Work Text:
First, he adds you on LinkedIn.
That’s normal, you suppose. You are working together. Sort of.
But it feels significant somehow. Like a beginning.
You remember the day you met him. The way his hair stuck up in all directions; the tiny printed volleyballs on his tie. How his eyes had widened slightly when they met yours.
He tells awful jokes.
You try to ignore him. Small talk has never been your strength.
He replies to your emails with exclamation points and kaomojis, and when he smiles across the table at you in meetings your spine tingles. Maybe you’re not eating enough salt.
He’s young, maybe a bit older than you. He tries to act confident, but you can see through it. See through the bravado and showmanship to the anxiety beneath. The burning desire to prove himself—to be good, better, enough.
It’s not a feeling you can relate to. You’ve always been enough for your own standards.
But there’s something about it—about him. Something infectious. Like that drive, that ambition is catching, flowing out of him in small airborne particles that find their way under your skin, settling into your bloodstream and permeating your core. A kindling ember, somewhere in your centre. A desire to be…something. What, you’re not sure yet.
His persona may be fabricated, but his passion is not. His enthusiasm for the work—your work—is unrivalled. He wants this to succeed. Wants to inspire, to connect. To make an impact.
A thrill of excitement runs through you when he talks about the project—this sport, his passion—with such fervour. He draws you into his dream, fills you with purpose. You feel the spark igniting within you: particles increasing in speed, thermal energy pulsing in your veins.
He burns, and you burn with him.
You don’t like presenting very much—don’t like speaking in front of strangers. You’ve never felt the need to justify yourself or your decisions. But you do understand what it means to be part of a team. To do your best—not just to appease your own standards—but to help others achieve their goals, too. Even if it has little bearing on your own self-worth, you’re proud to stand up and play your part in the game.
Your work is good, and there’s nothing quite like seeing the recognition dawn on someone else’s face when they realise the genius of your creations. When they see the strategy laid out before them—the pieces of the puzzle falling into place.
He isn’t looking at the presentation, though. He’s looking at you.
He’s looking at you, and there’s this dopey, star-struck kind of look on his face. Like you’re not quite real. Or like you’re the first real thing he’s ever seen.
All your life, people have looked at you like that. You’ve never understood it.
People have said your eyes are pretty, your hair is soft, your clothes are sexy.
You don’t think about such things.
You’re not interested in other people’s opinions.
It doesn’t mean you’re not interested at all, though.
Someone else is talking now, but he’s still looking at you.
The flame inside of you flickers.
You look back.
You’ve learnt to wield multiple languages, selecting the right code for the right project and bringing digital landscapes to life with the tips of your fingers. Your world is composed of the glare of a screen, coloured lines of text on a black background. The sound of a mechanical keyboard, clicking away late into the night. Commits, pull requests, deployments. You can communicate in ones and zeroes, strings of letters and symbols, words if absolutely necessary. Your language transcends borders, cultures, speech. It is universal. The language of the internet—an ineffable cyberspace, infinite in its possibilities.
But he speaks a language you’ve never learned. He speaks with a shaky laugh, with his eyes, with the awkwardness of his body—all lanky limbs and expressive eyebrows.
You can’t interpret him, can’t parse the meaning from his movements. You don’t know when a look is just a look, or when it means something more. You’ve never been very good at reading between the lines.
You so want to understand.
The fire inside you grows, a controlled burn simmering below the surface.
There’s still time to put it out, to extinguish it before it overwhelms you.
You choose to let it burn.
Your curiosity has always gotten the better of you.
Familiarity isn’t enough. You need to absorb things—to understand them. You look at the world—its problems, its oddities, its opportunities—and you want to know it all. To study it. To pull it apart and piece it back together again. To see what can be left out, and what can be repurposed from the remains.
They say it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. You wonder how many hours you have left. What you can spend them on.
Your life is finite, but the world is infinite.
When you sit at your desk, staring into the screen, you can feel the lines of potential stretching out of you, extending into the ether. There is more, so much more that can be done. More that can be learned. You ache to know it all.
You ache to know him most of all.
You’ve seen him energised and full of hope, and now you’ve seen him dejected and hollow. You think you’d do anything to build him back up again.
You make a silent promise. You hope you can keep it.
You work harder than ever to make sure you do.
A forest fire rages beneath your skin. Blazing.
You wonder if it will incinerate you completely.
You wonder if he’s on fire, too.
Every day you discover something new.
Your mind stretches and expands to take in each new datapoint, to catalogue each discovery.
He is, without a doubt, your most fascinating subject of enquiry.
The two of you speak a language all of your own. One you never could have learned independently. One that had to be created from scratch, co-authored by curious minds and eager hearts.
You find that same infinite feeling in the vastness of his eyes; the brightness of his smile. When he laughs and slides his fingers through your hair, you feel the world opening up at your feet.
You know you won’t ever master him. Won’t ever know him fully.
It doesn’t matter.
You’ll spend your life trying.
The curiosity flows through you like lava. Molten and unstoppable, leaving a changed earth in its wake.
He’s changed you, too.
You find that you don’t really mind.