Shondo’s stream had always been a bright little hearth in the endless winter of the internet, soft music, playful banter, a chat that knew when to tease and when to protect. But lately the warmth had been poisoned by a single, persistent shadow: Somn.
At first he was just another name in the scroll, a familiar emote, a generous dono. Then he became a presence. A private message here. A “coincidental” appearance there. A thread of comments that never quite snapped, no matter how many times Shondo tried to gently, politely, unmistakably cut it.
He spoke like her kindness was a contract.
You smiled at me.
You read my message.
You laughed at my joke.
Therefore, in the cracked palace of his mind, he belonged beside her.
Shondo tried the soft approach. Then the firm one. Then the final one, the message with no warmth in it at all.
“Stop,” she wrote. “This is not cute. This is not romantic. This is not welcome.”
Somn answered with paragraphs, grand declarations, wounded virtue, devotion dressed up as destiny. He spoke of their future as if she were merely forgetting her lines.
That was the night Shondo called Abdul.
He arrived the next day like a door slammed shut, calm, broad shouldered, and carrying the kind of quiet that made loud men suddenly remember they could whisper. His headdress and squared stance made him look half legend, half warning, Abdul, the Savior of Shondo, not by title but by consequence.
They met where there were no mods, no chat logs, no stage lights, just air and honesty.
Somn came puffed with indignation and delusion, red gloves pulled tight over hands that had never known real work. “She led me on,” he insisted, voice cracking under the weight of his own fantasy. “She’s mine. She just doesn’t…”
Abdul did not argue. Abdul simply stepped forward.
Somn swung first, wild and desperate, like someone trying to punch a dream into reality. Abdul moved like a man who had spent years choosing discipline over excuses. One feint. One clean pivot. And then the lesson, swift, decisive, a single thudding truth delivered straight into Somn’s certainty.
Somn’s head snapped back. Sound fled him. The world narrowed to ringing and humiliation. He stumbled, tried to reassemble pride from broken pieces, and found only weakness. Abdul did not chase him, he did not need to. He merely waited, watchful, as Somn’s courage ran out.
Somn dropped to his knees, tears bursting forth like a flood finally given permission. “Come back!” he sobbed, arms thrown out toward the distance where Shondo stood beside Abdul, her posture stiff with relief and exhaustion. She did not look at Somn. She looked past him, as if refusing to grant his obsession even the dignity of eye contact.
Then a hand settled on Somn’s shoulder.
Somn flinched, braced for mockery, for a second punishment. Instead there was weight. Steady. Familiar. Not cruel.
He turned.
And there stood Tubby.
He was comically enormous, absurd in the way only old friends can be, round as a joke, calm as a promise, with that unmistakable wet cat head and a small, knowing smile that seemed to say I remember you before you became this.
Somn’s face was a ruin, tears, snot, shame, yet something fragile shifted inside him. The hunger in his eyes dulled, replaced by a soft, startled hope.
“You came back for me?” Somn whispered, voice cracking not with entitlement, but with disbelief.
Tubby did not answer with speeches. He did not feed the fantasy. He simply pulled Somn closer, hand still on his shoulder, anchoring him to something real. Something old. Something that did not require a stranger’s affection to justify its existence.
In the far distance, Shondo’s silhouette was smaller now, no longer the center of Somn’s universe, just a person reclaiming her own life. Abdul guided her away, his presence shielding her like a wall built from patience and strength. She exhaled for what felt like the first time in months.
Somn looked once toward them, then back to Tubby, back to the warm weight of reality.
The kiss was not salvation in some grand, theatrical sense. It was not a reward. It was simply a quiet, human reset, a reminder that love is not taken, and it is not owed, and it certainly is not invented out of someone else’s kindness.
Tubby’s arms wrapped around him, steady as a tide. Somn’s eyes squeezed shut, his desperate story collapsing into something smaller and truer.
And in the aftermath, where the delusion had finally been punched out of him, Somn found the only thing that had ever had a chance of saving him.
Not Shondo.
Not the stream.
But an old friend who had come back anyway.
