Sweet Romance13 min read
My Spatula, My System, and the Likes That Saved Us
ButterPicks13 views
I woke up with dust in my mouth and a sky that had the color of old metal. Three of them were already reaching for me—flies on a sore wound of a broken city.
"Help," I tried to say. The sound came out like a cough.
"Move!" a voice barked and a blade sang. A man's shadow fell across the nearest thing that wanted me dead.
He was tall in a black coat, all motion like a drawn line. He wiped blood off his blade, looked down, and said, without any warmth, "Annoying. Really annoying."
I stared. "Who—"
"Keep moving," he said. "This block is clear."
He pushed me into a ruined lobby and left.
I didn't follow him. I shouldn't have looked back. I knew the story in my head—the book I read the night before. I knew where this building and this man fit into it. He was the hero turned lover in the original: Sancho Cox. In the book he would meet the sweet heroine, spark would fly, and everything would shine like candy wrapped in apocalypse dust.
He said, "I never liked you. The engagement will be broken. Stop clinging."
"I understand," I told him, keeping my voice small. I had read the whole book. I knew my role. I was the fiancée that begged and blocked and then got tossed. I was supposed to be called "the fiancée" in every chapter.
I watched him walk out into the rain. I planned to go downstairs to the safe rooms and mind my own survival.
A tinny mechanical voice crackled in my mind like a broken speaker.
[WARNING! Today's likes are too low!
[Plot predicted as boring!
[Activating augmentation mode!]
I didn't know what to do with that, until an interface popped before my eyes: like, upvote, comment, collect—an exact copy of a certain knowledge-platform's UI. A system. A stupid system.
When the rain turned into a sudden downpour, the lobby, which should have been quiet, filled with sounds I had hoped to avoid: the low moans, the scrape of claws. The stairwell was blocked. The "clear" zone was suddenly not clear.
I ran after Sancho. "Sancho, wait—"
He glanced back like I was a pest. "Don't follow me," he said. He climbed on a bike and left me in the rain.
"Then I'm done following the book," I told the empty air. "You're gone."
The system wanted more drama. It got it.
Inside my chest a small green number flicked: 1 like. 2 likes. A popup: "Achievement: Ten Likes." Another: "Reward incoming."
A spatula dropped into my hands like a present from a strange god.
"What?" I held it like a joke.
Then the thing lunged at me. The spatula—it was absurd to feel relief at a kitchen tool—but the edge bit like a razor. Heads rolled. The world went absurd and glorious. I learned the balance, the swing. I learned that for this book-turned-apocalypse I was allowed to carve survival out of cookware.
"We're saved," someone said.
I hid in a stairwell and watched others. Ten people in our floor, tired and armed. An older woman who had watched me as a kid; a gray-bearded man who was tired like coal. There was a man with a marked ax, fighting like he had no tomorrow.
"That's Ali," someone told me. "Ali De Santis. He brought us here."
Ali looked like a storm. He was the kind of man who didn't waste motion. He fought like he wanted everything to end fast and fair.
A wounded man lay on the floor. He was handsome—so handsome my heart betrayed me with a silly, sudden flutter—and something about the light on his face made the like counter ping again and again.
[+1 like!]
[+3 likes!]
Every time I looked at him, the likes rose. The system liked my fascination. It rewarded me.
Soon I learned how the system worked: likes gave items, items gave survival tools, tools gave story beats. Praise was currency. I became a livewire of performative survival.
Then the building's quiet life turned to chaos.
"Careful," Ali said. "There's a mutated one."
I wanted to help. My body went forward before my mind, but the floor had other plans. The mutant leapt. It moved like a nightmare made kin to a wind bending in on itself. Ali screamed. He protected the injured man and got cut. I was useless with a spatula until the system upgraded it into a telescoping, deadly weapon with remote control.
We beat the thing together. The room that had nearly become a blood pit fell quiet.
"Who is he?" I whispered to Ali later.
He shrugged. "No idea. We found him on the way." He sounded like he had given away a secret by saying it.
The man opened his eyes the day I cleaned him with a rare serum I had bought with a rush of likes. He looked at me like he had only just learned what "face" meant.
"Who are you?" he breathed.
"Your nurse," I said and lied easily. "I'm Bianca."
He said, "You aren't."
He searched my eyes and missed me and then asked, "Where's Ali?"
Ali came back with indignation. "He'll be fine. Stop moving me."
The man smiled crookedly, and the like counter chimed like a bell. He stared at me with a lazy warmth that made my heart fold on itself.
His name, the system told me one flickering night, was Esau Douglas.
Esau. When he moved, like leaves in wind, the likes died of envy and leapt onto my posts. The system served me well when I looked at Esau. The likes grew.
Esau woke up with a childlike confusion. He asked about girls and cars and things a man who had his world jacked by memory would ask. He asked the wrong time and the right way.
"You my girlfriend?" he asked at one point, with a candor that made the room tilt charmingly.
"I'm not your girlfriend," I said, laughing, and he frowned, like a child whose candy had been yanked away.
But he stayed. He insisted on staying.
When we finally left the tower to search for supplies, I kept a spatula tucked under my arm like a talisman. My life had become unbelievable. I had a system that begged likes, a pot-lifted power that could turn utensils into weapons, and a heart that turned traitorous at the sight of Esau's smile.
The system punished laziness. When the like count fell, the so-called "augmentation mode" kicked in.
One morning at a highway toll, the world found an appetite for escalation. Ordinary zombies flashed into mutations, and fifty of them morphed in a glance into massive, shrieking things. Then a car skidded into them—a car full of three students. The car was flung like a toy. They tumbled out, and the beasts pounced. They were "material" the system had thrown at us.
We fought for hours. Esau flew on the wind like someone that belonged to storms. His fingers spun blades of air. I hacked and clattered, my spatula slashing a choreography taught by desperation.
"Car's clear!" Esau said, breathless, and the students bowed and cried and clung.
The system lavished likes. Rewards slid into my hands: pots, pans, a rolling pin that hummed, then a magnetic, remote-controlled frying pan that leapt at command.
Esau looked at me at night with a strange softness. "Why do you keep risking yourself?"
"Because if I stop, I die," I said.
He smiled, and some small worry in my chest dissolved.
We kept moving. The world burned and washed with rain. We found more survivors. We lost people. I learned to sleep with one eye open and the other with memories that did not belong to me. The book I had read had taught me the broad beats, but the system pressed me into improv.
I became the woman who could be half-zombie, who could switch between human skin and fang-darkened muscle, who could still keep her mind. I learned use and then relearned mercy.
Then came the day I should have recognized.
[WARNING! Today's likes are falling!
[Activating major augmentation!]
The sky broke and the ground split. The "zombie king" arrived—a thing like a collapsed building given teeth. It was huge, towered, and promised endings.
Esau and Ali and I stood against it. It picked me up and threw me like a rag. I tasted everything wrong.
Esau fell. He bled. He smiled.
"Don't die," he said, and that was the last thing sound and sweet before I saw stars.
I didn't die.
I didn't die and then, by some strange system mercy, the cooking utensils around me rose like faithful soldiers. My spatula swung. A pot smashed. A rolling pin whirled. They became extensions of my will.
"Bianca!" Esau screamed from below.
I saw him go limp.
Horror curled my spine into flame. My hands moved like a conductor. The frying pan whistled. The spatula found the king's throat. The pot banged the temple. The rolling pin pinned and sawed.
It was impossible. It was ridiculous. It was glorious. The king fell to pieces, the ground sighed, and the swarm around it broke.
Esau coughed open his eyes in the debris and laughed weakly. I bought and fed him the priciest potion—five thousand likes in the store—and watched as the color returned to his face like a tide.
We held each other in the rain, soaked and ridiculous, and the world had fallen in love with the image.
We rode that image straight to a city: the S City command center. People there were polished and armed and surprised.
Sancho Cox arrived shortly after, uniformed, eyes blazing at first with duty and then with something like guilt.
"You're alive?" his mother said. "We thought—"
Sancho tried to claim ownership, to slide back into the story he had abandoned. He sought to reclaim the name of my fiancé, to reinsert himself in the pages.
But S City had other people. The command center had ears and teeth and a camera pointed at everything.
It did not take long before we learned the truth: S City's research wing had been playing god with infected creatures. Their head—Dagger Clay—had used a lab to tinker with the virus, trying to craft obedient monsters and sell power to the highest bidder.
"Why?" I asked, one hand on Esau's sleeve.
"Because power," someone said, and the like meter chimed like a morbid clock.
Dagger Clay smiled thinly into a bank of microphones. "We offered security. We offered solutions."
"Solutions," one survivor spat. "You offered chains."
They hauled Dagger Clay into the main plaza in front of the command center. A crowd pressed in—soldiers, survivors, the family of the dead, the ones who had watched their children become toys for a laboratory's greed.
"You're charged with engineering biological agents and releasing them into populated zones," the lead commander read. The microphones swallowed the words and broadcast them.
Dagger Clay's face changed, line by line.
"This is a show trial," he said. He had always had the arrogance of someone with money enough to buy silence.
An old woman stepped forward and looked him in the eye. "My girl died from your experiment," she said. "You wanted control. You got children." Her voice was small, but the crowd roared as if it were a storm.
Dagger's smirk slipped. He tried to laugh; it came out as a dry cough. "We—" he started, then stopped. He learned the first lesson: the room had many cameras and no more patrons to choke off the truth.
A young soldier stepped forward and slammed a stack of documents on the table. "These are your grants, these are the shipments, these are emails where you suggested sending mutated hosts through population centers as 'tests'," he said. He flipped open a phone and projected images across the plaza. There, in a video, were Dagger's lab notes, bloodied cages, men with smiles asking if a child screamed louder than expected.
Dagger's swagger collapsed. He reached for pleading, for lawyers, for the protection of the old money he thought would shield him. "You don't understand—"
"Save it," someone yelled. "You don't get to say you didn't know when you sat with the ones who funded you."
Dagger's voice moved from smug to frantic. He whispered and then begged. His transformations were public and grotesque: from confident to flustered, from flustered to frantic, from frantic to broken.
People pressed forward. Some spat. A woman pointed a phone and recorded the whole thing. "This is what greed looks like," she said. "This is what buys bodies."
I watched him crumble with a kind of clinical interest and a human coldness. He tried to deny, tried to blame generals, tried to mumble about "research protocols." He was mocked. A thousand lit faces of survivors watched him fall the way a mirror breaks.
The punishment wasn't just humiliation. It was crafted like a lesson.
First, a public reckoning of facts. Papers, footage, names. Every lie Dagger had told was matched against the truth.
"Why?" I heard the old woman ask again. "Did you think we'd never see?"
Dagger shrank. Sweat rolled down his temples.
Then, the crowd had its say. Men and women who had lost everything came forward and read the names of the dead. They did not shout curses; they read like priests reading a ledger. Each name was a small hammer. Each voice hammered.
Dagger's responses fell apart: "I did it for progress." "We needed to know." He tried legalese, then tried to humanize himself. "I have a family."
A mother held up a photo. It was a child with flour on her nose, smiling. She didn't shout. She didn't sob. She simply placed the photo on the table, where cameras could not miss it.
"From now on," the commander announced, "Dagger Clay will be stripped of research clearance. He will never again manage biological material. He will be made to fund recovery—every asset to rebuild. He will be handed to civil courts. He will live, but he will live under the eyes of those he has harmed."
Dagger reached for pride, then for legalities, then for anything. The crowd hissed. Then he fell to his knees and begged. His pleas were not answered with fire, nor with blood—the survivors wanted different things: transparency, confession, restitution.
The local tribunal fastened conditions: Dagger would be publicly shamed, yes, but more than that he would be forced to clean the wards, to work with the families to restore what had been stolen from them, and to watch what his experiments had done. He would face a lifetime of witness.
The crowd's reaction changed from vicious to satisfied to hollow. They wanted more, but they also wanted meaning. They did not want to become like him. They wanted the truth aired so it could not be buried again behind closed doors.
Meanwhile, Sancho Cox tried a different tack. He tried to slip into the edges of the crowd as if he had returned to a stage he once owned. He found my mother and shook her hand. He found my old neighbors and told them stories of my childhood that landed like gloved hands.
I watched his face change when he realized that the crowd's eyes were not his to command. He attempted to speak to me at the edge of the plaza.
"Bianca," he said. His voice had the old cadence of the one who used to tell me what I "should" be. "You were reckless. You could have died."
"You left me," I answered.
His expression moved from surprise to the practiced confusion of the man who thinks nuance will rescue him. "I had duties," he said. "I couldn't—"
He tried to smooth it over by offering a public gesture: a plan to help rebuild a children's ward. A band of supporters bristled, saw advantage, and began whispering about how noble he was.
But the command had already seen his choices. A different group now circled him—not family, not friends, but the ones who had watched his actions and cataloged them. "You left people to die to chase a mission," one voice said. "You left your fiancée in a field of bodies."
Someone played a recording of his voice from months earlier, saying exactly the words he had told me in the downfall chapter: "I never liked you. The engagement will be broken." The echo of his words hit the plaza like a cold splash.
Sancho's face folded. He tried to deny it. He tried to say it was taken out of context. He tried to plead.
The punishment for him was simple and public: he was stripped of his honors, of his claim to family endorsements, of the symbolic ring that bound him to a line of duty. More than that, the survivors, in a ritual that had nothing to do with law, chose to erase his place.
They placed the testimony of those he left in his hand: the faces of those abandoned, the names of the people he let be eaten while he rode off. They asked him to read them and to say why he thought he had the right to ask for forgiveness. He read, voice cracking, then attempted to stand and propose a way to atone.
No one cheered. Instead, they walked away. He was stood in the center of a city that had learned to speak, and nobody gave the words he wanted them to hear.
His punishment was less organized but more ruinous: reputation stripped, trust burned, a life of small doors closing.
People recorded him. He was left standing beneath the same cameras that had once filmed his bravado. He found his shoulders empty.
Later, when I walked away from the plaza with Esau and Ali, my spatula heavy at my hip and my hands sticky with city dust, I thought two things at once: that justice had been spoken, and that the world we were building would not be easy.
Esau took my hand without ceremony.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
I laughed. "My likes are back up," I said. "We killed a monster with cookware."
He squeezed my fingers. "You are ridiculous."
We both were.
We built back the city. We fed people. We argued about roofs and who would fix the generators. We laughed at dumb old jokes. We kissed in odd places like exhausted people who knew the small miracles of warmth.
Months later, when the command center threw a small ceremony to honor the people who had fought and the lives that had been saved, Sancho tried to enter with two old supporters. The crowd closed like a hand. They would not let him in.
He stood on the sidelines, voice hollow, and I saw, for a second, a man who had become a story and could not change chapters.
Esau pulled me close. "Do you regret anything?" he asked that night under the stars in a cheap hotel window.
"No," I said. "I regret only that my spatula is scarred."
He kissed my wrist. "Your spatula is famous now."
"It has a name, if you like," I said.
He laughed and said, "Call it what you like. Just don't ever leave it behind."
It became our secret to keep—the little silver spatula that had become a weapon and a charm in equal measure.
The command moved firmly against the research groups. Dagger Clay is now a prisoner to his own notes, and his face is in every report as a lesson no institute can ignore. Sancho got the life he had helped create: known and unloved.
We stayed. We worked. We fed. We learned to make normal things out of a dangerous, noisy world. I wrote posts—small, pointless, human—and the system liked them. The numbers climbed. The like bar flickered toward a goal the system promised: freedom from "augmentation mode."
Esau leaned over me one evening, cheek against mine, and asked, "When we're safe, will you go back?"
"Where?" I asked.
"Back to the quiet life."
He kissed my temple. "You know I'd like to go with you."
"I don't want quiet," I answered. "I want full kitchens, and you near the stove, and my spatula in the drawer where you can steal it in the night."
He smiled. "Steal it, then."
Our life was not a bright, simple romance page out of the book anymore. It was messy: fights, repairs, healing, jokes slipped between life and death. But sometimes in the quiet after a long day of salvaging, when the generator hummed and the city outside hummed low like an animal sleeping, I would feel Esau's hand in mine and the weight of the spatula in a drawer and know that the story I had been forced into had been rewritten, line by line, by the likes of strangers and the stubbornness of a woman who refused to be a footnote.
"Bianca," Esau said one night, "do you still remember the first time you saw me?"
I looked at him, and the little blue triangle at the corner of my device pinged with a handful of likes.
"I remember," I said. "You looked like a storm. I wanted an umbrella."
He kissed me then, quick and certain. The like counter ticked up.
The system promised I could stop the augmentations if my total likes reached ten thousand. It was a target both silly and holy.
"Ten thousand," Esau murmured.
"Let's get there," I said.
He rested his forehead against mine. "We'll get there together. And then we'll open a little restaurant."
"With a spatula on the wall," I added.
"With your spatula on the wall."
I closed my eyes. The city had been rebuilt in small hands, in cooked meals, in public reckonings. The slices of justice had been messy, but they were real.
Outside, somewhere in S City, a camera kept an eye on the plaza where a man had fallen from grace. Inside, my device blinked with the quiet insistence of strangers who had watched us and clicked "like."
I tightened my hold on Esau's hand, and whispered, "If they ever make us go through 'augmentation' again, we'll just be louder."
He grinned. "And spicier."
We both laughed then, and I slid my spatula out from the drawer and tapped it against the wood: a private drum solo for two survivors who had found each other in the most unlikely of cookouts.
The End
— Thank you for reading —