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Chapter Text

“Nervous Subject” is not a real name, of course, but certain life circumstances have given him memory issues, so he’s unsure if this was a designation given to him by the Beakers, or a mocking nickname other kids in town came up with for a laugh. The scientist couple just calls him ‘subject’ most of the time, but he’s unsure if they’re simply leaving the cruel bit out, for the sake of maintaining some facade of care. He could ask, but he’s never going to. The answer would be deeply inconsequential, anyway, because the Beakers aren’t strangers to lying. 

Either way, he must’ve had an actual name, at some point, but he doesn’t know if he ever remembered it, or if it always collected dust on some birth certificate tucked away in a bookshelf, deeply, deeply unimportant. 

Circe suggested another hypothesis, cradling him in her arms after yet another injection turned out to be more painful than he was told it would be.

“Don’t cry, dear subject,” she stroked his hair. “Don’t call for her. You were taken from her for a reason, you know. She didn’t even give you a name. She didn’t give you a name, let alone a purpose.”

The boy didn’t even realize he was calling out for his mother. He was a child, barely entering teenagehood, so the things he said while in pain were merely instinct, because what else can a child do, when he’s in pain. He can only cry for his mother.

He doesn’t know if Circe was right. She said it like she was stating plain facts, but she tended to do that, when in reality she was presenting theories. He less gives her the benefit of the doubt and more learnt to live with her manner of speech. 

He doesn’t have any memory of his mother calling him by his name, that much is true.

“Mom?”

A little boy peeks out onto the back porch, his stomach grumbling and his hair unbrushed for days. He doesn’t remember his mother ever sitting him down and teaching him how to talk, but she must’ve done that, at some point, because there was no one else who could.

Olive hums in acknowledgement, but doesn’t turn around. She’s lounging in the chair, cigarette between her teeth, looking over their backyard with a wistful bliss. The boy doesn’t approach closer, because, as he learnt, the smoke smells really bad. 

“Will dad come to visit?”

Olive snorts, rocking back a bit.

“He will.”

She doesn’t elaborate, which leaves the boy with an empty feeling in his stomach. Perhaps it’s the hunger. 

“I want to meet him.”

Olive glances back at her son, a small, vulnerable creature, standing awkwardly in the doorway, in the limbo between the safety of the house and the gravestones bathing in the sun. 

“You will, love,” she smiles. “I’m certain of it. More than you know.”

He doesn’t have any memory of his mother calling him by his name, that much is true.

That is, however, mostly because in every memory he has of her mother, she calls him love.

Subject doesn’t remember when the Beakers began allowing him to go outside, but he does remember that his life was divided into halves: before he was let out of the basement, and after it. The sad thing is, though, that nothing much has changed. Only real difference is, instead of twitching and shaking in a cold basement, he started shaking and twitching on a random street. The amount of kindness in his life didn’t increase, either. 

Most people in the town soon realized he is someone who can be easily written off as a freak, and the kids especially understood the potential of a local freak, bullying him relentlessly. He didn’t particularly care. Most human beings on the outside were nothing more than faces, to him, and they never dared getting physical, mostly because if they got close most worried mothers would drag them off, talking about punishments like groundings and taking away their video games. Some even chastised them for their foolishness, telling them he might be contagious. He’s not. He barely listens, though.

One day, he spends several hours getting electrocuted to various degrees, and once he’s dismissed, coldly and uncaringly, he careens out the front door, and the Beakers don’t pay him any mind. The reason they let him out of the basement, after all, is because by now, they ensured he’ll come back. He has nowhere to go, so he always comes back. 

He walks into nowhere, his mind still dizzy, barely registering the blurriness that is the outside world in front of him, but he does see the blue sky, so he follows it like a moth. He ends up by some buildings, which are still just shapes in his line of vision, so he pays them no mind, as his eyes focus in on something green, bushes, in dirt, with weeds suffocating their roots.

The weeds are blooming. 

It’s a parasitic flower, probably, like dandelions growing in a carrot patch, but he doesn’t know anything about gardening, so he leans down, and lets his shaky fingers brush past the leaves, and his skin touches something that is alive, too, that is not cruel metal, so he lets his palm envelop the stem, and he is once more a child picking flowers off gravestones, except this time he’s plucking the killers, because he likes killers, even though he doesn’t know it. His trembling wrist brings the flower to his cheek, and the softness calms him, helps him recover, somewhat, some of its lifeforce absorbing into him, because he is the one that severed this living being’s time on this earth, and reduced it to nothing more than a carcass, to be pressed against his own still alive flesh. 

“You know, you’re not allowed to mess with the flowerbeds.”

He flinches and turns around only because he momentarily forgot he wasn’t the only human being on this planet. 

He looks up at another teenager, with plucky black hair and glasses pushed up on his nose in a way that make his eyes look larger than they probably are. 

Subject doesn’t respond. He’s not sure if he’s even capable of responding, right now, just the thought of speech bringing incredible frustration and pain to the front of his brian, so he just stares up, helplessly. 

“But, I guess you are plucking out the weeds,” the teen squats down, to Subject’s level. “So, good on you for taking care of these bushes.” 

Subject still doesn’t respond. Nobody has interacted with him like this before. He patiently waits for an adult to show up and drag this guy away, with a scolding.

No adult comes. 

“Are you okay, though?” the teen asks.

Subject doesn’t know how to respond. 

Subject shrugs, because the Beakers haven’t taught him how to lie.

The teen stands up and extends a hand to Subject. Subject takes it, because the Beakers haven’t taught him how to say no to prompts, either. 

“I’m Pascal,” says the teen, after pulling Subject to his feet. “What’s your name?”

Subject shrugs. 

“Oh, uh,” Pascal scrunches his eyebrows. “What do people call you, then?”

“Subject,” the teenager pushes out, and he’s still twitching, but he’s holding someone’s hand, now, so it doesn’t waver him off balance as much as it normally would, now.

The place he grew up in was a strange house, and adulthood has only made him regard it as stranger, because he’s still not sure how little boys are supposed to grow up, but he’s guessing not many are supposed to pick flowers that grow out of corpses, and press them between pages of books they don’t have the literacy to read, checking every week to see just how flat and dried up the plants have gotten. 

Many conversations in that house flew over the boy’s head, just like the pigeons he’d gawk at as he was playing outside. Nobody referred to any name, after all, some people simply came by, inquiring about ‘the child’. 

“What the hell do you want with my son?”

“Come on, don’t be like that, we’ve done simple business before, and our request this time is no different–”

“The difference is my son is not a corpse. And you will not be turning him into one, either.”

“And that is not our intention, of course! We are not cruel.”

“You are trying to buy a child off a mother’s hands.”

“No, no, of course not. We simply see how you’re struggling. You know, it’s a lot of responsibility, and with your troubled mind–”

“Don’t talk to me about troubled minds. The only reason you two are not regarded as graverobbers is me.”

“Yes, yes, and we are thankful for that. However, is this really the best environment for a child?”

“And you two would be any better?”

“We are people of science. With us, he could learn about this world, and not simply lag behind in it. You haven’t sent him to school, have you? Can he even read, or write?”

“That is none of your concern.”

“Maybe not. But it could be the concern of social services.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“We would never. But, you have to understand, you don’t have the best reputation, do you? A nosy neighbor may worry, seeing a little boy playing in a graveyard all day.”

“And I will deal with that.”

“You can’t run from it forever, Olive. The life you lead may be comfortable for you, but is it not dangerous for the boy?”

“And your lives are safer?”

“Yes.”

“Bullshit.”

“We would never harm him! We have his best interests in mind. I do not mean any offense, but his home situation, as it stands, is a father nowhere to be seen, and a mother who might be too old to wrangle an energetic child. A mother with questionable hobbies, at that.”

“Saying you mean no offense doesn’t change anything.”

“Oh, but understand, those are not personal assessments. They are simply observations a social worker might write in a report.”

“You don’t know shit about what’s good for this kid, and social services don’t either.”

“Oh, how we can relate to having goals that are so wholly misunderstood by others! But, sadly, we have to contend with the world we live in. We are simply warning you of very real possibilities.”

“Get the fuck out of my house.”

“Olive, you have to be reasonable. We can offer compensation.”

“I don’t need your bloody money. Get out, if you know what’s good for you.”

“You’ll consider our words, if you know what’s good for you, too.”

The boy is catching crickets. They make annoying little noises that stop if he squeezes them in his hands hard enough. But, they’re jumpy, so he has to be really careful to get close enough, first. 

“It’s time to get inside!” his mother hollers from the porch. He’s too big for her to pick up, especially when he swings his legs and arms, so she has to call him back like a rowdy dog.

“But it’s still light out,” he yells back, and the noise scares the cricket he’s been eyeing for the past fifteen minutes. 

“Doesn’t matter, I said get inside!” his mother bangs on the doorframe to accentuate her point. 

He obeys with unhidden disappointment, but hopes that being called inside means he’ll be given lunch. 

His mom ushers him into the living room, but doesn’t even look towards the kitchen. Instead, she herself stays by the back door, taking out a pack of cigarettes.

“No more playtime outside,” she says.

“What? Why?” he whines, looking towards the blue sky that he’s just been denied, perhaps forever. “Did I do something wrong?”

His mother looks down on him, her eyes stone and glass at the same time. She jams a cigarette in her teeth, and doesn’t answer his question. She goes outside, closing the door behind her. 

“So, you do like, science experiments? Like, mad scientist experiments?”

Pascal has had a hard time fishing anything out of Subject, the first month of their acquaintance. It was a lot of one-sided conversations, and Pascal did not mind talking someone’s ears off about things he likes, perhaps like most teenagers do, so he never questioned why Subject had little more to offer than one word answers. 

After some time, though, Subject started contributing to the discussions more, and, eventually, enough information spilled out of him to put two and two together. 

Subject nods, a little self-conscious. Only a little, though, because Pascal is still only a little more than a face to him. 

“That’s so cool,” Pascal grins. Subject glances up, staring at Pascal’s excited expression, and he realizes, then, this is what a regular teenager would likely think, one who has no reference to what human experimentation actually is, one who only saw weird injections in comic books, where they gave you superpowers. “So, like, what kind of experiments are they?”

“I don’t know,” Subject says, his knees tucked and his back against the side of Pascal’s bed. He’s on the floor, and Pascal towers above him in a desk chair, and Subject is just fine with this layout, because he never knew anything different, it’s always either his mother staring down at him with a cigarette in her mouth, or one of the Beakers, regarding him from above with a clipboard. Now, it’s Pascal, staring at him with a fascination of another child who knows nothing. 

Pascal is visibly deflated by that response. He was probably excited to learn about genetic modifications and brain enhancements. 

“So, they experiment on you, and don’t even tell you what they’re doing?” he asks, confused.

“Sometimes they tell me how much it will hurt,” Subject shrugs. “It usually hurts more, though.”

Pascal doesn’t know how to respond to that. He pouts, in the way children do, when reality doesn’t bend to their whims. Subject feels a little bad. Subject feels, at the back of his mind, a desire to be able to tell of a different truth, to Pascal, about the super cool enhancements he got as a result of all the experiments, enhancements that are not just twitches and blinks. Sadly, the Beakers have not taught him how to lie.

Pascal gets up and walks to his bookshelf. He picks out a book, and plops down on the floor next to Subject, which makes the former stiffen up. Pascal opens it, and slides it between the two boys.

“I got this recently,” he says, quietly. “I haven’t got a chance to read it. You wanna do it together?”

Subject tentatively, cautiously, extends his hand to the book. The Beakers have taught him how to read, at least. Lately, they’ve been teaching him to sort through their mail. 

“Sure.”

They read in silence, with only the occasional prompting from Pascal, on whether Subject is done reading, so he can turn the page. 

“Stay here, love,” his mother says, placing a plate of lukewarm porridge in front of him. 

She never says the word ‘love’ with warmth. She says it casually, like it’s obvious, for granted, that she loves him. It’s strangely comforting to remember that word said in her voice. The Beakers had a way of performing care, when he was still a child, their tone saccharine, their touch gentle in the way it looks, but little else. His mother was a more practical woman, one who ruffled his hair without much fanfare, who smoked cigarettes and watched him play with scraps, who kissed his head at random moments, and didn’t act like it was a big deal. 

The porridge is slimy and gross and he doesn’t complain because this is the first proper meal he’s gotten in days, on most nights scavenging in the fridge at random, stuffing his mouth with fruit and sausage until his stomach stopped rumbling. 

His mother left the room, and he hears voices outside, getting progressively more heated, but he tries to tune them out, as he’s been taught not to eavesdrop on conversations that don’t involve him.

That is, until this conversation starts involving him, as a woman in a pencil skirt barges in, his mother cursing her out in her wake. 

The next part is blurry. He remembers the woman asking him if the porridge is good. He remembers saying no, and immediately feeling incredible guilt upon seeing his mother’s expression. He remembers the woman moving to dominate his view, so he can’t even see his mom even more. He remembers being asked questions, being really uncomfortable and confused. He remembers yelling. 

He remembers getting into a car, and never seeing his mother again. 

After this one, he doesn’t feel real. 

Circe stopped bothering to tell him he did good, perhaps because there’s no use in it, now that his brain has been fried so many times over. Loki regards him with a cold stare, disdain evident in his eyes, because Subject is barely human, now. He is a set of numbers on paper. He is something you can pass through in person. 

The words of dismissal are less for him, now, because both scientists leave him laying on the floor, shaking. It doesn’t matter anymore, what he does between these acts, because the result will always be the same: he will crawl back through the same door, and let himself be put under the same conditions. He is nothing more than a dog, to them. 

Subject stumbles to the door, and he can’t think straight, so he walks off into the night, his legs taking him to the only place he could know peace, to the only place someone will think of him as more than a blank space, a dot on the canvas. 

When he stops at the Curious residence, he doesn’t know what to do other than chuck a piece of gravel at a window. 

Pascal opens it almost immediately, frantic and angry. 

“Hey, what the hell– Wait, what are you doing?”

Subject hasn’t regained much more of his senses on his walk, so he mindlessly picks up another piece of gravel, holds it in his hand, trembling, mostly because his motor function is giving out on him again. 

“Wait, wait, don’t throw that!” Pascal hisses, because Subject doesn’t know what it’s like to be a teenager, one with curfews and strict parents, the strictness he knows is one of a different kind, a kind he cannot imagine Pascal ever having. “I’ll come down to you, okay? Wait a second.” 

Despite the fog, Subject comprehends enough to obey. He doesn’t drop the gravel, but he watches the window close again, and he doesn’t take his eyes off if, not until the other teenager is right next to him, grabbing him by the arms, shaking him from his trance. 

“Hey! Hey, I’m here! Are you okay?” Pascal looks much more worried in person. Perhaps the run to the front door made him rethink the situation. Perhaps Subject looks worse in person, too. 

Subject doesn’t respond. Pascal has his jacket on. Is it chilly? Subject doesn’t know. He is focusing all his energy on breathing. 

“Hey, I’m here, okay?” Pascal tries, desperately, gripping Subject tighter, grasping at his shoulders, anything to make him more present. 

Subject realizes that Pascal is here. He is thankful for that. However, Subject doesn’t know if he’s here, in turn, a ghost with a brain that just keeps short circuiting, keeps rewinding to the feeling of electricity running through his body, keeps whispering the word ‘love’ in his mother’s voice, keeps feeding him images of a pen running along the lines of a clipboard. 

“It’s okay, calm down,” Pascal tries to keep his voice level, because he has realized, now, what he signed up for. He had realized, now, that he has to be the levelheaded one, because he’s the one for whom that’s physically possible. “Just breathe. Breathe.” 

That’s what Subject is doing. Is trying to do. He inhales air, and he exhales air. It shouldn’t be this difficult, a voice in his mind is telling him. It’s really easy. Why are you struggling?

“Just look at me,” Pascal whispers. Subject looks. There’s a crack in his voice, and tears forming in his eyes. “Focus on me, okay?” 

Pascal closes his eyes. Subject reaches out his feeble hands, attempting to hold, weakly, Pascal’s own arms. Pascal is trembling, too. Subject thinks of kids, with bruises just like him.  

“Shit,” Pascal can only say, can only mutter, can only curse. “Fuck. It’s really bad, isn’t it?”

Subject nods. 

He didn’t spend much time at the orphanage. The social workers were nice enough, and he got hot meals three days in a row, and that was as good as life was ever going to get. The talks behind his back continued, still, so, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

After a few days, a couple showed up. 

There was something about extensive background checks, something about them getting very emotional about the state of the boy’s health, but after all was said and done, he was meeting Circe and Loki Beaker. 

“It’s wonderful to meet you,” Circe exclaimed.

“You’ll love our house, little one,” Loki cooed. 

“It’s nice I get to go with people I’ve seen before,” the boy thought, and smiled back at them.

The urge to smile at the couple has been systematically eliminated from his brain, over the next few years. He barely remembers the first experiment, now, but he remembers that it was a week after he was adopted, a week of spending time bored out of his mind in a damp basement, a week of thinking: maybe being well fed is not a good trade, if it means being so absolutely bored.

It’s hard to be bored when you’re in pain, he has learnt. 

It must’ve been an injection, because he remembers walking around with a plaster on the inside of his elbow for a while afterwards, and the plaster was a plain tan, not even matching his skin color. His knees would randomly give out for a month afterwards, and he earned many bruises from falling on the cold floor of his room that he would poke, sometimes, when the pain subsided enough to let conscious thought set in.

“Whenever you feel you’re going to fall, or if you do fall, call out to us, okay?” Loki has said, as he pushed a cotton swab to his arm, not gentle enough to be a comfortable pressure.

When the boy first heard this, he remembered how his mother would tell him to call for her if he got injured, and he thought the Beakers would do the same as she did: come, wipe his tears, and ruffle in the medicine cabinet, pulling out a meager painkiller after ten minutes of searching, regardless of what the issue was. That was the only thing his mother could offer him: painkillers, to make sure he doesn’t suffer. She rarely addressed the issue at the root. 

How surprised he was, the first time he hollered Loki’s name after collapsing, the first time he was met with a strict man, who took one glance at the boy, and started taking notes.

“Can you stand up yet?” Loki asked, after five minutes.

“No,” the boy heaved, after attempting to get upright.

Loki took more notes. The question was repeated, until the child finally found the strength to get back up, and then the scientist examined him, jotted down something on his clipboard, and left the basement. 

“Bruises are completely normal, for kids your age,” Circe said, one day, after bringing him his plate of warm porridge, that wasn’t slimy. “Everyone gets those, and if they don’t, that just means they’re lazy. You’re not lazy, are you?”

The last part was a rhetorical question, which was one of the first long words he learnt from the Beakers, because they’d use those a lot. They would always ask questions, and never want an answer. They’d talk to the boy, and rarely want responses. 

“I’m not lazy,” the boy muttered, because at the time, the concept hasn’t quite settled in his brain. 

Circe forgave such an indiscretion, that time. She won’t be as lenient, in the future. But that time, she just nodded, and left him to his porridge. He ate, thinking about such a concept as other kids, who had bruises just like his. 

The first time he and Pascal kissed wasn’t that important to Subject. He didn’t even notice how their relationship grew in such a way, but he didn’t mind it. The first time Pascal placed a kiss somewhere other than his lips is far more clear in his fogged up mind, anyway.

Subject is sitting on Pascal’s bed, surrounded by books, because Pascal doesn’t know many other ways to calm him down. Subject has been shaking more than usual, tonight, and it’s going to get dark soon, so they’re on a tight clock before he has to go back, so the Beakers don’t get worried, or more likely, suspicious. 

“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” Pascal asks, again, because he hates to see this man leave, hates to watch him walk away and absorbed by the darkness. He still doesn’t know the details of what will happen once Subject leaves his field of vision, and that makes him hate their partings more. 

“Yes,” Subject nods, flipping through another comic about a superhero who got super-strength by getting injected with a magic serum. “I told you, it’s mostly just physical. I’ll sleep it off.”

Pascal’s lip quivers as he watches Subject’s fingers tremble, cradled around the thin paper. He thinks that the man just might rip it on accident, and he’s not worried over the integrity of his property. 

Pascal crawls onto the bed, slowly, as if approaching a wounded animal, and Subject regards him with a confused gaze, as if he doesn’t realize just how much of a wounded animal he is. He doesn’t stiffen up, anymore, when their shoulders brush past each other, and he doesn’t stiffen up even when he feels arms snake around him, he only shivers when he feels Pascal’s breath on his neck. 

The two don’t say anything, for a long time. After a few moments Subject just goes back to skimming the comic, and Pascal resides half-lidded in the crook of his neck, hugging him tightly, trying to wordlessly convey the fact that he is a real person. 

The sun sets slowly outside the window, creeping out of the dark blue sky bit by bit, licking away at the limited time the two men have together. When the streetlights begin flicking on, Pascal untangles his grip.

“You have to go, I think,” he whispers, despite how much the words hurt his throat. 

“Yeah,” Subject nods, with a sense of resignation. 

And then, he feels Pascal brush the disheveled strands of his mohawk aside, and press a kiss to his forehead. 

“Get home safe,” he mutters.

It’s such a phrase, a collection of words that sticks in Subject’s mind like a reminder pinned to a corkboard: get home safe! What is home? What is safe? How is he supposed to get there? Did he ever know a home, and was it ever safe? He thinks about it as he walks to the Beakers, his mind unusually clear. He hasn’t met his father, yet, even though his mother was certain he would. She never specified when, and she was always a practical woman, so he chooses to believe she was vague on purpose, rather than wrong, and that one day, he will know of home, and one day, he will return to it, even as an adult, even as the days of when he needed care passed him, he will know, what it’s like to have people that love him.

He even dares to dream that it will be safe.

The boy has few chores in the house, but one of them is sorting mail. 

He’s been taught to do this since he was quite small, because the Beakers said they had better things to do than look through junk, and Subject didn’t mind being taught to read for this endeavor. He has looked through thousands of letters since he was a kid, and the job was simple: check to whom it’s addressed to, if it’s junk, or if it’s important. In the beginning, he got quite a few wrong, and the Beakers only tolerated it for a few weeks, and soon after every envelope he brought to them they deemed useless was punished. 

It has soon become a mindless task, and this is what Subject imagined chores felt like to normal kids. Quickly enough, it was a matter of skimming, and he found a tiny bit of pride in the accuracy of his deductions on what was important postage and what was normal mail.

One day, however, a whole new kind of letter caught his eye.

It was addressed to him.

He read over the words on the envelope multiple times, breaking it down by syllable, to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating.

It was addressed to a Specter. That was his mother’s surname. 

He looked around with paranoid eyes, and his hands shook as he ripped open the paper prison, and he read frantically, not skimming, just running over the lines.

Once he got to the end, he dropped every other letter he was holding. His legs quivered under his weight.

Then, he took off.

Pascal is startled by a thud on his window. He barely has time to approach it before a bigger rock hits the glass, and he hollers:

“I’ll be right out!”

Before rushing down the stairs. 

He is prepared for everything. For gentle coaching on how to handle panic attacks, to performing first aid, to simply kissing the poor guy better. What he is not prepared for, however, is a piece of paper.

“Read this,” Subject says, smushing the paper into Pascal’s chest. 

Pascal is perplexed, but tentatively skims the writing. He reads it a second time, actually paying attention to it this time, something about a woman called Olive and death and inheritance. 

“Wow,” he can only say.

Subject nods, shaking from tip to toe.

“Wow,” Pascal can’t believe it.

Subject crashes his head into Pascal’s arm, less a coordinated movement and more a general statement on his mental state, currently.

“Holy shit,” Pascal cups Subject’s waist to support him. “What are you going to do now?”

Pascal shakily exhales.

He shrugs, and Pascal feels it, feels the shoulders move up and down against his body.

He doesn’t know.

Chapter Text

When Subject arrives at the house, it’s run down, peeling, creaking, falling apart at the seams. It’s not that it changed that much since he left, it’s more that as a kid, this house was his entire world, so he didn’t have a frame of reference. 

He feels starkly like an outsider out here. When he was small, he didn’t see this building from this angle much: he was in the backyard, inside, staring up at ceilings that seemed monumentally tall, he was beneath beds that smelled like dust. He was small. Now, he’s lanky in ways that are too awkward to ignore, and he’s standing outside the front gate as if he’s a neighbor passing by. 

The street is deserted, in more ways than literal, and of course it is: at this hour, only strange men like Subject are out and about. He isn’t supposed to be here, Pascal held him in his arms for hours, told him that they will figure it out together, that they will take it slow, that when Subject is ready, they will be standing here hand in hand. Subject agreed to stay the night, because the Beakers felt inconsequential at this point, and snuck off when Pascal dozed off. He went here. 

He’s not really sure what he’s even doing, just staring and having zero thoughts pass through his brain, just vague sensations that hit his nervous system like electric shocks, ones that make him twitch, and he sees no problem with this until the front door creaks.

Through the tiniest of cracks, the darkness reveals an eye, and then the crack slips a little more open and there’s the tiniest view through the tiniest slit of a fairly tiny girl, a teenager, perhaps, with dark skin and blonde braids and a loose tie around her neck, as if if it was worn properly it’d suffocate her in two seconds.

Subject knows all too well what to do when encountering a teenager, so much so his body moves on its own: he hides behind a bush.

“Who the hell are you?” the girl hisses from behind the door, shaking fingers gripping old wood. 

Subject doesn’t respond, just hides further behind the bush. 

“Oh my god, I can’t deal with this right now,” the girl is practically trembling. “I learn I’m getting evicted and now some creep is standing outside the house that’s not even mine anymore.” 

She inhales sharply. 

“This is great, wonderful, just perfect. I had a scholarship lined up, and I thought I’d get at least some money from my aunt, but no, leave the orphan girl floundering completely on her own, thanks! Oh my fucking god.”

She might be hyperventilating.

“I don’t even know a single adult anymore? Isn’t it crazy how all the adults in your life can just drop dead all at once? I guess they didn’t die all at once, but it’s just so sudden, all I’m left with is my two friends who are both teenagers. I can’t even call the cops, what if they accuse me of being some squatter and just kick me out right here? Oh my god, am I going to have to fight off homeless people for the right to stay here? Fuck, I don’t even know how to pay bills or file taxes!” 

Granted, Subject doesn’t know much, and won’t know more probably ever, but even he suspects this girl is being a bit unreasonable. 

“Even if I dash for the phone right now and you don’t break in through the window, who the hell will I call? Johnny has school tomorrow and he has to actually work on his grades if we want to get into the same university, I can’t interrupt his sleep. Ripp won’t care either way and would probably gladly show up with a crowbar, but what’s he gonna do? He hasn’t participated in any of his dad’s military drills since he was six on principle, I can’t live with being the one responsible for my best friend dying at the hands of some homeless guy!”

She gasps, covering her mouth with her palm.

“Oh my god, you might not be actually homeless, that’s so presumptuous of me, I’m so sorry. Please don’t break in through the window?”

Subject, for once in his life, finds that he is not the most erratic one in the situation, which gives him enough courage to peek from behind the leaves and ask:

“Why do you live here?”

The girl runs her fingers through her braids with a shaky exhale. 

“Well, my parents died, and my only living relative was my aunt, who I think might’ve been a serial killer? I don’t know, there’s some graves in the backyard and Ripp found a collection of newspaper clippings while snooping once, and he said that was totally serial killer shit, and he said to call him if I see any ghosts, and I think he was teasing but how else do you explain that? And I couldn’t sleep for a week, and then my aunt died, but I can’t even be relieved that she definitely won’t try to kill me now because she’s six feet under because, well, she left me nothing, instead giving away her entire inheritance to her son, who I didn’t even know existed! So now I’m getting evicted and I haven’t told Johnny yet because I know he’ll worry and Ripp offered to hide me in his closet but I’d rather take my chances fighting off homeless people than deal with his creepy dad and oh my god I’m totally trauma dumping on you right now. I’m so sorry. My life is really fucked up.”

She lets out a nervous chuckle and Subject huffs his own laugh. He finds it kind of funny, how apologetic she’s being to a man she’s convinced is here to break into her home. 

“Oh, um,” he delicately steps out from his hiding place, digging fingernails into his palms. “I’m, like. The son.”

It takes a beat for the girl to process that information. A second of the world’s most awkward staring contest passes between the two.

“Oh my god I’m so sorry I’m so sorry,” the girl breaks down at the speed of light. “Oh my god, this is your house, then, I’m so sorry, I’ll pack my stuff and be out of your hair soon, I promise, Jesus, I can do it right now, please forgive me, I don’t have much, I can sleep on some bench tonight please just give me a few seconds–”

“It’s okay,” he breaks her off before she can slam the door and run up to her room to frantically pack her bags. “You can stay. As long as you like, really.”

She blinks at him. From the way her chest rises and falls underneath her hand Subject can tell she’s doing breathing exercises. It’s an activity that Pascal has taught him, as well, read about it in some pop-psychology magazine: inhale through the nose for a couple seconds, exhale through the mouth. It’s supposed to slow down your heartbeat from where it’s trying to break out of your ribcage, even though it never quite worked for Subject. It seems to do much more for the girl, as she slowly nods, gathers her bearings, and opens the door wider. 

“Thank you,” she says, deliberately drawing the words out, an attempt to course correct from how she was just barreling out sentences moments earlier. “That’s very kind of you.”

Subject just kind of shrugs. It’s less kindness and more inaction, on his part, a type of indifference rather than affection. 

The girl seems lost in thought, for a moment, standing on a precipice. 

“If you’re my aunt’s son,” she starts. “I guess that makes us cousins.”

Subject shrugs yet again. He guesses so. 

His cousin’s name is Ophelia Nigmos, she is a month away from turning eighteen, and she’s so uncomfortable with awkward silences she fills them with erratic ramblings at every opportunity, turning them into even more awkward one sided conversations. 

She eats cereal for breakfast, does her homework with her tongue sticking out in concentration, and she shows Subject where his mother’s grave is. 

“Sorry for your loss,” she shifts from foot to foot and side-eyes the man, standing in front of a freshly pressed grave in what is now their shared backyard. She has a propensity for thinking so loud even Subject, a historically thoughtless being, can hear the questions running through her head fifty miles a minute, but she’s considerate, or perhaps socially awkward, enough to not bring them up. 

Subject just kind of nods. He really doesn’t know how to process this. His mother is now one of the corpses he used to catch crickets over when he was six. The youngest member of this household is seventeen now, so she’s probably outgrown catching crickets, and she also thinks this whole backyard gravesite thing is creepy and is the reason she lost sleep for a week straight, so the crickets will forever rub their filthy little legs all over the stone that bears his mother’s name. 

Olive Specter. Subject is unsure which side of Ophelia’s family is related to his mother, because he hasn’t asked, because he hasn’t said a single word to her since two days ago when he told her she can stay, but he does know that she doesn’t bear the surname. Subject doesn’t either. The family line dies here: with one last corpse in the dirt.

A few hours later Ophelia asks if her friends can come over, and she rambles on for way too long about how she’s probably being insensitive but Johnny really does need her help to get into their dream school and Ripp is generally good for moral support and also if he doesn’t get out of his house for more than a trip to the gas station often enough she’s afraid he will genuinely just drop dead, because she’s not the only one with a fucked up life, and the only normal one here seems to be Johnny, aside from the fact that he’s green.

Subject shrugs. He really doesn’t mean to be a dick, or avoid conversing with his new kind of roommate, he just feels numb all over. He should probably feel more affection, or warmth, or at least some sort of melancholy at being able to spend time with this sudden family member, but nothing can seem to break through his wall of indifference. He hasn’t talked to Pascal, either, and he wonders if the man also thinks he genuinely just dropped dead. 

That evening the building houses two extra teenagers, Johnny and Ophelia snuggling on the couch while sweating over textbooks, and Ripp is nearby fiddling with something like a guitar. It’s immediately apparent that he has no idea how to tune it, and doesn’t care to learn, because all the strums are warbled and any adjustments made are random and don’t help the situation in the slightest. 

Subject checks the fridge and it brings him a twisting sense of nostalgia, seeing it as empty and gross as it was when he was a child. There’s a bowl of molding oatmeal in the bowels. Just like how mom used to make it. 

The rumbling in his stomach as he closes the fridge is nostalgic, too, even though he can’t commit to feeling like a kid, not with his overgrown limbs and foggy brain. He walks around in a catatonic state, much like a corpse, and catches glances from the kids in his living room every once and again. He recalls that Ripp specifically asked Ophelia to call him if she ever saw a ghost. 

He wanders over to the chair his mother used to smoke in, and the thin layer of newly formed dust suggests she took care of it up until she died, or at least sat in it. 

As he leans against the back of the seat he tries his best to muster up a single thought that will help him comprehend his deceased parent. He can’t. He looks at graves and all he can think about is crickets. It’s better than thinking about the Beakers, he supposes. Surprisingly, they haven’t crossed his mind at all since he left their house with a crumpled piece of paper in his shaky hands. He can’t think of them even when he tries. 

What are they doing now? Are they panicking, realizing they flew too close to the sun, letting him out of his cage to come and go as he pleases? Are they simply waiting it out, thinking they trained their lab rat too well to not be conditioned to obey the whistle? Are they going to show up here? Are they going to fight him in court for his assets, claiming mental deficiency and need for caretakers that can manage his finances? Can he manage his finances? Is he capable of going to the store and buying cereal?

Not a single one of these questions can quite reach coherency in Subject’s brain, let alone be sent down the tracks, so no trains cross his mind. It’s crickets all the way down.

“Yo, cuz,” Ripp leans out the door. That’s what he resorts to calling Subject, because he’s too cool (and lazy) for ‘Ophelia’s cousin’, and not bothered enough to ask for a name. “We’re ordering pizza. You want anything?”

Subject doesn’t even have the decency to shake his head. He shrugs again. Is this another physical symptom of some rogue drug injected into his veins? Being unable to will your muscles to produce anything but short-lived jerks? Is he dying?

“Okay,” Ripp doesn’t mind not being talked to. Ripp is the kind of kid that thinks being ignored means he gets to do whatever he wants, and what he wants to do is mess around with a guitar while deliberately refusing to learn how to actually play it. Refusal is a very potent nectar, to Ripp, he finds a deep beauty in being useless. He tells Ophelia and Johnny that he will not go to the same university as them, but he’ll move to their college town and earn shit all at a gas station, and he’ll live in a cardboard box under a bridge, and if their college town doesn’t have a bridge, he’ll crash at their dorms until someone clocks him as homeless and kicks him out. Life’s easy, for Ripp. Life is about being a failure, just so his father can feel like a failure, in turn. 

About two hours later a box of pizza gets dropped off in Subject’s lap.

“Ophelia felt bad about you not eating anything,” Ripp explains with an easy smile. He spreads his lips as if he’s smiling just for himself, for the sake of it, for the sake of moving his mouth in a motion he finds pleasing. “It’s just cheese, since we didn’t know what you liked. Johnny said it’s a possibility you just don’t like pizza, but I said that would be really fucked up, so there’s like, fifteen bucks on the line on you eating it.”

Ripp bets money like he’s the richest man in the world, even though he’s broke. He’s the only teenager he knows who actually has a job, but his friends are better off because Ophelia gets pity points for being an orphan and Johnny is a child of the American Dream, white picket fence and loving parents and little sister and all. Ripp is broke because he’s not been given pocket money since his father found out he spent it on weed when he was fifteen, and his wage is spent on frivolities such as shitty soda and trading cards and pizza. Ripp is broke because he learns the wrong lessons on principle, so when his father lectured him about financial responsibility he interpreted it all backwards, and openly practices financial irresponsibility, instead. Ripp’s hobbies include framing his brother by placing empty booze bottles under his bed, even though everyone knows Tank would never do that and the fact that Ripp is the culprit is an open secret. Thrashing is just like smiling, to Ripp: he does it for the sake of it. 

Subject takes a pizza slice and places it in his mouth. Ripp openly cheers as he goes back in and demands Johnny to cough up the cash. 

Pascal comes on day three, panting and wide eyed and teary. Subject is the one to open the door, because Ophelia is in school. Pascal looks as if he saw a ghost. 

“There are missing posters,” Pascal breathes out. “With your face on them. You bitch.”

Pascal’s hands shake as if they want to do something, were this a normal lover’s quarrel he would’ve probably punched Subject in the arm, except he’s too deeply aware of how fucked up Subject’s life is, and he’s been reading too much pop-psychology magazines lately, so his hands can only uselessly shake. 

He has sent in a letter for the QnA column, once. He didn’t know how to phrase it for the life of him, because even a psychology major who hates their life because they’ve been reduced to a tabloid writer would never be prepared for:

“Hi! My boyfriend has been psychologically and physically tortured since early childhood, and that has left him with an unimaginable array of both physiological and psychological traumas, and I feel like a dick, because all I can do is kiss him and let him come over to my place I guess, and he can’t even stay the night because he still lives with his torturers, by the way. They still inject him with weird bullshit, they still run electricity through him as if he’s a Christmas tree, and he sometimes shows up on my doorstep too far gone to understand human speech. What the fuck do I do?”

It also felt like an invasion of privacy, strangely, even though Subject never seemed to care, for that particular aspect of humanity, which made violating it worse. What Pascal settled on in the end was a vague letter about helping a loved one in an abusive situation. He sent it in and shook as he bought a copy of next month’s edition. 

The answer was entirely unhelpful, because he’s writing to a psychology major who hates their life and is also a tabloid writer, so they interpreted “loved one in an abusive situation” as “my sister’s husband is beating her”, and Pascal is a good person, at least he tries to be, so he’s very thankful for being able to in some way contribute to creating a useful resource for anyone in a situation of domestic violence, or those witnessing a situation of domestic violence, however he just doesn’t think that what he should do is suggest Subject gets a divorce lawyer. 

If there’s one piece of advice he did gleam, however, is the need to be delicate. So, as delicately as he can muster, he wraps his trembling fingers around Subject’s arms, and says:

“What the fuck.”

Okay, that part was less delicate. To be fair to him, he’s gone through the worst case scenarios already before getting the idea to check this place. He was half prepared to storm the Beakers’ residence with a makeshift flamethrower, but only half, because he knew that it would probably not help and would likely end with him chained up in a damp basement. Or worse. He spent far too much time contemplating the worse.

Subject returns the touch, weakly, not enough strength in his palms to properly hold onto Pascal’s elbows, but then he says:

“We have cold pizza.”

Pascal’s brain shortly ceases operation. 

“Who in the hell is we?”

The next twenty five minutes is the most Pascal has witnessed Subject talk without interruption. He explains that he has a cousin, that his mother’s corpse is in the backyard, that Ophelia’s friends are nice and are also really fucked up, that nobody in this house is sure of the legal proceedings of anything, and that they also will have to figure out how to pay bills and file taxes before they all actually get evicted. 

Pascal can only gape around a mouthful of pizza, and, look, he’s also kind of a shithead idealist who doesn’t know how to cook anything more complex than mac and cheese, so the idea of being the most capable adult in a five mile radius doesn’t exactly thrill him, but he’ll do what he has to do. 

“Are you, like…” he tries to form words once Subject has been silent for five full minutes. “Okay?”

Subject shrugs. He’s beginning to get annoyed with himself, at the amount of shrugging he’s been doing the past few days. He wonders if he should continue his mother’s legacy by becoming a serial killer, too, and that would make his body do something more than uselessly lift his shoulders up and down. 

“Okay, well. Shit,” Pascal can only say. The next few hours are spent filing bills, and taxes, and also trying to find a lawyer. Not a divorce one, but maybe that QnA column had the right idea after all. 

Pascal is seriously close to bashing his head into a wall when the door opens to two teenagers.

Ophelia is immediately on guard, and practically hides behind Ripp, probably assuming Pascal is yet another homeless person trying to duke it out in the battle royale for this residence. Ripp just kind of raises his eyebrows, taking a long sip of his soda.

“This is my boyfriend,” Subject supplies with zero emotion from the couch. Ophelia releases some tension from her body. 

“Cool,” Ripp nods in a sign of respect, and then extends a finger pointing at Pascal. “You’re cuz two, then.”

“Isn’t it weird to call them both cousins? Since they’re dating?”

“Well, what else am I supposed to call them? Cousin in law? Cuzlaw?”

“I have a name. It’s Pascal.”

“Do you prefer Pas or Cal?”

“Would it kill you to say more than one syllable?”

“Yes.”

Pascal understands entirely what Subject meant when he said Ophelia’s friends were fucked up. Ripp is different from Ophelia, in the sense that Ophelia talks because she hates silence, and Ripp talks because forcing people to listen to him is like his own little inside joke with God. 

“You should be thankful, really, you’re living the life. Loving boyfriend, nobody to bother you about your future, cool cousin who doesn’t give a shit about what you do, you have it all. You really should loosen up and live a little, because, like, fuck me, do you stress over nothing.”

“Ripp, I’m an orphan,” there’s no hurt in Ophelia’s voice as she reiterates this, so it seems this is a recurring conversation and also one that doesn’t hold too much meaning. She’s lying on her stomach on the floor, trying to crack a math equation, her legs in the air in the picturesque pose of an average teenage girl, one who doesn’t have to worry about dead parents or serial killer aunts or her friends whose top aspirations seem to be professional outcast. 

“And you’re lucky for that,” says Ripp, in a phrase that would be deemed too far to any normal human being, but the teens seem to have a strange rapport in which these words don’t mean jackshit. Ripp can just say the most grief inducing things in a way that makes them sound comforting rather than harsh, so much so Ophelia huffs a laugh.

“What the fuck,” Pascal mutters under his breath, and finds his fingers being tugged at.

He turns a little too quickly, staring at Subject putting his head on the other man’s shoulder, intertwining their fingers, closing his eyes. This house is weird, and messed up, and is also Subject’s now, forever, so he makes the rules of what’s acceptable, so this is apparently fine. This is what Pascal signed up for. Pascal contemplates another letter to the pop-psychology magazine QnA column. 

Pascal becomes something of a housewife: he cleans the place, helps Ophelia with her homework, and cooks, even though the food in question is overcooked pasta drowned in store bought tomato sauce. He’s the best they got, since Ophelia is scared of hot oil and Subject has a messed up internal clock that leaves him boiling rice for half an hour until it’s all mush. 

Pascal takes a few days off work. Pascal contemplates if Subject should get a job, so he can have something to do, other than wither away in his mother’s chair. Pascal imagines the kind of people that hire a person named ‘Nervous Subject’. Pascal decides to be the sole breadwinner forever, and also thinks Subject should get a hobby. 

This, however, brings up another problem, one that manifests as a slow vortex of guilt somewhere above Pascal’s abdomen: he has no idea what Subject actually likes. They met when he was a shithead teenager happily babbling on about his shitty comic books, not stupid enough to take silence as interest, but arrogant enough to take advantage of not being told to shut up, in that way where you know what you’re doing is crossing a line, and also know that the person you’re doing it to is enough of a pushover to not call you out, but you reason you’re not a terrible person, you’re just fifteen, even if you don’t grow out of this habit until you’re twenty. 

Subject likes superhero movies because those are the only ones Pascal ever owned DVDs of, Subject likes books about the greatest scientific discoveries in history because every romance novel has spent years collecting dust in the back of Pascal’s shelf, Subject likes sitting on the floor with his back against the bed because that way, when his muscles spasm and twitch, his head hits the mattress and not wood. 

Pascal organizes a movie night. He invites Ophelia because it’d be nice for Subject to get along with his family, and lets Ophelia bring her friends because Pascal doesn’t know how to interact with teenage girls and the unknown scares him. They pick a movie each, and carve out the six or so hours needed to get through them all, and it’s probably a bad thing that the teens are allowed to go to bed at three am, but Pascal is not a father and never signed up to be one, so it’s not his problem if the energy drink Johnny brings is half filled with what is definitely not an energy drink, and it’s not his problem if Ripp puts his phone on silent after three ignored calls, and it’s not his problem if Ophelia can’t look him in the eye. 

The first movie is a romantic drama filmed a decade ago, adapted from a classical novel or something of the sort, the kind where men spew poetry and women die of tuberculosis. It’s Ophelia’s pick, and she wastes no time explaining the intricate relationship dynamics to Subject, as well as the historical context of the time period and how that affected the relations of men and women under the patriarchal system of the time. Ripp bangs his head against the couch cushion and Johnny has a strained smile, indicating this is a rant they’ve heard a million times before, but Subject listens with polite nods. 

The second is, honest to God, a musical. It’s about High School and has actors that were clearly recruited on a budget, like someone’s dream opera was written with feverish passion but found itself in the hands of a troupe that have never even seen a microphone before and are sweating bullets knowing their resumes will have a one way ticket to the trash after having to own up to this performance. Johnny says there’s equal parts horrible execution and sincere intent, making it an enjoyable movie both ironically and genuinely, like a fountain of cringe and shame and part of it is cringing at yourself for liking it. Ripp calls it post-irony, to which Johnny disagrees, and Pascal doesn’t know what’s worse, listening to their debate or the warbly off-key solo of the main character on screen. 

The third movie is the dumbest slasher in existence. It’s a mess of deeply unrealistic gore, and Pascal turns his head in a panic every five minutes to make sure Subject doesn’t react negatively to people’s ankles being broken with a baseball bat. Surprisingly, Subject has his chin in his palm and watches the film without any complaint, not even flinching when Ripp cheers at particularly flashy blood splotches. Ophelia, on the other hand, has to keep her face covered for half the runtime, cursing Ripp under her breath for having such shit taste in cinema and storytelling. Johnny cries at the ending, when the last survivor intertwines her fingers with her dead lover’s disembodied arm, and walks off into the sunset. 

Pascal puts on his pick, which is a documentary about the formation of the desert in which Strange Town resides in. Five minutes in Ripp starts performatively snoring, and Ophelia smacks him and says to be nice to her cousin’s boyfriend, to which Johnny joins into Ripp’s display of mockery, and it devolves into a heated pillow fight between all the teenagers up until the end credits, which means Pascal can’t even enjoy one of his favorite pieces of media perhaps ever. The only reason he doesn’t snap is because Subject keeps casting his gaze towards the cacophony with a tiny amused smile. 

When Subject gets out his movie pick, the box is a blank orange. 

“What movie’s that?” Pascal asks. Subject shrugs. 

“It said it’s one of a kind,” he points to the shiny golden sticker on the side of the box, one that was probably bought in the gift card aisle and was meant as a compliment to your niece rather than a marketing strategy. 

“Oh, I know this scam,” Ripp pipes in. “It’s one of a kind because it’s not a movie, it’s someone’s home footage they transfer to a cassette or DVD and sell for a quick buck split with the video store.” 

Pascal’s heart sinks all the way to his knees, not quite shattering on the floor, holding on by the hair which is the fact that Subject’s face hasn’t changed yet, although it rarely does anyway. 

“The really shitty ones market it as indie, too,” Johnny pipes up. “My classmate told me about it, there was a brief moment where more people getting home cameras meant they’d try to be filmmakers and sell a few copies of their tapes to small video stores, who wanted to support the local independent movie scene. She said she began building up a whole collection, and obviously most of them sucked, so she got with some friends and started a bad film club, they’d get together once a week and watch new ‘indie’ schlock, but eventually the club fell apart because the market got flooded with random nonsense footage that’s not even bad, just pointless, the kind of stuff there’s no reason to watch.” 

Pascal grits his teeth and prays Subject doesn’t go catatonic. The man lowers the cassette a little, looking at it with perplexion.

“But, you know, we can still watch it,” Johnny quickly amends, because he’s a nice kid at heart. “Sometimes they’re actually interesting and pretty funny.” 

So, they put the movie on. It’s a hopeless endeavor from the start, but Pascal finds comfort in the tiny detail that everyone in the room cares for Subject enough to overlook that. It starts with a girl pointing a camera to herself, the footage is unedited, presenting in full glory the moment she presses the record button, the way she moves back from the camera to show off her outfit and fix her hair. She doesn’t say anything, in the background of a field and trees in the far distance, a starting point for some woods.

Then, she picks up the camera again, and starts walking. The footage shows her steps, pointed to her boots as the ground changes from long grass to untouched leaves and acorns on the forest floor. Eventually, she puts her camera down on a rock, smiles at the viewers, and walks off. 

It’s a snoozefest from there. Nothing happens, as it slowly gets darker and the wind rustles some bushes and the birds call out in the distance. Pascal fights for his life to look like he’s paying attention, scared even a stray glance away will be the nail in the coffin, and as his boredom spirals his thoughts do, too, and he thinks: can I live with this? With the fact that this is what my boyfriend likes? Will I have to pretend to enjoy this, forever more?

And then, a raccoon walks into frame. It’s boring in the way only uncut footage of animals can be boring. You, a fool of a human being, see this creature, and expect for something to happen, but it just kind of sits and ruffles through leaves and waddles across the screen. You, a fool of a human, know that there is a camera pointed at the raccoon, but the raccoon doesn’t know that. The raccoon doesn’t know that there are expectations attached to his existence in this particular patch of the forest at this particular moment, it is a wild animal and it wouldn’t even be able to insert a cassette into a player. 

This isn’t like those funny cat videos on the internet, either, it’s not a curated clip of an animal, it’s just a raccoon in a forest. Most moments in the daily life of anything are unbelievably dull, and it is the job of teenagers filming vlogs and those that can afford editing software to splice compilations of the most important, the coolest, the most interesting ones. Data, is what this raccoon is. Raw, unprocessed data. And you, fool of a scientist, desperately want to process it. 

Pascal watches Subject stare at the raccoon with unbridled fascination. He’s tracking every paw movement, every time the animal raises its snout to the sky to sniff the air or freezes at a noise. It’s a five minute clip of a raccoon doing absolutely nothing, and Subject is thrilled. 

Ah, Pascal thinks. That’s what it’s about. Subject never existed as raw, unprocessed data: for the first several years of his life he was an undocumented little critter, a thing catching crickets, unknown by all except for the smoker in his backyard. And then, he was information. He was an orphanage case file, he was a test dummy, someone to be analyzed, given a purpose, fit into a puzzle. He was information, information he was never privy to, first because he didn’t understand grownup talk, second because the numbers would make no sense to him even if he was given the clipboard, and third because he didn’t care for pop psych magazines. He was information to Pascal, too, sadly. 

There is no reason to watch this cassette, the raccoon scurrying on screen has no point, there’s nothing to gleam from the bleak footage, and yet it was sold to Subject for three whole dollars, yet it was slotted into a cassette player, yet Subject’s eyes are glued to the screen. 

It’s beautiful, watching things when there’s no reason to. 

The teenagers start whispering between each other after the first three minutes, bored out of their minds, and by the time the player hits the 15 minute mark they’re all in a snoozing pile on the couch, because it’s late and holds no interest to them, even one you muster out of politeness. Subject stays up and watches the entire tape religiously, it’s an hour of nothing happening, of an occasional noise in the distance or the wind rustling some leaves. The raccoon is probably the most interesting event in the entire thing, not counting the three seconds in which an ant crawled onto the lens. 

At the very end two boots enter the frame, presumably the woman from before, and there’s not even an outro, it just cuts in the middle of the motion of the camera being picked up. No end credits, no fade to black, the smudged background of the forest and the vague outline of a hand lingers on the tv for a while, for so long both men are snapped out of their trance by a screensaver. 

“Movies are pretty cool,” Subject breathes out. Pascal watches the serenity on his face, and tucks his nose into Subject’s neck.

The next day, he goes back to work. The next day, he starts saving up money for a video camera.

Having regained his will to move, and the general makings of a sentient being rather than an amoeba in someone’s petri dish, Subject starts to look through bookshelves. He takes books and shakes out dried flowers, ones so old they disintegrate if you breathe wrong, ones that could’ve been made into something beautiful, some time ago, by gentler hands, but learning has always come hard to Subject, so they were always destined to wither hopelessly, tucked away on a shelf that only gets dusted on occasion. 

He rifles through yellowed pages, zero interest in reading any of them, putting books back neatly only because Pascal recently learned what a manic episode is, and Subject doesn’t want to deal with an intervention. 

Finally, his fingers brush up against the sought out prize, a document wrapped in plastic for safekeeping, covered in so much dust he coughs while trying to read it.

He learns several things, that day:

1. His birthday is in February, the last month of rigor mortis before Spring revives all.
2. What his mother’s signature looks like. It’s all loops and beautiful cursive and barely comprehensible initials. 
3. His real name.

Subject looks at it for a while, breathlessly forms his lips around vowels that are so foreign to him they may as well be a different language, tries to not think about why this specific combination of syllables was selected, traces the letters with his fingerpad, fails to not think about why this specific combination of syllables was selected. 

He tucks the document back into the back of the shelf, smushed by books, left to its fate of disintegration, just like a flower.

Subject has never been called by that name, as far as he is concerned, so he cannot wrap his brain around how it can be real.

He goes outside, both to expunge the dust from his lungs and to sit in his mothers chair and let nothing but crickets penetrate his skull for the next several hours, only to find someone in the backyard.

It’s strange for Ripp to be here, because Ophelia and Johnny are at Johnny’s place, today, so Ripp is entirely a sole wanderer, sitting on the ground with his guitar, hair blowing into his face and covering his eyes, which does nothing to affect his play, because truly miraculous things must be done to make Ripp’s music sound worse.

Subject recalls Ophelia saying that if Ripp doesn’t get out of his house for more than a trip to the gas station often enough, he’ll drop dead, and Subject is still unsure of how exactly that would come about, but he wonders if tonight came close. If what he’s looking at is a freshly revived corpse.

Subject sits in the chair anyway, staring at the teen awkwardly. Ripp looks up briefly, raises his palm in greeting, and then goes back to his favorite hobby of all: being shit.

Subject can’t really hear the crickets over the new noises filling his familiarly empty (except for, well, all the skeletons in the closet) (and the literal skeletons, too) backyard, so he finds it in him to add his own sound to the symphony:

“Do you know how to play?”

Ripp looks up with a grin. He’s doing that thing where he pulls the strings as tight as he can, and then as loose as he can, and then tries all the in-betweens, too, seemingly to concoct the most grating noise imaginable. This is probably not good for the integrity of his instrument. He probably spends a lot of money on replacement strings. 

“Nah,” he says with a shrug. “I’ve been playing for, like, two years.”

Doing something for two years and not learning a single thing is impressive in its own right, and Subject kind of admires it. 

“I mostly do it to piss off Tank. And, well, dad, but dad is kind of in that stage where he writes me off as a failure and tries not to think too hard about it,” there’s a lacing of bitterness to his vowels, like traces of arsenic he’s coughed up by now, but couldn’t entirely get rid of. “Although I know he does. He thinks so hard about it. Or, well, he will. Disappointing your father is kind of a long-con game, you know?”

Subject doesn’t know. Or maybe he kind of does? This is what he’s doing right now, isn’t it: waiting for the Beakers to show up, waiting for the cathartic dread of a glare. 

“But Tank is too stupid and stubborn to not get annoyed, and he thinks that it’s like, a genuine insult, pointing out that I don’t know what I’m doing,” Ripp giggles. “Siblings are like that. They’re the only person that’s exactly like you, made up of the same two halves. And yet, the way I think is entirely incomprehensible to him. He can’t help but project his own perfectionism and fear onto me, and that’s a bit funny.”

There’s no mirth in Ripp’s eyes. It’s hard, talking about your own brother so cruelly. That’s the only person that’s exactly like him, after all. 

“My father may give up on me, but Tank never will. Even if he really wants to. And he really, really wants to,” Ripp sighs. “His life would be so much easier if he could just hate me and move on, but I think our dad taught him too well. Older sibling instincts are just in his brain now, forever, so he can’t just scold me, he has to care about it.”

Subject cannot even begin unpacking all of that, but he can begin to sympathize. He reaches out a twitchy hand and places it on Ripp’s shoulder. Ripp regards it for a second, and then goes back to his guitar, not really ignoring it, just not providing any comment. Maybe that’s the best reaction. 

“But, yeah, I don’t wanna learn chords and all that bullshit,” he shrugs. “Like, I know I’m a disgrace to all guitarists everywhere, but I’m still making music, aren’t I?”

In order to demonstrate he places his fingers randomly and gives his strum his all, and the sound is so disgusting Subject winces, and the melody is not aided by the fact that one of the strings does snap, which makes Ripp break out into laughter.

He strums some more, ignoring the missing string, and it’s horrible, painful, like gargling on your own vomit, like electric currents through your veins, like needles into neck, but it is, undeniably, music. Ripp is making himself heard, and is making sure your ears bleed while he’s at it. 

“You should become a philosopher,” Subject says, kind of in awe of this kid whose ambitions do not exceed shitty gas station soda. 

Ripp snorts, and twirls the snapped string around his finger. 

“You know, that’s not a bad idea,” he nods sagely. “That will piss my family off so much, you don’t even know.”

The Beakers crash family dinner. 

The doorbell interrupts Ophelia’s rant about her calculus teacher, and she volunteers to answer because she’s a polite young girl, and also because Pascal’s cooking is easy to part with. 

When she opens the door, she sees two people with frowns and ginger hair, and Ripp has told her all about how gingers are aliens with no souls, as opposed to Johnny, who is an alien with a soul, and she knows he was joking but she still had nightmares about a cult of sickeningly orange haired humanoids kidnapping her, so her eyes are blown wide and she stammers and minces her words before they can leave her throat. 

“Does a man live here?” the woman asks, straight to the point.

Ophelia’s first thought, is, of course: the toughest, meanest homeless people in her neighborhood have come to challenge her for her right to stay here, however she has to quickly rule that option out, remembering how Pascal has ensured her that this house is legally theirs and there’s nothing anyone can do to kick her out, so her next thought is:

Debt collectors. Maybe Pascal messed up the paperwork, maybe her cousin’s shady past involves gang warfare and the mafia, maybe they’re in trouble with the police. Her mind flashes back to all the times Ripp pushed alcohol into her hands, his cheeks red with tipsiness and bad decision making, and she concludes that if her cousin is wanted for murder, she’ll be sentenced twice as harshly for the unforgivable crime of taking (and promptly spitting out) a sip of vodka while underage.

Thankfully, Ripp taught her more than the fact that gingers are the pinnacle of all evil, and that is that, when dealing with authorities, just pretend you don’t speak English.

Unfortunately, Ophelia doesn’t know any other languages, and she’s clearly taking too long trying to muster up the courage to fake one, because the man’s frown deepens and he says:

“Where are your parents?”

Well, that’s a sore subject, thanks! Only Ripp is allowed to bring that up so flippantly, because he’s a hopeless shithead but he’s a hopeless shithead she loves, and he also has the uncanny ability to make bleakness sound desirable, so Ophelia is brought to great anger by the fact that this random evil man decided to bring up the subject of parents to an orphan, even though he has no idea she’s an orphan and would have no way of finding out.

Ophelia bites her tongue as she resists the urge to trauma dump all over these godless gingers, because multiple sources have advised her against doing so (Johnny: I think it’s better if you leave some things private, you know? It’s okay if you want to talk about it, I understand it’s hard for you, but, I’m here if you ever wanna chat, okay? I don’t care if it’s at three a.m. or in the middle of class, call me whenever, I’ll always respond) (Ripp: DON’T TALK TO COPS! EVER!). Ophelia squeezes her eyes shut and the two evil homeless debt collector cops open their mouths with concern, as if terrified this girl is going to explode on them, but she doesn’t let them get a single word in before she, loudly, resoundly, with as much confidence as her anxiety ridden body can muster, says:

“No!”

And slams the door on them. When she returns to the kitchen Pascal and Subject stare at her, having only heard her ‘no’ and a decisive slam, but they don’t have the opportunity to ask questions before their doorbell blows up. 

“Ignore it,” Ophelia grumbles into her spaghetti. “It’s nothing.”

It’s easy for Subject to shrug that off and continue eating. Pascal looks far more worried, his brow only smoothing out when the doorbell stops ringing. He fidgets with his fork momentarily, but then figures it was probably door to door salesmen, or recruiters for some weird cult, or maybe Ophelia’s acquaintances from school that can’t leave her alone.

He’ll have to ask if she’s being bullied. From all he’s observed, she is extremely bulliable. Pascal slots that as a bookmark for another time, and prompts Ophelia to finish her rant about her calculus teacher, if she still has some steam to let out, which she surprisingly does, continuing on her tirade as if the interruption never happened.

And just like that, things go back to the tentative normal they’ve been precariously balancing on up until now, and Subject is robbed of his cathartic dread of a glare without even knowing.

Ophelia’s birthday comes quicker than anyone has expected. Days turn into weeks, and the date falls squarely on the same number on the calendar as is Olive’s recorded date of death, except a month later. 

On the walk back from school, Ophelia says something a lot like “of course the old hag had to hog the spotlight on my day,” and then immediately apologizes and begs her friends not to say anything like that to her cousin, at which they both shrug and tell her she’s allowed to be bitter, even if she cares enough about Subject to not voice such sentiments anywhere near him. 

Arriving home, they are greeted to a dinner of champions: takeout. Because Pascal has the self awareness to not plague the birthday girl with his cooking. Subject’s mohawk is squished by a cardboard birthday hat, and the elastic looks like it’s straining and will snap any minute as it cups his long face, and Pascal brings out a heap of packaged birthday candles all of which are in the shape of either the number one or number eight, and he asks her to pick out the ones she likes most, because he wasn’t sure what her favorite color was.

Ophelia is notoriously bad with choices, so she’s on the brink of breaking down into tears as she sifts through the wax. She likes glitter, but wouldn’t that be too tacky? She can widen her options by not matching the one to the eight, but that would look stupid and unharmonious on her cake. She completely forgets what her favorite color even is halfway through, too overwhelmed by being loved so much she’s given agency she has no idea what to do with, and she knows there’s no wrong answers, and nobody in this room will judge her even a tiny bit, but she’s probably scared of some higher judgment, somewhere. Will she be questioned about this at the pearly gates? “Hey, remember that one birthday? Why the fuck did you pick such an ugly shade of blue?”

Ripp, with his talent for making the hopeless feel homely, suggests she just puts all of the candles on the cake, and that genius is promptly followed by all three teens sticking an absolute nonsense combination of numbers onto every available piece of the dessert, no frosting left untouched. 

Her cake looks like a monstrosity. There are candles sticking out its sides, some slot diagonally and are about to slide off, and it generally looks like a hedgehog who’s very passionate about math. She loves it. 

Lighting the whole thing is another hassle, and by the end it genuinely looks like they set up a small bonfire in their kitchen, and Pascal mutters something about smoke detectors, and Johnny holds her hand as she makes a wish and blows on the raging wildfire. 

Of course, that’s not enough to put out even the majority of the candles, so her friends get to work ogling her cake from all sides to make it safe for human consumption, but once there’s one candle left, lopsided on the very edge, she stops them.

“You should blow one out,” she addresses Subject, who so far has been contributing what he contributes best: just kind of staring.

He blinks and points a perplexed finger on himself.

“Yeah!” she nods eagerly. “Make a wish, and then blow on it.”

It takes a few minutes for Subject to come up with a wish. They all wait patiently, watching the wax drip onto the frosting, slowly making a pool of hot white and melting the buttercream. Once he seemingly settles on something, he makes an ‘o’ with his mouth and the bush fire is successfully put out. The team high five each other, even though Subject just awkwardly holds out his hand in an imitation of what the kids are doing.

“So, what did you wish for?” inquires Ripp with a smirk, taking the candles out of the cake. 

“Shut up, Ripp,” Ophelia lightly pushes him. “I wouldn’t have wished it if I didn’t want it to come true!”

Subject opens his mouth, but all the teens stop him by holding out their hands in alarm. It’s childish in the most beautiful way, Pascal notes, how seriously they take this tradition. No matter how fucked up their lives are, they are all shithead idealists in the end, ones who know what torment is but struggle to name it, ones who make light of everything because they know there’s more waiting for them after they reach their current milestones, ones who take birthday wish rules very seriously not because they believe in them, but because they choose to make meaning by whatever means available. 

“You’re not supposed to say your wish out loud,” explains Johnny. “Then it won’t come true.”

Subject shuts his mouth. He scrunches his brows in confusion, and Pascal mentally sighs, bookmarking needing to have a conversation with him about how this doesn’t apply to general desires and talking about your feelings. Pascal also bookmarks to redirect his pop-psychology magazine subscription to this address.

The cake looks like it’s been stabbed in every conceivable space on its fragile corpse, which, in all fairness, it has, but nobody minds the holes as they shovel it into their mouths. Ophelia, being the birthday girl, gets to lick the extra frosting off of all the candles, which, under normal circumstances, would’ve been an extra treat, but since they decided to recreate the Ides of March, the collective amount of sugar she consumes gives her a headache, and she pathetically digs through her slice of cake, dreading having to eat it all. 

Johnny puts her out of her misery by standing up and loudly announcing: 

“Time for presents!” 

Pascal hands her her present first, because he knows it’ll be underwhelming so they might as well get it out of the way before she receives the things she actually wants. It’s a book, cheap with an eye straining cover, called ‘noobs guide to cocktails’. Pascal shoots off into an alcohol safety tirade, as if he’s ever had more than three beers at a local pub (he hasn’t), and Ripp has to bite down on his knuckles to hold back laughter. 

The teenager then presents his gift: it’s a keychain with the logo of Ophelia’s favorite TV show, as well as a hoodie with the same thing shittily stitched on the back. Ripp brags that he shoplifted the keychain, and also learned how to sew entirely from scratch for this, and Ophelia puts her hands on her mouth to not squeal. Many hugs are in order, and she dons the hoodie and doesn’t take it off for the rest of the night. 

Johnny brings out his gifts: the first is a few textbooks required for Ophelia’s major, since he knows she struggles with money and prefers owning physical copies because she feels bad about filling out library books with her notes, and the second is a set of jewelry. He, apparently, saved up his pocket money for three months in order to buy her the bracelet, and also two rings. They’re simple gold, and Johnny sheepishly confesses he thinks they could both wear them to match. Ophelia kisses him to death. Pascal watches the way the light bounces off the metal, and thinks about how this is childish, too: they’re promise rings, cheesy and sidestepping the notions of any actual commitment, but they have a sentiment behind them as they slot themselves onto youthful fingers. Pascal side eyes Subject, watches him croon his neck to the side in curiosity, watches him blink. Pascal wonders if he should really adopt relationship dynamics from teenagers. Pascal wonders what even is different, between twenty five and fifteen. 

“This is all wonderful,” Ophelia says, burying her wrists in the sleeves of her hoodie. “Thank you all so much.”

Pascal touches Subject’s hand, in a gentle nudge to show off his present. Subject shuffles to retrieve the only box left in the pile. It’s wrapped in bright red cardboard, not even wrapping paper, and the tape holding it all together is extremely visible, but he tenderly hands it to Ophelia nonetheless. 

Ophelia tries to open it carefully, but with all the overlapping glue it’s so impossible she just starts digging in like a feral animal. Eventually, she shakes out a single container of pepper spray.

The entire room goes silent. 

“You always seem so stressed,” Subject shrugs. “I figured this will give you a sense of security.”

Ripp bursts out laughing first. Johnny turns away to snicker to feign politeness. Ophelia looks like a deer in the headlights. 

Eventually someone feels sorry for how confused Subject looks, and Ophelia thanks him profusely, because it’s a thoughtful gift and she appreciates his thought process and practicality. Subject asks if he did something wrong. Pascal says she likes it, and that’s what matters. 

After the gift giving is done, the teenagers file into Ophelia’s room, to do whatever it is teenagers do to celebrate important occasions, and Pascal and Subject are left in the living room. Pascal slots his fingers into Subject’s palm, and they stay there, subtle touch that’s comforting enough. 

“I’m sorry your mom’s dead,” are the words that come stumbling out of Pascal’s mouth, and he knows that’s not the thing to say, but he can’t take it back, so he just has to wince. 

“Yeah,” Subject nods. “But my dad is somewhere out there, I guess.” 

Pascal turns at that. It’s not often that Subject talks about his father, only brief mentions occasionally, and Pascal still has no idea what the situation is there. He just assumed it’s the case of a typical deadbeat, but the way Subject talks about him is still wistful, mysterious. 

“I guess he got word of your mother’s death, somehow,” Pascal says. “Do you think he’d visit?”

Subject sighs. 

“Maybe he has, already.”

Ophelia, since discovering her unknown cousin, has been unable to get away from his face whenever she went. There were missing posters of him, for the first few months. That has been a huge source of tension in the way she looks at him, at first, but she was always too scared to push the question. Ripp does questionable stuff all the time, so she figured she has no ground to stand on for Subject’s mere crime of minor disappearance. There’s been the same woman plastered on the side of milk containers for as long as she remembers, so, who cares, maybe this is part of growing up in this god forsaken town. She just shyly turned away whenever her cousin stared at her from lamp posts. 

Nowadays, it doesn’t bother her as much. It faded into the background of her life, as she got to know him as more than an image peering at her from the corner of the sidewalk. Life goes on, and so does she, on her walk home from school. 

The morning after her birthday she lingers at the bus stop, her bus late and the air of the morning biting at her half asleep bones. She stares into the eyes of her cousin, lifeless beads printed on yellowing paper. It doesn’t say his full name, just clarifies: “He responds to Subject”. 

The missing poster is peeling off, now, too old to be relevant. Ophelia is sure by now the police dropped the case, dismissing it as another person choosing to leave this shithole of a town. There’s only so much you can do when your dog runs off into the night, after all. She carefully picks at the corner of the paper and rips it off all the way, crumpling it in her fist and throwing it in the trash, because she doesn’t litter. 

Her bus gets there two minutes later, and she gets on, and thinks about what Pascal will cook for dinner.