I watch the blood drip from his eyebrow, I see his chest rise and fall in sharp, ragged breaths. I watch the fury in his eyes slowly curdle into something else as he takes in my stillness, my silence, and my complete and utter lack of reaction.
His brow furrows. The aggression in his stance softens almost imperceptibly, replaced by a flicker of confusion. He’s a predator who has stumbled upon a creature that doesn’t know it’s supposed to be prey. He doesn’t know what to do with me.
And in the silent, dead space of my mind, a thought flickers. It is a foreign, alien thing, a spark in the void. It’s not fear, nor pity, nor shock. It’s a feeling so old, so long-buried that I barely recognize its shape.
Curiosity.
It’s a quiet, intellectual hum; an anomaly. He is a puzzle, a chaotic variable in my carefully controlled, empty equation. The violence rolling off him should be terrifying, but it isn’t. It’s just… intense. He is the polar opposite of the nothingness I inhabit. He is a roaring fire, and I am a vacuum.
The moment stretches, suspended in the damp, red-lit air. The city hums around us, but in this alley, the only sound is the drip of water from a rusty fire escape and the ragged sound of his breathing.
He breaks the silence first. His voice is rough, a low rasp that sounds like gravel and smoke.
“You,” he breathes, the word a curse, an accusation, and a question all at once.
It’s not a question. It feels like a statement of fact I don’t understand. My mind scrambles for a response, for a box to put this in, but there isn’t one. Faced with an overwhelming, confusing emotional accusation, my brain does the only thing it knows how to do: it retreats to observable data.
My own voice feels rusty, unused. “You’re bleeding,” I say. It comes out as a quiet, steady breath.
The words hang in the air, so inadequate, so bizarrely clinical that they seem to throw him off more than a scream would have. A flicker of disbelief, of profound frustration crosses his face. He takes a single, deliberate step toward me. He’s tall, taller than I realized, and he moves with a predatory grace that is both beautiful and terrifying.
He stops a few feet away, close enough now that I can see the faint spray of blood on his cheek. “I know I’m bleeding,” he says, his voice a low, dangerous growl laced with a new, sharp impatience. He’s angry that I deflected, that I refused to engage with the invisible thread he’d thrown between us. “That’s not what this is about. This is about you. Standing there. Looking at me.”
He studies my face, searching for something he can understand. Fear. Anger. Anything. He finds none of it. His gaze intensifies, and he’s no longer just looking at a witness. He’s studying me, really seeing me, as if comparing me to a photograph he’s memorized.
“Why aren’t you afraid?” he asks, the question softer now, more intense. It’s the real question. The one that truly bothers him.
“I don’t feel fear,” I state, because it is a simple fact. Like the sky being blue, or blood being red.
That gives him pause. He actually blinks, a flicker of something unreadable—vulnerability? disappointment?—that is gone as quickly as it appears. He looks at me as if he’s trying to reconcile the girl he thought he knew with the woman standing in front of him.
“You should be,” he says, his voice a near-whisper. It’s not a threat. It’s a warning. A piece of advice from one broken thing to another.
The curiosity inside me sharpens. It’s a needle point of light in the darkness.Why? Why should I be afraid of you? What are you?
The feeling is too new, too unwelcome. It’s a crack in the foundation of the tomb I’ve built for myself. It’s a threat to the quiet I’ve cultivated. I need to get away from him. I need to get back to the nothing.
Without another word, I pull back, letting the heavy door swing shut between us. The last thing I see is his face, frozen in the red light. His expression is a mixture of fury, confusion, and a startling, unexpected flicker of his own intrigue.
The latch clicks, the sound unnaturally loud in the sudden silence of the stairwell. I’m alone again.
I turn and walk up the stairs, my feet feeling heavy, my movements stiff. I don’t stop at my floor this time. I go all the way back up to the seventh floor, back to the door leading to the roof. I need to reset, I need to find the void again.
I push the door open and step back out into the cold night air. I walk to the ledge and sit down, dangling my legs over the edge once more.
The city is still there. The lights are the same, the wind is the same, but it’s all wrong.
The quiet is no longer empty. It’s filled with the image of him, his blazing green eyes, the blood on his skin, and the raw, chaotic energy that seemed to pour from him.
The nothingness I came up here to find is gone.
In its place, a single, persistent question echoes in the silence.
Who are you?
The curiosity remains, a tiny, burning ember left behind by the storm. I have the terrifying suspicion that it’s not going to go out.
Two
