Face-Slapping15 min read
I Dreamed My Death — So I Cancelled My Engagement and Broke the Plot
ButterPicks16 views
I woke on the plane from Heathrow with a taste of dream dust in my mouth.
"Where are you? Hot milk, please," I told the flight attendant, because the dream was still loud in my head and my hands shook.
"Hot milk. Coming right up, Miss," she said.
I closed my eyes but the voice in my head wouldn't let me rest. "Casey, who are you?" I whispered against the airplane hum.
[Casey Ahmed online. Host, I am your life-repair system. Bind confirmed.] The voice was not human, it was bright and machine-light. It called itself Casey, and it sounded like a polite customer service rep that knew too many secrets.
"You're a system?" I asked aloud.
[Yes. According to the script file you are in, you die in two months. Unless you accept tasks. Bind now to win more life.] Casey's voice was crisp.
"I already took special medicine," I said, and the truth tasted bitter: I'd been given the cure, or a cure. I had been put back together. "I'm not going to die in two months."
[Story nodes are sticky. But if you bind, I can grant life days when you finish tasks. Do you accept?]
"No," I answered right away. Then I closed my eyes and thought about my grandmother's teeth chattering in the dream, my company under attack, the two people who loved me only enough to use me. I thought about the little star who wore my scripts like new clothes, and the man who laughed while people around my grandmother cried.
"All right," I said after a long minute. "Bind me."
[Task one pending: attend Chen Manor banquet tomorrow. Target: Bruno Khalil. If you appear and force a visible annulment, reward: three days life. Do you copy?] Casey spoke like a game host.
"I copy," I said. I already knew the banquet's layout from the dream. I already had the photo files waiting in my phone like loaded bullets.
We landed. The smells of Jiang city hit me like a promise — fried dough and river water and the oppressive heat that hugged streets like a greedy aunt. My parents waited at arrivals. The hug was warm and real.
"How are you, my girl?" my mother, Christina Thompson, asked, voice small with relief.
"I'm fine, Mom," I lied like someone who had learned the art of small truths.
At home, my brother Lucas Gibson walked into the kitchen while I spilled the flight tea.
"Eat," he said. "You're home. Stop being dramatic."
"I was dramatic in London too," I said lightly.
That night I lay awake and paged through old messages with my doctor. The donor who saved me had demanded secrecy. The hospital had obeyed. I had never thanked him. I had only felt a noise in my heart, a soft bruised gratitude that had nowhere to go.
"Casey," I whispered into the dark. "Why Bruno? Why him?"
[Bruno is the male lead in your book file. He is the fiancé who will become convenient. Also he is a node necessary for the plot. He must be handled cleanly.] Casey replied.
"I will handle him cleanly," I promised. I was a writer. I had no interest in being a footnote in someone else’s rise.
The next night was the Chen manor banquet. The house glowed like a palace in my memory; chandeliers made rivers of light along the balustrades. I walked in quietly in a white gown that felt like armor.
"Bruno," I said when I reached him. He turned, regal and smooth in a black suit. "Hello."
"Yours is a surprise," Bruno said with a practiced smile. "You look very well. The recovery was quick, wasn't it?"
"Not the question," I said. I put my phone in his face. "Is this a surprise?"
He reached for the phone with a laugh. "There must be a mistake. Those photos are—"
"—from the hotel two blocks from your downtown office. Those are your messages to Isabel Peters saying, 'My wife is a bank card.' Those are your hotel receipts." I let the room breathe around us.
He paled. It was the first honest thing his face had done all night.
"I don't—"
"Either you announce the annulment now," I said, "or I play everything for everyone."
He was a man who had always counted on soft power and quiet veils. The room around us changed temperature. Glass chimed in other hands. People started to sense a story.
"Do it," he mouthed to the man at the microphone behind him, a nod I didn't see until later.
"Everyone," Chen Kun — Ignacio Zheng — said into the mic with a smile that was a little too public, "we have a new piece of news. There is an annulment."
That was my victory — small and clinical, like a surgeon's incision. Bruno's mask slipped.
After the announcement, Bruno tried to charm the crowd.
"Everyone, please. It's a misunderstanding."
"Misunderstanding?" I laughed. "Do you want to explain to my grandmother why she had a stroke and went white-haired overnight? Do you want to explain the emails that tried to take my family's company because you sat with the person who wrote them?"
He lost control of a breath. "You can't say that," he whispered. "Not here."
"Then I will," I said, and I showed the photos — the hotel keycard, the kiss, the messages, the voice note where he called me a puppet. Phones rose like iron birds. Lights flared. People leaned in. The room turned from gala to courtroom in a single dramatic swing.
"It is a shame to see a fiancé speak like that in front of his future kin," Chen Kun said, which is to say the host did not like having his public face smudged. He walked two steps toward Bruno as if walking to a chess piece.
Bruno's smile started to quiver. He went from calm to unsure in three blinks.
"What is this?" he stammered. He laughed a sound that had no teeth. "You're making a scene."
"You're the one who tried to make my life into a scene for them to rehearse in," I said. "You thought I would be the footnote, the convenient sacrifice. I lived; you acted. The play is over."
"Play? You think this will ruin me?" Bruno's tone hardened. He made a thin attempt at bravado and failed.
I could have let him disappear into the night, but Casey's voice pinged in my head: [Present villain punishment node unlocked. Public humiliation will balance plot karma. Proceed?]
I tapped the mic and put the video on the LED wall. "Want proof?" I asked.
The moment I pressed play, five hundred phones peeled toward the screen. The video's first frame was Bruno's phone, his face in the mirror asking, "Who needs to know?" The next frame was his text, the next frame my company's statistics that had been mysteriously shifted the week my grandmother fell ill.
People gasped. Someone started recording. Someone else hissed, "Is that the heir's fiancé?" A woman in the front row laughed. Someone else started whispering, "I knew it, I always knew." The crowd divided into murmurs like a boiling pot.
"Turn it off," Bruno hissed, moving to the stage like a man half a step behind his indignation.
"No," I said. I was calm to the bone. I was calm because I knew how sharp exposure can be, how permanently it can cut.
He stepped onto the stage and faced the crowd. "You all don't understand," he said. "It's a joke. A stupid thing taken out of context."
"Out of context?" Isabel Peters, standing beside him like a paper doll starlet, smiled with teeth too white. "Out of context for whom, Bruno?"
"Isabel," Bruno snapped, and for a moment they were the perfect private married couple in public, two people who had created a small private hell.
"I thought—" Isabel began, voice trembling not in guilt but in fear.
Fans around them began to murmur, then shout. "Shame!" a voice broke free and the single word multiplied. Somebody shouted, "Cut his contract!" Another pulled out a phone; live networks connected; feeds lit the banquet, the garden, the city. The clip I had just shown began to echo across social platforms. People streamed in, their faces incredulous and hungry.
Bruno beat his palms together, pleading with the host. "Chen — this is a private matter. Please—"
"For you it's private," Chen said, "for them it's public. You brought this to us." He spoke loudly enough to be heard. People snapped photos. The air smelled like perfume and regret.
"Bruno Khalil," I said into the microphone, my voice steady, "you used me and tried to bankrupt my people. You treated my grandmother like a piece to be moved. I won't let you take one more thing."
"You're making this about money," he said, rage prickling. "You think people will believe you?"
"They already do," someone yelled from the balcony. "We saw the screenshots." Hundreds of phones recorded the scene like a necklace of cold lights.
His face went from confident to puzzled to small. He tried to deny it. He tried to backpedal. He tried to accuse me of staging an attack.
"Enough," I told him. "You need to apologize, not to me — to everyone you used." I leaned in close so that the microphones could roll with the intimacy. "On stage."
He was still human enough to be afraid, and people love fear. They lean in. The microphones leaned closer. Cameras aimed. They wanted his collapse like a slow bloom.
Bruno's mouth opened and closed. He tried to construct a denial, but the room had already delivered its judgment. Phones turned into witnesses. Guests whispered. Someone laughed; someone recorded. A woman near the head table started clapping, softly at first, then others joined in. The applause grew like a wind, not in praise but in glad witnessing.
"Please," he said, voice cracked, "I can fix this. I'll call him, I'll end it."
"Fix?" I felt fury sweet and cold, and I took my time. "When you call him, will you tell him to apologize to my grandmother? Will you apologize to my family for the attempt to claim our business? Or will you try a thousand excuses?"
He staggered and then, as if gravity and shame were the same substance, he dropped to his knees on the polished floor.
"You can't—" he started, then stopped. There was no camera angle on his shame; journalists had found the angle.
He put both hands on the floor and bowed his forehead. "Please," he whispered, eyes dark with something like panic. "Please forgive me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
The crowd's reaction was a complex thing: some people hissed. Some phones raised higher. Others laughed like the sound of breaking glass. A few were silent, like a held breath.
"Say it," I told him. "Say it in public. Tell every one of these people that you lied and you used me and my family."
"Yes, yes," he choked out. "I lied. I used her. I am sorry. I—"
"Hold on," I said. "Now tell them why you did it."
He flinched. For a second he was a child in the public square, asking for a pardon that wouldn't come.
"Because I wanted power," he said, barely audible. "Because I thought I could take what I wanted."
The field of faces read the confession like a verdict. Phones recorded the whole string of words and they spread faster than breath. A woman I did not know filmed him kneeling and panned to me with an expression that said she had finally seen a truth she expected to see one day. Others had tears in their eyes. Some recorded the scene with a glee that tasted like penitence given to the righteous.
He begged and stammered in front of the crowd, and his arc went exactly where Casey predicted: from smug to stunned, from denial to pleading, then to collapse.
"Please," he said again, louder. "Please, I'll step down from any roles. I'll leave the family if you want. I will pay restitution. I will—"
"No," I said.
He froze. The meaning of the single word hammered through him.
"No one in that family will accept a staged show of repentance," Chen said quietly. "This is not one of our dramas."
Bruno tried to drag himself back up. His knees trembled. He reached for the microphone.
"Please," he said weakly, "Please don't do this publicly."
"Too late," I said.
He screamed, small and ridiculous under the chandeliers. He tried to push himself upward and failed. A few people crowded to take closeup footage. Someone tossed him a bottle of water. Another person whispered, "Kneel if you must, but don't expect forgiveness."
He was a man unmade in public. His fingers found no purchase on the carpet of his old pretenses. He started to plead in fragments: "I will leave. I will—just let me—"
Phones clicked, videos uploaded, the world watched his shame live. People commented in real time: "Finally." "Serves him right." "He always had that look."
He begged for mercy and got a funeral of cold clicking cameras. A security guard stood by with a blank face and no sympathy. Some of the Chen guests turned away as if at a plague.
"Stop filming," he flailed. "Please, remove the videos."
"Too late," I said again. "You cannot unshow what you have done."
The crowd took notes. A woman whispered, "I saved it. I'm sending it to my boss." Someone else shouted, "Call his sponsor!"
No one moved to help him up. It was a long, slow teardown. He had turned a private vice into a public exposure and now he had nothing left but a public plate of humiliation.
He slid his palms over his eyes and cried. He cried differently than pity. It was the sound of someone who had thought himself invincible seeing the floor because the floor was all that was left.
"Do you know what happens next?" Chen said softly to Bruno. "Your contracts will be reviewed. Your names will be checked. Your marriage — the arrangement — is canceled. Go home and explain it to your conscience."
He tried to stand. He couldn't. People murmured. Some took advantage of the moment to film themselves standing near the scandal, to feel the breath of infamy on their faces.
He screamed and then he whined. He begged. He called me names at last, and he asked forgiveness from the wrong people. People recorded the sound of his pleading and uploaded it. There is a cruelty in that, and a justice in it, and the world balanced with each upload.
When the crowd finally dispersed, the hum of phones and the click of keys left a smear of evidence that would not vanish. The clip trended. The billionaire partners called. Bruno blamed technology and cheap editing. He tried to save himself with lawyers and letters. The lawyers came, and the letters too, and the world had already voted.
That night, the video replayed in thousands of timelines. Bruno learned fast what it means to be small under the lights.
The punishment had an arc: triumph to denial to public collapse to a long, empty plea. The watchers applauded and cursed in equal measure. People gathered to whisper about the dynasty's stain and the petty man's ruin.
It was vindication. It was messy. It was public.
I left the Chen manor with a quiet that felt like success. My mother cried when she learned. My grandmother held my hand and squeezed it like a benediction. Casey pinged: [Task complete. Life + three days. Next target: Atlas O'Brien. Antagonist role locked. Choose one: kiss him; spend three hours and take a photo at the amusement park.]
"I'll pick the park," I said, and that was how my second act began.
"Atlas is cold," Lucas said later when I told him. "Be careful."
"I'm an author, not a coward," I said.
"You're reckless," Lucas said with a smile.
"He has a marble face," my mother said later when I told her over soup. "Don't break your heart over faces."
"I won't break him. The system needs me to bend him for life days." I tried to explain. "Casey, show me his profile."
[Atlas O'Brien, CEO of YL Group. Cold. Wounded. Tasks filed: flirtation node, protect node. Reactive. High reward.]
We supplied the universe with small choices. I took the list and put my life before it like a ledger. I would win days and I would exchange them for breathing room.
Three days later, I met Atlas O'Brien at a terrace with moonlight caught like coin on the railing. He arrived like an overdue truth.
"You almost fell," he said simply, and when he steadied me with the flat of his hand, my whole plan thinned like paper.
"Thanks," I said. "You're late."
"I ran into traffic," he said. "And you made a scene at Chen Manor."
"You saw?"
"I saw the aftermath."
"I couldn't let him get away with it."
Atlas's face was still a cool plane of things. He lifted his chin slightly, like a gentleman measuring wind.
"Why didn't you let him pay?" he asked.
"Men like him don't pay. They barter. We bartered in public."
"You bartered well."
After that the system delivered me ridiculous missions: "Get a kiss," "Spend three hours at an amusement park with Atlas and take a photo." I read the words and laughed out loud.
"No," Atlas said the first few times I bribed him to join me, but life runs on small revolutions. He said yes because he was a man who could not stand to leave loose ends.
"How long do I have?" I asked Casey once while Atlas drove me to the park. I felt absurd talking to a machine in the passenger seat.
[Current life: additional thirty days total. Complete missions to extend. Projection: two more years if you exceed 80% completion rate.]
"Two years," I said under my breath and heard the future.
He let me be a child on the rides. He held my hand on roller coasters. He bought my ice cream and then promptly ate mine, and that was scandalous and trivial and the kind of thing that stitches two people stealthily together.
"Why are you spending time with me like this?" he asked in the ferris wheel, when the whole city flickered below us.
"I'm completing a mission," I confessed.
He looked at me as if I had handed him a tiny clock. "What about you? What about your real life? The manuscript? The company?"
"Those are my things," I said. "They are not yours to fix."
"Maybe I want to help fix them," he murmured.
"Then prove it," I said, but I didn't mean it as a challenge.
On the ferris wheel, he leaned in and his mouth found mine like an apology and a dare. It slowed my heart in a way my life map had forgotten how to do.
The system rewarded me with days as if life were an arcade game and I had just scored points. I kept asking Casey to convert points to years and Casey gamely suggested months and weeks. "No," I told Casey, "keep my weeks. I'm greedy for more time."
We fell into a routine of missions, small mercies, and revelations. I learned Atlas had funded the London lab that had treated me. He never told me. He hated hospitals because of what they'd cost him once. He disliked pity. He preferred action.
When the script got darker — a staged theft, a trap, a knife — the plot turned violent in the way stories often do when they need a climax.
I was kidnapped outside a shoot, a ragged set of actors and broken props in the countryside. It was messy and cold and quick. When the blade tore flesh, the world narrowed to white-hot pain.
"Tell them you love him and get out," Casey said.
"I can't," I whispered.
In the middle of the barbarous haze somebody screamed for an ambulance. The city arrived late and the police were slow. I woke in a hospital bed with Lucas asleep in the chair and Atlas pacing the floor like a caged thing.
"You should have called," Lucas said when I opened my eyes.
"I did," I said. "I called who I could."
Atlas stood at the foot of the bed. He looked like an accusation and a promise.
"You almost died," he said. "Who did this?"
"Chen's cousin," I said. "She snapped. I didn't cause it."
"Walk me through it," he said. "Everything."
I told him, and his face went tight with an anger I had not seen before.
"They used you," he said. "And the network is on this. I will find them."
He did. He found them with lawyers and police and a slow bulldozer of evidence that left neither apologies nor reputations easy to rebuild.
In the end, the villain who had been set to ruin me, Bruno, was undone in a theatre of his own making at the Chen event and then cleaned up publicly by sponsors and lawyers. The woman who had staged my kidnapping — whose mind had been fed on poison — went away to a hospital bed and to legal checks. The public punishment ran and re-ran: his kneeling, the bows, the phone videos, the applause that wasn't praise.
"Good," Atlas said once, softly, when we watched the clip of Bruno's kneel together. "You wanted him to pay."
"I wanted him to stop," I said. "Paying is easier than stopping sometimes."
"Then let's stop him," he said.
He stood and walked away without a boast. He did not save me to be the hero who sweeps everything with a cape. He saved me with phone calls, with attorneys, with quiet meetings in rooms that smelled of coffee and money. He never asked me to be thankful with words; his actions said it enough.
"Casey," I said later that week. "How much life do I have now?"
[Current morphology: 1.9 years, subject to mission completion and plot variance.] Casey answered like an accountant measuring destiny.
"Then let's make a story worth living," I said aloud.
"And if the plot wants to kill you anyway?" Lucas asked over dinner.
"Then I will die having lived," I replied, and for once that felt like a tidy sentence.
Days became a string of small tasks and larger acts: uncovering who paid the online shills, signing my script over to the studio under my terms, walking with Atlas through the public storm when people wanted to twist the narrative into a romance that was not ours yet.
"Oh, we are in a public romance now," someone said one afternoon as we held hands at a premiere.
"Good advertisement," Atlas said, once, and then kissed me with a hunger that could have been a headline.
"Do you love me?" I asked him one rainy evening in the office where he sometimes slept when things got too loud.
He looked at me for a long moment and then said, "I will love you the way I guard things I know are precious. Quietly, and with stubbornness."
"That will do," I said.
Time shifted. The system kept buzzing: days added, days withheld, missions announced and completed. I learned to play and to cheat and to bargain. I learned that the old story had not been a curse so much as a map of wounds waiting to be mended differently.
When Bruno's world closed like a theater curtain, he did it publicly. When the small actress Isabel tried to climb a ladder built on my bones, the ladder collapsed. People record the fall and remember the sound.
"Will you write about all this?" Lucas asked once, sweeping a hand over the drafts on my desk.
"I will write a book," I said, and I knew the book would be brutal but honest.
"Promise me something," Lucas started, but I shook my head.
"No, not the silly promises," I said. "Just this: if my life becomes a book, then let it be a mirror and not a theater. Let it show the teeth and the kindness and the small mercies."
"Okay," he said.
We moved forward in a life that did not promise forever, but it did promise the next breath. I kept binding with Casey, completing tasks that were sometimes ridiculous, sometimes tender, always strange. Atlas learned to be less like a wall and more like a harbor. He opened doors and refused to be a villain in any script that would paint him otherwise.
I still had days counted on some system screen, but I had also reclaimed authorship of my own plot. I had the luxury of small pleasures: the museum at three with no line, a cup of cold milk, the feeling of being held after nightmares.
My ending was not given to me by a fate in a dream. I rewrote the dangerous parts as they came. I refused to be a prop. I refused to be a martyr. I learned to use my anger as a pen.
Once, while we sat on the roof of his glass office, watching the city pulse beneath us, I touched the little felt Shiba Inu doll he'd kept under glass since I had joked about it.
"Keep it," I said.
He handed it to me like an offering. "Keep it," he answered. "And keep breathing."
I promised.
The End
— Thank you for reading —