Chapter Text
There was something categorically off about him.
He knew it. Most people knew it, in fact. At least he thought they did. Deep down in their chests, something must have told them that there was something wrong with him. A bone-deep sort of knowing.
Sometimes, spotting the odd one out wasn’t a matter of knowing but feeling. It was old instinct driven by the days of hunting-gathering, the kind that deer had when approaching a still lake of water. They couldn’t see the brain-eating amoeba that lurked beneath the surface, but they knew instinctively it was there. Sometimes, living things could just sense when something was wrong.
He never did anything to disprove it either. Why would he bother?
He grew up alone. He made no friends, no connections and had a total of zero interactions per day with the busy world around him. The rebellion’s leaders were too busy to bother him about it, and the few times they tried to reach out, he didn’t reciprocate. Nor did he join the scavenging groups or the assault teams or the techies that lived in the lab twenty four hours a day, every day. They never tried to get him to do anything either, which felt a little like they knew how much of a nothing he was and knew it couldn’t be changed, and feared that he might spread it to the others if he existed in their close presences for too long.
Each day was the same. He woke up, had no event of importance happen, and went to sleep. He did nothing, said nothing and contributed to nothing. He simply existed. It was an unsmiling, uninterested, intangible existence, worthless and impermanent, and he liked it that way as much as he could like anything, so: not at all. It wasn’t even as if nobody had been kind to him in his life to make him that way. The most anyone had done for him was a lot, in fact, and it still felt like nothing.
Everything felt like nothing.
It was a parasitical kind of living, which was to say it was just the most basic level of survival. There was a freedom in it, in having to do nothing to keep being alive, but it wasn’t a freedom he cared about or even acknowledged. He would have to care to acknowledge it, which he didn’t, because he didn’t care about anything. He didn’t slack off out of laziness or depression. He wasn’t entitled and wasn’t spoiled. He just didn’t feel enough to do anything else. It seemed a little like the world owed him something at times, but he never knew what it was, and didn’t try to find out.
He grew up at some point, as all living things had to. If he’d somehow had it his way, he wouldn’t have because it just seemed like it was another thing happening that didn’t really appear as though it needed to happen, but that was something out of his control.
Years passed in the rebellion where he simply ghosted along the sidewalk of life, and he grew from being a blank-faced, off-putting child and turned into a blank-faced, off-putting teenager and to what would probably eventually be a blank-faced, off-putting adult in a year or so. He didn’t care about that either. Average looks, average intelligence, and something probably incredibly wrong with him that was not wrong with anyone else. It was a unique wrongness that never allowed him to relate to any other he had ever met and most likely would ever meet.
The other children had avoided him like the plague when he was little. He imagined it was a little like kittens getting scared of an odd-looking, wrong-footed reflection in the mirror, a flipped canvas of themselves. He was only part of what they were in whole and they could tell. He had never learned to be as they were. Had never wanted to do anything they did, which again, was a lot: running and howling and playing, little gambolling wolf cubs, tumbling and yipping and falling over each other like stupid ignorant puppies in a pile.
Meanwhile, he had found a dog once, which he had cooked and eaten and forgotten about in the span of half an hour. He stayed by himself, reading, watching the wall and sleeping in interchanging hours. It was better to be alone than with people, mostly because people always sensed that wrongness in him and stayed away to protect their peace.
As a teenager, he continued to feel nothing and do nothing, just as he had the past seventeen years. A parasite, living off the charity of others. At that point, he thought that the only reason why the rebellion kept him was because he didn’t eat very much and wasn’t any sort of trouble simply because to cause trouble you had to want it, which he didn’t, because he wanted nothing. It was inherent to who he was.
What a colorless existence. What a pointless one. What a fitting existence for something so inhumane it lacked a name. Even bad things had names, which just went to show that he was so nothing that even morality simply slid off his back like an oil slick. It was the sort of thing people only felt guilty for if they felt anything at all. He was nothing, and it wasn’t in a self-deprecating way.
It was all just nothing in his world.
Then, one day, Jacob came back.
Jacob wasn’t alone.
“Hyuna,” the newcomer said, plopping down next to him like she owned the bench he was sitting at, which she didn’t and he knew she didn’t because he had never seen her before in his life, and he had spent his whole life here. She had long silky brown hair and a jumpsuit on and a certain look to her he couldn’t immediately place, not that he particularly cared. He paid her greeting no mind and took a placid bite of his food. Sometimes new humans did this until their instincts kicked in and they finally realised he was nothing. Then they’d leave to find something. It took a few of them a bit longer than thirty minutes, but none ever lasted a full hour.
Her eyes studied him, blinking and oddly alert, a strange overbright alertness that was still cradled by a lazy big-cat sort of laxness. It was different from the hair-trigger impulses some in the rebellion developed after running into too many of the segyein. This was something long and searching, the kind that came from knowing there was danger, knowing it was close-by, and knowing when exactly it would arrive, thus also knowing there was nothing to fear in the present. She said, again, “Hyuna. That’s my name. What’s yours?”
He said nothing. Even if he had a name, he would have still remained silent. She leaned in again like his silence didn’t matter, nudging, co-conspiratorial. “Come on, I’m friendly. Maybe a little too much. But I swear I don’t bite!” Then she paused like she was waiting for a response that never came. She continued to get nothing for her efforts. Maybe even less than nothing, because if he could be something even less and more absent than nothing, he would be. Not a faraway dying star, but the blackness that lasted inside a black hole.
Still, she kept speaking, loud and cheerful and bright, bright, bright. Not the sun, but a distant cousin. “Okay, you can tell me if you think I’m too noisy if you want. Everyone thinks that, and they still warm up to me eventually. Because everyone likes me.” She winked, a bit of her hair falling from where it was previously tucked behind her ear. It looked stupid, that one bang just hanging there like a limp worm. He said nothing and took another bite of his food.
She didn’t give up yet. She leaned in so her face was beneath his and he couldn’t see anything but her, zoomed into the dimple by her cheek and the perfect cover-up of her eyebags. If her hair hadn’t been pinned up in a claw clip, it would have fallen off her shoulders and into his canned mashed potatoes. She was still smiling like his silence didn’t bother her, though. “Hey, I’ll get you to talk eventually. You might as well give up now. You play the silent game a lot, huh? I used to do that too, with the other kids. Good for peace and quiet. You look like a person who likes peace and quiet. But maybe you’ve had a bit too much of it by now?”
He wasn’t capable of annoyance or irritation. He just reached under her to move his tray a few inches to the left and moved along with it. Then he continued to eat. It was a move that always earned what he interpreted as annoyance, or scorn, or disbelief that their attempts to connect weren’t being reciprocated.
She just laughed uproariously instead, pounding her fist so hard into the table his orange juice spilled into the mash. “You’re a riot! Sassy and honest, I like you. I always thought we needed more of that in the world,” she grinned, leaning in again. This close, he could smell something bitter and vaguely smoky on her. “I’ll get you to talk if it’s the last thing I do. Swear on it,” and she held out her pinky. He simply stared at it, ignoring her smile, and it went on for a minute. Then two, then five, and then ten. Then Isaac came, scowling at her and staring at him, and took her wrist, saying something about Jacob asking for her. She went with him, but she blatantly ignored him as she was pulled up, her eyes firmly fixed on her target. “Ahh, I have to go now, so you win this round. But I’ll see you around, okay? Talk tomorrow!!”
She looked like she was waiting for a response. She looked like she would have waited forever for one. Then Isaac tugged impatiently at her wrist and she was up, flowing after him like water, gone. He knew what would happen next. Someone would warn her about him and then she would never show up again, at least not so close. He felt nothing about it and brought a spoon of sickly-sour mashed potato to his lips.
The lunch hour for his wing ended and he glanced up at the clock. She had lasted an hour, though. Just over a minute, in fact.
He swallowed the orange-infused mash. It was bad.