Chapter Text
Telamon had forgotten how many worlds he'd built.
There'd been deserts that glowed with the hue of gold under dual suns, oceans as deep as memory, forests so dense the trees themselves whispered secrets. He'd woven starlight into tapestries and distorted gravity into spirals that sang. And still, no matter how fine, how precise his hand, each creation fell short.
Rivers dried up to scabs. Forests choked themselves to ember. Creatures crafted from his wind destroyed teeth on one another. Perfection always slipped through his fingers, and he'd be standing and staring at wreckage when there was supposed to be splendor.
He told himself he didn't care. That a god was supposed to be above emotion. But with centuries upon centuries upon centuries and loneliness the only friend, Telamon could not help but admit it: he was happy.
And in that isolation, something else brewed. Hatred. Not at himself—never at him—but at the flaw that hung on everything. He suppressed it, buried it like a body in his side. But it never stopped talking.
It was during one of those endless days, on the shore of a new world born, that he felt the commotion.
A spark. Not natural. Not his.
The god tensed, eyes narrowing. He felt it in the code—the skeleton of creation. Somebody was fouling.
A man stepped out of the glitch. Human. Flesh and blood where there had only been stars and stone. He had something that glowed in his hands, a slab of flowing red light that said "c00lgui." His blonde hair fell over his eyes with his horns glows with a red outline and black inner colour that matched with his tail and half of his face being corrupted. His face wasn't reverence or horror—it was amusement.
Telamon raised his hand, ready to unmake him. But the man spoke to him instead.
"Well," the intruder said, voice calm and arrogant. "This isn't in any directory I've cracked so far."
The god's voice thundered. "You trespass on the domain of the gods. You will call your name, or I will disperse you to dust."
The man met his gaze. "007n7. The best hacker of all robloxia." he said with a confident, almost arrogant tone
Telamon left the word hanging between them. Hacker. It was strange, sharp. "You admit to breaking the creation laws."
"Laws are just walls," 007n7 shrugged, his fingers tapping against the glow of the screen. "And walls are to be climbed. I was bored. Wanted to know what was on the other side." He grinned. "Looks like I discovered a god with control problems."
Telamon should have struck him down. This was assumption on the part of madness. But instead of charging, he demanded: "Why?"
007n7's eyebrow went up. "Because anything less would be petty. You aren't."
The god curled back his fingers to his own side slowly. For the first time in centuries, he held back.
⊹ ࣪ ˖
007n7 came back. And again.
At first, Telamon scolded himself for enduring the mortal just to witness him—this unseemly one who held on to the seams of godliness. But eventually, he was left waiting. Waiting to hear that voice once more. Waiting to watch what destruction the hacker wrought.
Their opening arguments were ferocious. Telamon shaped a river, smooth and ageless, only for 007n7 to deflect it with some wrist movement on his device, splitting it into distorted deltas.
"You spoil perfection," Telamon snarled.
"No," the hacker said, crouching on the riverbank, his screen throwing shadows as white as moonlight across his face. "I reveal it. Perfection is denial in good light."
Telamon's teeth ground. He could punish him a thousand times. And yet—there was some truth in the hurt. Truth he didn't want to hear.
A day passed, and Telamon cut beasts to pasture in a meadow. Fragile, balanced, harmonious. 007n7, whimsical, altered their code. One grew too many wings. Another, teeth where they had no business having any. The meadow filled with gangly hybrids.
Telamon nearly shouted. But when the hacker laughed, something in the god's chest creaked. He laughed too.
He hadn't laughed in centuries.
⊹ ࣪ ˖
Their arguments turned into discussions. Their discussions turned into lessons.
Telamon instructed 007n7 on how to whirl stars, how to embroider gravity into orbits. He stretched out his hands and let galaxies erupt like sparks.
007n7, in turn, showed Telamon how to exploit flaws. How to bend a rule until it broke, and then use the break to create something new.
“You’re too clean,” the hacker said one night as they sat on the edge of a half-formed moon. “You hate cracks, but cracks are where the light leaks in.”
“Cracks destroy,” Telamon argued.
“Cracks reveal,” 007n7 corrected.
It should have been obscene. But Telamon listened. Against sense, he learned.
⊹ ࣪ ˖
Slowly, their closeness shifted.
Telamon began to wait not just for the voice of the hacker, but for his form. The puff of his breathing, rapid and human, and the stillness of godly air. The way he leaned back on his elbows, careless and human, as galaxies sparkled above them.
One night, as a dying star rained sparks over the void, 007n7 leaned against him. "You know," he said, his voice almost soft, "you seem to be lonely when you're not in character."
Telamon stiffened. "Lonely?"
"You wear that god mask like armor," 007n7 answered. "But I can see through it.".
Telamon's response was to deny it, to say loneliness wasn't for him. But the words caught in his throat. For the first time in his life, he had no lines.
Instead, he whispered, "And if I am?"
007n7 looked at him, really looked, then smiled—not teasingly, but almost tenderly. "Then maybe you're not as untouchable as you think."
Telamon's heart tightened. When 007n7's hand brushed against his, the god didn't step back.
⊹ ࣪ ˖
What had begun in repartee grew into trust.
Telamon confessed things he had never spoken aloud: how every failure of his creations gnawed, the darkness in him that spat that it would never be enough. He spoke of the Hatred, but did not speak it.
007n7 listened. For once, he did not mock. He just allowed the words to float between them.
"Bury that, though," the hacker finally said, his voice unusually somber. "Hatred doesn't die. It grows. One day, it's going to rip itself loose."
Telamon put up his hand, cupped the hacker's face, his thumb stroking the sensitive warmth of human skin. "Let it try, then. For now, I choose you."
They kissed under a falling-star-filled sky.
⊹ ࣪ ˖
But love didn't silence the shadow.
The Hatred still came back. Louder, louder. With each new world Telamon built, the flaws screamed back at him. With each creature he made and they killed themselves, the murmurs grew louder: Flawed. Broken. Useless.
He tried to deny it. He tried to lose himself in laughter, in stolen moments with 007n7. He let the hacker take his hand, play with him, even soil his work, just to keep the silence at bay.
And it worked for a while.
But the Hatred was not so easily diverted.
⊹ ࣪ ˖
One night, Telamon stood on the edge of a new world, its oceans still steaming with heat. He watched as his creatures—weak, beautiful—began devouring one another before they had even mastered breathing.
His fists were clenched.
"It happens again," he murmured, voice crumbling. "Always again. I give them beauty, and they defile it. I give them life, and they destroy it."
007n7 sat next to him, unusually quiet.
"You're angry because you want them perfect," he declared finally. "But perfection doesn't exist, Telamon. You made me, and I'm not perfect."
Telamon wheeled about. His eyes flashed, but his tone was soft. "You—I do not regret." The hacker wrapped his tail around Telamon's arm.
The hacker was dumbstruck for once.
But underneath the words, underneath the softness of that moment, the Hatred throbbed like a second heart.
Telamon shut it away. He chose love.
And in that decision, his destiny was sealed.