Can you do an x reader for either. 1. Mymo, anything with Mymo, (maybe smut but that’s only if you are comfortable) Or 2. Noerde with a reader who finds her on the mattress thing after the whole border arc, saves and takes of her (maybe they spar sometimes too and she learns that the reader is pretty strong) and they grow into a good relationship and she learns to love being with reader more than being with zodyl and the raiders!
AND YE MISTOOK HIM FOR SALVATION.
PAIRING(S): Mymo x Gender-Neutral!Reader
SYNPOSIS: He offered you order, attention, and a place at his side. You took his hand thinking it was safety. By the time you realize what he truly is, you are already too deep inside his grasp to leave untouched.
GENRE(S): Psychological Angst • Manipulation • Hurt / No Comfort • Tragedy
WARNING(S): Emotional manipulation • Psychological abuse • Possessive behaviour • Dependency • Isolation • Distortion of affection/love • Unhealthy power dynamics • No comfort • No happy ending • Mymo refers to himself in the third person at first, but gradually starts calling himself “I.”
A/N: Thank you for this request! For this one I decided to take this in bit of a darker direction instead, I don't really do smut (sorry 😭) and considering how much of a horrible person Mymo is. Honestly I struggled between Noerde and Mymo because of the lack of content for them in general and it's nice to write for different characters other than my favourite characters/popular characters from time to time. Gountness makes an appearance in this one-shot. I hope I did this alright 😅. @lucky-antireality8008
There were rules for using your key. Not written rules.
Not rules anybody had sat you down and taught you properly.
The kind that lived in your hands now. In your bones. In the little careful parts of you that liked things in the right place, order and sequence.
Three, if the door inside was stubborn.
Never open something if the room beyond it is screaming.
That one was yours. You had decided it yourself a long time ago.
You stood very still with the brass key resting in your palm, your thumb rubbing over the worn head of it again and again and again until the grooves warmed beneath your skin. It had once belonged to the tiny wooden box your mother kept her ribbons in. The hinge had broken years ago. The box was gone now. The key was not.
Nothing important was allowed to be lost.
The corridor around you smelt faintly of iron and lamp smoke.
Far overhead, pipes gave a tired rattle.
From somewhere much farther away came the muffled, bright sound of a voice you knew immediately, too cheerful, too quick, too perfectly shaped for the morning bulletin spilling from a mounted screen in another room.
He always sounded as if he were smiling with all his teeth.
You liked knowing when he would be on.
You liked that his broadcasts had structure. Greeting. Weather. Market conditions. Warnings. Odd little jokes dropped exactly where they were meant to go. Even when he spoke too loudly or his energy made you tense, there was still order. Something you could follow.
He had told you that was one of your best qualities.
You were adept at following.
A soft click sounded behind you.
“Aren’t you sweet when you wait properly?”
Your fingers closed around the key at once.
Mymo stood at the far end of the corridor as though he had always belonged there, framed by the weak yellow light and the shadow of the doorway behind him. White coat that is salmon pink inside and detailed with golden buttons. Sunglasses are bright even in the dimness. The microphone hung easily in one hand, casual as a toy. He looked put together in the same way liars often did, deliberately and prettily, without a single honest thing about it.
But he smiled when he saw you.
And that smile always made something inside you unknot before you could stop it.
“Good morning, (F/N). You made it here before I asked. Almooost unsettling. Should Mymo be impressed? Or a little frightened?”
You lowered your gaze to his shoulder instead of his face. Easier that way. Safer.
“You said to wait here,” you answered.
“And you listened.” His voice softened with pleased approval. “See? That’s why Mymo likes you.”
You looked back up before you meant to.
He noticed. Of course, he noticed. Mymo noticed everything you wished people wouldn’t.
He crossed the corridor slowly, not because he needed to, but because he enjoyed making people aware of him. Every motion seemed chosen in advance. When he stopped in front of you, the smell of metal folded over the stale corridor air.
He tilted his head, looking at the key peeking from between your fingers.
“Have you polished it again?”
“Mymo didn’t tell you to do that.”
Never kind, no matter how gently he wore it.
“Darling little thing, always fixing what nobody else notices.”
You did not know what to do with that, so you looked down at the key again.
That was one of the ways he was easy to be around at first. The silences you shared with Mymo was never rushed. Other people filled them. Other people got impatient. Other people asked the same question twice in different words and expected you to answer faster the second time.
Then he rearranged the room around your answer.
“Someone is waiting for us,” he stated at last.
“Mm.” He rolled one shoulder. “Not in the way you mean. More tangled than sick.”
“Yes. In here.” He tapped one gloved finger against the side of his own head. “All knotted up. Locked down. The room is filled with essential items that Mymo requires, and they are unlikely to be resolved on their own.”
Your eyes drifted to the microphone in his hand.
“...Do I have to go inside?”
“You only have to open the door.” He pronounced lightly, as if that made all the difference in the world. "I will handle the ugly part.”
You stared at him for a second too long.
He lowered himself slightly until he was closer to eye level, his voice dropping into that warm, neat cadence he used when he wanted your shoulders loose and your hands steady.
“(F/N),” he started, “what do you do?”
You answered because there was comfort in correct answers.
“I don’t force the hinges.”
His expression turned pleased enough to make your chest ache with relieved pride.
That warm little click inside you. Rightness. Sequence. You had said it properly.
“Perfect! See? No reason to be nervous.”
You hadn't realised you were nervous until he announced it.
Now you were more nervous.
He noticed that too. He always did.
His hand came up, slowly, so gently, and touched just beneath your chin, steering your face up with two fingers. The gesture looked gentle. It felt gentle. That's what made it difficult. If he had been rough, you thought perhaps you could have named it more easily.
Instead, he only smiled down at you, patient and indulgent, as if both of you shared some private understanding nobody else was clever enough to grasp.
“Do you trust Mymo?” he asked.
You knew better than to answer too quickly when the wrong people asked things like that, because quick answers could be lies. People liked quick lies if they made them feel comfortable.
Mymo was not the wrong person.
Mymo liked careful answers.
You tried to give him one.
“You…” Your thumb rubbed hard across the key’s teeth. “You explain things.”
“You don’t get frustrated when I ask again.”
Something flashed behind his glasses.
Not enough to understand.
And still, somehow, you finished softly, “So yes.”
His hand dropped from your chin.
The air he left behind felt too cool.
“Mymo could kiss you for that.”
He laughed immediately, bright, delighted, and theatrical enough to make it sound like a joke.
He was always joking right before he said something true.
“Come,” he ordered, already turning. “Before our guest starts thinking Mymo has better things to do than be charitable.”
The corridor narrowed, then bent, then descended by a short set of steps that always made the back of your neck prickle. You had been this way before, but never alone, never without Mymo, and never without feeling that the deeper rooms of the building had their own weather. Colder. Wetter. Air that did not move correctly.
Your shoes sounded too loud.
Somewhere above, faint through the walls, his voice still carried from a distant screen, laughing through a report, too polished, too lively, too harmless. It made something in your stomach twist.
You had once asked him how he could be in two places at once.
He had laughed and told you, “That’s what clever men are for.”
You had not known whether that was an answer.
At the end of the last passage stood a metal door with a small square window set into it. The glass was thick and dirty. No sound came through. That was wrong by itself.
Rooms with people in them were meant to sound like something.
Mymo stopped before the door and looked at you.
His voice, when he spoke, was almost tender.
“One turn first,” he reminded you.
Your hand moved on instinct.
The brass key rose from your palm, suspended by anima and memory and the old, practised love that had made it what it was. A faint gold shimmer traced around its edges. Not bright. Your key was never bright. It was lamplight, not lightning. Safe-room light. Hallway light. The kind that belonged beneath blankets and under doors.
You held it in front of the lockless metal surface.
You felt the seam before you saw it, the hidden outline of something beneath the steel, something inward, spiritual, and delicate, like nerves. The key trembled once, eagerly sensing depth. A door under a door. A room under a room.
Behind you, Mymo’s voice slid over your shoulder as silk dragged across a blade.
The metal door gave a low groan that had nothing to do with hinges.
For the briefest instant, before the crack widened enough to let the first thread of dim interior light bleed through, you smelled something from the other side—
Something frightened enough to have gone quiet.
At once, his hand settled over yours from behind, warm and firm and impossible to mistake for an accident.
“Open it, (F/N),” he told you softly. “You’ve already come this far.”
And because you had, because he was there, because his hand was over yours and the key was already turning and the rules had always been rules and good things happened when you did things correctly—
And from inside, at last, came the sound of someone trying very hard not to scream.
Not a fresh scream. Not the sharp kind that burst out before a person could stop it.
Like the scream had lived in the body so long, it no longer knew how to leave properly.
It stayed over yours, warm and steady, guiding the final turn of the key until the hidden seam split wider through the metal and the room beyond dragged itself into view inch by inch.
First, the light. Dim. Sickly. The colour of a hallway lamp is left on for too long.
A frame pretending to be one.
Rust along the arms. Straps across the middle. Metal fastenings. A shape meant to keep a person upright, whether they wanted to be or not.
He was so thin that for one stupid second, your mind tried to make him into something else. A coat hung over wires. A sketch. A body that had already left itself behind.
A face gone pale in that deep, ugly way that spoke of years, not days. Long white hair hanging wild around it. Belts pinning him in place. Tubes ran above and below, leading into places you did not want to understand at first glance. His chest rose too high, too sharply, and there was something wrong with the shape of it; something under the cloth was too rigid, too mechanical, too deliberate to be flesh.
Your fingers spasmed around the key.
The seam in the air wavered.
Nothing bigger would come out.
Mymo moved at your back, close enough that his voice touched your ear before the rest of him did.
“Ah,” he murmured, far too pleased. “There he is.”
The man in the chair flinched.
It happened immediately, instinctively, like pain is recognising its own name.
All at once, the room rearranged itself.
Little things slid into place with a soft internal click that made you sick.
The silence through the window.
The way Mymo had said tangled instead of sick.
The way he had said the ugly part.
The way he had smiled when you answered correctly.
Your key dipped in the air.
The man’s eyes shifted to it.
For the briefest moment, something flashed there so nakedly that it burnt going down.
This is not enough to be mistaken for strength.
Just the horrible, starving reflex of somebody seeing a new variable in the room and reaching for it before he knew better.
Then he really looked at you.
At your face. Your hand. The key.
Whatever hope had sparked there twisted into something else.
You're not being recognised.
He knew what you were here for long before you did.
Your stomach turned so sharply it hurt.
“Mymo,” you spoke again, but his name came out wrong this time. Smaller. Not a question and not quite a protest, either. Just something helplessly shaped like one.
He stepped around you then, as easy as a host walking into his parlour.
“There’s no need to look so frightened, (F/N), this is Gountess.”
He said it like an introduction at a tea party.
It was as if the room did not smell of old blood and overheated metal.
Like Gountess, he was not strapped into that chair with his body threaded through tubes, hardware, and whatever had been done to his chest.
Like, there was any polite way to meet a person in pieces.
His mouth moved around one, but whatever came apart in his throat on the way up left it frayed.
“Oh, don’t start that already,” he sighed, almost affectionate. “You’ll upset them.”
As if you were the delicate thing in the room.
You took one step inside because the alternative was standing in the doorway and making the space wronger. The key still hovered beside your hand, golden and trembling, uncertain whether the door was meant to remain open. You did not tell it to move. You did not know what rule applied anymore.
Gountess watched you come in.
His breathing had changed.
Quick now. Shallow. The breath of someone bracing for impact before the blow landed.
You looked at the straps first because it was easier than looking at his face.
Your gaze caught and stuck.
You had seen metal braces before. Frames. Supports. Crude workarounds for damaged things.
This was a theft left uninstalled.
The backs of your teeth ached.
“His feet—” you started, then stopped because the sentence would not finish.
“Yes.” Cheerful. “Aren’t they clever?”
Something in Gountess jerked violently enough to make one of the tubes tremble.
You looked up so fast your neck hurt.
Mymo had gone to his side now, resting one hand atop the chair as if it belonged there. His microphone dangled from the other, brushing against his coat. Sunglasses on. Smile on. Everything on.
You heard your pulse, countable and loud.
You liked counting because numbers stayed where they were put.
“...Why is he tied down?” you asked.
Mymo turned his head toward you.
He did not answer immediately, and that pause was its own kind of lesson. It told you he was deciding what version of the truth would be useful.
At last, he said, “Because Gountess is important.”
The man in the chair let out a raw, shredded noise that might once have been laughter if laughter had bones to break.
“Correct?” Mymo supplied. “Complete? Pretty?” He waved one of his hands. “I can live with that.”
Then he crouched slightly in front of Gountess, tilting his head in a caricature of concern.
Gountess’s eyes had not left you.
They should have stayed on Mymo. On the danger. On the person speaking.
Instead, they clung to you with a terrible intensity, as if they were trying to force something across the space between you without saying it aloud.
That happened occasionally. When too many meanings arrived at once, they tangled together before you could lay them flat. Usually, you solve it by asking again, slower.
There was nobody safe here to ask.
“Mymo,” Gountess managed, barely.
The next words came torn up, forced out like they hurt the whole way. “Don’t—”
So quickly, you startled.
Not a dramatic movement. Not violent. Just immediate, efficient, and total. The temperature of the room changed with it.
His hand came down onto the top of the chair.
“I’m afraid,” he said pleasantly, “that you’ve mistaken your place in the conversation.”
Gountess folded in on himself as much as the straps allowed.
You heard it then, the wet, mechanical rhythm beneath his breathing. Not quite a heartbeat. Not entirely a machine either. Something borrowing the shape of life without honouring it.
Your eyes dropped to his chest again.
A strange expression crossed his face.
But beneath it is something else, deeper and somehow worse.
As if he were ashamed, you had to see him like this.
That did something ugly to the inside of your ribs. “What did you do to him?"
It came out more direct than you meant it to.
His smile returned so smoothly that if you blinked at the wrong moment, you might think it had never left. “Mymo kept him alive."
The kind of sentence that wanted to stand where the truth should go.
You hated it immediately because part of you understood how it worked.
That word could excuse almost anything in the mouth of the right monster.
Gountess let out another broken sound. His head tipped back against the chair. Tears had gathered in the corners of his eyes without falling. He looked too tired even for crying properly.
“You don’t understand." Mymo went on, speaking to you now as though Gountess were a tool laid between you rather than a person listening. “This world discards fragile things. It always has. Mymo simply found a way to make fragility useful.”
Your fingers went numb around the key.
The same way he said it to you.
A positive quality. The best quality. You’re good at following. You’re excellent at opening. You’re useful.
Whatever remained of his strength seemed to gather itself in his throat all at once.
Mymo did not even glance at him.
He turned fully toward you then. No annoyance yet. No overt force. Just that patient, the terrible warmth he used when pretending your obedience had always been your idea.
“Come here,” he repeated. “He won’t hurt you.”
In a way, his body had learned stillness too well.
The evidence of twenty years of torment is written all over him in the language of restraint, replacement, and fear.
And because you were looking at him instead of Mymo, you saw it first—
Gountess is shaking his head.
Tiny. Frantic. Barely there.
His voice stayed light, but something colder slid beneath it.
You did what frightened animals did when there was too much room and not enough exits.
Mymo smiled as if you had done perfectly.
“That’s enough for now,” he rewarding the almost-obedience as neatly as if you’d given him all of it. “See? Mymo knows better than to push when you’re overwhelmed.”
The praise landed wrong this time.
He beckoned you closer with two fingers and, when you still hesitated, shifted tactics at once.
His tone made your spine lock.
“You know how to listen to doors, don’t you? Hinges, pressure, the way a room tells you whether it wants opening.” He tipped his chin toward Gountess. “Then listen to this one. Tell me what you see.”
Gountess made a broken, desperate sound.
“Do you want to be helpful?”
Another terrible question.
You hated that he knew exactly which words opened you.
Before your mind had finished organising itself, your mouth moved.
The key quivered in the air beside you, reacting to your pulse, your anima, your hesitation. It wanted instructions. It always wanted instructions. A sequence. A door. A room. Something hidden made legible.
Gountess saw the glow strengthen and went rigid in the chair.
“No,” he mumbled, and this time the word tore its way out whole enough to matter. “No, no, don’t—”
Mymo’s hand landed on his shoulder.
Gentle again. Almost fond. Gountess flinched like he’d been cut open.
“Shh,” Mymo murmured. “You’ll confuse them.”
Then he looked at you over Gountess’s bent head, and even behind the glasses, you could feel the full shape of his attention settle onto your face.
“Open him for me, (F/N).”
And for the first time since the door had split apart, you understood with perfect, nauseating clarity that Gountess was not the task.
Gountess was still breathing in that broken, mechanical way. The tubes still gave the occasional quiet shift. Somewhere overhead, something in the walls throbbed and clicked and carried on, indifferent to what was happening underneath it.
But inside you, everything drew tight.
What lived there now was older than fear. Older than pain, maybe. A look so worn down by repetition that it had almost lost the strength to call itself hope, and yet, somehow, still reached for you anyway.
For the possibility that you might do the one thing he no longer could.
The word came out so quietly that, under ordinary circumstances, it might have vanished in the machinery, the breathing, and the stale wet air.
He did not even take his hand from Gountess’s shoulder.
He only turned his head slightly, as if he were making sure he had heard you correctly.
You swallowed hard enough that it hurt.
The key dipped lower in the air.
Your fingers felt numb and feverish at once. “I-I said no.”
This time, there was enough sound to make it real.
Gountess’s eyes shut for half a second.
It was more like the body’s last prayer, which went briefly unanswered before the world remembered what it was.
His hand slid from Gountess’s shoulder.
For a moment, he simply looked at you, and in the pause between one second and the next, the room changed shape again. Not because anything physical moved. Because something was left on his face.
Or the performance of it.
“You should not ask me to do this.”
“Mymo should not ask his clever little helper to help? Now that would be a very strange arrangement, wouldn’t it?”
You shook your head too quickly, then stilled because the motion made the room tilt.
You looked at Gountess again.
Because the second you did, Mymo saw exactly where to cut.
He shook his head and stepped away from the chair at last. Slow. Unhurried. Not retreating from Gountess so much as advancing on you one measured pace at a time.
“Listen. Carefully, because I know you like things explained properly.”
Your hand closed around nothing. Opened again. Closed.
“You are not being asked to hurt him. You are being asked to open a door. That is what you do.” Another step. “A lock is not a wound. A hinge is not a knife. A room is only a room.”
His voice was gentle enough to pass for mercy if someone else had been wearing it.
But you had heard what came through the door. You had seen what was left of Gountess.
“No. Not that tone. Mymo dislikes that tone on you.”
Your mouth closed at once. There it was. That ugly little reflex. Obedience is moving faster than thought.
Behind the dark lenses, he presses because he noticed.
Something went cold all the way down your back.
Gountess made a ragged sound in the chair. You did not look at him this time. You could not. If you looked, you thought you might fall apart the wrong way, and the wrong way was dangerous here.
Mymo stopped in front of you.
He tilted his head, studying your face with an intensity that made your skin feel too tight.
“Tell me why you said no.”
You hated that question instantly. Not because you had no answer. Because you had too many.
You dragged in air. “He doesn’t want me to.”
Mymo’s expression did not change. “Is that your answer?”
“Ah.” He nodded once. “Then try again.”
Your thumb rubbed hard over the side of your index finger where the key usually rested.
Then, with almost lazy softness, “And?”
The room swam around the edges.
What kind of answer was that meant to be?
Mymo saw you searching. Saw the way your thoughts snagged and doubled back, and you were attempting to arrange something right out of pieces that would no longer lie flat. He looked so cruel.
“Oh, did you think I was going to deny it to make you feel better?”
That was worse than shouting.
Because he was putting the truth in your hands and daring you to carry it.
“He is useful. You are useful. Being surrounded by useful things. That is why I’ve gotten as far as I have.”
He touched the floating key with one finger to make it ring softly in the air. You flinched.
“Do you know why Mymo chose you?” he asked.
The question made your stomach drop.
Not because you didn’t know.
Because part of you had always wanted an answer.
He had praised you and kept you near. He spoke clearly to you when everyone else became blurred into noise, impatience, and hidden meanings you could never catch in time. He made space for your pauses. You were given tasks with beginnings, middles, and ends. Looked pleased when you got them right. Told you what things were for.
Nobody ever did that without wanting something back.
Just slower, sometimes, at seeing the price.
“You listen and notice small things. That was part of it. You don’t bruise the hinges.” His fingers left the key. “And when someone smarter gives you a shape for the world, you step into it so obediently.”
Behind him, Gountess made a strangled sound that might have been a warning, or pity, or both.
Mymo did not turn around. He did not need to.
“I told you where to stand,” he went on. “You stood there. I told you what your work meant, and you repeated it back to me until it became true in your mouth. I told you ugly things were not your part, and because you wanted that to be right, you let it be right.”
Your pulse had gone too quick to count properly. When you could count, you could stay. When you lost count, things slipped.
He bent slightly, bringing his face closer to yours, the sunglasses reflecting a tiny, warped version of you back at yourself.
“I gave you an order. Didn’t I?”
You hated that your silence had already become another shape for him to use.
“Mm. And what did everyone else give you?”
The question had already gone in.
Noise. Confusion. Smiles that meant two things. Instructions that changed halfway through. People say, “You know what I mean," when you don't. Hands tugging you too quickly. Irritation when you asked again. The hot little shame of always arriving one beat too late to everyone else’s understanding.
Mymo had found the bruise and pressed his thumb into it. “Tell me.”
He knew that waiting made some people feel cruel and made them feel cornered. “Too much.”
A tiny one. Barely visible.
You wanted to call it back into your palm. You wanted to throw it. You wanted to break something. You wanted the corridor, the rules, the quiet, the person you had been before this room opened.
Instead, you stood there with your breathing gone thin and useless while Mymo arranged your insides like furniture.
“You are frightened now because I stopped dressing the truth for you. But the truth itself has not changed. You open doors. Mymo steps through them. That is all this has ever been.”
“No.” Gountess forced out.
Mymo’s head turned, sharp as a blade catching light.
For the first time, annoyance moved visibly across him.
Just that fleeting, ugly irritation of a man displeased that something broken had found a way to make sound.
Gountess was shaking hard enough now that the chair gave a faint metallic complaint beneath him. He dragged in one ragged breath, then another.
“Listen,” he choked. “Listen to—yourself—”
Mymo crossed the room in two strides.
Fast enough to make you jerk.
His hand caught Gountess by the face, not slapping, not striking, just gripping hard enough to tilt his head back against the chair.
The sound Gountess made then was small and awful.
“Now, now,” Mymo said. Still smiling. Still smiling. “That was not your line.”
Your body moved before your mind did.
The hand stayed on Gountess.
And in that exact instant, you understood something that should have been obvious long before now:
Mymo did not mind disobedience when it was soft. Hesitant. Recoverable. The kind that still circled back to him, even after all this time.
What he hated was being interrupted and being made to split his attention between tools.
He released Gountess’s face and let it fall back with a dull, helpless thud against the support behind him.
Then he walked back to you.
“How disappointing. I’ve been so patient.”
“There. That’s much clearer.”
Something inside you steadied all at once.
Not because you were less afraid.
Because fear had become simple.
He wanted you to open Gountess.
For one brief, stupid second, the world narrowed into something almost survivable.
Then Mymo said, very softly:
“Do you think refusing now means you were innocent before?”
Sweat started forming on your forehead, and that pleased him.
“I’ve wondered when you’d start pretending this began tonight.” He circled you slowly, voice carrying low and close by turns. “Who held the doors open while memories were sorted? Who steadied the rooms when people forgot what they had seen? Who listened to the hinges and told me which locks were weakest?”
Not because he was wrong.
Because you could not bear the shape of him being right.
The words were almost comforting. So much so that it was disgusting.
“You didn’t want to know,” he corrected. “Different thing.”
Your eyes stung, not from tears yet but from pressure. From too many truths shoved into too small a space.
You heard yourself say, “I was helping.”
“Yes.” He stopped in front of you once more. “You were helping me.”
The cruelty of his honesty was so complete it nearly felt clean.
Behind him, Gountess had gone very still.
Maybe knowing where this was going before you did.
Mymo lifted his hand toward your face.
His fingers paused in the air.
“Oh, darling. There you are.”
He stroked two fingers down the side of your cheek anyway.
“You should have done that much sooner. Fear suits truth better than gratitude ever did.”
Your vision blurred at the edges.
The key pulsed brighter, responding to the spike of anima in you, to panic and to the terrible need for one correct instruction to cut through the noise.
And he smiled, as though he had finally reached the intriguing part.
“Since Gountess has become so uncooperative, I suppose we will have to use a different door.”
Your breath started coming too fast. “No.”
Mymo’s smile widened reverently. “Oh yes.”
The wall met your shoulders before you realised how little space was behind you. The key spun sharply in the air, gold light now stuttering in uneven rings.
“I learned so much from watching you. Rooms inside rooms. Locks within locks. All that care is spent making places safe, quiet, and orderly.” He tilted his head. “Did you really think Mymo wouldn’t wonder what yours looked like?”
It came out louder than anything else you had said tonight.
A child’s answer, almost.
Not because you were childish.
Because terror makes language simple.
Mymo did not look offended.
“Then don’t make me ask twice.”
You shook your head hard enough to make yourself dizzy. “N-No.”
His expression did not change.
So mild it barely seemed connected to anything at all. “Must I really do this the ugly way after all?”
He moved before you could think.
One hand caught your wrist.
The other closed around the back of your neck.
Not brutal. Not frantic. Terribly controlled. The sort of force that had already been measured, exactly how much you could resist it and how best to break its shape.
"Shh," he drew your trapped wrist upward between you both. “No one is hurting you. I’m only helping you open properly.”
“Three turns, wasn’t it?”
Your whole body went cold.
Of course, he knew. He had always known.
“One to listen,” he said near your ear, his voice low and intimate in the most monstrous way. “Two to loosen. Three, if the door inside is stubborn.”
“That was yours,” you whispered.
The words brushed your skin like a blessing spoken over a grave.
He guided your hand upward.
The key answered instantly, snapping into your palm with a metallic weight so familiar it made something in you break.
Alive with your fear, your care, your years of rules and private rituals and quiet places and the little systems you had built so the world would stop scraping you raw.
Mymo closed his hand over yours.
Press the key upright between your joined grips.
Held it before your chest.
Right over the frantic pounding there.
Gountess was saying something.
You heard it distantly. Not words. Just voice. Ruined, desperate voice.
You could not make it through the panic.
The room had narrowed to the brass head of the key, Mymo’s hand over yours, and the terrible certainty that if you turned it, something would open that would never shut right again.
His fingers tightened at the back of your neck. “Look.”
You did. He’d made looking harder than ignoring. Survival had shrunk into obedience again without asking your permission.
Your body remembered him too well.
There was no kindness in his face now.
And something almost holy in its ugliness.
“As above,” he murmured, “so within.”
You did not understand the phrase.
Then, with a smile so calm it made your stomach heave, he whispered:
The room inside you answered in a rush.
You felt it before you saw it: the old safe architecture of your mind giving way beneath the key’s insistence. Hallways. Doors. Little labelled drawers of memory and routine, and counted breaths. Quiet rooms were made for hiding when the world became too bright, too overwhelming, too much. All of it shuddered at once, the anima in your body lighting every threshold.
“There,” he whispered. “There you are.”
The second turn nearly split you open.
Locks withdrawing. Hinges sliding free. The sealed parts of your drawing parted under his command, while your own power obeyed because it had always obeyed you, and your hand was yours, and that was the cruelty of it; your vital instrument did not know the difference between your will and your forced compliance.
For one vast, sickening instant, there was only the interior of yourself.
A corridor lined with numbered doors. The ribbon box is still whole here. A narrow bed pushed against the wall of a room built entirely of muffled sound. Shelves of copied phrases, filed carefully so you could use them later when your own took too long to arrive. Corners worn smooth by pacing. One locked room was painted the colour of safety. Another with all the lights turned off. The place where you kept every instruction Mymo had ever given you, stacked and restacked until they looked like scripture.
His anima touched the threshold of you like a hand in holy water.
Tears finally spilt hot down your face.
His voice went soft with satisfaction.
“I knew you’d say it beautifully.”
Then he made you turn the key a third time.
The certainty of a presence where no one had ever been invited.
He moved through your inner halls with obscene composure, your memories brightening under his attention one by one. He passed the rooms where you hid. The shelves where you sorted language. The soft places you retreated to when the world became unlivable. The small systems that kept you upright. He looked at them all.
Owned them in the instant of understanding.
“No…” You sobbed, though it came out thin and useless.
Behind him, outside him, somewhere in the faraway physical room, Gountess was making a noise like an animal caught in a wire.
Small. Plain. He secured it with greater care than the others.
He rested his hand on it.
“What a lovely room,” he murmured.
The one with the dim light, the counted breaths, and the ribbon folded on the chair, and no one else was ever inside it. The one you went to when things were too loud, too sharp, too human. The place that lets you come back from overwhelm with enough of yourself still gathered to keep moving.
He looked back at you, not with his eyes, because he was inside now and everything here was worse than sight, but with that total intimate awareness that comes when a person has found the exact point your life hinges on.
“This is why you stayed.”
You shook your head, crying so hard your teeth hurt.
“Yes", a pause. “I became easier than your own mind."
The words went through you like cold iron.
You threw yourself toward it, but the space was your own interior, and panic did not move cleanly here. The hall stretched. Your feet dragged. The distance changed shape under your fear.
Mymo stepped into the room before you reached it.
At the folded quiet. The order. The careful little sanctity of it.
Then he turned back to you with that same awful calm.
“I think…you won’t need this anymore.”
The lock slid into place from the outside.
Your whole mind convulsed around it.
When the scream tore out of you this time, it did not sound human.
The physical room slammed back all at once.
Metal. Blood. Wet air. Gountess in the chair. Your body against the wall. Mymo’s hand still rests over yours, the key burning in your palm like a brand.
Your knees hit the floor hard enough to bruise. The key clattered from your hand and spun once across the concrete before falling still.
For a while, there was only your breathing.
Mymo crouched in front of you.
He tilted your chin up with the same two fingers he had used before, like his touch was still gentle, like this was still guidance, like he had not just walked through your soul and bolted the safest room shut behind him.
He watched them with open interest.
“Well, that was enlightening.”
Behind him, Gountess had gone white with horror so complete it looked almost like guilt. As if he knew too well what it meant to survive Mymo’s curiosity.
The words would not line up.
They had somewhere to go before. Drawers. Shelves. Sequence.
Now panic flooded the halls where order used to live.
Mymo noticed immediately.
His thumb brushed once beneath your eye, wiping away a tear with obscene tenderness.
“There now, I made things simpler for you.”
You flinched so hard your shoulder struck the wall.
“Don’t look at me like that. You were the one who wanted peace.”
He stood, then turned toward Gountess with an air of bright completion, as if he had finally settled the ugliest part of the evening.
And because he could never resist one last act of theatrical cruelty, he glanced back at you over his shoulder and said:
“Now you understand him much better, don’t you?”
Gountess closed his eyes.
And on the floor at your knees, the brass key lay where it had fallen, still yours, still alive, still warm from your hand—
and no longer capable of taking you anywhere safe.
