Day 4:

The monster doesn't speak today, and turns his face to the wall whenever you're there. If you're being honest, you're fine with that. You don't really want to speak to him, either.

Although you do tell him about the sunset again. It was a fiery orange today, a deep contrast to the infinite dark blue of the sea.

Day 5:

You get up to the music and do your fitness requirements, then feed the monster all his meals and attend all of your meetings. Today he looks up and thanks you for remembering his coffee, to which you grunt a reply and hurry out before he can say anything manipulative.

The relative monotony of your duties, though, leaves you time to catalog what you have in the storeroom. Afua warned you that the fresh food would be the first to go, so you grab a notepad and make a plan to eat everything in the refrigerator section before it goes bad. Then you plan your meals for the next week, but you still have hours once you reach the back of the cavernous storage room.

You tap the pen against your chin, the sound echoing through the dripping, concrete cavern of the storeroom. You move to tap your other fingers against the shelf by the door to harmonize, when you see the corners of a white book peeking out at the bottom.

You drop down, the shelving slats separating you from the rest of the storeroom, and realize that it's a whole stack of white books. Gingerly reaching your fingers between the slats, you pull out one of the books and hold it up to flip through the pages.

They're entirely blank.

You set that one aside. The next one is the same blank white on front, but its pages are slightly larger. On the front, in black calligraphy, it reads Guestbook.

The inside is filled with scribbled notes from who you guess are previous occupants of the Bubble. They note the dates, their names, the kinds of monsters they were guarding, occasionally leaving behind a little note. Brina, Rogue Siren. Gebralt, Vampire. David L/N...

Your eyes skid back, and you drop the book, the cover slipping through your fingers and landing with a dusty thud on the storeroom floor. You hurry to pick it back up, thumbing through the pages until you find the entry.

David L/N, Desmond.

What kind of monster is a Desmond? You think, staring at the handwriting. It's spidery, but legible, and that's when you realize that your Dad must have written the monster's name instead of its kind.

You shove down the book, angry tears pricking to your eyes. The monster would kill him, and your Dad wrote its name.

Stupid. Your mother's voice fills your ears. He thought he could change things, and look what that got him.

You can't stop staring at the book, wondering what his handwriting said about him. Maybe he wrote fast, because he had so much on his mind. Maybe he thought about you, sometimes, barely five before he'd been recalled to the Bubble shift that killed him.

You'd heard he was a man full of energy, from his colleagues at USOUT. They said he was the kind of person who would invite the more stoic members of his team to dance to music and sing with him, in the strong voice you were always told he had.

You slam the book shut as your vision starts to wobble, and move to throw it on the ground before you realize that you can't drop something with so much of him in it. You lower it to the ground, ripping your eyes back to the rest of the shelf. The other white books are journals, filled with official USOAT memos and reports about their lives on the Bubble. You guess the empty one is meant to be yours.

You thumb through Brina's, Gibralt's, and so many others, until you find your Dad's, written pictures all but peeling off the page, filled with pages and pages of the same script in the Guestbook.

You hold it as if it's sacred, then lower it to the ground, next to the others. By now you stand in a pile of the white tomes, fingers numb and shaking. You gather up the Guestbook, your book, and your Dad's journal and run out of the storage room, closing the door and locking it behind you.

For a moment you wait there, against the door, breathing heavily.

The TV sits there, waiting for the meeting with Afua. The door to the raft is firmly closed, blending pleasantly into the white wall. Did your Dad claw at it to get out? Did he even make it outside?

Maybe he hit the alert lock. Maybe it wasn't enough, and Desmond got him, anyway.

A thin tear tracks down your face, and you smudge it away with a sleeve. Maybe it didn't matter what he did. The monster manipulated him into trusting it, and then he died.

That night you don't say a word to your monster. You set down his food, glaring down at the chute.

You turn to go, and he lifts his head. "What color is the sunset tonight?"

You whirl on him. "Don't you dare," you spit, advancing towards the wall of glass. "Don't you dare try to manipulate me into treating you like a human being, because you won't. I am not gullible, and I am not stupid. Did you know that this is the Bubble where my Dad died?"

You can feel yourself spinning off the rails, grief echoing into the deepest tunnels of your chest, but you don't care, you just don't care. "He died because of monsters like you, Hyde. Monsters that he thought he could help, but he couldn't, and I can't, either. Monsters are monsters, and that's all you are and it's all you'll ever be."

The monster steps back, looking like I just ripped out his heart and threw it on the ground. His hand drifts to his chest, then drops. His face hardens.

"Really," he says, cold as ice, "because I think you're both gullible and stupid. You locked yourself in here, with me, within the first week. I can hear you, on the TV up there."

He leans forward, tilting his head. "Tell me, Y/N, why aren't you good enough for an action team?"

You slap the glass with a hand. "I am good enough for a team-"

He turns his head, licking at his lower lip. "Are you? Or do you just want to believe that so you feel better about the fact that your own mother-"

"Shut up!" You shout, the breath wrung out of your chest like a twisted towel until you feel breathless and hollow. "You know nothing! You don't know anything about me!"

You wrap your arms around yourself and stalk back up the stairs, slamming the door behind you and bolting it. Your hands are shaking. Your whole body shakes, and you sniff back the water that threatens to prick at your eyes. You don't have time for this. This isn't... it isn't...

You pick up your phone and text Afua I don't feel like meeting tonight, then squeeze a pillow to your chest in your bed and cry, the kind of scream-crying that lasts long into the morning.

Day 6:

You make it through your fitness reqs and feed the monster without saying anything. He doesn't look at you, either, hunched over in the corner.

Your Dad's book sits over in the corner, but you don't open it. How can you?

"You didn't tell me I was in Dad's Bubble," you say to your mother in the meeting, your eyes dead. It's lucky the board meeting is only every other day. You don't know if you could do this all the time.

"It's assigned by letter of last name," she says shortly, waving for the board to continue the briefing. "It wasn't intentional."

Perhaps it's a testament to how you are as a daughter that you don't believe her, but she has no reason to lie. She wouldn't want you somewhere with his journals, with his optimistic ideas of humanity and monsters. Maybe she really just didn't care.

Day 7:

You and the monster are still not speaking. You ache inside when you think of what you said to him. You told him he was a monster. Dad would've hated that.

But then you think of what he said to you, and your chest burns, crushing your heart into a cold blue piece of coal.

You dutifully attend your meetings and spend extra time on your fitness, and when Afua calls, you listlessly nod along to what he says.

"Oh, and one more thing before I go," he says, pausing with his hand over the end call button. "Donovan Galpin- the monster's father- has requested to speak to him."

You grunt. "So?"

"So you'll need to be there to patch him through and listen in on the conversation," Afua says, looking up at the webcam meaningfully.

"What-" you protest, but Afua cuts you off, pointing to the right, where your laptop rests on the table.

"His video call will be coming through that laptop there about this time tomorrow," Afua says. "See that you pick up."

With that, Afua's screen winks out.