Chapter Text
'Twas a dark and stormy night, and on this midnight dreary no soul dared to wander the streets lest they'd be struck by a lightning bolt. Most beings known as humans were fast asleep, awaiting for the moment their respective alarms would go off and they'd need to hurry to work or school or some other meeting of great importance, but one sat awake, staring at their laptop screen. Their eyes of green on a brown base, hazel it was apparently called, reflected the bright blues, looking more blue on occasion, as they scanned the screen in front of them. Their large headphones blasted the oh so familiar opening of the show the person was watching to which they hummed along, perhaps a bit louder than they thought they were.
His name was [redacted] or "Red" like some people would call him jokingly due to his reluctance towards speaking, which reminded many of a beloved game character. Though his red hair might've also had something to do with the fact. Red was the type of person who seemingly had no emotion at all, always with a neutral face, that made others feel a little nervous around him, but deep inside he was a kind person with love for mischief and pranks. It wasn't known why exactly he preferred to stay silent, but there were many theories about it. Some believed that he was embarrassed of the way he sounded, others that he was mute, some thought that he just didn't have the mental capacity to be able to speak at all, among many other guesses.
Naturally, these guesses were way off the mark and over complicated things, and the truth was the simplest thing ever.
Red merely felt no need to talk, he usually had nothing to add to the conversation, which in most parts appeared to be of mundane surface level things, like the weather or where someone bought something from. And he often couldn't understand the way these people worked, why would they speak in these odd codes instead of just stating how they truly felt or if they wanted something to be done. "It's supposed to be sunny all day", just wasn't an effective way to tell someone that you wanted them to put the laundry out to dry. If anything, it just sounded like a "If you go out, make sure to use sunscreen or a hat so you don't get burnt, and hydrate" or possibly "It's too pretty to stay indoors all day, you should go outside for a bit", and in some cases, it meant exactly that. So… what the fuck. How was one supposed to figure out which meaning it was supposed to be? From the tone? Most people Red knew didn't actually use their tones to change the meaning of the coded message and then proceeded to get angry when the other person didn't understand what they meant. It was frustrating.
"It's impolite to ask someone to do something", his grandmother would say, but this just made it all the more confusing. If someone is expected to take part in the upkeep of the house, why would asking them to do their part be considered rude and impolite?
And then there was the way everything was timed. Everyone was expected to go to sleep around nine or ten pm and then wake up at some early hour of four to six to go to a workplace or a school and stay there for the next consecutive eight hours and if you weren't the type of person to whom this day schedule worked, you were ostracised for it. Even if following this tempo negatively affects your health.
Red was one of these people, people who weren't designed to be awake during the day. It was part of human evolution to have some people who were like this, to stay awake and watch over the rest, ready to defend them would there be a threat or to wake the rest so they may escape. And now these people were being looked down upon, for existing, for doing the thing evolution had made them to do. It didn't help that Red was also a creative type.
Creativity meant that the person is more likely to take risks, to do things in a new way that could benefit the whole group. But there was also always the possibility of these risks coming back to bite the person. And this scares humans. The risk that comes with new, untested, unknown things. Humans consume things that creative people do on a daily basis without a second thought, all the while looking down on those who create. Telling them to "get a real job" when what they mean is "do manual labour that I can see being stressful and tiring", never realising that creating new things is still in a way manual labour and that many creative people suffer from various aches in their bodies, and are exhausted and stressed out due to how much energy creating actually requires.
And just like so many creative people before him, Red came to live by his own rules, following the internal clock he had, interacting with only very few people, most of whom were also creative, and when asked what he did for a living, he'd vaguely answer with "Night shift". His days, or.. nights rather, were spent with studying various things to better his craft, and meticulously drawing, and redrawing, the story that'd end up being consumed by the day shifters in a mere hour or so depending on the speed one read through it. The story was… inconventional, to say the least, just something that he'd started to work on during his years at university to cope with the existential terror and trauma that he had been living with up until that point, and it divided the readers, like all works do. Some loved it, others hated it and many, many tried to force him into making their headcanons true.
X character had to be into Y and they had to have hot and steamy sex every night, Z had to be deep down a bad person, and so forth. Weirdly many also wanted him to add a romance subplot and were very… forceful about it. He'd stopped checking reviews long ago because of that. Mainly because the way these people seemed to view romance was very inflated Hollywood styled "romance" which was just lust with no actually interesting dynamics, just a man and a woman who happened to meet because of circumstances and because they were a man and a woman they obviously were attracted to one another despite of never even having a conversation longer than two words. Unrealistic and boring. Not that the samesex relationship wanting readers were any better, for many it wasn't enough that there were obviously tender feelings and trust, unless the characters kissed and had sex it clearly wasn't romance and thus it was queer baiting.
Perhaps it was because he himself couldn't feel any attraction towards someone he didn't know well enough, but he always found the romance subplots unnecessary and unnervingly uncomfortable to look at, even more so when he'd realised that they were added in because… they made the characters feel relatable to some people…? It was such a weird thing to learn about, that someone would see a character and need to relate to them on the level of seeing themselves on that particular character and not just on the level of "Oh this character is cool, I'd love to hang out with them", and that to some people seeing character have sex is that one thing they can use to relate to them. It felt… dehumanising in a way. Like these people looked at everyone and kept rating them on some arbitrary scale of how human the person is based in whether or not they had sex and then on top of it had another scale that was for how likely the person was to want to fuck the person they saw.
Then again… it wasn't like Red had ever truly felt like a human. He hadn't been treated as one in a very long time.
The phone that had been resting on the bed next to the laptop lit up, showing that one of his rare friends had sent a message to him. Red glanced at it briefly as he paused the episode he had been watching. It was C[redacted]. Immediately, Red picked the thing up, pressing his right thumb against the fingerprint scanner. And with a couple of sweeps, he had discord open.
>I just got out of work and guess what?
<You're exhausted and yearn for oblivion?
>lmao no
>I got a Chopper plushie
<O
> [picture of a small Chopper plushie]
<Cute
>RIGHT???
>so anyway what are you doing?
<Rewatching One Piece while I'm taking a break, atm on episode 325
>I had to look it up
>fuck Black Beard
<He doesn't deserve the title nor to be fucked
>my bad
>I wish Teach a very "starve to death on a remote island"
<That's more like it
A lightning strike illuminated the room briefly, making Red shudder, he hated storms with passion. They were too bright which hurt his eyes, and too loud which made his ears hurt. He'd also grown up in the countryside where a lightning storm, if it were to hit any electrical wiring, could potentially destroy all of the electronics that were plugged in. But in the town where he now resided, it shouldn't be a problem of any kind. He looked back at the phone screen, where new messages were appearing.
< Aa, sorry, I got distracted. There's a storm in my area.
> are you okay?
< Yeah, I'm wearing headphones so it's not as ba
Another lightning struck, but this time Red had no time to be startled as his laptop started to flash in different colours before settling into a blue. Panicked, the young man took a hold of the thing. "NO! NOT THE BLUE SCREEN OF DEA-", he didn't have the chance to say more as he was claimed by darkness.