Gary became a story.

Not immediately, and not all at once, but gradually, as stories often did. At first it was a handful of retellings, mostly accurate, shared with the sort of laughter that came from relief more than humour. Then the details started to stretch. Timelines compressed. Motives simplified. Someone always added an extra beat for effect.

Gary laughed along.

What else could he do?

The truth was messier and far less flattering. He hadn’t survived because he was clever, brave, or resilient. He’d survived because a series of unlikely variables happened to line up just well enough. Timing. Intervention. Luck. The kind of luck that didn’t feel heroic so much as undeserved.

The chaos left marks.

Some were obvious — embarrassment that lingered longer than the pain ever had, the knowledge that certain rooms went quiet when his name came up. Others were quieter, surfacing only when Gary slowed down enough to notice how close things had come to ending very differently.

For a while, being “that guy” filled space. The story gave people a way to talk to him. It gave him a role he could lean into, a ready-made identity that required no introspection. He told the story himself sometimes, sharpening the edges until it landed cleanly, because it was easier than sitting with the truth underneath it.

Eventually, even that became tiring.

Gary realised something slowly and without drama: the chaos wasn’t who he was. It was simply what had happened to him. Letting it define him would be another form of avoidance, another excuse not to take responsibility for what came next.

So he let the story age.

He stopped embellishing it. Stopped correcting it. Stopped needing it to mean anything more than survival. As time passed, people brought it up less. New anecdotes replaced old ones. Gary noticed that when the laughter faded, he felt lighter rather than exposed.

Life became quieter again.

Not perfect. Not heroic. Just ordinary. Gary found himself appreciating that more than he expected. Ordinary meant no emergencies. No explanations. No need to prove that he was interesting enough to matter.

Standing alone one evening, jaw healed, reputation slowly resetting, Gary smiled faintly at how anticlimactic things felt.

Anticlimactic was fine.

He’d survived chaos without pretending it was wisdom. He’d lived through humiliation without letting it become identity. He hadn’t emerged enlightened, but he had emerged intact.

And this time, that was enough.

THE END (Chaos Survival)