Chapter Text
You opened your eyes to the sound of a phone call, the shrill sound of your ringtone blaring incessantly into your ears. Your eyelids were heavy, burdened as they were with the pain that can only be achieved by crying for hours on end, and try as you did to resist waking up, your annoyance over the grating sound got the better of you. In the darkness of the room, you squinted at the glare of your phone’s bright screen to look at the caller ID. The call, your phone said, came from a certain “Tara”.
You didn’t know a Tara. At least, not in real life. Huh. Strange.
You picked up the call anyway, only to be greeted by a garbled voice. ‘Ah great, my room’s shitty signal strikes again,’ you thought with much derision as you rose from the bed. The cold floor sent a jolt through your bare feet, shaking your senses enough to make sure you didn’t just retreat and crawl back into the covers. You padded out onto the living room and put the phone to your ear.
“Girl, where are you, girl?” the high pitched voice of a woman on the other end asked you. Her voice was familiar, but you couldn’t quite place who the voice belonged to, or at lease where you had heard it before. Huh. Strange.
The person on the phone spoke again, but the words came out all jumbled again. The signal, you thought, was still not good enough. From the corners of your half-asleep eyes you spotted the balcony. Thinking that you might find better signal there, you stepped on outside and put the phone to your ear as you walked out through the sliding glass door and out into the cool night air.
“Sorry, what did you say just now? Signal was choppy,” you spoke into the phone.
“The Hunter Association Supermoon Party is about to start!” the caller, who was identified by your phone as Tara, squealed. “Please tell me you’re on your way soon, or there won’t be any tequila shots left for you!”
‘Hunter Association? Supermoon?’ you thought to yourself as you stood on the balcony and stared out to the street below.
It was then you realised: you didn’t have a balcony. You still lived with your mom, in your room that had no access to the outside world except for a window where your only view was the neighbour’s firewall. Your free hand —the one that wasn’t holding your phone— gripped onto the railing as you peered out onto the street below. What you saw down there was definitely not your street. You looked around, fixing your eyes onto the horizon in front of you, and your eyes were met by a cityscape that was definitely not your own, either.
You spun around quickly to look at the living room you just walked out of. In your barely awake state, you failed to realise that you were not in your room, but rather somewhere else entirely. The furniture, the decor, the hardwood floor— all of it was completely foreign to you. Where was your pet cat? Where were all your books? Where was that life-sized Zayne standee that you won after bidding for it at a fan-organized cup sleeve event? A gust of wind that blew through the city that wasn’t yours, sending a shiver down your spine as you realised that wherever this was, you woke up in a place that was not your home.
The realisation that something was fundamentally wrong started to swell in your chest before settling low in your stomach, clutching your core so tightly that the urge to vomit seized you. Where were you?
A loud thud landed on the railing of the balcony, interrupting your downward spiral. You spun around again, only to find a man crouched on the railing of your balcony. The man had a muscular build, with a broad chest and shoulders that almost took up your entire field of vision. Despite his size, he was able to keep excellent balance on the railing that seemed so thin compared to him. The night breeze blew through his auburn hair, a feeble attempt to muss up his already tousled locks. His golden eyes pierced through you from underneath his strong brow, and his gaze easily overpowered your own will and robbed you of your better judgement to turn and run away. His lips turned up into a smirk as he raised his hand, his thumb, index finger, and middle finger extended while rest of his fingers were curled into his palm to make his hand resemble a firearm. He leaned in, and those luscious lips parted to speak:
“Bang,” he said as he ‘shot’ you with his finger gun.
You felt the blood drain from your face as you recognized who this man was. Your lips struggled to form words, but you knew for sure the name that dwelled on your tongue, the name of the man in front of you.
Valko.
Everything fell into place all at once. Somehow —God only knows how— you were inside Love and Deepspace, the game you were cried yourself to sleep over the night before. The balcony you stood on was part of your MC’s apartment, and the city skyline that surrounded you was that of Linkon City. You looked down on the phone in your hand, only to see that the call with Tara was still running. Tara, the character who was meant to be your MC’s best friend and colleague…
“Hello?” she called out before calling you by your in-game name. “Helloooo, are you still there, girl? Did you zone out or something?”
“Who’re you talking to?” Valko asked before peering at the phone in your hand. He glanced at the caller ID on the interface before reaching down to cut the call. He put his face even closer to yours, so much so that you could see the faint twitch of his lips as they turned up into yet another nearly imperceptible smirk.
“Take me in for the night,” he said, and for a moment it felt more like an imperative that you could not defy.
“This can’t be happening,” you thought. Valko… Valko wasn’t real. Infold had cancelled his release. They said so themselves— they had decided to cancel both the launch and the development of “the new love interest,” which could only ever mean Valko. They started deleting Valko’s content across their social media too, even the version update livestream they had that featured Valko. They were making it to seem as though Valko was never developed over the span of two years as a love interest. They were making it seem as if Valko was but a fever dream. They were making it seem as though he never existed. You knew better, however, of course you did. Valko’s introduction as a love interest was very real. The dream —or rather, the nightmare— was in how Infold handled the “backlash” that plagued his release.
More importantly, the whole game isn’t real. Well, the game as it existed in your three-dimensioned reality —the one that until now was the only reality you were convinced of being capable of living in— was real as a game, and that was all Love and Deepspace was: a game. It was just a bunch of pixels on your screen, mere data values and strings of complex code wrought together to display lines and lines of text alongside pre-determined 3D-rendered models of attractive men with attractive voices. Not even a VR mode of gameplay for the game—which hasn’t even been released yet— could possibly offer this level of realism. Yet now, somehow, you were in the Bond story for Valko that was announced a few days ago. Not experiencing it, not watching it on a screen; you were in it, actually in it, possibly taking the place of your MC. And Valko was there, with you. As if his release as a love interest was never cancelled. As if the past days were a terrible delusion meant to test your faith in him.
And yet you of little faith still could not believe, even with Valko right in front of you. So you reached out to touch him, your fingers ghosting the surface of his chest through the black muscle shirt that threatened to tear apart from how tight it clung onto his body. Beneath your touch, the firm muscle underneath the fabric tensed for a moment, leading you to the undeniable conclusion that it was real. The warmth of his body surged underneath your fingertips, and you had no choice but to concede that the heat that radiated from his body was likewise real. Much closer now, you were able to see that the moonlight that gleamed on the thin layer of sweat that sat at the surface of his skin was, just like everything else that had yielded to your senses so far, real.
“Trying to muzzle me?” Valko asked, and the sound of his voice, the way it rumbled in his chest and onto your fingertips, overwhelmed you to the point that tears started to prick at your waterline.
“It’s a little too late,” he smirked as he rose to his full height before jumping off the railing and onto the floor of the balcony. You rushed backwards with so much speed that it hurt when your back hit the glass window of your —well, your MC’s— apartment. For a brief moment, you were robbed of the ability to breathe, and you couldn’t fathom whether if it was the force of impact of your back hitting the glass, or if it was the fact that the sight of Valko— moving, talking, existing Valko— made your chest tighten so much it hurt.
Valko took measured yet confident strides in your direction, and the sheer mass of him finally dawned on you as you craned your neck to continue looking him in the eye. All you can do was stare at him, your eyes drinking in the sight of him bathed in the moon’s silver light. Your breath grew ragged as the tears that threatened to fall earlier finally started to follow through with their threats. Valko, actual Valko, right in front of you, walking to you, talking to you, looking at you. Only you.
Valko stopped in front of you, only to see tears flowing freely down your cheeks. Any hint of self-assured confidence that lived in his eyes was quickly replaced by genuine concern as he saw how much you were crying. The pain you felt knowing that he wasn’t ever going to be released, and now the relief and the disbelief that for some reason, somehow, he was there, in front of you, swirled violently inside you to the point that it was too much for you to bear, and you buried your face into your hands as you lost the strength to look him in the eye.
“Oh, I know what’s up,” Valko said before he bent down to pick you up bridal-style. He caught you off-guard, so much so that your tears had stopped from the surprise of it all. You yelped as he draped you across his big arms and carried you through the siding door and into the living room, walking as though you weighed nothing.
“Look at me, baby, I’m carrying you over the threshold,” he smirked as he looked down to see your cheeks flushed and glowing from what he implied.
“This isn’t the front door, Valko. It only counts if it’s the front door,” you countered, getting a semblance of your wit back as his gait made you rock gently against his firm chest.
“Front, back, it’s all just a construct,” he argued. “A door is a door, a threshold is a threshold, and I just carried you over it.”
You rolled your eyes at his attempt to philosophize as he set you down on the sofa.
“Stay there, I’ll go get you some water,” Valko said before heading to the kitchen.
You took the opportunity to look around the apartment. Damn, it really was MC’s apartment in the game. The placement of the furniture was exactly how it was laid out in the trailer for Valko’s Memoria and his Bond Story. The arc floor lamp in the corner of the room, the red blanket draped over the sofa, the side table that had no business being placed in the room the way it was: everything was exactly as it was in the video. Even the Jenga tower was there, half-constructed in a haphazard way that would make architects weep, the wooden blocks waiting for Valko to tear them down.
“You said you knew what’s up. What on earth is happening here, Valko?” you asked him as he entered your field of vision and handed you a glass of water. You took an experimental sip from the glass first; once your taste buds failed to detect anything off about the water in the glass, you gulped the whole thing down in a matter of seconds. The whole ordeal had left you with a parched throat, and the cool water did much to help you ground your senses an calm down.
“Thirsty, are we? Let me get you another glass,” Valko offered as he reached out to take the glass in your hand. As you handed it over to him, your fingertips brushed for the briefest of moments, and you saw his lips turn up into a soft smile before he turned his back and headed back into the kitchen.
You stared at him as he sauntered on over to the cupboard and grabbed a cool glass of water from the pitcher inside the refrigerator. Valko’s gait was lazy and relaxed, like someone walking in the park on a Sunday morning. How was he taking this calmly while your sanity was at the very precipice of crumbling?
Valko came back with another glass of water, which you took more moderate sips of. As you drank the water, you felt his gaze on you. His amber eyes were hyperfocused on you— not in a loving way, but rather in an analytical way, as if he was some sort of researcher and you were his test subject. If eyes alone could cut, his were methodically dissecting you, bit by bit, studying you in earnest before taking some mental notes that you didn’t have access to. Despite the cool relief offered by the water, you could feel the heat creeping up your neck and onto your cheeks as his stare continued to sear across your face, your body. Before you knew it, you had finished all of the water again, and you gingerly placed the empty glass on the chrome coffee table in front of you.
“You’re not my MC, are you?” he began before taking the other end of the sofa. Your eyes widened at Valko’s mention of “his MC”; it broke your mind that a love interest would refer to the playable character as “MC”, the same way you would refer to her. It was always “Partner”, “Miss Hunter”, “Miss Bodyguard”, “pipsqueak”, “kitten”, “my love”, or one of those countless other nicknames for her used throughout the main story and the events, but never “MC”, like the way Valko called her now.
“My MC didn’t cry when she first saw me show up here. But you did. You look at me like you saw a ghost, like you saw someone who shouldn’t be alive. That makes you…” he trailed off, for some dramatic effect, it seemed. “Her player. You’re the player who plays this game.”
You were taken aback by how quickly he reached the correct conclusion. What you were more alarmed by, however, was that he was aware of the fact that he was in a game, and that there was a player —you— who existed beyond the game.
“Of course, the game logs reveal that much,” Valko continued. “I read one of them earlier. 'Game file integrity check failed. Modified file found in game directory,’ it said, and it pointed to this part of the patch. Had to check it out and see it for myself.”
“Valko,” you whispered again, and you forgot that he even asked you a question in the first place. Before you could stop yourself, you closed the distance between the both of you and reached out to cup his face in both of your hands. He leaned into your touch, nuzzling your palm as he closed his eyes to take in your warmth, your scent. “How are you real?”
Valko’s golden eyes fluttered open and he flashed you a wide grin, his sharp canines protruding slightly from underneath the curve of his smile. “I was made for you, puppy. Quite literally.” You rolled your eyes at his attempt to flirt with you, and he laughed at your annoyance.
“You know what I mean, Valko,” you said, your voice much smaller than you had anticipated it to be. You let go of his face to hug your knees and bring them closer to your chest as you remembered the savage grief that tore at you like a berserker through the heart.
“Infold…” you began, unsure how to word the rest of the sentence you started. “…They killed you off.…”
“I’m still here though, aren’t I?” he asked, leaning into the cushions of the sofa.
“But… how…?” you asked, still unable to wrap your head around the fact that you were somehow in the game with Valko.
“Hmm…” he hummed, as though he was finding a way to simplify what he wanted to explain. “Let me use your hand to explain, if you’ll let me. Lend me your fingers.”
You extended your hand towards him, and he scooted closer to sit across you. He took your hand in both of his, his fingers gently bending your own to conform to the explanation in his head.
He curled your fingers into a loose fist, only to gently lift your index finger and position it to point up to ceiling. “Y axis.” Then, he pointed your thumb straight out to form an ‘L’ shape with your index finger. “X axis.” Finally, he stuck your middle finger out to form a 90-degree angle between your index finger. Together, these three fingers formed a rough representation of a cube corner. “And Z axis. This is 3D. This is your world. This is the reality you interact with.”
Valko then uncurled your two remaining fingers before straightening the rest that represented axes. Your hand was now open and facing him.
“Now, however, you are in a 2D plane of the game. Sure, it’s rendered to look like it’s 3D, but it’s displayed as a 2D plane on the screen of your device. Only X and Y axes,” he continued, and he raised his own hand in the same way, only to put it flush against yours, palm to palm, skin to skin. His hand was incredibly warm, and the sheer size of hand nearly dwarfed your own.
“I, too, now exist in the 2D plane of the game. But in this 2D plane, and in the fiction of the storyline, I am still very real, and your MC is also very real,” Valko went on, threading his fingers through yours before closing his hand around yours to give it a squeeze. “The consciousness, the sentience you are using to perceive me now is that of your 3D self, but you’re interacting with me now through your MC’s model in this 2D space.”
You nodded as you tried to catch up with Valko’s explanation.
“Great job, by the way, your MC is absolutely gorgeous,” he grinned, and you gave him a deadpan look that screamed “I’m so done with your bullshit, Valko.”
“Cheap shots don’t count, Valko, you said so yourself,” you quipped, and Valko chuckled, adjusting his grip while still not letting go. He marveled the shape of your —well, your MC’s— hand, how small it was compared to his, how soft it was against his rough, calloused ones.
You mulled over what Valko had just told you in the past few minutes. As he explained it, while your consciousness was still your own, your body —if you could call it that— was of your MC’s, the same 3D-rendered model you designed two years ago in the godforsaken hours of the morning after hearing about a new otome game that was worth checking out.
“So let me get this straight…” you finally spoke, your mind starting to wrap around the situation. “I’m in the game files with you?”
Valko paused to consider your question before giving a thoughtful nod. You brought your hand —the one he had used to explain your currently altered reality— down gently, and his followed with yours.
“Oh my god,” you gasped, and you nearly ripped your hand out of his to thread it through your hairline. “I’ve been isekai-ed?”
“Pretty much,” Valko murmured, a small frown forming on his lips as he already missed the warmth of your hand on his.
“But… but how are we even talking to each other now?” you asked him. “Your responses are fixed. Your voice lines are pre-recorded...”
“Beats me,” Valko shrugged. “I wish I could tell you I knew why, but I really don’t. All I know is that the game client we’re in now is a developmental build. It’s offline. That’s why we’re here, together, now. This is supposed to be the Bond Story, but I couldn’t resist going off the script to talk to you.”
“But… if I’ve been isekai-ed into the game, that would mean…” You started to ramble as your mind traced the usual plot of an isekai work. The protagonist wakes up in an alternate universe, a game they were playing, a novel they were reading, only to discover that the reason why they woke up in the alternate universe was because their souls, their consciousnesses, their whatevers were released from their mortal bodies—
“Oh… my god,” you whispered as you felt your mind start to cave in on itself. “Valko. Something happened to me in the real world, right? That’s the only way I could have been isekai-ed into Love and Deepspace. What happened to me out there?”
Valko’s lips hardened into a thin line, and he looked away from you. His unwillingness to speak only proved to you that there was something he knew, something that he wasn’t going to tell you.
“You’re not gonna tell me?” you pleaded with him, squeezing his hand tighter to get his attention. But Valko’s lips stayed shut. For one reason or another, he refused to answer your question, and his deliberate silence only created more questions for you.
Silence filled the space between you, and you conceded that whatever it is that happened out there, Valko had his reasons for not telling you.
“I don’t know how long you’ll stay here, but I know you don’t belong here, puppy,” he finally said, not quite answering your question. “I’ll find a way to get you out of here.”
“What?” you questioned Valko, unwilling to accept what he just told you. “No, no. No, Valko. I want to stay here, with you.”
“Puppy, that’s—” Valko began to argue, but you cut him off.
“Here, in this game, stupid as it sounds, Valko, I mean something. I’m Miss Hunter, my work matters, and I’m appreciated for my efforts. I have friends here who look for me. There are… more-than-friends who seek me out. I’m loved here, Valko. I want to stay here.”
“No,” Valko said firmly, before saying your name— your real-life name, not your in-game name— in a pleading tone. A shiver coursed through your whole body as he called you by your real name. How could he have known that? “You belong in the real world.”
You shook your head and drew in a ragged breath before speaking. “Valko, my life in the real world is meaningless. I work a dead-end job where I see everyone else gets the praise and the credit for my work, while I work my ass off hoping for the day my boss tells me he’s been hearing good things about what I do on the job. I go home and I’m a stranger to my own family. I have no boyfriend to spend my weekends with, my friends are too busy to find time for me, and there are days when I feel like I live for a game that’s run by a company that doesn’t even try to listen to its players. Life isn’t so subtle in telling me that I don’t matter, Valko.”
You closed your eyes and breathed in deep. You felt bad for pouring out all your bad blood on Valko— you knew he didn’t deserve to hear how shitty your life was, but there was no other way for you to explain to him why you wanted to just slip away from your reality, except to tell him the truth of what your reality actually was.
“Don’t say that,” he whispered, his fists balling up so tightly that the tops of knuckles started to turn pale. He looked down at the space between you, hiding his face from your view.
“Say what?” you snapped, and for a second even you, in all your hurt, were able to hear how confrontational you had sounded at that moment. Valko didn’t deserve that, not a single bit of it. Your lips pressed into a hard line, and you hastened to apologize. “Valko, my love, I’m so sorry—”
Valko interrupted your apology. “Don’t say that your life is meaningless. That you don’t matter. You matter. So much. So don’t say that. Please.”
His voice sounded so soft, yet so raw, as if he was the one who was pained by the thought that you didn’t matter. He looked up at you again, finally, and what you saw robbed you of whatever self-deprecating barb you could possibly utter. By the soft lamplight, you saw Valko’s eyes fill with tears. He looked like wounded puppy, and you, unwittingly, were the very person who wounded him by speaking about yourself in such a hurtful way.
“How…” you trailed off, thinking of what to say next. Your question from earlier remained unanswered. “How did I get here, Valko? How did I get isekai-ed into this video game?”
“Thirty minutes ago your mother found you in your bed, breathing but unresponsive. After you had a seizure that lasted three whole minutes, she called an ambulance. As soon as you got to the emergency room, they ran a bunch of tests on you. They’re hoping it wasn’t a stroke.”
You stared at Valko, unable to believe what you were just told.
“How… how do you know all this?” you asked him once you found the voice to speak.
The sound of a notification cut through the silence. Valko glanced at it on his phone before reaching behind him to take something from his back pocket. He fished out a small, rectangular case, which he opened and took out a pair of folding glasses.
Huh. The nerd brought glasses around with him, even when doing crazy parkour stunts around the city that including hopping onto your balcony three storeys above street level. Valko put his glasses on and started to read something on his phone to you.
“Your tests —well, the test results of your real life self— just came back,” he informed you. “The remarks say that your blood pressure is a bit high, but nothing critical.” Valko’s amber eyes looked away from the screen to lock with yours.
“I know I’m not Zayne,” he began, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t read a doctor’s report.”
You giggled, despite yourself and despite the seriousness that the situation demanded of you. “I never said you weren’t a smart boy, Mr. Chairman of EonTech,” you said between the giggles.
“No stroke, that’s good…” Valko trailed off as he scanned the rest of whatever it is that he was reading. “Ah, here it is,” he said as he pinched his fingers open on the screen. “Hypoglycemia, it says right here. Your blood sugar dropped to 40. “
“Because I forgot to eat… after your cancellation had been announced…” you whispered, more to yourself than to him, as the realization hit you hard. Across from you, Valko’s brow furrowed, and he leaned over to flick your forehead with a force that told you that he wasn’t being playful: he was genuinely cross.
“Stupid, so stupid,” he muttered, glowering at you now from the tops of his glasses. “Not eating just because I’m not coming home. That’s so stupid, puppy. Absolutely reckless.”
“I didn’t mean to…” you grumbled, feeling like a child who was told off for doing something dangerous. “I just forgot…”
“You’re still unconscious —says here hypoglycemic coma— but with the corrective treatment being administered now, they expect you to make a recovery. Soon.”
“How… how do you know all of this? That’s my personal information,” you stammered, unable to even imagine as to how Valko got access to your medical records.
“You know, puppy,” Valko smirked before scooting even closer on the sofa, so close that you could feel the warmth radiating from his body. He moved his lips closer, his hot breath fanning across the shell of your ear. “If you’re so particular about your data privacy, maybe you shouldn’t just grant camera and microphone access on a shared network to some random game you downloaded off the internet, even if it’s full to bursting with hot guys wearing nothing but their towels,” he chuckled, the noise a low rumble that resonated deep from his chest. You shuddered, and you didn’t know if it was from the deep sound of his voice, the lack of space between the two of you, or the fact that the game, that godforsaken application, may just have heard and saw everything in your daily life.
“The doctors are reading the charts to your mom and explaining what they mean to her,” he supplied as he closed his phone and put it down. “What I read just now is a transcript of what the doctors are saying.”
But hearing Valko mention the access that you gave the game made you realize something, something that only produced more questions than it did answers.
“Valko…” you trailed off, trying to find the best words to frame your logic. Valko, however, had since laid down on the sofa to nestle his head on your lap, the tops of his shoulders bumping against the side of your thigh as his golden eyes looked up at yours from his plush, makeshift pillow. His long fingers wrapped around your wrist, leading your hand to his head. ‘He’s asking for headpats,” you thought to yourself, and the sheer innocence, the profound purity of his request shook you to the very core of your soul. Perhaps it was him asking for a reward for providing you with information. Or, more likely, it was perhaps his way of distracting you from the vitriol you were so willing to pour all over yourself. Whatever his aim was, what he was doing was clearly working. “Of course, nothing but the finest headpats for my best boy,” you thought as you reached out to thread your fingers in his auburn hair. You saw his whole body melt into your touch, and you felt all the hatred you held for yourself in your heart dissipate to make way for this purer, more precious treasure of a man whose head now lay in your lap. A sense of calm bloomed in your chest, the pain of the past few hours dissipating as the only thing that remained in your consciousness was the softness of his hair and the faint smile on his face, the air of peace that settled on his strong features.
The seconds bled into minutes, and the question you searched for answers for was soon forgotten, little rumbling noises of pure satisfaction escaped his lips with every light scratch of your fingernails against his scalp. His wolf ears had popped out at some point, and you made sure to give him extra scratches behind his fluffy ears.
“Valko?” You called out again, your tone firmer now as you recalled what you wanted to ask him.
“Hmm?” He mumbled, and for a moment the thickness of his voice made it seem as though he had fallen asleep, and you had roused him awake.
“The pre-download for Version 6.0 isn’t even out yet. And you said this was a developmental build hosted on a dev’s PC. How could I have possibly been isekai-ed into game files I don’t have access to?”
Valko opened his eyes, their rich amber hues glimmering gently in the soft light of the lamp in the living room as he was slowly roused from the place of bliss your touch had sent him to. He fixed his gaze onto you, but behind those golden eyes you could see the cogs of his cognition moving, his sharp logic trying to find some plausible explanation.
“Dunno,” he finally answered, and you ran your thumb over the crease that seated itself deep between his furrowed brows. Perhaps this was one of the mysteries that you just couldn’t unravel, no matter how hard you tried. One thing was certain, however: whatever it was that caused this— a glitch in the matrix, some higher being that took pity on you, or something completely different, something entirely beyond the Euclidean mind of man— it had brought you and Valko together at that very moment. And somehow, in a way that you couldn’t even begin to reduce into human language, having Valko in your arms somehow made up for all the suffering you had gone through in the past few weeks. Your gripes at work, the lonely monotony of your day to day, the whole mess with Infold— all of it faded away and dissipated into the background, yielding to this one precious moment with the one you thought you would never meet.
But Valko was right: you didn’t belong here. You being in a hypoglycemic coma mean that you were most likely going to recover and regain consciousness in a matter of hours, So you breathed in deep and savored this moment, this blessing that warped the very essence of space as you knew it, and committed it to memory. The warmth of his skin, the softness of his auburn hair, the way his wolf ears twitched against your fingers when you would rub the space behind them, all of it was precious, all of it was Valko. And for the sweetest of seconds, at that very moment, all of it was yours.
“I don’t want to go back, Valko,” you finally said, breaking the silence that hung like a veil over the both of you. “These past few moments with you have been the most peaceful I’ve had in a while.”
“I know, puppy, but since your recovery plan is now underway, it’s only a matter of time until your consciousness has to return to your real-life body,” he replied. Valko sat up to sit cross-legged across you on the sofa, and he reached out to take your hand in his. You fixed your eyes on the way your hand fit in his perfectly, and added it to the list of things you were going to miss.
“It’ll be hard for me, too, you know,” he whispered, his voice thick. You looked up to see his eyes gleam with tears that he refused to let go of. “You’re my fated mate. Not your MC, you. I dreamt of you for 26 years before I saw you. And now that I’ve met you, I only have a few hours to spend with you before you and I are separated forever. They say that every separation is a link, but that’s not good enough for me, puppy. I was hoping to at least bond with you through your MC, but I guess I can’t even have that,” he sighed, and hearing how resigned he was to your star-crossed fate weighed heavy on your chest.
“Now I’ll never get to run through the woods with you,” Valko continued, a lone tear falling from the corner of his eye. “I won’t hit up the arcade with you and see you go crazy over those plushies you love so much. I won’t get to nuzzle into your hairline, or hold your hand,” The tears were flowing freely now, and you leaned in closer to wipe his tears. “I won’t get to hear your laughter as you grab my nose, or hear you complain about how clingy I am for holding on to your ankle as I work…”
“Work…” you thought to yourself. Even the Chairman of EonTech at the tippy top of the chain has to work..”
All of a sudden, a blaze of light entered your mind to form an idea. A crazy idea, surely, perhaps even impossible, but an idea regardless. And if your separation with Valko was inevitable anyway, what could be the harm in trying to attempt the impossible?
“Valko!” you exclaimed, the urgency in your own voice surprising you. The way you called Valko’s name shocked him, but he looked up to meet your gaze, his eyes still glassy with tears.
“Mr. Chairman of EonTech, how good are you with computers?” you asked him.
“I’ll never get to hear you call me Mr. Chairman again too….” he sniffled, unable to see past his tears.
“No, no, Valko, listen to me. How good are you with computers?” you asked again, this time making sure that he understood that your question was dead serious and required an answer.
“Pretty good. I still do a lot of software development, since a lot of the stuff we use inside EonTech involve complex processes that I don’t trust anyone else to do the coding for.…” he answered. Coding! Coding! Oh you could kiss him for being such a huge nerd! You probably would, later on, but right now your priority was to see if your idea, your one last chance left, was something that was actually possible. You let out a shaky laugh, a laugh of relief, and you grabbed both his hands to steady yourself from the excitement that ran through you like lightning.
“Why’d you ask?” Valko asked you, a confused expression settling on his face.
“I have an idea, Valko,” you rambled, and for a moment you were so sure that he thought you had finally gone insane. “It’s a crazy one, but you gotta hear me out and tell me if it’s possible. We don’t have much time, though. How fast can you get us to your private research facility?”
“I can have Vasili, the family butler, pick us up in five minutes,” he muttered, reaching for his phone to send a text to his butler. “He can get us there in fifteen minutes or so. But why?” Valko asked as he hit send, clearly still confused.
“I’m trying to figure it all out myself,” you admitted, feeling a little sheepish for riling him up over a half-baked plan. Still, however deranged and impossible the plan seemed, your gut told you that it had a fighting chance. And that was all you needed at that moment: a chance.
You leaned in to whisper to him in a hushed tone, as if you were initiating him into a conspiracy.
“But Valko… if I can’t stay here, then why don’t we try breaking you out?”
Valko’s eyes widened at the suggestion, his wolf ears perking up at the idea. The shock lasted for a few seconds, though, before he regained his usual composure, a confident smirk once again gracing his lips.
“Oh I’m game, puppy. Let’s play a little.”