panic, cold and sharp, began to crawl up his spine. “WHERE AM I?” His voice, louder now, echoed unnaturally in the confined space, bouncing off the hard surfaces and assaulting his own ears. “EMILIA? BEATRICE? ANYONE?” The silence that answered him was absolute, heavier and more profound than any he had ever experienced. It was the silence of a tomb. After a few ragged breaths, the instinct for survival, honed by countless agonizing deaths, kicked in. Yelling was a beacon. Yelling meant drawing attention. And in a place like this, attention was the last thing he wanted. He forced his breathing to slow, his heart still hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He needed to focus. Assess. Survive.

It was then he noticed he wasn't alone. Standing a few feet away, observing him with an unnervingly placid curiosity, was a figure that made his blood run cold for an entirely different reason. Clad in a flowing black dress, with long, pure white hair and eyes as dark as the void, she was an impossible, terrifying sight.

“Echidna…” Subaru breathed, a mix of pure shock and simmering rage coloring his tone. “Why the fuck are you here?”

The Witch of Greed offered him the same serene, infuriatingly unreadable smile she always wore. Her presence here, physically manifest and solid outside the confines of her tomb or dream world, was a violation of every rule he understood. She simply appeared, as if the universe had bent to her will to place her right in front of him. "To walk with you," she said, her voice smooth as silk, yet carrying an undercurrent of insatiable curiosity. "My interest has been piqued beyond the confines of my trials. This world, this place... it is an entirely new library of knowledge, and you, Natsuki Subaru, are the one who has led me to its doorstep. I want to see this journey for myself."

Subaru stared at her, his mind reeling. He was trapped, lost, and now saddled with the very embodiment of manipulative avarice. He wanted to scream at her, to curse her, to demand answers she would almost certainly never give. But he was also practical. He was utterly, hopelessly alone. And she was a known quantity, albeit a monstrously dangerous one.

“Fine,” he ground out, the word tasting like ash. He was grasping at any semblance of control he could find. “As long as you listen and do what I tell you to do. No tricks, no secret plans, no using me for your own sick curiosity. You follow my lead. That’s the deal.”

He expected her to laugh, to mock his pathetic attempt at setting terms. He expected a condescending lecture on their respective power levels. He was wrong.

“You have a deal,” Echidna replied instantly, her smile not wavering in the slightest. The ease of her acceptance was more unnerving than any argument would have been.

Subaru was momentarily stunned into silence but decided to roll with it. He had a Witch on a leash, for whatever that was worth. He took a deep breath, the sterile air doing nothing to calm him, and began to walk down the hallway, Echidna falling into step beside him, a silent, ghostly presence. He didn't know where he was going, but standing still felt like accepting defeat. With every step, however, he could feel the weight of his own existence pressing down on the environment. The Witch’s Scent, amplified by his recent, horrific death, clung to him like a shroud. It was more than a smell; it was a palpable aura of pure, undiluted agony, a psychic scream of a soul that had been broken and pieced back together too many times.

They hadn’t gone more than fifty feet when the silence was broken. From both ends of the corridor, heavy metal doors slid open with a pneumatic hiss, and figures clad in black tactical gear, armed with advanced-looking rifles, swarmed in, establishing a perimeter. They moved with a chilling, practiced efficiency that spoke of countless drills. Lasers, tiny red dots of death, danced across Subaru’s chest and forehead.

Subaru froze, his hands instinctively going up. Echidna, by contrast, merely tilted her head, her expression one of mild, academic interest, as if observing a peculiar new species of insect.

Before the tense standoff could escalate, a new figure emerged from the forward group. She was a woman with sharp features, blonde hair pulled back into a severe bun, and a white lab coat worn over a practical pantsuit. Her eyes, magnified slightly by her glasses, scanned them not as people, but as data points. A small device in her hand was beeping erratically. "Hold your fire," she commanded, her voice calm and authoritative. "Subject designations are unconfirmed, but the male is emitting anomalous energy signatures off the charts. A miasmic field of… despair? And something else, something ancient. Ma'am, you are not registering on any of our conventional sensors." She was looking directly at Echidna.

"That is to be expected," Echidna said sweetly. "I am not what you would call 'conventional'."

"I am Dr. Buck," the woman stated, stepping forward cautiously. "You have breached a secure facility of the SCP Foundation. We require your full cooperation."

Subaru was about to spit out a sarcastic retort when Echidna placed a delicate hand on his shoulder. "We will cooperate, of course," she said, her voice weaving a subtle, persuasive thread through the air. "Natsuki Subaru here is… a special case. He's been through a great deal. It would be a shame to treat him as a common criminal. He is far more valuable than that. Perhaps a probationary classification? Something that allows for observation but grants him a measure of respect. He responds much better to that."

Dr. Buck blinked, a flicker of confusion crossing her face as if the thought had been her own all along. She looked at Subaru, at the sheer, unfiltered suffering in his eyes, at the way the hardened soldiers around him seemed unconsciously to shrink away from the aura he projected. "A special D-Class designation," she mused aloud, tapping her chin. "Yes… that could work. Contingent on full cooperation. We have a task perfectly suited for a subject with your… unique emotional output."

And so, Subaru found himself escorted not to a barren cell, but to a small, clean briefing room. He was given a standard orange jumpsuit, which he put on over his tracksuit with a sense of profound resignation. He was now D-9341. Echidna was simply referred to as 'The Anomaly's Associate' and was allowed to observe, a concession Dr. Buck couldn't quite explain but felt was necessary.

"Your first assignment, D-9341," Dr. Buck began, pulling up a file on a large monitor. A picture of a young woman with startlingly long pink hair appeared. "Is to interact with SCP-2396."

She explained the entity's properties in a dry, clinical tone. SCP-2396, also known as 'Ms. Sweetie', had a passive anomalous effect on any male-identified individual who entered her proximity. They would be overcome with an intense, instinctual urge to flee, to get as far away as possible. Those who stayed would experience severe physiological symptoms mimicking a diabetic coma. SCP-2396 believed this was a way to keep 'nasty brothers' away from her. Subaru just stared blankly. Fleeing? After what he'd faced, an overwhelming urge to run away sounded more like a Tuesday than a paranormal threat.

Dr. Buck continued, detailing the secondary, more dangerous effect. Small, candy-like objects, designated SCP-2396-A, would manifest in a six-kilometer radius around her, increasing in number when she was under stress. Harmless to females, but if a male ingested one… the results were grotesque. A rapid, catastrophic spike in blood sugar, with levels exceeding $600\text{mg/dL}$, followed by a horrifying metamorphosis. Over twelve hours, the subject's entire body—flesh, blood, bone—would be converted into a hard candy-like substance, creating an SCP-2396-B instance. These candy humanoids were strong, resilient, and mindlessly aggressive toward any males they encountered, their sole purpose to breach containment and reach SCP-2396.

"We have been unable to conduct a proper psychological interview with her because all male personnel are immediately affected, and she is generally uncooperative and sometimes hostile with female personnel, whom she perceives as rivals," Dr. Buck concluded, fixing her gaze on Subaru. "You, however, radiate an aura of profound negative emotion that we theorize might counteract or otherwise interfere with her standard psychic defenses. Your task is simple: enter the containment chamber, initiate a conversation, and do not be hostile. We simply want to talk to her."

Subaru felt a bitter, hysterical laugh bubble in his chest. Eaten alive by rabbits, and now he was being sent to talk down a candy girl who might accidentally turn him into a lollipop. The sheer absurdity of it was almost a relief. Death by sugar was at least a novel concept.

"And what if I don't?" Subaru asked, his voice flat.

"The standard termination protocols for uncooperative D-Class personnel are quite effective," Dr. Buck replied without a hint of emotion.

"Fine," Subaru sighed. "Let's go meet the candy witch."

He was led to a large, reinforced door. Next to it was an observation window made of thick, bulletproof glass. Echidna stood there beside Dr. Buck, her smile as fixed and placid as ever. She gave him a small, encouraging nod that looked utterly insincere.

"The chamber is secure. Enter now, D-9341," a voice commanded over an intercom.

The heavy door hissed open. Subaru took a breath, the air inside smelling cloyingly of sugar and artificial strawberry, and stepped through. The door slammed shut behind him with a deafening clang of finality.

The room was not a cell. It was decorated like a teenager's bedroom, if that teenager had a budget of millions and an obsession with the color pink. The walls were pink, the bedsheets were pink, and a soft, plush pink carpet covered the floor. Sitting on the edge of the bed, looking up at him with wide, curious magenta eyes, was SCP-2396. She was exactly as the picture showed: tall, with a curvaceous figure that her simple pink sundress did little to hide, and a cascade of bubblegum-pink hair that reached her waist.

She tilted her head, a confused frown on her pretty face. Her gaze wasn't hostile; it was baffled. "You're… you're a boy," she stated, her voice soft and melodic. "Why aren't you running away? All the other boys run. Or they get all sweaty and fall down."

Subaru just stood there, a few feet from the door, letting the sheer weirdness of the situation wash over him. He felt no urge to flee. No sudden sickness. He just felt… tired. So profoundly tired. The aura of suffering that clung to him was a thick, heavy blanket, and it seemed to smother the girl's psychic 'keep away' signal entirely.

He met her gaze and gave a small, weary shrug. "Running?" he said, his voice raspy. "I've got nowhere to run to. Besides, I've seen worse things than a pink room."

This was not the response she was expecting. Her eyes widened further, a spark of genuine interest replacing the confusion. She stood up, taking a hesitant step toward him. "Worse? What could be worse than my room? The doctors say it's very pleasant."

"A blizzard filled with rabbits," Subaru replied automatically, the words leaving his mouth before he could stop them. The memory flashed behind his eyes—white fur stained red, the sound of a million tiny jaws. He shuddered.

The girl, Sugar, stopped. She didn't seem to notice his shudder, but she sensed the shift in the air, the sudden spike in the already overwhelming sadness that emanated from him. "You're so… sad," she whispered, her voice laced with a strange, newfound sympathy. It was a tangible thing to her, like a fog filling the room. "It hurts. It feels… like your heart is crying."

Subaru blinked. No one had ever described the Witch's Scent like that. To others, it was a foul stench that inspired fear and rage. To her, it was just… sadness. For the first time since waking up in this nightmare facility, he felt a flicker of something other than despair or anger. He felt seen.

"Yeah, well," he mumbled, looking away. "It's been a rough day."

"My name is Sugar," she said, offering a small, shy smile. "The doctors call me SCP-2396, but I hate that. It sounds like a droid."

A ghost of a smile touched Subaru's lips. "Subaru. Natsuki Subaru."

"Subaru," she repeated, tasting the name. "I like it. It doesn't sound like the other names. The other boys… they have mean names. And mean faces." She took another step closer, now only a few feet away. She was completely enthralled by this strange, sad boy who didn't run. "You don't have a mean face. You just have a tired one."

"Comes with the territory," he said with a sigh. He looked around the room, at the pristine, lonely pinkness of it all. "So this is your whole world, huh?"

"For a long time," she admitted, her gaze dropping to the floor. "They don't let me leave. They're afraid of me. They're afraid I'll… sweeten them." She looked up at him, her magenta eyes pleading for understanding. "I don't mean to! It only happens when they're mean, or when they eat my treats without asking!"

"Your treats?" Subaru asked, his eyes scanning the room. He saw a small bowl on her nightstand filled with colorful, glittering, candy-like pebbles. SCP-2396-A. The source of the candy monstrosities.

"Would you like one?" she asked, her expression brightening with genuine hope. "I made them myself! They're strawberry-kiwi today. My favorite."

Behind the glass, Dr. Buck tensed, her hand moving toward a red button on the console. Echidna simply watched, her dark eyes glittering with profound interest.

Subaru looked at the candy, then back at Sugar's hopeful, innocent face. He knew exactly what that candy would do to him. He could picture the process—the sickening sweetness flooding his veins, his skin hardening into a sugary shell, his bones cracking and reforming into brittle rock candy. Another agonizing, bizarre death to add to his collection. And yet… looking at her, he couldn't find it in himself to recoil in terror. Her loneliness was as palpable as his own despair. They were two monsters, trapped in different cages.

He walked over to the nightstand, picked up one of the glittering pink pebbles, and held it in his palm. It was warm to the touch.

"You know," he said, looking at the candy and not at her. "I know what it's like. To have people run from you. To have them hate you just because of… something about you that you can't control. A smell, or… something else." He thought of the mabeasts, of Rem's initial distrust, of the way the world seemed to twist in hatred around him when the scent was strong.

Sugar stared at him, her jaw slightly agape. No one had ever understood. They were either terrified of her or wanted to study her. No one had ever just… related to her. "You… you do?"

"Yeah," Subaru said, closing his hand around the candy pebble. He didn't eat it. He just held it. He then turned to her and gave her the first genuine, albeit small and weary, smile he'd managed all day. "I do."

Her reaction was instantaneous. Her face lit up with a brilliant, dazzling smile of pure, unadulterated joy. For a moment, the cloying sweetness in the room felt less like a threat and more like a warm embrace. She saw him not as a D-Class, not as a test subject, not as a male to be repelled, but as a kindred spirit. A sad, tired boy who understood what it was like to be a monster.

"You're different, Subaru," she breathed, her voice filled with an emotion that was entirely new to her. "You're really different. I… I like you. Please… please come back and talk to me again?"

The conversation, against all odds, had ended on a profoundly positive note. Subaru had not only survived, but he had forged a genuine connection with one of the Foundation's anomalies. Behind the glass, Dr. Buck looked on in stunned disbelief, while Echidna's smile widened just a fraction, her thirst for new and interesting knowledge momentarily sated.

Subaru watched her through the thick pane of glass, a strange sense of detachment settling over him. He had simply talked to her. He had listened. He had shared a sliver of his own monstrous loneliness, and in return, she had smiled. It was the most bizarre and, in a twisted way, the most normal interaction he’d had since arriving in this sterile white hell.

Inside the observation room, Dr. Buck was staring at her monitors, her professional composure completely shattered. All the bio-telemetry and psychic-resonance scanners focused on SCP-2396’s chamber were showing readings she had previously thought impossible. The ambient psionic field that caused severe biological and psychological distress in males had completely dissipated. It wasn't being suppressed or counteracted; it was simply… gone.

“It’s impossible,” she muttered, adjusting her glasses as if they were faulty. “The effect has been a constant since initial containment. It’s an inherent property of the anomaly. It can’t just vanish.”

“Perhaps your understanding of the ‘anomaly’ was incomplete,” Echidna commented airily, her gaze fixed on Subaru. She looked like a proud teacher whose most problematic student had just solved an unsolvable equation. “You saw a lock and studied its mechanics for years. Natsuki Subaru, however, simply walked up and found it was a push-door all along.”

Dr. Buck shot a wary glance at the Witch before turning her attention to the intercom. “Sergeant Miller, prepare to enter the chamber and escort D-9341.”

A tense silence followed. “Ma’am?” the voice on the other end was strained. “You want a male operative to… enter the active containment zone?”

“The zone is no longer active. That’s an order, Sergeant.”

With visible reluctance, a heavily armed guard approached the chamber door. He moved with the rigid posture of a man walking into a radiation zone, expecting to be hit by that wave of nausea and psychic dread at any moment. The door hissed open. The guard stepped inside. He froze, rifle raised, and then… nothing. He slowly lowered his weapon, his helmeted head turning from Subaru to Sugar in utter confusion. He felt fine. Perfectly, utterly fine.

Sugar, who had previously cowered or become distressed in the presence of the guards, simply beamed at the newcomer before her eyes immediately snapped back to Subaru, filled with an undisguised, radiant adoration.

This wasn’t enough for Dr. Buck. Science demanded repeatable results. “Dr. Ames,” she said, turning to a nervous-looking man in a lab coat behind her. “You know the protocol.”

Dr. Ames paled. “You want me to… ingest a 2396-A instance?”

“The subject appears neutralized, but we need confirmation. For science, Doctor.”

With a trembling hand, Dr. Ames was given a candy pebble retrieved by the guard. A medical team stood by with insulin injectors and a defibrillator. He looked at the shimmering piece of sugar, said a silent prayer, and popped it into his mouth. He chewed. He swallowed.

The room held its breath. One second. Ten. Thirty. A full minute passed.

“Well?” Dr. Buck prompted, her voice sharp.

Dr. Ames blinked. “It’s… quite good, actually,” he said, a look of profound relief on his face. “A bit tart. Is that kiwi?”

The implications crashed down on the Foundation personnel in the room like a tidal wave. Natsuki Subaru had not just survived an SCP. He had, through a completely unknown mechanism, permanently neutralized its anomalous properties. He had fixed it.

The debriefing was surreal. Subaru was seated at a metal table while Dr. Buck paced, firing questions at him. What did he say? What did he do? Did he employ some kind of psychic ability? A thaumaturgical ritual?

“I just talked to her,” Subaru repeated for the fifth time, rubbing his temples. “She was lonely. I told her I understood. That’s it.”

His explanation was so mundane, so utterly devoid of scientific rigor, that it only deepened the mystery. In the middle of the interrogation, the door opened. Sugar, now dressed in a simple civilian outfit of jeans and a pink sweater provided by the Foundation, walked in. This was the first time she had been allowed out of her containment chamber in nearly a decade. She looked around the hallway with wide, childlike wonder for a moment, before her eyes found Subaru. She immediately rushed to his side, taking a seat so close their shoulders were touching, a blissful expression on her face.

Subaru shifted uncomfortably. “Hey.”

“Hi, Subaru,” she chirped. The fact that he was the center of her universe was obvious to every single person in the facility. Every person, that is, except for Subaru himself, who was too preoccupied with his own trauma and confusion to notice the teenage girl practically melting with affection next to him.

“We can’t keep calling her SCP-2396,” Dr. Buck mused, looking at the girl who was now, for all intents and purposes, a normal human. “She needs a name for the file.”

“She told me she likes Sugar,” Subaru offered, shrugging.

Sugar’s head whipped toward him, her eyes sparkling as if he’d just handed her the moon. “You remembered!” she squealed with delight, latching onto his arm. “I love it! I’m Sugar now! Thank you, Subaru!”

And so it was. SCP-2396 was reclassified as Neutralized. Sugar was given provisional clearance to free-roam certain sectors of the Site, a personal psychological evaluation and education plan, and a room down the hall from Subaru’s own newly assigned, significantly more comfortable quarters. His orange jumpsuit was taken away, and he was simply… Natsuki Subaru, a person of extreme interest. Not a D-Class, not a researcher. He was a key that opened locks no one else could see.

Naturally, the Foundation wanted to see if the key fit other locks.

A few days later, Dr. Buck approached him, Echidna trailing behind him as always, a silent, elegant shadow. “Subaru. We have another case. A benign humanoid. We’d like you to simply… interact with it. See what happens.”

They were led to a different wing of the facility, to a standard humanoid containment cell. "This is SCP-527," Dr. Buck explained, showing Subaru a picture on a tablet. It was a man in a standard jumpsuit, perfectly normal in every respect, except his head was that of a large, golden-scaled fish, its mouth permanently set in a gormless, downturned expression.

Subaru just stared at it, then sighed. “Okay. A fish guy. Why not.” His capacity for surprise had been utterly eroded.

He entered the room alone. Echidna and Dr. Buck watched from the observation booth. The room was sparse, containing only a bed, a table, and a chair. Sitting on the chair was the man from the picture, his fish head occasionally twitching, a gill on its side flaring.

“Another one?” the man’s voice was surprisingly normal, though it had a slightly bubbly, filtered quality. “Come to gawk at Mr. Fish? Get it over with.” His tone was dripping with a cynicism born from years of being a living oddity.

Subaru didn’t gawk. He simply walked forward, stopping a few feet from the man. “They told me your name was SCP-527. That sounds like a hassle to say. Do you have a real name?”

The fish head swiveled to look at him properly. Its glassy, black eyes held a flicker of surprise. “Never needed one. ‘Mr. Fish’ is what they all call me.”

“That’s a stupid name,” Subaru said bluntly. “I’m Subaru.” He extended his hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

SCP-527 stared at the offered hand as if it were a venomous snake. No one had ever offered to shake his hand. They took samples, they ran tests, they asked him questions, but they never made a simple, human gesture like this. After a long moment of hesitation, he shrugged his shoulders, a strange gesture for a man with a fish head, and reached out, his human hand grasping Subaru’s.

The moment their skin touched, a soft, golden light emanated from SCP-527’s neck. It wasn’t explosive, just a gentle, warm glow. The fish head seemed to waver, like a projection on a faulty screen. It shimmered, became translucent, and then dissolved into motes of light that faded into nothingness.

In its place, a human head seamlessly formed. Skin knitted itself into existence, a jawline defined itself, brown hair sprouted from a scalp, and a pair of startled blue eyes blinked open. A completely normal, unremarkable man in his late thirties now sat where the piscine anomaly had been.

He slowly raised his hands, his fingers trembling as he touched his face. He felt the cartilage of his nose. The lobes of his ears. The stubble on his chin. He took a deep, shuddering breath through a human mouth and nose for what must have been the first time in his life.

Tears welled in his new eyes. "…Holy shit," he whispered, his voice raw, unfiltered, and perfectly human. He looked at his hands, then at Subaru, a look of ecstatic disbelief on his face. He let out a choked sob that turned into a laugh. "I'M FINALLY NORMAL!"

The aftermath was even more astounding for the Foundation than Sugar’s case. SCP-527 was, for all intents and purposes, cured. He was gone. In his place was just a man. He tearfully requested the name ‘Frank’, the name his mother had intended to give him.

The O5 Council, the shadowy figures who ran the Foundation, issued a special decree. Frank was to be given a Level 4 amnestic treatment, not to erase his memory, but to integrate a new one. A plausible backstory, a life lived, a family. He would be released into the world, set up with a job, a wife and two kids who believed he had been with them all along. He would get the life he was robbed of.

Subaru watched as Frank, dressed in civilian clothes, was led away by two plain-clothed agents. Before he left, he turned to Subaru, his eyes still wet with tears of gratitude. “Thank you,” he mouthed, before turning and walking out of the Site, and out of the Foundation’s world, forever.

Subaru had saved him. He hadn't died. He hadn't failed. He had taken someone's suffering and erased it. The feeling was so foreign, so powerful, it left him lightheaded.

He turned to leave the observation room, and nearly bumped into Sugar, who had been waiting patiently for him the entire time.

“You did a good thing, Subaru,” she said, her smile soft and genuine.

“Yeah,” Subaru said, a real, tired smile gracing his own features. “I guess I did.”

He still didn't notice the way she looked at him, like he was the only person in the entire world. But Echidna, standing silently in the corner, noticed. And she found the impending complications of this burgeoning, one-sided romance to be an utterly fascinating variable in this already captivating new reality.

Life at Site-17 settled into a bizarre routine. For Subaru, it was a surreal reprieve from the constant cycle of death and despair he had known. Here, his curse, his scent, the very things that had marked him for death and misery, were a source of fascination and, bizarrely, a tool for good. For the Foundation, he was a living, breathing containment procedure, a skeleton key for anomalies that had stumped them for decades.

And for Sugar, life was a revelation. Every day was a new discovery. The taste of coffee from the staff cafeteria, the feeling of grass in the small outdoor recreational area, the sheer joy of a conversation that didn't end with someone running away or collapsing. Her world, once a lonely pink box, had expanded into a universe of new experiences, and at the center of that universe was Natsuki Subaru.

Her affection was as subtle as a neon sign. Sugar, being in her early twenties and a good few inches taller than the eighteen-year-old Subaru, had a natural physical presence that she used to its full advantage. Whenever they walked down the sterile corridors, she would be pressed right against his side. When they sat at a table, she would lean in close, her chin propped on her hands, her magenta eyes drinking him in. And then there was the matter of her figure. Sugar was generously proportioned, a fact Subaru was made acutely, painfully aware of every time she leaned over to point something out, or gave him a hug for bringing her a pastry, enveloping his face in a soft, sweet-smelling warmth that sent his brain into a full system reboot.

“Look, Subaru!” she’d say, leaning over his shoulder to look at a tablet he was reading, her ample chest pressing firmly against his back. “They have movies here! Have you ever seen a movie called ‘The Princess Bride’? Dr. Buck said it’s a classic!”

Subaru would stiffen, a furious blush creeping up his neck as he tried desperately to focus on the text and not the two very prominent reasons his focus was failing. “Uh, n-no, can’t say I have,” he’d stammer, trying to subtly lean forward. “Sounds… nice.”

He remained completely, profoundly oblivious to the romantic nature of her advances. In his mind, she was just… friendly. Overly friendly, perhaps. And very physically affectionate. He chalked it up to her being isolated for so long. He was the first person who had shown her kindness, so of course she was a bit clingy. The idea that this beautiful, kind, and now-perfectly-normal woman could be romantically interested in a broken, broke, pathetic mess like him was so far outside the realm of possibility that his brain didn't even process it as an option.

Echidna watched these interactions with the detached amusement of a biologist observing a particularly strange mating ritual. “Her pheromonal output increases by thirty-seven percent when in your proximity,” she commented one afternoon as Sugar happily dragged Subaru off to the rec room. “Fascinating. Her affection is literally a measurable, physical force.”

“She’s just happy to be out of her room,” Subaru muttered, pointedly ignoring the comment as he was pulled along.

This period of relative peace, however, was just the calm before the storm. The Foundation’s curiosity was insatiable. Subaru had neutralized a Safe-class anomaly and cured a Euclid-class one. The question hanging in the air, spoken only in hushed tones in the O5 Council’s secure communications, was inevitable: what would happen if he was pitted against a Keter?

The day came when Dr. Buck approached him, her expression more severe than usual. Sugar was with him, as always, but the guards who flanked Dr. Buck gently but firmly held her back.

“Subaru,” Dr. Buck began, her voice low. “We have… an ultimate test. It is extremely dangerous. You are under no obligation—”

“It’s SCP-049, isn’t it?” Subaru interrupted, his voice flat. He’d been reading the files. The Plague Doctor. The entity that believed humanity was afflicted with a ‘Pestilence’ only it could see, and whose ‘cure’ was to kill any human it touched and reanimate them as a mindless zombie.

Dr. Buck’s eyes widened slightly. “Yes. How did you—”

“It was the only one that made sense,” Subaru said with a tired sigh. “The one whose entire deal is an instant-death touch. You want to see if my… condition… affects it.” He looked past her to where Sugar was watching, her face etched with worry. He gave her a small, reassuring nod he didn't feel. “Alright. Let’s do it.”

The containment chamber for SCP-049 was in the deepest, most secure sector of the Site. The air grew colder as they descended. Echidna followed, her placid smile never wavering. She seemed utterly unconcerned, a fact that deeply unsettled every guard in their escort.

They arrived at a massive, vault-like door, surrounded by an observation deck shielded by layers of reinforced glass and powerful energy fields. Inside the dimly lit, sterile white chamber, a tall, cloaked figure stood perfectly still. SCP-049, with its ceramic plague doctor mask and dark, flowing robes, looked like Death itself had come to call.

“Are you certain about this?” Dr. Buck asked one last time, her hand hovering over a terminal.

“Just open the door,” Subaru said.

The heavy vault door hissed open with a groan of protesting metal. A wave of cold, sterile air washed over him. He stepped inside, and the door slammed shut behind him, the sound echoing with a dreadful finality.

Inside the observation room, every monitor was focused on him. Dr. Buck’s knuckles were white as she gripped the console. Sugar pressed her hands against the glass, her breath fogging it up. Echidna simply crossed her arms, her dark eyes gleaming with anticipation.

SCP-049 turned its head slowly, its masked gaze fixing on Subaru. Its voice, calm and resonant, filled the chamber, filtered through its mask. “Another subject. I can sense the disease in you. It is… overwhelming. The Pestilence has taken deep root. Fear not. I am the cure.”

The entity took a slow, deliberate step forward, its gloved hand outstretched. This was the moment. The lethal touch that had claimed the lives of countless researchers and D-Class personnel.

Subaru didn’t flinch. He didn’t back away. He simply stood his ground, his eyes, filled with a weariness that went beyond bone-deep, meeting the dark lenses of the mask. He took a breath and spoke, his voice clear and steady in the silent room.

“Touch me.”

SCP-049 paused. Its head tilted. This was… unexpected. No one had ever invited the cure. They always struggled, always screamed. This boy’s acceptance was an anomaly within an anomaly. Intrigued, it glided forward and gently, almost delicately, placed its gloved fingertips on Subaru’s exposed forearm.

In the observation room, they held their breath. One second. Two. Three.

Nothing.

Subaru didn’t collapse. He didn’t convulse. He just stood there, breathing.

And then, everything stopped.

The digital clocks on the monitors froze. The audio feed cut to dead silence. The guards outside the window were frozen mid-motion. For everyone watching, it was as if the universe had hit a pause button.

But inside the chamber, time flowed differently. For Subaru and SCP-049, the world didn’t stop; it fell away. The white walls dissolved into an infinite, starless void. There was no sound, no light, only the two of them, suspended in a moment outside of reality.

And then, a voice.

It did not come from the void around them. It came from within Subaru. It was a chorus of whispers and screams, a cacophony of pure, possessive rage that clawed its way out of his very soul. It was the sound of a love so deep and so twisted it had broken the laws of reality. It was Satella.

“NO PESTILENCE.”

The words slammed into SCP-049 not as sound, but as a physical force, a wave of pure conceptual denial. The entity, which had never known fear, staggered back, its hand recoiling from Subaru’s arm as if it had been burned.

“NO PESTILENCE,” the voice from Subaru’s heart roared again, louder this time, shaking the very foundation of their isolated reality. “NO PESTILENCE.”

It was not a request. It was a law. It was the ultimate, primordial disease staring down a lesser ailment and declaring its absolute, unquestionable sovereignty.

“GET OUT,” the voice shrieked, the possessiveness turning into a command of pure, undiluted loathing. “GET OUT. GET OUT.”

And just as suddenly as it had stopped, time resumed.

The clocks on the monitors ticked forward. The audio feed crackled back to life. The guards blinked, unaware that any time had passed at all.

Inside the chamber, the effect was dramatic. SCP-049 scrambled backward, its calm, clinical demeanor completely gone. It moved with a jerky, panicked haste, putting as much distance as possible between itself and Subaru. It stared at him, its masked face somehow conveying a sense of profound, existential terror. It had reached out to cure a disease and had instead touched an abyss, an abyss that had stared back and found it wanting.

Subaru’s expression was utterly blank. His eyes were empty, devoid of all emotion. He looked at the cowering plague doctor, the bringer of death who was now experiencing fear for the first time, and he spoke. His voice was a monotone, a cold, dead thing.

“You can’t cure someone whose disease is itself,” he said, the words echoing the truth that had just been laid bare. “If you are the cure, then I am the disease that must be kept from everyone else.”

He was not Natsuki Subaru in that moment. He was a vessel, a living testament to a love that defied death and a curse that overwrote reality. He was Satella’s ultimate anomaly, and in this place of monsters, he had just proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he was the greatest monster of them all.

In the observation room, there was a stunned, horrified silence. Dr. Buck stared, her mouth agape, her scientific worldview shattered into a million pieces. The guards looked on in disbelief. They had just witnessed a Keter-class entity, a being of pure, implacable death, recoil in utter terror.

Sugar began to cry, silent tears streaming down her face. She didn’t understand what she had just seen, but she had felt the sheer, soul-crushing despair that had poured out of Subaru in that moment.

Only Echidna smiled. It was a wide, genuine smile of pure, ecstatic delight. The knowledge she had just gained was priceless. She had just witnessed the fundamental nature of Subaru’s authority, the absolute power of his Return by Death, manifest itself and bring a god-like entity to its knees. It was more beautiful than she could have ever imagined.

Chapter Text

The fallout from the encounter with SCP-049 was immediate and profound. An emergency meeting of the O5 Council was convened. The entire Site was put on a level of alert usually reserved for full-scale containment breaches. Natsuki Subaru was no longer just a person of interest; he was a walking, talking paradox, a force that could stare down one of their most dangerous Keter-class anomalies and make it afraid. He was reclassified from "Thaumiel-potential" to a new, unique designation: "Axiom." A self-evident truth that defied their understanding of reality.

Subaru, for his part, was just exhausted. The encounter had dredged up the raw, possessive power of Satella in a way he had never felt before. It left a cold hollowness in his chest, a reminder of the abyss he was tied to. Sugar’s constant, warm presence was a small comfort, a tether to something resembling normalcy, even if he still couldn't comprehend the depth of her feelings.

It was only a day later when Dr. Buck, looking pale and sleep-deprived, approached him again. Her demeanor had changed. The clinical detachment was gone, replaced by a cautious, almost reverent respect.

"We have another… candidate," she said, forgoing the term 'test'. "SCP-1799. He calls himself 'Mr. Laugh'."

The file described a man in a cartoonish suit and a permanent grin. His anomaly was a form of auditory compulsion: anyone who heard him speak was forced to laugh uncontrollably, perceiving everything he said as the pinnacle of comedy. For the listener, it was a brief, confusing experience. For SCP-1799, it was a living hell. He couldn't have a serious conversation, couldn't express sadness or anger, couldn't connect with anyone. Every word he spoke, no matter how tragic, was met with hysterical laughter. He was the loneliest man in a world that found him hilarious.

Subaru was led to a soundproofed containment cell. Inside, a man in a slightly-too-large pinstripe suit was slumped in a chair. He looked up as Subaru entered, his face fixed in that wide, painted-on smile.

"Well, look what the cat dragged in!" SCP-1799 exclaimed, his voice booming with forced cheer. "Another lab coat ready for a chuckle? Let me tell you, the food here is so bad, the other day my soup spelled out 'help me' in alphabet pasta!"

Subaru didn't laugh. He didn't even smile. He just stood there, his eyes filled with a familiar empathy. He saw past the clown suit and the compulsory punchline. He saw a man screaming into a void that could only laugh back.

He walked forward, just as he had with Frank, and extended his hand. "That sounds awful," Subaru said, his voice quiet and sincere.

Mr. Laugh's smile faltered for the first time on record. He stared at Subaru's outstretched hand, then at his dead-serious face. Hesitantly, he reached out and shook it.

A strange, almost imperceptible shimmer passed through the air. Mr. Laugh took a deep, shuddering breath. He looked at Subaru, his eyes wide with a terrifying hope.

"...You aren't laughing," he whispered, the words barely audible.

Subaru just shook his head. "There's nothing funny about being trapped."

At that moment, as per protocol, another researcher entered the room to monitor the interaction. The man in the suit looked at the newcomer, his heart pounding. "I'm Mr. Laugh," he said, the old moniker sounding strange and foreign on his tongue.

The researcher just nodded. "We're aware of your designation, SCP-1799. Is D-93— is Mr. Subaru causing any issues?"

The man's jaw dropped. No laughter. No giggling. Just a standard, professional response. The dam of a lifetime of forced comedy broke. Tears streamed from his eyes, washing paths through his faint clown makeup.

"...You… You cured me," he sobbed, his voice cracking with raw, unadulterated relief. "I can finally talk… I CAN FINALLY BE NORMAL!" He collapsed back into his chair, weeping with a joy so profound it was painful to watch.

Later, during the debriefing, he was told about Frank and the offer the Foundation was extending to him. A new life. When asked what name he wanted, a real smile, a genuine one, touched his lips. "After all those years as Mr. Laugh," he said, wiping his eyes, "I think I want to keep a little something comical. Call me Carl. Carl Wheezer."

And just like that, another cell in the Euclid wing was marked for decommissioning.

The Foundation was now operating on a new paradigm. Subaru wasn't a weapon; he was a reset button. The next name on their list was one of the most tragic: SCP-1504, Joe Schmo. His anomaly was a form of perceptual blindness. People could not perceive him as a person. If he stood in a room, they wouldn't see him. If he spoke, they wouldn't hear him. If he bumped into someone, they would blame the wind or their own clumsiness. His actions were constantly reinterpreted by the minds of those around him to exclude his existence. He was a ghost in his own life, utterly and completely alone.

When Subaru entered his standard humanoid containment cell, it appeared empty. But Subaru’s perception, honed by a power that transcended physical laws, was different. He saw the faint, shimmering outline of a man standing in the corner, watching him with an expression of utter defeat.

"I can see you," Subaru said quietly, speaking to the 'empty' corner.

The shimmering outline solidified. A man of average height and build, with brown hair and weary eyes, stood there, looking at Subaru with stunned disbelief.

"I can see what you are doing, unlike the others," Subaru continued, his voice soft. "You're trying to get my attention. It must be a living hell."

Tears immediately welled in Joe's eyes. To be seen. To be acknowledged. It was a miracle he had given up on decades ago.

Subaru walked forward and, for the third time, offered a simple handshake. "I'm Subaru."

SCP-1504 looked at the hand, then back at Subaru's face, a face that was actually looking at him. He shrugged, a gesture of pure, hopeless habit, and shook it.

The effect was instantaneous. It felt like a static charge leaving his body. Joe opened his mouth to speak, to thank him, when two guards entered the room.

"Everything alright in here, Mr. Subaru?" one of them asked, his eyes flicking from Subaru to Joe and back again.

Joe froze. The guard... was looking at him. He had seen him.

"I… I'm fine," Joe stammered, his own voice sounding alien to him after so long.

The second guard's head snapped toward him. "Did you say something, sir?"

Joe's knees went weak with relief. He could be heard. He could be seen. He was real again. "Yes," he said, a massive, tearful grin spreading across his face. "Yes, I did."

The prison of invisibility had been shattered. Joe was given the same offer as Frank and Carl, a chance to live a life he was never allowed to have. Another cell was emptied. Another Little Mister was free. Subaru wasn't just neutralizing anomalies anymore; he was liberating souls.

The string of successes had created a palpable shift in the atmosphere of Site-17. The fear and caution that usually permeated the facility had been replaced by a buzzing, electric sense of anticipation. Natsuki Subaru was their miracle worker, their living axiom, and the Foundation was eager to see just how far his influence could stretch. The next target, however, was a significant step up in terms of sheer, unpredictable reality-bending.

"SCP-1765," Dr. Buck said, her voice tight with tension as they stood before a heavily reinforced containment chamber. "It's a trio of reality-bending entities of unknown origin. Their interactions are… unpredictable. They alter reality in ways that seem whimsical but have catastrophic consequences. We've lost three researchers just trying to establish a dialogue. Their effects are subtle and bypass most of our conventional defenses."

"So they're powerful, annoying, and they talk a lot. Got it," Subaru summarized, feeling a familiar sense of dread.

"That is a crude but not entirely inaccurate assessment," Dr. Buck conceded. "For this encounter, given the unpredictable nature of the threat, your associate will be permitted to accompany you." She nodded towards Echidna, who had been observing the pre-briefing with her usual placid interest.

Echidna's smile widened slightly. "How thoughtful. It has been a while since I've encountered beings who attempt to rewrite the narrative. This should prove… quaint."

The heavy door slid open, revealing a room that looked like a poorly constructed stage set of a Victorian parlor. The air was thick with the smell of dust and ozone. In the center of the room, three figures shimmered into existence. They were vaguely humanoid but seemed to flicker at the edges, as if they weren't fully committed to being there. One had fiery orange hair, another had mousy brown, and the third was a silent blonde.

SCP-1765-1, the one with orange hair, stepped forward and bowed theatrically. "Greetings, esteemed members of the Foundation. We come to you with auspicious news."

"Aye, you'll be right pleased you will," the brown-haired one (SCP-1765-2) added with a cheeky wink.

"Hello," the blonde one (SCP-1765-3) said softly.

Subaru blinked, unimpressed. "Okay, so what are you three supposed to do?"

SCP-1765-1 held up a hand, looking offended. "Pardon, sir, I'll be with you in a moment." It then turned to its companions. "Sisters, I thought we have agreed to let me do the introductions. You are embarrassing us."

"Oh, woops! Heehee, go on, we'll be quiet," SCP-1765-2 giggled, covering her mouth.

"Apologies," whispered SCP-1765-3.

SCP-1765-1 cleared its throat. "Ahm. Yes, as I was saying, Greetings. We are pleased to finally be able to make your acquaintance, for we have observed your organization for quite some time. Indeed, we have observed a great many, and out of them all you stood out like a shining beacon of progress in a dark sea. Well done."

"Oh, we are so very proud!" SCP-1765-2 chimed in, unable to help herself.

"Congratulations," the blonde added.

"Ok?" Subaru said, starting to get annoyed. "What—"

He stopped mid-word, a strange sensation filling his mouth. It felt thick, and the taste of ash and granite filled his senses. He tried to speak, but his tongue felt heavy, unresponsive. For a split second, he felt a fundamental change, a rewriting of his own biology. His tongue was turning to stone.

Before the change could even fully manifest, Echidna, who had been watching with a bored expression, simply lifted a single, delicate finger. She didn't speak, she didn't move from her spot, but a wave of invisible force, a pure negation, washed over Subaru. The petrifying sensation in his mouth vanished instantly, the taste of ash replaced by the normal, metallic tang of his own saliva. It happened so quickly that if he hadn't felt it, he would have doubted it occurred at all.

SCP-1765-1, completely oblivious to the failed attack, continued its monologue. "I told you, sir, I will be with you in a moment. Where was I? Oh, right. All this considered, we have decided that you, and no other, are worthy of receiving our assistance. It is an honor most rare, we assure you."

"Like a bloody steak it is, that's how rare," SCP-1765-2 added.

"Tartare," said SCP-1765-3.

Subaru’s patience snapped. "Seriously, what are you trying to do—"

This time, the attack was more direct. It wasn't a physical change, but an assault on his consciousness. A wave of profound, crushing vertigo washed over him. The edges of his vision went dark, the sound in the room warped and faded, and a powerful, irresistible pull dragged his mind towards a black, silent abyss. He was about to lose consciousness, his very awareness being edited out of the scene.

And again, Echidna acted.

This time, her smile widened into a genuinely amused grin. The trio's attempt was like a child trying to scribble on a masterpiece. With a flick of her wrist, a barrier of pure, shimmering white light erupted around Subaru. It was translucent, but it warped the air around it, a visible manifestation of absolute authority. The psychic assault slammed into the barrier and dissipated into nothing, not even causing a ripple.

Subaru stumbled, the feeling of near-unconsciousness vanishing as quickly as it had come, leaving him dizzy and disoriented. He looked down and saw the shimmering field of light encasing him, separating him from the rest of the room. He looked over at Echidna, who was watching the three entities with the condescending delight of a cat watching a cornered mouse.

"Ok seriously," Subaru yelled, his voice a mixture of fear and pure frustration as he pointed from the trio to the barrier and back. "What the fuck is going on?"

The three sisters of SCP-1765 finally stopped their speech. They stared at the shimmering barrier, then at the smiling Witch of Greed. For the first time since their manifestation, they seemed utterly, completely stumped. Their narrative had been interrupted by a far superior author.

The dynamic in the room had shifted entirely. The three sisters of SCP-1765 were no longer performers on a stage; they were specimens under a microscope, and Echidna was the one looking through the lens. Their reality-bending attempts grew more frantic, more desperate, as they tried to assert their control over the narrative.

First, the room's gravity inverted. Subaru felt a lurch as the floor tried to become the ceiling, but Echidna's barrier held him firmly in place, a small, personal bubble of normal physics in a world gone mad. The sisters, unaffected, floated in the air, looking down at him with frustration.

Next, the air in the room was replaced with a thick, viscous fluid that looked like molasses. It should have been impossible to breathe, but inside his protective sphere, Subaru’s air remained fresh and clean. He watched as the sisters swam through the goop, their expressions growing more strained.

They tried rewriting his personal history, whispering that he was their long-lost brother, that his memories of another world were a delusion. The psychic assault washed over his barrier like water on stone, having no effect. Echidna even let out a small, amused chuckle at the sheer audacity of their attempt to overwrite a history as convoluted and blood-soaked as Subaru's.

Finally, after a dozen failed attempts, SCP-1765-1 clapped its hands together, its theatrical smile looking forced and brittle. "Well! That was a most invigorating series of… preliminary tests! You have proven yourselves most resilient. Now, for the final part of our generous offer. A treat!"

With a flourish, a small table appeared between them, covered with a white tablecloth. On it were two tubs of ice cream, one vanilla and one chocolate, along with a scoop and a bowl.

"A simple taste test!" SCP-1765-2 chirped, her cheerfulness ringing hollow. "To prove your commitment to our partnership!"

SCP-1765-3, the silent blonde, moved behind the table, her hands hovering over the containers. She scooped a small ball of the vanilla into the bowl and offered it to Subaru. He took it, and nothing happened. He then took a bite of the chocolate. Again, nothing.

Echidna watched, her head tilted. "Their methods are crude," she commented quietly from beside Subaru, her voice laced with disappointment. "They layer reality like a cheap painter, rather than weaving it from the threads of causality. Still, be on your guard. The final stroke is always the most telling."

The blonde sister then reached under the table and brought out a third, smaller container. The ice cream inside was a stark, unnatural black. It seemed to absorb the light around it, and a faint, cold mist rose from its surface. This was it. The final test. The one that, in every prior instance, had resulted in the subject ceasing to exist.

SCP-1765-3 scooped a small portion of the black ice cream and placed it in the bowl, pushing it across the table toward Subaru. Her eyes were fixed on him, a flicker of desperate hope in them. This had to work.

Subaru looked at the ice cream, then at Echidna. She gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod. He was protected. He picked up the spoon, scooped up a tiny amount of the black substance, and brought it to his lips.

The moment it touched his tongue, the world went silent.

It wasn't a reality bend from the sisters. It was something deeper, more absolute. A cold that had nothing to do with temperature washed through Subaru's being. It was the cold of the grave, the final, undeniable truth of entropy. This was not a poison; it was a conceptual kill switch.

But before that switch could be fully thrown, a different power, an ancient and possessive force, rose from the depths of Subaru's soul and said NO.

Behind the table, SCP-1765-3's eyes widened in horror. A spiderweb of black cracks, like fractured obsidian, instantly spread across her face. She let out a silent gasp, her form flickering violently. The kill switch, denied its intended target by an authority far greater than the sisters could comprehend, had rebounded. It had followed the path of causality back to its source.

She collapsed, falling behind the table with a soft thud. In the observation room, her vital signs flatlined instantly. SCP-1765-3 was, by every metric the Foundation possessed, dead.

Her two sisters stared in abject terror at the spot where she had fallen. Their narrative had not just been interrupted; it had been hijacked and used to murder one of them.

Then, just as suddenly, the cold presence in Subaru’s soul receded. A flicker of warmth, a gentle, sorrowful sigh, seemed to pass through him.

Behind the table, the blonde sister gasped, her body jolting as if struck by lightning. She scrambled back to her feet, breathing in ragged, panicked gulps. The black cracks were gone. She was alive, trembling and staring at Subaru with a new, profound terror. Satella had given her a second chance.

Subaru slowly lowered the spoon, his face a mask of cold fury. He stood up and walked around the table to where the terrified, resurrected entity was huddled on the floor. He crouched down, his eyes locking with hers.

"I told you," he said, his voice low and devoid of any warmth. "Do not manipulate or try anything on me." He glanced at her two horrified sisters, ensuring they heard every word. "You are lucky Satella gave you a second chance. There will not be a third."

Chapter Text

The neutralization of SCP-1765 sent another shockwave through the Foundation. The Axiom hadn't just resisted a trio of narrative-warping entities; he had asserted his own story's dominance over theirs, with one of his core components—Satella—acting as a lethal editor. The list of anomalies deemed "safe" for him to interact with was growing, but so was the Foundation's understanding that they were dealing with a power far beyond their comprehension.

In the observation deck overlooking Subaru's comfortable, if sterile, living quarters, Sugar watched him read a book, a small, genuine smile on her face. These quiet moments were what she cherished. The terror of his trials was a constant weight on her heart, but seeing him safe, seeing him just be, was a balm to her soul. Her feelings had deepened from a simple crush into a fierce, protective devotion. He had saved her not just from a pink room, but from a profound loneliness she never knew how to escape.

Her peace was shattered when Dr. Buck entered the observation room, her expression grim. Echidna materialized silently in a corner, ever the observer.

"We have the next assignment," Dr. Buck said, her voice low. "It's SCP-953."

Sugar's smile vanished, replaced by a cold knot of dread in her stomach. She had access to the non-classified files now, a privilege granted to monitor Subaru's progress. She knew exactly who SCP-953 was. The Kumiho. A nine-tailed fox of Korean legend, a shapeshifter of immense power and cruelty. A being known for taking the form of a beautiful woman to lure, seduce, and then brutally murder her victims, often toying with their minds before delivering a gruesome, painful death.

The fact that the next SCP was a female, and a legendarily seductive one at that, sent a surge of pure, undiluted jealousy through Sugar. Her hands, resting on the console, clenched into tight fists, her knuckles turning white. "You can't be serious," she said, her voice trembling with a barely suppressed anger. "You're sending him in there with her? After what she does to people?"

"It is precisely because of what she does that he is the ideal candidate," Dr. Buck replied, her tone clinical but not unkind. "Her primary method of attack is psychological manipulation and mental domination. Subaru has proven uniquely, perhaps absolutely, resistant to such effects."

"It's not a risk, it's a death sentence!" Sugar shot back, turning to face the doctor, her magenta eyes flashing.

Echidna watched the exchange with a flicker of amusement. The girl's possessiveness was so raw, so beautifully transparent. "Her concern is not entirely without merit," the Witch commented, her voice smooth as silk. "However, the potential knowledge to be gained is immeasurable. A clash between a being of pure malice and one of absolute, cyclical suffering… the outcome is a fascinating unknown."

Sugar shot a venomous glare at Echidna before turning her pleading eyes back to Dr. Buck, but the decision was already made. She could only watch, her body shaking with a mixture of fury and terror, as Subaru was briefed and led away.

The containment chamber for SCP-953 was a large, open-air enclosure designed to resemble a tranquil Korean garden, surrounded by 30-foot-high concrete walls and a perimeter of guards trained to be immune to psychic influence. Subaru stepped inside, the heavy metal door sealing behind him.

Sitting on a smooth, grey rock beside a placid koi pond was a woman of breathtaking beauty. She had long, flowing black hair, eyes that seemed to hold ancient secrets, and a figure that was the very definition of allure, clad in a traditional, elegant hanbok. Nine, soft-looking fox tails swished gently behind her, a mesmerizing, hypnotic motion. This was SCP-953.

She turned her head, a slow, predatory smile gracing her perfect lips as her eyes raked over Subaru. "Well now," she purred, her voice a melody that promised paradise and ruin. "It has been so long since they sent me such a tender little morsel. You are filled with such… delicious pain. Come closer, little man. Let me soothe your sorrows."

She stood and began to walk toward him, her movements fluid and graceful, each step a carefully crafted invitation. Her psychic aura washed over him, a wave of promises—pleasure beyond imagining, an end to all his suffering, the warmth of an embrace that would make him forget every death, every failure.

Subaru didn't move. He let the wave of seduction hit him, and he felt… nothing. It was like a gentle breeze against a mountain of agony. The promises she whispered to his mind were hollow echoes compared to the screams of his own soul.

"Also, I don't think you understand," he said, his voice flat and unimpressed, cutting through her enchanting aura like a shard of ice. "You can't seduce me. I've been eaten alive by rabbits. Twice. I've had my limbs twisted off, my stomach torn open, and my mind shattered more times than I can count. Your little mental tricks are a vacation compared to a Tuesday for me. Nothing gets past me."

SCP-953 stopped dead in her tracks, her perfect smile faltering. Her psychic probe, which should have found a mind to twist and break, had instead slammed into a wall of pure, unadulterated trauma. The sheer density of the suffering radiating from him was not just a shield; it was an offensive weapon, pushing back against her power.

Subaru's gaze hardened. "So I'm going to ask you something. Why? Why do you kill?"

The Kumiho’s expression shifted from seductive to scornful. She let out a sharp, derisive laugh. "Why? You foolish little human, you ask why the wolf eats the sheep? I kill because you are weak. Because you are arrogant. For centuries, your kind has hunted me, betrayed me, tried to chain me. I kill because it is my nature, and because every scream is a small payment for the indignities I have suffered. I kill because it is fun."

Subaru listened, his expression unchanging. He had heard justifications for cruelty before. Roswaal's mad devotion, the Archbishops' twisted gospels. Hers was just another verse in the same song.

"When it comes to killing and doing things," he began, his voice low and intense, "I only do things to make sure others don't suffer. Only I can suffer. Only I should suffer." He took a step forward, the Witch's Scent flaring around him, a palpable miasma of death and despair that made even the ancient Kumiho flinch. "I don't cause others to suffer. I take it all onto myself to make sure they don't have to. However, if it means I have to suffer, to die a thousand times, to be torn apart again and again to save even one person from that fate… so be it."

He sighed, a deep, weary sound that seemed to carry the weight of a hundred lifetimes. He then looked SCP-953 directly in the eyes, his own gaze holding no malice, no judgment, only a profound, soul-deep exhaustion.

"I'm going to ask you to do one thing," he said. "Shake my hand. You are stronger than me, faster than me. You could rip my throat out before I could even blink. So don't think it's a trap."

He extended his hand.

SCP-953 stared at him, utterly bewildered. This boy was an enigma. He spoke of suffering as a shield and a purpose. He radiated an aura of death that dwarfed her own killing intent. He stood before her, a predator of legendary power, and showed no fear, only a strange, sorrowful pity. Her instincts screamed at her to tear him to pieces, but her curiosity, an instinct just as old, was piqued. What was this strange human? After a long, tense moment, she shrugged, a flicker of amusement in her dark eyes. She reached out her delicate, human-like hand and grasped his.

The moment their skin touched, a jolt went through her, not of electricity, but of pure, conceptual change. It was as if a lifetime of grime had been power-washed from her soul. The red haze of instinctual hatred, the compulsive need to dominate and kill, the cruel joy she took in suffering—it all just… evaporated. It wasn't destroyed; it was simply rendered null and void, overwritten by the absolute authority of his own suffering-for-others philosophy.

She was still a Kumiho. She still had her nine tails, her power, her memories. But the driving malice was gone. In its place was a sudden, shocking clarity. She looked at her own hand, then back at Subaru, and for the first time, she saw him not as prey, but as the source of a profound, earth-shattering miracle. He hadn't just cured her; he had saved her from herself. Her heart, which had for centuries beaten with a cold, predatory rhythm, now fluttered for an entirely different reason.

In the observation room, Sugar had been watching the entire exchange, her heart a jackhammer against her ribs. When the Kumiho had reached for his hand, she had nearly shattered the console with her fist. But then… she saw the change. She saw the look of pure, unadulterated awe on the fox-woman's face as she stared at Subaru.

The relief that he was safe was instantly consumed by a fresh wave of incandescent rage. It was happening again. Another one. Another beautiful, powerful woman, now utterly captivated by her Subaru. Sugar was shaking, her fists clenched so tight her nails drew blood from her palms.

Echidna, standing in the corner, let a slow, deeply satisfied smile spread across her face. The data she was gathering was exquisite. Subaru was not just a key; he was a catalyst. He didn't just neutralize anomalies; he converted them. And the emotional fallout, the burgeoning web of affection and jealousy now spinning around him, was proving to be the most fascinating experiment of all.

The day after SCP-953’s reclassification as "Miwa," the entire social ecosystem of Site-17 warped. The Foundation, an organization built on sterile procedure and the cold classification of horrors, suddenly found itself hosting a high-stakes romantic drama. It was the only topic of conversation in the cafeterias and break rooms. Bets were being placed. Alliances were being formed. And at the center of it all was Natsuki Subaru, the most emotionally dense object in the known universe.

His "day off" was a new concept for him. No tests, no life-or-death conversations with reality-bending entities. He was encouraged to relax, to explore the non-hazardous sectors of the facility. He found himself in the Site's surprisingly well-stocked library, a quiet, comfortable space with soft chairs and the pleasant smell of old paper. He was trying to read a light novel, a simple fantasy story, but his mind kept drifting. He thought of Emilia, of Rem, of the life he'd been ripped from. He was safe here, safer than he'd been in years, but it was a gilded cage, and the loneliness was a familiar ache in his chest.

He was so lost in thought that he didn't notice the silent, graceful approach of a figure until she spoke, her voice a silken melody that cut through the quiet hum of the library.

"A story of heroes and dragons," Miwa observed, leaning over the back of his chair. "How quaint. I knew a dragon once. Terribly arrogant beast. Used his own hoard as a bed and constantly complained about the coins getting stuck between his scales."

Subaru jumped, startled. He looked up to see Miwa smiling down at him. She was dressed in simple, modern clothing—jeans and a soft, black sweater—but she wore them with an innate elegance that made them look like high fashion. Her nine tails were gone, hidden by some innate glamour, but her predatory grace remained. She wasn't just beautiful; she was captivating, her every movement a study in confidence.

"Oh, uh, hey Miwa," Subaru stammered. "Didn't see you there."

"My apologies for startling you," she said, though her smile suggested she wasn't sorry at all. She gracefully slid into the armchair next to his, crossing her legs and fixing him with an intense, knowing gaze. "I find myself at a loss. For the first time in centuries, I have no desire to kill the people around me. It leaves one with a rather large amount of free time. I thought perhaps you could… guide me."

Her approach was a masterclass in subtlety. She positioned herself close, but not touching, creating an intimate space around them. Her words were simple, but her tone was laden with a deeper meaning. She was a predator, and while her desire to kill was gone, the thrill of the hunt remained. Subaru was her new, fascinating prey, and the prize was not his life, but his heart.

Before Subaru could formulate a response, a whirlwind of pink and righteous indignation descended upon them.

"Subaru! I've been looking all over for you!" Sugar chirped, her voice a little too loud for the library. She wedged herself between their two chairs, effectively breaking Miwa's carefully constructed intimate space. She was holding two large cups of milkshakes. "I got you strawberry! It's your favorite, right? I remembered from that one time you mentioned it!"

She beamed at him, her affection as bright and direct as a spotlight. Then, she turned her gaze to Miwa, and the temperature in the room dropped several degrees. Her smile became tight, her eyes narrowed. "Oh. Hello, Miwa. I didn't realize you were bothering him."

"I wasn't bothering him," Miwa replied, her voice losing none of its silken smoothness. "We were having a conversation. Something adults do. About dragons."

"Well, I brought him a milkshake," Sugar retorted, pushing the cup into Subaru’s hands. "Because I listen to what he likes."

The battle lines were drawn. To everyone else in the room—the two researchers pretending to read at a nearby table, the librarian peering over his desk—the conflict was painfully obvious. To Subaru, it was just… confusing.

"Uh, thanks, Sugar," he said, taking the milkshake. "And Miwa, that's cool about the dragon."

He was a neutral territory being fought over by two superpowers, and he hadn't even noticed the war had started.

Later that day, Sugar was fuming in the rec room, viciously mashing buttons on a game controller. Miwa had monopolized Subaru for nearly an hour, captivating him with ancient stories and legends, making Sugar's offer of video games seem childish and clumsy.

"It is a fascinating tactical problem, is it not?"

Sugar yelped and turned to see Echidna standing behind her, observing the scene with her unnerving, placid smile.

"What do you want?" Sugar snapped, not in the mood for the Witch's cryptic nonsense.

"I am merely an observer of human nature," Echidna said, her dark eyes glittering. "And I have observed that your current methods are… inefficient. Your approach is one of direct, emotional appeal. The Kumiho, by contrast, employs centuries of experience in psychological and social manipulation. You are bringing a battering ram to a chess match."

Sugar glared at her. "So what? You think I should just give up?"

"Of course not," Echidna said, a hint of genuine amusement in her voice. "That would be a boring conclusion. I am merely suggesting you leverage your own unique assets more effectively. For instance, there is the matter of physical advantage."

Sugar blinked. "Physical advantage?"

"Indeed," Echidna continued, her tone as clinical as a researcher's. "Based on my observations and a cross-reference of human aesthetic standards, you possess a notable superiority in one specific area. By my estimation, your chest is an E-cup, whereas Miwa's is a D-cup. While both are statistically significant, yours presents a clear, measurable advantage. A strategic deployment of this asset could disrupt your rival's more subtle tactics."

Sugar stared at the Witch, her face slowly turning a shade of red that matched her favorite strawberry milkshake. Was she… was Echidna, the ancient Witch of Greed, giving her flirting advice? And was it the most bizarre, objectifying, and strangely logical advice she had ever heard?

Yes. Yes, it was.

And in her desperation, Sugar decided to listen.

Chaos ensued.

The next day, Subaru was in the cafeteria, trying to eat a bowl of cereal. Sugar "accidentally" dropped her fork. "Oh, clumsy me!" she exclaimed, then bent over very, very slowly to pick it up, giving Subaru an unobstructed, eye-level view of the "asset" Echidna had mentioned. Subaru, meanwhile, was staring intently at the back of the cereal box, completely missing the display.

Later, they were watching a movie in the rec room. Sugar insisted on sitting next to him. Halfway through, she declared, "I'm cold!" and proceeded to hug his arm, pressing herself against him with the force of a hydraulic press. Subaru, utterly oblivious, just patted her head. "You can borrow my jacket if you want," he offered, completely missing the point.

The pinnacle of the chaos came that evening. Miwa had engaged Subaru in a conversation about the nature of souls, a topic he found morbidly fascinating. She was leaning in, her voice a conspiratorial whisper, when Sugar charged in with a tray of freshly baked cookies.

"I made cookies, Subaru!" she announced. "And I need help getting them to the top shelf to cool!"

She dragged him over to a kitchen counter, handed him the heavy tray, and pointed to a ridiculously high shelf. "Can you put them up there for me?"

As Subaru strained to lift the tray, Sugar stood directly in front of him, "spotting" him, her face just inches from his chest. "Be careful!" she said, pressing in closer.

Miwa watched from the doorway, an arched eyebrow her only comment. This was amateurish. Childish. She glided over. "You know," she said to Subaru, her voice cutting through Sugar's clumsy attempt. "Lifting with your back like that is terrible for your posture. Here."

She placed a hand on Subaru's lower back, her touch sending a jolt through him. "Bend your knees. Engage your core." Her other hand came to rest on his shoulder, her fingers applying a gentle, knowing pressure. She was "helping," but in a way that was intimate, knowledgeable, and undeniably sensual.

Subaru was now trapped. Sugar was plastered to his front, a wall of determined, sweet-smelling affection. Miwa was behind him, her touch both instructive and electrifying. He was caught in a crossfire of E-cups and ancient seduction techniques, holding a tray of rapidly cooling cookies, and all he could think was, "Wow, my friends are really helpful."

Echidna, watching from a hidden security camera in Dr. Buck's office, took a slow, deliberate sip of her tea. The knowledge she was gathering was simply exquisite.

The fragile peace forged by the absurdity of the ongoing love triangle was shattered the next morning. The air in Site-17 was different. The usual low hum of activity was replaced by a tense, heavy silence. Guards walked with a rigid posture, researchers spoke in hushed, anxious whispers. Subaru was summoned to the main briefing room, and the moment he saw Dr. Buck’s face, he knew this was different. Her professional mask was still in place, but it was strained, her eyes holding a deep, grim apprehension.

Sugar and Miwa were already there, having been called in as primary observers of Subaru’s condition. Echidna, as always, simply was.

“Subaru,” Dr. Buck began, her voice devoid of its usual clinical detachment, replaced by something that sounded almost like a plea. “The Council has reviewed your progress. Your… unique interaction with anomalous properties has led them to authorize a final, definitive test. It is, by every metric we possess, the most dangerous interaction you have yet faced.”

She brought up a file on the main screen. It was heavily redacted, but the designation was clear: SCP-096.

A collective gasp went through the junior researchers in the room. Sugar’s face went deathly pale, her hands flying to her mouth as a choked sob escaped her. Miwa, for the first time since her transformation, lost her confident composure; her posture stiffened, and a flicker of genuine fear entered her ancient eyes. Even she knew the legends of The Shy Guy.

“Its trigger is absolute,” Dr. Buck stated, her voice a low monotone, as if reciting a death sentence. “Any individual who views SCP-096’s face, whether directly, in a photograph, or even a video recording, will be targeted. Once triggered, SCP-096 enters an unstoppable rage state. It will run, swim, or break through any barrier on Earth to reach its target. Upon arrival, it will… dismember and consume them. One hundred percent lethality. No exceptions. No survivors.”

She turned to face Subaru directly. “The test protocol is simple. A D-Class will be shown a photograph to trigger the rage state. You will then enter the containment chamber. The goal is to see if your anomalous field can pacify it.”

The room was silent, save for Sugar’s quiet, terrified weeping. The plan was insane. They were going to point a living nuke at a target and then ask Subaru to walk into the blast zone.

Subaru listened to the entire briefing, his expression unchanging. He looked at the redacted image on the screen, at the clinical description of a perfect, unstoppable killing machine. He thought about the Great Rabbit, a mindless, swarming force of nature that had devoured him whole. He thought about Petelgeuse, a madman whose Unseen Hands had turned his body into a broken puppet. He thought about his own countless, agonizing deaths.

An unstoppable monster that would hunt him down and tear him apart? It wasn't a new threat. It was a Tuesday.

He let out a short, sharp breath that was almost a laugh. It was a sound completely devoid of humor, a sound of pure, bone-deep exhaustion.

“Fuck it,” he said, the two words cutting through the terrified silence of the room. He looked at Dr. Buck, his eyes holding the flat, deadened look of a man who had already seen the abyss a hundred times over. “Let’s get this over with.”

The containment cell for SCP-096 was a fifty-foot steel cube at the bottom of the deepest shaft in the facility. The observation room was a bunker, shielded by feet of reinforced concrete and a pane of specialized one-way glass that cost more than a fighter jet.

Subaru stood before the final airlock, dressed in a simple jumpsuit. On the other side of the glass, he could see the terrified faces of the research team. He saw Sugar, her face pressed against the glass, tears streaming down her cheeks as she silently begged him not to go. He saw Miwa, her fists clenched, her expression a mixture of terror for him and a cold, predatory fury at the Foundation for doing this. And he saw Echidna, her smile wider than ever, her eyes alight with an ecstatic, feverish curiosity.

“Triggering SCP-096 now,” a voice crackled over the intercom. “Subject D-9036 has viewed the photograph. We have auditory confirmation of the distress state.”

A sound began to bleed through the thick walls. It started as a low, mournful sob, then rapidly escalated into a high-pitched, hysterical shriek of pure, undiluted agony and rage. It was a sound that scraped at the soul, a sound of something fundamentally broken.

“The subject is in his rage state,” the voice said, trembling slightly. “Open the chamber for Axiom.”

The massive steel door hissed open. Subaru took a breath and stepped inside.

The chamber was cold and empty, save for the figure huddled in the far corner. It was tall, impossibly thin, its skin a pale, bone-white. Its limbs were grotesquely elongated, and its hands were covering its face as it screamed, that terrible, world-ending shriek echoing off the metal walls.

Subaru didn’t hesitate. He didn’t try to talk to it. He didn’t try to reason with it. He walked directly toward the screaming, cowering creature. He knew what the Foundation wanted. They wanted to see if his passive aura would calm it down. But Subaru was done with passive. He was done being a key. He was going to be the hand that turned it.

He reached the monster and did the one thing no one in the history of the universe had ever done willingly. He reached out and gently pulled SCP-096’s hands away from its face.

And he looked.

The face was not monstrous in a conventional way. It was an elongated, bone-white canvas of pure, unending agony. The mouth was a lipless slit, stretched wide in that eternal scream, filled with small, needle-like teeth. But the eyes… the eyes were tiny, milky-white orbs that held no iris, no pupil, just a look of such profound, soul-shattering shyness and pain that it was almost impossible to bear.

The moment Subaru’s eyes met its, the scream hitched. It had a target. Its one, singular purpose in its miserable existence was now to destroy the boy in front of it.

But before the rage could fully consume it, before its limbs could lash out, Subaru did the second impossible thing. He reached out his other hand and gently touched the creature’s tear-streaked, bone-white cheek.

The effect was instantaneous and absolute.

The scream died in its throat, cut off with a choked, wet gasp. The creature’s entire body went rigid, then began to twitch violently, as if a thousand seizures were wracking its emaciated frame at once. The fundamental law of its being—see face, kill viewer—had just collided with the fundamental law of Subaru’s being—I will shoulder all suffering. And Subaru’s law was stronger.

The twitching stopped. The creature’s impossibly long arms fell to its sides. The lipless slit of a mouth, which had been stretched in a scream for as long as anyone had known, slowly, shakily, closed. For the first time on record, SCP-096 was silent.

It slowly raised a trembling hand, not to its face, but to Subaru’s hand, which was still resting on its cheek. And then, a voice, rough and cracked from a lifetime of disuse, rasped through the silent chamber.

“…..Wait…..”

The sound was a thunderclap in the observation bunker. Researchers fell out of their chairs. Dr. Buck stared, her jaw hanging open, all scientific composure gone, replaced by pure, unadulterated shock.

“…..I…..” the creature rasped, its milky eyes blinking slowly. “…..Can…..Talk……How…..”

It took a shuddering, rattling breath. Its mouth, which had been a simple slit, seemed to gain a new definition, the pale flesh forming into something that resembled actual lips. It was still bone-white, still terrifyingly inhuman, but it was changing. It was becoming something else.

It then turned its head, its gaze sweeping past Subaru and toward the one-way observation window.

Panic erupted in the bunker. A dozen researchers screamed and dove for cover, a deeply ingrained, conditioned terror taking over. They had seen the face. They were all dead men.

But the scream didn’t come. The charge didn’t happen.

The creature, SCP-096, just… looked at them. Its milky eyes held not rage, but a dawning, horrified confusion. It was seeing them, and they were seeing it, and the universe was not ending.

It had a consciousness. A self. The rage, the compulsion, the curse—it was all gone, absorbed and nullified by the boy who was the living embodiment of suffering.

In the bunker, Sugar was on her knees, sobbing with a relief so profound it was physically painful. Miwa was leaning against a wall for support, her legs weak, staring at Subaru with an expression of pure, unadulterated awe.

And Echidna… Echidna was laughing. A quiet, breathless, utterly delighted laugh. She had just witnessed the impossible. She had just seen a fundamental constant of a universe be rewritten. The knowledge, the sheer, beautiful, impossible knowledge of it all, was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted.

The reclassification of SCP-096 from Keter to Safe was a paradigm shift for the entire SCP Foundation. The creature, who now haltingly referred to himself as ‘Shy’, was moved to a comfortable humanoid containment suite. He was no longer a walking apocalypse but a patient, a being with a dawning consciousness, slowly learning to speak from therapists who interacted with him via video link. His existence was a constant, terrifying reminder of the power Natsuki Subaru wielded—the power to not just neutralize, but to redeem.

Subaru, however, felt no sense of accomplishment. The hollow feeling in his chest remained. He was a tool, a key, and the Foundation was still looking for more locks to open.

The next briefing was held a day later. The atmosphere was significantly less tense than the last one. Dr. Buck stood before the main screen, a file displayed with a designation that seemed almost comical after the existential dread of SCP-096: SCP-1472.

“This is a unique, extradimensional anomaly,” Dr. Buck began, her tone returning to its familiar clinical professionalism. “It manifests as a nightclub that seems to exist in multiple realities simultaneously. Patrons report a wide variety of non-human and anomalous entities inside. The primary anomalous effect is…” She paused, clearing her throat. “The establishment’s theme is that of an adult entertainment venue. A… strip club.”

The silence in the room was deafening.

“The goal,” Dr. Buck continued, trying to push through the sudden, awkward tension, “is for Subaru to enter, observe, and report on any interactions. We need to know if his presence stabilizes the dimensional drift or has any effect on the patrons—”

“NO!”

The shout was a synchronized roar of pure, unadulterated fury from two very different sources. Sugar shot to her feet, her face flushed with righteous anger, her hands slammed down on the briefing table. Miwa didn’t move from her seat, but a low, dangerous growl rumbled in her chest, and her eyes flashed with a predatory, possessive light that made the junior researchers shrink back in their chairs.

“Absolutely not!” Sugar yelled, pointing an accusatory finger at Dr. Buck. “You are not! Sending him! Into a… a filthy place like that! Have you lost your minds?”

“My associate is correct, though for different reasons,” Miwa added, her voice a low, silken threat. “The boy has proven his worth against gods and monsters. You would demean him by sending him to a den of cheap, fleshy distractions? He is a key to unlocking the secrets of the universe, not a patron for some… cosmic brothel.” Her words were dignified, but the underlying message was clear: My prize is not to be paraded around for the amusement of others.

Dr. Buck was taken aback, completely unprepared for the unified, ferocious front. “This is a scientific exploration, not a recreational outing! His emotional state is irrelevant to the data we need to—”

“His emotional state is everything!” Sugar shot back, her voice cracking. “He’s been through hell! You can’t just… throw him into a place designed to exploit people! It’s wrong!”

“Furthermore,” Miwa continued, standing up with a fluid grace that was utterly menacing, “I can assure you, Doctor, that if he is made to feel uncomfortable or is approached by any of the… dancers… I will personally find a way to demonstrate the more traditional, and frankly lethal, aspects of my folklore. And I assure you, your concrete walls will not stop me.”

The threat hung in the air, cold and sharp. Dr. Buck looked from Sugar’s tearful, furious face to Miwa’s cold, deadly glare. She glanced at the security chief, who looked as if he’d rather fight SCP-682 than get between these two and their shared obsession. This was a battle she could not win.

Echidna, who had been watching the entire scene with rapt attention, let out a soft, delighted sigh. The convergence of righteous innocence and predatory possessiveness, all focused on a single point of contention, was a beautiful, chaotic equation.

Dr. Buck pinched the bridge of her nose, a rare crack in her professional armor. “Fine,” she conceded with a sharp sigh of frustration. “Fine! The mission to SCP-1472 is scrubbed. We will proceed with an alternate assignment.” She typed furiously on her console, her movements stiff with annoyance. A new file replaced the old one. SCP-035.

The room’s atmosphere shifted again, from awkward tension to a cold, familiar dread. The Possessive Mask. A white porcelain comedy mask that, when approached, would attempt to possess any nearby individual. If a host was found, it would take complete control, subsuming their personality and using their body as its own. Over time, it would secrete a highly corrosive black fluid that would decay the host body from the inside out, turning it into little more than a walking corpse.

“The protocol is for Subaru to approach the containment cell,” Dr. Buck said, her voice clipped. “We will monitor for any psychic influence. He is not, under any circumstances, to touch the artifact.”

Subaru stood before the sealed glass case. Inside, resting on a black velvet pedestal, was SCP-035. It was a simple, elegant comedy mask, its painted smile seeming to mock the sterile environment around it. He could feel its psychic presence reaching for him, a greasy, cloying whisper in the back of his mind, promising knowledge, power, freedom from his pain.

It was a pathetic attempt. It was like a child whispering secrets to a king who had already heard the screams of creation.

He looked back at the observation window. He saw the anxious faces of Sugar and Miwa, the cold focus of Dr. Buck, the ecstatic curiosity of Echidna. They wanted him to stand here. They wanted him to wait, to be a passive subject in their experiment.

He was tired of being a subject.

With a fluid motion that caught everyone by surprise, Subaru reached out, keyed in the emergency release code he had memorized from the file, and opened the case. Alarms blared. Red lights flashed.

“Subaru, no!” Sugar screamed, her voice a distorted cry through the intercom.

Before any of the guards could react, Subaru picked up the mask. It felt cool and smooth in his hands. The whispers in his mind grew louder, more desperate, more promising. He looked at his reflection in the dark eyeholes of the mask, his own face an emotionless, empty canvas.

Then, he put it on.

The world went silent. The mask fit perfectly against his face. He felt a slimy, invasive presence slither from the porcelain and try to force its way into his mind, to burrow into his consciousness and take root. He felt the back of the mask grow wet, the corrosive fluid beginning to form, ready to decay its new host.

But nothing happened.

The fluid didn’t touch his skin. The invasive presence slammed into a wall within his soul, a wall of shadow and starlight that was ancient and absolute.

And from behind that wall, a voice, a chorus of loving, possessive rage, screamed at the intruder.

“GET OUT.”

The mask’s entity recoiled, shocked. It had never met resistance. It pushed again, harder this time, trying to overwhelm the barrier.

“GET OUT,” Satella’s voice roared within his mind, the force of it making the very porcelain of the mask vibrate against his face. “GET OUT. GET OUT.”

This was not a negotiation. It was an eviction by a primordial force. This mind, this soul, this vessel of infinite suffering and infinite love, was her property. No other entity was permitted entry. The mask’s consciousness was not just repelled; it was savaged, torn at by shadows that dripped with a love so powerful it was indistinguishable from hate.

“GET OUT!”

With a final, desperate shriek that only Subaru and the mask could hear, the entity retreated, pulling its presence back into the porcelain shell, terrified.

Subaru stood there for a long moment in the screaming silence of the alarms. Then, he slowly reached up and took the mask off. He placed it gently back on its pedestal. The back of it was completely dry. Its psychic whispers were gone, replaced by a cowering, terrified silence.

He turned to the observation window, his face still a perfect, emotionless mask of its own. He had faced down another god, another absolute, and had found it wanting. But he felt no victory. He felt nothing at all. He was just the stage upon which greater powers fought, and he was so, so tired of the play.

Chapter Text

The day was done. The alarms from the SCP-035 incident had long since faded, replaced by the quiet, sterile hum of the facility's ventilation. For Subaru, the silence was no different from the screaming. Both were just noise that failed to penetrate the thick, gray fog of his exhaustion. He had faced down a mind-thief backed by the raw, possessive power of a Witch, and he felt nothing. No pride, no relief, just the profound, bone-deep weariness of a soul stretched far beyond its limit.

He was walking down a long, white corridor, heading back to his quarters. For once, he was alone. Sugar was being debriefed by a psychologist about her "overly protective tendencies," and Miwa had been called away by Dr. Buck for an evaluation of her own. It was a rare moment of solitude, and he cherished the lack of emotional chaos, even if his own internal world was a silent storm.

He was just passing a junction when it happened. A blur of motion in his peripheral vision. A figure, clad in a dark, nondescript uniform he didn't recognize, sprinted past him from a side corridor. Subaru’s instincts, honed by countless ambushes and sudden deaths, flared. He tensed, ready to turn, ready to fight, guessing it was some kind of containment breach, another monster loose in the halls.

But then he felt it.

It wasn’t a punch or a shove. It was a cold, sharp, intimate violation. A sudden, piercing pressure in his side, followed by a sickening, wet warmth that began to spread across his tracksuit. He stopped, his body frozen in place. He slowly looked down.

Protruding from his abdomen, just below his ribs, was the hilt of a crude, blade-like object, almost like a sharpened piece of rebar fashioned into a shiv. The figure was already gone, a fading echo of footsteps down the hall.

For a long moment, Subaru just stood there, staring at the foreign object embedded in his flesh. The pain hadn't registered yet. His mind, so accustomed to catastrophic, world-ending threats, couldn't quite process this simple, brutal act of violence. Getting stabbed... it felt so mundane. So... personal.

Then, the pain arrived. It wasn't the clean, conceptual erasure of SCP-1765 or the psychic assault of SCP-035. This was primal. A hot, searing fire that tore through his nerves, a visceral agony that his body remembered all too well. His breath hitched. The white walls of the corridor seemed to waver, to tilt. The floor rushed up to meet him.

He collapsed to his knees, the impact sending a fresh, blinding wave of pain through him. And he began to scream.

It was not a cry for help. It was a raw, unfiltered sound of a dam breaking, a lifetime of agony pouring out in a single, horrifying shriek that echoed through the sterile halls. It was the scream of a boy who had been eaten alive, who had been frozen solid, who had been beaten to a pulp, who had been forced to watch his friends die, over and over and over again.

The response was immediate. Guards and researchers rounded the corner to find a scene of pure horror: their Axiom, their miracle worker, kneeling in a rapidly expanding pool of his own blood, screaming as if his soul was being ripped from his body.

The journey to the infirmary was a blur of panicked shouts and frantic movement. Sugar and Miwa, hearing the commotion, arrived just as he was being loaded onto a gurney. The sight of him, pale and bleeding, broke them.

"Subaru!" Sugar shrieked, tears instantly flooding her eyes as she tried to push through the guards.

Miwa’s reaction was colder, more terrifying. Her eyes narrowed into slits, and a low, guttural growl escaped her lips. The ancient predator within her had resurfaced, and its gaze swept the corridor, hunting for the one responsible.

As the medics worked, cutting away his tracksuit and applying pressure to the wound, Subaru’s mind fractured. The physical pain was a key, unlocking a Pandora's Box of remembered agonies.

The cold… so cold… his limbs turning to ice, shattering against the stone steps of the loot house… the feeling of his own warm blood freezing on his skin…

"He's going into shock! Blood pressure is dropping!"

White fur stained red… countless tiny mouths, sharp teeth tearing, burrowing, consuming… the wet, hot agony of being eaten alive from the inside out… the sound of his own flesh being ripped from his bones…

"We're losing him! Get the defibrillator!"

The Unseen Hands… twisting, crushing… the feeling of his own limbs being turned against him, his spine snapping, his world turning into a kaleidoscope of pure, white-hot pain… Petelgeuse’s insane laughter echoing in his ears…

And through it all, one image. One constant. A girl with silver hair and amethyst eyes. The reason he endured. The reason he fought. The reason he died.

Emilia…

Emilia…

EMILIA…

EMILIA!!!!!

"EMILIA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

He bolted upright on the operating table, his eyes wide with a wild, desperate terror that had nothing to do with the infirmary. The scream tore from his throat, a name that meant nothing to anyone in this world, but was the absolute center of his. It was a cry for a home he couldn't reach, for a person he might never see again. The sheer psychic force of his despair slammed into everyone in the room, making them stagger back.

A doctor, recovering quickly, jabbed a syringe into his arm. The powerful sedative took hold, and his eyes rolled back as he collapsed back onto the table, unconscious once more.

Two hours later, he was patched up. The wound was severe but not fatal, the weapon having missed any major organs. He lay in a recovery bed, staring at the white ceiling, the emotionless mask back in place. Sugar sat by his bedside, her face puffy from crying, silently holding his hand. Miwa stood guard by the door like a sentinel, her cold fury a palpable presence in the room. Dr. Buck and Echidna stood at the foot of the bed.

"We have the attacker in custody," Dr. Buck said softly. "A member of the Chaos Insurgency who had infiltrated the Site. He's being interrogated. You are safe."

Subaru didn't respond for a long moment. He just stared at the ceiling. Then, he slowly turned his head, his tired eyes finding Echidna.

"Before I finish today," he said, his voice a hoarse whisper, "I owe Echidna one thing. She told me to do the SCP she picked."

Sugar gasped. "Subaru, no! You were just stabbed! You need to rest!"

"He's right," Miwa said, her voice tight. "This is madness. You are in no condition—"

"I'm in the perfect condition," Subaru interrupted, his voice gaining a hard, brittle edge. He sat up, ignoring the sharp pain in his side. "This… this was just a reminder. Of what my purpose is. To suffer. Let's get it over with."

Dr. Buck looked hesitant, a flicker of genuine concern on her face. "Subaru, this is not necessary. The Council would understand—"

"What is the assignment?" Subaru asked, his gaze fixed on Echidna.

The Witch of Greed smiled, a slow, deeply satisfied smile. Her chosen test had been interrupted, but this outcome was far more interesting. "The Foundation has its procedures, Doctor. But my request was a personal one, a test of a different sort. The subject I am most curious about is SCP-231."

A deathly silence fell over the room. Even the name was taboo. Dr. Buck went rigid, her face draining of all color. "Absolutely not. That is out of the question. Procedure 110-Montauk is sacrosanct. No one is assigned to SCP-231. No one."

"And yet," Echidna countered, her voice as smooth and cold as glass, "you have a subject here whose entire existence is a monument to suffering. A boy whose psychological trauma dwarfs anything your 'Procedure' could ever hope to inflict. You are worried about the psychological toll on your D-Class personnel, are you not? Worried that the… details… of the procedure would break them?"

She turned her dark, knowing eyes to Subaru. "He is already broken. He has experienced horrors you cannot even begin to fathom. He is the only person in this world, perhaps in any world, who can walk into that room, perform the necessary actions, and walk out unchanged. Because no horror you can show him can compare to the ones he keeps locked inside."

Her words were a death sentence delivered with a scholar's curiosity. She was the only one who knew the truth of his past, and she was wielding it like a weapon, not for the Foundation's sake, but for her own insatiable, greedy desire to see what would happen.

The journey to the containment sector for SCP-231 was a descent into a special kind of hell. The sterile white corridors of the upper levels gave way to grim, grey concrete. The air grew heavy, thick with a psychic residue of unspoken, institutionalized horror. Every guard they passed had a haunted, thousand-yard stare. Every researcher looked hollowed out, their faces etched with a permanent, soul-deep weariness. This was the part of the Foundation that was not spoken of, the necessary, monstrous act committed daily to keep the world turning.

Sugar and Miwa had been barred from accompanying him, a decision met with furious protests that ultimately broke against the wall of O5-level clearance. They were forced to watch on a monitor in a distant, secure room, their faces pale with terror. Only Dr. Buck, a handful of high-level security, and Echidna were permitted to escort Subaru to the threshold.

Dr. Buck was visibly trembling, her hands clasped so tightly her knuckles were white. "Subaru, it is not too late to turn back," she pleaded, her voice a strained whisper. "No one would blame you. What happens in there… the procedure… it breaks people."

"I'm already broken," Subaru replied, his voice a flat monotone. He didn't even look at her. His gaze was fixed on the massive, soundproofed vault door ahead. The pain in his side from the stabbing was a dull, rhythmic throb, a physical anchor in the sea of dread that permeated the air. "Let's just do this."

He looked at Echidna, who gave him a serene, encouraging smile that was the most terrifying thing he had ever seen. She was not just curious; she was eager. She was a scholar about to witness the climax of a gruesome, fascinating thesis.

The vault door opened not with a hiss, but with a low, mournful groan, as if the very metal was in pain. The moment it opened, Subaru wanted to vomit. It wasn't a smell or a sight, but a feeling. The room was saturated with an agony so profound, so concentrated, that it was a physical force. It was the psychic stain of unspeakable acts, of ritualized torture performed in the name of salvation.

The room was dimly lit and padded. In the center was a reinforced medical bed. And on that bed lay a young woman, no older than him, her face pale and tear-streaked, her body swollen with the anomalous pregnancy that held the world hostage. She was chained to the bed, not with metal, but with thick leather restraints. This was SCP-231-7.

"Begin Procedure 110-Montauk," a tinny, detached voice said over an intercom, the words sounding like a death sentence.

Several figures in heavy, intimidating gear began to move toward the bed.

"Don't," Subaru said, his voice quiet but carrying an authority that stopped them in their tracks. He took a step into the room.

"Subject, halt! Do not approach SCP-231!" one of the guards by the door shouted, raising his weapon.

Before the guard could take another step, a shimmering, invisible barrier slammed into him, throwing him back against the wall. Echidna stood at the doorway, her hand outstretched, her smile fixed and unyielding. "He will not be interrupted," she stated calmly.

Subaru ignored the commotion. He walked slowly, deliberately, toward the bed. The woman flinched as he approached, her eyes wide with a terror that expected only more pain, more horror. She began to sob, a broken, hopeless sound.

He stopped beside her. He looked down, not at the monstrous pregnancy, but at her face. He saw not an anomaly, not a world-ending threat, but a girl. A girl who was trapped in a nightmare from which there was no waking. Her suffering was a constant, screaming symphony, and in it, he heard a familiar tune.

He reached out his hand, palm up. A simple, non-threatening gesture.

The woman stared at his hand, then at his face. She saw no malice in his eyes. No cold, clinical detachment. Just a deep, profound, and utterly familiar weariness. A shared understanding of pain that transcended words.

Hesitantly, shakily, she lifted her own hand, her trembling fingers brushing against his. She clasped his hand.

The moment their skin touched, the universe held its breath.

There was no flash of light, no clap of thunder. There was only a sudden, shocking absence. The oppressive, agonizing aura that filled the room vanished, sucked into a void. The woman gasped, a shudder running through her entire body. The cruel, world-ending presence that had been nested within her, the source of all her torment, was gone. It had been pulled from her, drawn out through her connection to Subaru and into the shadowy, possessive abyss of Satella's love.

Her stomach deflated, the anomalous pregnancy disappearing not with a pop, but as if it had simply been a projection that had been switched off. The pain in her eyes, a constant fixture for years, was replaced by stunned disbelief. The leather restraints, no longer needed, seemed to crumble to dust.

It was over.

A collective, shuddering sigh of relief went through the entire facility. In the observation rooms, researchers and guards who had been forced to witness and participate in the horrific procedure for years began to weep openly. They were not tears of sadness, but of pure, unadulterated joy and relief. The nightmare had ended. They had seen the good ending, the miracle they had never dared to hope for.

The former SCP-231 sat up, her hand still clutching Subaru's. Tears streamed down her face, but for the first time, they were tears of joy. "It's… it's gone," she whispered, her voice choked with emotion. "The pain… it's gone."

She was at peace.

But as her agony ended, a new one began.

No one noticed at first. They were too caught up in the celebration, the sheer, overwhelming relief. But Echidna saw it. She saw the subtle shift in Subaru’s posture, the way his hand, holding the woman's, began to tremble.

Satella had taken the anomaly. She had erased the physical threat. But the emotional and psychological component, the raw, unfiltered trauma of years of ritualized torture, the sheer psychic agony of the woman's experience, had to go somewhere. And it all flooded into the only available vessel.

Subaru’s mind, already a fractured landscape of his own horrors, was hit by a tsunami of alien suffering. It wasn't just information; it was feeling. He felt every moment of her despair, every second of her pain, every violation, every hopeless tear. Her trauma slammed into his own, and they began to resonate, to amplify each other, multiplying in a feedback loop of pure, unadulterated agony.

His own memories, his own deaths, rose to the surface, now magnified, sharpened, and poisoned by this new, immense wave of suffering. He saw the Witch Cultists, their insane, smiling faces as they tortured Rem. He saw the way their robes, their mannerisms, their sheer, joyful cruelty mirrored the cold, procedural cruelty that had been inflicted upon the woman before him.

The two traumas merged, becoming one monstrous, unbearable whole.

His face, which had been a mask of emotionless resolve, began to twitch. A low growl rumbled in his chest. His eyes, once just tired, now blazed with a fresh, incandescent rage. The name, the face, the very symbol of that kind of gleeful, sadistic evil, burned itself onto the forefront of his mind.

He let go of the woman's hand and staggered back, clutching his head.

"Subaru?" she asked, her joyful expression turning to one of concern.

He didn't hear her. He could only hear the insane laughter, feel the Unseen Hands twisting his limbs.

He let out a scream, a sound so filled with rage and pain that it silenced the entire facility. It was not a scream of fear. It was a promise of violent, bloody murder.

"PETELGUESE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

The name was a curse, a war cry torn from the deepest, most wounded part of his soul.

"I'LL KILL YOU! I'LL KILL YOU, YOU BASTARD! I'LL TEAR YOU APART! I'LL MAKE YOU SUFFER! I'LL KILL YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

His legs gave out. He collapsed to the floor, his body convulsing as his mind was consumed by a storm of his own trauma multiplied by a factor he couldn't comprehend. His eyes rolled back into his head, and as the shocked and horrified faces of the Foundation staff looked on, he lost consciousness, plunging back into a familiar, welcoming darkness.

The medical bay was an oasis of calm in the chaotic world of Site-17. Machines beeped in a steady, reassuring rhythm, charting the vitals of their most precious, most paradoxical patient. Subaru lay unconscious, his breathing deep and even, his face finally free of the weary tension that usually clung to it. He looked, for a moment, like a normal eighteen-year-old boy.

Sugar sat vigil by his bedside, her hand gently holding his, her eyes red-rimmed but resolute. Miwa stood near the door, a silent, beautiful predator guarding her den. Dr. Buck was overseeing a team of specialists who were running diagnostics with a new piece of experimental equipment—an Archetype Resonance Imager, designed to map the deep psychic structures of anomalous humanoids.

"It's designed to be completely non-invasive," the lead technician explained to Dr. Buck. "It reads the residual energy in a subject's neural pathways to create a model of their core identity. With Axiom, we're hoping to understand the source of his… influence."

"Be careful," Dr. Buck warned, her gaze fixed on Subaru's sleeping face. "Everything about him is an exception to the rule. Do not provoke a variable you don't understand."

The technician nodded and activated the machine. A low hum filled the room as a faint, blue light scanned over Subaru’s body. On the main monitor, complex diagrams and flowing lines of data began to appear. For a moment, it seemed to be working perfectly.

Then, a junior medic, trying to adjust a nearby IV drip, stumbled. His arm brushed against a critical power conduit for the scanner. There was a flicker, a spark, and a sound like a skipping record.

"What was that?" Dr. Buck snapped.

"Just a minor power fluctuation, ma'am," the technician said, his eyes glued to his console. "The system is auto-correcting… wait. What is this? The data stream… it's reformatting. It's interpreting the subject's archetypal memory as… as a chronological video file. That's not possible."

Before he could finish the sentence, the main monitor in the medical bay flickered to black. Then, it came to life.

It wasn't data. It was an image. A dingy, wooden room. A girl with blonde hair, a red bow, and a terrified expression. And Subaru, looking younger, more naive, standing before a beautiful woman with a chilling smile and a curved blade.

On screen, the woman, Elsa, moved with impossible speed. The world became a blur of motion and then a spray of crimson. The camera, locked to Subaru's perspective, tilted wildly as he fell. He looked down. His stomach was laid open, the sight so gruesome, so shocking, that a wave of nausea swept through the medical bay.

"What the hell is that?" a nurse gasped, her hand flying to her mouth.

"Shut it down!" Dr. Buck commanded. "Shut it down now!"

"I can't!" the technician cried, his fingers flying across the keyboard. "The signal is… it's feeding back on itself! It's not just displaying, it's broadcasting! It's hijacked the internal network!"

The image on the screen went black, then resolved again. The same room. The same people. The same conversation. A loop. This time, he died alongside the girl, a blade through his back. Then again, this time seeing the silver-haired girl he'd screamed for, Emilia, die before him, a look of pure despair on his face before his own life was taken.

Sugar let out a choked, horrified sob, her grip on Subaru's hand tightening. "No… no, make it stop…"

Miwa’s face was a mask of cold fury. The casual, repeated brutality… it was obscene. This wasn't a fight. It was a slaughterhouse.

The scene changed. A dark alley. Thugs. A knife in the ribs. He bled out on the cold cobblestones, alone.

Again. The same alley. This time he fought back, only to die again.

The screen became a flickering, hellish montage of death.

In his newly furnished suite, Shy, the former SCP-096, was watching a documentary about penguins. The screen suddenly went black, then showed the face of the kind boy, Subaru, contorted in pain. He saw him being torn apart by what looked like a pack of monstrous dogs with horns.

Shy let out a low, mournful whimper. He didn't understand what he was seeing, but he understood the pain. The sheer, unending terror on Subaru's face was a language he knew intimately. He curled into a ball on his sofa, his long, thin arms wrapping around his head as he began to sob, not with rage, but with a profound, heartbreaking empathy. "Hurts…" he whispered to the empty room. "It hurts him…"

In his cold, sterile cell, SCP-049 was observing a tissue sample under a microscope. The small monitor on his wall, usually displaying research notes, flickered to life. He saw the boy who had made him feel fear. He watched as Subaru’s limbs were twisted into impossible angles by an unseen force, his screams echoing from the monitor's tiny speaker. He watched him freeze to death, his skin cracking. He watched him get devoured by a swarm of white rabbits.

The Plague Doctor stood up, gliding closer to the screen. He saw the death, the physical destruction. But then, he saw the loop. He saw Subaru return, whole and unharmed, only to be thrown into another crucible of pain. A chilling, profound realization dawned in the ancient entity's mind.

"Remarkable," SCP-049 murmured, his voice a low, resonant hum. "The Pestilence… it is not in him. He is the antibody. The world is so thoroughly infected that it repeatedly, violently rejects its own cure. This is not a series of deaths. It is a series of failed treatments."

In a quiet recovery wing, the woman who was once SCP-231-7 was learning to knit. The television in her room, which had been playing a gentle cooking show, suddenly showed the face of her savior. She saw him in a snowy forest, his body covered in curses, his mind broken by a cackling, insane man in a dark robe. She saw him take his own life to save the silver-haired girl. She saw him beaten to a pulp by a man in a butler's uniform.

She dropped her knitting, her hands trembling. She, who had been the focal point of a ritual of pure agony, was now watching the boy who had absorbed her pain endure a seemingly infinite variety of his own. The shared trauma created a bond of pure, horrified sympathy. "You poor, poor boy," she wept, her tears of peace turning to tears of sorrow for him. "You suffer too."

Back in the medical bay, the broadcast was reaching its crescendo. They had seen it all. The dozens of failures, the small, agonizing victories that only led to more pain. They saw him watch his friend Rem be twisted and broken, her memory erased from the world. They saw him beg and plead and bargain, only to be met with more cruelty.

Dr. Buck was leaning against a wall, her face ashen. The data was undeniable. The loops, the resets, the slight variations. This wasn't a hallucination. This was a record. The Axiom's ability, the source of all his miracles, was a curse of unimaginable horror. "My God," she whispered, her scientific mind finally giving way to simple, human horror. "What has he been through?"

Sugar was no longer crying. She was catatonic, her eyes wide and unblinking, staring at the screen as the boy she loved was systematically, endlessly destroyed. Her mind couldn't process the sheer scale of the suffering.

Miwa was shaking with a rage so profound it was silent. Her knuckles were white, her jaw clenched so tight it was a wonder her teeth didn't crack. Every scream from the monitor was a hammer blow to her soul, forging her protective instincts into a weapon of pure, vengeful fury.

Only Echidna was unmoved. She stood with her arms crossed, a look of serene, academic fascination on her face. "Ah, the Great Rabbit," she commented quietly as the screen showed a snowy field being consumed by a white tide of fur and teeth. "A truly fascinating expression of gluttony. His second encounter with it was particularly… visceral. A marvelous data point on the resilience of the human psyche."

Her words were met with a unified glare of pure hatred from every conscious person in the room, but she paid them no mind. She was watching the climax of her favorite story.

The screen showed the final, terrible moments. Subaru, alone, being swarmed, consumed, his final, agonized scream before the world dissolved into a static hiss.

The monitor went black.

A profound, tomb-like silence fell over the medical bay, and over every other room that had witnessed the broadcast. The beeping of the heart monitor was the only sound, a steady, rhythmic counterpoint to the universe of pain they had just witnessed.

They all looked from the blank screen to the boy on the bed. He was no longer a key, no longer a miracle worker, no longer an anomaly to be studied.

He was a martyr.

And as they all stared, their minds reeling with the terrible, newfound weight of his existence, a single, silent tear escaped from Subaru's closed eye and traced a path down his cheek. He was unconscious, but somewhere, in the deepest part of his soul, he was still screaming.

The silence that followed the broadcast was a heavy, suffocating thing. It was thicker than the concrete walls, filled with the ghosts of a hundred brutal deaths and the shared, unspoken horror of the living. The only sound was the steady, rhythmic beep of the heart monitor, a stark, mechanical proof of life in a room that had just been saturated with death.

Subaru’s return to consciousness was not a gentle drift, but a painful, gasping ascent from a deep, dark ocean of nightmares. He surfaced with a choked sob, his body still remembering the phantom pains of being torn, frozen, and broken. Before he even opened his eyes, tears began to stream from them, hot and silent. It was a grief so profound, so ingrained, that it was his natural state of being, the first emotion to greet him upon waking.

He blinked, his vision blurry. The white ceiling of the medical bay slowly came into focus. He saw the IV drip, felt the soft blanket, and registered the gentle, trembling pressure on his hand. He turned his head. Sugar was there, her face a mess of tear-streaked sympathy and profound sorrow. He saw Miwa by the door, her usual predatory confidence replaced by a rigid, protective fury. He saw Dr. Buck, her face pale, her scientific composure shattered.

And he saw Echidna, standing at the foot of his bed, her expression one of calm, satisfied curiosity.

"Ah, you're awake," the Witch of Greed commented, her voice cutting through the heavy silence. "Your vital signs are stabilizing. A most resilient constitution."

Subaru just stared, his mind still foggy, the tears still flowing from a wellspring of pain he couldn't yet place. He felt exposed, raw, but didn't understand why their faces held such a terrible, pitying knowledge.

"What… what happened?" he whispered, his voice hoarse.

Echidna’s smile was serene, clinical, and utterly devoid of compassion. She delivered the truth like a scientist stating a simple, observable fact.

"There was a malfunction with the diagnostic equipment," she explained. "A feedback loop. It broadcast your memories. Subaru, they saw them."

The words hung in the air, each one a hammer blow against the fragile walls of his sanity.

They saw them.

Subaru froze. The tears stopped. His breath caught in his throat. Every muscle in his body went rigid. It was as if his entire being had been flash-frozen in a moment of pure, absolute horror.

They saw him die. They saw him fail. They saw him scream and beg and cry. They saw him at his weakest, his most pathetic. They saw the ugly, bloody, shameful secret that was the engine of his entire existence. The one truth he had guarded with his life, the burden he believed was his alone to carry, had been laid bare for them all to see.

"No," he whispered, the word a choked, strangled thing. His eyes darted from Sugar's heartbroken face to Miwa's furious one, to Dr. Buck's look of horrified pity. He saw it in their eyes. The truth. The terrible, violating truth.

"No," he said again, louder this time, shaking his head in frantic denial. "No… you didn't… you couldn't have…"

"Subaru, it's okay," Sugar sobbed, squeezing his hand. "We know. We understand now. You don't have to—"

Her words of comfort were like acid. Understanding? Pity? It was the last thing he wanted. He wanted their ignorance. He wanted to be the strong, sarcastic, resilient boy they thought he was, not the broken, screaming failure he knew himself to be.

"NO!" he roared, ripping his hand from her grasp. The heart monitor shrieked, its steady rhythm turning into a frantic, panicked alarm. "NOT THIS WAY! YOU WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO KNOW! NOBODY WAS SUPPOSED TO KNOW!"

He took a ragged, desperate breath, his mind consumed by a singular, primal instinct: escape. He couldn't be here. He couldn't face them. He couldn't bear to look at them, knowing what they had seen.

With a surge of pure, adrenaline-fueled terror, he threw off the blanket and scrambled out of the bed, ignoring the searing pain in his wounded side. He had to get out. He had to run. He didn't know where, but he had to get away from their eyes, away from their pity.

"Subaru, stop!" Dr. Buck yelled, her voice sharp with alarm. "You're not stable! Sedate him!"

He made it two steps. Two stumbling, desperate strides toward the door before his body betrayed him. The massive dose of sedatives still lingering in his system, combined with the shock and the injury, hit him like a physical wall. His legs turned to rubber. The world tilted, the white walls of the infirmary blurring into a dizzying vortex.

His strength vanished as quickly as it had come. He collapsed, his legs giving out from under him, and pitched forward. Miwa was there in an instant, moving with a speed that was not quite human, catching him before he hit the floor. She held him, her arms wrapped around his trembling body, her usual cold fury replaced by a desperate, protective tenderness.

"It's alright," she murmured, her voice a low, fierce whisper meant for him alone. "I've got you. You're safe."

But he was already gone. His eyes, wide with panic and a soul-deep despair, rolled back into his head. The last of his consciousness fled, and he went limp in her arms, succumbing once more to the welcoming, silent darkness.

The silence in the medical bay was a fractured, fragile thing. Miwa held Subaru’s unconscious form, the dead weight of his body a terrifying testament to the storm that had just torn through his mind. The frantic shriek of the heart monitor had been silenced, leaving only the soft, rhythmic beeping that felt more like a countdown than a reassurance.

Sugar was the first to move. A choked sob broke from her lips, and she stumbled forward, her hands hovering over Subaru as if afraid to touch him, afraid the slightest pressure might shatter him completely. "Subaru…" she whispered, the name a prayer of pure, undiluted pain.

Dr. Buck found her voice, the professional veneer cracking but holding firm through sheer force of will. "Get him back on the bed. Now," she commanded the stunned medical team. "Administer a low-dose stabilizer, something to ease the neural strain, and monitor his brain activity. I want to know what that… episode… did to him."

Miwa reluctantly allowed the medics to take Subaru from her, her movements stiff with a barely controlled rage. She laid him gently on the bed, her eyes never leaving his face. As the team swarmed around him, adjusting drips and attaching sensors, Dr. Buck turned to face the only person in the room who looked completely unfazed.

"You," she said, her voice a low, dangerous growl directed at Echidna. "You knew. You knew all of it. That broadcast… that was his life, wasn't it? Or his lives."

Echidna met her gaze, her smile serene and maddening. "I am the Witch of Greed, Doctor. Knowledge is my domain. Of course, I knew. I have had the distinct pleasure of watching his journey from a front-row seat. It is the most fascinating story I have ever encountered."

"Story?" Sugar whipped her head around, her face a mask of tear-streaked fury. "You think that was a story? He was being tortured! Slaughtered! Over and over!"

"Yes. That is the central conflict of the narrative, is it not?" Echidna replied simply, as if discussing a character in a novel. "A boy, given a single, extraordinary power by a jealous Witch, all so he cannot escape her, cannot die and leave her truly alone. The power you've witnessed, the one I believe he calls 'Return by Death', is not a gift. It is a leash. An Authority of the Witch of Envy, Satella."

Dr. Buck stared, her scientific mind struggling to process the arcane, fairy-tale terms. "Authority? Witch of Envy? Explain. Now."

"It's quite simple, really," Echidna said, beginning to pace slowly, her tone that of a lecturer addressing a particularly slow class. "When Natsuki Subaru dies, time itself is rewound to a prior 'save point', leaving only him with the memories of the failed timeline. Everything you saw—every brutal, bloody end—was a genuine death. His soul is a library of scars from lives no one else remembers. He has lived and died more times than you can imagine, all in the service of protecting those he cares for, all while being bound to a love that transcends death and sanity."

The full, horrifying weight of the truth descended upon them. It wasn't just that he could survive anything; it was that he had to. He didn't respawn. He was dragged, kicking and screaming, back through time to endure the pain again until he found a way through. His resilience wasn't a personality trait; it was a scar tissue built up over a hundred lifetimes of agony.

Sugar sank into the chair by his bed, her body trembling. Her affection for him, which she thought couldn't be any stronger, was now alloyed with a new, fierce, and painful empathy. All his jokes, his weird pop-culture references, his occasional moments of profound exhaustion… it was all a mask. A shield to hide a universe of pain. Her goal was no longer just to win his heart. It was to become a sanctuary, a place where he wouldn't need the mask, a person who could share the burden he was never meant to carry alone.

Miwa’s reaction was colder, sharper. She now understood the source of the immense suffering she had sensed in him, the very thing that had neutralized her own malice. It wasn't just trauma; it was an active, ongoing curse. Her possessive instinct, once romantic, now became absolute. He was not just a person to be won; he was a treasure to be guarded. She would become his impenetrable shield. The world had killed him a hundred times. She would not allow it to kill him again. Not once.

Dr. Buck leaned against the console, her mind racing. The Axiom Protocol was obsolete. Subaru wasn't a tool; he was the most valuable and psychologically fragile subject in the history of the Foundation. The O5 Council would need to be briefed immediately. The entire paradigm had to shift from testing and utilization to protection and preservation. But how do you protect a boy whose very power relies on his own death? The paradox was staggering.

"So every time he has 'cured' one of our anomalies," Dr. Buck mused aloud, her voice filled with a dawning horror, "he has been walking in with the knowledge that if he fails, he will simply have to endure that failure, and the death that comes with it, until he succeeds."

"Precisely," Echidna confirmed, a spark of delight in her eyes. "He is the ultimate experimental subject. Infinite trial and error, with the psychological cost borne entirely by him. Isn't it wonderful?"

The sheer, monstrous detachment of her words made everyone in the room flinch.

The door to the medical bay hissed open. A grim-faced agent in a dark suit stood there, holding a secured tablet. "Dr. Buck," he said, his voice grave. "A directive from O5-1. Effective immediately."

He handed her the tablet. She read the screen, her eyes widening slightly.

"The Axiom Protocol is hereby suspended," she read aloud, her voice regaining its professional steel. "Subject Natsuki Subaru is reclassified as Thaumiel-Prime. All further testing is forbidden. A new directive is being drafted: Project Sanctuary. All resources are to be redirected from utilization to preservation and protection of the asset. No one, and nothing, is to be allowed to harm him. That is an absolute, top-priority order."

A new age had dawned at Site-17. Subaru was no longer their key. He was now their king, and the entire might of the Foundation was being repurposed to be his castle wall.

But as he slept, oblivious, a new storm was gathering. The world around him had changed, twisted by the revelation of his secret. He would awaken not to the pitying eyes he feared, but to the suffocating, iron-willed protection of three women and one of the most powerful clandestine organizations on Earth, all of whom now believed they knew what was best for the boy who died.

Chapter Text

The return to consciousness was a slow, syrupy crawl up from a bottomless, black pit. For a long while, there was only the dull, distant thrum of machinery and the feeling of a soft, impossibly comfortable surface beneath him. The last vestiges of a nightmare, filled with the phantom sensation of a blade in his side and the soul-crushing terror of being exposed, clung to him like a shroud. He fought against waking, instinctively knowing that consciousness held a horror he wasn't ready to face again.

But the world pulled him upward. The first thing he registered was the scent. Not the sterile, antiseptic smell of the infirmary, but something cleaner, with a faint, pleasant hint of ozone from an air purifier. The second was the light. It wasn't the harsh, fluorescent glare of the Foundation standard, but a soft, warm glow that seemed to emanate from the walls themselves.

Subaru’s eyelids fluttered, then opened.

He wasn't in the medical bay. He was in a room that was less like a containment suite and more like a luxury hotel room. The bed was large and plush, the sheets a high-thread-count cotton. There was a small sofa in the corner, a desk with a state-of-the-art computer, and even a bookshelf stocked with novels and manga. The walls were a soft, calming grey instead of a stark, clinical white.

Panic, cold and immediate, began to prickle at the edges of his mind. Where was he? What had they done to him?

Then he noticed the figures in the room, and the panic crystallized into a solid lump of dread in his throat.

In a comfortable armchair by his bedside, Sugar was asleep, her head resting on her folded arms. Even in sleep, her expression was etched with worry. Standing like a marble statue by the window, staring out at a simulated starfield on a high-resolution screen, was Miwa. She wasn't looking at him, but he could feel her awareness, a silent, intense vigil that had likely not wavered for hours.

His memory came crashing back. The broadcast. Echidna’s words. The terrible, pitying knowledge in their eyes. His desperate, failed escape.

He had been recaptured. Placed in a new, softer cage.

He tried to sit up, but a wave of dizziness and a sharp, protesting twinge from his side forced him back down with a groan. The small sound was enough.

Sugar’s head snapped up, her magenta eyes wide and instantly alert. "Subaru! You're awake!" she whispered, her voice thick with sleep and relief.

Miwa turned from the window, her movements fluid and silent. She was at the other side of the bed in a heartbeat, her sharp eyes scanning him, assessing his condition with an intensity that made him feel like a fragile specimen under a microscope.

Subaru instinctively flinched, pulling the blanket up to his chin, a pathetic, reflexive attempt to hide. He braced himself for the questions, for the looks of pity, for the hushed, awkward whispers about the monster of failure they now knew him to be.

But they didn't come.

"Are you thirsty?" Sugar asked, her voice impossibly gentle as she reached for a pitcher of water on the nightstand. "The doctors said you might be dehydrated. Or hungry? I can get the kitchen to make you anything you want. Anything at all."

Her kindness was a physical blow. He didn't know how to react to it. He just stared, his mind reeling.

"Your wound has been treated with an anomalous regenerative agent," Miwa stated, her voice calm and even, betraying none of the fury he'd seen before he passed out. "The doctors say you should feel no more pain, but you must not exert yourself. Your body has undergone significant trauma."

He flinched again at the word 'trauma'. They were tiptoeing around it. The great, horrific elephant in the room.

"Just… just say it," he croaked, his voice raspy. He had to face it. He had to get it over with. "You saw. So just say what you think. That I'm a freak. A monster. That I'm pathetic for dying so many times."

Sugar’s face crumpled, fresh tears welling in her eyes. "No! Subaru, we would never think that! We think you're… you're the strongest person we've ever met."

"To endure what you have endured," Miwa added, her voice a low, reverent murmur, "is a feat beyond the comprehension of gods or mortals. You are not pathetic. You are a survivor on a scale the universe has never known."

Their praise, their sympathy, was worse than any condemnation. It was a thick, cloying blanket of pity that threatened to suffocate him. He felt his anger begin to rise, a familiar, welcome defense against the crushing weight of their concern.

The door to the room hissed open, and Dr. Buck walked in. Her face was different, too. The sharp, analytical edges had softened. She looked at him not as a subject, but as… a patient. A ward.

"It's good to see you awake, Subaru," she said, her voice gentle. "How are you feeling?"

"Peachy," he spat, the sarcasm a reflex. "Love the new room. Is this the 'special care' wing for the freaks who get their entire trauma history broadcast to the whole facility?"

Dr. Buck didn't rise to the bait. She simply pulled up a chair. "This is your new permanent residence. It's the central hub of a new initiative. Project Sanctuary."

"Project Sanctuary?" he asked, the name tasting like poison. "Sounds like a prison for endangered animals."

"It's a protocol for your protection," she explained, her tone patient, as if explaining a complex topic to a frightened child. "The O5 Council has reviewed the… data from the broadcast. Your classification has been updated to Thaumiel-Prime. All testing has been permanently suspended. Your previous designation, Axiom, has been archived. You are no longer a tool, Subaru. You are the single most valuable—and vulnerable—individual under Foundation protection."

He stared at her, the meaning of her words slowly sinking in. No more tests. No more SCPs. Protection.

He felt a cold, claustrophobic dread that was worse than any fear of death.

"Protection?" he repeated, his voice dangerously low. "So what am I supposed to do? Sit in this room all day? Read books and play video games while you all watch me through the cameras to make sure I don't trip and fall?"

"Your physical and psychological well-being is now our top priority," Dr. Buck said, completely missing the point. "You will have access to any amenities you require. Entertainment, food, educational materials. These two," she gestured to Sugar and Miwa, "have volunteered to be your primary companions, to ensure you are never without support."

"So I'm a prisoner," he snarled, finally pushing himself to a sitting position, ignoring the dull ache in his side. "You saw that I can't die for good, and you decided to lock me in a box for the rest of eternity!"

"We are trying to help you, Subaru!" Sugar cried, her voice breaking. "We saw what you went through! We just… we want you to be safe! We don't want you to have to… to do that ever again!"

"You don't get to decide that!" he yelled, his voice cracking with a desperate, furious energy. He felt cornered, stripped of the one thing he had left: his purpose. His entire identity was built on the foundation of his suffering, on using his curse to save others. Without that, what was he? Just a broken boy with a head full of ghosts.

He tried to push them away, to provoke them into treating him like they used to, like a tool, like an asset. But his anger just bounced off the unbreakable, united front of their suffocating care.

Sugar met his rage with heartbroken tears. Miwa met it with a quiet, unshakeable resolve. Dr. Buck met it with calm, rational assurances. They were a wall of well-intentioned pity, and he was beating his fists bloody against it.

Exhausted, he slumped back against the pillows, the fight draining out of him, leaving only a cold, hollow despair. He had escaped death a hundred times, only to be imprisoned by kindness.

As Sugar began to quietly list all the different kinds of food he could have for dinner, a familiar figure shimmered into existence in the corner of the room, visible only to him. Echidna stood there, a thoughtful, curious expression on her face.

"Fascinating," her voice echoed in his mind, a cool, intellectual counterpoint to the warm, emotional concern filling the room. "They witnessed the source of your strength—your willingness to suffer—and have mistaken it for a weakness to be coddled. They have seen your pain and, in their desire to end it, they have decided to take away your very purpose. Tell me, Subaru, is a painless life without meaning truly a life at all? The parameters of this new experiment are most intriguing."

Subaru closed his eyes, her words twisting like a knife in his gut. He was safe. He was protected. He was cared for.

And he had never felt more trapped in his entire life.

The first twenty-four hours in Project Sanctuary were the most peaceful, comfortable, and psychologically torturous of Subaru’s life. He was a king in a velvet prison, his every whim catered to by wardens who wore the faces of his friends.

Sugar treated him with a suffocating, heartbreaking gentleness. She would bring him meticulously prepared meals, her eyes wide with concern, asking if the temperature was right, if the texture was okay, as if a poorly cooked piece of chicken might shatter his fragile psyche. She’d read to him from light novels, her voice soft and soothing, choosing only the most cheerful, conflict-free stories. Every action was a reminder of what they’d seen, a declaration that he was too broken to be treated like a normal person.

Miwa’s care was a different form of torment. She was a silent, ever-present shadow. If he walked to the bookshelf, she was a few feet behind him. If he sat on the sofa, she would take up a position by the door, her gaze sweeping the room, eternally vigilant. She spoke little, but her presence was a constant, suffocating weight. He was no longer a person to her; he was a priceless, fragile artifact she was tasked with guarding. The fierce, engaging woman he’d spoken with was gone, replaced by a beautiful, terrifying security system.

Dr. Buck would visit, bringing him "enrichment materials" and speaking to him in the slow, placating tone one might use with a spooked animal. She offered him academic courses, complex puzzles, anything to keep his mind "stimulated" and "distracted."

This wasn’t a life. It was a managed existence. They had seen his suffering and, in their horror, had decided the only cure was to strip him of his agency. They had taken away the one thing that gave his endless pain a sliver of meaning: his purpose. Here, his curse was just a curse. A litany of ugly memories with no redemptive outcome.

This infuriated Echidna to no end. She had found the greatest source of new, impossible knowledge in the universe, and these sentimental fools had decided to lock it in a display case. The flow of data had been cut to a trickle. Her greed, an intellectual force as powerful as a law of nature, was being starved. This sterile, predictable peace was anathema to her very being.

"This is not a sanctuary, Natsuki Subaru," she whispered to him one evening, her form shimmering in a corner of the room only he could see. "It is a mausoleum. They are preserving your body while letting your purpose wither and die. How utterly, dreadfully boring."

Her words only gave voice to the scream that had been building in his own soul. He looked at Sugar as she carefully arranged his pillows for the tenth time. He saw Miwa watching him with those sad, fiercely protective eyes. He knew they were doing it out of love, out of a horrified, misplaced sense of compassion. And that made it so much worse.

He couldn’t fight them. He couldn’t reason with them. Their conviction was absolute, forged in the fire of watching him die a hundred times.

But he had one tool. One terrible, final, undeniable piece of leverage. The very thing they were trying to protect him from.

That night, as Sugar sat in the armchair, humming a soft, reassuring tune, and Miwa stood her silent watch by the window, Subaru made his decision.

"Sugar," he said, his voice quiet.

She immediately brightened. "Yes, Subaru? Do you need something? Are you uncomfortable?"

"Could you… get me some more of that apple juice?" he asked, pointing to the empty glass on his nightstand. "I'm really thirsty."

"Of course! Right away!" she said, her face beaming. It was the first thing he had asked for all day. She took the glass and practically skipped out of the room, eager to fulfill his simple request.

He was alone with Miwa. He sat up in bed, his gaze meeting hers.

"Thank you," he said, his voice sincere. "For watching over me."

Miwa seemed taken aback by the direct address. A flicker of her old self returned to her eyes. "I will always watch over you," she vowed. "Nothing will harm you while I am here."

"I know," Subaru said.

And with a speed that shocked even the ancient Kumiho, he bit down. Hard.

The pain was excruciating, a blinding, white-hot agony as his teeth sheared through the soft, sensitive muscle of his own tongue. The coppery taste of blood flooded his mouth instantly.

Miwa’s eyes widened in sheer, uncomprehending horror. "Subaru?!"

He couldn't answer. He was already choking, the severed piece of flesh and the deluge of blood cutting off his airway. His body convulsed. He pitched forward, falling from the bed. The last thing he saw was Miwa’s terrified face as she lunged toward him, and the sound of a glass shattering in the hallway as Sugar returned.

Then, the familiar, welcome darkness pulled him under.

The return to consciousness was a violent, instantaneous snap. One moment, the suffocating blackness of death. The next, the soft light and sterile scent of the luxury prison. He was back in the bed, whole and unharmed, the memory of his own brutal suicide still fresh in his mind.

He knew he only had seconds.

This time, he didn't wait. The moment his eyes opened, before the fog of waking could even settle, he acted. But he was not the first.

"Do not move."

The voice was not Sugar's. It was not Miwa's. It was Echidna's.

She stood in the center of the room, not as a shimmering ghost, but as a solid, physically present being, her aura radiating a cold, ancient authority. Her sudden appearance, so solid and commanding, shocked Sugar, who was just beginning to stir in her chair, and made Miwa, who had been by the window, spin around with a snarl.

"You have all just witnessed Natsuki Subaru awaken from his recovery," Echidna stated, her voice cutting through the air like a diamond. Her dark eyes swept over them, pinning them in place. "In a few moments, Dr. Buck will arrive. She will inform you of a new initiative: 'Project Sanctuary'. You will believe you are helping him by turning him into a protected specimen."

Sugar and Miwa stared, utterly bewildered by her words, by her presence.

"Do not proceed with this plan," Echidna warned, her voice dropping, laced with a threat that was as absolute as a physical law. "You are building him a gilded cage. A mausoleum for his purpose. And I have just returned from a timeline where he chose to kill himself, brutally and without hesitation, simply to escape it."

The bombshell landed, shattering the confusion in the room and replacing it with pure, cold shock.

"What did you say?" Miwa breathed, her mind struggling to comprehend the impossible statement.

At that exact moment, the door hissed open and Dr. Buck entered, a data tablet in her hand. "Sugar, Miwa, I have an update on Subaru's status—"

She stopped dead, her eyes widening at the sight of Echidna standing there.

"There is no need, Doctor," Echidna said, turning to face her. "I am aware of the O5 directive. I am aware of Project Sanctuary. And I am telling you now, if you proceed, he will use his Return by Death to escape you. He will kill himself. Again, and again, and again. He will plunge himself into that agony repeatedly until you learn that your suffocating 'protection' is a fate worse than death for him."

Dr. Buck was speechless. She looked from Echidna's cold, knowing face to Subaru, who was now sitting up in bed, his expression grim, hard, and utterly serious. There was a look in his eyes she had never seen before—the cold certainty of a man who had just come back from the future.

"She's right," Subaru said, his voice steady. "Every word. You think you saw my suffering? You have no idea. Being useless, being trapped, that's the real hell. Try to lock me in here, and I will show you a loop of suicides that will make that broadcast look like a comedy."

The threat was monstrous. It was self-destructive. And it was utterly believable.

They were in a checkmate. Their desire to protect him was the very thing that would drive him to the one act they wanted to prevent.

Sugar looked at him, her heart breaking. Miwa looked at him, her protective fury turning into horrified understanding. Dr. Buck looked at the tablet in her hand, the O5 directive for Project Sanctuary now feeling like a suicide note.

Echidna smiled. Her experiment was back on track. "Reinstate the Axiom Protocol," she commanded, her voice leaving no room for argument. "His suffering must have a purpose. It is the only thing that keeps him sane."

So, a comprimise had to be made.

The compromise was, like everything else in Subaru's new life, utterly surreal. The Foundation, a monolithic entity that operated on logic and protocol, had bent its rules to accommodate the emotional stability of a single, traumatized teenager. Project Sanctuary was still in effect, but it had been amended. Weekends were his. He was granted supervised free-roam privileges in the safe sectors of the Site—the libraries, the cafeterias, the recreational areas. He could be, for two days a week, something resembling a person.

But weekdays were for work. His status as Axiom was reinstated, albeit under the strictest of new protocols. No Keter-class entities. No life-threatening scenarios. Every interaction was to be triple-vetted for psychological safety, and under no circumstances was he to be put in a position where Return by Death might be triggered. Sugar and Miwa were to be present for every test, acting as his official "Companion-Guards," a title that made Subaru cringe every time he heard it.

His first day back on the "job" felt like the first day of a particularly strange, high-stakes school. He was escorted by his two fiercely protective companions to a simple, unassuming testing chamber. Inside was Dr. Buck, a team of researchers, and the day's subject: SCP-294, a standard-looking coffee vending machine.

"Alright, Subaru," Dr. Buck began, her voice carefully neutral. "This is SCP-294. It is capable of dispensing nearly any liquid that can exist in a liquid state. The user simply types the name of the desired liquid on the integrated keypad." She gestured to the QWERTY keypad on the machine's face. "We are simply going to test its interaction with your anomalous properties by requesting a series of baseline liquids. Nothing hazardous."

The tension in the room was thick enough to chew. Sugar stood beside Subaru, her arms crossed, her expression daring the machine to try anything funny. Miwa stood on his other side, a silent, beautiful statue radiating an aura of lethal protectiveness.

"Let's get started," Dr. Buck said. "Request: 'Cup of Water'."

A researcher typed in the request. The machine hummed, and a standard paper cup dropped down, quickly filling with clear, clean water. A remote drone delivered it to a testing station, where it was confirmed to be perfectly normal H₂O.

"Request: 'Cup of Coffee, Black'," Dr. Buck continued.

The process was repeated. The coffee was normal. They went through a dozen simple requests: orange juice, milk, molten gold (which the machine dispensed, melting the cup and splashing onto the reinforced collection tray), and even a "Cup of Music" (which came out as a flavorless, odorless liquid that, when analyzed, showed sound waves somehow encoded into its molecular structure). Everything was proceeding with a dull, scientific normalcy.

And then Echidna, who had been observing from a corner with a placid, almost bored expression, stepped forward.

"My, what a fascinating device," she said, her voice a silken melody that immediately put everyone on edge. "A machine that can create any liquid from a simple request? The epistemological implications are simply delightful. May I?"

Before Dr. Buck could formulate a protocol-abiding refusal, Echidna had already glided to the machine.

The moment her delicate, white fingers hovered over the keypad, Subaru felt a cold, familiar dread wash over him. His face, which had been a mask of weary boredom, instantly paled. But it wasn't the pallor of fear. It was the deep, spiritual paleness of a man who sees an incredibly awkward and unpleasant family reunion looming on the horizon and knows there is no escape. He knew her. He knew her insatiable, amoral curiosity. He remembered the dream castle, the white dress, and the taste of her tea.

His eyes widened slightly as the horrifying realization dawned. Oh no. She wouldn't. Not here. Not with this.

Echidna’s fingers danced across the keypad, typing a request that no one else could see. She then stepped back, a small, deeply satisfied smile on her lips, and looked directly at Subaru. The machine hummed. A paper cup dropped. A pale, faintly steaming, tea-colored liquid filled it.

"Subaru," Echidna said, her voice sweet as honey. "You look parched. Why don't you have this?"

A remote drone arm swiveled, picked up the cup, and presented it to him.

Sugar immediately stepped in front of him. "Don't you dare drink that! We have no idea what it is!"

"It is perfectly harmless," Echidna assured them. "In fact, I would say it's quite… familiar to him."

Subaru let out a long, suffering sigh. He knew he was trapped. Refusing would only create a bigger scene, and Echidna would find a way to reveal what it was anyway. It was better to just get it over with. It was his entire life philosophy in a nutshell.

"It's fine, Sugar," he said, his voice deadpan. He gently moved her aside, took the cup from the drone, and stared into the tea-colored liquid. He tried not to think about it. He tried to think of anything else. Convenience stores. Mayonnaise. The plot of his light novel. He brought the cup to his lips and, with the grim determination of a man taking his medicine, he drank the entire thing in one long, continuous swallow.

It tasted exactly as he remembered. A complex, not-unpleasant flavor that was impossible to describe, a flavor that felt ancient and deeply personal. He shuddered, a full-body cringe of pure, unadulterated awkwardness, and lowered the empty cup.

A tense silence filled the room.

"Well?" Dr. Buck asked, her scientific curiosity overriding her caution. "What did you request, Ms. Echidna? The liquid is not registering on any of our organic or inorganic sensors."

Echidna's smile widened into a genuinely delighted grin. She loved a good reveal. She looked from the horrified faces of Sugar and Miwa to the clinical curiosity of Dr. Buck, savoring the moment before she dropped the bomb.

"Oh, it's quite simple, really," she said, her voice chiming with theatrical innocence. "I just requested a cup of 'Echidna's fluids'."

The silence that followed was so profound that the hum of the ventilation system sounded like a jet engine.

Dr. Buck froze, her brain visibly short-circuiting as it tried to process the statement. The researchers behind her stared, their mouths agape.

Then, the two glares hit Echidna with the force of a physical blow.

"YOU WHAT?!" Sugar shrieked, her face turning a shade of crimson that bordered on violet. She pointed a trembling, accusatory finger at Echidna. "YOU MADE HIM DRINK YOUR… YOUR… WITCH JUICE?! THAT IS THE MOST DISGUSTING, VILE, PERVERTED THING I HAVE EVER HEARD!"

Miwa’s reaction was colder, and infinitely more terrifying. She took a half-step forward, a low, murderous growl rumbling in her chest. Her eyes seemed to glow with a predator’s light. "You sacrilegious fiend," she hissed, her voice a silken whisper of pure death. "You have defiled him with your own profane essence. When this is over, I am going to tear you apart, molecule by molecule."

Subaru, caught in the middle of the firestorm, coughed, the aftertaste suddenly a thousand times worse now that it had been named. "Could have gone my whole life without a repeat of that tea party," he groaned, rubbing his face with a weary hand. "Seriously, what is wrong with you?"

Dr. Buck finally rebooted, her professionalism warring with sheer, biological revulsion. "Get a sample!" she snapped at her stunned team, pointing at the residue in the empty cup. "Full biological and anomalous analysis! Quarantine the machine! How is it even possible for it to replicate the bodily fluids of a non-corporeal, extra-dimensional entity?! What are the properties?! Is it a biohazard?!"

Echidna just laughed, a light, tinkling sound of pure, unadulterated amusement. She had broken the sterile boredom of Project Sanctuary, confirmed a fascinating new capability of an SCP, and thrown Subaru’s self-appointed guardians into a homicidal rage, all with a single cup of tea.

For the Witch of Greed, it was a perfect day back at work.

Chapter Text

The aftermath of the "fluids" incident left a strange, tense energy hanging over the Axiom team. Sugar and Miwa had formed an unspoken, temporary truce, their combined animosity now laser-focused on Echidna, who seemed to bask in their glares as if they were rays of sunshine. Dr. Buck, having scrubbed the entire testing chamber with industrial-grade decontaminants and classified the resulting data at a level so high she could barely access it herself, was determined to make the next test as clean, simple, and scandal-free as humanly possible.

"Today's subject is completely benign," she announced, leading the group into a brightly lit, spacious observation room. Her voice was firm, a clear message to Echidna that there would be no more shenanigans. "There are no biological components, no psychic assaults, and no consumable liquids of any kind."

In the center of the room below them was a large, pristine white table. Laid out across it was an intricate, sprawling panorama of interconnected sheets of drawing paper. There was a detailed cityscape, a lush forest, a serene beach, all seamlessly blended together. It was a beautiful, miniature world rendered in graphite and charcoal. A high-resolution camera was positioned above the table, its feed displayed on a massive monitor on the observation room wall.

"This is SCP-085," Dr. Buck explained. "She is a sentient, sapient, two-dimensional entity. Her consciousness is bound to this medium. She can move freely between any connected sheets of paper. For the purposes of this interaction, we will be communicating with her via this monitor and microphone system. She refers to herself as 'Cassy'."

On the monitor, a tiny, hand-drawn figure of a young woman in a simple sundress walked out from behind a sketched skyscraper. She looked up toward the camera, her movements fluid and lifelike, and gave a small, hesitant wave. She appeared to be around Subaru's age, with a kind, melancholic face and large, expressive eyes.

The tension on Sugar’s face eased slightly. A drawing. That was… probably safe. Miwa, however, remained impassive, her gaze analytical. A rival could take any form, and this one was at least aesthetically pleasing, which made her a potential threat.

The initial interaction was sterile and procedural. Dr. Buck asked a series of baseline questions, confirming Cassy's awareness and emotional state. Cassy's voice, coming through the speakers, was soft and clear, but held an undercurrent of deep, unshakable loneliness. She was polite, answered the questions dutifully, but there was a wall between her and the researchers, a wall made of more than just paper.

"Subaru," Dr. Buck said, gesturing for him to step up to the microphone. "Please initiate a conversation."

Subaru looked at the screen, at the small, lonely figure standing in her black-and-white world. He didn't see an anomaly to be analyzed. He saw a prisoner in the most profound prison he could imagine. He leaned toward the microphone, his companions flanking him like sentinels.

"Hey, Cassy," he began, his voice surprisingly gentle. "I'm Subaru. That's a really nice world you've got there. Did you draw it?"

The question caught Cassy off guard. Her animated face on the screen registered a flicker of surprise. "No," she replied, her voice a little less distant. "The researchers draw things for me. New places to go. It’s… nice of them."

"It must be lonely, though," Subaru said, the words coming out before he could stop them. He knew loneliness. It was the taste of every death before the reset.

Cassy went still. She looked up, and for the first time, she seemed to be looking at him, not just at the camera. "Yes," she whispered, the word fragile. "It is. I can see your world. I see the doctors in their colorful coats, I see the light from the windows, I see the steam from your coffee cups. I see it all in three dimensions. But I can't touch it. I can't smell the coffee. I can't feel the warmth of the sun. I'm just… an image, watching a world I can never be a part of."

Her words struck a chord deep within Subaru. He was a man out of time and place, trapped in a world that wasn't his, bound by a curse he couldn't explain. He was a ghost haunting his own life. He understood.

"What do you wish you could do?" he asked, his voice soft. "If you could step out of that paper for just one day, what's the first thing you'd do?"

No one had ever asked her that. They had asked her about the physics of her 2D existence, about her cognitive processes, about her origins. No one had ever asked her about her dreams.

Tears, tiny graphite smudges, welled up in her drawn eyes. "I… I'd want to feel the sun on my skin," she said, her voice trembling with a longing that was centuries deep. "I'd want to walk on real grass and feel the blades tickle my feet. I'd want to hold a flower and feel the softness of its petals, smell its scent. I'd want to feel a cool breeze on my face. Simple things, I guess. Things you all probably take for granted."

Subaru’s heart ached for her. This wasn't a monster. This was a girl in a cage, and her only crime was existing. He thought of the miracles he'd been a part of, the impossible cures he had somehow manifested. He had given a fish-man a human face. He had given a silent monster a voice. He had freed a woman from a world-ending curse. The rules of reality, in his presence, seemed to be negotiable.

A familiar, reckless determination ignited in his chest.

"I'll find a way," he said, his voice ringing with a sudden, unshakable conviction. The words were not just for her; they were a declaration of war against the cruelties of this new world. "I've seen impossible things happen. There has to be a way to get you out of there, to make you real. I promise you, Cassy. I will get you your happy ending."

On the screen, Cassy’s face transformed. The deep, ingrained melancholy was washed away by a tidal wave of pure, unadulterated hope. She stared at the microphone, at the source of this boy's voice, as if he were a messiah. This strange, sad boy who understood her loneliness didn't just pity her; he was promising to save her. And looking at him, hearing the absolute certainty in his voice, she believed him. A tiny, animated blush appeared on her paper cheeks.

The atmosphere in the observation room, however, had gone from calm to chaotic in the space of that single promise.

"Her happy ending?" Sugar muttered under her breath, her fists clenching at her sides. The brief respite from jealousy was over. Another beautiful girl, another damsel in distress, another promise from her Subaru. "Subaru, you can't just promise people things like that! That's… that's not your responsibility to fix everyone!"

"The girl is a drawing," Miwa stated, her voice a low, cold warning. "The boy's purpose is not to grant wishes to every sad story we find in this menagerie. Do not waste your energy on phantoms."

Dr. Buck stepped forward, her face a mixture of alarm and professional exasperation. "Axiom, that is enough! Do not make promises regarding the fundamental alteration of an anomaly's state! SCP-085's condition is, as far as we know, absolute. Giving her false hope is a breach of ethical protocol and is considered psychological cruelty!"

Subaru barely heard them. He was locked onto the hopeful, adoring face on the monitor, his mind already churning, his savior complex now fully engaged.

Only Echidna seemed pleased. She leaned forward, her chin resting on her steepled fingers, a delighted, predatory smile on her face. The Axiom was setting his own objectives now, creating new, fascinating experimental parameters all on his own.

"Oh, my," the Witch of Greed purred, her voice filled with eager anticipation. "A promise to give form to the formless, to pull a concept into reality. How wonderfully, beautifully ambitious. I do hope we get to see you try."

Subaru stood there, oblivious to the storm of jealousy, protectiveness, and professional outrage he had just unleashed. He had a new mission. A new person to save. He was the eye of a hurricane of his own making, and he wouldn't have had it any other way.

The promise still hung in the air, a tangible thing that had completely altered the atmosphere of the facility. Subaru’s declaration had turned a routine observation into a personal quest, and the weight of it followed them as they left Cassy’s observation room. On the monitor, Cassy’s small, graphite form waved, her face alight with a hope that was both beautiful and terrifying to behold.

Dr. Buck was practically speed-walking down the corridor to the next containment wing, her jaw tight. "I must reiterate, Axiom," she said, not looking at him, "making promises to anomalies regarding their fundamental state of being is a severe breach of protocol. You are not a miracle worker; you are a subject whose properties we are trying to understand."

"The line's getting a little blurry on that, isn't it?" Subaru muttered, his mind still buzzing with the possibilities, with the sheer, raw hope he'd seen in Cassy's eyes.

They arrived at the next chamber. It was a comfortable, well-furnished suite, more like a person’s apartment than a cell.

"Our final interaction for the day," Dr. Buck announced, pulling up a file on a nearby terminal. "SCP-105. Her name is Iris. She is a human female, eighteen years of age. Her anomalous property is linked to this item." An image of an old Polaroid camera appeared on the screen. "When Iris holds a photograph taken by this specific camera, she is able to reach into the photograph and manipulate objects within the two-dimensional space as if it were a real, physical location."

Dr. Buck continued, "The standard procedure is to observe her manipulating objects in a series of pre-prepared photographs to—"

She was cut off by a sudden, sharp intake of breath from Subaru.

He had frozen mid-stride. His eyes, which had been distant and thoughtful, were now wide, locked on the image of the Polaroid camera with an intensity that was almost painful. The gears in his mind weren't just turning; they were spinning at a thousand miles per hour, smoke pouring from the friction as two impossible ideas slammed into each other and created a brilliant, terrifying spark.

A picture. Reaching into a picture. A girl trapped in a drawing.

It was so simple. So obvious. So utterly, impossibly perfect.

"That's it," he whispered, the words barely audible.

"Subaru?" Sugar asked, placing a worried hand on his arm. "What's wrong?"

He didn't answer her. He strode past Dr. Buck, planting his hands on the console and staring at Iris’s file. "Her," he said, his voice filled with a manic, desperate energy that sent a jolt of alarm through everyone in the room. "She's the one. She can do it."

Dr. Buck stared at him, baffled. "Do what? The test hasn't even begun."

"Not the test!" Subaru said, whirling to face her, his eyes blazing with a newfound fire. "Cassy! Don't you see? You said Iris can reach into a photograph. Cassy is a drawing. She's an image on paper! What if… what if Iris takes a picture of Cassy's world? A picture of a picture. Can she reach in? Can she touch her? Can she… can she pull her out?"

The proposal hung in the air, a concept so radical and so far outside the realm of established procedure that it felt like a bomb had gone off. The room was plunged into a stunned silence as everyone processed the sheer, insane audacity of the idea.

Dr. Buck was the first to recover, her face paling with professional horror. "Absolutely not," she said, her voice sharp and absolute. "That is the most irresponsible suggestion I have ever heard. Unsanctioned, unmitigated cross-testing of two sentient humanoid anomalies with reality-altering properties? It is forbidden for a reason, Subaru. The potential for a catastrophic ontological paradox, a recursive loop failure, a conceptual collapse… we could erase one or both of them from existence. We could merge them. We could create a new, hostile anomaly that combines their properties. The list of potential disasters is a hundred pages long. The answer is no."

"But what if it works?" Subaru shot back, his desperation making him bold. "What if the one-in-a-million chance is that we can save her? We can't just ignore that! We can't leave her trapped in there for the rest of eternity because we're scared of what might happen!"

"Subaru, she's right, this sounds really dangerous," Sugar said, her protective instincts warring with the obvious hope in his voice. "What if something happens to you?"

"This is a foolish risk," Miwa added, her tone cold and pragmatic. "Your promise does not obligate you to wager your own safety on a scientific whim."

Subaru was about to argue, to plead, when a third voice joined the debate, her tone dripping with amused, intellectual curiosity.

"Oh, I must disagree," Echidna said, stepping out from the shadows. "Doctor, you are a woman of science, are you not? And you stand before a potential breakthrough of such magnitude it could redefine your entire understanding of dimensional theory. A chance to observe the interaction between three unique anomalies: the formless girl, the dimensional gateway, and the boy who acts as a universal constant. This isn't a risk; it's an unprecedented opportunity for knowledge. Are you truly going to let a dusty old rulebook stand in the way of that?"

Her words were a poison-tipped arrow aimed directly at the heart of Dr. Buck's scientific soul. The doctor visibly wavered, the temptation of the unknown battling with a lifetime of disciplined caution.

"We will proceed with the initial, approved interaction. And nothing more," Dr. Buck finally said, her voice tight. "Bring in SCP-105."

The door to the inner chamber opened, and a young woman with blonde hair and weary blue eyes walked in. It was Iris. She held her old Polaroid camera in her hands like a holy relic, her posture guarded, her expression one of tired resignation. She was here to perform for the scientists, just like always.

Subaru, however, had no time for procedure. He stepped up to the observation window, bypassing Dr. Buck and the microphone system, and spoke directly to the reinforced glass, knowing she could hear him.

"Iris!" he called out, his voice filled with an urgent passion that made her look up in surprise. "My name is Subaru. I know they have a test planned for you, but I need to ask for your help. There's a girl, her name is Cassy. She's trapped. She's a drawing, she lives on paper, and she's never felt the sun or held a flower. But you… your ability… you might be able to reach her. You might be the only person in the universe who can save her."

He gestured to a nearby monitor, where Cassy's feed was still active. On the screen, the small, drawn figure was pressed up against the "edge" of her paper world, her hopeful, pleading eyes fixed on Iris.

Iris stared from Subaru’s intense, desperate face to the image of the girl on the screen. She was used to being an object, a tool. This boy, this strange, passionate boy, was asking her to be a hero. He wasn't talking to SCP-105; he was talking to Iris. He was asking for her help. A feeling she hadn't felt in a very long time—a flicker of hope, of purpose—began to stir within her.

Dr. Buck stood frozen, trapped in an impossible position. Protocol screamed at her to shut this down, to sedate Subaru and put Iris back in her cell. But her heart, and the greedy scientist within, saw the tableau before her: the boy who could rewrite reality, the girl who could bridge dimensions, and the drawing who dreamed of being real. Three separate, impossible stories, all converging on a single, incredible moment of hope. Before her was a choice: to follow the rules, or to take a chance on a miracle.

Dr. Buck stood on a precipice of her own making. Before her were three anomalies, all looking to her for a decision. Protocol, safety, and a century of hard-learned caution screamed at her to shut it down. But the desperate hope on Subaru’s face, the pleading eyes of the girl on the monitor, and the quiet, determined nod from Iris—it was a trifecta of possibility she couldn't bring herself to deny. The silent, smug encouragement from Echidna was the final, damnable push.

"Against my better judgment," she said, her voice tight with a tension that felt like a coiled spring, "and in explicit defiance of at least seventeen different containment doctrines… I am authorizing a limited, exploratory cross-test." She took a deep breath. "But the instant—the very nanosecond—I see a hostile reaction or an ontological failure, I am terminating this experiment, and all of you are going into separate, high-security lockdowns for a month. Is that understood?"

A wave of relief so powerful it was almost a physical force washed through Subaru. "Understood! Thank you, Doctor! You won't regret this!"

"I assure you, I already do," she muttered, turning to her team. "Get me a full reality-anchor team on standby. I want every sensor we have focused on that chamber. Prep a mobile task force for immediate intervention. Let's move."

The entire facility seemed to shift gears. The quiet, procedural atmosphere was replaced by the frantic, high-stakes energy of a rocket launch. The large, interconnected canvas of paper that was Cassy's world was carefully moved by robotic arms into Iris’s more secure testing chamber. The room was a large, white, empty space, now dominated by the sprawling 2D landscape on the floor.

Subaru, Iris, Sugar, and Miwa were allowed into the chamber itself, while Dr. Buck, Echidna, and a score of terrified scientists watched from the reinforced observation bunker. Sugar and Miwa took up positions near the door, a united front of anxious protection, ready to drag Subaru out at the first sign of trouble.

Inside the chamber, the air was thick with a mixture of hope and terror. Subaru knelt down beside the paper world, getting as close as he could to Cassy. On the paper, her tiny figure was trembling.

"Hey," he said, his voice a soft, reassuring murmur. "It's happening. Just like I promised. You just need to be brave for a few more minutes, okay?"

Cassy looked from his giant, out-of-focus face to the girl with the strange, square device. "I'm scared," her voice came, small and tinny from a speaker in the ceiling.

"I know," Subaru said. "But Iris is going to help. We're all here for you."

He looked up at Iris, who stood nervously by, clutching her Polaroid camera. She had performed her 'trick' hundreds of times for the Foundation, but never like this. This wasn't a test of her ability; it was a test of her soul. "You ready?" Subaru asked her.

Iris took a deep breath, her weary eyes filled with a new, uncertain light. She looked at Cassy's trembling form on the paper. She knew that feeling. The feeling of being trapped, of being a curiosity observed through glass. For the first time, her power didn't feel like a curse. It felt like a key. She gave Subaru a firm, determined nod. "I'm ready."

She raised the camera.

The silence in the chamber was absolute. Every scientist in the bunker held their breath. Sugar gripped her own arms, her knuckles white. Miwa’s hand rested on her side, as if ready to draw an invisible blade.

FLASH.

The burst of light was startlingly bright in the white room. The camera whirred, a soft, mechanical sound that was deafening in the silence, and ejected a square photograph. Iris caught it, her hands steady.

All eyes were on the small, white square in her hand. Slowly, magically, an image began to fade into view. It was a perfect, miniature replica of the scene on the floor: the paper landscape, and in the center of it, the tiny, drawn figure of Cassy, looking up with wide, terrified eyes.

"Okay," Iris whispered, mostly to herself. "Here we go."

She held the photograph in one hand. It looked so small, so fragile. She took another deep breath, focused her entire will, and reached toward it with her other hand.

And the impossible happened.

From the perspective of the observers, Iris's physical, flesh-and-blood hand moved toward the tiny photo, and then simply… went in. Her fingers, her palm, her wrist—they vanished into the two-dimensional surface of the Polaroid, creating no ripple, no tear, just seamlessly passing from one reality into another.

But from Cassy's perspective, it was a miracle of terrifying, biblical proportions.

The grey, graphite sky of her world tore open, not with a sound, but with a silent, vibrant intrusion of color. A colossal, three-dimensional hand of flesh and bone, rendered in hues of pink and tan she had only ever seen from a distance, descended from above. It was a god's hand, impossibly real, impossibly huge. It moved with a slow, deliberate grace, stopping a few feet above her. The fingers unfurled, offering an open, gentle palm.

"It's okay," Iris's voice echoed from all around, her words strained with the immense concentration it was taking. "It's me. Iris. Take my hand, Cassy."

Cassy was frozen, not with fear, but with an awe so profound it transcended terror. This was it. The bridge between her world and theirs. The promise made manifest. With a trembling, graphite-and-paper arm, she reached up. Her two-dimensional fingers, lines on a page, touched the warm, solid, three-dimensional skin of Iris’s hand.

It was the first physical sensation of her entire existence. It wasn't just warmth; it was pressure, texture, the feeling of blood pulsing beneath the skin. It was real. It was the most real thing she had ever known.

She wrapped her hand around Iris's finger, her grip surprisingly strong.

"I have her," Iris grunted, her face beaded with sweat. "I'm going to pull. Subaru, get ready!"

Iris pulled her hand back out of the photograph. As she did, the image on the paper canvas on the floor began to warp. The drawing of Cassy stretched, her form becoming elastic, peeling away from the surface of the page like a decal. The lines of her body thinned, then snapped away from the paper, leaving a perfectly blank spot where she had been standing just a moment before.

For a split second, there was a shimmering distortion in the air above the blank spot, a brief, silent implosion of light and color.

And then she was there.

Standing on the cold, white floor of the testing chamber was a girl. Not a drawing. A real, solid, flesh-and-blood girl. Her sundress was a pale, soft yellow. Her hair was a real, tangible shade of chestnut brown, falling around shoulders that had dimension and weight. Her eyes were a startling, clear blue. She was breathing, the soft rise and fall of her chest a miracle in itself.

She stood perfectly still, her bare feet planted on the cool, smooth floor—the first surface she had ever truly felt. She slowly lifted a hand, turning it over and over, watching the way the light played off her skin, the way her fingers could bend and curl. She wiggled her toes, the sensation novel, alien, and utterly intoxicating. The air she was breathing had a scent, a sterile, clean smell that was still the most complex and wonderful perfume she had ever known.

The world was not a picture anymore. It was a place. And she was in it.

She was frozen, her mind a silent, screaming chaos of sensory overload, a lifetime of deprivation ending in a single, beautiful, overwhelming moment. She was real.

The stunned silence in the testing chamber was a fragile, crystalline thing, ready to shatter at the slightest sound. Cassy stood on the floor, a living, breathing miracle in a yellow sundress, her mind a roaring tempest of newfound sensations. The cool, recycled air on her skin was a revelation. The low hum of the facility's power was a symphony.

She took a hesitant, wobbly step, then another. She looked down at her feet, at the way they could press against the solid floor, and a breathless, disbelieving laugh escaped her lips. She touched her own arm, marveling at the warmth, the soft texture of her own skin.

"It's… it's real," she whispered, her voice, no longer filtered through a speaker, filled with a raw, tactile awe. "I'm real."

Subaru, who had been holding his breath, let it out in a whoosh of pure, triumphant relief. A wide, genuine, unguarded grin split his face. "You are," he said, taking a step toward her. "I told you. I told you we'd find a way."

Overwhelmed by a sudden wave of vertigo from a lifetime of 2D existence suddenly thrust into a 3D world, Cassy stumbled backward. Her back hit a large, laminated technical poster hanging on the wall.

But instead of bouncing off it, she simply… vanished.

For a heart-stopping moment, everyone thought the effect had reversed. But then they saw it. On the complex schematic of the facility's plumbing system, a perfect, colored drawing of a girl in a yellow sundress was now standing next to a diagram of a water pump, her expression one of pure shock.

A second later, with a visible shimmer, she pushed herself out of the poster, tumbling back onto the floor in a heap.

She sat up, blinking, and then a look of profound, earth-shattering joy dawned on her face. "I can still do it!" she exclaimed, her voice ringing with delight. "I can go in! But… I can come out, too! I can choose!"

The implications were staggering. She wasn't just cured; she was perfected. She had lost her prison but kept her unique gift. She was the master of her own existence.

Dr. Buck, her scientific mind finally rebooting, stepped into the chamber, her face a complex mixture of awe, relief, and procedural panic. "Remarkable," she breathed. "Your state is… stabilized, but fundamentally altered. You will, of course, have to remain within the Foundation, SCP-085. You are still a significant, albeit now mobile, anomaly." She gestured to Sugar and Miwa. "You will be given quarters and privileges similar to these two."

Cassy looked at her, then around the sterile white room, and her smile didn't waver in the slightest. "I don't care," she said, her voice filled with a happiness so pure it was radiant. "As long as it's not on paper, any room is a palace."

Her eyes then fell on the two people who had made this miracle happen. She scrambled to her feet and rushed to Iris, who flinched back reflexively, not used to such open emotion. Cassy threw her arms around the blonde girl, a hug filled with a lifetime of pent-up gratitude.

"Thank you," Cassy wept, her tears, real and wet, soaking into Iris's jumpsuit. "Thank you, thank you."

Iris stood stiffly for a moment before awkwardly patting Cassy's back. A strange, warm feeling spread through her chest. She wasn't a tool. She wasn't a number. She was a person who had just helped another person. It was a new and wonderful sensation.

Then, Cassy let go of Iris and turned to Subaru. Her expression was one of pure, unadulterated adoration. He hadn't just helped; he had been the catalyst. He had been the one who had dared to hope, the one who had made a promise.

She launched herself at him, wrapping her arms around his neck in a hug so tight it lifted him off his feet. "You promised!" she cried into his shoulder, her voice thick with joyful tears. "I didn't think anyone could, but you really did it! You got me my happy ending!"

Subaru stumbled back, laughing as he steadied them both, patting her back. "Hey, it was a team effort."

But as he held her, he was completely oblivious to the two pairs of eyes that were now fixed on the back of Cassy's head, radiating a combined intensity that could have peeled paint. Sugar’s jaw was clenched, a low growl of frustration in her throat. Miwa’s eyes had narrowed into cold, predatory slits.

Cassy, even in her euphoric state, felt the sudden drop in temperature. She peeked over Subaru’s shoulder and saw the twin glares of pure, possessive jealousy. A mischievous, playful spark ignited in her newfound blue eyes. She was no longer a helpless, melancholic drawing. She was a real girl, and she was in the arms of her hero. With a subtlety no one but her two new rivals could see, she stuck her tongue out at them, a silent, cheeky declaration that a new player had just entered the game.

After a long, happy moment, she finally let go of Subaru, who was still grinning like an idiot, high on the sheer success of his impossible plan. He then turned to Iris, his eyes shining with genuine admiration.

"Iris," he said, his voice earnest. "That was… incredible. You were incredible. I know they've treated you like a tool, like just another SCP to be tested. But you're not. What you did today… you're a hero."

The word struck Iris with the force of a physical blow. Hero. No one had ever called her that. She was a number, an anomaly, a security risk, a subject. But never a hero.

Subaru, caught up in the emotion of the moment, pulled her into a hug as well, a firm, grateful embrace. "Thank you for helping her," he said sincerely. "Thank you for trusting me."

Iris stood frozen in his arms. She could feel the warmth of his body, the steady, reassuring beat of his heart against her ear. The word echoed in her mind, a revolutionary concept. Hero. Hero. Hero. A hot flush crept up her neck, and her own heart began to pound in her chest, a frantic, unfamiliar rhythm that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the strange, kind, oblivious boy who had seen a person instead of a number.

In the observation bunker, Echidna watched the tableau unfold, a slow, deeply amused smile spreading across her face. She took a delicate sip of tea that a nervous researcher had brought her.

She saw Subaru, the central point of it all, beaming with a pure, selfless joy, completely unaware of the chaotic emotional storm swirling around him.

She saw Sugar, clenching and unclenching her fists, her protective affection now curdling with a fierce, potent jealousy.

She saw Miwa, whose cold possessiveness was now being challenged, her predatory gaze shifting between the two new potential threats.

She saw Cassy, the newly liberated soul, whose gratitude was plainly blossoming into a deep, adoring crush.

And she saw Iris, the forgotten tool, who was now looking at Subaru with a newfound, hero-worshipping reverence that was bound to become something more.

"Oh, my," the Witch of Greed murmured to herself, her dark eyes glittering with profound delight. "From a simple triangle to a chaotic quadrilateral, and now… a pentagonal affair? The variables… the potential for new and interesting conflicts, for new heights of emotional discovery… It's simply magnificent."

She looked down at the boy in the chamber, surrounded by four powerful, anomalous young women, all of whom were now competing for his heart.

"And the central point of it all," she mused, "hasn't the faintest clue. How wonderfully, perfectly foolish."

Chapter Text

The morning after the miracle of Cassy’s liberation was a study in controlled chaos. When Subaru woke in his suite, he found a small crowd had already assembled in his common area. Sugar was there, humming as she arranged a breakfast spread fit for a king. Miwa was conferring with a security officer, her eyes coolly assessing the day’s schedule. Cassy, still looking at the world with the wide, wondrous eyes of a newborn, was tracing the patterns on a rug with her bare feet, marveling at the simple sensation. And Iris, leaning against a wall with her camera slung over her shoulder, offered him a small, shy smile that he returned with a tired grin. This was his life now: an entourage of anomalous young women acting as his self-appointed guardians, rivals, and friends.

Dr. Buck arrived promptly at 09:30. "Good morning, Subaru," she said, her tone professional but lacking the hard, clinical edge it once had. "I trust you're well-rested. We have a simple interaction scheduled for this morning."

The briefing took place in the hallway as they walked, his entourage trailing behind them like a royal court. The file that appeared on Dr. Buck's tablet made Subaru’s stomach clench. SCP-134.

The image was of a small, Japanese girl, perhaps ten years old, with short black hair and a plain dress. She looked utterly normal, except for her eyes. They were not eyes. They were two, perfectly black, featureless voids, like holes punched through reality into a starless night sky.

"SCP-134 is biologically human," Dr. Buck explained, her voice softening with a hint of clinical pity. "Her anomaly is isolated to her ocular organs. They are, for all intents and purposes, miniature wormholes. She cannot perceive the visible light spectrum. She is, in our sense of the word, blind. However, she can perceive other wavelengths—radio, microwave, gamma rays. She sees the world as a symphony of invisible energies. The goal today is simple communication. Assess her psychological state. Your presence has a calming effect on sentient anomalies; we wish to observe the interaction."

Subaru stopped walking. The others paused behind him. He stared at the picture of the little girl, at the clinical description of her existence. A ten-year-old. A child. Trapped in this concrete tomb, given a number, studied like an insect under glass.

He felt the bile rise in his throat. He wanted to puke. Not from her appearance, but from the sheer, soul-crushing injustice of it all. No child deserved this. No matter how strange or different they were. He thought of Beatrice, alone in her library for four hundred years, and a cold, protective fury ignited within him.

"She's a little girl," Subaru said, his voice dangerously quiet. "What possible threat could she be? Why isn't she in a proper home? At least put her with other kids, for God's sake. There have to be other child SCPs here, right?"

"Her anomaly, while passive, makes integration with non-anomalous children impossible for her own safety and for the Veil," Dr. Buck replied, giving the standard, infuriatingly logical Foundation response. "She requires containment. We provide for all of her needs."

"All of them except a life," Subaru shot back, his glare so intense that Dr. Buck actually took a half-step back. He took a deep breath, reining in his anger. Yelling wouldn't help the girl. "Let's just go."

The containment chamber was, as he had feared, a mockery of a child's bedroom. It was filled with colorful furniture, soft toys, and a bookshelf filled with books printed in Japanese Braille. It was a perfect, sterile, soulless imitation of a childhood.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, clutching a stuffed rabbit, was SCP-134. She was small, frail-looking. She didn't look up as they entered the observation room; she couldn't. Her head was tilted slightly, as if she were listening to a sound no one else could hear. And her eyes… her eyes were a hundred times more unsettling in person. They didn't reflect any light. They were perfect, black circles of absolute nothingness.

"You may enter, Subaru," Dr. Buck said softly.

He walked into the room alone, the door hissing shut behind him. The girl didn't react, though her head tilted slightly in his direction, likely 'seeing' the heat signature of his body or the faint electrical signals from his nervous system.

He was given a list of questions to ask through an earpiece. He started with them, his voice feeling hollow and wrong in the quiet room. "Hello, SCP-134. My name is Subaru. How are you feeling today?"

Her head turned a little more. "I am… satisfactory," she replied, her voice a soft, quiet whisper in perfect Japanese. She had clearly been instructed on how to answer.

"The researchers would like to know what you see in this room."

"I see the bright lines of the lights in the ceiling," she whispered. "The warm shape of the computer in the wall. The quiet, glowing box in your pocket. I see the loud noise that comes from the sky. The one that carries stories and songs." She was talking about the radio waves from broadcast towers miles away.

He was supposed to continue with the script, to ask her to identify different frequencies, to treat her like a piece of sensory equipment. He couldn't do it.

He took out his earpiece, dropped it on the floor, and sat down on the carpet a few feet away from her, making himself smaller. He switched to Japanese, his tone gentle and warm, completely abandoning the clinical pretense.

"Hello," he said softly. "My name is Subaru. It's nice to meet you. You don't have to call me a glowing box."

The girl froze. This was not part of the script. "They told me to call you Subject," she murmured.

"That's a silly name," Subaru said with a small smile. "I prefer Subaru. What's your name? Not your number. Your real name."

She hesitated for a long, silent moment. "I… don't remember," she whispered, and the profound sadness in those three words was a physical blow.

Subaru’s heart broke. He looked at the girl, at this child who was so lost and alone that she had forgotten her own name, and he felt the quiet, crushing weight of her emotional pain. It wasn't the loud, violent trauma of the others. It was a slow, grinding despair, the agony of profound, absolute isolation. She was blind to a world that was blind to her, a ghost living in a world of different ghosts.

"That's okay," he said, his voice gentle. "We can just be friends. You can tell me about your rabbit. He looks very soft."

As he spoke, he began to tell her a story. A story about a foolish boy in a tracksuit who found himself in a magical kingdom, about a beautiful half-elf and a tiny, grumpy spirit librarian. He didn't cure her. He didn't perform a miracle. He just sat on the floor and talked to a lonely little girl, treating her not as a number, not as an anomaly, but as a person.

In the observation room, the four young women watched, their expressions a mixture of emotions. Sugar was quietly crying, deeply moved by his compassion. Miwa's cold facade had softened, a flicker of empathy in her eyes. Cassy and Iris were seeing the raw, unfiltered kindness that was the source of his power, the very thing that had saved them.

And as Subaru continued his story, the little girl with the black-hole eyes, for the first time in a very long time, smiled.

The scheduled observation period had ended over an hour ago, but Subaru refused to leave. He remained seated on the floor of SCP-134's containment chamber, the door left open under the watchful, nervous eyes of a dozen guards and researchers. The little girl with the black-hole eyes sat before him, listening intently as he told her about the taste of salty potato chips and the bright, chaotic colors of a festival he once knew. He was painting a world for her in words, a world she could only experience through his descriptions.

In the observation room, the mood was a complex tapestry of emotions. Sugar and Cassy watched with tearful, heartfelt smiles. Iris looked on with a quiet, newfound respect. Miwa’s usually cold expression was softened by a strange, unfamiliar gentleness. Dr. Buck stood with her arms crossed, her professional objections silenced by the undeniable, positive rapport Subaru had built.

"...and the fireworks," Subaru was saying in gentle Japanese, his hands gesturing in the air as if he could physically shape the memory for her. "They're like giant flowers made of light that bloom in the night sky. Red, and blue, and gold. They make a loud 'BOOM' that you can feel in your chest, but it’s a happy sound."

The little girl listened, her head tilted, trying to imagine a flower made of light. "I wish I could see it," she whispered, her voice barely audible. "I wish I could see your face, Subaru-san. The others… their voices are sharp. But yours is warm. I think you must have a kind face."

Her words were a dagger in Subaru's heart. This child, who could perceive the fundamental energies of the universe, was blind to a simple, kind smile. The injustice of it, the sheer, tragic loneliness of her existence, was overwhelming. All the horrors he had faced, all the monsters he had fought, seemed simple compared to the quiet, unending cruelty of this child's prison.

Tears welled in his eyes, hot and sudden. He tried to blink them away, but one escaped, tracing a path down his cheek.

"I don't know about that," he said, his voice thick with an emotion he couldn't hide. "But… you don't need to see my face to know I'm here. You don't have to be alone."

He opened his arms slowly. "May I give you a hug?"

The request was so simple, so profoundly human, it seemed to hang in the sterile air of the chamber. The little girl hesitated, her body tensing. Physical contact was not a part of her normal routine. But the warmth she perceived from Subaru, the genuine, aching sincerity in his voice, was a comfort she had never known. She gave a small, almost imperceptible nod.

Subaru moved forward gently, wrapping his arms around her small, frail body. He held her, pouring all the empathy, all the sorrow, all the fierce, protective instinct he felt into that one simple embrace. He was holding a child who had been denied the most basic of human connections, and he was determined to give her, if only for a moment, a feeling of safety and warmth.

And then, IT happened.

As he held her, a soft, ethereal light began to emanate from her face. Dr. Buck gasped. "What's happening? Get me a reading on that energy signature!"

Subaru pulled back, his eyes wide. The black, empty voids of the girl's eyes were no longer empty. A soft, white light was swirling within them, like twin galaxies being born in a sea of nothingness. The light was gentle, beautiful, and pulsed with a quiet, ancient power. It didn't feel dangerous; it felt… creative.

The light intensified for a breathtaking second, illuminating the room with its soft, cosmic glow, and then, as quickly as it had come, it faded, retracting back into the darkness.

Subaru stared, his heart pounding in his chest. The girl’s eyes were still the same impossible, absolute black as before. But there was one, stunning difference.

In the center of each black void, a single, brilliant point of pure white light now resided. Like two distant, piercing stars in the infinite night sky. They weren't pupils in a biological sense; they were points of focus, of awareness, of sight. They were almost identical to the knowing, ancient eyes of the Witch of Greed who watched from the observation room.

The little girl blinked. Once. Twice. The slight, constant tilt of her head was gone. She was holding it perfectly level, her new, star-like pupils darting around the room, taking everything in for the first time. The dawning, wondrous comprehension on her face was a sight of pure, unadulterated awe.

Her gaze, no longer seeing a world of heat signatures and radio waves, landed on Subaru’s face. She saw him. Really, truly saw him.

"Subaru-san?" she whispered, her voice filled with a trembling wonder. She slowly raised a small, shaking hand and pointed at his face. "Your hair… it's black. Like my eyes. And your eyes… they are sharp. And brown." She paused, her own new eyes widening as she saw the moisture on his cheeks. "And… you're crying."

Subaru, who hadn't even realized it, let out a choked, laughing sob. He was crying, not from sadness, but from a joy so profound it was physically painful. He had done it. Or rather, something inside him had. A simple act of kindness had rewritten a law of this child’s existence.

The girl looked down at her own hands, turning them over and over, her mouth agape. She looked at the bright colors of the stuffed rabbit in her lap, at the yellow stripes on her dress, at the blue of the walls. A lifetime of sensory deprivation was ending in a tidal wave of color, shape, and form.

In the observation room, the assembled personnel were frozen in a state of stunned, joyous disbelief.

"She can see," Dr. Buck breathed, her hand over her heart. "Her brain is processing visual-spectrum light. It's impossible. It's a miracle."

Sugar and Cassy were openly weeping, clutching each other in a shared, happy embrace. Miwa’s cold facade had completely melted, a rare, genuine smile gracing her lips. Iris held her camera, but for once, she wasn't thinking about taking a picture; she was just witnessing a moment of pure, unscripted beauty.

Only Echidna was not celebrating. She was observing, her mind racing, her smile sharp and analytical. She recognized that light. She recognized those eyes. This was not a random miracle. This was an Authority at work. The Axiom's power was not just his own; it was a conduit. To cure the girl's blindness, it had drawn upon the fundamental concept of 'sight' and 'knowledge' from another source. It had used her Authority, the Authority of Greed. The implications were staggering.

In the chamber, the little girl, now with stars in her eyes, refused to let go of Subaru's hand. Tears of pure, unadulterated joy streamed down her face as she looked around her new, vibrant, and finally visible world.

"It's beautiful," she cried, her gaze returning to his face. "You're beautiful, Subaru-san."

And Subaru, holding the hand of the girl to whom he had just given the world, smiled. It was a real, true smile, free of pain and weariness. For the first time since coming to this strange, terrifying place, he felt like a hero.

SCP-134 UPDATE: Subject has been reclassified as SCP-134-ARC (Altered, Remediated, Contained). Designation is now Safe. Subject has chosen the name "Stella." Subject now possesses full visual-spectrum sight, with ocular anomalies presenting as black sclera and white, luminous pupils. Psychological evaluation confirms a stable, positive disposition. A strong filial attachment to Thaumiel-Prime has been noted. Subject has been granted Level-1 Free Roam privileges, contingent on accompaniment by Level-3 personnel or an approved Thaumiel-Adjacent companion.

SCP-105 UPDATE: Per the direct request of Thaumiel-Prime and a review by the Ethics Committee, SCP-105 ("Iris") has also been granted Level-1 Free Roam privileges under similar companion-contingent protocols. Her cooperation has increased by 400%.

AXIOM PROTOCOL (REVISED): All interactions with Thaumiel-Prime are to be non-hostile and focused on observation and benign communication. The previous high-risk testing model is permanently suspended per Project Sanctuary Directive.

PSYCHOLOGICAL NOTE: A recurring and statistically impossible pattern of behavior has been confirmed. SCP-085 ("Cassy"), SCP-105 ("Iris"), SCP-953 ("Miwa"), and SCP-2396 ("Sugar") all display signs of extreme, anomalous emotional fixation on Thaumiel-Prime. This fixation presents as overt romantic affection, intense jealousy, and extreme protective behavior. Thaumiel-Prime himself appears to be completely oblivious to this phenomenon. Further observation is required.

The official report could never capture the sheer, chaotic warmth of the new reality. The main recreational commons of Site-17, once a sterile place for stressed researchers to decompress, had become the unofficial court of Natsuki Subaru and his anomalous entourage.

He sat on a soft couch, a picture book of animals open on his lap. Beside him, snuggled close, was the little girl who had chosen the name Stella. She was pointing a small finger at a picture of a tiger, her new, star-filled eyes wide with wonder.

"So his fur is… orange?" she asked in Japanese, her voice filled with a happy, musical curiosity.

"That's right," Subaru replied patiently, a gentle smile on his face. "It's a bright, warm color. Like a sunset. And the black stripes are dark, like your hair."

"Like my hair," she repeated, touching her own short, black locks. She then looked up at him, her gaze full of a pure, uncomplicated adoration. "You are very smart, Subaru-nii."

The honorific, 'Big Brother Subaru', sent a pang of both warmth and sorrow through him. It was so much like Beatrice. This small, ancient-eyed girl, clinging to him for guidance and protection in a world that had only ever treated her like a prisoner… the parallel was uncanny.

From across the room, Echidna, who was observing the scene with a cup of ethereal tea in her hand, let out a soft, barely audible chuckle.

Subaru glanced over, an annoyed frown on his face. He knew exactly what she found so funny.

"Stella," she had mused to him earlier, her voice dripping with irony. "My, what a wonderfully, painfully familiar name you've chosen for her. It's almost as if the universe enjoys its little jokes at your expense."

He chose to ignore her, focusing instead on the complex, overlapping orbits of the four young women around him. Sugar was approaching with a plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. "Stella-chan, Subaru, I made snacks!" she announced, her smile bright but her eyes lingering on his face, gauging his reaction, his mood, his every micro-expression.

Cassy sat on the floor nearby, a sketchpad in her lap, her pencil flying across the page. She was drawing him and Stella, but the version of him in her drawing was taller, broader-shouldered, with a heroic glint in his eye. Her adoration was plain for all to see.

Iris was trying to pretend she wasn't watching, focusing on taking "artistic" photos of the room's architecture, but her lens kept drifting back to the couch, a soft, hero-worshipping smile on her lips every time Subaru laughed.

And Miwa stood by the far wall, a silent, beautiful sentinel. Her arms were crossed, her expression placid, but her predator's gaze missed nothing. She wasn't just watching Subaru; she was watching everyone else watch Subaru, her mind a complex calculus of threat assessment and social dynamics.

This was his new normal. A constant, suffocating, well-intentioned bubble of protection and affection. The tests were laughably simple now. A researcher would approach.

"Thaumiel-Prime," one had said earlier, "we would like to gauge the emotional responses of your companions. Could you please state that you have a headache?"

Subaru had sighed. "Guys, I have a headache."

The response was instantaneous. Sugar had rushed off to get water and painkillers. Miwa had started interrogating the researcher about ambient sound levels in the facility. Cassy had started drawing a 'get well soon' card, and Iris had looked genuinely distressed. The researcher had furiously scribbled notes. It was absurd.

From a secure observation deck above the commons, Dr. Buck watched the scene with a tired, resigned expression.

"Affective response readings are still holding at 98% above baseline for all four subjects," a junior researcher noted, staring at his monitor. "The fixation shows no signs of diminishing. It's statistically impossible, Doctor. A psychological anomaly in itself."

Dr. Buck sighed and rubbed her temples. "We are well aware, Johnson. The O5s are calling it the 'Axiom-Attraction Phenomenon'. It's now a recognized, if poorly understood, secondary effect of his presence."

"It's just… they're so obvious about it," Johnson said, shaking his head in disbelief. "The jealousy, the competition for his attention… it's like a high school drama. And he really… doesn't see it?"

Dr. Buck looked down at the scene. Subaru was now patiently trying to explain to Stella why cats purr, completely engrossed in the simple, wholesome task. He was oblivious to Sugar adjusting the collar of his shirt with a lingering touch, to Cassy sketching hearts in the corners of her drawing, to Iris's adoring gaze, and to the way Miwa's eyes narrowed slightly when Sugar's hand rested on Subaru's shoulder for a fraction of a second too long. He was the calm, still center of a raging, five-way emotional hurricane.

"Johnson," Dr. Buck said with the weariness of a woman who had seen too much. "He sees Keter-class monsters, alternate timelines, and the fundamental laws of reality bending before him. But the four powerful, anomalous young women who are hopelessly in love with him? To him, they are completely, utterly invisible."

Chapter Text

The day's work was supposed to be over. The emotional highs and lows of the encounters with Cassy and Stella had left a lingering, weary peace over the facility. But an urgent, high-priority directive had come down from the O5 Council. The success with SCP-134 had emboldened them. They had another child anomaly, one infinitely more dangerous, and they believed Subaru was the only key to a more humane, stable form of containment.

The briefing room was colder than usual. The faces of Dr. Buck and her team were pale and drawn with a tension that surpassed even the lead-up to the SCP-096 test. This was not a monster that could be understood and cured; this was a god in the shape of a little girl.

"The subject is SCP-239," Dr. Buck began, her voice low and grave. A picture of a small, sleeping, blonde-haired girl of about eight appeared on the screen. "Designation: Keter. Also known as 'The Witch Child'."

A collective, sharp intake of breath came from the four young women standing behind Subaru. Even Miwa’s stoic composure faltered for a moment. They all knew the file. SCP-239 was a Type-1 Reality Bender. Her perception of reality was reality. If she believed the walls were made of candy, they became candy. If she had a nightmare about monsters, real monsters would manifest. Her power was limited only by her childish imagination and a single, critical rule the Foundation had painstakingly programmed into her: "witches are good and do not hurt their friends."

"To contain her," Dr. Buck continued, "she is kept in a permanent, medically-induced coma. It is the only way to prevent accidental, catastrophic reality failures. The Council wants to explore a new option. They have authorized us to awaken her for a brief, controlled period. The hypothesis is that your Axiom field, Subaru, may act as a passive reality anchor, stabilizing her abilities and making a conscious, ethical containment possible."

"You're going to wake her up?" Sugar whispered, horrified. "That's… the protocol for that is listed as an apocalypse-level risk!"

"The risk is noted," Dr. Buck said grimly. "Only Subaru will enter the chamber."

"That is unacceptable."

The voice was Echidna's. She had appeared silently in the corner of the room, her arms crossed, her expression one of profound, academic interest. "Doctor, you are about to send a lamb into a den with a lion cub that does not yet know the strength of its own claws. A lion cub who believes, in her heart of hearts, that she is a witch."

She pushed herself off the wall, her dark eyes glittering. "What you need is a lioness. You are dealing with a child who perceives the world through the lens of magic and spellcraft. To send in a boy she has no context for is to invite chaos. But," she paused, letting the weight of her words settle, "if you send him in accompanied by me, you are sending him with an elder of her kind. Another witch. I can speak her language. I can shape the narrative. It is, by any logical metric, the far safer and more strategically sound option."

Dr. Buck stared, her mind a battlefield of conflicting protocols. Letting a second, monumentally powerful reality-bender into the chamber with SCP-239 was an act of pure insanity. And yet… the Witch's logic was flawless.

"This is a containment nightmare," Dr. Buck breathed. But she knew Echidna was right. "Fine," she ground out. "But if your 'narrative' deviates by a single syllable from my instructions, I will flood that room with every nerve agent we have. Am I clear?"

"Abundantly," Echidna replied with a serene smile.

The chamber was designed to be a fairy tale. The walls were painted with soft, pastel murals of enchanted forests, the bed was a four-poster with a gossamer canopy, and the room was filled with plush toys and beautifully illustrated books of spells and legends. In the center of the bed, the small form of SCP-239, Sigurrós, lay sleeping.

Subaru and Echidna entered, the heavy door sealing behind them. As the last of the anesthetic gas was vented from the room, the little girl stirred. Her eyelids fluttered open, revealing eyes of a startling, pale green. She sat up, looking at them not with fear, but with a groggy, childlike curiosity.

"Hello?" she said, her voice small. "Are you… from the Guild?"

Subaru was about to answer when Echidna stepped forward, her movements graceful and assured. She gave a slight, almost courtly bow. "We are travelers," she said, her voice a gentle, melodic hum that seemed to resonate with the magical air of the room. "My name is Echidna. It is a pleasure to finally meet the youngest of our kind."

Sigurrós’s eyes went wide with wonder. "You're a witch?" she whispered, her voice filled with awe.

"That is one word for it," Echidna replied, her smile knowing and kind. "And this," she said, gesturing to Subaru, "is my companion, Subaru. He is… a knight, of a sort. Sworn to protect good witches from harm."

This narrative instantly framed them as allies, as heroes from one of her storybooks. Subaru, caught off guard, just gave a slightly awkward wave. "Yo."

"A real knight?" Sigurrós breathed, her gaze now fixed on Subaru.

"Something like that," he said with a small smile, seeing the lonely little girl behind the world-ending power.

"I can do magic, you know," the child said, eager to show off for her new, important guests. "Watch! I can make butterflies!"

She closed her eyes in concentration, her small hands clenched. In the observation room, alarms began to flash as reality-flux sensors spiked. "She's warping reality!" a technician yelled.

The air in the chamber shimmered. Then, a single, beautiful monarch butterfly, vibrant and impossibly real, fluttered into existence from thin air. Then another, and another. Soon, the room was filled with a gentle, silent storm of dozens of butterflies, their wings of orange and black painting the air with color.

The researchers were in a panic, but Subaru just laughed, a genuine, delighted sound. He reached out and let one of the butterflies land on his finger. It was solid. It was real. "Wow," he said, looking at Sigurrós with genuine admiration. "That's amazing. It's the best magic I've ever seen."

His praise, his utter lack of fear, made the little witch beam with pride.

Echidna watched, her eyes narrowed in intense, greedy focus. This was not an Authority as she knew it. It was raw, untamed, belief-made-manifest. The child didn't rewrite causality; she simply imposed a new truth on top of it. And Subaru's presence… it was acting as a foundation, a grounding rod. The butterflies were perfectly stable, self-contained miracles. They did not unravel at the edges or cause paradoxical ripples. His Axiom field was containing her power by its very nature.

The test was a resounding success. For the next hour, Subaru played with the child, letting her show him her "spells"—turning water into juice, making her toys float and dance, creating a shower of harmless, sparkling lights. Echidna, meanwhile, spoke to her as a mentor, a fellow witch, gently guiding her understanding of her own power, planting the seeds of control and responsibility.

For the first time since her discovery, SCP-239 was not a monster to be feared, but a little girl to be taught. She was not alone anymore. She had found a kind knight and a wise, elder witch who understood her. As the new, milder sedatives began to lull her back to a peaceful, natural sleep, she looked at them both with a happy, hopeful smile.

In the observation room, the team was in a state of stunned disbelief. The apocalypse had been averted. A new, ethical path forward was now possible.

Sugar, Miwa, Cassy, and Iris watched the screen, their collective relief palpable. Subaru was safe. But a new, deep unease was settling in. They had just watched him, with Echidna's help, charm a literal witch-child. The web of affection and complication surrounding their oblivious hero had just gained a new, terrifyingly powerful, and magically-inclined thread.

A fragile, hopeful peace had settled over the observation bunker. The test was a success beyond their wildest dreams. SCP-239, the Witch Child, was drifting into a gentle, natural sleep, the mild sedatives ensuring she wouldn't wake up startled. Her reality-bending abilities had been stabilized by Subaru's presence, her narrative guided by Echidna's steady hand. For the first time, a future that didn't involve keeping a child in a permanent coma seemed possible.

Dr. Buck was on a direct line to the O5 Council, her voice filled with a triumphant, professional excitement. "The Axiom field acts as a perfect regulator. Her reality alterations are localized, stable, and non-paradoxical. We can establish a new, ethical containment protocol…"

But inside the fairy-tale chamber, Subaru wasn't celebrating. He looked down at the small, sleeping girl, her face finally peaceful, and he felt a cold, familiar anger. This was better, yes. A gentle sleep was better than a forced coma. But it was still a cage. She was still a prisoner, her consciousness a switch to be flipped on and off at the whim of her jailers. They had found a more comfortable way to chain their god, but she was chained all the same.

He thought of Stella, now seeing the world for the first time. He thought of Cassy, now walking in it. He had promised them a happy ending. Not a better cage.

He looked at Echidna. She stood by the door, watching him, her dark, ancient eyes missing nothing. She saw the storm gathering behind his gaze, the reckless, empathetic resolve that had upended every protocol in this facility. A slow, knowing, and deeply encouraging smile spread across her face. She wanted to see it. She wanted the knowledge that would come from him breaking the rules one more time.

That was all the permission he needed.

Then… He did IT.

The observers, distracted by their success, didn't notice at first. But the four young women who orbited him felt it instantly. A sudden, chilling drop in the room's emotional temperature. A wave of profound, ancient despair that seemed to emanate directly from Subaru’s body.

"What is that?" Iris whispered, her hand instinctively going to her camera. "What is that feeling?"

"It's him," Miwa growled, her eyes narrowing, every protective instinct flaring. "The aura he had… when he faced the Doctor."

Inside the chamber, Subaru took a deep breath and focused. For the first time, he wasn't just passively radiating the Witch's Scent; he was consciously wielding it. He gathered the miasma of death, failure, and looping agony that clung to his soul and pushed it outward. It was not an attack. It was an offering. A transfusion of absolute, conceptual law.

He knelt beside the sleeping girl's bed. He gently reached out and took her small, warm hand in his.

The moment he made contact, the anomalous energy sensors in the room screamed, redlining so violently that several of them sparked and shorted out.

"What is he doing?!" Dr. Buck yelled, spinning away from her comms link. "Get him out of there! Now!"

But it was too late. The miasma, the very essence of the Authority of Envy, flowed from Subaru and into the sleeping witch-child. It was a power born of an obsessive, absolute love that had broken time itself, a fundamental rule from another universe. It poured into Sigurrós, not to harm her, not to destroy her reality-bending gift, but to give it context.

Her raw, untamed ability was like a limitless ocean without a shore. The miasma, the Authority, was the framework, the bedrock, the laws of gravity and physics that could give that ocean shape and purpose. It provided the rules she never had, the control her childish mind could never grasp.

A soft, emerald-green light, the same color as the child's eyes, emanated from where their hands were joined. It pulsed gently, once, twice, and then faded.

And then, it all just… clicked.

Sigurrós’s eyes, which had been closed in a sedative-induced slumber, fluttered open. But she wasn't groggy or confused. Her gaze was clear, sharp, and filled with a sudden, profound understanding. She sat up, not as a sleepy child, but as someone who had just awakened to her own true nature.

She looked down at her own hands, flexing her fingers. A small, shimmering butterfly of pure light fluttered into existence above her palm, hovered for a moment, and then winked out of existence with a silent, perfect precision. She had willed it, and it had obeyed, exactly as she intended. No extraneous effort, no accidental side effects.

"I… I can feel it," she whispered, her voice filled not with childish wonder, but with a quiet, confident awe. "The magic. It isn't a loud noise anymore. It's… quiet. It listens to me now."

She was awake. And she was in control. The world-ending threat of SCP-239 was, in that single, impossible moment, neutralized.

She turned to Subaru, her green eyes shining with a gratitude so immense it was humbling. "You," she said, her voice clear and sure. "You showed me how. You have so much… pain. But you made it into a shield. You gave me one, too."

In the observation bunker, there was a stunned, breathless silence. They had just witnessed the impossible. Their most volatile, unpredictable Keter-class entity had just been rendered completely and permanently Safe. Not by a procedure, not by a machine, but by a single, empathetic, rebellious touch from the boy who died.

Echidna’s smile was one of pure, greedy, intellectual triumph. Her theory was proven. His Authority was not just a curse for him; it was a key for everyone else. It could redefine the very nature of other anomalies. The knowledge she had just gained was a feast.

The little witch, the god-child who no longer needed to sleep, swung her legs off the bed and stood, still holding Subaru's hand, a picture of perfect, controlled power. The most dangerous witch in the Foundation's custody was now just a little girl, saved by a boy who carried the scent of another.

The day after the miracle of SCP-239 was the first day that felt truly, hopefully different. The oppressive cloud of fear and tension that had perpetually hung over the high-security wings of the facility had dissipated, replaced by a cautious, buzzing optimism. Two of their most dangerous and tragic child anomalies were now safe, stable, and, for the first time, had a chance at something resembling a life.

It was Subaru's idea. The logic was so simple, so profoundly human, that the Foundation’s complex ethical committees had been momentarily stunned into silence before approving it. "They're just kids," he had told Dr. Buck. "They've both been alone their whole lives. They need a friend."

And so, in a specially prepared, high-security recreational area designed to look like a sunny park, the Foundation's first-ever anomalous playdate was underway.

Subaru watched from a nearby park bench, a genuine, bone-deep satisfaction warming him from the inside out. Stella, the girl with stars in her eyes, was laughing, a pure, tinkling sound that was worth more than all the treasures in the world. She was chasing after a swarm of shimmering, magical butterflies that another little girl, Sigurrós, was effortlessly conjuring from thin air.

Sigurrós, for her part, was a picture of focused delight. She was learning the limits and feel of her now-controlled powers, treating it like a new set of crayons. The reality-bending was small, contained, and filled with a child's innocent creativity. A flower would bloom instantly from the astroturf, a small, harmless sparkling cloud would drift by. She was no longer a world-ending threat; she was just a little girl playing make-believe, only her make-believe was real.

This, Subaru thought, was his purpose. The endless cycle of death, the screaming agony, the trauma that was now public knowledge—it was all a currency. A price he paid so that these children, these lonely, trapped souls, could have a moment of peace, a chance at happiness. Suffering for others… it wasn't just a curse. It was his reason for being.

Of course, he was so focused on this profound, noble purpose that he failed to notice the complex, multi-front war being waged for the territory of his personal space. His obliviousness had been a fortress, but the walls were beginning to show cracks.

Miwa approached his bench, holding a small tray with two glasses of iced tea. "It is important to stay hydrated," she said, her voice a smooth, pleasant melody. As she leaned in to place a glass on the small table next to him, she "stumbled" on a perfectly flat section of the ground. With a small, elegant gasp, she pitched forward, catching herself on the bench. The tray clattered, but the glasses remained upright.

It was, however, a very convenient stumble. It put her directly in front of him, bent over at the waist as she reached for the fallen tray. Her form-fitting jeans left little to the imagination, and her single, fluffy, black fox tail, which she now let manifest freely within the safe confines of the site, swung around and "accidentally" brushed against his arm. It was as soft as spun silk.

"My apologies," she said, her voice a low purr as she slowly straightened up. "How clumsy of me."

Subaru, his face suddenly hot, just stared. "Uh… no problem," he managed to stammer. His mind, a supercomputer for recognizing patterns in death loops, flagged the event. That's the third time this week she's done something like that. She's the most graceful person I've ever met, but she only seems to get clumsy right in front of me…

Before he could fully process that thought, another front opened. Sugar came jogging over, a bright, cheerful smile on her face. "Subaru! The girls look so happy! Isn't this great?" she chirped. As she got to the bench, she "tripped" over the leg of the table Miwa had just placed the drinks on.

With a small shriek of "Whoa!", she tumbled forward, directly onto him.

The world became a soft, warm, sweet-smelling darkness. His face was pressed firmly and deeply into her generous bosom, the impact surprisingly gentle. It was a sensation that was becoming alarmingly familiar. It was like being crushed from two big marshmellows.

"Oh my gosh, I am so sorry!" Sugar exclaimed, albeit not in a hurry to get up, her face a mask of flustered apology. "Are you okay, Subaru? I'm such a klutz!"

"I'm… fine," he wheezed as she finally got off of him after twenty seconds, his brain completely short-circuiting. Okay, that's the fifth time. And it's always my face. How does someone even trip like that? Is there a localized gravity field I don't know about?

The two shy members of his entourage were more subtle, but no less direct. Cassy, who had been sketching the scene, came over and sat down close beside him, their shoulders touching. "Subaru," she said, her voice soft. "I finished a new drawing. I wanted you to be the first to see it."

She showed him the sketchpad. It was a beautiful, heroic depiction of him, standing between a terrified Stella and Sigurrós, shielding them from a vague, shadowy threat. Around his head in the drawing, she had sketched a faint, golden halo. It was an amazing piece of art, full of emotion. It was also, he was beginning to realize, completely unsubtle.

"It's… really good, Cassy," he said, feeling the warmth of her shoulder pressed against his.

Iris was the last. She approached hesitantly, her camera in her hands. "Subaru," she said, her cheeks faintly pink. "I was just… taking pictures of the garden area. And I thought this one came out nice. You can have it. If you want."

She handed him a small, perfect Polaroid. It was a candid shot of him from a few minutes earlier, watching the two girls play, a proud, happy, big-brotherly smile on his face. It was a perfect moment, captured flawlessly. It was also a picture of him, taken by a girl whose camera was almost always pointed in his direction.

He looked at the photo, then at the four young women now gathered around his bench. Miwa, standing with a sultry, knowing smirk. Sugar, looking at him with wide, hopeful, affectionate eyes. Cassy, leaning against him with a happy sigh. Iris, shuffling her feet, unable to meet his gaze.

The patterns. The "accidents." The art. The photos.

It was all… aimed at him.

It wasn't just friendship. It wasn't just gratitude. This was… something else. Something complicated and terrifying and aimed directly at the center of his chest.

His fortress of obliviousness, once impenetrable, now had cracks so wide he could see the sunlight streaming through. He wasn't just their hero or their friend. He was… something more. And he had absolutely no idea what to do about it.

Chapter Text

The sun, a concept Subaru was slowly re-acclimatizing to, had begun its descent, painting the meticulously manicured grounds of the secure recreational area in hues of orange and purple. The happy, chaotic energy of the children's playdate had faded as Stella and Sigurrós were escorted to their quarters by a team of friendly, but vigilant, Foundation caretakers.

The quiet that remained was heavy and uncomfortable.

Subaru sat on the bench, the Polaroid photo Iris had given him clutched in his hand. He kept looking at the image of his own smiling face, a face that felt like it belonged to a stranger. That was him, yes, but that smile was uncomplicated. The Subaru in the picture was not currently wrestling with a sudden, horrifying paradigm shift in his social understanding.

The four young women had arranged themselves around him in a loose, unspoken semi-circle. They weren't speaking, but the silence was filled with a palpable, expectant energy. Sugar was fidgeting with the hem of her sweater. Miwa was observing him with an unreadable, predatory patience. Cassy was doodling in her sketchbook, though her eyes kept flicking up to him. Iris was polishing the lens of her camera with a focused intensity that was clearly a front for her nervousness.

They were all looking at him. And for the first time, he understood that they were looking at him.

His mind, a place of scarred tissue and traumatic memories, was now trying to process a new, entirely different kind of threat. It was a threat with no clear solution, no monster to outwit, no death loop to brute-force his way through. It was a complex, terrifying web of emotions, and he was tangled in the very center of it. He couldn't ignore it any longer. The patterns were too clear. The evidence was irrefutable.

He took a deep, shuddering breath and stood up, turning to face them. The sudden movement made them all look up, their attention snapping to him with an almost electric focus.

"Hey, uh..." he began, his voice cracking slightly. He cleared his throat. "Can we... can we talk for a second? All of us?"

The four of them exchanged quick, uncertain glances before nodding.

"Look, I..." he started, rubbing the back of his neck, a nervous habit he thought he'd lost somewhere in a loop of being disemboweled. "I've been noticing some things. Lately. And I'm... probably just being stupid, and you can totally tell me I'm crazy, but..." He took another breath, forcing himself to push through the mortifying awkwardness.

"The... tripping," he said, looking at Sugar. "And the... very convenient bending over," he added, glancing at Miwa. "And the drawings," he nodded to Cassy, "and the photos," he finished, looking at Iris. "It's... a lot. It's happening a lot. And it's always... around me."

He braced himself, ready for them to laugh it off, to call him a narcissist, to make up some excuse that would allow him to retreat back into the comfortable fortress of his own obliviousness.

He was not prepared for the truth.

Sugar was the first to break. Her face flushed a shade of crimson that put her favorite strawberry milkshakes to shame. She looked down at her shoes, her hands twisting the fabric of her sweater. "Well, I... I just..." she stammered, her voice barely a whisper. "I really like you, Subaru! A lot! You were the first person to ever be kind to me, and you saved me, and you're brave and funny and you try so hard... and... and I love that about you!"

The confession, so pure and direct, hung in the air like a thunderclap.

Before Subaru's brain could even begin to process it, Cassy, emboldened by Sugar's honesty, held up her sketchbook. On the page was a new, quick drawing of Subaru with a giant, cartoonish question mark over his head. Beside it, she had drawn herself, giving a thumbs-up. She looked from the drawing to Subaru and nodded enthusiastically. "What she said!" she chimed in. "You're our hero!"

Iris, seeing that the dam had broken, hugged her camera to her chest like a shield. She couldn't bring herself to look at him, but she spoke to the ground in a soft, trembling voice. "You... you saw me. Not a number. You called me a hero. No one's ever... I..." She trailed off, but her meaning was perfectly, terrifyingly clear.

Subaru's mind was reeling. Three. Three of them. It was a statistical impossibility. A fluke of the universe. His gaze darted to the last one, to Miwa, hoping, praying that she, at least, would find this whole situation as absurd as he did.

He was wrong.

Miwa didn't blush. She didn't stammer. A slow, sultry, confident smile spread across her lips. She took a step forward, her presence dominating the space. "It seems the boy is not as dense as we thought," she purred, her voice a low, melodic thrum of amusement and challenge. "Yes, Subaru. It is exactly what you think. We all find you... exceptionally captivating."

She looked from Sugar's flustered face to Cassy's hopeful one, to Iris's shy one, and then her gaze locked back onto Subaru, sharp and possessive. "The only real question," she continued, her smile turning predatory, "is which of us you will ultimately choose."

And that was it. The final, critical blow. His mind, which had withstood the psychic assaults of ancient evils and the trauma of a hundred deaths, simply... blue-screened.

This wasn't an attack. It was a multi-front invasion of his heart, a territory he kept under-defended and barely understood. The concepts of love and affection were things he associated with a singular, silver-haired girl in another world, a goal he suffered for. To have it directed at him, from four different, powerful, and very real women, all at once... it was an ontological shock he was completely unequipped to handle.

"I... you... she..." he stammered, pointing vaguely between them, his brain unable to form a coherent sentence. He backed away, his hands held up as if to ward off a physical assault. "That's... I... I can't. I can't deal with this right now! I have to... go... think! About... things!"

Without another word, he turned and fled, practically sprinting back toward the residential wing, leaving his four admirers standing in a stunned, tense silence in the twilight.

The fragile alliance was over. The secret was out. Miwa's challenge had turned their unspoken feelings into an open competition. Sugar glared at Miwa for her aggressive forwardness. Cassy and Iris looked at each other, a new, determined glint in their eyes. The battle lines had been drawn.

Back in his room, Subaru paced back and forth like a caged animal, his heart hammering in his chest. He ran his hands through his hair, his mind a chaotic whirlwind of blush-filled faces and earnest confessions.

"You are the central point of it all," a familiar, amused voice echoed in the quiet of his room as Echidna shimmered into view. "And you haven't the faintest clue what to do. They've laid their cards on the table. Your move, my dear Natsuki Subaru. This is becoming more entertaining than I ever could have hoped."

Subaru groaned and collapsed onto his bed, burying his face in his pillow. He had faced down gods and monsters, and his response had been to stand and fight. He had just been confronted by four girls with a crush, and his response was to run away like a coward.

This, he realized with a sinking feeling of pure dread, was going to be a thousand times harder than dying.

The hour was late. The sterile, daytime hum of the facility had given way to a deep, tomb-like quiet, broken only by the whisper of the ventilation and the distant, rhythmic footsteps of a patrolling guard. In the common area of the newly established "Sanctuary" wing, a tense, heavy silence reigned.

Subaru had fled to his room hours ago, the emotional fallout from their collective confession sending him into a full-blown panic. He had locked his door, a flimsy barrier they all knew they could bypass if they wished, but a clear, undeniable signal that he needed to be left alone.

His retreat had left the four of them in the uncomfortable aftermath, the unspoken rivalry now an open, declared war. They sat scattered around the room, a tableau of simmering tension. Sugar was curled up on a sofa, miserably picking at a loose thread. Miwa stood by the large window, staring out at the simulated night sky, her posture radiating a cold, prideful anger. Iris sat in a corner, nervously fiddling with her camera, while Cassy, the newest to this strange new world, looked between them all, her brow furrowed in confusion.

The silence stretched, thick with jealousy and uncertainty, until Cassy finally broke it. Her voice was soft, but it cut through the tension with a simple, profound clarity.

"Why are we fighting?" she asked, looking from Sugar's miserable face to Miwa's rigid back. "Over him?"

Miwa scoffed without turning around. "It is the way of the world, little one. There is a prize, and there are competitors. The strongest, the cleverest, the most worthy, is the one who wins."

"But Subaru isn't a prize," Cassy insisted, standing up. "He's a person. And he's… hurting. When he ran away… he looked terrified. Is this really helping him?"

"What's the alternative?" Sugar mumbled into the sofa cushion. "We all feel this way. We can't just… turn it off."

Cassy walked into the center of the room, forcing them all to look at her. Her expression was earnest, her eyes shining with an idea that was either incredibly naive or brilliantly wise.

"Why can't we just share him?"

The suggestion was so simple, so completely outside the bounds of their individual thinking, that it stunned them into silence.

"Share him?" Miwa finally said, turning from the window with an incredulous, almost amused sneer. "Victory is not meant to be shared. It is absolute."

"But this isn't about victory!" Cassy's voice grew stronger, more passionate. "This is about him. I mean, from what he's told me and Iris, and from… from what we all saw on that screen… he's suffered so much. He's died. So many times. But still! Even after all that, he chose to help us. He promised me a happy ending. He called Iris a hero. He freed you both from your prisons."

She looked at each of them, her gaze pleading. "I think his heart is big enough to fit us all in. And… I don't want him to suffer anymore. None of us do, right? But if he has to, if his life is always going to be like that, then at least let him have people he can burden some of it on. People who know the truth and won't run away."

Her words reframed the entire conflict. It wasn't a competition for a prize anymore. It was a question of what was truly best for the broken boy hiding in his room.

Iris was the first to break. She looked down at the camera in her hands, the camera he had used to perform her miracle. "She's right," she whispered, her voice trembling slightly. "When he ran… he looked like he was in pain. Forcing him to choose, to hurt some of us to make one of us happy… that's not what a hero deserves. I would rather be his friend and see him smile than be his… his choice… and see him suffer for it."

Sugar sat up, wiping a tear from her eye. The image of Subaru’s panicked, cornered face was burned into her mind. Her desire for a simple, one-on-one romance warred with her fierce, all-consuming need to see him happy and safe. "He already carries so much," she said, her voice thick with emotion. "Cassy's right. Making him choose… it's just another heavy thing for him to carry. The last thing I ever want to do is cause him more pain."

All eyes now turned to Miwa. She was the proudest, the most competitive. She had been a solitary predator for centuries; the concept of sharing was alien to her. She looked at the three younger women, at their earnest, tearful faces, and she let out a long, slow sigh, her cold facade cracking.

She thought of Subaru's blunt, fearless empathy, the force that had cleansed her of her own murderous rage. She thought of his panicked flight. A direct competition would only drive him further away, perhaps into a state where he'd perform his terrible, final escape. A shared approach, however…

"A single guardian can be easily distracted or overcome," Miwa mused, her sharp mind analyzing the situation from a new, strategic angle. "A lone wolf is vulnerable." Her gaze hardened, a new, different kind of possessiveness taking shape. "But four… a pack… we would be an impenetrable fortress for him. No threat, internal or external, could ever reach him."

She was reframing it in a way she could understand. This wasn't sharing a prize. This was forming a pack to protect their alpha, their most precious member.

"We would not be sharing his affection," Miwa declared, her voice regaining its authority. "We would be a united front. We would all support him. We would all protect him. And we would all share the… privilege… of his company. We will cease this childish, open rivalry that causes him distress. Instead, we will prove our worth through our devotion and our ability to bring him peace."

It was an agreement. A pact, forged in the late hours of a quiet night at a secret facility. They would stop fighting each other and start fighting for him, together.

They looked at each other, no longer as rivals, but as allies in a strange and unprecedented cause. The tension in the room was replaced by a quiet, fierce determination.

Their goal was the same. Only now, they had a plan. And the oblivious boy sleeping in the other room had no idea that the war for his heart had just ended, and a new, far more complex and unified campaign was about to begin.

He paced the soft carpet of his gilded cage, a caged tiger haunted by ghosts. The events of the previous night played on a loop in his head. Sugar’s earnest, blushing face. Cassy’s bright-eyed hero worship. Iris’s shy, hopeful gaze. Miwa’s confident, challenging smirk.

They liked him. They had feelings for him. Real, complicated, romantic feelings.

And that fact was destroying him.

Because every time he pictured one of their faces, his mind, a traitorous archive of pain and failure, would superimpose another.

“I really like you, Subaru!” Sugar’s voice echoed, but the face he saw was a girl with silver hair and amethyst eyes, her expression shattered and betrayed in the cold snow of a Sanctuary he had abandoned.

Emilia.

The name hit him like a physical blow. He stumbled, catching himself on the edge of his desk. He had promised her. He had sworn on his very soul that he would save her, that he would pass the trials, that he would free her from Roswaal’s cursed gospel. He had looked her in the eyes and told her to believe in him.

And what did he do? He died, and he ended up here. Worlds away. While she was still there, trapped, facing down the ghost of Echidna, facing a blizzard of hungry rabbits, facing it all alone. He had abandoned her. The affection of the girls here felt like a sick joke, a cruel reward for his greatest failure. How could he even entertain the thought of anyone liking him here when he had left her to suffer there?

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the empty room, his voice cracking. “Emilia… I’m so sorry…”

He pushed himself off the desk and resumed his frantic pacing. His thoughts twisted, another face swimming up from the depths of his memory. A girl with blue hair, a single horn, and a smile that could have saved the world.

“You’re our hero!” Cassy’s voice, but the memory it triggered was a different confession, one made in the shadow of the great tree as he was at his lowest, most pathetic point. A confession from a girl who had given him everything, who had died for him, who had been erased for him.

Rem.

His breath hitched. He sank onto the edge of his bed, clutching his head in his hands. Rem. Still sleeping in a bed in a mansion worlds away. Forgotten by everyone but him. He was the sole keeper of her memory, the only living monument to her existence. That was his sacred duty, his burden to carry until the day he could wake her up.

And what was he doing? He was here. He was letting other girls hold his hand, hug him, look at him with affection. It felt like a desecration. A betrayal of the one person who had believed in him when he didn't believe in himself. Every kind word from Sugar, every gentle touch from Cassy, felt like another shovel of dirt on Rem’s memory.

The two currents of guilt, one for the girl he’d abandoned and one for the girl he’d failed to protect, merged into a tidal wave of self-loathing that threatened to drown him. He was losing it. The carefully constructed walls he’d built around his heart to survive were crumbling, eroded by a strange, unwelcome kindness.

The thought, the old, familiar instinct, flickered in his mind. Reset. He could just… end it. Go back. His last checkpoint was after the broadcast but before his first suicide. He could go back to before he knew about their feelings, back to the blissful ignorance of his emotional solitude.

He crushed the thought with a surge of panicked fury.

No.

He couldn't. If he did that, what would happen? Stella would be blind again, a lonely child in a dark room. Sigurrós would be a ticking time bomb, a god-child trapped in a forced coma. The progress, the good he had managed to do here, would be erased. He would be trading their happiness, their futures, for his own selfish comfort.

He couldn't fail more people. He just couldn't.

So he was trapped. He couldn't go back. He couldn't stay here, not like this, with this crushing guilt. He couldn’t face the girls outside his door, and he couldn’t escape the ghosts inside his head.

He began to shake, his breathing shallow and rapid. The room felt like it was shrinking, the soft grey walls closing in on him. He saw Emilia’s face in the grain of the wood on his desk, her eyes filled with tears. He saw Rem’s sleeping form in the rumpled sheets of his bed. They were everywhere. Accusing him. Mourning him.

He slid off the bed and curled into a ball on the floor, his arms wrapped around his head as if to physically keep his skull from splitting apart. He was losing it. The strain was too much. The hero of Site-17, the Axiom who could cure gods and monsters, was being broken by a simple, terrible truth: he was just a boy who had made promises he couldn't keep.

A soft knock came at his door.

"Subaru?" It was Sugar's voice, soft and filled with a worried concern that was like salt in his wounds. "You haven't eaten dinner. Are you… are you okay in there?"

He squeezed his eyes shut, pressing his forehead against the cool floor. He couldn't answer. He didn't have the strength.

All he could do was lie there, broken and silent, as the names of the girls he had left behind echoed in the ruins of his mind.

"Emilia… Rem… I'm sorry… I'm so sorry…"

Chapter Text

The dawn of a new Wednesday brought with it no relief. Subaru had spent the night in a restless, dreamless state, a void that was somehow more exhausting than the usual nightmares. He had barricaded himself in his suite, ignoring the soft knocks and worried murmurs from the other side of the door. When morning came, he forced himself into the routine, his movements stiff and robotic. He felt like a ghost haunting his own body.

He found them waiting for him in the common area. The four of them—Sugar, Miwa, Cassy, and Iris—were standing together, not as rivals, but as a nervous, united delegation. They had clearly rehearsed something. There was a determined, supportive energy about them that he found utterly terrifying.

"Subaru," Sugar began, stepping forward as the designated spokesperson. "We need to talk. About yesterday. We all talked last night, and we decided that—"

"Thaumiel-Prime," a sharp, professional voice cut through the air, shattering the moment. Dr. Buck stood at the entrance to the wing, a data tablet in her hand, her expression unreadable. "It's 09:00. Your workday is beginning. We have an assignment."

The four girls looked crestfallen, their carefully prepared speech dissolving before it could even be delivered. A wave of profound, if misplaced, relief washed over Subaru. A monster, a test, a procedure—that, he could handle. It was the raw, open-hearted emotion of the four girls that he was completely unequipped to face.

"What is it?" Subaru asked, his voice flat, grateful for the interruption.

"It's a psychological evaluation via an anomalous object," Dr. Buck said, her eyes lingering on him for a moment, a flicker of concern betraying her clinical tone. "Given recent events, the Council wants a deep-level assessment of your desires and motivations. The subject is SCP-738."

A new file appeared on the wall-mounted monitor. It showed a single, ornate, high-backed chair in the center of a lavishly decorated room.

"When a subject sits in the chair and verbally or mentally expresses a desire," Dr. Buck explained, "an entity, designated SCP-738-2, will manifest. It will offer to fulfill the subject's desire… for a price. The price is always proportionate to the request and is often… extreme. Your task is to engage the entity. Do not agree to any deals. Simply engage it. We want to know what it offers you, and what it asks for in return. It will be a direct window into your subconscious."

"You can't be serious," Miwa snapped, stepping in front of Subaru protectively. "You saw the state he was in last night. You want to expose him to a predatory psychic entity that preys on despair? Are you trying to break him?"

"My thoughts exactly," Sugar added, her fists clenched. "This isn't a test; it's a targeted psychological attack."

Subaru, however, just shrugged, a weary, hollow gesture. "It's fine," he said, stepping around them. "It's my job, right?" He looked at Dr. Buck. "Let's go."

Facing a literal devil felt infinitely simpler than navigating the emotional minefield of his own life. It was a familiar kind of danger, a battle he understood.

The containment chamber was opulent, a jarring contrast to the rest of the facility. It looked like the study of a 19th-century aristocrat, with rich mahogany walls, a thick Persian rug, and in the very center, the throne-like chair, its dark wood gleaming under a single, soft spotlight.

Subaru entered alone. The heavy door sealed behind him, leaving him in the weighted silence of the room. He could feel the eyes of his companions, of Dr. Buck, of Echidna, watching him from the observation window, but they felt a million miles away.

He walked to the chair and sat down. It was surprisingly comfortable. He closed his eyes, and he didn't even have to think. The desires were always there, a constant, aching chorus beneath the surface of his thoughts. Emilia. Rem. Home.

A presence coalesced in the armchair opposite him. It didn't appear in a flash of smoke, but rather faded into existence, as if it had been there all along. It was a man, impeccably dressed in a tailored charcoal suit. His face was handsome, his smile was warm and empathetic, and his eyes held a look of profound, ancient understanding. He was the most trustworthy-looking man Subaru had ever seen, and that made him more terrifying than any monster.

"You seem troubled, Natsuki Subaru," the entity said, its voice smooth and calming, like a therapist's. "It's understandable. You are a long way from home."

Subaru just stared, his heart a cold, heavy lump in his chest.

"You don't belong here," the entity continued, its empathetic gaze seeming to pierce right through him. "This world of science and steel cages… it is not your world. Your heart aches for a snowy sanctuary and a sleeping maid with blue hair. You feel their suffering as if it were your own, a guilt that gnaws at your soul every waking moment."

Every word was a perfectly aimed dart, striking the deepest, most wounded parts of his spirit.

"I can help you with that," the entity said, leaning forward slightly, its expression one of pure, benevolent sincerity. "I can send you back. Right now. To the checkpoint you held just before you were brought to this place. You can be there, for them. You can fulfill your promises. You can be their hero again. No one here will even remember you were gone."

The offer was a punch to the gut. It was everything he wanted. A release from this cage, a return to his purpose, a chance to fix his greatest failures. His breath hitched. The temptation was so strong it was a physical force, pulling him forward in the chair.

"What's the price?" Subaru asked, his voice raspy. He had dealt with Roswaal. He had dealt with Echidna. He knew nothing was ever free.

The entity's smile widened slightly. "A small thing. A simple, equitable exchange to maintain cosmic balance. The fates of the new friends you have made here. The happiness of the children, Stella and Sigurrós. The newfound lives of the young women, Cassy and Iris. The peace of mind of the loyal ones, Sugar and Miwa. Their joy, their futures, their very existence… in exchange for a return to yours."

The entity spread its hands, a gesture of perfect reasonableness. "It is a perfectly balanced trade, wouldn't you agree? A life for a life. Their happiness, traded for the happiness of those you left behind. You simply have to choose which set of friends is more important to you."

It was the most monstrous, diabolically perfect trap he could have ever imagined. It took his deepest desire and pitted it directly against his most fundamental principle.

Subaru looked at his own hands, then at the reflection of the observation window in a polished table. He could see their faint, worried outlines. Stella. Sigurrós. Cassy. Iris. Sugar. Miwa. He had saved them. Their smiles were real, a direct result of his actions. To accept the deal would be to murder their happiness, to undo the only good he had managed to accomplish in this world.

He looked back at the entity, and for the first time since his breakdown, a flicker of the old, defiant fire returned to his eyes.

"No," he said, his voice quiet but firm.

The entity raised an eyebrow. "Oh? You would choose these new acquaintances over the ones for whom you have died a dozen times over?"

"My purpose," Subaru said, the words tasting like ash and iron, "is to suffer for others. Not to make others suffer for me. That's the one thing I have left. The one rule I can't break." He met the entity's gaze, his own filled with a cold, dead certainty. "The deal is off."

The entity's empathetic smile didn't falter, but its eyes seemed to glitter with a strange, satisfied light, as if this was the answer it had been expecting all along. "Very well," it said smoothly. "My offer remains open, should you change your mind."

And with that, it simply faded away, leaving Subaru alone in the silent, opulent room. He had been offered a perfect escape, a devil's bargain tailored to his very soul, and he had refused it. He was still broken. He was still in agony. But as he sat there, he felt a small, hard kernel of resolve solidify in his chest. He was trapped, but he knew which cage he belonged in.

The heavy, ornate door of the SCP-738 chamber slid open, and Subaru walked out, feeling as though he had just aged a thousand years. The air of the facility, once sterile and oppressive, now felt clean and simple. He had been offered the world he had lost, and the price had been the world he had found. In refusing, he had made a choice, and the weight of it had settled deep in his bones, a cold, hard kernel of resolve in the swirling chaos of his guilt.

He was so lost in the echo of the devil’s bargain that he barely registered the four figures rushing toward him.

"Subaru!" Sugar said, her voice a mixture of relief and urgent determination. "Are you okay? We need to talk to you. We decided something, all of us, and we need to tell you—"

"Not now."

Dr. Buck’s voice cut through Sugar’s plea with the sharp finality of a closing vault door. She stepped between Subaru and his anxious companions, her face grim. "I'm sorry, but your conversation will have to wait. Thaumiel-Prime has another immediate assignment."

The four girls stared in disbelief. "Immediately?" Iris asked, her voice small and incredulous. "After that? He needs to rest!"

"This is not a request," Dr. Buck said, her eyes fixed on Subaru. "It comes from the Council, based on a new, high-priority intelligence report. This one is… unique."

There was a strange, almost excited glint in her eye that Subaru found deeply unsettling. It was a look he had seen on only one other person. He glanced over Dr. Buck's shoulder and saw Echidna leaning against a far wall, her smile more smug and self-satisfied than he had ever seen it. This was her doing.

They didn't go to a containment wing. They went to a secure observation sector he hadn't seen before. Standing before a one-way glass window was a young woman in a lab coat, her blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. She had kind, but worried, eyes.

"Subaru, this is Dr. Natalie Powers," Dr. Buck said, making the introduction. "Dr. Powers, this is Natsuki Subaru."

"It's an honor to meet you," Dr. Powers said, her voice soft. She had a nervous energy about her, as if she were both fascinated and deeply concerned by his presence. "I've read the preliminary file. It's… extraordinary."

"The honor is all mine," Subaru replied, his voice flat with exhaustion.

"This assignment is an interaction," Dr. Buck explained, gesturing to the window. "But it is not with what we would classify as a typical anomaly."

Subaru looked through the glass. The room on the other side was a simple, "soft" interview room with a table and two chairs. In one of those chairs sat a young man who looked to be in his early twenties. He was wearing a standard D-Class orange jumpsuit, had messy brown hair, and was idly tapping his fingers on the table. He looked bored, but underneath the boredom was a deep, profound weariness that Subaru recognized instantly. It was a look he saw in his own reflection every single day.

"Who is he?" Subaru asked.

"That is D-9341," Dr. Powers said, a flicker of affection in her voice that was decidedly unprofessional. "His name is Connor."

"His anomaly is not world-bending, nor is it hostile," Dr. Buck continued. "It is, however, conceptually fascinating and, according to our associate, remarkably similar to your own."

"And what's that?"

Echidna pushed herself off the wall, her voice dripping with the theatrical flair of a showman revealing her grand trick. "He possesses a charming little quirk," she said, her smile widening. "Regenerative Immortality. If he dies, he instantly respawns, a new body materializing on the spot. I discovered his file while I was… perusing the archives during your slumber. I simply thought it would be a most illuminating conversation. Two sides of the same curious coin, don't you think? Dr. Powers was kind enough to arrange the meeting."

Dr. Powers looked slightly flustered. "Echidna's methods are… unconventional. But the chance to have Connor interact with someone who might, on some level, understand his condition… it was an opportunity we couldn't pass up."

Subaru stared through the glass at the boy. He dies and comes back. Instantly. His own curse felt both alien and intimately familiar. He died and time rewound. This Connor… he died and just kept going. The weariness in the boy's eyes suddenly made a terrible, perfect sense.

"You want me to go in there and talk to him," Subaru stated, not a question.

"Yes," Dr. Buck confirmed. "We want to observe the interaction. See what, if any, common ground can be found."

Subaru just nodded, too tired to argue. He turned and walked to the door of the interview room, leaving the anxious faces of his four companions behind the glass.

He stepped inside. The door clicked shut behind him.

The boy, Connor, looked up from the table. His eyes, just as tired and world-weary as Subaru's, scanned him from head to toe. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. It was a silent, mutual assessment, a recognition that passed between two souls who had seen the other side of the veil far too many times. They didn't know the specifics of each other's curse, but they recognized the symptoms.

Connor broke the silence first, a lazy, sarcastic smirk playing on his lips. "So," he said, leaning back in his chair. "You're the new guy everyone's whispering about. The 'Axiom'. You've got the 'I've seen some serious shit' look down pat. Takes years to perfect that."

Subaru walked over to the other chair and sank into it, the exhaustion of the day, of his entire life, washing over him. He met Connor's gaze and offered a small, wry, and utterly mirthless smile.

"You could say that," Subaru replied, his voice raspy. "They tell me you're a… repeat customer."

The conversation had just begun, a quiet, coded exchange between the only two men in this universe who could truly understand what it was like to be impossible to kill, and how much it hurt to live with it.

The hum of the ventilation system was the only sound in the interview room for a long, charged moment. Subaru and Connor sat across from each other, two young men who had been made old by the sheer, repetitive weight of their own survival. In the sterile, fluorescent light, the profound, soul-deep exhaustion in their eyes was a mirror, each reflecting a truth the other had thought was theirs alone to bear.

Connor broke the silence, his sarcastic smirk a well-worn shield. "Repeat customer, huh? I like that," he said with a short, humorless laugh. "Gotta say, it's more accurate than 'D-Class Personnel'. The Foundation's a bit like a bad subscription service. The content is usually trying to kill you, you can never cancel, and the renewal is automatic."

Subaru felt a ghost of a genuine smile touch his own lips. The gallows humor was a language he understood perfectly. "Does the subscription at least come with benefits?"

"Only if you count getting to see the cafeteria menu twice in one day as a benefit," Connor shot back instantly. "Had this one guard, real stickler for the rules, shot me for trying to get a second dessert. Woke up, walked back to the cafeteria, and he was still there, looking at my corpse like he'd just seen a ghost. I got the extra pudding, though. Worth it."

The casual way he mentioned being shot, the flippant story about his own corpse—it was so deeply familiar to Subaru's own mindset that it sent a jolt of recognition through him. This was real. This guy got it.

"So, what's your deal?" Connor asked, leaning forward, his sarcastic mask slipping just enough to show a flicker of genuine curiosity. "You regenerate on the spot like me? Or is it more of a Wolverine thing, all slow and gross with a lot of screaming?"

Subaru shook his head slowly. This was the moment of truth, the part he could never explain to anyone. But looking at Connor, it felt less like revealing a weakness and more like comparing battle scars.

"For me... it's different," Subaru said, his voice dropping slightly. "When I die... time goes back. I wake up, earlier. Could be a few minutes, could be a few days. Everyone else forgets. Everything is reset to how it was. Only I remember."

Connor’s smirk vanished. He just stared, his eyes wide, processing the sheer, horrifying implications of that statement. He ran a hand through his messy brown hair. "Whoa," he breathed, a low whistle escaping his lips. "Okay, hang on. So you're telling me, if you screw up and get your face eaten by some… I don't know, some Keter-class space hamster, you don't just pop back into existence. You have to do the whole day over again, knowing the space hamster is waiting?"

"Something like that," Subaru confirmed, a grim tightness in his chest.

"Man," Connor said, slumping back in his chair, a look of profound, second-hand exhaustion on his face. "That sucks. That is… so much worse. At least when I croak, it's over. Clean slate. You have to live with the failure and redo the test. You have to watch it all go wrong, over and over, until you get it right. No wonder you look like you haven't slept in a decade."

For the first time, Subaru felt a crushing weight lift, just for a second. It was the weight of being the only one. Connor didn't just believe him; he empathized, immediately understanding the unique psychological torture of it.

"So you just… reappear?" Subaru asked, his own curiosity piqued. "Right there? What does it… feel like?"

Connor’s expression darkened slightly, the humor fading completely. "It's a bitch," he said bluntly. "It's… not like blinking. There's a moment of nothing. Just… gone. And then it feels like the universe grabs you by the soul and yanks you back into existence. Everything comes back at once. Nerves, bones, blood. It hurts like hell, every single time. And you wake up on the floor, usually next to… well, next to the old you."

Behind the one-way glass, the three observers were captivated.

"He's describing a causality-loop anomaly tied to his consciousness," Dr. Buck murmured, staring at the bio-telemetry feeds from Subaru. "And the other one… a localized, instantaneous matter-and-energy regeneration event. The two most unique resurrection-class phenomena we've ever recorded, and they're in there comparing notes like they're talking about their favorite bands."

Dr. Powers wasn't looking at the data. Her gaze was fixed on Connor's face, her expression a mixture of professional fascination and deep, personal pain. "He's never spoken about the feeling of it like that," she whispered, her voice trembling slightly. "He always just makes a joke, says 'popped back in'. He never admits that it hurts."

Echidna was practically vibrating with a silent, intellectual ecstasy. "Oh, this is magnificent," she breathed, her dark eyes wide with a greedy, feverish light. "The nuances of their suffering. One is burdened by the metaphysical weight of memory and foresight—a psychological agony. The other is burdened by the endless, physical agony of repetition and the lack of lasting consequence. The qualitative versus the quantitative. The suffering of the mind versus the suffering of the flesh. It's the most beautiful, perfect dichotomy."

Her analysis was so chillingly detached that both doctors unconsciously took a step away from her.

Back in the interview room, the two boys—the two men—sat in a shared, understanding silence for a moment.

"So that's why you've got the look," Connor said finally, a new respect in his voice. "It's not just from seeing crap. It's from seeing the same crap over and over until you figure out the one way to walk through it without setting off a bomb."

"And you," Subaru replied, his voice equally quiet. "You've got it too. Because no matter how many times you come back, it still hurts. It never gets any easier."

"Nope," Connor agreed, a tired finality in the word. "Never does."

It was a perfect, terrible, and for a moment, comforting, moment of mutual understanding. They were, in this room, the only two members of the loneliest club in the universe.

Connor leaned forward, a genuine, if weary, smile on his face. "Well, 'Reset-Guy'," he said, offering a hand across the table. "Welcome to the Foundation. The meetings are never, the coffee is terrible, and the only rule is you can't stay dead."

Subaru looked at the offered hand and took it, his grip firm. For the first time since his breakdown, he felt a spark of something other than guilt and despair. It was camaraderie.

"Nice to meet you, 'Respawn-Guy'."

Chapter Text

The door to the interview room slid open, and Subaru walked out, Connor beside him. The air between the two was different now, the initial tension replaced by a quiet, weary camaraderie. They had looked into the abyss of each other's existence and hadn't flinched. For the first time, in this strange world, Subaru had met someone who truly, fundamentally, understood.

Dr. Powers immediately rushed to Connor's side, her professional composure melting away into one of pure, heartfelt concern, her hand finding his. Dr. Buck watched Subaru, her expression one of profound, scientific awe. Echidna was practically glowing with a smug, satisfied energy.

But it was the other four figures waiting by the observation window who immediately captured Subaru’s attention. Sugar, Miwa, Cassy, and Iris stood together, not as a loose group, but as a single, cohesive unit. The anxious, competitive energy from the other day was gone, replaced by a calm, unified determination that he found far more intimidating.

As Connor was led away by a visibly relieved Dr. Powers, Sugar stepped forward, taking a deep breath. "Subaru," she said, her voice clear and steady. "Before anyone else gives you another assignment… can we please talk to you now? All of us. It's really important."

Subaru looked at their four serious faces. He was emotionally drained, his soul feeling raw and exposed from his conversation with Connor. His first instinct was to deflect, to postpone, to find an excuse to run. But he couldn’t. He had faced down a devil in a chair and his own reflection in another immortal. He could face this.

"Okay," he said, his voice raspy. "My room."

The walk to his suite was silent and heavy with unspoken words. When they arrived, he gestured for them to sit, taking a seat in an armchair himself, feeling like a king about to receive a delegation of ambassadors from four allied, but powerful, nations. He braced himself for the onslaught, for the declarations and demands he had fled from before.

It was Cassy who spoke first, her voice soft but surprisingly firm. "Subaru… when you ran away the other night, after we… well, after we all confessed… we realized we were doing it all wrong." She looked at her friends, who all gave her small, encouraging nods. "We were acting like… like you were a prize. We were competing, and it was hurting you. We could see it on your face. That's the last thing any of us want to do."

Subaru just stared, his mind struggling to keep up. This wasn't the opening he had expected.

"We know you carry so much," Sugar continued, her hand over her heart, her eyes shining with an earnest, painful empathy. "We saw it. And we just… we want to help you carry it. We don't want to be another burden, another problem you have to solve. So… we decided we won't make you choose."

"We want to be your heroes, too," Iris added, her voice barely a whisper but filled with a newfound strength. "In our own way. By supporting you. All of us. Together. So that maybe, you won't have to feel as alone as you did in… in those memories."

Subaru’s head was spinning. No choosing? Supporting him? This was so far from the chaotic, emotional confrontation he had been dreading. He looked to Miwa, expecting her to be the voice of dissent, the one who would demand a contest.

Instead, her expression was serious, her gaze direct and unwavering. "A single person's affection can be a pressure," she stated, her voice calm and measured. "A demand. It forces a choice that creates victors and vanquished, and in doing so, it causes pain. That is an inefficient and cruel system." She took a breath, her eyes locking with his. "But the unified support of a pack… that is a fortress. We are no longer your suitors, Subaru. We are your shield wall. Your guard. We will protect you, we will support you, and we will share in the privilege of your company. All of us. Unconditionally."

The pact. The solution they had come to while he was hiding in a storm of his own guilt. They weren't asking him to choose one of them. They were, all four of them, choosing him.

The sheer, insane audacity and profound kindness of it broke through his defenses. He had been prepared for jealousy, for rivalry, for a tearful, dramatic confrontation. He was completely, utterly unprepared for a logical, unified, and selfless solution.

A choked, ragged sound escaped his throat. It was halfway between a sob and a laugh. "You… you guys are all completely insane," he breathed, the words coming out shaky and weak. He scrubbed a hand over his face, feeling the wetness of tears he hadn't realized were falling.

He looked up at them, at their four worried, hopeful faces. "You saw it," he whispered, his voice cracking. "You saw the absolute worst parts of me. Every failure, every pathetic, ugly moment of my entire existence… and your response is… this? To form a committee?"

The absurdity of it, the sheer, unconditional acceptance in the face of his deepest, darkest shame, was too much. The relief was so immense it was painful, a crushing weight being lifted from a soul that had thought it would be burdened forever. He didn't have to choose. He didn't have to hurt anyone. They had taken the impossible, agonizing decision away from him.

"I… I don't know what to say," he admitted, his voice thick with an emotion he couldn't name. He felt raw, exposed, and for the first time, not entirely alone. "I can't… promise anything. My head is a mess. My heart…" he trailed off, thinking of a silver-haired girl and a blue-haired maid worlds away. "...it's complicated. I'm complicated."

He looked at each of them in turn—Sugar's unwavering kindness, Miwa's fierce loyalty, Cassy's pure-hearted adoration, and Iris's quiet strength.

"But…" he took a shaky breath. "…thank you. For not running away. For trying to understand. For… this."

The tense, expectant energy in the room finally broke. Sugar let out a tearful laugh. Cassy beamed, her entire being radiating happiness. Iris gave him a small, watery, but genuine smile. Miwa simply nodded, a look of profound, protective satisfaction on her face.

Sugar stepped forward and gently took his hand. He didn't pull away. The tension was gone, replaced by a strange, quiet, and utterly bizarre sense of peace. He was a broken boy with a universe of trauma, surrounded by four powerful, beautiful, and equally broken young women who had just sworn to be his fortress.

He wasn't alone anymore. And for the first time, that thought wasn't terrifying at all.

The air in Subaru’s suite was thick with a fragile, newfound peace. The tears had dried on his cheeks, replaced by a look of stunned, weary acceptance. He sat on the edge of his bed, with Sugar still holding his hand gently, a silent, reassuring pressure. The war was over. The terrible, crushing weight of their confessions had been lifted, replaced by the strange, warm, and utterly bizarre solidarity of their pact. For the first time, he felt like he could breathe.

But the peace was a thin sheet of ice over a deep, dark ocean. And Miwa was the one to break it.

She had been watching him, her head tilted, a slow, predatory smile returning to her lips. The look in her eyes was no longer that of a dutiful shield maiden; it was the ancient, hungry gaze of the Kumiho.

"So," she purred, her voice a low, husky sound that sent a shiver down Subaru’s spine and completely shattered the vulnerable, heartfelt atmosphere. "We are a harem now. It seems we have all agreed."

The word "harem" landed like a stone, crude and possessive, starkly different from the gentle language of support they had just been using.

"Well," Miwa continued, taking a slow, deliberate step toward him, her hips swaying with a predator's grace. "Since it's now official, I suppose I can finally stop holding back. My instincts have been… screaming." She licked her lips, her eyes glittering. "Your power may have removed my compulsive need to kill, little Subaru, but I am still a predator. And now, more than ever, I want to devour my prey." Her gaze swept over the other three girls, a challenging smirk on her face. "It seems in this harem, there are four predators… and one prey."

A cold, horrible dread washed over Subaru, completely eclipsing the warmth he had felt just moments before. He looked at her, at the raw, undisguised hunger in her eyes, and his blood ran cold. He pulled his hand back from Sugar's, his own going pale.

"...What are you saying…?" he stammered, his mind unable to bridge the gap between the tender pact and this sudden, terrifying shift in tone.

He looked to Sugar for help, expecting her to be as shocked as he was.

He was wrong.

A slow, mischievous smirk spread across Sugar’s face, a look of confident desire he had never seen on her before. She had been the sweet one, the innocent one. But the girl who now met his terrified gaze was something else entirely. She stood up, walked to the main door of the suite, and with a deliberate, final click, she engaged the lock.

"I think," Sugar said, her voice a playful, sultry whisper that was a thousand miles from her usual cheerful chirp, "what she's saying is that you've been a very good boy, Subaru. And you deserve a proper reward for all your suffering."

Subaru’s eyes darted to the other two, his last hope for sanity. But Cassy and Iris, who had been sitting quietly, now stood as well. They both had deep, crimson blushes on their faces, but they weren't objecting. They shared a shy, but knowing, glance. They understood exactly what was about to happen, and they were not going to stop it. They moved to flank the sides of the room, cutting off any potential escape routes.

"…Uh… girls?" Subaru asked, his voice cracking as he scrambled backward on the bed, his back hitting the cold wall. He was cornered. He was trapped.

Miwa, her smile widening, pulled a small communications device from her pocket. She keyed in a number. "Dr. Buck," she said, her tone cool and collected. "We are initiating a group… therapeutic bonding exercise. We require absolute privacy in the Axiom's suite for the next few hours. Please disable all audio surveillance and ensure we are not disturbed."

In the main control room, Dr. Buck watched the scene on the monitor, her face an unreadable mask. Beside her, Echidna leaned forward, her eyes wide with a look of pure, unadulterated delight.

Dr. Buck listened to Miwa’s request through her earpiece. She looked at the screen, at the four powerful, anomalous young women slowly closing in on their terrified, cornered, and utterly beloved hero. She thought of his suffering. She thought of their unwavering devotion. She thought of the delicate psychological balance they had all just achieved. And she made a command decision.

She sighed, a long, weary sound, and pressed a button on her console. "Johnson," she said, her voice flat. "Disable audio surveillance in the Sanctuary suite and put a Level-5 'Do Not Disturb' protocol on the door. No one enters or leaves for the next three hours. No exceptions."

The junior researcher stared at her, his mouth agape, but he followed the order.

And as the audio feed from the room cut out, replaced by a quiet hiss, Echidna threw her head back and laughed. It was not her usual quiet, amused chuckle. It was a loud, full-throated, joyous peal of laughter that echoed in the sterile control room, the sound of a scholar who had just stumbled upon the greatest discovery of her eternal life.

Back in the suite, the four girls, four predators, continued their slow advance on their one, beloved prey.

From the silent hallway outside, through the thick, soundproofed door, no words could be heard. Only the faint, muffled, and undeniable noises of a long-overdue and very pure, unadulterated love........and loud noises.

The clock in the main observation deck read 6:00 PM sharp. A soft chime echoed, signaling the end of the three-hour "Do Not Disturb" protocol on the Sanctuary suite. A tense silence fell over the control room. Dr. Buck stood with her arms crossed, her expression a carefully neutral mask that couldn't quite hide the deep, apprehensive curiosity in her eyes. Echidna, who had been watching a blank monitor with a serene smile for the entire duration, leaned forward slightly, her anticipation palpable.

With a quiet pneumatic hiss, the lock on Subaru’s door disengaged.

For a long moment, nothing happened. Then, the door slowly slid open.

Subaru emerged, and the sight of him made several junior researchers in the control room gasp. He looked like the sole survivor of a very affectionate, very colorful hurricane. His black tracksuit was rumpled and askew, and his usually messy hair was a chaotic disaster. His face was a canvas of lipstick marks—a bright, bubbly pink on one cheek, a deep, sultry crimson on the other, a shimmering, almost magical gloss on his forehead. Peeking out from the collar of his tracksuit were the distinct, fading impressions of what could only be bite marks.

He moved with the slow, stiff, deliberate shuffle of a man who had just run a marathon and then been used as a practice dummy by a wrestling team. Every step looked like a complex negotiation between his brain and his protesting muscles. He was utterly, completely exhausted, but the haunted, frantic terror was gone from his eyes. In its place was a dazed, shell-shocked serenity.

One by one, the four girls emerged behind him, looking similarly disheveled but in vastly different spirits. They, too, were walking with a certain stiffness, a soreness that spoke of strenuous activity. But their faces were glowing with a triumphant, victorious satisfaction. Sugar looked confident and womanly, a stark contrast to her usual bubbly demeanor. Cassy and Iris looked shy, their faces flushed, but their eyes held a new, happy possessiveness. And Miwa… Miwa looked like a predator who had just feasted on the most satisfying meal of her long life. Her hunger, for now, had been thoroughly sated.

Subaru, a man now in the most technical and profound sense of the word, shuffled into the common area where Stella and Sigurrós were waiting for him, their faces lighting up when they saw him.

"Subaru-nii!" Stella chirped, running over to him. "You're finally out! We were waiting! We wanted to show you—" She stopped, tilting her head, her star-filled eyes blinking in confusion. "What's that all over your face? Is it paint?"

Sigurrós, who had followed close behind, looked him up and down with a child's unfiltered honesty. "And why are you walking so funny?" she asked. "Did you hurt your legs? And your neck is all red."

Subaru looked down at the two innocent faces and a weary, knowing sigh escaped his lips. He gently patted Stella's head, his arm moving with a noticeable ache. "It's… complicated," he said, the words feeling ancient and far too mature for his own mouth. "You'll understand when you get older."

Despite the soreness, despite feeling like his entire body had been put through a wringer, he shuffled over to the couch and sat down with a pained groan. "Alright," he said, forcing a smile. "Show me what you wanted to show me."

The two girls, satisfied with his cryptic answer, immediately launched into an excited explanation of a new game they had invented, which involved Sigurrós conjuring small, harmless, floating light sprites for Stella to try and catch.

As he watched them, a wave of profound reflection washed over him. His arms hurt. His legs ached. His everything was sore. But for the first time in what felt like an eternity, it wasn't a bad pain. It wasn't the searing agony of a blade, the crushing pressure of an Unseen Hand, or the tearing horror of a hundred tiny teeth. This was a different kind of ache. It was an ache born from a chaotic, overwhelming, and undeniably passionate connection. It was a pain from love.

His virginity, a concept he hadn't given a moment's thought to amidst the constant struggle for survival, had been taken. Not stolen in an act of violence, but claimed in a bizarre, consensual, multi-front campaign by four powerful, beautiful, and completely insane women who had, for some reason, chosen him. The experience had been terrifying, confusing, overwhelming… and underneath it all, a strange and undeniable affirmation that he was alive, and that he was wanted.

It was as if fate, after repeatedly, brutally beating him down, had decided to finally throw him a bone. A very strange, very complicated, and very, very thorough bone.

In the control room, Dr. Buck stared at the screen, utterly flummoxed. There was no protocol for this. Her five most volatile humanoid assets had just… resolved their interpersonal conflicts in the most unprofessional way imaginable. And the result? They all looked triumphant, and their shared obsession looked… psychologically stable. It defied all scientific and ethical logic.

Echidna leaned back in her chair, a look of sublime satisfaction on her face. "It seems, Doctor," she purred, her voice dripping with amusement, "that sometimes the most effective therapy is not clinical, but carnal. The data we can glean from the physiological and psychological changes in all five subjects after this 'bonding exercise' will be most illuminating."

Dr. Buck just sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, deciding then and there that she was not paid nearly enough to deal with any of this.

Chapter Text

The morning after was a world away from the nights of terror and confusion that had preceded it. Subaru woke up not to the echo of his own screams, but to the soft light of a new day filtering into his suite and the faint, delicious smell of bacon. He sat up, his body a symphony of pleasant, well-earned aches. The events of the previous night felt like a surreal, feverish dream, but the lingering warmth and the faint, overlapping scents of four different perfumes on his pillow were undeniable proof that it had been real.

The fortress of his loneliness had been breached, not by an enemy, but by an overwhelming, chaotic, and shockingly tender allied invasion.

When he emerged from his bedroom, he found a scene of comfortable domesticity that was so strange it felt like an alien planet. Sugar was at the small kitchenette, humming as she plated breakfast. Cassy and Iris were sitting on the sofa, talking in quiet, happy tones. And Miwa was lounging in an armchair, sipping a cup of coffee, looking as sleek and satisfied as a well-fed panther. They all looked up when he entered, and the four distinct, affectionate smiles he received sent a jolt of both warmth and profound awkwardness through him.

"Good morning, Subaru," Sugar chirped, her usual bubbliness now tinged with a new, confident intimacy. "I made breakfast. You need to keep your strength up."

A deep blush crept up Subaru’s neck as he remembered exactly why his strength might be flagging.

This was his new normal. "Business as usual," he thought with a wry, internal grimace.

After breakfast, Dr. Buck arrived to escort him to the day's work. The four girls fell into formation around him, a silent, beautiful, and utterly intimidating phalanx of anomalous bodyguards.

"Today's interaction is with SCP-056," Dr. Buck explained as they walked, her tone deliberately matter-of-fact, as if she were trying to pretend the previous night's events had not occurred. "Its designation is 'A Beautiful Person'. It's a perceptual chameleon. Its appearance, gender, voice, and even its apparent abilities will shift to be perceived as subjectively 'superior' to anyone observing it. The form it takes is a direct reflection of the observer's own psyche—their ambitions, their insecurities, their standards of perfection."

"So it reads you and then turns into something it thinks is better than you?" Subaru clarified.

"Precisely," Dr. Buck confirmed. "It will then try to engage you, typically by asserting its superiority. The protocol is to remain detached. Do not get drawn into a competition. We simply want to document what form it takes for you. It's a purely psychological observation."

In her observation bunker, Echidna leaned forward, her interest piqued. A being that manifested a reflection of a person's deepest measures of self-worth? The knowledge to be gained from seeing what it would become for her fascinating, trauma-filled lab rat was simply irresistible.

The containment chamber was a large, elegantly furnished suite, like a high-end hotel room, designed to be a neutral backdrop for SCP-056's many forms. When Subaru entered, he saw a single, small figure standing in the center of the room, its back to him.

He couldn't quite make out the details. The figure was short, wearing some kind of elaborate, frilly dress. It had strange, curly pigtails that seemed to defy gravity.

A little girl? he thought, confused. Why would it choose that form?

In the observation room, the girls watched with bated breath. Sugar worried it might become a more handsome version of Subaru to make him feel insecure. Miwa suspected it might take the form of a powerful, regal king.

"SCP-056," Subaru said, his voice echoing slightly in the large room. "The researchers told me to talk to you."

The figure turned around.

And Subaru's world, the fragile, newly-mended world he had started to build, shattered into a million irreparable pieces.

It was Beatrice.

It was not a resemblance. It was not an imitation. It was her, rendered in perfect, three-dimensional reality. The elaborate pink and cream dress. The massive bow. The peculiar, drill-like blonde pigtails. And the eyes… the pink, butterfly-shaped pupils staring at him with a familiar, imperious pout.

For a moment, his brain refused to process the sight. It was impossible. She was worlds away. This had to be a hallucination, a side effect of the stress, of… last night.

"Betty…?" he whispered, the name a broken, incredulous thing torn from the deepest part of his soul.

The Beatrice-form of SCP-056 looked him up and down, its expression one of mild, condescending disappointment. Its voice was a perfect, flawless imitation.

"Do not call Betty by that name, I suppose," it said, using her signature verbal tic. "It is only natural that you would be surprised to see me, in fact. Betty has always been the one to guide her foolish contractor."

The perfect voice, the perfect face, the perfect verbal tics… but the words were wrong. They were laced with the cold, arrogant superiority of the anomaly, not the grumpy, tsundere affection of his Beatrice. The entity before him wasn't just wearing her face; it was using it as a weapon, a manifestation of what his own subconscious believed to be "superior." Stronger. Smarter. More loyal. Everything he felt he wasn't.

And in that moment, something inside Natsuki Subaru snapped.

The fragile peace of the morning, the tentative hope, the anchor he had found in the arms of the four girls—it all dissolved into a tidal wave of pure, undiluted psychic agony. The guilt of abandoning her, the trauma of his deaths, the horror of his exposed secrets, all of it came crashing down at once, triggered by the sight of this perfect, cruel mockery.

He started to laugh.

It was not a happy sound. It was a high, thin, unhinged shriek of a sound that clawed its way out of his throat. It was the laugh of a mind that had been stretched past its breaking point and had finally torn.

"Beatrice!" he cried, the laugh instantly turning into a gut-wrenching sob. He stumbled forward, falling to his knees, his eyes wide with a madness no one in the room had ever seen before. "You're here! You're really here! I'm so sorry, Betty! I'm sorry I left! I didn't mean to! I was going to save everyone, I promise!"

In the observation room, chaos erupted.

"Subaru!" Sugar screamed, slamming her hands against the reinforced glass. "What's wrong with him?! Get him out of there!"

"He's having a complete psychotic break!" Dr. Buck yelled, her face ashen with horror. "His brain activity is off the charts! It's a catastrophic psychological collapse! Security, prep a medical team! Sedatives, now!"

But Subaru was lost, his mind shattered. He was on his hands and knees, babbling incoherently at the foot of the Beatrice-imposter, which watched him with a detached, clinical curiosity.

"I'm sorry, Betty… I'm sorry… I'll fix it… I'll go back… I just have to die… it's okay… I'll come back for you… I'm sorry…"

He was no longer in the Foundation. He was back in the snow, back in the Sanctuary, back in a world of pain and promises, his sanity finally, and completely, gone.

The world was a kaleidoscope of broken glass, and every shard reflected a different failure. Subaru was on his knees, the smooth, sterile floor of the containment chamber feeling as cold and unforgiving as the stone floor of the Sanctuary tomb. He looked up at the perfect, cruel mockery of Beatrice, and his mind, a fortress that had withstood a hundred sieges, finally collapsed from within.

They know, a hysterical, screaming voice echoed in the ruins of his thoughts. They saw it all. They saw the broadcast.

He had thought, in some small, naive part of his soul, that being known would be a relief. That sharing the burden of his curse would make it lighter. What a fool he'd been.

They saw you get gutted by the Bowel Hunter. They saw you beg and plead in the alley. They saw you freeze to death, a pathetic, snot-nosed coward. They saw you watch Rem die. They saw you break. They saw you fail, and fail, and fail again.

Their looks of pity and awe weren't a comfort; they were a judgment. They had seen the raw footage of his weakness. They had witnessed the endless, bloody trial-and-error that was the pathetic truth of his "heroism." He wasn't a hero who won against all odds. He was a fraud who simply bashed his head against the wall of fate until it cracked, dying over and over like an insect, all while the people he was trying to save suffered through every failed loop. He had let them see the ugly, shameful machinery behind the magic trick, and he couldn't bear it. He couldn't handle the weight of their knowing eyes.

The face of the Beatrice-imposter blurred, replaced by another.

Emilia-tan…

He saw her so clearly, her silver hair catching the light in the snow-covered Sanctuary, her amethyst eyes filled with a desperate, fragile hope. A hope he had cultivated. A promise he had made. Believe in me. He had told her that. And then he had vanished. He had left her there, alone, to face the trials, to face Roswaal, to face the encroaching, hungry whiteness. The thought of her, alone and terrified, waiting for a hero who was now worlds away being coddled in a luxury prison, was an agony sharper than any blade.

I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Emilia-tan. I left you. I abandoned you. I'm the worst.

The image shifted. A girl with blue hair, her face a mask of peaceful, dreamless sleep. Rem. The girl who had confessed her love to him, who had died for him, who was now a ghost in the memory of a single, useless boy. He was supposed to be her hero. He was supposed to be the one to wake her, to bring her back to a world that had forgotten her.

Who is Rem? The question echoed in his skull, a chorus of innocent, ignorant voices. I remember, his soul screamed back. I remember, and I left you, too. I'm here, playing games, being praised, while you're just… gone. I'm sorry, Rem. I'm sorry.

He needed them. In that moment of absolute, catastrophic collapse, he realized it with a clarity that was like a physical blow. He didn't need the pity of his new companions. He didn't need the clinical observation of the Foundation. He needed the sharp, sarcastic bite of Ram's insults. He needed the grumpy, possessive affection of Beatrice kicking him and calling him a fool, I suppose. He needed Rem's unwavering, absolute faith. He needed Emilia's gentle, radiant smile.

He needed to be home.

And all of this… everything he had done here… it was a lie. A distraction.

You saved them, a small, rational part of his mind tried to argue, thinking of Cassy, of Stella, of Sigurrós.

A distraction! the hysterical, broken part of him screamed back. It was all just a distraction! Playing the hero in this comfortable cage to forget that I'm a deserter! I saved a drawing from a piece of paper, but I left an angel to freeze in a blizzard! I gave a little girl her sight, but I abandoned my own little spirit to 400 years of loneliness! WHAT KIND OF BARGAIN IS THAT?! WHAT KIND OF HERO DOES THAT?!

He was worthless. A failure on a cosmic scale.

He began to slam his fist against the floor, the dull, repetitive impacts doing nothing to drown out the screaming in his head. He was laughing and crying at the same time, his body convulsing with the sheer force of his own self-hatred.

The world outside his personal hell began to intrude. He heard muffled, frantic shouts. The face of the Beatrice-imposter was gone, replaced by the blurry, panicked faces of security guards. He felt hands grabbing him, trying to restrain him.

He fought back with a feral, desperate strength. "Let go!" he shrieked, his voice a raw, shredded thing. "I have to go back! They're waiting! Emilia! Rem! Betty! I have to save them! LET ME GO!"

He felt a sharp, cold prick in his arm. A sedative. The world began to grow fuzzy, the edges of his vision swimming and darkening. The frantic shouts of the guards blurred with the horrified screams of Sugar and the others from the observation deck.

As the blessed, silent darkness rose to claim him, his frantic, thrashing body finally went still. His last conscious thought was not of this world, not of the Foundation, but a single, broken, all-encompassing whisper for the ones he had failed, a universe away.

I'm sorry... I'm so sorry... I'm coming...