Chapter Text
“My daughters’ computer,” The man begins amicably, gently setting the heavy device down on his counter. He goes to pat the side, but he seems to hesitate, and by then it looks more like he’s caressing it than anything in his reluctance to kill it even more. “It’s not turning on anymore. But, uh…neither of us know what’s wrong with it.”
Outwardly, the thing looks fine, but that doesn’t really mean anything when all the important bits are inside. Tommy takes it by its two ends, bracing it.
“How long have you had it for?” He asks, scrutinizing the outside uselessly as he twirls a screwdriver from his back pocket into one hand.
“Only about five years.”
Five years is practically nothing, at least for a PC like this. As long as you do basic maintenance every one and a while. Tommy skillfully maneuvers it to lay on its side, carefully, as not to jostle it into further disrepair. These things were like legos, made of many, many fitting parts. The difference was, it was much more detrimental to drop something like this.
“Anything happen to it recently?” Tommys’ eyes are dutifully glued to the thing as he unscrews its side panel, making sure to pocket each screw.
“Not anything big? Er, we did move recently…” The man almost sounds sheepish, and Tommy's gaze flicks upwards, urging him to continue. “And while moving it, it slipped from her hands once.” Thing about PC's, is that they fall apart like Legos too.
Tommy can’t help but wince. Dropping it: literally just the thing he was hoping didn’t happen. The man must see it, because he’s quickly going to try and make it seem better than it is.
“—But it wasn't from very high! The outside wasn’t even dented. It was only from around a foot or two.”
That absolutely did not help his case. Tommy thinks Mr. K would be proud of the amount of discipline it took for him to school his expression into something that wasn’t wildly judgemental. It wouldn’t be befitting of a customer service worker. Boss's words, not his.
Instead, Tommy just nods, like he understands.
With the side panel off, Tommy can see the full extent of the damage. Just like the outside, nothing really jumps out at Tommy, but he knows the first thing to check for. His prognosis turns out to be, unfortunately, correct. Tommy lifts the CPU from its place where it’s supposed to be snuggly fit inside, and eyes the many little pins with something almost pained.
They’re bent, ever so slightly. This CPU is so fucking done for.
The one thing Tommy feels he can’t overstate enough about computers like this, is just how fragile they are. It’s not like a phone, which Tommy admittedly has thrown around more times than probably recommended, but at least that thing can take a hit or two with a brick.
A computer on the hand…a mild breeze could render it down for the count, truthfully.
Tommy leans forward and over the computer that's laid out for surgery, getting on the guys' level. He presents the now useless CPU with deft fingers, and the man scooches over to look down at it, albeit with a little less understanding of how absolutely cooked it is.
“Y’see this? These little pins? These are the things that make the computer work.” Admittedly, a simplification, but that’s basically what it is. “They’re supposed to be standing straight.” And Tommy, for the first time in this particular exchange, lets part of his attitude shine through with a pointed look into the man's eyes.
“Ohhhh. Oh.” The man, thankfully, doesn’t seem too bothered by it. More so by the sheer broken-ness of the CPU.
“Yeah. The pins are really fragile, I mean really.” Tommy tries not to sound like he’s scolding him, it’s just better to know now then later, before he drops another two-thousand dollar computer.
“So, is there no fixing them?” The man already looks resigned to his dead CPU fate, but Tommy delivers the finishing blow anyways.
“Yeah…” Tommy draws out the word, offering a grimace he wills to be sympathetic. “Sometimes they’re salvageable? But in this case, they’re a little too bent. Sorry mate.”
The man frowns, but thank everything that is good, doesn’t get unreasonably mad at him for his answer. Tommy doesn’t think he had the energy to tell another customer to politely fuck off, and for the record, that was something Mr. K said he was allowed to do if they got rowdy.
The man thanks him, regardless of the fact he’ll have to get his CPU fully replaced, along with the other parts that may or may not be also fucked. Tommy sends him a thumbs up as he politely shoos, or more so suggests him away to wait for his full diagnosis to come in, and when he strafes off to idle somewhere else in the store, Tommy checks the time.
Nearly six, which is around the time his shift ends. His boss takes over for him after that till closing at around eight.
Tommy completely lucked out with the kind of boss he’d landed. Taking him in as an intern, a paid one at that, was more than Tommy had ever been aiming for.
Thinking about it, being an unpaid working intern was fucking crazy, and he thinks he definitely would’ve built some sort of resentment towards the guy if he’d given him anything but payment, even with how he’d practically groveled at Mr. K’s feet when he’d been told he’d be getting paid a generous fifteen-dollars an hour.
He’d been working here for nearly six months now, and recently Mr. K has been sending him weirdly fucking direct hints about him getting a raise sometime in the near future. Like, it was uniquely bizarre. Shit like, “you’ve done good work boy. Two dollars more worth of work…” before giggling weirdly and disappearing ominously into his office — a really strange thing to see on a guy who looks like he decimates trees in the forest as a living, by the way.
The customer, miraculously, ends up not needing to replace anything more than the CPU, something Tommy tells him with a proud grin after he beckons him over.
Still fucking expensive, but much less than it’d be if he had to replace the whole thing. He sends him off with his receipt, and his daughter's PC cautiously padded in a box for less precarious transit.
“You know our number,” Tommy makes a side-to-side telephone motion with his hand, “Call if you have any more issues!” He gets another ‘thank you’ in return, and then with that, his shift is finally over.
It’d been one of those rare, quiet nights for the shop. Bereft of its usual crowd of at least twenty people on average at any given moment, instead replaced with a meager ten an hour. It was noticeable, especially in what could be considered a grossly overcrowded megacity. Apparently, it was something closer to a metropolitan city, with less people living here than people who took day trips to Argos instead.
You were, unfortunately, never more than like, twelve hairs away from another person at all times. Unless you lived in a fancy apartment that was more than four-hundred square feet in total.
Might’ve been a slight exaggeration, but if you lived here, you’d believe him.
The streets are populated when he leaves, (not before enduring his daily strong handshake from his boss.) but not in the way that's…normal, for this city. When there's hundreds of people walking the streets at every hour of every second of every day, braver ones practically trying to vault over cars to get to work, you realize a decline in a few fifty or something citizens every few days isn't something even remotely noticeable.
That's why it gives Tommy pause when he exits the storefront, and he can take in the appearance of each person on the street individually. It’s looking less like the sea of heads he’s used to, and more like his college campus.
There's still a good amount of people, it's in no way sparse, it's just…starkly…different.
Tommy purses his lips, grabbing the strap of his backpack a little tighter. Fucking weird. Who died? That's, a little grimly, his first thought. His second thought is that his first thought was fucking stupid, because no one really gives that much of a shit if someone dies. It's sad, yeah, but like, not enough to clear the streets.
There's certainly the same amount of cars, enough that Tommy thinks it's just the pedestrians that are preoccupied somewhere else. Same amount of cars that Tommy wishes would cool it with the honking.
It's a big fucking city, but of course, Tommy remembers the way back home. It's close enough to work that he doesn't need to take public transit, unless it's really crowded that day, but that day is certainly not today.
He sees a man trying to catch his little black dog that’s somehow expertly dodging his embarrassed attempts at grabbing, with a few chuckling bystanders to the sides. There’s a few groups of college kids walking together in clumsy huddles, bumping into each other as they try not to take up the entire sidewalk. Someone jumps over a fire hydrant.
Other than the weird decrease in the city's usual population, there's nothing else that jumps out at him as particularly strange or off-putting during his walk home. That is, until audible commotion reaches his ears.
Tommy likes to think he can mind his business most of the time, but hey, sue him. They're in the city, and he's curious. The first thing that he can make out are police sirens, then the cacophony of murmurs, accredited to the large crowd surrounding the scene.
As he gets closer, and closer, their murmuring almost comes second to a different sound. It's just barely there over the drone of people, and it sounds like…growling. Snarling, even.
Tommy can barely see what they're all looking at over the sizable amount of bodies blocking the view. Eventually, he's closer, and someone moves their head, and he finally gets to see what's got everyone so tense.
Two police officers are holding down a fervently struggling figure. For a moment, Tommy had almost mistaken them for an animal. They're moving erratically, screaming in short bursts before returning to the near rabid snarling from before. Other than that, they're very visibly identifiable as a person.
They're wearing what Tommy can make out as plaid, and jeans, though they're stained with something he thinks might be blood. He, admittedly, doesn't really see what the crowd had formed for. It wasn't the safest city ever — the crackhead or two that'd randomly fucking lose it on someone that particular week wasn't anything to write home about.
He thinks he can hear someone begin to passionately chant something along the lines of ‘let him go! let him go!’ before promptly cutting themselves off with an audible wince in their voice and an ‘oooh,’ as they presumably take in the state of the persecuted. Amen.
He gets closer. A pair of college girls, thoughtfully, take a few steps to the side to give him room to join them in their morbidly curious bird-watching.
Red veins pulse painfully up the guy's neck, looking inflamed and angry. Tommy makes a face. It might be disgust. This is some serious fucking drugs. They're not even saying anything coherent, aside from the stray ‘let me go!’, something he hopes the police don't take to heart, as much as he's not their biggest fan.
Then, they make eye contact. Him and the druggie.
He almost thinks, deliriously, that their eyes are red. And not in the crackhead way. He almost thought their pupils were red, like milky blood. Clear as sin in the rapidly fading daylight, Tommy was distantly reminded of the eyes of an animal after the flash of a camera.
He leaves the bystanders to resume minding his own business after that. Albeit, tactically walking a little faster. He’ll probably hear about this at school the next day, then just like every other bit of drama it’ll fade out. Shit just happened sometimes.
There's more people the longer he walks, and he’s simultaneously getting farther away from the scene of the crime. It's something he'd be surprised about if it turned out to be coincidence.
The next thing that happens, Tommy won't admit wasn't smart of him.
He doesn't live in a bad part of town, objectively, he really doesn't. Literally nothing bad has ever happened near his apartment complex. There were worse places to live here, places where you should definitely hold your metaphorical purse closer and carry a knife maybe, just in case. The worst thing he'd ever witnessed happening here was a lady getting pulled over for having a trunk full of shoplifted groceries.
So, when Tommy turns into the alley that separates the street he was on and the street his apartment sat on, the meaty sounds of fists meeting skin shock him into stillness.
With his legs frozen in place, his eyes rake the situation before him at a breakneck speed as he frantically tried to set a record for deciding whether to turn heel and jog away or not.
Someone, erratic looking and fitted in an otherwise well-kept looking hoodie, is attempting to wrangle someone in office wear to the wall. He can't tell whether or not it's an equal fight, just that office-wear is fighting back, and upon further, wide-eyed observation, is losing.
Hoodie is trying to get what looks like a briefcase out of office-wear's grasp. Definitely a mugging, then.
Tommy's first instinct is to run in no questions asked and forcefully separate them. His hand twitches around the strap of his backpack. Tommy doesn't have time for a second instinct, because by the time he gets to it, he's already flung his backpack off his shoulder and he’s darting forwards, throwing hoodie off of office-wear.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” Tommy bites out confrontationally, holding out an arm to shield the guy behind him as hoodie staggers a few steps backwards, looking massively out of it for how aggressively they'd been acting moments before.
He doesn’t get a response, because in the next second hoodie is too busy trying to bum rush him.
Tommy, a few inches taller than his assailant, successfully fends him off for the most part. He admittedly doesn’t work out, but he’s not frail. For both his and office-wears’ sake, he sure hopes he’s not. He’s glad it’s autumn, and its long sleeve weather. He thinks his arm might’ve been fucked otherwise, from how wildly the mugger tries to tear at it.
Tommy shoves harshly at the guy's shoulders, throwing a bold fist and cuffing hoodie on the chin.
Like a cornered animal, the hooded man retreats back after a scuffle that felt so much longer than a few seconds. The mugger hunches low to the ground, unnervingly. Definitely on drugs, or just massively fucking peculiar. Tommy barely registers the milky red glint in their eyes, the last bit of sunlight reflecting finely as they turn to flee.
He gave up easier than Tommy had been expecting. Or…
…really, he didn’t know what he was expecting. Truthfully, he’s fucking glad that guy followed the conduct of a feral cat, and not a mountain lion, or something equally ballsy and stronger than him.
More importantly is the guy who he’d been assuming was still behind him after his impromptu skirmish, and when he turns to check, finds he’s right. Office-wear is hunched similarly to the mugger, but less in the animalistic way he’d been, and more in an exhausted, frightened way.
“Y’alright?” Tommy raises a brow, going to lend some more stable assistance. Office-wear reels back from his outstretched hand, breathing heavily. The brief case is still being bruisingly gripped in a hand that's going white, like he’ll die if he lets go. “Jesus, you’re fucking bleeding. Do you need me to bring you to someone?”
Office-wear mumbles something he can’t hear.
Tommy goes to brace his shoulders. “Speak up mate, can’t hear you.”
“No, no…no hospital, no…” He takes in a greedy breath of air, looking on the verge of collapse.
Christ. Tommy thinks the guy might be trying to say something else, but he doesn’t get a chance, because he’s immediately slumping to the ground after getting his previous words out. If Tommy weren’t there, this guy might’ve been sporting a massive concussion when he woke up.
Tommy thinks it might keep him up at night if he just left him here, and after a bit of rigorous searching, can’t find a phone on the stranger either.
In his stress, he can’t think of any other option…other than to bring him to his own apartment. It’s stupid. So, so stupid. Something he repeats over and over to himself even as he’s actively hauling the unconscious man into the elevator of his apartment building, and even as he’s carefully making sure the man doesn’t hit his head on anything as settles him into the lift.
Even as he’s dutifully making sure the guy's suitcase doesn’t get damaged on its journey with him, he’s thinking about how stupid this is. Even when, and especially when, his neighbor, an old woman named Clementine, peeks outside her door to ask if everythings alright to meet the sight of a suspiciously wide-eyed Tommy lugging a visibly unconscious man to his door.
“Yes, miss. He’s just blackout drunk, s’all.” He shrugs sheepishly, and manages to sound embarrassed for his irresponsibly wasted “friend”.
“Oh,” Her nose scrunches up, shaking her head in what’s clearly disapproval. “Make sure you have him drink water.” She says despite it, shutting her door with a quiet click.
Tommy gets the stranger the rest of the way into his apartment with little trouble after that.
He sets the stranger down on his couch, placing the mysterious briefcase beside him, since he seems oh so opposed to parting with it. He wonders if that druggie out there thought it was weed in there or something, in their induced state.
Tommy grimaces down at his faux intoxicated pal, really really hoping this guy is normal. Or at least not dangerous. He’d made the assumption office-wear was the muggee, but that totally could’ve been a massive case of profiling on his end. Jesus, he hopes it wasn’t.
Settling against the edge of his counter, Tommy brings out his phone to blindly google what to do for injuries. Injuries, in the vast sense, because Tommy has no fucking clue what’s up with office-wear. Head injury, possibly. He’d seen blood, but by the time they’d arrived at his apartment the bleeding had clotted and stopped altogether. So, it was very surface level.
Might still be a good idea to wash it. But Tommy, despite all his good samaritan behavior, didn’t feel like prodding around while the stranger was unconscious to clean his wounds. Perhaps if the guy was still actively bleeding out, but both his couch and the guy look like they’ll be able to hold over for the night. Or at least until office-wear wakes up.
Tommy, even though the man in his home is decidedly not drunk, prepares a glass of water anyways. Water was always a good idea, in more scenarios than one.
After shedding his jacket, Tommy checks the laptop in his backpack he’d unceremoniously swung around earlier for any obvious consequences. Turning it on and off quickly, he’s thankful that he finds no visible damage. Tommy didn’t want to test out that employee discount with Mr. K just yet.
The rest of the contents in his backpack are also just as unharmed, thank everything that’s holy, even the clumsily stored homework that miraculously has no wrinkles where it’s pressed up parallel to his laptop. His English professor fucking hated it whenever anyone brought in assignments visibly damaged in some way. Even if it didn’t hinder any of your reading ability, he’d mark you down a point for it. At least that was his biggest flaw. Could be worse.
Plopping down into a chair, Tommy massages his temple as he eyes the stranger on his couch from across the apartment.
The sun has long disappeared behind the horizon by now, and it leaves his apartment dark. Aside from the light from the bathroom that illuminates the rest of the apartment, and the little light his kitchen appliances give off, there's no other source he's bothered to turn on. It's quiet, enough so that the dull buzzing from his fridge is noticeable.
He thinks he hears voices raise from outside, but then after a second passes, he's not sure whether or not it's people, or sirens. They quieten, before crescendoing again, sounding like the distant screams from a roller coaster. Tommy purses his lips, pushing up from his table and drifting towards the closed blinds.
He reaches for them, shoulders hiking further up his neck in what he attributes to nerves. He doesn’t get a chance to follow through, because a softened bump is sounding from behind him. Tommy whips around, just to find the stranger has woken up, one knee slipped off from the couch and looking uncomfortable where it’s digging into his carpet.
The stranger still looks frazzled, despite the danger being long gone. Tommy supposes they wouldn’t know that.
“Where— where am I?” It’s strained, but they aren’t even looking at Tommy, instead going to frantically paw at the briefcase they’d supposedly just realized was beside them. Their hands are going to feel at the case frenetically, though they manage to look focused.
“My apartment,” Tommy supplies awkwardly from his place at the window, palms digging into his sill.
“Why?” Office-wear stresses, going to pat down their own trousers as if looking for something. The man still isn’t looking at him, instead more preoccupied with a device Tommy is perplexed that he didn’t find when he’d tried searching for a phone earlier.
“You passed the fuck out, that’s why.” Tommy retorts haughtily, admittedly a little confused.
Now that he’s really looking at him, office-wear isn’t in casual office wear. It’s fully a suit, if a little less conspicuous than a formal one. It looks like something Tommy would assume a CEO wears, or maybe a lawyer. Blonde hair is falling out in strands from where it must’ve been meticulously slicked back before.
The man almost looks composed, for a moment, coming down from the alarm he’d woken up in—
—then, he twitches. Violently. It’s incorrect to call it something as little sounding as twitching, because it’s more of a spasm, and it has Tommy flinching back into his window on instinct.
Brow pinching, Tommy eases forward with his hands outstretched. “Fuck— dude, are you okay?” concern for the stranger is mixed with unease, but compassion outweighs it.
The stranger swears, loudly. He’s holding his own head, seemingly pained as he briefly goes blissfully unaware to what's just happened. His grip on the briefcase is releasing in that moment, and his resolute insistence on holding onto it no matter what, is ultimately its undoing.
It’s practically being flung, and it lands a few feet away, an equal distance from both Tommy and the man.
To Tommys’ ignorance, and the man's growing horror, it pops open on impact with a harmless sounding click. Tommy doesn’t get a chance to wonder why the man looks so terrified, sitting with the knowledge of a danger Tommy goes without, because several vials which were previously fit snugly in between mesh molds are thrown out to shatter on the apartment floor with a loud crashing that’s even louder in what used to be droning silence.
Tommy goes to reflexively shield his face, but after a moment, finds no glass shards have reached it that high. Chancing a glance downwards to assess the damage, Tommy is nearly letting down his guard.
Then, he makes eye contact with the stranger, and the resigned fear in his eyes is haunting.
The liquid in the vials have spilt over the hardwood floors, looking contaminated with an inky twinge, and when it begins to crawl up the man's figure across from him, it darkens even further.
Like water, pooling around his form, it’s agonizingly slow as the liquid gently swathes the man in a liquid tomb. Not slow enough to where Tommy gets a chance to think anything more than a panicked thought of needing to pull the stranger away from it— but, when he tries to move, something is stopping him.
He looks down, confused, but that confusion turns to alarm when he sees the same liquid had pooled around his own feet, and it was enveloping his legs with rising dread. He pulls uselessly, and that only seems to accelerate the process.
Frozen, Tommy whips his head back up to meet the strangers once brown eyes. He finds wide-eyed fear, but there’s still that resignation, like he’d known it was too late the moment glass had met the floor.
Struggling naively, Tommy can no longer feel where the water has laid its claim. He can’t move, and it’s almost warmly cool as the only feeling it leaves him in the place of his water casted body is a light tingling. This is how he’s going to fucking die, he thinks, as the water cools across his face, almost mocking him with how gentle it is.
The last thing he sees before it’s taking away his sight, is the stranger looking at him with something almost akin to sorrow.
When Tommy comes to, he comes to slowly. Confused, and blind.
Bizarrely calm, he doesn’t have it in him to panic, preoccupied with his senses that are slowly coming back to him, one by one.
One finger twitches, then another, and then he suddenly feels cool air against the tips of them. He can hear cracking, and after a moment of stillness he uses to digest the situation, feels that it’s not his joints. Joints that are uniquely stiff.
Something cracks again with his attempted movement, and then something else. And then, something falls, and light is assaulting his eyes. He has to squint as they adjust. No longer the pitch black he’d begun to grow accustomed to in his consciousness, his one free eye darts around the room he’s groggily remembering as his apartment.
Another crack, and then another one. He regains more mobility, gradually. Another crack, then—
Tommy falls, fast, an unfounded breeze whipping across his face.
His other eye is now free, and he’s blinking rapidly to clear them. Air across his skin, free of the constricting hold, it leaves Tommy nearly freezing for a moment. It doesn’t last long, because mere seconds later, something warm flourishes deep within his chest, effectively banishing the cold that’d had him going rigid with its intensity.
He’s so warm, he doesn’t know what to do about it. He feels like a rogue engine, and then all at once it’s like nothing had happened at all. He’s neither too cold, nor is he burning up. He feels abnormally rejuvenated, like there’s some energy coursing from his toes to his head, back down to his finger tips.
He…
…How did he get here? Tommy casts a gaze back towards where he’d been frozen standing moments ago. It’s several feet away now, in his living room. To his growing confusion and unease, Tommy can’t help but stare at where crystals shaped in a mold of his shoes are cracked and broken open, and yet still holding the shape even after he’d unceremoniously pulled himself free.
The crystal casing is black, and inky, and almost opaque.
Pieces of it that’d presumably been on Tommy beforehand are broken off in shells on the ground, all in varying sizes.
Tommy brings his hands up to fumble with his clothing, hands smoothing across his body searchingly. There’s no excess shell on him that he can find, not even anything little clinging on. Confounded, Tommy slumps, but he can’t find that there's any exhaustion for him to embrace.
Then, a memory is freezing him in place. Memories of eyes staring at him with sorrow, of the sound of fists against flesh, loud swearing. Eyes of sorrow disappearing under a cloak of ink. Tommy doesn’t want to look, but he finds that he can no longer avoid it in his peripheral, no matter how hard he tries.
He stares straight forward for as long as he can, up until morbid curiosity gets its hold on him, regrettably.
When he does turn to face what he knows is already there, a statue made of opaque crystal stares right back at him, eyes shiny — not with life, instead with material that reflects the rays of light subtly.
Frozen in the same position Tommy had last seen him in, the stranger stares forward with a face that's still etched in resignation. Indefinitely, it stays that way. Tommys’ mouth dries up.
At first, Tommy doesn’t feel anything. His eyes travel the crystal statue, noting the details in the clothing he’d worn are now lost in the bumpy make up of crystals woven together. Nothing, is followed by sinking dread. He feels unfamiliarly sick when he tries to see the person under the thick layer of crystal shell, only to no avail. Only a snapshot of their last moments frozen in time.
Tommy’s gaze flicks towards the cloudy daylight that shines stubbornly through his blinds. The both of them had stayed there, the entire night. But whereas Tommy emerged, the stranger had continued to stay.
Tommy sits there waiting for the stranger to move for a long time.
The stranger doesn’t end up moving, ultimately, and Tommy knows he has to move on. Tommy doesn’t think he was expecting him to. Move, that is — but he guesses a part of him was hoping he hadn’t just witnessed some guy die in his fucking apartment.
He— he doesn’t really know what to do with him. The statue. The stranger. He’d already missed his first class of the day, and the second one was coming up in an hour, and he was debating on whether he even wanted to go in or not at all. There’s a missed call from one of his table partners from first period, but that’s it.
He peeks out the window at one point, and there’s a tiny lady being dragged along by an overenthusiastic poodle outside. A handful of people walking with a purpose in business suits are holding coffee trays. He sneaks one more glance at the stranger frozen in place in his living room, hopelessness staring directly through him, and he makes the executive decision to go to second period.
The walk to school is less cold than he’d anticipated. Tommy had, frankly, expected to feel dead on his feet. Instead, there’s that thrum of energy under his skin that keeps him unfamiliarly refreshed. It’s like he’d miraculously gotten a healthy eight hours of sleep followed by a brisk, uncomfortably warm shower. That type of refreshed.
That, arguably, didn’t happen, but Tommy doesn’t really want to think about what had happened in its place.
His mind is kept deliberately absent of most thoughts that might try and bother him as he walks down the city streets that have been returned to their usual population. Through public transit, through crowds of people, past a group of people with megaphones, shouting about something Tommy doesn’t listen to, and onto campus.
Students are huddled together in their cliques, or they’re speed walking in the direction of their next class. A few isolated people here and there are dotted around the fields, looking like they’re trying their hand at the aesthetic of doing homework outside.
Tommy pulls at a loose thread from a jacket he’d thrifted, frowning straight ahead of himself as he power strides to his English lecture.
Walking into the lecture hall, Tommy finds he’s a few minutes late, because Mr. Lopez has already begun the discussion on Greek literature. It’s then, that he’s also forced to admit that he’d less so walked in and more so burst in. Very unceremoniously, and loudly. A few heads turn towards him. Even more when Mr. Lopez stops mid speech to stare at him. Gee, fucking thanks, Lopez.
“My bad. I slept in.” Tommy raises his hands in defense, not actually sounding too sorry about it. His words would be small in the large room, if he weren’t so naturally loud. Mr. Lopez just beckons him to sit, not looking anything more than mildly exasperated as a few other students here and there chuckle.
Tommy shuffles into a free seat, trying his best to pay attention when his Professor speaks, but no matter how hard he tries to convince himself Ancient Greece is interesting, his mind keeps drifting. Specifically, drifting back to the crystal like statue in his apartment. Thinking about it from further away leaves him feeling detached from it, something he's admittedly glad for.
He didn't know why he lived. He didn't know what the fuck that was. And he doesn't know what the fuck to do. Maybe coming to school was a mistake, especially directly after…the incident, but god, he didn't want to stay in that fucking apartment with that thing. This isn't something…this isn't something he's equipped for. When shit like this happens, they tell you to call the police, and if it's superhuman related, the police call IUVO.
Tommy thinks he knows what category this falls into. Police, then the police call IUVO.
He doesn't know what they'd do about it though, because the vials in the guys suitcase are broken, and the liquid inside had long solidified around both him and…office-wear. Office-wear is presumably dead, and most definitely knew much more than Tommy. He plays with the idea of trying to move on like it'd never happened, but he worries that'll lead to it eventually catching up with him anyways.
Before today, superheroes and IUVO and whatever fuckery happens in that part of the world had never been something Tommy concerned himself with. Heroes didn't come to Argos, because they didn't need to. You leave the typical crimes to the police, and the weirder crimes involving inhumans to Government Agents.
Heroes deal with inhumans that have gone rogue, because only other inhumans can take on one of their own. At least, not without several unnecessary casualties. That's what they said, anyways. Tommy doesn't wanna fucking get involved, because he already has a life going, and he doesn't need that fucked up because of some supernatural bullshit he thought only happened in the more ‘for the future’ concentrated cities, where rogue inhumans knew heroes would be there to stop them.
He doesn't know if he just came to class today to try and pretend everything was still normal, to delay having to tell someone about this for a little bit longer, but it's not fucking working. It's all he can think about.
Mr. Lopez is going on and on about the fucking Greek, and how their literature on the gods held some truth, if a little twisting here and there on the mortality of the inhumans of that time, and all Tommy can think about is the broken shell in his apartment and the statue across from it that showcased what the shell looked like before it'd cracked.
All he can think about is how the liquid had latched onto the nearest warm bodies the moment it'd been freed, something that looked like a mix of water and ink snaking up his leg slowly enough that he hadn't even noticed until it'd been too late.
All he can think about is how he doesn't know if he's okay or not. Because he feels fine, better than fine, really, but he doesn't know what it did to him. He doesn't know why it let him live.
It's before he even knows it, that second period is done and finished, and Mr. Lopez is beckoning students to drop off the assignment from the day before at his desk. Fuck. He definitely wasn't listening for at least half of that. Tommy shuffles up from his seat, meandering down the stairs and clumsily fishing around in his backpack for the assignment that he hadn't even taken out from the night before to double check.
In his defense, he was…preoccupied.
He thinks Mr. Lopez tries to talk to him, but by the time he's noticed he's already halfway out the door, and he really doesn't feel like going back.
Leaned against a wall outside, Tommy manages to find the motivation to call back his table mate from earlier, just to see what he'd wanted. Truthfully, he doesn't really remember the guy's name, which might be partly the fault of the fact his contact is saved as ‘Emo hair’, but also, they just didn't talk that much.
For a minute, Tommy wonders if the guy's even gonna pick up at all, and then the line is clicking to life.
“Hel—”
“Didj’you need something?” Tommy asks, sounding more chipper than he feels, to be honest.
“Oh! I was just calling to see if you got home alright.” His table mate says kindly from the other end. Before the silence can stretch too long, he's continuing. “—Just, because y'know, of the outbreak of uhh, druggies, last night.”
He sounded like he was trying to find a nicer word, but couldn't. Tommy snorts, a little perplexed on why the guy had felt compelled to check up on him, because they definitely didn't know each other that well, but he's not a dick.
“I'm good. It didn't,” Tommy almost catches himself pausing for a little too long. “It wasn't near me, really. Walked past some police and shit, but that's all.”
He's such a fucking liar. But he's also not telling table mate #4, also known as Emo hair, that he'd been fucking cocooned in some freaky magic water with a mind of it's own last night and woke up miraculously fine. And that some guy is dead in his apartment at this very moment. Seems like a heavy topic for their tenth time speaking, in grand total.
“That's good! That's good.” A pause from the other end, then another voice comes from the other end before fading out. Then, Emo hair is speaking again, “Because, you just didn't show up for first period? And, so…”
Oh, shit. Yeah. “That's because maths is fucking lame.”
Emo hair, presumably, believes him, because there's a wheezy laugh from the other end. “Yeah, yeah that's fair. But uh, I'll see you!”
“Bye byeeeee,” Tommy says flatly, but not unkindly. The line beeps after that, and Tommy is alone with his thoughts again.
The rest of the day passes quickly. Like with every other blink he would take, he’d fast forward an hour. He almost thought he was dissociating, or something, but Tommy knew he was painfully conscious, and there just wasn’t much going on in the real world in comparison to his racing thoughts. There just wasn’t enough down time in the day for Tommy to come to terms with everything.
Occasionally, with the groups of students he’d hang around sometimes (at their insistence) he’d hear the stray rumor here and there. Just as he’d assumed, they’re talking about yesterday. Some of them think it’s inhumans, and some of them thinks its some new fucked up drug. None of their theories are coherent, really, but at least they’re sort of fun to listen to.
Tommy feels himself fidgeting more throughout the day, noticeably more.
He’s anxious, and he knows it. Tapping his foot rapidly whenever he can, snapping his fingers over and over again. He’s perfected the art by now. Thankfully, no one gets on his case for it, because he’s seriously not in the mood for a screaming match with a stranger.
He can’t say he’s not excited when it comes time to go to work, because that’s at least something he actually enjoys, and it’ll get his mind off everything. Not that school isn’t a wonderful privilege and he’s so grateful for the opportunity. He rolls around the rehearsed thought in his head like it’s a beaten ball of dough. He wonders if he can convince Mr. K to let him work the extra hours he usually takes for him.
Hands stuffed in his pockets, he has to shoulder past a vast amount of people that he certainly wishes he’d appreciated the lack of yesterday more. It doesn’t matter now, because for now, everything is back to the status quo, and Tommy can go to work and tell more people why they shouldn’t drop their PC’s from any height in no uncertain terms. Yes, not even a little bit.
Then, a rumbling from somewhere else in the city stirs, and he can feel it in his entire chest.
Evidently, everyone else can as well, because hundreds of heads go to turn to the source, which apparently no one can agree on. Some people are looking up, and some are fearfully looking at the buildings that stack high to the sky, which are admittedly a little precariously tall in places.
The second rumble is even more pronounced, and it brings even more hush.
When the third comes, it’s unmistakable as the rumbling of the earth beneath them. Tommy’d never been in an earthquake before, a thought that comes to him distantly when people around him begin to move faster, also apparently recognizing the shaking for what it is. Some aren’t getting the memo, conversing with the people beside them, confused.
Tommy can’t blame them too much, they don’t really get earthquakes here. Not in all the years Tommy’s lived here, at least.
Something inside Tommy tugs. Pulls insistently for him to go find the source, but that’s fucking stupid. Instead, he begins to make his way to Mr. K’s even faster, pushing past people who don’t know what to do. Some people exit their cars to look skyward, and the honking on the streets grow exponentially louder.
They stop, when the fourth rumble comes, and it’s less a rumble and more of a violent quake. This one sends tremor after tremor of aftershocks behind it, and Tommy is nearly thrown off his feet, but finds he’s managed to unexpectedly stay standing while most of the people around him have been pushed to the ground by the shaking.
He hunches low to the ground, brows furrowed with his hands thrown out to balance himself. Tommy doesn’t have the time to wonder why none of them have gotten any earthquake alerts on their phones yet, because the next set of tremors come in full swing, and with it comes screaming. Tommy doesn’t join them, not because he’s not scared or anything, but because that’s seriously not gonna do anything for him.
He doesn’t know if the journey to Mr. K’s is worth it anymore, he thinks as he watches with muted horror as a large theater sign destabilizes from where it’d been bolted to the wall. Metal groans with its weight as it comes free, and the sign begins to fall.
He can hear the voices of the louder ones yelling at people to move, and while it’s not nearly crowded enough on the streets for the path to evacuation to clog into a stampede, someone isn’t fast enough. An old woman he doesn’t recognize in the moment can’t run fast enough, and there’s an equal amount of people pulling back the ones that are trying to go back for her.
Oh fuck. He can’t watch this.
He doesn’t even recognize it when at one moment, he’s standing on the other side of the street wearing a face twisted in dread, and then in the next, his arms are wrapping around someone, and his limbs feel lighter than air as a breeze whirls around him.
It’s followed by a sound that he distantly registers as something that sounds like resounding thunder in his ears, before he can’t hear anything at all. Only an incessant ringing is left.
Vibrations are rippling, but he can only see the woman in front of him, alive and unscathed.
Something large crashes behind him, but he finds he can barely hear it. The ringing gradually begins to fade, but he’s not paying any attention. The woman's wrinkled face is scrunched into something that’s so terrified, eyes pinched closed as if in an effort to miss her own undoing, but Tommy can only be relieved at the fact it’s anything at all.
And then, confusion is washing over him quick enough for it to be closer to shock. Any confidence he’d had before crumbles in place of abject confusion. What had…
He blinks a few times, feeling as though he should be dizzy, but he’s not.
Tommy is bracing the old woman's shoulders, for her sake or for himself, he doesn’t know. She doesn’t dare open her eyes, trembling so much Tommy is almost worried she’s gonna have a heart attack, but he can’t find the concern when he’s preoccupied with the disorientation he’s facing. His peripheral is obscured by the hood that’d somehow made it over his head during the time between then — then being before he’d gotten here, and now.
Tommy chances a peek behind him, and in hindsight, is grateful he’d decided to keep his head dipped so low as he did.
The theater sign is much larger looking when it’s on the ground. But, only adding to his confused daze, it’s several paces behind the two of them. Wasn’t he just…wasn’t she…just?
The onlookers don’t get a chance to ogle at the damage, because the next set of tremors are less forgiving. These next ones are stronger than the last, angrier, with more force put into them than he really thinks is necessary for the earth. It still doesn’t manage to put him off balance, something he doesn't get to add to his growing list of things he can’t comprehend at the moment, because he’s too busy jumping off with another burst, and the crackling boom that comes with it is deafening.
When he stops, the momentum he’d pushed himself forward with too much for his inertia to bear, which doesn’t stop him as he scrapes his palms against the concrete ground, trying to stop himself from skidding even further. Tommy’s eyes widen as he realizes what’s just happened.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding.
This can’t be fucking happening to him. This isn’t fucking happening to him. He hunches over on the ground, scraped open palms bleeding into the rumbling concrete. This isn’t fucking happening to him.
Tommy stares dizzily at the ground in between his splayed hands, and he doesn’t even register the pain. People are screaming out all around him, and the rolling sound that reminds him of thunder is loud enough to pierce through the ringing in his ears. There’s something crackling, and paired with the screams, it’s enough to pull him from the crisis he’d nearly been falling into.
The earthquake. The earthquake. Right. Fuck.
Tommy stands, whereas no one else can regain their footing on the unstable ground. His palms sting, but it’s an afterthought as he clenches them tightly.
With a burst of speed that feels unfamiliarly natural when he does it, Tommy shoves a pedestrian out of the way of a crumbling piece of debris. Time is just as fast as it’s always been, but bizarrely, Tommy finds he can keep up with it. Like a fish to water, the wind he cuts through doesn’t manage to shock him even with how hard it tries to resist his velocity.
With a resounding crackle, Tommy vaults over a long since abandoned car to pull a man out from where two cars had been dangerously close to crushing him in between their sides. This isn’t happening to him, he thinks mindlessly just as he pulls out another person from where they’d been trying to escape their car.
Another set of aftershocks, and then another, this time smaller. And then another, this time on its own. Then, it stops all at once. The district is quiet with a foreboding fear, but then as a beat passes, and then several more, people begin to hesitantly remove their arms from where they’d been shielding their heads.
He needs to leave. He needs to leave right now.
It’s his chance, where no one is paying attention to him, for him to retreat. Just as the thought enters his mind, a head is turning to him, and Tommy ducks his own head down, but it’s not enough. That particular head nudges the person next to them, and then another pair of eyes is on him, and Tommy feels like he’s overstayed his welcome.
One step backwards, then another, and he’s bracing before setting off with an echoing rumbling he finally begins to recognize for what it is: a shockwave. He doesn’t get a chance to retrieve his backpack from where it’d flown off his shoulders, and he doesn’t know if he even wants to.
When he runs, he doesn’t feel like he has control over his limbs. He feels clumsy, he feels too fast, and he feels desperate.
Desperate to get out from prying eyes, because this hasn’t been who he was for the past seventeen years of his life, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. When he intermittently takes a moment to stop, shock waves roll off of him in shallow waves, and he can’t hide. Because it’s too loud, and too obvious, and people are staggering backwards and looking at him, and he thinks he can hear police sirens, or maybe it’s an ambulance. He doesn’t know.
He breaks into a run again, pushing back the people that’d begun to try and get close. He can’t let people see him. There’s no time for thinking when he runs, because he’s at point B before point A can even forget his figure. It’s fucked, but he can’t stop for more than a few seconds, because there are people lining every, single, fucking square inch of this stupid fucking city.
The sun is setting, but Tommy knows exactly where he’s going.
A grainy picture of him is on the screen, blurring with anticipated movement in his stiff figure. The hood of his jacket covers most of his face, yet disturbingly, he finds that peeking out from beneath the shade of his hood are two, vivid specks of glowing orange he doesn’t recognize as his own eyes.
“...Argos’s first vigilante has made their debut tonight, November twenty-fifth at around four PM. They have made no other appearance after disappearing after the unexpected earthquake, causing the damage to several buildings in the Hartley District. The city is already preparing for repairs, don’t wo…”
Tommy feels his eye twitch, staring scathing holes into his TV. The crumbling figure of the statue in his apartment sits next to him, officiating the death of the stranger once and for all.
He needs to burn this fucking jacket.