This was not going to be a sexy story.

Is it going to be a sexy story, though, really?

...I puttered about for a bit, not really sure. Still nursing my fictive bruise from my fictive friend.

And the funny thing is, it HURT like a bruise. Like the ghost of one. I was remembering getting hit in the head, all the times that'd happen, for various reasons.

Damn, Hell of a Keyboard.

Were stenography keyboards even 'built' to bludgeon that effectively?

I shook myself from the thought. Not now, focus, idiot.

...The God of Marriage. Why were they a problem?

Aerith: "Because not everything needs to be bumped together like ragdolls!"

Right. Because sex with everything fundamentally left sex with nothing. Or something like that. It stopped being sexy once Leviathan had consumed all relationships... or wait, was it Tiamat that did that? Ugh, I was getting my Mesozoic monstrosities mixed together.

Aerith: "A little older than that, right?"

Aerith, stop narrating yourself like it's a playscript. Behave and prompt me to write you like a normal narrative character.

"Sorry," she said. "I'm having fun with this, though!"

... Christ. The fate of the multiverse... maybe every-verse, in the hands of this one waif who likes to prompt people to dress in drag and sell themselves to horny criminals. And we're talking about the one topic even she doesn't get.

... the problem, now that I think of it, is that Tiamat freaks out when Apsu is gone and donezo. But... how seriously do I take a story like that? Besides which, that's a marriage that's 'ended' in an untimely fashion, right? Not... whatever freak denaturing-slash-synthesis process Jenova puts you through to make a monstrosity out of you with her virus. Nevermind what Hojo does with that corruption...

...so the problem was that I was scrolling through my mind, trying to understand... where things had gone so wrong.

...corrupt unions, unions untimely severed... children begotten from unhappy relationships that didn't quite come together...

Of these things, I was a person who came from a peaceful household, with a happy family. What business did I have writing about such a heavy subject?

Aerith chimed in: "Doesn't that mean you're the role-model for how it's supposed to work?"

Oh right. No. I was like, thirty-seven, and unmarried. There we go. Back to the thing everyone knows but isn't saying.

All because I had this weird fixation with furgirls. No, not that kind of furgirl... not fashion models in fur. The other, obvious kind. The tailed-and-snouted variety.

Something had simply gone wrong. I'd had... clung to a... no, this was self-deprecation voodoo. I needed to climb my way out.

My standard... is it... okay, to save myself for something or someone that can't exist in my world?

Was that my reason, all this time, for not continuing the proper cycle of human relationships?