The Architecture of Not Being Special
Where lost kings learn to wait in line, pay full price, and love without worship.
He wore gold diapers. Now he’s learning about vending machines, rejection, and salted caramel.She chain-smokes bureaucracy, fights bullies with emotional trauma files, and believes in him—just enough to let him fail.
This isn’t the story of how Tutankhamun reclaimed his crown.
This is the story of how he learned to microwave soup.
And maybe, just maybe, stay.
👁🗨
If you’ve ever tried to rebuild your worth from scratch,
If you’ve ever been told you’re no one unless you’re “exceptional,”
If you’ve ever needed a cigarette that wasn’t about nicotine—
This one’s for you.
He didn’t ask to come.
One moment he stood in his gilded chamber, three eunuchs perfuming his wrists with jasmine and a priest dabbing cinnamon oil on his brow. The next—light, snap, wrench—he was yanked through something that tasted like static.
And there she was.
Roz.
Hair like it lost a fight with a socket. Jacket older than some dynasties. Cigarette clenched between her teeth like it owed her money.
“Move,” she barked, not looking at him. “We’re late.”
“For what?” he managed.
“Reality,” she muttered, lighting the cigarette with a Zippo that had probably seen a war.
They landed—no ceremony, no procession—on a cracked sidewalk in some North American nowhere. The sky was the color of wet cement. A dog barked at nothing. A siren wailed and gave up. The air reeked of diesel and despair.
Roz marched. Tut followed, linen sandals sliding against grit.
“No one’s kneeling,” he said, glancing around, genuinely unsettled.
Roz snorted. “You want someone to kiss your feet, Your Majesty? Go stand in traffic. You’ll get all the attention you can handle.”
They passed a man yelling at his phone like it owed him an apology. A woman in scrubs lit a cigarette with trembling hands and stared into nothing. No one bowed. No one looked up.
Tut froze, rattled. “Where are we?”
She stopped mid-stride, turned just enough to flick ash in his direction.
“The future,” she said flatly. “Yours, maybe. If you don’t get yourself flattened first.”
They sat—well, she sat—on a grimy bench outside a hardware store. He hovered beside her like something sacred. She blew smoke sideways, her face unreadable.
“You’ve been taught people exist to serve you,” she said, finally. “Here? Everyone’s serving someone else. Bosses. Apps. Algorithms. Themselves, if they’re lucky.”
“I don’t understand.”
Roz took a long drag. “That’s because you’ve never had to earn a goddamn thing. You wore gold diapers. You had priests telling you the sun rose because you sneezed.”
Tut blinked.
“That true?”
He nodded, a little ashamed.
“Yeah. Sounds exhausting.” She spat into the street. “Out here? You wake up broke, hustle all day, and go to sleep tired enough to cry. No slaves. Just subscriptions.”
A beat.
He looked at her. “I don’t belong here.”
Roz finally turned, really looked at him. Her eyes weren’t cruel. Just unblinking.
“You didn’t belong there either,” she said. “You just had better lighting.”
Tut sat. The concrete bit through the silk of his tunic.
Roz leaned forward, elbows on her knees.
“You had builders, right? Stone, copper, paint, all that tomb bling?”
“Yes,” he said slowly.
“Great. We’ve got contractors. Same con, less eyeliner. They show up late, charge triple, ghost you halfway through. Sound familiar?”
He hesitated. “So they’re just… stealing?”
Roz tilted her head. “Welcome to capitalism. It’s not stealing if you call it a business plan.”
A siren whooped and Dopplered past.
She tapped ash off the end of her cigarette, then lit a second with the dying tip of the first.
“Here’s the thing, King. You’re not special. Not anymore. You’re just a broke guy in a bathrobe. And if you want to build anything, you’re gonna need more than incense and a bloodline. You’ll need permits. Zoning. Maybe a therapist.”
Tut exhaled shakily.
Roz nodded, satisfied.
“That’s your first lesson. Empire-building these days? It’s paperwork, not prophecy. And nobody gives a shit about your sarcophagus unless it comes with parking.”
She stood.
He didn’t.
“Get up,” she said, flicking her spent cigarette onto the pavement. “Lesson two’s about to start.”
“What is it?”
She smiled, but not kindly.
“Customer service.”
And she walked, boots chewing pavement, while behind her the last boy-king of Egypt clutched his robes and tried to keep up.
Tut swirled the cream in his coffee, watching it bloom like clouds on fire. “So I’m supposed to learn humility. And taxes.”
Roz opened her mouth to respond—but the door jingled.
Two men entered. Mid-forties, paint-streaked jeans, the kind of eyes that scanned for weakness and found it even when it wasn’t there.
One of them zeroed in.
“Hey, Halloween’s in October, buddy.”
Tut looked up. “I beg your pardon?”
The guy grinned, elbowed his friend. “Ohhh, sorry—Your Majesty. Didn’t recognize you outside the sarcophagus. You do TikTok cosplay or what?”
The other chimed in. “Maybe it’s a cult. Or a theater thing. Kid’s got drama student written all over him. Looks like an intern at the Luxor.”
Roz didn’t blink. She just sipped.
Tut straightened his back. “I am Tutankhamun, sovereign of Kemet, Lord of the Two Lands, chosen by the gods—”
“Oh my God,” the first guy said.
“He’s in character.”
Roz glanced at Tut.
“You sure you want this one?”
Tut nodded, too proud.
“Yes. I will handle it.”
He stood. “Gentlemen,” he said stiffly. “Your ridicule is misplaced. I come not to perform, but to learn. Your ignorance—”
“Okay, Shakespeare, relax,” one said. “Jesus, what is this, a street play? Someone give him a tip jar.”
The second one leaned toward Roz.
“And what’s your deal, lady? Post-it notes on your coat? What are you, a filing cabinet with menopause?”
Roz set her cup down. Calmly.
“You done?”
The guy blinked. “What?”
She stood. Not fast. Not loud. Just upright, steady, smoking.
“You walk in here smelling like drywall and failed dreams, and you think you’re gonna peacock around a kid who still believes in something? You want to bully him for wearing robes? You wore Ed Hardy in 2009 like it was a personality.”
The first man opened his mouth.
Roz didn’t let him.
“You—what are you, a contractor? Bet you got a truck with fake testicles swinging from the hitch and a girlfriend who thinks being ignored is foreplay. And you?” she pointed at the second guy. “You’ve been dying to be the funny one since tenth grade, but every punchline you throw hits like room-temperature soup.”
People were watching now. Phones lifted, half-recording.
“You want to heckle someone?” she said. ‘“Try heckling your reflection. Or the life you built on discount ego and step-dads who left too soon. But don’t do it in front of me. And sure as shit not in front of my student.”
Tut blinked. “I’m your what?”
Roz turned to him, lit a fresh cigarette off the old one.
“My student,” she said. “Lesson three: some people don’t want to be better. They just want someone to feel smaller than they do. Never volunteer.”
The men stood there, suspended between fake laughter and slow shame.
Roz smiled wide.
“Now why don’t you two go finish your coffee and Google ‘emotional regulation’ before someone with less patience and a bigger trauma file finishes it for you?”
Silence.
Then: a slink toward the exit.
Roz sat again. Sipped.
Tut was still standing, jaw slightly open.
“I was going to say something noble,” he mumbled.
“I know,” Roz said.
“That’s why I didn’t let you.”
He sat.
Across the room, the teenage barista whispered,
“That was sick.”
Roz winked.
“Stick around, kid. I’m just getting started.”
Epilogue: Tut
He stayed. Not because Roz told him to—but because something in him had started to bloom and it didn’t fit inside a sarcophagus.
Tut—now going by “T”—got a job shelving books at the used bookstore with the ghost-paper smell. He lived in the upstairs apartment, learned how to microwave soup, paid rent late but always paid it. He took a pottery class. Fell in love with the wrong person, then the right one, then himself, sort of. On weekends, he wore his old linen robe over the hoodie, just to remember the ridiculousness of taking yourself too seriously.
He didn’t build an empire.
But he did rebuild a broken vending machine that now gave out poems instead of snacks. And once a month, he left a cigarette on the windowsill—unlit, half-crushed, a little prayer in Roz’s language. Just in case.
Epilogue: Roz
Roz didn’t go home. Home was more of a direction anyway.
She took three trains, four naps, stole a soft pretzel, told a tourist his aura looked like expired mayonnaise, and caught a transfer bus driven by a guy named Goose who didn’t ask questions.
And as the city dimmed behind her, she muttered, mostly to herself:
“I think I’m gonna go see Winston.”
She flicked her lighter. No cigarette—just habit.
“Yeah. Winston Churchill. The cigar-smoking bulldog. Not a pug. Not a greyhound. Not an English terrier. He’s a bulldog, or maybe a tank with fur. I like him. Smells like defiance and flatulence. My kind of spiritual advisor.”
She pulled out a notebook, wrote: “See Winston. Bring biscuits. Warn him about time travel.”
Then she looked out the window. The stars were just starting to blink on, like someone was testing them.
Roz grinned.
“History’s a mess,” she said. “But damn if it isn’t entertaining.”
And the bus rolled forward into the dark.
Tut stood in front of the vending machine like it was a minor deity. He’d been staring for three minutes. Buttons. Numbers. Reflections.
“Roz,” he said, “it wants… tribute.”
Roz didn’t look up from her newspaper. “It wants two bucks and your last shred of hope.”
Tut nodded solemnly, pulled a copper coin from a pouch. “I shall offer this. Pure metal. Stolen from Nubian mines and forged in fire.”
He held it up, reverently.
Roz looked now. “Oh no. Don’t—”
Too late. Tut pressed the coin into the snack slot.
The machine blinked. The coin thunked to the bottom tray.
Tut gasped. “It rejected it.”
Roz groaned. “Of course it did. This thing barely accepts American Express.”
He crouched down, whispering to it. “I meant no offense. I bring more. A dried fig. A tear. The tooth of a lion cub, filed smooth.”
Roz stood. “That’s it. You’re cut off. No more mythology until you’ve learned to use exact change.”
Tut turned, wounded. “But it shimmered, Roz. I saw it—”
She grabbed a Snickers from her pocket and tossed it at him. “Here. Eat this and contemplate your divine rejection.”
He bit into it. His face shifted.
“This is… salted caramel?”
Roz lit a cigarette. “Lesson Four: You don’t need sacred rituals. You just need snacks and low expectations.”
Later, they sat on a park bench watching a man yell at a goose. The goose, unsurprisingly, won.
Tut, still chewing the Snickers, asked, “Why do you help people like me?”
Roz didn’t answer right away.
Instead, she pulled a folded paper from her jacket. Unfolded once. Then twice. Then again—way too many folds. It was a flowchart. Bureaucratic hell in crayon.
At the top: “Roz’s Cases—Cycle 12B: Timeline Salvage”
She stared at it, sighed, then shoved it back in her coat.
“Because every now and then, one of you figures it out,” she said softly.
“Figures what out?”
“That no one’s coming. That the world’s held together by duct tape, shared playlists, and people who don’t walk away.”
A beat.
Then Roz stood.
“Anyway, I need to file a Form R-14/Chaos Adjustment. You wanna help me yell at a fax machine?”
Tut blinked. “What’s a fax machine?”
Roz grinned. “God, I missed having someone to disappoint.”
