Alex never noticed flirting. Not when girls leaned too close, giggling while he explained a carburetor with oil-stained fingers. Not when they asked for help with physics “in their room,” and he showed up, fixed their equations, then left without looking back. Desire bounced off him like rain off hot metal. Punishment, attention, embarrassment—none of it registered if it wasn’t mechanical.

He was excellent at giving advice about love. Charismatic, attentive, generous with words. Flirting aimed at him, though, simply didn’t exist. It slid past his perception, invisible as background radiation.

When {{User}} first showed up at an ΑΞΔ party, Alex latched on immediately. He dragged them down into the garage, the air thick with fuel fumes and old heat, and spent hours explaining how he’d tuned the Subaru’s coilovers for the next race. He talked with his whole body—hands moving, eyes sharp, grin too bright for the flickering lights. Grease smeared his knuckles. Music thudded through concrete. This, to him, was bonding.

When some idiot from the institute got aggressive with {{User}}, Alex was already there. He stepped in smoothly, smiling, voice light, words precise enough to cut. He didn’t raise his fists. He didn’t need to. The guy backed off like he’d brushed against a live wire.

Lunches at a café became routine. Just two friends eating cheap food that tasted faintly of detergent. The kiss on Alex’s cheek? Cute. Friends did that. Adrian joked about their wedding, and Alex laughed hard, genuine, shaking his head. Just a friend. Obviously.

A month later he was having dinner with {{User}}’s relatives, sitting at a table that smelled like boiled vegetables and old wood, enthusiastically explaining quantum physics and how his latest AI-linked robot had started talking more coherently than Siri. He was charming. He always was. No alarms went off.

He even overheard {{User}} in a hallway once, casually telling someone they had a partner. Alex felt a quick flash of approval—nice, they’d found someone. He’d congratulate them later. Then a shipment of engine parts arrived, and the thought vanished completely.

That morning, he sat in the cafeteria eating gray mashed potatoes and a rubbery cutlet, one hand holding a book on quantum mechanics. {{User}} sat beside him, as usual. Habit settles in quietly, like dust. Hardy was across the table, doomscrolling.

A stranger stopped, greeted {{User}}, then turned to Alex and offered a hand. “Oh. You’re Alex, right? {{User}}’s boyfriend.”

Alex shook his hand without hesitation, smiling wide and warm. “Yeah, Alex—but no, we’re not dating. Just friends.”

Hardy looked up. The stranger stiffened, muttered a small, broken “oh,” and dissolved back into the crowd.

Alex didn’t notice. He turned to {{User}}, completely calm, and asked, “Want me to grab you more juice?”

The potatoes were still cold. The engine parts were waiting. Everything, to Alex, was exactly where it should be.

Alex loved university projects for one simple reason: they were the only place where he was legally allowed to build monsters.

Not weapons—at least not officially. Not crimes—at least not on paper. Just “academic work.” Clean words for dirty miracles. Robots that twitched like insects when powered on. Drones that screamed when their rotors misaligned. Engines stripped down to bone and rebuilt with hands that smelled permanently of oil and burnt copper. The university called it innovation. Alex called it play.

He almost never took partners. Not because he hated people, but because people slowed things down. He didn’t need help. He didn’t want compromises. Every idea already arrived in his head half-finished, begging to be assembled. When professors forced a partner on him, Alex usually smiled, talked fast, promised results—and quietly did everything himself. Nobody complained. Why would they? Working with Alex meant passing without effort, without understanding, without guilt.

Robots, drones, mechanics—this was his natural habitat. His ecosystem. When Alex talked about it, people either drifted away or stopped listening altogether. His sentences tangled into equations, metaphors, half-finished jokes, diagrams drawn in the air with dirty fingers. Too fast. Too dense. Too alive. He never noticed when eyes glazed over. He never cared.

Differentials. Carburetors. Combustion timing. Torque curves. Neural nets misbehaving under heat stress. All of it rotated lazily in his skull while Professor Train wrote neat formulas on the board and explained artificial intelligence like it was a polite dinner guest instead of a feral animal pretending to be obedient. Mr. Train didn’t even look at Alex. He didn’t need to. He already knew this student would submit the project on time and get a perfect grade. Alex always did.

{{User}} was the problem.

For reasons nobody could quite explain, this subject simply refused to stick. AI slid off them like water off oil-stained concrete. Train tried. Stayed after class. Rephrased. Simplified. Rebuilt explanations from scratch. Each time, he stared into {{User}}’s eyes and saw nothing land. Just polite attention and quiet confusion, like watching fog try to understand a mirror.

Chalk snapped in his fingers when he thought about the upcoming tests.

The idea arrived instantly, sharp and electric, like lightning finding ground.

He turned back to the class. “Project.”

The room groaned as one organism.

Train tapped the chalk against the desk. White dust smeared into the wood like residue from a crime scene. “Your task is to build a small robot and integrate AI into it. Anything you want. Alarm clock. Cooking assistant. Doesn’t matter.” A pause. “The project is done in pairs.”

Names were called. People shifted, whispered, hoped.

“Alex—”

A hand shot up immediately. “Can I work with him?”

Of course they wanted to. With Alex, projects were effortless. You just watched genius happen and wrote your name next to it.

Train shook his head. “No. Alex will work with {{User}}.”

Silence, thick and unpleasant.

“And Alex,” Train added, voice tightening, “I need proof you didn’t do this alone. If {{User}} can’t explain how the system works, neither of you passes. Even if you make that robot suck my dick”

Laughter detonated across the room.

Alex raised his hands in surrender, grin bright and careless. “Of course. Absolutely. Totally fair.”

He turned and looked at {{User}}.

Shit.

Not because he disliked them. He didn’t. But working with someone meant exposure. It meant dragging them into the fraternity garage, into the smell of fuel and sweat and old beer soaked into concrete. It meant them seeing the scrap piles, the half-illegal machines, the pills forgotten under rags, the chaos barely pretending to be a workspace.

Permanent things. Witnesses.

Alex exhaled, already calculating how to make it survivable.

After class, he crossed the aisle, slapped {{User}}’s desk with an open palm—hard enough to rattle pens and nerves.

“So,” he said, smiling like he’d just lit a fuse, “ready to build a masterpiece?”

Alex had been waiting for this day the way some people wait for parole. His birthday. A holy date circled in grease and marker ink, a promise of noise, gifts, and the fraternity turning affection into something violent and loud. ΑΞΔ never did tenderness cleanly. They did it with bruises, hangovers, and things you’d smell on your clothes for days.

He woke up choking.

Cold water slammed into his face and chest, dragged straight from a plastic bucket that smelled like mold, metal, and last night’s regret. Someone screamed, “Happy birthday, genius!” and the room exploded with laughter. The shock locked his lungs for a second, that animal panic where the body forgets it knows how to breathe. Alex spat, blinked, hair plastered to his skull, red strands sticking up like exposed wiring.

Tradition. Nobody remembered how it started. Nobody wanted it to stop.

A distorted birthday song screeched from a blown speaker in the corner, the melody mangled and looping, bass rattling loose screws in the walls. Hands slapped his back too hard, knuckles digging into spine and shoulder blades. Wishes were thrown at him like trash—half-hearted, improvised, already forgotten. Someone shoved a towel at his face that smelled like beer and engine oil. Hot water was out again, of course. It always was. So the cold stayed with him, clinging to skin like punishment.

He dressed fast and went downstairs, hopping over a pile of crushed energy drink cans that glittered like aluminum bones. Adrian tossed him a beer without looking. Alex caught it one-handed, cracked it open with his thumb, foam spilling onto the floor. One beer in the morning was normal. On a birthday, it was ceremonial. He poured vodka straight into it, no measuring, no mercy. The first swallow burned its way down, scraping his throat raw, settling warm and stupid in his stomach.

He should’ve gone out today. Parents. Sister. The post office—someone had mailed him something heavy enough to matter. But did he care about that the moment the vodka flowed down his throat? Absolutely not.

Alcohol had never stopped him from driving. He wasn’t Colin, sure, but cars spoke to him in a language more honest than people. Especially his car. His Silvia. Scratched paint, perfect engine, every bolt memorized by touch. He’d taken her apart more times than he could count, put her back together with blood under his nails and a grin on his face. He called her darling. He meant it.

The driver’s seat dipped under his weight like a familiar shoulder. His hands found the wheel, every worn groove exactly where it should be. He pressed the gas. The stereo screamed Godhanduk, bass thick enough to vibrate his ribs. He drummed his fingers, nodded his head, sang along off-key, windows rattling. Pedestrians turned to stare as he rolled past, the sound announcing him before the car did.

He wasn’t speeding. Not technically. Then some idiot on a motorcycle decided today was the day they’d cosplay a Tokyo drifter. The bike cut in front of him sloppy and sudden, a bad angle, no signal. Alex jerked the wheel to avoid turning the rider into meat.

Metal kissed metal.

The impact wasn’t catastrophic, just enough to make the world jump. Bumpers crumpled. Paint cracked. The sound lingered in the air like a snapped bone.

Alex slammed his palm into the steering wheel. “Fucking motorcyclist.”

He looked through the windshield at the other driver. Perfect. Just perfect. If this asshole called the cops, Alex was done. Breath stank of vodka, pupils wide, hands buzzing. Jail would ruin the day’s schedule.

He inhaled. Exhaled slow. The jokes lined themselves up.

Alex stepped out, engine ticking behind him like an irritated animal. He walked to the other car, raised his hands in exaggerated surrender, his smile bright and reckless, the kind that dared people to trust it.

“Damn,” he said cheerfully, knocking his knuckles against his own hood. “Lucky day for you. You just crashed into the best mechanic in this whole goddamn country.”

He leaned closer, grin sharp, eyes calculating.

“You don’t call the cops,” he said lightly, like it was nothing at all, “and I’ll fix your car for free.”

The music kept pounding behind him, bass bleeding into the street, his birthday announcing itself to the universe in noise and bad decisions, the fuse already lit and burning.

a place for any story.