The door clicked shut behind them with a soft thunk that sounded too final.
The room was small — smaller than any safe house Lance had ever known. Bare concrete walls, rough and cracked, kissed by a dim, flickering light that hummed with an almost lazy buzz.
The air was stale but still.
No twisting corridors.
No warped floors.
Just silence.
Lance sank against the cold wall, knees pulled up, still clutching Dario close. The dog nestled into his chest, warm and steady—a tether to something real.
Dani leaned against the opposite wall, arms crossed, eyes scanning but not restless. For the first time since they met, she didn't speak.
The quiet stretched long between them.
Lance's breath slowed, but his mind raced.
What was that place? That... rift?
What was happening to him?
The twitch in his chest pulsed faintly—no longer urgent, but persistent, like a slow, ticking clock buried under his ribs.
His fingers itched, as if the skin barely held together the tremors beneath.
His eyes drifted to the faint glow of a single red button on the far wall—unlabeled, blinking softly like a heartbeat.
Should he press it?
He didn't know.
The silence wasn't empty.
It was waiting.
Waiting for something to break the stillness.
Lance blinked and swallowed.
"Dani," he finally said, voice hoarse but steady.
She looked up, expression unreadable.
"Yeah?"
"Why... do you have a lunchbox with a dinosaur on it?"
Her lips twitched into the faintest smirk.
"Don't ask."
He let out a breath that was half laugh, half sob.
For a brief moment, the world outside the door felt miles away.
But somewhere, deep beneath the calm, the twitch stirred again.
The quiet before the storm.
Lance's back pressed hard against the cold concrete wall, the roughness digging into his skin like a reminder he was still here—still somewhere—still him, or at least a version of him.
Dario's warmth radiated through his chest, a faint heartbeat against the chaos inside.
He blinked, staring at the blinking red button across the room but didn't move toward it.
Because how could he?
The twitch inside him wasn't just some weird power.
It was a creeping, gnawing fracture — a constant reminder that things were slipping.
That he was slipping.
That everything he had thought solid, stable, real was folding away into something else.
And all he wanted was to press pause.
To catch a breath without the world burning or bending or tearing or screaming for him to do something.
But there was no pause.
There was no breath.
Just the pressure of everything—the monster, the shifting reality, the twitch that wasn't quite his, the unknown leaking into his bones.
He thought about the printer at work he'd spent hours trying to fix last week.
The angry customer who just needed a simple print job.
The part of him that wanted to vanish, to be invisible, to just be "that guy" — unnoticed, unremarkable.
But that guy was gone.
And the new version—fractured, twitching—was stuck here.
With Dani, who probably thought he was nuts.
With a monster that warped reality behind them.
With a leaking mind and a dog who didn't understand but didn't leave.
Lance closed his eyes, tried to breathe slow.
He thought about all the moments where things didn't go right, and how the weight of every bad thing stacked up until it felt like drowning.
Not the dramatic kind with splashing and gasping.
But the slow kind.
The silent kind.
Where you can't catch air because your chest is filled with everything.
He opened his eyes again.
Dani was watching him, but not with pity.
With something harder to read.
The kind of look that said she knew the world was broken.
And maybe, so was he.
But it was going to take a lot more than a broken world to stop her.
Lance shifted, fingers curling around Dario's fur.
He whispered, barely audible.
"I don't know if I can do this."
And for the first time, it wasn't just a joke.
It was the truth.
The concrete wall pressed cold against Lance's back, its rough grain a sharp contrast to the smooth warmth pressed against his chest. Dario, unmoving, heavy with steady life, was a solid anchor in a sea that had gone terribly, terrifyingly still.
Lance's fingers curled around the dog's fur almost without thinking. His hand was shaking, but Dario didn't pull away. Instead, the dog leaned into him, offering quiet comfort in a world that no longer made sense.
For a moment, Lance let himself forget the twisting halls, the impossible corridors bleeding into one another, the monstrous cow's fractured eyes stalking somewhere just beyond the edges of his mind.
He let himself pretend he was back in his apartment, the morning sunlight pouring in as Dario waited patiently by the door, tail wagging, just wanting a walk.
But the image cracked beneath his breath.
His eyes—once sharp and clear—now felt... wrong. They caught the dim light of the room and refracted it oddly, as if layered beneath a thin veil of white film. Opaque. Blurred.
He blinked. The film didn't vanish.
It was there, always there, just behind his lids.
And with it came flashes—fleeting shadows at the edges of his vision, like something watching through his own eyes.
Not him. Not yet.
Something else.
He swallowed hard and tightened his grip on Dario. The dog's steady heartbeat against his ribs was the only proof he had left that he was still Lance.
His mind unraveled slowly, like a spool of thread caught on a nail.
The day at work played behind his eyes—the ringing phone, the endless queue of tickets, the frustration of a printer that refused to cooperate.
He remembered laughing once with a coworker—so simple, so human—and it made the tightness in his chest grow sharper.
"Remember when this was normal?" he whispered to Dario, voice cracking. "When all I had to do was fix the damn printer?"
Dario's warm muzzle nudged Lance's hand. A small, grounding thing amid the chaos of spiraling thoughts.
The twitch inside his ribs pulsed faintly. A reminder. A beat that wasn't quite his own.
He tried to focus on Dario's eyes—deep pools of loyal brown, unclouded, unbroken. Those eyes didn't lie.
But Lance's were starting to feel like strangers.
He felt them slipping further away—becoming windows not to himself, but to something waiting beneath.
A silence stretched, thick and suffocating.
Lance's breathing slowed, shallow and uneven. The air felt too heavy. Too thin.
He squeezed his eyes shut, but behind the lids, the flickering shadows danced.
Faces—not his—whispering words that weren't quite language. A static hum rising like a tide beneath his thoughts.
Not yet.
Almost.
Soon.
His grip on Dario tightened until his knuckles whitened.
"I don't want this," he said softly. "I don't want any of this."
The dog's steady breathing was the only answer.
For now.
But Lance knew: the symbiote wasn't just in the milk.
It was in him.
Watching. Waiting.
And the longer it stayed, the harder it would be to tell where Lance ended—and whatever this was began.
He clung to the simplest thing left to him.
The unblinking loyalty in Dario's eyes.
Because even if his own gaze was clouded, the dog's was not.
And for now, that was enough.