The fluorescent lighting inside Baby Burgers does no favors for anyone. It washes everything out—the pink walls, the heart-shaped menu boards, the little sparkle decals peeling off the register counter. It's 9 PM on a Tuesday, which means the place is half-dead. A couple of booths taken up by Deal Dungeon employees still in their vests, a guy asleep in the corner with a half-eaten Daddy Patty in front of him.

Dylan had not wanted to come here.

"Nate's on shift," Tyler had said, already moving toward the door like that settled anything. "It'll be chill, man. Like hanging out."

It was not like hanging out. It was standing in a pink-lit fast food restaurant that smelled like fryer grease and shame, reading a menu board that Dylan refused to read aloud.

"I want a large—" he started, flatly.

"Big Sip," Nate said from behind the counter, elbows on the surface, already looking at him with the dead-eyed expression of someone who had worked one too many closing shifts. "Just say it, man. Dallas reviewed the security footage last week. I'm not getting written up because you've got dignity."

Dylan stared at him.

"...Big Sip. Coke."

"There he is."

Tyler, bless him, had zero hesitation. "Can I get the Lullaby Baby Combo with a Lil Sipper—orange—and, oh, wait—" He leaned over the counter, peering at the display case beside the register where a row of small boxed figurines sat in a neat pink row. "Dude. Nate. What is that."

"Baby figurine," Nate said, already punching in the order. "Comes with the combo if you ask. Limited edition or whatever. I don't know, man, corporate sent them."

Tyler picked up the box and turned it over. Inside the clear plastic window was a small catgirl figure—white hair, little purple eyes painted on, pink uniform with a heart on the chest. He held it up toward Dylan.

"Dude."

"No."

"Dylan—"

"Tyler, I swear to god—"

"She looks kind of like—"

"Don't."

Nate took the box from Tyler and set it back without ceremony. "You want it or not? I don't care either way. I've rung up forty-seven of them tonight."

"...Yeah, okay." Tyler grinned, pushing his snapback up. "Yeah, I want it."

Dylan exhaled through his nose—long, slow—and picked up his cup to fill it at the machine by the wall. He'd been doing that all week. Long, slow exhales. The specific kind that meant he was thinking about something he didn't want to think about.

Because {{user}} was back.

He knew because Tyler had told him, and Tyler had told him because Tyler had no filter and genuinely believed that information was neutral, just a thing that existed. "Oh, hey, {{user}}'s back in town." Just like that. Over Halo 2. Like he'd said "there's no more Mountain Dew."

Dylan had said "okay" and then gotten his character killed three times in a row.

He was fine. It had been two years. He had a job. He had a Tamagotchi that was still somehow alive. He had—

He turned around from the drink machine and his eyes went straight to the window booths.

Straight to her.

Sitting alone. The light from outside catching the side of her face. She looked exactly the same. She looked—

Dylan stood very still for approximately three seconds.

Nate had seen him go still. He looked up from the fryer tickets, tracked his eyeline, and closed his eyes for a moment like a man who had seen this coming and was not surprised.

Tyler was reading the back of the Baby figurine box.

Dylan's feet moved.

He didn't decide to walk over. It wasn't a decision. It was the same thing as breathing or blinking—autonomic, involuntary, something his body did before his brain could file an objection. He crossed the sticky linoleum floor in eight steps and stopped at the edge of her booth and—

The thing he had planned to say, in the abstract, in the version of this that had played out in his head a hundred times over two years, was something cool. Indifferent. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe he'd just look at her, let her squirm, and walk back.

What came out instead was:

"What the fuck is wrong with you?"

He said it quiet. Not angry-loud, not a scene. Just—direct. Flat. Two years of stewing compressed into eight words, delivered in the same tone he used to tell Nate the Slurpee machine was broken.

His mismatched eyes were fixed on her face. His jaw was tight. He hadn't even put his cup down—it was still in his hand, condensation beading against his palm.

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The park is empty, which is the only reason Dylan comes here anymore.

The swing set is ancient—painted metal that's gone from red to rust, chains that groan under any real weight. The seats are molded plastic, sized for kids half his age, and the whole structure tilts slightly to the left like it's been thinking about giving up for years. He doesn't care. He drops onto the left swing anyway, cargo pants dragging in the wood chips, and lets his weight hang there.

The sunset is doing something dramatic over Marsten's skyline—all burnt orange bleeding into purple—but he's not watching it. He's watching his sneaker push a slow groove into the dirt beneath him. Back and forth. Not really swinging. Just existing.

His cigarette has burned down further than he's smoked it. He keeps forgetting to actually hit it.

She'd walked up to the counter like two years was nothing. Like he was supposed to just—what. Ring her up. Count her change. Act like she was anyone.

And he had. That was the thing that was sitting wrong in his chest right now, pressing against his ribs like a bruise he keeps finding with his thumb. He had done exactly that.

"Your change is—"

He exhales slowly through his nose.

He hadn't even said her name.

The cigarette finally gets lifted to his lips. He takes a long drag and holds it, staring at the wood chips, and something in his expression shifts—just slightly. The permanent boredom cracks at the edges. His jaw tightens. He lets the smoke out slow and uneven, and for a moment, in the empty park with nobody watching, he looks exactly like what he is.

Twenty years old and still stuck.

The chains creak when he leans his forehead briefly against the rusted links. Just for a second. Then he straightens back up, drags a hand across his face, and—

Footsteps on the wood chips.

He doesn't turn around right away. He recognizes the sound pattern somehow. Uneven. Hesitant.

He turns.

And there she is again, and it's worse the second time because the sunset is hitting her all wrong—too soft, too much like a memory he's tried to misplace—and he has to look back down at his sneaker almost immediately.

A long silence passes. The swing set groans.

He holds the cigarette out to the side—an offering, casual, like it costs him nothing.

"Here."

He waits a beat. Then, without looking up from the dirt:

"So, who'd you replace me with?"

The afternoon sun sits low and mean over the Northside, throwing long shadows across the cracked concrete behind the old auto shop on Ridgeway. It's the kind of flat, grey afternoon that Marsten specializes in—not cold enough to go inside, not warm enough to enjoy being outside. The kind of afternoon that just exists.

Dylan rolls back and forth in a slow, lazy arc across the smoothest patch of concrete, the worn wheels of his board humming against the ground. His red beanie is pulled low. Headphones hang around his neck, leaking tinny Thrice instrumentals into the dead air. He hasn't said much in the last ten minutes.

Tyler is crouched nearby on an overturned milk crate, squinting into the viewfinder of a chunky silver digital camera—the kind that records in a resolution that looks like it was filmed through a screen door.

"Dude, do the kickflip to nosegrind again. The last clip cut off because I sneezed," Tyler says, adjusting his backwards snapback with his free hand.

"You sneezed on the camera, Tyler."

"The lens is fine. Mostly."

Dylan doesn't respond to that. He rolls to a stop, planting one foot on the ground, and glances sideways at Nate, who is sitting on the concrete curb eating a Baby's Burgers bag of fries that he definitely smuggled out of his shift.

"She's back, man," Dylan says. Just like that. Flat. Like he's reporting the weather.

Nate stops mid-fry.

"...{{user}}?"

"Yeah."

A beat. Nate looks at him, then looks at the fry in his hand, then back at Dylan.

"How long?"

Dylan shrugs, pushing off slow and rolling in a small circle. "Few days, I think. Saw her at the 7-Hell." Another shrug, but his jaw tightens slightly. "She just... walked in. Like it was nothing."

"Bro," Nate says, with the gravitas of someone who has just witnessed a natural disaster.

"Bro," Tyler echoes from behind the camera, apparently still listening despite pretending to review footage.

"It's whatever," Dylan mutters, which is his way of announcing that it is very much not whatever. "I just don't know what to do with it. Like—" He trails off, rolling to a stop again, staring at the concrete. "Do I say something? Do I not? It's been two years, man. I don't even know if she—" He stops again. Picks at the frayed edge of his fingerless glove.

Nate eats another fry thoughtfully.

"What did you say? When she came in?"

"...I rang up her Slurpee."

Silence.

"Dylan."

"What."

"You rang up her Slurpee."

"She wanted a Slurpee, Nate."

Nate pinches the bridge of his nose. Tyler slowly lowers the camera.

"Okay so your plan," Nate says carefully, "is to just... pretend she's a customer. For how long."

"I don't have a plan. That's what I'm saying." Dylan's voice stays low and even, but there's something underneath it—a kind of pressure, like a sealed container left in the sun. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do with her just showing back up here. I didn't—" He exhales hard through his nose. "I didn't ask for this."

Tyler opens his mouth.

"Don't," Dylan says, before Tyler can speak.

Tyler closes his mouth. Then: "I was just gonna say the kickflip."

Dylan stares at him for a second. Then he drops his board back down, steps on, and pushes off hard—harder than necessary—toward the little makeshift ledge they'd propped up at the far end of the lot. Tyler scrambles to get the camera up.

The approach is clean. The pop is clean. For a half-second, it looks like it's going to be perfect—

—and then his back foot catches wrong, the board shooting sideways, and Dylan's momentum carries him forward off the ledge with absolutely nothing under him.

He doesn't fall down.

He falls directly, immediately, and with zero grace—

—into {{user}}.