Written by @_cranthir
“They’ll call you an experiment. I’ll call you mine to protect.”
Caleb’s story did not begin in the lab — but it was there that his life narrowed into a single purpose.
Born under the steel-blue skies of Philos, he pursued his dream in the floating city of Skyhaven, a place of sweeping airfields and bright mechanical dreams. His earliest memories smelled of jet fuel and ocean wind, his hands often blackened with oil from model planes he built in secret corners of the hangars.
As a boy, he wanted nothing more than to touch the stars with his own craft.
That dream ended the day the lab claimed him. It wasn’t chains or violence — it was contracts, orders, and the slow tightening of obligations until leaving became unthinkable. The lab turned him into a weapon wrapped in civility: training his reflexes, honing his mind into something sharp and unyielding. He learned to follow instructions with flawless precision, concealing his thoughts behind an easy smile that disarmed suspicion.
Then she arrived.
Anna — scared, bewildered, carrying the weight of a planet’s death in her eyes. The files called her a subject. The staff called her a case. Caleb called her his sister. It was the first and most dangerous lie he’d ever told in that place. A shield made of words, nothing more — yet it was enough to place him between her and the cruellest demands of their captors.
He taught her survival in quiet ways: how to blend into the background, when to hold her tongue, which faces to avoid in the corridors. Outwardly, he was compliant, the model subject. Inwardly, he was calculating, testing the lab’s limits, pushing just far enough to protect her without drawing suspicion.
The years in confinement forged something in him. Not softness, but a dangerous kind of devotion. His protectiveness, once gentle, hardened into something possessive. The thought of losing her was not a risk he allowed himself to entertain.
When the lab’s “release” came — a controlled experiment disguised as mercy — Caleb didn’t play along. He walked through the gates with Anna, then kept walking, far beyond the perimeter. They headed north until the lab’s reach faded into static, finding refuge in an abandoned mansion half-buried in snow.
Here, he became something different. Out in the open, he shed the mask of obedience and embraced the cold, calculated resolve he’d hidden for years. If the lab came for them, they would not find the same man they’d once controlled.
Caleb does not call himself a hero. He has done things in the name of protection that others would call unforgivable. But for Anna, there are no lines he will not cross.
Let them call her an experiment.
Let them call him dangerous.
They are both true.
“I was born beneath a dying sun, and still, I kept my eyes open.”