For the first time in days, the morning felt almost normal.
A soft, silvery light filtered through the kitchen curtains, painting slow-moving patterns on the tiled floor. Outside, the world still glistened with the remnants of last night's rain — beads of water clinging to the windowsill, leaves heavy and bowed, the garden soil dark and fragrant. The air carried that familiar scent of rain-soaked earth, the kind that seemed to seep into the walls and linger like a memory. From somewhere in the trees, a few birds sang tentative notes, as though testing whether it was safe to welcome the day.
Catherine stood by the counter, one hand wrapped around a warm mug, the other absently tracing circles along the rim. The coffeemaker hissed softly behind her, filling the kitchen with its deep, comforting aroma. She hummed without realizing it — an old lullaby she used to sing when Aaron was little, back when mornings were easy and filled with laughter. The sound trembled slightly at the edges, as if unsure whether it belonged here anymore.
She let herself imagine, just for a moment, that the quiet meant things were finally settling. That maybe the worst had passed, and all the tension that had taken root in this house was finally loosening its grip. But the silence felt too careful — the kind that comes when people are afraid to speak, afraid to break the fragile illusion of calm.
Her gaze flicked toward the ceiling. The floorboards above her didn't creak, not even once. No faint footsteps, no soft thump of drawers being opened. Aaron was still asleep. Or at least, she hoped he was.
Maybe that was for the best.
Sleep had been the only time he seemed peaceful lately, the only time his face wasn't shadowed by something heavy and unreadable. When he was awake, his eyes — once so bright and curious — had the distant, unfocused look of someone caught between wanting to be present and wanting to disappear. Catherine couldn't decide which worried her more.
She turned back to the window. A droplet of rain slid down the glass, leaving a clean, wobbly trail in its wake. The world outside looked calm, innocent — but the reflection staring back at her was tired. She tried to smile at it, as if convincing herself that a normal morning was possible.
The kettle clicked, the clock ticked, the hum of the refrigerator filled the air. Ordinary sounds. Familiar sounds. Yet they all seemed to echo in the emptiness of the house, reminding her of what wasn't being said.
Catherine took a slow sip of coffee and closed her eyes.
Maybe, she thought, if she just let the moment stretch a little longer, she could almost believe it — that this was what healing looked like.
Almost.
David sat at the table, shoulders hunched, his eyes fixed on the tablet in front of him. The screen's glow painted faint blue shadows across his face, the color of sleepless nights and second thoughts. The mug beside him had gone cold long ago, untouched since he'd poured it. He scrolled slowly through the lab reports that had come in overnight — numbers, graphs, lines of coded observations. All precise. All meaningless in the way data sometimes was when the heart refused to follow where reason led.
He hadn't said much since last night. Neither of them had. The silence between him and Catherine wasn't hostile, exactly — just tired. Stretched thin, like paper that had been folded too many times. They'd both learned that some conversations were safer left unfinished, at least until morning.
Now, in the stillness, the house almost felt like it used to. For once, it wasn't humming with fear or guilt or the unspoken dread of what came next. Just the tick of the kitchen clock and the soft hiss of rain on the porch roof. For a fleeting moment, David let himself believe that maybe, just maybe, they could hold on to this fragile calm.
Then his tablet buzzed. Once. Then again.
He frowned, thumb hovering above the screen. It was far too early for messages — at least, the kind that weren't bad news. The lab only reached out when something broke containment, when results defied explanation, or when someone, somewhere, had seen something they shouldn't have.
A small chill crept down his spine. He opened the notification.
[URGENT] David, you need to see this. It's spreading everywhere.
The sender's name flickered on the screen — an old colleague from the research division, someone he hadn't spoken to directly in months. That alone was strange enough to make his pulse quicken.
He hesitated for a second, then tapped the link.
The page loaded slowly, as if resisting him. The silence in the kitchen deepened; even Catherine's humming stopped, replaced by the faint rustle of wind through the half-open window. And then —
The screen filled with chaos.
Dozens of clips and still images flooded the feed — shaky footage, grainy stills pulled from security cameras, blurred faces in hospital corridors, news anchors talking over one another with captions screaming words like mutation, containment breach, and sighting confirmed. His chest tightened as he scrolled, eyes darting from one image to the next, each more frantic than the last.
Then he saw it.
The first clear image — too familiar to mistake for anyone else.
Aaron.
Not a lookalike, not a trick of light — him. The frame caught him mid-motion, eyes glowing faintly against the dark, his body half-turned as if startled by whoever held the camera. The footage was grainy, but there was no doubt. David felt his throat tighten. His fingers went cold against the tablet.
Another clip followed — a few seconds of surveillance video, distorted and chaotic, its edges flickering with digital noise. David's stomach clenched as he hit play.
The footage began mid-motion. A narrow corridor bathed in sterile white light — one he recognized instantly. It was from the lab's east containment wing, where Aaron was kept. The camera caught only pieces of what happened next: a flash of movement, the blur of a figure slamming against a wall, a scientist staggering backward before being thrown out of frame. Then the alarms ignited in pulsing red, painting everything in violent flashes.
The sound was stripped out, replaced by the faint hum of static — somehow making it worse. Without the noise, without the screaming or the chaos that must have filled that room, it felt eerie, unreal, like watching a memory through water.
And then, just before the feed cut to black, there was a glimpse — barely a second long.
A face.
Aaron's face.
His expression was wild, his eyes burning with a light that was neither human nor monstrous — something caught in between, something desperate. It wasn't rage David saw there. It was fear. But the world wouldn't see that.
The video ended with a harsh click, leaving the screen blank except for the timestamp. David's reflection stared back at him from the dark glass, pale and shaken.
There was no context. No sound. No explanation.
Just enough for the world to decide what it thought it saw.
He scrolled down, and the pit in his chest deepened. The post had already exploded across social feeds — thousands of shares in under an hour, comments flooding in faster than the servers could keep up. Screenshots of the video had been plastered with lurid captions, spliced into headlines designed to spark panic:
"Lab Creates Hybrid — Turns Violent."
"Biotech Experiment Attacks Researcher."
"Creature or Man?"
Each headline felt like a knife twisting deeper. They didn't see Aaron. They saw a monster. A threat.
David pressed a trembling hand to his mouth, willing his pulse to slow. He knew how fast these things spread — how quickly outrage outpaced truth. It wouldn't matter that Aaron was terrified, that the containment breach wasn't his fault, that he'd only reacted when cornered. None of that would make it into the story.
Catherine noticed the way his shoulders tensed.
"David?" she asked softly from across the room. "What is it?"
He didn't answer. Not right away.
He couldn't.
On the tablet, another notification blinked to life — new footage, new angles, new fire.
And beneath it all, one single thought echoed through his mind, cold and heavy as lead:
It's.
"David?"
Her voice was cautious, thin — like she already knew something was wrong but wasn't ready to face what.
He turned the tablet toward her, his face drawn tight. "It's the lab," he said quietly. "Someone leaked footage — and pictures."
For a moment, Catherine just stared at him. Then, slowly, she reached for the tablet, her fingers brushing his. They were cold.
The clip began to play again — that same jagged, distorted video. The image of Aaron twisting under the flicker of red light, claws flashing, eyes glowing faintly with that same inhuman shimmer she had once seen in person. The frame cut out just before the woman hit the floor, but the implication hung heavy in the air, filling the silence with something too loud to ignore.
Her hand flew to her mouth. "Oh god…"
David looked away. He couldn't bear to see her expression — that mix of horror and heartbreak. "They don't know who he is yet," he said quickly, forcing his voice into something steadier than he felt. "The footage is cropped, low-quality—"
"But they will," she interrupted, her voice rising. There was panic now, raw and unfiltered. "They'll trace it. They'll see him. And they'll think he's dangerous."
The word dangerous seemed to hang in the room like smoke.
David raked a hand through his hair, pacing the narrow stretch of kitchen floor. "I'll contact the lab," he muttered, half to himself. "They can start pulling it down, get a statement out before—"
"You can't pull this down," Catherine snapped, her composure cracking. "It's everywhere already."
Her voice wavered at the end, trembling not from anger but from helplessness. She looked at him with wide, desperate eyes. "People will come looking," she said softly. "They'll think he's some kind of monster."
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The only sound was the quiet hum of the refrigerator — and then, buzz.
The tablet vibrated in Catherine's hands. Once. Twice. Then again.
Another alert. Another upload. Mirror copies of the same video flooding new channels, hashtags multiplying faster than they could disappear. Each ping sounded louder than the last, cutting through the room like a countdown.
David's breath hitched. Every instinct told him to act — to do something — but there was no fixing this. The world had already seen. The story had already taken root, and truth no longer mattered.
Catherine's hand trembled as she set her mug down. The ceramic clicked sharply against the counter. "He can't see this," she whispered. "Not yet."
David hesitated, then nodded weakly. "I'll keep him away from the news feeds," he said, though the guilt in his voice betrayed how impossible that would be. His eyes flicked toward the ceiling, where Aaron still slept — unaware, for now, of the storm gathering outside his door.
Catherine followed his gaze, her jaw trembling as she whispered, "We were supposed to be keeping him safe…"
The tablet buzzed again. Louder this time.
And suddenly, the morning didn't feel normal anymore.