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“Neil. Neil Josten. Neil. So, when do you turn 20?” Neil stares at himself in the mirror, alternating questions about his newest personality with simply repeating the name, his voice pitched just a shade above a whisper.
Normally his mother would be the one asking the questions and calling his name, correcting him with heavy hands when he got one wrong or responded to an old name. He hated picking up the new identities, forgetting whom he had been days or hours before and learning to be an entirely new person in an absurdly short time, but then again, he hadn’t been much of a fan of any part of their life. The only good thing about running from his father had been his mother having his back and keeping him alive. Neil can’t help but wish she’d been a little better at doing so for herself.
“Mr. Josten. Neil. So where are your parents?” Neil feels tears sting his eyes at the thought of his parents; of anger or sorrow he’s not quite certain, but he knows people will ask. He chokes back nausea and ignores the phantom smell of gasoline to parrot out a response. “They’re out of town.”
His mother would smack him for the way his voice wavers, but if she were there to correct him, his voice would hold strong. There had been moments during their time on the run when he’d resented his mother, more times like that than times where he’d appreciated her. But at the end of the day he’d always known he needed her. Now that she’s not with him, he’s struck with the realization of exactly how much.
Neil’s hands slip from their tense grip on the side of the sink, the fight he’d been clinging to leaving him in a heartbeat. He drops his eyes from the stranger looking at him in the mirror, from the brown eyes that now he has to recognize as his own. He knows he should keep working and memorizing and practicing, but he finds himself unable to raise his gaze again. The bitter tang of failure only adds to his despair as Neil turns away from the dingy bathroom towards the equally unpleasant bedroom.
It’s only a few steps to the bed, but Neil simply leans against the wall and slides down it, shoulders slumping forward to rest his forehead against bent knees. He doesn’t dare risk sobbing, because he needs to be able to hear every set of footsteps that pass his door, to see which ones are too even and pause too long. He thanks the terrible quality of the motel for the fact that it allows every sound from outside Neil’s room to filter in. If he could have his way about it, Neil wouldn’t be staying in a motel, even one as sleezy as this where the staff didn’t think twice about taking cash from him and didn’t ask for an I.D, but it was a necessary risk. He’d needed to dye his hair, and he didn’t dare try and blend into the rest of the world until he’d forgotten his previous life and learned his new one.
Neil tries to distract himself from the burning in his eyes and the scent of death that’s been haunting him for days by planning what he’ll do when he leaves tomorrow. He makes it as far as planning to leave before the sun rises, knowing the office is 24 hours and he can drop his key off with them at any point, before he has to stop and correct himself. If he wants to appear normal, he can’t leave that early, his mother would never have entertained the idea for a second. Leave early, but not so early that you stand out.
His mother. Everything he’s doing to set up his new life he’s learnt from her, and it hurts to have to use that knowledge without her guidance. The tears that have been threatening Neil begin to fall onto his hands. He shifts, leaning his head back and resting it against the wall, sniffing once and swallowing hard in an attempt to prevent himself from properly crying. He doesn’t have the luxury to be able to afford to mourn his own mother’s death, because the man who killed her is still out there and would be more than happy to kill him, too.
He considers counting to fifty in all the languages he can, but the thought of his mother’s murderer burns at the edges of Neil’s despair, transmuting it in the way that only one negative emotion can transform another of its kind. He latches onto that anger and lets it burn through the weight that has dragged him to the ground.
His father had killed his mother, and it pisses Neil off. He’s not even that angry at him for killing her, he’s simply infuriated by the situation itself. They hadn’t been sloppy, they’d been so careful that it wore at them both day and night, yet still his father had caught up with them. It wasn’t right that he’d been able to do so, and it certainly wasn’t anywhere close to fair, not that Neil ever expects “right” or “fair” from life. His father shouldn’t have been able to find them, and his mother shouldn’t have been so damnably stubborn that she’d hidden the fact she was dying until her final moments.
Neil pushes himself off the floor, finding more than enough energy to stand as he internally curses his parents. He doesn’t let his frustration blind him to the world, but he does let it propel him back to the bathroom, where the stains his dye left on the toilet are indistinguishable from those that were there before. He hovers his hands over the edge of the sink before clasping them awkwardly in front of him. There’s too much power in grasping the porcelain and leaning forward, it would put too much confidence in his stance and Neil Josten can’t afford to be confident.
He raises his eyes to the mirror again and sets on correcting his stance, first. The anger had burned off his sorrow for the time being, and now Neil uses cold logic to subdue the anger. Not a healthy way of dealing with the situation, but as he drops shoulders that had moments ago been far too squared and proud to blend in with a crowd, it works. He shifts a few more aspects of his posture, relaxing his jaw slightly but not completely, and adjusting his weight distribution on his feet. This should have been his first step of setting up his new identity, making sure his body language was unconfident but also not skittish.
Neil checks himself in the mirror, and he thinks he’s achieved an acceptable unremarkable pose. That is, until he meets his own eyes. There, he still sees anger at every cruelty that life has dealt him. He closes his eyes and counts to ten, breathing evenly and deeply to try and clear some of his emotions. A little bit of anger is good, it will help him keep moving and wear on him less than the desperation that usually provides that motivation, but too much will make him stand out, and his mother would kick his ass in the afterlife if he got himself caught by doing something as foolish as letting his emotions get out of check.
When he opens his eyes, the brown lenses seem duller, portraying less emotion to the world. He mentally congratulates himself, feeling even more successful when his expression doesn’t flicker in the slightest. He tries out a few expressions, taking care not to look lifeless, but also not to have too interesting a smile. He takes a deep breath and starts the routine of questions again.
“Neil. Neil Josten. Neil. So, when do you turn twenty?” He runs through all the basics multiple times. When is his birthday, where was he born, why did they move. All the questions he can come up with have unremarkable answers. He skirts around the question that had nearly caused him to break down earlier for as long as possible, but he can’t avoid it forever, and the longer he takes to answer it, the longer he’s stuck in a crappy motel room that only has two exits. “Where are your parents?”
Mom’s dead and dad killed her. His expression remains calm, and Neil shrugs. “Out of town. Why? For work.”
He studies his own responses, looking for any flicker of emotion, and then asks himself the questions again. He wishes he had someone to ask him them and test him before it was life or death, discovery or survival out in the real world, but he stops himself before he goes too far with that. Wishes are dangerous, and they never turn out well for people like him. No, he has to keep a tight hold on his desires, live as Neil Josten for as long as he can, and then move on.
When Neil finally stops quizzing himself and settles in for an uneasy few hours of sleep, strap of his duffle heavy on his shoulder and the wall a comforting presence at his back, he knows that he’ll have no trouble convincing the world that his mother and father are both alive, distant due to their busy schedules, but happy and kind enough. Even as he feels a brief brush of pride in himself for acclimatizing to a new identity without his mother, Neil feels the weight of despair settle in his chest again, this time not for his mother, but himself.
This will be his life, now. He’ll be a series of people who bear less and less resemblance to who he actually is, until he becomes someone else entirely. He’ll never actually be able to have a life, any sort of connection, for fear of being discovered. He tries to shake the ominous line of thought, but with nothing more promising to distract himself with, his attempts are in vain. His thoughts trend darker and darker until his depression is indistinguishable from his fatigue, seeping deep into his bones and dragging his eyes shut. Neil tries to think of anything that could make this worth it, of anything that has ever made putting up with life’s injustices worth it, and for a long time he comes up blank. His mind doesn’t even bother providing new premonitions of doom and gloom to him, it simply allows him to sit and feel the weight of his future crushing his veins.
But then he gets one flash of light, one tiny spark that might be able to hold him just out of reach of total despair. The memory of running for fun, of a ball whizzing through the air, and of gratuitous violence committed in the name of “sport”. Despite still not knowing where he’s going to end up, Neil knows he has to go to highschool, now. Because if he goes to highschool, he can play Exy. And if he can play Exy, maybe, just maybe, he has a chance to actually live rather than just surviving.