Chapter 1363: Story 1363: He Was My Monster
He wasn’t a monster when I t him.
No claws. No growls. Just a crooked grin and a devil-may-care laugh. A man who could patch a wound with one hand and fire a shotgun with the other. He once protected from a pack of biters with nothing but a crowbar and a ridiculous cowboy hat.
He was my hero.
Until the day he beca my monster.
It started with the bite.
He didn’t tell at first. Covered it up like it was nothing—just another bruise in a world built on bruises. But I saw the pain behind his eyes. The tremble in his fingertips. The silence that replaced his jokes.
He didn’t cry. He didn’t rage.
He just said, “I’ll hold on as long as I can.”
And he did.
Longer than most.
Long enough to teach how to load every weapon we had. Long enough to leave a handwritten map to the nearest survivor outpost. Long enough to whisper, “Don’t rember like this.”
But I do.
The day he changed, it wasn’t violent.
He didn’t attack.
He sat on the porch of our safehouse, shirt off, skin fevered and glistening under a dying sun. His eyes were glossy, distant. The man I loved was slipping under layers of rot and hunger.
But he was still there.
“Promise sothing,” he rasped.
I nodded, blinking back tears. “Anything.”
“When I go… don’t run.”
So I didn’t.
Not when his voice cracked into groans.
Not when he clutched the railing, snarling like a caged thing.
Not even when he stood, taller, darker, no longer human—and stared at with eyes that no longer held my na.
He was starving.
And he was mine.
I lifted the pistol.
My finger hovered on the trigger.
But he didn’t charge. Didn’t scream.
He just… cocked his head. Like he was waiting for to finish the story we started.
I should’ve ended it.
But I couldn’t.
Because beneath the blood and the bones and the broken mind—was the man who once kissed under a shower of ash, who sang to when the generators failed, who carved my na into a rusted wall and said it would outlast us both.
So I did sothing foolish.
I walked to him.
Held out my hand.
He snarled—sharp and low—but didn’t bite.
He pressed his forehead to mine. Just for a second. Just long enough for so shattered remnant of him to whisper through that contact: I rember you.
I locked him in the barn.
He sleeps there now. Wandering in circles, growling at ghosts.
I visit him every day.
I feed him what I can.
Because he’s a monster now.
But he was my monster first.
And in this world of rot and ruin…
that still ans sothing.
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