By the fourth month, Momo had stopped sleeping properly.
She never told him why. She let him believe it was coursework, deadlines she'd fallen behind on while spending her evenings talking to strangers on his behalf, and he believed it because he was too deep in his own work to look closely enough to doubt it.
The truth sat in a folder on her laptop labeled, with her usual dry humor, definitely not important.
Inside it: screenshots of a Discord server with eleven thousand members, all of them there because of a game that hadn't released yet. A spreadsheet tracking wishlist numbers on the storefront page, climbing in a way she checked obsessively, refreshing it the way some people refreshed their bank accounts, half-expecting the number to be a mistake each time it grew. Messages from three separate gaming press outlets asking for early access. One message, unanswered for a week because she didn't know how to respond to it without giving too much away, from someone claiming to work at a publication with more reach than the other three combined, asking simply: who is Doctor Sterben, and why has nobody heard this name before now.
She read that message more times than she wanted to admit.
She never told him about the eleven thousand. She never told him about the wishlists, or the press, or the growing thread of theories on forums speculating about who was behind the game, whether it was a lone developer or a hidden studio, whether the art style was inspired by this or that acclaimed release, arguments spiraling for pages under posts she'd made almost as an afterthought months earlier.
She wanted him to finish it the way he'd started it. Quiet. Unburdened. Hers, in a small apartment, before it became something the rest of the world got to have opinions about.
"You've been weird lately," Yami said one evening, not looking up from his screen, the words offered carelessly, the way you comment on weather.
"Weird how?"
"Tired. Distracted."
"Coursework," she said, which by now had become reflex.
He glanced at her, just briefly, something flickering behind his eyes that suggested he didn't fully believe her, but he let it pass, the way he let most things pass when he trusted someone enough not to demand every truth all at once.
She hated lying to him. She told herself, most nights, that it wasn't really lying. It was withholding a gift until the wrapping was finished.
The release date arrived on a spreadsheet before it arrived anywhere else, a single cell she'd stared at for longer than was reasonable before finally locking it in and sending the build to the storefront for review. She did this while he slept, Null curled against his side, the two of them breathing in that same slow unison they'd settled into months ago.
She sat at the desk long after, the glow of the monitor the only light in the room, and allowed herself, just once, to imagine what his face would look like the day he understood what she'd built quietly alongside everything he'd built loudly.
She didn't know yet that she would only get to see part of it.
She closed the laptop. Climbed back onto the mattress beside him, careful not to wake him, careful not to disturb the small gray shape curled between them.
"Seven days," she whispered to no one, to the dark, to whatever version of the future was already in motion and could no longer be stopped. "Just hold on seven more days."
Null's ear twitched once, then went still.
Outside, the city hummed on, unaware that somewhere inside it, a countdown had already begun.