Emil Sevrens slept through his alarms, not even bothering to hit the snooze button or dismiss them. Eventually, the alarms were replaced by his generic ringtone, at which point he caved in and picked up his phone. “What.”

“Don’t ‘what’ me,” said the man on the other side. “You were supposed to be here two hours ago. Get over here.”

“Mm.” With that mumble of affirmation, he hung up on the caller and slowly pulled himself out of bed. Would he even bother getting dressed? There were days where he would simply power up without even changing out of his pajamas just so that he could go back to sleep immediately after powering down. After deciding not to deal with getting dressed today (it wasn’t like he had to go shopping or anything that required going around as a civilian), he transformed into Cor Caroli, Corrupt Eternal Senshi of Will, and slowly made his way to the Negaverse headquarters.

Cor Caroli had come to hate his full senshi title. His sphere was a joke. There was no point in representing Will if a force existed that could overturn it without pause.

He arrived at the special section of the headquarters where the surveillance monitoring took place. A Captain greeted him there, his arms folded. “Three hours late. It’s not like we don’t expect you to do this every day, but can’t you at least keep up the appearance of caring about your shift?”

Cor Caroli shrugged. He barely cared about getting out of bed every day, much less about keeping up appearances. Everyone knew his deal by now, anyway. He slept and avoided the day for as long as he could, stared at the screens and occasionally pointed out something of interest when he was at work, made a token attempt to eat lunch, stared at the screens some more, then went home and went back to sleep. This cycle repeated endlessly, day in and day out. Every day was exactly the same.

Nothing special happened for the first section of monitoring, so he was left sitting alone at lunch, idly poking at what was supposed to be chicken curry. Even if he still enjoyed food like he used to, this would receive a pass. It was lumpy and had an offputting consistency.

Didn’t he know someone who liked curry, once?

A young woman, a Lieutenant, sat down across from him at the table. “Hey there.”

He looked up at the woman. He recognized her; during a time when his depression had peaked, she had shown him kindness. He had stopped eating because nothing seemed to have a taste, and it became a tedious chore for him. When he collapsed in a hallway somewhere in headquarters and ended up in the medical sector, she was one of the nurses who saw to him as they made him recover. She was more patient than the others, who ranged from meaning well but completely lacking understanding to being rude enough to grouse outside his door about how hard it was to make him do anything. She would stop in, sit with him, even talk to him despite his unresponsiveness.

The young woman said, "How are you? Have you been eating okay?" Cor Caroli shrugged and made an ambivalent noise. She shook her head and slid a paper bag to him across the table. "You need to take care of yourself. I don't want to see you get sick and weak again like you did. I've got some extra muffins from one of the bakeries around here and I want you to have them. Go on, take them."

Cor Caroli just stared at the bag. Though he appeared blank out the outside, his inner landscape was more turbulent. He never understood why this woman was kind to him and took care of him. He felt he didn't deserve it. He was merely an empty shell of a person with no ground to stand on. When she stayed with him in his medical sector room, he only barely avoided panic attacks from being unable to process how being treated well made him feel. When she left, or even when he just wasn’t facing her, he cried almost constantly from what he thought was pain. If he thought about it, perhaps the supposed pain was more like surprise or relief that felt horrible because he didn’t think he deserved it.

“Go on.”

The Lieutenant’s voice jarred him out of his reverie, and he met her expecting eyes. A shudder ran through him, and with a sniffle, two tears ran down his cheeks. “Why?” he asked in a wavering voice. “Why are you so nice to me?”

She gave him a puzzled look. “Does there have to be a reason? Okay, I can give you a few. More than it just being my job to make sure everyone is healthy, I feel like we have to look out for each other. If everyone just cared about themselves, this organization would break apart very quickly. But really, do you need a reason? Why not just ‘because I can be?’”

“Because you can…” He wasn’t quite satisfied with that answer, being unable to accept that some people still helped others out of their own kindness, but he didn’t want to reflect on it. Wiping his eyes, he reached over and took the bag, pulling it close to him. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now take care of yourself, okay? You’re too handsome to let yourself get all sickly, even with all that hair.” She stood up. “See you around.”

Clutching the bag close to him, he watched her go. There might have been a time where he would have enjoyed that compliment, but now it just made his cheeks burn from embarrassment.

The second section of monitoring was uneventful aside from the vigil he kept over the bag of muffins. Some upstart Lieutenant had the gall to ask him what was in the bag, and he shot him a look so severe it made the Lieutenant back right down. Once he got home and powered down into Emil and the pajamas that he never changed out of, he finally opened the bag and saw what was inside. There were six muffins there, all different flavors. He could pick out a chocolate chip one, a double chocolate one, a blueberry one, and a banana one. The two at the bottom of the bag seemed to be different types of mixed berry.

Slowly, as though he expected a trap in the muffin, he pulled out the double chocolate one and picked off a tiny piece. The sweetness was like a shock to his system; after such a long period where nothing seemed to have a taste (and if it did have a taste, he didn’t care for it), the fact that it had a good, strong flavor was overwhelming. He sobbed aloud; he was home and didn’t have to worry about other people’s reactions, so he let his emotions have free reign. He didn’t deserve this kindness, he didn’t deserve to have pleasure, he didn’t deserve anything that Lieutenant had done for him.

As he cried out his painful feelings, he felt a peculiar lightness come to him. Perhaps he had just cried to the point of causing legitimate physical strain, but for the first time in a very long time, he felt hungry. He let himself pick at the muffin, and it was like he could feel that woman nearby, talking to him like she did when he was sick. He let himself get lost in fantasy, pretending that she was nearby, and while he was daydreaming, one empty muffin wrapper turned into two, which turned into three, which eventually became a scattered pile of six.

When his alarm went off the next morning, he blearily wondered why his stomach hurt. A few blinks gave him the answer: he had fallen asleep curled around the now empty bag of muffins, having eaten them all before drifting off. It had to have been the first time he had seriously indulged himself, let alone overindulged, in years. The resulting feeling was somewhere between satisfaction and guilt; he had received a little taste of how it felt to be cared for again and found himself craving more, and yet he still wasn’t sure if he was worthy of it.

He didn’t want to reflect on it. He clutched the bag to his chest, turned over, and went back to sleep.