(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. Eighth of 10)
Age 13
Finals week made the campus sound different.
The usual chatter thinned to whispers. Doors opened softer. Even the wind seemed to move on tiptoe between the oaks. Folders and index cards flashed like migrating birds across the quad. Every bench became a desk. Every stairwell, a study carrel. The air itself felt underlined.
I woke before my alarm the first morning and stared at the ceiling while the room remembered to breathe. I could have listed the day's exams by heart. I could have listed the places I'd sit between them. I could have listed the grades before they were posted. That certainty used to feel like comfort. Today it felt like a room with windows painted shut.
I dressed, straightened my desk out of habit, and stepped into the hallway. The building had winter in it now. Dry heat and pencil dust, a faint chemical tang from the floor cleaner. At the stairwell, Ben looked up from a stack of forms and offered a tired salute with a paper cup.
"Morning, Cooper. You and a thousand other anxious geniuses."
"Anxiety is inefficient," I said.
"Tell that to everybody else," he muttered, nodding toward the glass doors. "Go make the curve cry."
I kept walking.
The cafeteria served a version of breakfast that left no fingerprints on the day. Toast that looked like toast, an orange that looked like an orange. Paige slid onto the bench across from me and set down two small butter packets like gifts.
"You're not nervous," she decided.
"I'm using the time."
"Same thing, fancy hat." She peeled an orange with surgical focus. "After today we are free for what, a whole twenty-four hours? We should celebrate. Cake, or a legally ambiguous amount of sleep."
"Freedom feels inefficient," I said, deadpan.
She snorted. "You are the only person who could make happiness sound like bad code."
The weak radio above the cash registers cut through the ambient scrape of chairs. A DJ's too-bright voice gave way to a tight, unfamiliar tone.
"And in local news, Austin police are investigating a fire at a North Austin yogurt shop. Early reports—"
Chairs slowed, then stopped. Someone turned the volume up with the bottom of a tray. The voice kept going. Details tripped and rearranged themselves as if the language itself didn't want to carry them. Four victims. Teenage girls. After midnight. Fire as cover or cause. No suspects.
Paige's hands went still. The orange smelled too bright all at once.
I didn't move. I stared at the radio like I could pry more facts from the speaker by will alone. The room breathed in, held it, and forgot how to exhale.
The announcement ended the way early announcements always do. A promise for more later, a request for tips, a recitation of numbers no one could yet place into any shape that made sense.
The scrape of chairs resumed. The cafeteria remembered it was a cafeteria.
Paige's voice was small but steady. "We have exams."
"We do," I said.
We finished breakfast without tasting it.
The exam rooms were versions of each other. Clock high on the back wall. A proctor who took our names like a ritual. The specific silence of forty people agreeing not to talk.
My pencil did its work. Paige's did, too. On the page, the world still obeyed. Functions behaved when you asked them correctly. Proofs gave up grudges if you found the right edge to pry with. Time split itself into intervals I could live inside.
I turned in the first test with five minutes to spare and spent those five watching the room instead of the clock. A girl in a red sweater pinched the bridge of her nose until color left it. A boy in a varsity jacket whispered something into his sleeve and looked guilty afterward, as if hoping God curved grades.
Between exams, the campus felt colder. Students moved more quickly, heads down, as if a storm might blow the questions out of their skulls if they didn't hold them in.
By afternoon, rumors outran the radio. Someone's roommate's cousin had driven by the shop at one in the morning and seen smoke. Someone else knew a police officer who said robbery. Someone else said it could not be robbery, not like that. No one used the word murder for more than a sentence at a time, as if the term required a permit.
In Holloway's class the next morning, three people cried quietly without meaning to. He capped his marker, looked at the room, and said, "We're done for today," in a voice that carried without forcing itself. No homework, no quiz, no lesson. He paused, as if weighing something visible only to him, then added, "Be gentle with each other," which landed softer than chalk and stayed longer.
Outside, sirens sounded closer than usual even when they were far away. The wind carried them down the long corridors between buildings and made them sound like insects lodged inside the air.
That evening I walked the campus alone. I wasn't supposed to. Curfew required routes and sign-outs when it wasn't a straight line across the courtyard to my own door. But Ben had a stack of incident reports high enough to hide behind and a face like it had forgotten sleep, and I stepped past the desk with a nod that felt like permission.
The winter sky had dropped a shade. The Tower lights burned softer, like the city had dimmed them out of respect. Leaves skittered along the walkways with the nervousness of small animals.
I stood in front of a bulletin board under a pool of light and took in all the notifications of ordinary life. Lost scarf. Study group. Ride share. Band audition. Someone had pinned a clipping over the flyer Paige and I had folded off the vending machine weeks ago. A new headline in a larger font, taking up more space, insisting on attention.
Four Teenage Girls Found Murdered in Austin Yogurt Shop.
I read the words without reading them and then read them again. The article said everything and nothing. The hour approximated. The neighborhood generalized. The investigation described without being described. Phrases like no motive and no suspects repeated until they became their own kind of pattern.
My mind did what it does when presented with a pattern that refuses to hold. It built scaffolding. It asked the questions in a sequence. If entry was forced, why fire? If theft was the goal, why this? If fire was to destroy evidence, what evidence? And if it was anger, why method?
The curiosity repelled me even as it landed. The wrong thing for the right reason, or the right thing for the wrong one. I hated that my brain treated horror like a theorem in need of structure. I wanted to close the window and walk away from it. The window would not close.
Cold leached through my sleeves. I moved only when my hands started to sting.
Back at the dorm, Ben looked up with a start that softened when he saw me. "You're cutting it close tonight."
"Some things don't fit their pattern," I said.
He watched me for a second, like he was deciding whether to ask which things. He didn't. "Night, Cooper."
"Night."
The next day in the computer lab, Paige tried to outrun the news with noise. The room helped her. Keyboards tapping in overlapping staccato. Fans humming. Printers making their careful teeth-click sounds. She compiled on purpose just to hear the success chime. She wrote a loop she didn't need.
I sat beside her with the newspaper folded into awkward, too-careful halves. I didn't open it. I read the television without sound. Some student had found the remote and muted it as if volume itself could be tactless.
Professor Park crossed behind us, a sleeved mug cupped in both hands. She looked at our screens, at our faces, then at the TV. "Morbid viewing for this room," she said, not unkindly.
"Information is neutral," I said, still watching the scrolling text. The words moving faster than my ability to hold them still.
"Until you decide what to do with it," Park said.
Paige stopped typing. The cursor blinked an accusation. "We don't have to watch," she told me. "It doesn't help them."
I didn't argue. I didn't agree.
After class, Park lowered her voice as students filed out. "You two, if you need extensions, say so."
"We'll be fine," Paige said, quick.
"We will," I said, slow.
Park hesitated, then squeezed Paige's shoulder lightly. "Go get air."
We did. The air felt heavier outside than in.
We sat on a low wall out of the wind with our coffee cups cupped into our hands like small furnaces. Traffic on Guadalupe moved like a tired animal. People talked softly to be overheard without trying.
Paige picked the cardboard sleeve apart at the seam and flattened it. "You're treating it like a puzzle," she said.
I didn't say what. She didn't need me to.
"Because it is," I said finally.
"No," she said, and then sighed. "It's a tragedy."
I nodded because both things could be true.
We let quiet have the next few minutes. A bus wheezed. Somewhere, someone laughed and then stopped and half-apologized for it to no one.
Paige set her cup down and looked at me like she wanted to be wrong. "Does knowing why make it better?" she asked.
"No," I said. "But not knowing makes it worse."
"Why?"
"Because not knowing repeats."
She looked away, then back. "You can't fix everything."
"I'm not trying to fix it." I heard my voice and almost didn't recognize it. "I'm trying to understand it."
"That sounds like fixing to me."
"It isn't."
She swallowed and nodded and didn't say I was lying. I wasn't. I just didn't know the difference between repair and comprehension yet.
We stayed until the cups went cold. We walked back toward the dorm through the courtyard that had been a set and was now a place again. Ben's clipboard waited like a gate. Paige peeled off to her wing with a small wave. I signed the sheet and watched my own name become a line that meant here, while the rest of the city refused that luxury.
That night rain found the windows again. Streetlight turned it orange where it crossed the glass. The room smelled like paper and heat and the faint sugar of the cocoa packet Paige had left on my desk and told me to use whether I liked it or not.
I didn't turn the lamp up all the way. The half-light let the room keep its shape without arguing about definition. The newspaper clipping lay open beside my notes. My pencil waited beside the clipping as if it had volunteered.
I tried not to. I failed gently.
I drew the city not like a cartographer but like a probability problem. The burglary markers from earlier in the semester. The yogurt shop. The hour. The roads in and out. I wrote times in the margins as if they could turn into answers by circling them. I connected the dots not to prove anything but to see whether a picture arrived on its own.
The lines refused to make anything easy. I respected them for that.
A soft knock interrupted the way my brain wanted to complete its own sentence.
Paige stood in the doorway, hair pulled back, oversized sweater hanging like it belonged to a larger universe. "Ben said you were still up."
"Barely."
She took in the desk, the paper, the lines. She did not look away quickly. She walked in and sat on the foot of the bed like she had always intended to.
"You can't sleep," she said.
I made a small shape with my mouth that meant yes without admitting it. "You can't either."
"No." She rubbed her thumb along her palm like she was page-turning a book that wasn't there. "I keep picturing their parents waking up to a phone that didn't ring yet and hoping that meant something good."
I stared at the corner of the desk. "Hope isn't data."
"It's human."
"I know."
She followed the lines with her eyes, not touching the paper. "Tell me what you're seeing."
I almost said no. I almost folded the page shut and made a joke about homework to let her off the hook of asking. But the question wasn't permission. It was mercy.
"Time," I said. "Too neat, then too messy. If it was robbery, the take is small and the burn is loud. If it wasn't, the fire is control and risk both. Entry method is something, I don't know what yet. Witnesses are unreliable. Too dark, too late, too scared."
"You sound," She stopped, searching for a word that wouldn't make us both flinch. "You sound far away."
"I'm trying not to be."
"Why do it this way, then?"
I looked at the lamp, at the ring of light around the base where dust drew its own galaxy. "Because I don't know what else to do."
She exhaled and let that be an answer. The rain ticked. Someone in the next room turned a page. Somewhere down the hall, the elevator doors opened with their theatrical yawn.
"I don't want this to be a thing we're good at," she said, voice barely a voice.
"It won't be," I said, and wished I knew how to mean it.
Silence laid itself across the room like a blanket that didn't ask for thanks. The light shifted as a car passed outside and made the walls look briefly like fire and then like walls again.
Paige leaned forward and pressed her finger onto one edge of the clipping so it wouldn't curl. "It's awful that you're right," she said.
I closed the notebook because the only humane thing was to close it. The paper slipped inside and disappeared, trapped between pages that would remember how to hold it when I wanted to forget.
I turned the lamp down, then off.
For a while we sat in the dark and let the air do the talking. The hum in the heater. The weather's soft arithmetic at the window. The fact of our breathing.
In the dark, the room shrank to the size of the two of us and then grew again to fit the idea that the city existed beyond it with its sirens and its fathers and the four mothers buying milk with hands that shook.
At the door, she hesitated. "You good?"
"No," I said, and because the truth cost less in the dark, I added, "Not yet."
"Me neither."
I opened the door for her and stayed there a moment after she'd gone, listening to the hallway become hallway again. When I closed it, the click sounded like a period instead of a lock.
I lay down and looked at the ceiling until the ceiling forgot to look back. I counted breaths like steps. I did not sleep for a long time.
Morning returned without permission. The city kept its questions. The radio found new ways to repeat them. Newsprint smeared onto fingers that didn't care. Students walked in quieter lines toward exams that had started to look indecent under the light of the last twenty-four hours.
I washed my hands twice and still found a smudge near my thumb at lunch. Paige slid her tray across from mine and ate half a slice of bread in four meticulously equal bites. Ben stood at the cafeteria entrance with a list that wasn't a list anyone could help with.
Finals ended because clocks say so. People clapped in a lecture hall and then stopped when they remembered why that felt wrong. Someone turned the radio off and the silence it left behind sounded like a decision.
We met at our usual table in the library with nothing to do for an hour. Paige laid her head on her folded arms. The fluorescent lights hummed like memory. I stared at the spines of books that promised answers to questions no one had asked politely.
I reached into my bag to touch the notebook without opening it, the way you touch a pocket for keys. Confirmation that the thing you carry is still the thing you carry.
Outside, the city burned with questions that would not cool for years.
Inside, I learned that understanding had a cost, and that my mind would try to pay it whether or not I approved of the currency.
I did not know it yet, but the line I'd drawn between numbers and people had just moved. And once a line moves, it rarely returns to the same place.
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.