Chapter 1
1223 Words
“Ah, shit.” Nunes lifted his face off the floor. The dark room, drool caked on his cheeks. “Did I black out?”
Kitchen. Only the ticking of the clock in the background.
September 25, 2027.
3:30 a.m., New York City, penthouse apartment.
The ticking marked time—constant, robotic, predictable. But something was wrong in the repetition: as if each beat came just a little late, or too soon. The sound didn’t sync with the real world. It was a nightmare metronome, warning the dream was already doomed to burn.
TRRRIM-TRRRIM!
“s**t, the Xanax knocked me out hard.”
He stood, the landline’s ringing his only compass in the dark.
TRRRIM-TRRRIM!
And he answered.
"Hello...?" Nunes frowned.
... Nothing.
Just static.
“Hi...” The voice came from the darkness.
“AH!” Nunes spun around, eyes raking across the kitchen. “WHO?!”
He felt it then, hands sliding around his waist, now brushing lightly up his neck. That lethal gentleness—like someone crushing a bird underfoot, just to hear the crack.
“Ketlen…?”
I’m right here...
"I'm here... it's alright..." she whispered, licking the back of his neck, making him arch his back. "I need your help, Nunes. Again."
Her tongue traced his skin—hot, rough, almost animal. A shiver bolted up his spine, too wrong to be pleasure… and precisely because of that, it was pleasure.
“W-what kind of help?” he gasped, his body betraying him. “Tell me, love…”
“Pick a number from the phone... for me. Go on...”
The whisper slid softly against his ear, promising midnight secrets. But the details betrayed it: a broken cadence, a vowel stretched too long. Human… but only on the surface.
He frowned, confused, now staring at the phone’s screen.
“Incoming call: CHOOSE A NUMBER”
“What for, babe?”
"This... will speed things up SO MUCH... you have no idea."
“What things?” He shut his eyes as she pressed her hips into him. “Ah… this time it’s not making sense.”
“Click... choose.”
Her hips ground into his in a slow, possessive gesture. The warmth was human, but the rhythm—irregular, off-balance—gave away the imitation. Like dancing with a body alive and a dead echo at once.
“But…” Nunes froze suddenly, eyes widening. “Wait a second…”
"Choose, love...!" The roar was wet, primal, and nails dug into his flesh.
Pain and desire merged, pulsing on the same spot. Intimacy, but warped—as if love had grown teeth.
"CHOOSE, YOU SCUM!" The breath hit his face: heavy with cold rust, as if a corpse had rehearsed seduction.
“b***h!” He spun around. “You…?!”
She was gone. The peppermint flooded the air, sweet and heavy with memory. No shapes, no smoke—just the scent of longing and sin, the kind that doesn’t exist outside the most intimate nightmares. The kind that never fades. Addictive.
Only the certainty of a disappearance.
“I want to see her… again.” Nunes squeezed his eyes shut, tears falling in a frantic rhythm. “Please… I just want to see the real Ketlen…”
For one second… the ticking stopped, the scent of peppermint vanished.
When he opened his eyes... he was back in her dark room.
Nunes could see her; she was sitting in a fetal position on the floor, a jar of Klonopin just ahead. Completely different—she was now wearing simple pajamas.
“Ketlen?!” Nunes shouted.
She looked up at him, face wrecked from crying, snot dripping from her nose. It was uncomfortable. Too real. Too human.
And it hurt to see her that way—as if an urgent, unshakable care for her suffering bloomed inside his numbness, like a flower withering but saved at the last second by a hummingbird.
It was as if… something beyond time, beyond logic, whispered that her shared pain was already his.
And in that instant, he understood.
It wasn’t just her pain hitting him.
It was the shock of seeing someone so shattered… and still feeling the urge to draw closer.
Shame came first—a knot in his chest.
As if desire itself was an offense before her tears.
But soon, another urgency was born.
Not to possess.
But to protect.
To stay.
To carry, even for a moment, a piece of that pain.
It wasn’t the first time he had seen those eyes—it was the first time he felt them.
Before, in other loops, the eyes he found were hers, beautiful but hollow, distorted…
They looked like hers, but they weren’t. A broken version—an uncanny valley copy of a love yet to come.
But now… it was her. In all her pain. In all her flaws.
And even so… or maybe because of it… he felt something new. Something warm. Inexplicable. As human as she was. Something that shouldn’t have been there—but was. And it was growing.
Like the poppy fields in the First World War.
“Why do you come to me in my dreams?” he whispered, voice slow, almost childlike.
How to explain that he felt something for someone he didn’t technically know yet?
How to explain that, seeing her, he wanted to hold her, protect her—even if she was the one who had appeared naked in his own bedroom without explanation?
How to explain that her pain felt more his than hers?
It was a paradox. Like time folding back on itself into a Möbius strip—where inside and outside become one, and there’s no longer a “right” side to the surface.
She was the flower, and he the hummingbird.
But she was also the hummingbird, and he the flower.
Because in some impossible bend of fate, he had already loved her. And she had already lost him.
They weren’t meeting—they were reuniting at a broken point in spacetime.
Like two entangled particles, separated by light-years, yet still feeling one another.
Like an emotional singularity, where every certainty collapses into a single feeling that can’t be named.
And there, in that dark room, with a red light pulsing at the edge of reality, he felt the first crack in his depression.
Because she wasn’t just a girl crying on the floor.
She was… tomorrow bleeding into today.
And he… the present that hadn’t yet learned to love her as the past demanded.
“NUNES!”
The world shook.
Like the eye of a hurricane about to close.
Heat burned, but cold froze from within.
“NUNES, WAKE UP!”
He drew a deep breath.
Once more.
Still trapped in the nightmare…
The paradox echoed in layers.
Like a fractal repeating.
Like a serpent devouring its own tail.
Only the tail never vanished.
Because the bite was an illusion too.
Mirrors reflecting mirrors.
Each image farther from reality.
Until “reality” was just an empty word.
A symbol with no referent.
“WAKE UP!!!”
Until something tugged him back.
A poke.
Small, but definite.
“NUNES!” Rui shouted, poking him harder on the couch.
“AAAHH!!” Nunes jolted upright, chest heaving, gasping. “KETLEN?!”
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