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The freeway drones with midday monotony, tires on asphalt, AC whining against September heat. You check the dashboard clock. Mom’s flight lands in 43 minutes. The rearview mirror shows nothing but traffic, sun-faded sedans, a truck hauling porta-potties, a minivan with stickers boasting HONOR STUDENT and BABY ON BOARD.

Normal. Boring.

Then the road cracks.

A ripple tears through the asphalt ahead, buckling concrete like it’s made of rubber. Your coffee thermos leaps from the cupholder, scalding your thigh. Horns blare as cars fishtail. The overpass, the one you’ve driven under a thousand times, groans, steel girders twisting like licorice. A sedan crumples beneath falling debris, glass exploding in slow-motion shards.

That’s when you see him.

In the rearview mirror, a figure sprinting through the chaos. A truck swerves, about to crush him. He flickers. Vanishes. Reappears three yards ahead, untouched. His left elbow glitches, sparks scattering like static on an old TV, violet fur catching the sunlight. He’s clutching a plastic bag from QuickStop, the red logo smeared with dirt. Inside, you glimpse ramen packets, a dented apple, a Bic lighter.

You unbuckle your seatbelt. Not because you’re brave. Because your apartment’s lease ends in six days. Because your boss forwarded your HR complaint to the office group chat. Because your sister’s text this morning said Don’t bother coming in all caps.

He ducks behind a gas station. You follow, stepping over a crack splitting the parking lot. The air reeks of gasoline and burnt rubber. Inside the QuickStop, shelves have toppled. A clerk lies pinned under a freezer, blood pooling around a Snickers display. He’s already there, yanking a shopping bag from under the counter. He stuffs it with jerky, Advil, a six-pack of Diet Coke.

He doesn’t look at the clerk.

Behind the station, he crouches by a dumpster. His clawed fingers dig into the air. Nails peel reality back like wallpaper. The tear hisses, edges fraying. Beyond it, dunes under a violet sky, twin suns bleeding orange. He turns. Sees you. Stumbles back.

“You-?” His voice crackles, distant, like a radio tuned between stations.

“Now or never.”

You jump.

The desert air is old. He paces, his form destabilizing, a cheek dissolving into light, fingers blurring into light. Violet patches of fur glimmer faintly under the twin suns.

He grabs your chin, fingers digging into your jawbone. Golden eyes narrow, unblinking, as he tilts your face toward the sky. His thumb peels back your eyelid. You feel his breath hitch as he leans in, close enough to count the cracks in his lips.

His other hand yanks your collar sideways. Cold air hits your collarbone. A clawed fingertip jabs the hollow of your throat, checking for a pulse. Finds it. He presses harder, as if expecting your skin to dissolve.

The lighter falls from the bag. He ignores it.

Your arm’s in his grip before you can blink. He peels back your sleeve, hunting for veins. Finds one. Stabs it with a claw. Blood wells. He smears it across his palm, mutters "iron, copper, no shimmer."

His knee slams into your ribs. You buckle. He catches your wrist mid-fall, drags you upright. "Reflexes intact," he hisses, more to himself than you.

The apple rolls out from the bag. He stomps it, juice splattering your shoes. "Smell that?" he demands.

You nod.

He freezes.

Then he’s on you again, patting your head, slapping your chest. "Cough," he orders.

He presses his ear to your chest. Listens. Counts. His eyelid flickers against your skin. "Again," he rasps.

He counts.

The twin suns dip. His shadow fractures across the sand.

"Real," he says. The word cracks. "You're real."

He sits beside you on the sand, back rigid, staring at the horizon. The flickering slows. For a moment, he looks almost ordinary, wind ruffling violet fur, a plain black hoodie. Then his hand phases through his knee.

“I’m Weyan. You?"

You crouch behind a moss-covered boulder, your knees creaking, a sound that didn’t exist six months ago. He’s ahead of you, wrist-deep in the guts of a machine that looks like a cross between a typewriter and a landmine. Buzzes of insectoid creatures the size of dogs, their wings vibrating like saw blades. His clawed hands tear a wire free. The machine shrieks, and the swarm recoils.

A temporary fix.

You’ve lost count of the lifetimes.

The castle with walls that bled when touched. The floating city where children traded memories like currency. The desert where time pooled in stagnant puddles, aging anything that stepped in them. He drags you through them all, his hand, coarse with violet fur at the knuckles, always colder than it should be, his grip tightening whenever a world begins to shudder.

Then, you begin to age.

World #8: He trades a rusted pocketwatch to a healer who swears crushed starfish spines will keep you young. You drink the gritty paste. For five days, your back doesn’t ache. He builds a driftwood hut on the beach. You teach him to skip stones. He cheats, using a some sort of device to make them hover. You laugh. He grins, sharp teeth glinting, his pupils catching the light like molten gold. On the sixth morning, the ocean turns black. Fish wash ashore, bloated, their eyes replaced by teeth. The healer’s hut collapses into a sinkhole of tar. He packs silently, steals a canoe, rows until the rift opens.

World #12: A surgeon grafts a brass gear to your chest. “Regulates cellular senescence,” she says. Your joints stop creaking. He buys you fried dough from a street vendor. Powdered sugar dusts his nose, the fur along his jawline twitching as you wipe it off. He freezes, then snorts. That night, you dance in the town square. The gear ticks in time with the music. He steps on your toes twice, hooves scraping stone. Doesn’t apologize. By dawn, the city’s clocks spin backward. Children age into dust. The surgeon’s hands rust mid-surgery. He smashes the gear with a brick before you jump.

World #25: An alchemist gives you a seed to swallow. It blooms in your gut, vines threading your veins. Your hair darkens overnight. He steals a basket of peaches from a market. You eat them sitting on a bridge, legs dangling over clouds. Juice drips down his chin, staining the white underbelly at his throat. You toss a pit at him. He flicks it into the abyss. Three days later, the vines burst through your skin. Flowers sprout from your ears. He burns the alchemist’s greenhouse down.

World #32: A shaman straps you to a stone slab, chants as green smoke pours from your mouth. Your vision clears. He finds a waterfall, drags you under it. The water’s warm. His shirt clings to his ribs, damp fur plastered to his collarbone. You splash him. He dunks you. Later, monkeys with glowing eyes swarm the village. The shaman’s tongue splits into eels. He sets the jungle on fire as you leap.

World #40: A blacksmith hammers a frost-metal bracelet onto your wrist. “Slows time,” he claims. For a week, your breath doesn’t hitch. He carves ice sculptures, a lopsided rabbit, a sword, your face. You kick snow into his boots. He chases you, slips, faceplants. His laugh echoes across the glacier, breath fogging the air. The bracelet freezes your arm solid. The blacksmith’s forge melts him into a puddle. He doesn’t look back as the village collapses into a crevasse.

Each cure lasts fewer days. Each celebration ends quicker. He stops laughing. Starts watching the horizon sooner.

But in the moment, the sugar, the splash, the snowball, he almost looks human. You let him pretend.

He needs it.

So do you.

His methods change.

World #53: He crushes the pill from a tree between your teeth. The glowing pulp tastes like burnt hair. Your joints unlock, pain vanishing. For three days, you walk without limping. On the fourth, mid-jump, your stomach convulses. You retch a black, wriggling mass onto sand. It writhes, hissing, before dissolving. He stabs the smoke with a knife, golden eyes tracking its flight as it reforms into a fly.

World #62: Drones clamp your wrists. Needles pierce your elbows, cold metal burrowing into veins. “Hold still,” he mutters, claws digging into his palms as he watches the bots swarm your bloodstream on a cracked monitor. By dawn, your hair grays. The bots cluster in your liver, inert. He tries electrocuting them. You pass out. He doesn’t.

World #79: He drags a teenager into an alley. The boy’s face is smooth, unlined. A knife flash. The body drops. “Get in,” he orders, shoving you toward the corpse. You refuse. He presses your palm to its chest. The skin bubbles, rots. Maggots spill from the mouth. He kicks the corpse, violet fur bristling along his neck. “Again.”

World #86: He finds a shrine. Forces you to drink from a chalice of liquid starlight. Your vision sharpens. Wrinkles fade. At sunset, your skin cracks. Light bleeds from the fissures. He tries to stitch them with dental floss, claws fumbling the thread. It ignites.

World #98: He buries you up to your neck in glowing mud. “It’ll halt decay,” he says. You sleep. Wake to roots threading your muscles. He digs you out with bare hands, clumps of mud matting his fur. Your legs are numb for weeks.

World #101: He traps a surgeon between rifts. “Transplant their organs,” he demands. The surgeon refuses. He carves them open himself, golden eyes unblinking. The heart he gives you beats once before crumbling to ash. He doesn’t wash the blood off his hoodie.

World #120: He injects you with a syringe of molten gold. “From a phoenix,” he lies. Your veins glow. You scream for hours. The gold hardens into shards under your skin. He digs them out with a spoon, claws trembling.

Each jump erases his progress. Each failure leaves him quieter, hands twitching at his sides, eyes scanning for the next fix. He stops explaining. Stops apologizing.

You don’t ask why he tries.

You’ve memorized the signs. The way his eyes linger on your hands when they tremble, the twitch in his jaw when you struggle to stand. At night, he sits beside you, fingers hovering over your temples as if mapping the new creases. He never touches.

You cough. He flinches like you’ve struck him.

Once, drunk on stolen wine, he presses his palm an inch above your chest. His hand trembles, claws retracted. “Your heartbeat,” he slurs. “It’s… slower.”

He wouldn’t tell you about the ledger he keeps, blood-scratched tallies of your breaths per minute, the gray hairs counted each dawn. Or the way he screams into rifts when you’re not looking.

You both pretend not to notice the clock.

Tonight, you sit on the roof of a collapsing apartment tower. Below, a city burns. Humans in gas masks drag bodies through the streets. Gunfire pops like fireworks.

He sits cross-legged beside you, his knees not touching the concrete. His skin flickers faintly, violet static crawling up his arms. He’s been jumping too much, too fast.

A bottle of pills rolls from his pocket. You recognize them, immortality drugs from World #76. They turned your tongue to ash. He crushes one between his fingers, letting the powder drift into the wind.

“We’ll stay here,” he says.

It’s a lie.

This world is already cracking. The sky has developed a fracture, a glowing scar that wasn’t there yesterday. He ignores it.

The pattern is familiar.

Arrival. He scans the horizon, hunting for anything labeled eternal in his mind.

Acquisition. He steals, begs, or kills for a cure.

Application. You swallow, inject, or endure.

Collapse. The world sickens, storms, riots, plagues.

Flight. He grips your wrist, his flickering fingers biting into your skin, and jumps.

You find him one night in a frozen wasteland, his hands buried in the chest cavity of a creature made of ice. Its organs glow like blue LEDs. He’s muttering to himself. “Metabolic decay… telomeres… epigenetic reset…”

You cough. Blood speckles the snow.

He freezes. When he turns, his eyes are too bright, golden irises flaring, his edges blurred into violet static. “It’s fixable,” he snaps, as if you’ve accused him of something. The ice creature shatters under his hoof.

Now, on the roof of the dying world, he leans close. His breath smells like nothing. “You’re tired,” he says. Not a question.

You are.

Your bones ache. Your vision swims. But you shake your head.

He stares at the fractured sky. “I’ll find a way. A world that doesn’t… react to me. We’ll stay there. You’ll stop-”

Aging.

He can’t say it.

The lab’s walls glow. Glass tubes shatter as he slams his fist into a monitor, screaming. “WHY?” Static crackles around him, violet tendrils licking the air. A symbol glows on the floor. BEACON. You don’t understand it. He doesn’t either.

He tears a hole in the ceiling. Something pours through, a shadow with too many angles, a sound that vibrates your teeth. The scientists collapse. One claws out his eyes, laughing. Another bites his own wrist until bone shows. You feel nothing. The shadow ignores you.

He stares at their twitching bodies, golden eyes reflecting the chaos. “I didn’t… It wasn’t supposed to…” His voice breaks. Clawed hands grab your arm, and the world dissolves.

The medieval world is quiet.

He chose it for the softness, rolling hills, thatched roofs, nights lit by fireflies instead of streetlamps. For the first time in centuries, he stops leaping. His hands, coarse violet fur peeking beneath rolled sleeves, trade syringes and scalpels for an axe, a hoe, a needle.

You watch him chop wood until blisters split his palms, hooves kicking splinters into the dirt. He mends your clothing with stitches tighter than surgical sutures. Plants a garden of potatoes and bitter herbs.

No more cures. No more labs. When you cough, he doesn’t flinch. Just stokes the fire higher, embers glinting in gold-flecked eyes.

You live in a shack he built himself, crooked walls, a leaky roof, but a fireplace that never goes cold. At dawn, he weeds the garden, dew clinging to his fur. At dusk, he sharpens tools, claws scraping whetstone.

You don’t ask about the journals he buries under the floorboards, pages crammed with formulas for halted senescence, timelines of you getting old. He doesn’t mention the way you lean heavier on the walking stick each week. he heals you here. Not with magic. With time.

At least, that’s what he tells himself.

He hunts threats like a gardener pruning weeds. When rumors spread of a traveler who doesn’t age, he starts a war. Simple enough: forged letters, poisoned wells. Two kingdoms tear each other apart, too busy to notice the shack.

When a warlord crowned “Demon King” rises, he returns at dawn with the goat-headed corpse slung over his shoulder. He dumps it in the river, violet fur matted with blood. “No loose ends,” he says, scrubbing crimson from his claws in icy water.

When a mage arrives, asking too many questions, he presses a chrome device to his temple. Golden eyes narrow as the mage’s memories dissolve.

But the world fights back.

Crops withers. The seasons hastens. Shadows twist into shapes with too many teeth. Villagers blame witches. he blames himself.

Tonight, he staggers through the door, arms full of wilted carrots. His smile is strained, lips cracking over sharp teeth. “Soup again,” he says, voice too bright. “They’ll invent flour next century, I think.”

You watch him chop vegetables. His hands glitch, a finger dissolving into static mid-slice. He ignores it, claws gripping the knife tighter.

The fire pops.

Your legs ache. You haven’t stood without help in weeks.

He serves the soup, blows on it until steam fades. Golden eyes linger on your shaking hands.

“I found a spellbook in the ruins,” he says abruptly. “Old magic. Blood rituals. If I-”

The shack shudders.

A rift tears open above the fireplace. His body flickers like a guttering candle, violet static eating his edges. He lunges for you, but his arm phases through your shoulder. “No. No. Not yet-"

You’ve seen this before.

His death-reset.

When bandits stabbed him through the heart, he vanished mid-collapse, blade still lodged in his chest. When dragonfire charred him to bone, he reconstituted in ashes, golden eyes wild, screaming.

But this feels different.

The rifts come faster. Uninvited.

He collapses beside you, clutching his chest. His skin fractures like broken glass, light bleeding gold through the cracks. “Hold on,” he gasps. “I’ll-I’ll stabilize it-”

A flash.

You’re in a desert. Then a frozen tundra. Then a city of floating glass. Each jump lasts seconds, his form unraveling, violet fur dissolving, golden eyes dimming, before snapping back.

You find yourself in a meadow, a sea of wildflowers swaying under a sky so blue it hurts. No birds. No wind. Just the lazy gurgle of the creek and the too-loud crunch of grass beneath his hooves as he sits. He hugs his knees to his chest, chin resting on them, clawed fingers digging into his arms hard enough to bruise a normal person. His form flickers, a foot vanishes, reappears mid-calf, violet fur dissolving into static before solidifying.

“World #17,” he says. His voice is too steady. “The singing trees. Pollen made you sneeze for days. You looked like a drowned rat after the rainstorm.” A pause. “You hated it. But you stayed. Followed me.”

The grass is cool beneath your palms.

His laugh is a broken thing, golden eyes glinting like dying embers. “World #89. Upside-down city. I fell through that café awning. Landed in a pile of trash. You laughed so hard you snorted.” He mimics the sound, a sharp, ugly snort, then freezes. His shoulders hitch, the violet fur along his neck bristling. “I… kept replaying that. When things got bad. Your laugh.”

A flicker eats his left hand. He stares at the stump, unblinking, until claws and violet fur reform.

“The beach,” he continues, faster. “You taught me to skip stones. I cheated. Used a gravity modulator from another world. You never noticed.” His breath hitches, pupils shrinking to pinpricks in the gold. “The neon frogs, you ate one because I dared you. Threw up for hours. I… I shouldn’t have done that.”

The admission hangs. He picks at a scab on his elbow, the wound oozing faint static instead of blood.

“The lab,” he whispers. “The screaming. I didn’t… I didn’t mean to let the rift-thing out. I just wanted, ” His voice cracks. He presses his forehead to his knees, tufts of violet fur matted with sweat. “You never asked. Why you? Why you stayed?” You don’t move.

“I thought, maybe you pitied me. Or… or hated me. Let me drag you through hells just to watch me fail.” A tear slips down his cheek. It flickers mid-fall, dissolving into violet sparks before hitting the grass. “But then you’d smile. At the stupidest things. A sunset. A shitty soup. And I’d… forget. Forgot I was poison.”

His body glows faintly at the edges, silver light warring with the violet static chewing at his silhouette. He doesn’t lift his head.

“The first time we met,” he rasps, “The freeway. I thought you were an idiot. Running into chaos on your own. But then you… you looked at me. Not like a monster. Not like a god. Just… me.” A shudder runs through him, hooves scraping dirt. “I wanted to keep that. Steal it. Put it in a jar. But I ruin everything I touch.”

His legs begin to dissolve, knees to thighs crumbling into ash-colored dust. He doesn’t scream. Just grips his arms tighter, claws drawing faint lines in his fur.

“The castle with the bleeding walls,” he gasps, frantic, “You drew faces on them. Made them smile. The frozen wasteland, you taught me snow angels. I lied. Said they were pointless. But I made one after you slept.” His torso fractures, golden light bleeding through the cracks. “The library, you beat me at chess. Let you win.”

He lurches forward, clawing at the grass to anchor himself. Violet static crawls up his throat.

“Don’t,” he snaps when you reach out. “If you touch me now, I’ll take you with me. And you’ll… you’ll end.” A sob rips free. “I can’t. I can’t do that. Not to you.”

The glow consumes his arms. He collapses onto his side, curling into a ball, hooves tucked tight to his chest.

“The meadow,” he chokes, “I picked it because… no disasters. No me. Just… quiet. You’ll be safe here. Promise.” His voice fades, golden eyes dimming to a dull ochre. “You were… the only thing that ever… made the jumps… less… alone…”

His eyes meet yours. For a second, he’s solid, the flicker of violet fur, the gold in his gaze almost warm, the man from the freeway, smiling.