- 'They live fast. Multiply faster. But you could stop the process with annihilation of a single generation.'
---
It started with a twitching shape in the corner of the school's Chemistry science lab, half-shadowed under a radiator.
Lucius had noticed it first.
Of course he had.
The rest of the class was bent over Bunsen burners, coaxing pale blue flames into life under teacher's orders. But Lucius had angled his head just so, eyes sharp and unblinking, watching the thing drag itself along the skirting board—antennae trembling like a pair of sensitive wires testing the air.
A cockroach.
Not the plump, well-fed kind that hid in kitchen cupboards, but a scarred, street-seasoned veteran. Its carapace was dented in places like old armour, legs moving in ragged sequence.
Lucius smiled in a way that would have looked entirely inappropriate to anyone who wasn't Kael.
Kael caught the expression—lazy, almost a glance rather than a look—and knew something was about to happen. He rested his chin on his hand, scribbling nothing in the margins of his notebook, his gaze drifting to Lucius in mild amusement.
Lucius was already moving. A deliberate bend at the knees, a crouch that spoke of hunting more than curiosity. His hand darted forward, fingers clamping around the insect with swift precision. He didn't crush it—he contained it, the way you'd hold a fragile instrument before deciding whether it should be played or destroyed.
Kael's eyebrow twitched. So it begins.
"Why?" Kael's tone was flat, almost bored. Not a challenge—just a question, like asking the temperature outside.
Lucius held up the struggling insect. Its legs clawed at air.
"Because," Lucius said, "I can."
The teacher was occupied with reprimanding someone for leaving a burner unattended, so Lucius reached for one of the specimen jars on the counter—a wide-mouthed thing half-filled with clear water from the last lesson's biology project.
He dropped the cockroach in.
It didn't die instantly. It flailed, paddling frantically toward the glass walls as if the surface might give way. Bubbles streamed from its body in tiny, erratic trails.
Kael leaned in slightly.
"You're not doing it to kill it."
Lucius tilted his head. "No. Not yet."
The whole thing fascinated him—the insect's desperate movements, the mechanical rhythm of its body pushing against inevitability. There was a strange satisfaction in watching a creature cling to its life so uselessly.
Kael tapped his pen idly against the desk, considering. He'd seen people kill without thinking. He'd killed things without thinking. But Lucius wasn't like that—he needed to think about it. To choose it. To savour the moment of power before pulling the trigger, even if the trigger was just a jar of water.
"People say cockroaches can survive anything," Lucius murmured, eyes fixed on the insect's jerky fight. "Radiation, famine… even decapitation, for a while. But that's not true."
He swirled the jar slowly, just enough to disorient the creature inside. "Everything breaks."
Kael smirked faintly. "You sound disappointed."
"I am."
They didn't speak for a while. The water was clouding slightly—minute flecks of whatever the roach had shed in its panic drifting like dark snow. The tiny sounds of its legs ticking against glass seemed impossibly loud under the hum of gas burners.
Then Kael said, "You want to prove you're stronger than it."
Lucius looked at him, a faint flash of interest in his otherwise unshaken expression. "Stronger? No. That's too obvious. I want to make it wish it had never existed."
Kael's smile widened just a fraction. That was new. People didn't often surprise him.
He reached over, took the jar, and without warning upended it into the sink. The roach landed with a wet clatter, twitching violently, half-drowned but still alive.
Lucius stared. "Why?"
Kael shrugged, turning back to his notebook. "It's more interesting if it remembers."
For a moment, they simply looked at each other—the conquerer and the unconquerable—each seeing something in the other worth keeping around.
Not friendship.
Not yet.
Just the quiet recognition of another mind that played with life like a delicate, breakable toy.
---
The smell of disinfectant never quite masked the rot in the school walls — not literal rot, but the kind that seeped from too many people breathing the same air for too many years. The corridors hummed with the low, mechanical wheeze of old radiators, and every time a door shut, dust quivered from the ceiling. The building felt like it was alive, but only in the way a cockroach is alive: by refusing to die.
Lucian liked it here. It was a petri dish of weakness, a buffet of flaws to catalogue. The others thought he was quiet because he was shy. They had no idea it was because he was counting.
Kael sat two rows away in biology, leaning back in his chair like gravity worked differently for him. His pen dangled from his fingers, tapping an arrhythmic beat against the desk. He looked half-asleep, but Lucian had already clocked the way his gaze darted sideways whenever the teacher wrote something inaccurate on the board. A twitch in the jaw. The smallest quirk of a lip.
Tell. Tell. Tell.
"Lucian, Kael," the teacher said, snapping her clipboard like it was a guillotine. "You're partners for this term's comparative psychology project."
A few students exchanged the kind of glances that meant you two are going to hate this. But when Lucian's gaze met Kael's, neither of them looked surprised. Kael gave him a half-smile that didn't reach his eyes. It was the kind of smile that said Let's see who bleeds first.
---
They began with the assigned topic — behavioural conditioning in mammals — but within minutes, the discussion had gone feral.
"What if the subject's frontal lobe was partially removed?" Lucian said casually, sketching brain segments in pencil. "Wouldn't that make stimulus-response more… primal?"
Kael didn't flinch. "You'd get faster conditioning. Less moral interference. Like teaching a starving dog to kill."
"Dogs already kill."
"Not with precision," Kael replied. "Not with reason."
The teacher froze halfway to their desk, overhearing enough to look unsettled. "I… don't think the syllabus covers frontal lobe removal."
"It should," Lucian said, his voice smooth. "It's relevant to learned behaviour."
Kael's eyes flickered with amusement. "Only if the goal is obedience. Or destruction."
"Sometimes they're the same thing."
The rest of the class had gone quiet, like they could feel something sharp being unsheathed between them. Not anger, but the slow testing of a blade's edge. Kael leaned forward, elbows on the table, his voice dropping low enough that only Lucian caught it.
"You like cutting things apart to see how they work," he said. "But you've never had something cut you back."
Lucian smirked. "Try me."
---
By the time the bell rang, they had enough material for three projects, most of it unusable without alerting the school counsellor. As they left, Kael fell into step beside him like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"When there's less eyes," Kael said. "We'll talk more."
It wasn't a suggestion.
---
They didn't even make it to the gate before being intercepted.
"Lucian. Kael." The vice principal's voice was the brittle kind — all surface authority, hollow underneath. "I've been hearing… disturbing reports about your conversation in class."
Lucian feigned mild confusion. Kael didn't bother. He stared at the man with an expression that made silence feel like a blade.
"I hope you understand," the vice principal continued, "that this is an educational environment, not… a horror laboratory."
Lucian tilted his head, letting the pause stretch until the man's confidence wavered. "We were discussing neurological processes. If that's disturbing, perhaps the curriculum is too fragile."
The vice principal's jaw worked like he wanted to snap back but couldn't find the angle. Kael stepped in, his tone polite enough to be venom.
"Maybe," Kael said, "you're just uncomfortable with students who already know more than you."
It landed like a slap — not loud, but humiliating. The man's eyes darted between them, searching for some foothold of control.
"Careful, Kael. I can—"
"You can what?" Kael's voice was quiet but carried weight. "Detain us? Suspend us? Then you'd have to explain why… and the parents would see the report. Would they find your wording as fragile as your understanding?"
Lucian could almost see the mental gears seize up. He stepped closer, just enough to make the man shift back, and delivered the kill shot.
"You should let us go," he murmured. "Before we start asking you questions you can't answer."
The vice principal relented, muttering something about "watching themselves" and retreating down the corridor.
Kael grinned slightly as they walked out. "You're good at breaking them apart. I'm better at making them break themselves."
Lucian glanced at him. "Useful skill. I might have work for you."
"Likewise."
It wasn't friendship. Not yet. But it was a recognition — of matching calibres, of potential utility.
Two different breeds of predator circling the same carcass, neither willing to share… yet.