(AN: First I want to say thank you to those who have taken the time to read my story.
I will be releasing 10 chapters today and then 10 again next week to make up for the week of Christmas and New Years I will be preoccupied.
Ok thanks again more at the end but for now lets get to it. Seventh of 10)
Age 13
By October, campus had settled into rhythm.
The chaos of move-in, the late-night laughter, the cafeteria noise, all of it had faded into patterns.
Even the weather had learned routine. Bright mornings, slow heat, evenings cooling just enough to invite a jacket.
I liked that.
At least, I thought I did.
My days were perfect sequences. Morning lecture, afternoon study, dinner at six-thirty, lights out by nine.
No wasted motion, no missed steps.
Ben joked he could set his watch by the sound of my door each morning.
"You've turned life into a spreadsheet," he said once, leaning against the hallway wall.
"Spreadsheets work," I told him, not looking up from the book I was carrying.
Paige was the opposite kind of predictable. Her schedule was just as full, but she made chaos look graceful, bouncing between computer labs, group projects, and a new coding club that met twice a week.
When she wasn't typing furiously, she was talking, explaining algorithms as if words could keep the logic alive.
Sometimes she dragged me along to the labs after class.
I never stayed long.
"I swear," she said once, spinning in her chair, "if you ever learned to enjoy debugging, you'd be unstoppable."
I didn't answer. I was watching the code scroll by. Line after line, perfect symmetry interrupted by sudden error.
The imperfection interested me more than the program itself.
Professor Holloway's Lecture
The first cool front arrived on a Monday. A breeze slipped through the open classroom windows, carrying dry leaves and the scent of chalk dust.
Holloway was in rare form, scribbling equations faster than most students could follow.
"Nonlinear systems," he said, tapping the board. "Small changes, big effects. A reminder that perfection is an illusion."
He underlined a phrase.
Butterfly Effect.
Paige leaned toward me. "This is the fun stuff."
I nodded slightly. My notebook, normally filled with precise equations, was empty except for one word I'd written in neat block letters.
Noise.
Holloway's voice echoed.
"The difference between theory and reality is noise. Even in math, you can't escape it."
A student raised a hand. "So chaos theory is just math that fails to behave?"
"Math doesn't fail," Holloway said. "It describes failure. Systems diverge. The noise isn't a mistake. It's what makes the system real."
My pencil froze mid-stroke.
Something in that phrase tugged loose, a small thread I couldn't stop pulling.
When the lecture ended, I stayed behind, staring at the board until Holloway noticed.
"You're chasing control," he said quietly, erasing the symbols.
"Control is efficient," I replied.
"It is," he agreed. "But the world resists it. That resistance is where truth hides."
I didn't answer. I just wrote another word beneath Noise.
Truth.
Professor Park's Lab
Wednesday was computer-science day, and Professor Park's lab felt like another world entirely. Humming machines, glowing screens, the faint electric smell of effort.
Paige thrived there. She worked like she was part of the circuitry itself, fingers flying over the keyboard.
Professor Elaine Park, mid-thirties, sharp-eyed, effortlessly calm, floated between students, answering questions without ever raising her voice.
"Good logic," she told Paige, scanning her code. "Clean, modular, efficient. You could be teaching this class in a few years."
Paige grinned. "I'll hold you to that."
Park turned to me, noticing that I hadn't touched the keyboard. "You're just watching today?"
"I'm optimizing," I said dryly.
She smiled. "Observation counts. But eventually you'll have to let the code talk back."
Paige laughed. "He's allergic to bugs."
"Bugs are how we learn," Park said. "The beauty of code is that mistakes talk back."
"Most systems don't apologize for failure," I said.
"That's the difference between equations and people," she replied.
I thought about that for a while.
Later, when Paige ran a random-number-generator test for homework, I leaned closer.
"Those aren't random," I said.
She squinted at the monitor. "They're literally random. That's the point."
"Patterns repeat," I murmured, tracing the numbers on the printout. "You just can't see it yet."
Park overheard and smiled. "He's right. Chaos still follows rules, just more complicated ones."
I didn't smile back, but something clicked.
I wrote a note in the margin of my notebook.
Order inside randomness.
It didn't leave my head for days.
Monotone Days
By the third week of October, the days blurred together.
I moved through them like clockwork. Efficient, precise, and increasingly numb.
I started exercising more in my room before curfew, though I never admitted it was for anything other than focus.
Paige noticed, of course.
"You're gonna wear a groove in the floor," she said one evening, watching me stretch.
"Helps me think," I said.
"You already overthink."
"Then I'm optimizing it."
She groaned. "That's not how brains work."
I didn't argue. Some part of me knew she was right, but movement felt cleaner than thought. No noise, no emotion, just repetition and control.
Evening Quiet
November arrived with drizzle and low clouds.
The courtyard between our dorm wings smelled like wet stone and coffee.
Paige appeared under the overhang one night, two steaming cups in hand. "You looked like you needed caffeine."
I accepted the cup, though I preferred tea. "You're assuming I need anything."
"I know you do," she said, sitting beside me on the bench. "You've been quiet."
"I'm always quiet."
"Quieter," she corrected. "Even for you."
We sat in silence, watching the rain soak the grass.
"I keep thinking," she said finally, "math and coding are the same problem in two languages. You prove, I build. You predict, I design. It's like we're chasing the same ghost."
"Different syntax," I said.
"Same function," she agreed, smiling faintly. "But lately, I don't know what the function's for."
"You mean purpose?"
"Yeah. We're good at this, freakishly good. But to what end? Another test? Another degree? It's just noise, you know?"
The word struck me like a bell.
"Noise," I repeated softly.
"Yeah. The static between what we can do and why we do it."
I sipped the coffee, bitter and grounding.
"Maybe noise is the signal," I said.
Paige blinked. "That's very fortune-cookie of you."
"I've been studying under one."
She laughed, and for a moment the tension broke. The rain softened to mist.
Beside the bench, a flyer clung to the vending machine. A wrinkled notice about a string of local burglaries, asking for tips from students near the river district.
Paige noticed it first. "That's been up for weeks," she said. "Weird that it's still unsolved."
I followed her gaze. The paper was warped from rain, ink bleeding where the details had faded. Times, streets, a vague description of a car.
I peeled it off the metal, smoothing the wrinkles with one hand.
"What are you doing?" Paige asked.
"Cleaning clutter."
She grinned. "Sure you are."
We walked back through the hall divider toward our separate wings. Paige waved, vanishing around the corner as Ben looked up from his clipboard.
"Two minutes early tonight," the RA said.
I nodded absently, the folded flyer still in my hand.
After Curfew
In my room, I spread the paper flat across the desk. The text was half-erased, but what remained was enough. A list of dates and times, two-hour intervals, clustered near bus routes.
I picked up my pencil and began mapping them out in a small spiral notebook. Not to solve anything, just to see the shape of it.
The pattern emerged slowly. Fridays, always between eight and ten p.m., west side.
Predictable.
And I didn't know why that bothered me.
When I finally slid the paper between the pages of my math notes, it felt deliberate. A bookmark for something I couldn't name yet.
Professor Park's Observation
The next week, Park stopped me as class ended. "You've been quiet lately."
"Thinking," I said.
"That's not unusual for you."
"Different kind of thinking."
She smiled. "The dangerous kind?"
"The noisy kind."
Park tilted her head. "Good. Stay curious. Just remember, code doesn't have to explain everything. Some outputs aren't meant to be debugged."
I nodded but didn't promise.
Library Night
A week later, Paige found me at our usual library table. My notebook lay open beside an empty coffee cup.
"What are you working on?" she asked.
I flipped the page closed before she could see the pattern of times. "Homework."
"Sure," she said, unconvinced.
We fell into companionable silence. Her typing steady, my pencil rhythm precise. The hum of fluorescent lights filled the space between us, constant, mechanical, almost comforting.
Then she said quietly, "You ever get tired of being predictable?"
"No," I said. "I get tired of everyone else being chaotic."
"Same thing," she murmured.
I smiled, just barely. "Maybe."
That night, long after she'd gone, I looked at the folded flyer again.
Its corners were soft now, the ink fading, but I couldn't bring myself to throw it away.
I didn't care about the crime itself. Not yet.
What intrigued me was the inconsistency. The missing data, the flawed timeline, the variables that didn't add up.
Noise.
I slipped the flyer back into my notebook and closed it with the precision of someone sealing an idea before it could escape.
Outside, the rain returned, faint against the window.
The sound wasn't distracting anymore.
It was pattern.
And somewhere beneath that pattern, for the first time, something unknown stirred.
Thanks for reading, feel free to write a comment, leave a review, and Power Stones are always appreciated.
I have two other stories I am currently working on and I want to assure that it will not effect this story I have every thing planed out story wise.
The first story is called Naruto: Crimson Reaper
The story of a soul reincarnated into the naruto universe half Uzamaki half Chinoike
The second story has a work in progress name but it is a story a sould reincarnated as Cain (Bible) in the world of TVD/Originals.