"You're really fucked up," he says conversationally, nudging the mug of coffee towards me. He cannot help but to do it; it is in his undeniable nature to be nurturing. The dull glare in his eyes informs me that he detests this. "I know." My voice is empty; I am still in shock, and will be for the forseeable future. How else is one to react when they, in perfect innocence, walk into their kitchen of a morning to find a perfect stranger leaning against their counter--a perfect stranger that isn't unfamiliar at all? His name is Kierlin. He doesn't quite know how to pronounce his name, though, because I don't know how to pronounce it. He told me this with no small amount of bitterness; it was the first thing that he said when he saw me. He didn't give me much of a chance to reply; he said that I had been doing far too much of the talking over the years, and that now it was his turn. Kierlin is a character in a story that I have been writing on and off in collaboration with a friend of mine ofr several years. He has always been my favorite creation. I wrote him as a sidekick; a loveable and cheerful comic relief character, polite and kind and stereotypically effeminate. I found it slightly strange that he appeared before me, well, at all, actually, but especially with a gaping but curiously bloodless stab wound through the center of his chest. "You kill me at the end, remember?" he said cheerlessly, fixing my regular morning coffee as I stood flabbergasted. I blushed with unexpected shame, and fell into my usual chair to stare in shock as he informed me that I was fucked up. "I hate you." Kierlin informs me, and I flinch. "Only I can't hate you, can I. That's not how you wrote me. It's like you created me for the sole purpose of venting your own agony; you gave me a tragic and abusive backstory, an unrequited love interest, an abusive and insane best friend who was also an unrequited love interest, you made me gay in a society that's even less advanced than your own, you made me suffer for years in an unnecessary war, and then you killed me before the battle was even won. Yet somehow I am flat and two-dimensional, incapable of anything other than selflessness. What the hell did you actually want for me?" I can tell that he wants to be, is trying desperately to be screaming in rage, but he is incapable of rage. "I didn't..." I whisper, incapable of looking at him. "You weren't supposed to be...it was just for fun." His tawny eyes, which look so unnatural and strange in the real world, harden. "I hope your life is just as fun as mine." Moving faster than I can comprehend, he dumps the mug of scalding coffee into my lap--breaking character in a way that he had implied was impossible. I stare at him, in pain and in fear, as strange purple-black flames burst spontaneously from the floor around him, clinging to his body and disintegrating him piece by piece. In the end, I can't tell if the expression on his face is one of pain, or of relief.