Chapter Text
On a warm day of September 2022, as the golden sunset light invades the bedroom from the simple glazing windows setting the scene in a softer atmosphere, two young boys are facing each other. Their shadows mirror each other in a harmonious mix of resemblances and differences. One has long hair, the other has short hair. One is wearing a simple gray shirt when the other still has a heavy leather jacket on. But both have this mesmerizing aura while being completely mesmerized by the other. Their juvenile faces are stoic, frozen, all attention captivated by the other’s features.
A new ecosystem coming to life.
Lovers to be.
Soulmates finding each other.
Then, slowly, the second one raises his hand to the other’s face, soon to be mimicked by the first one, from the cloth to the skin. Their fingers’ print cataloging every pore, curve and hair present on their epiderm. The first one’s hand ends up around the second one’s neck, no pressure is used, no threat is meant, just pulse checking. Anchoring this moment in reality by making sure they are both very much alive to live it.
If you’re observant, you’ll notice that another difference counters their symbiosis. The first one’s sight isn’t working as the second one’s. While his companion’s gaze follows his own hand in their ritual, his is stuck into space, looking at something that isn’t in the same physical plane as they are. Then, their liturgy takes on its full meaning.
This day is the first day of many more for those two found souls, days where their connection evolves to its full potential until it gets brutally terminated in a matter of seconds.
Anawin couldn’t feel more fulfilled than he has been those past few weeks.
First, he found a way to pay for this prestigious university that someone like him shouldn’t even be able to fantasize about. His dream of becoming a writer, creating his own universe made of ink and paper to make other people dream with him, is finally within reach. All he had to do now is work on it while following his teachers advice and critics. How hard could it get when you’re passionate about it like he is?
Then, the mysterious boy, always silent, always at the back of the class, always going around with his bulky, noisy machine, finally noticed him. Thanks to his character building teacher and her complex duet assignment, he had finally been able to speak to this beautifully broken looking classmate. Soon, the boy who had only been obsessed with writing since primary school realizes that learning about the other boy is far more interesting than learning about how to write a complex but logical psychotic character.
Learning about his name, Kheyn. He was born to write stories but not to live them.
Learning about Perkin Brailler and braille in general. His sight might only allow him to discern things within a 5-cm distance, but his world was still colorful. And Anawin wasn’t troubled about having to stand in those five little centimeters to be seen by the shyly handsome boy.
Learning about his mind and the imagination it holds. The complex world building he already has all figured out in his fascinating brain, a mix of modernity and technology with Victorian fashion style.
Learning about his interests, however unsettling they may be. “How can known historical events help us understand our future?” or “how quantum science, based on theoretical facts, can only mean that anything you witness in your everyday life can have a philosophical aspect?” are typical questions his lovely cryptic boy can spend days debates about without it getting boring.
Learning about love and cherishing someone while being loved and cherished in return. Their relationship has never been a normal one. Both of them can be qualified as “misfit”, one by his appearance and behaviors, the other by his social status and his obsession. But “not normal” doesn’t mean “nonfunctional.” They quickly start living together in this small and seedy apartment, waking up together, going to class together, doing assignments together, dreaming together and, obviously, writing together.
Learning about writing, because what was just supposed to be a first-year assignment became so much more for the both of them. The psychotic character became Damon, a sociopath serial killer who considered his murders as works of art. This one was Kheyn’s child, the perfectly charismatic killer that can lure any of his victims where he needs them to be. To counterbalance this human shaped monster, they needed the ideal knight in shining armor, the representative of good morals. That’s why Anawin created the negative version of the villain, the heroic police investigator, Finn.
It became a game between them. Kheyn would create the perfect murder, using a type of art as reference and Anawin would spend days figuring it out as if he’s really Finn so he could write the inspector’s side of the story. Their everyday life has also been affected by this weird roleplaying as the two lovers often debate about philosophical and societal subjects. The fully sighted one gets more and more radical about his opinion of what’s good and what’s bad, contrasting his personal ideology until the shades of gray became only black and white flat tints. As for the other one, his answers are getting more and more worrisome, as if his character was slowly rubbing off on him.
Anawin never paid attention to those changes, though. He was too invested in their worldbuilding to actually realize that this imaginary world was overflowing into the real world through their own behaviors. Maybe he should have been more attentive. Maybe he should have realized the toxicity overrunning their little space. Maybe he would have seen it coming.
There is one last thing that he learned thanks to Kheyn. The only thing he wants to unlearn: heartbreak. This feeling of a freezing cold dagger getting stab into your heart, slowly, until your blood stops, blood cells frozen by the temperature drop, organs getting heavier one by one like icebergs falling into the salted sea creating destructing waves crashing over any form of thoughts that could be formed in the wounded mind of the victim. The time stopping at the moment the harmful words leaves the other’s sharp mouth. A whole world of memories and projections getting reduced to nothing.
And for what? Because he decided that they weren’t healthy for each other? Based on what proofs? Him who always said that any theory or idea needs at least a stable three pillars base to be implemented to a story in order to avoid plot holes and storyline anomalies. He wasn’t able to give one single justified reason for their break up. Has he always been all talking, no acting? Has their whole story been as artificial as the one they spent days and weeks writing together?
If Kheyn had given him a reasonable answer, maybe Anawin would have understood why this was happening, maybe he would have been able to heal, to move on. But, he left with everything and left nothing in his wake. Letting his former lover stuck in time and space, stuck physically and mentally in a depressive stasis.
Months passed, where the aspiring writer had stopped living, only surviving. Thankfully, his only friend helped him to not lose himself entirely to depression. But the harm has been done. His attendance and grades dropped as the mysterious boy who stole all his attention had vanished not only from his apartment but from the whole university too. He didn’t feel strong enough to work on their world by himself. It was too painful. He had only become a shadow of his past self.
Then came the creditors. The literature student, too lost in his artificial paradise, forgot that he actually needed to repay the shady people who paid for the studies he wasn’t even fighting for anymore. Fear made him feel alive again for the first time in months but more as a prey than has a human being. Again, Koh was his savior, helping him find some small job to pay just enough so he wouldn’t get too badly hurt by the thug the organization was sending at his doorstep every few weeks.
What really brought him back to life was that evening where Koh talked about a new web novel getting viral in the whole country. The title only made his heart beat get back to a normal rhythm: “Finn & Damon”. Those two western sounding names couldn’t be put together only by a coincidence. This has to be Kheyn’s doing. And it was.
Anawin became obsessed again. His former lover had refined the world they had outlined together. Creating side characters such as a police partner for Finn or a legist helping the inspector in his investigations. Damon is still a lone wolf in this version, but his use of human anatomy to create his “art” became more precise and disturbingly accurate as if Kheyn had become a medicine student since he left.
Anawin wasn’t angry at Kheyn for continuing to make their world run, not now that they are separated, not when he couldn’t. But he did start to be anger driven, an anger not aimed at a real person, but at a fictional one: Damon. Shifting his hatred of Kheyn’s actions to Damon’s behaviors and character development. This is a personal matter to him, but no one could ever understand, like no one ever knew about his former relationship and how it sucked out his soul and zest of life out of him.
When Anawin comes back to reality, he can't help but have a little shy smile on his lips. His right hand is still cupping the strange man’s face. He takes the dog tag in his free hand, reading it.
How unbelievable it may sound, the young writer realizes that this is really Damon, the fictional character, in the flesh and not the writer. This man could clearly see well enough to stab people with precision and wasn’t talking using enigmatic sentence structures. His aura is also different, so bright but not a warm brightness, it’s a cold, freezing pure light, the one reflecting on a blinding white and threatening iceberg to hide all the monstrosity it’s capable of under the water. This is the opposite of warm golden sunset lights. In no universe this could be the same person.
Anawin also read the sentence written in braille. “I’m not a demon”. This message had to have been written specially for him. He finally realizes all the weight of the words he put in the manuscript those past weeks.
There, laying on the floor, a fragile body, harmless if you didn’t know what it had just done minutes ago. Anawin is the one in control in this situation. His choice will have an impact on the following events, whatever it may be. The ball is in the writer's court. The character is at his mercy.
But, the decision-maker is suffering from a blank page syndrome right now. Because this is the character he has been dismembering those past few days, fighting for who he really is. And someone like Anawin, an empty shell, could only dream to feel so confident and proud to know who he is.
So the decision is taken. Nothing would be done. Fate would be the only judge of what happened, happens and will happen.
Anawin slowly let go of the dog tag, then let his eyes linger an instant on the man’s face before taking his right hand away. Still stuck under a slow-motion spell, he stands up.
His movement is stopped by a hand gripping his wrist, strongly, not enough to be painful, just enough to maintain the boy in place.
“You’re leaving me here, curious boy?” The voice came from Damon, who is staring at him with half opened, tired eyes. His voice intonation is different, less frenetic and crazy.
This change stuns Anawin even more.
Damon’s stare is normal and interrogative, waiting patiently for the other’s answer. He still doesn’t look like Kheyn’s, to clear for that, but he doesn’t look like he’s going to actually kill him this time. Judging that the danger is out of the picture now, the younger boy makes the decision to take his arm back from the other’s grip without getting away. He stays there, close to the lying man, his mind lost in the other’s eyes.
After a while, the holy silence between them is finally broken.
“Don’t you want answers about what’s happening?” Damon asks.
Anawin nods slowly. To this answer, the older man straightens up on his elbows, to ease his already painful neck. All the muscles in his body are sore, and it shows in his jerky movements. A keen glow of intelligence is shining in his eyes. It’s like a third person is inhabiting this familiar body, there was Kheyn a long time ago, there was Damon just a moment ago and this is someone new.
As if understanding the questioning taking place in the younger boy’s mind, he speaks up again. “I still haven’t found myself back completely but this is enough for me to have a mind clear enough. Something is happening, I don’t have all the ins and outs yet, but I need this to stop. Would you help me, writer boy?”
“Damon” looks at him with big round pleading eyes. But Anawin could clearly see that there was no real innocence or vulnerability in them. Just like that, the ball had changed court, but this court’s owner had the courtesy to fake a semblance of equality of force between them.
But how could there be any equity with those hypnotic eyes? The eyes of the man he used to love, the ones which were filled with craziness and murder just minutes ago, the ones which look so old right now, holding humanity’s timeless knowledge. Anawin has to take the time to think about the proposition, even if it's a vain reflection. He has to do it for his own ego. Making a choice when there is no choice to make.
The other stare back at him, not putting any pressure on the young boy’s thinking, just respecting the calculation of the wannabe writer, like time doesn't mean anything to him. Two souls stuck in time, so close to each other, but worlds away at the same time.
In a normal, mundane situation, the logic of anyone with a working survival instinct would scream to them to reject the proposition and run away as fast as possible. But this isn’t a normal situation, and this isn’t a mundane person making the proposition. This situation shouldn’t even be possible. It shouldn’t even be part of reality.
His mind should reject this possibility altogether and make him decline the offer.
Maybe he has lost it, because Anawin couldn’t see how he could say no to him.