The gates of infinity open towards me, and all I can see is an unmovable, uncaring universe, and myself, a tiny spec of dust, drifting through it all, kicking and screaming for a meaning for my existence... is some bullshit a more competent story than this would say. But you're not here for deepness, you're here for haha.

But there is not a "haha" to be seen, only "huh?"

Why did Farfallah turn into Lee? What is happening? What is this thing about a choice? What-

Lee/Farfallah snaps her fingers, bringing me out of my stupor. "Hey, I know that look. Stop monologuing, you dingus."

I almost say sorry as a reflex, but you know what? I'm not sorry. I need to process this, dammit!

"Who are you? Or better yet, what are you?" I call to her.

The goddess crosses her legs and rests her head on her hands in an annoyed way, looking down at me. "I'll answer any questions you have, but give me the bottle first."

Ah, yes the damn bottle. I've forgotten about that whole Mcguffin. I raise the bottle between us. "Nuh-hu. Talk first, bottle later. I'm not gonna give away my bargaining chip."

After a brief moment of silence, Lee/Farfallah takes a deep breath and straightens up in her throne. "Fine, if you want to play that game, I'll amuse you for a while."

The right side of her body contorts with a snap of her fingers, changing from the pink-haired goddess to the curly, bespectacled form of Lee Vazquez. "As you might've deduced by now, I was Lee Vazquez this whole time." Her whole body changes, taking the unmistakable form of Lee, in all her icy coldness. "And yes, that means that I, Lee Vazquez, have been the goddess Farfallah this whole time."

Shit. Forget all that about being a spec of dust in an inmutable, uncaring universe. Right now, I'm feeling front and center, as if I'm the center of the galaxy. Why? How? When? I don't even know what to ask.

"However, this has been a lie as well," says the goddess. She shifts back to her goddess form, pink hair flowing in the air as if submerged in water. "My real name is not Farfallah."

"It's not?" I ask, as if that's been the most incredulous thing to happen.

"Of course not, that's just the name of a type of pasta," she says between condescending giggles. "Merely the first thing I thought of at the time. A thing to deceive you."

"Why? Are you Jesus? Oh my God, was Jesus a girl? That would explain a lot. There weren't 12 disciples, but 12 simps. Did Judas sell you out because he was an Incel?"

"I'm not Jesus," says the Goddess.

"Right, Prophet Muhammad. Assalamualaikum."

"I'm not Muhammad, either!"

"...Zarathustra?"

The goddess slaps her face hard enough to leave a red imprint on it. "No, I'm not Zarathustra! Don't even try, you'll not gonna guess it."

"Good, because I ran out of gods," I say. "What even is the point of changing your name if I don't know it in the first place?"

To that, she smiles. Not a cute smile, or a tender smile, but a mocking smile. Why am I shivering all of a sudden? "Well, that's because humans call me by many names. Lady Luck, Destiny, Providence, Nemesis...but I prefer to go by the name of Fortuna, goddess of fate."

Fate? Destiny? That sounds... that sounds like plot! Is she the goddess of plot?

"Yes, I am," she says, seemingly reading my mind. Hey, Lee could read my mind as well! Season 1 flashbacks, for sure. "I'm the goddess of what is, what was, and what will be. Time is a flat circle, and your story has already been written, Ayden Gomez. I am, effectively, the personification of plot."

I don't even think about it twice. I climb the stairs to her cristal throne, getting all up in her face. I make her look up at me as I jab a finger on her chest. "So you're the motherfucker who's been fucking with my life! The one who made me into a bad boy! The one who made me a victim of kidnappings, cults, gangs, cheesy Hallmark plots, and stupid fantasy shit. You and I have a problem, Fortuna, and we're gonna solve it right here and there. What the fuck's wrong with you, huh? Got beef with me? Come on, then. I'll grill you a knuckle burger, and you can call me Wendy's, 'cuz my beef fresh, never frozen."

She looks bemused. Nonplussed, even. "What? You're not gonna say anything? At least look a little plussed. Even a little musing would suffice."

A giggle punctuates how insignificant she sees me as a threat. I mean, I know I can't defeat a god, but I can punch her in the boob a few times. That hurts like hell.

"Oh, you Aydens are all the same. I've no desire to make you suffer. On the contrary, everything I've done, ever since you've been born, has been for your good."

Huh? Never mind that "Aydens" part, what does she mean "for your own good"? I see no good coming out of this. My life has been a cascade of shit of such great proportions that I'm sure it's gonna inspire the sequel to "Up" someday. Nothing good has ever come out of being a bad boy.

Well, except Hayden. And even that's gone.

"It seems you're confused, as always," says Fortuna. She moves her wrist, and a gush of wind pushes me away from her, almost making me roll down the steps to the throne. "Let me rephrase that. Everything that I've done to you has been for the good of the one you love. Every hardship, every heartbreak, every roadblock, has been for the good of one Hayden Wilson."

I'm more confused now than I was in the paragraph above. The shit keeps coming and coming with no end in sight. "Hayden? What does he have to do with anything?"

"He has to do with everything," she says. With a snap of her fingers, the water erupts into a wall of ice, big enough to be a jumbotron.

Something stirs inside the ice wall. A smudge of something I can't make out, like a fuzzy memory of a dream when you just wake up. Shapes soon emerge amidst the moving colors, changing into bodies, into people, into settings. And in the middle of all, Hayden, donning a football helmet in the middle of a game.

"See, son of Adam. See the fate of the man you love, merely a week from now."

He's in a huddle, a starting point, with his defenders in front. He yells something at the people in front of him, and they pass the ball at him. He hesitates to pass it forwards, lingering for a couple of indecisive seconds. Suddenly, someone tackles him sideways, and he falls to the ground, hitting his head pretty hard. Everyone stands up, shakes the pain off, and resumes their positions.

Everyone, except Hayden. He stays on the ground, unmoving, unresponsive. A player comes to see him, then the entire team. Paramedics take him out of the field and into an ambulance.

"What the hell?!" I ask. "What just happened?"

I turn around to see Fortuna eating popcorn out of a bedazzled bowl. "Ever since he met you, Hayden Wilson stopped training. He was so sure that he could build the club of his dreams thanks to you that he didn't even consider going back once. He might be a jock-type bad boy, but even those need to train their body and mind. He hesitated a second too long, got knocked out, and his out-of-practice body couldn't take the hit."

With a wave of her hand, the images morph from a football field to a hospital, where Hayden is crying, surrounded by me, Brayden, and Okayden.

"Cervical fracture, damaged spinal cord. Paralyzed from the waist up," she says nonchalantly, as if talking about a character in a book and not describing the most horrific thing a person could go through. "He will be wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life."

I watch in horror as the image changes to a decrepit trailer, still stacked to the roof with boxes, and a cluttered, dirty stove. Hayden is in a wheelchair, skinny, no light in his eyes, no will to move on. "With no path forward, his dreams crushed, alone in the world, he merely survives, a living zombie with no goal. His father takes his disability checks and drinks it away into a stupor. Nobody there to help him. Nobody there to take care of him."

This can't be right. This cannot be the future. I refuse to believe it.

"What about me? What happens to me that I'm not there with him?"

The door to the trailer opens, and here I enter, older, more handsome, and miserable, holding some takeout box. There's no sound coming from the ice, but I don't need to hear anything to know what happens.

I kneel next to him, talking, trying to have a conversation with him, to no avail. He doesn't even look at me. I try to feed him soup, but he doesn't open his mouth. He's trying to push me away, I bet. Sees himself as a burden to me. Hayden has always been kind like that, putting others in front of himself. Eventually, I get frustrated and leave the trailer in a hurry. A single tear roll owns Hayden's cheek.

"He doesn't want to be a burden," says Fortuna. "All he wants is for you to follow your dreams. He wants to set you free. And yet, the only way he knows he can do it is-"

"Enough!" I yell. "Don't say it. Don't make it real. Don't you dare!"

Fortuna snaps the bowl away, and looks at me with a somber gaze. "You know how this story ends. I see it in your eyes, son of Adam. All because you gave him hope, and love, and a way out."

No, this can't be right. No, no, no, no. This has to be a dream. A nightmare. A horrible prank.

But Fortuna doesn't laugh. All he does is stare at me with those doe eyes and a cold expression. And yet, I know. I know deep inside that she's right. Everything was fine until I came into his life. If I weren't here, he would've been fine. Maybe unhappy, but fine. Alive, even. Being able to talk and walk, and eat! No matter how you cut it, it all starts and ends with me.

"Do you see it now?" says the goddess, standing from her throne. "You said it yourself, everything would be better if you were not around."

She walks past me, grabbing the bottle from my hands, that at this point have no force to keep it away from her, and descends the little staircase. "And that is the thing I've been trying to do all your life."

The image in the ice changes to me when I was a baby, during my first kidnapping. It quickly changes to my first human sacrifice, at age five, then my first school fire, my first alien abduction, my first Adam Sandler movie, and so on, going from tragedy to tragedy in quick succession.

"See, I tried going about it in a subtle way," says Fortuna, now at the bottom of the stairs. "A kidnapping here, the occasional high school harem there, the usual plot things fate sends to you, all in the hopes you wouldn't change schools and meet Hayden, even throwing potential loves on the way. But, there's a snag: you're a bad boy. Bad boys don't play by the rules. They are agents of chaos that can derail even the best-laid plots, and not even destiny can reign them in."

The image changes to my first day of high school, when I met Hayden. "If one bad boy is chaos, two or more are pandemonium. Sadly, your chaos powers are so strong together that I had to throw the subtle approaches to the wind and take a physical form to try and pry you two away from each other. Of course, you know what happened here. You told me no to my very generous offer of joining the council."

Another change, another setting. This time when we tried to cancel her on Twitter. "I sprung into action and moved the goalpost, and you scraped it back to where it was. So benevolent, I am. And you spat on my face. I needed to change my tactics. If I can't prevent you from joining the club, I'll have to disband it. There was still a chance to make it right."

Enter Aiden and his smug face. "I had to combat bad boy with bad boy, so I let loose Aiden upon you. I knew he would eventually find a way to disband the group, and he did, perfectly, if I might add. Hayden went back to playing football, and you were in another school. Of course, bad boys are an agent of chaos."

Cut to the school burning, and Brayden laughing maniacally. "He's such a little goblin. Thus, your eventual reunion was out of my hands once again. You were already in love, and there is no bigger agent of change than two bad boys in love. We tried a hail mary with a battle royale rigged for you to lose, but since that didn't work last time, we decided to scrap it. While Hayden did leave you, he didn't follow his dreams, and he will eventually be paralyzed. We didn't achieve the desired outcome. We're scrapping this whole timeline and starting from scratch."

Okay, there are a lot of things to unpack from here--including the confirmation that the universe was playing me for a fool. I knew things were fishy the moment someone tossed me in a river inside a duffle bag full of bricks for the third time in a row--but I'll have to leave that aside for the absolute bonker ending to that charade. "We? Who is we? Scrapping the timeline? What the hell are you on?"

The goddess looks up at me, smiling, but now with pain and melancholy. "I told you before. This doesn't have to be the end. This is an opportunity. I'm giving you a choice."

Suddenly, the water bulges outwards, taking the shape of a person. A person I immediately want to punt in the face. A being of long, blue hair and a bad boy smirk. Aiden.

"We are giving you a choice," says Aiden, as if he didn't abra-cadabra his way into a magic realm. What is he doing here? Is he a god, too? Who is the god of punchable gonads? Testiculus?

But he's not alone, tens, no, hundreds of other bulges come from the water, and I can't believe my eyes.

Bad boys, all of them, as far as the eye can see, from different shapes and sizes, races and colors, even a few genders thrown in there. A cacophony of testosterone and weirdness, all staring at me.

"Ayden, son of Adam," says the goddess, "may I formally present to you Aiden Prime, leader of the Committee of Dens?"