The night air hit him like a bad hangover he hadn't earned yet.
Lance staggered into the open street, hands on his head, teeth clenched against the burn running under his skin. It wasn't pain the way broken bones hurt—it was more like someone was pushing into him from the inside, filling the contours of his body with something that wasn't his shape.
"God—!" He choked the word into the cold, jaw locking. His voice sounded... lower. Not by much, but enough that even he noticed.
His reflection in a shop window glanced at him—too quick, too sharp. It wasn't him. Not exactly. The jawline was a fraction tighter, cheekbones higher, mouth set in a smirk he definitely wasn't making. He moved a step closer and the glass seemed to ripple, like heat over asphalt. The face staring back had pupils too dark, almost swallowing the iris.
Rico's eyes.
Lance looked away fast.
Just get home. Just get home.
The streets stretched strangely, storefronts crowding together then yawning apart like a breathing thing. Streetlamps buzzed too loud. The shadows beneath them swelled and receded as if they were tides. Every passerby's face seemed to flicker between two people—sometimes strangers, sometimes someone he half-knew.
A man in a coat brushed past him. Lance caught a whiff of something like old coins and wet ash—and for a fraction of a second, the man's head wasn't a head at all, but a rounded mass of flesh studded with watch hands ticking in all directions.
Lance blinked, and it was just some guy with a bad haircut.
He didn't slow down. Couldn't.
Every few steps, his face tightened—muscles pulling in directions they'd never needed to before. His teeth didn't fit against each other right. His skin itched like it was trying to remember a scar it had never had.
It wasn't fast. That made it worse.
By the time he reached his street, the houses looked like they'd been painted in the wrong order. Sky where roofs should be. Gardens that folded in on themselves.
And at the far end, sitting under the dim porch light of his house, Dario waited.
The dog's ears perked up as soon as Lance turned the corner, tail wagging with a soft thump-thump-thump against the porch boards. His presence cut through the nightmare filter for a moment—details snapping into place. The color of the siding. The smell of the air. The sound of his own footsteps again.
"Hey, buddy," Lance muttered, voice rasping.
Dario trotted down the steps to meet him, leaning his warm weight against Lance's legs. The pressure was grounding. Steady. The tremor in Lance's breath eased.
Then the front door opened.
His mother stood there, arms crossed, expression tight enough to snap.
"Where have you been?" she asked. The tone wasn't sharp, but there was an edge Lance knew all too well—a blade she could swing either way in a heartbeat.
He straightened instantly. "Out. Just out."
Her eyes flicked to his face, lingering. "You look... different."
Lance's stomach knotted. He forced a small laugh. "Just tired."
Her mouth pressed thin. "I don't like that tone."
Every instinct told him to dial himself down. Shoulders lowered. Voice softer. "Sorry, Mom. Long day. Didn't mean anything by it."
She didn't answer right away. Something in her gaze shifted—like she'd forgotten what she was about to say. Her lips parted, then closed. Her figure seemed... lighter. Fainter.
Lance blinked, and for an instant, he could see the kitchen behind her through her arm.
"Mom?"
She frowned, stepping back into the house. The color drained from her shirt. Her voice sounded far away. "Close the door when you come in."
The words should've been normal. They weren't. They echoed too long, stretching into the black corners of the hallway.
He turned, shutting the door slowly—so slowly it barely made a sound when it latched. When he faced her again, his vision buckled.
The walls were gone.
Everything beyond her outline was black, infinite, featureless. Like they were the last two things left in existence.
He blinked, hard, but the darkness stayed. His mother's figure wavered, edges fraying like a poorly preserved photograph.
His head throbbed.
Am I drunk?
The thought felt stupid, inadequate, but it was all he had to make sense of the way the room had become a void.
She was still talking—he thought—but her voice was thinning out, dissolving into static. He could see her mouth move, but it didn't sync with the words in his head anymore.
And something inside him broke.
The sentence that left his mouth came in a trembling, cracked tone he didn't even recognize as his own:
"I... don't even know if you're still here anymore. I can't—" He swallowed hard, a lump rising that wasn't just grief. "I can't remember what it feels like to know you're real."
For a heartbeat, her eyes softened. Then her face blurred, and she was gone—not like she left the room, but like she'd never existed there in the first place.
The only sound was Dario's claws clicking faintly against the floor, anchoring Lance in the black nothing.
Lance's legs carried him down the hall, but his breath was ragged, scraping rough against his ribs like shattered glass. Just breathe. Just breathe, he told himself, but the words barely reached past the crushing weight inside.
The bathroom light flickered on with a harsh buzz. The mirror glared back—a face that no longer felt like his own. His hands slammed against the cold sink, fingers trembling as he pressed his forehead down, desperate to ground himself. But the reflection wavered—cheekbones sharper, eyes darker, a jawline he barely recognized. That face was a warning. He was slipping.
Breaking.
His gaze flicked to the toilet. A simple, urgent need. But then he stopped. The bowl was filled—no, drowned—in milk. Thick, white, viscous. It rippled faintly, mocking him. The smell, faintly sour, invaded the cramped space like a rotten secret.
Lance froze. The absurdity smashed into him.
Milk.
Milk.
The milk he'd left on the counter, meant for something normal. Now it was choking the toilet like some cruel joke. His heart hammered harder.
"Who the fuck did this?" The words shattered the silence, raw and violent.
He bent forward, fingers trembling as they brushed the surface of the milk. Cold. Unyielding. Mocking.
Dario.
But the dog was nowhere to be seen.
A bitter laugh tore from his throat—low, fractured, and jagged, like glass breaking inside his chest. The laugh cracked open into a ragged bark of anger and disbelief.
Fury crashed through him, raw and unforgiving. He kicked the toilet hard. It barely rocked, the milk sloshing close to the edge like a mocking tide.
Tears welled and spilled, burning hot and fierce.
Why?
Why is everything falling apart?
Why is nothing mine anymore?
He pounded his fists against the tiles, each blow a desperate scream without sound. The absurdity of it—the milk, the fading mother, the shifting face in the mirror—was a merciless joke, and he was the punchline.
He collapsed to his knees, hands pressed to the freezing floor, shaking with the force of everything breaking inside. His breath came ragged and broken. "This isn't real. It can't be real." The words came fierce, a desperate mantra.
He looked back to the mirror, searching for something solid—anything—to hold him together. But the eyes staring back were strangers. The room spun, and the edges of himself cracked and splintered like broken glass.
I'm losing it.
Terror bloomed deep inside, black and cold. Because losing it meant disappearing. Vanishing into the nothingness that was waiting, patient and hungry.
He curled into himself, the weight of loss, madness, and isolation crushing down. The milk. The mother. The reflection. All tangled in a suffocating spiral he couldn't stop.
And as his sobs shook his body, the final, brutal truth hammered in—he was utterly, painfully alone.He sat on the edge of his bed for what felt like hours, clothes still on, the faint echo of his mother's voice stuck between his ears.
He kept his hands pressed into his eyes until they ached, the light behind them shifting into swirling, nauseating colors. Every time he blinked, his reflection in the darkened window seemed sharper in the wrong ways—cheekbones where they hadn't been before, a faint change in the slope of his jaw. It wasn't dramatic yet, but he could feel the rest coming.
And then the thought, sudden and slicing clear through the fog:
Wait... someone knew. Someone knew I would come for the milk. Someone knew I would go to the store.
His breath hitched.
So was it really Dario?
His mind spun again, clutching at possibilities and horrors. If not Dario... then who?
The question echoed endlessly in the empty spaces of his unraveling mind, refusing to be silenced.
The symbiote's pull was relentless.
It whispered in quiet flexes under his skin, tugging at the corners of his identity, at his shape. He imagined it the way teeth worry at a loose thread, pulling and pulling until the whole thing unraveled.
Dario, curled beside him, stirred when Lance's breathing hitched. The dog nosed at his side, tail thumping softly against the mattress, warm against Lance's hip like a living anchor.
Lance exhaled shakily.
The trembling in his arms slowed—not because the change had stopped, but because the warmth pushed it back, like heat thawing something that was trying to frost over. He wanted to yell at Dario for the milk, but he is still wondering if it was him.
His vision blurred, and before he realized it, tears slid down his cheeks. He caught them on the heel of his palm, but they just kept coming, his throat closing up. He bent forward until his forehead pressed into Dario's fur.
The smell of him—faintly dusty, faintly dog—hit him like a memory he didn't want to lose.
It was stupid, but the heat radiating off Dario's body seemed to keep the edges of him from dissolving.
The crawling sensation under his skin weakened, the alien hum receding like a tide.
His breath hitched again, but this time from something closer to relief than fear.
If it could work now—if Dario could hold it back—maybe he wouldn't lose himself at work tomorrow.
He'd have to bring him.
He would bring him.
Not because it was smart.
Not because he knew how people would react.
But because the idea of sitting alone tomorrow with the symbiote eating away at him—while his coworkers spoke to him like he was still someone he wasn't—felt like being lowered into a grave and told to just get comfortable.
The warmth stayed with him until his breathing slowed. But sleep didn't come easy. Every time he closed his eyes, the void tried to creep back in, swallowing the edges of the room. He held Dario tighter, afraid that if he let go, he might wake up as someone else entirely.