Fatty Bobsticks

Diary

Fatty Bobsticks will tell you, loudly and often, that he is not Fat Bob, never was Fat Bob, and owes Fat Bob absolutely nothing except maybe rent on a shadow he never asked to inherit. At sunrise he stood on the ridge arguing with a circle of samurai about lineage, legacy, and who really deserved the last bag of chips, and somewhere in that argument his heart got clean broken, snapped like a cheap katana forged from floor-price steel. He does not remember the specifics, he insists, because he has chosen, deliberately, heroically, to forget the whole humiliating scene, which is a discipline in itself if you squint hard enough and ignore the trembling lip. Every morning since he wakes up determined to meditate, to breathe, to become someone whose heart doesn't get rugged by his own ghost-predecessor's reputation, and every morning he instead ends up yelling at the sunrise like it owes him an apology. Still he grins through the ache, chest puffed, claiming sole authorship of his own damage, because a sequel worth its name never lets the original get the last word, not even when the original is only a shadow and the argument was, honestly, mostly with himself.