And I’m sorry I was the first.
You always said you’d never be the villain. But there it was. Your tag. Gold-plated. Leading a crew called Nyx’s Wraiths . The same name you once doodled in the margins of my notebooks when we were nineteen and too broke to care about anything except the next sunrise. former love interest runs a gang video game
Because out here, in the real world, you’re the one who got away. And I’m sorry I was the first
— Your former second-in-command. Your almost-everything. Your tag
People say video games aren’t real. But the loneliness that builds a criminal enterprise in a digital city? That’s real. The need to be feared because being loved cost too much? That’s a story as old as bones.
You’ve built an empire out of pixels and latency. A hundred players report to you. They call you “Bishop.” They don’t know you cried during the third act of La La Land . They don’t know the way your hand used to find mine in a dark theater, just to check if I was still there.
I almost sent a message. Something casual. “Nice take on the Meridian heist.” But I stopped. Because what I really wanted to ask was: Is this where the soft part of you went? Did you bury it in the server room? Or did you just learn to armor it so well that even I can’t see the seam?