- 'They spread disease and nuisance, but fulfil their role of consuming decay.'
---
This particular morning, the hallways of the school smelled faintly of disinfectant, but to Lucian it reeked of rot. Not the kind that clung to corpses, but something deeper, something unwashed and eternal—the decay of spirit, the decomposition of individuality. The students moved in sluggish currents, slouched beneath the weight of their backpacks, their laughter shrill and inconsequential. They clustered like larvae swarming around a carcass, each one convinced of their own importance, yet indistinguishable when you really looked at them.
Lucian looked. He always looked. His eyes were cold needles, pinning them against the glass walls of his perception. A blur of acne-ridden faces and watery eyes, shrieking over gossip, shoes squeaking across linoleum—he still saw them not as classmates but as infestations. Maggots. Their cheap perfumes and body sprays layered over sweat only deepened the nausea. Their mouths gaped open, words tumbling out without meaning, and Lucian imagined flies breeding in those cavities, their moist wings beating against rotting gums.
They were pests.
He walked among them in tailored silence, immaculate shirt collar tucked beneath his vest, his shoes polished to the point they cut like a syringe beneath the fluorescent light. He never slouched. He never stumbled. He strode. And the insects never noticed. They were too busy writhing in their self-made muck, blind to the predator in their midst.
But Kael noticed.
Across the hall, Kael leaned against a locker as though the building itself were scaffolding built for him to prop against. He never mimicked Lucian's refinement; Kael had his own silence, heavier, more static. His oak hair fell loose around a face devoid of expression, except for that faint, almost imperceptible quirk of his lips when he caught Lucian's gaze through the shifting crowd. To others, it was emptiness. To Lucian, it was recognition - two 'humans' sharing the joke of being surrounded by something undeserving of that title.
And that joke was endless.
---
The lessons now served as separation.
In first period, Lucian sat alone at the back of the classroom. The teacher's voice droned, dragging like chains across stone. A lecture on historical revolutions. Revolution—such a noble word degraded by repetition until it belonged in these rooms of pale light and peeling paint. The students around him bent dutifully over their notes, but Lucian did not write. He simply watched. The movement of pens across paper resembled larvae gnawing through soft tissue, head-bobbing in perfect unison. Parasites consuming knowledge they could never digest, only excrete.
The girl in front of him twirled her hair around her finger as though her vanity could shield her from her insignificance. He imagined her skull cracked open, plump larvae blooming from her brain in a white writhing cloud, feeding on the mush of thoughts never worth speaking aloud. He saw it so vividly he nearly smiled.
When the teacher posed a question, the boy beside him raised his hand too quickly, elbow jabbing the air like an insect jerking on a pin. His voice squeaked, unformed, desperate for validation. Lucian felt bile rise in his throat—not disgust at the boy's ignorance, but at his eagerness. The willingness to be another crawling body in the mass.
Kael was not in this class, and so Lucian remained silent. Without Kael, there was no need to speak. He was content to watch the insects devour themselves.
---
Breaks became their times of contact: by mid-morning, they met again.
The courtyard outside the school was alive with chatter and shrieks, the hive buzzing under a bleak sky. Kael sat on the edge of a bench, knees apart, posture slack yet deliberate, as though carved into permanence. His lunch sat unopened beside him.
Lucian approached, and without greeting, lowered himself into the space beside Kael. They didn't speak at first. They didn't need to. The silence was theirs alone, impermeable to the swarm of voices surrounding them.
Eventually, Kael tilted his head, pale eyes - a persevering yellow, like a dystopian sun - tracking a group of boys roughhousing near the fence. Their laughter was jagged, unrefined, throats tearing with false dominance.
"Larvae," Kael murmured, voice so low it dissolved into the air.
Lucian's lips curved faintly. "They fatten themselves on noise."
"And when the flesh rots away," Kael replied, "they'll be the ones still gnawing."
The words served as a declaration, confirmation, and reassurance. Neither of them laughed. They simply observed the pests, already envisioning them stripped of their disguises, reduced to crawling filth.
A girl glanced over then, eyes lingering a moment too long on Lucian's sharp profile, on the precision of his clothes. She whispered something to her friend and giggled. Lucian turned his gaze upon her, not blinking. The smile froze on her lips, brittle. She looked away quickly.
"These insects mistake light for warmth," Lucian said softly.
Kael's mouth twitched. Approval.
---
The time it took for the afternoon to come around seemed longer than before.
In science class, chance—or perhaps some inevitable design—placed them together during a group experiment. The teacher, oblivious, thought it wise to let the students mix, to "collaborate."
Two others joined them, buzzing with nervous energy. A boy who bit his nails until the skin bled, and a girl who couldn't stop apologizing every time she breathed. They shuffled, giggled, fumbled with test tubes. Lucian watched their hands shake as though motor control were optional.
"Careful," Lucian said at last, voice like chilled glass, when the girl nearly dropped a beaker. His warning wasn't kindness; it was hunger. He wanted her to break it. To cut herself. To bleed.
Kael leaned over, adjusting the flame of the Bunsen burner with clinical detachment. His eyes flicked to Lucian, and something wordless passed between them. A thought, an impulse: How simple it would be to watch these 'non-humans' char like insects in flame.
Instead, they endured. The experiment concluded. The teacher praised their group for "excellent teamwork." The irony was unbearable.
Lucian's gaze lingered on the girl's wrists as she packed up—thin, translucent skin stretched over bone. So easy to pierce. So easy to end.
Even insects have exoskeletons.
Where was hers?
In his personal notebook, Lucian noted down the name "Katya" next to a description which could only be summarised as that of a "lab rabbit".
---
After school at the laboratory, working together was the only part of the day worth anything.
The dustless, organised laboratory was their kingdom, far from the surveillance of contamination. Paid part-time work for the University's STAE department and and all.
It was perfect.
Kael unpacked the new lad acquisitions from the tray left for their inspection — containers of insects, bits of rodent tissue, swabs of human cells. Each item laid out on the counter with ritual precision.
Lucian pulled on gloves, the snap of latex echoing sharp in the hollow room. His movements were methodical, almost elegant, as he prepared the slides, adjusted the microscope, logged their progress on papers he knew they would later have to present to the head of department.
The insects writhed beneath glass, antennae twitching, wings scraping in vain. Lucian leaned close, observing them with fascination. "They don't know why they exist," he whispered. "Only that they must feed. Multiply. Spread."
Kael proceeded to test the first sample - it even came with it's own white, lab-grown rat. At his conduction of the experiment, the creature's limbs convulsed, stiffened. Kael's expression did not change, though his eyes sharpened with focus. "Decay begins faster when provoked," he said.
Together, they worked in silence broken only by murmurs of observation. To anyone else, it would be monstrous. To them, it was clarity. This was not cruelty. This was truth. The insects showed them what humanity really was: blind hunger dressed in fragile shells.
And they—Lucian and Kael—were not bound to that cycle. They were the observers. The architects. That's what they wanted to be, believed to inevitably meant to be.
Lucian watched a colony of maggots devouring a scrap of tissue in a petri dish, their bodies writhing as one seething mass. "Look at them," he said. "They strip everything clean. They leave nothing but bone."
Kael's voice was low. "They are what the masses were born for. Consuming until they vanish. A function, nothing more."
Lucian smiled, thin and sharp. "Then we'll use them. Decay can be guided."
This realisation was a taught bow released, arrow directed at the heads of all unthinking.
---
By the time they were walking to the train station, it was just light enough to see each other's eyes. The sun had already begun its descent when they left the school grounds. The streets were slick with drizzle, reflecting broken light from streetlamps that buzzed faintly with trapped moths.
They walked side by side, not touching, but aligned as though tethered by something invisible.
Around them, commuters shuffled past, eyes downcast, headphones in, faces sagging with exhaustion. Lucian's gaze cut across them all, dissecting each movement. Their footsteps scuffed like dragging carcasses. Their coughs rattled like failing engines. The gray tide of humanity. Maggots spilling endlessly from an unseen corpse.
Kael muttered, "We could disappear here. No one would notice."
"They'd step over our bodies on their way home," Lucian agreed. "Pests trample pests. That's all they are."
At the station, they parted as always. Lucian descended to one platform, Kael to another. Their separation was ritual, but it never felt like distance. They were mirrors facing each other across the void, reflections extending into infinity.
---
At home, Lucian's room was a sanctuary of order. His books aligned with military precision, his clothes pressed and immaculate. No posters, no sentimental clutter. The walls were white, almost sterile.
He sat at his desk, notebook open beneath the yellowed glow of his lamp. His handwriting flowed sharp and clean as he transcribed the day's findings—not only scientific observations, but thoughts, metaphors, visions. He wrote of larvae and decay, of function without identity, of how the masses deserved only consumption.
Every word sliced into paper was a promise, carving the shape of the bloated and inevitable.
In another part of the city, Kael sat in his own silence. His room was darker, heavier, the curtains drawn. He didn't write, but he thought, his mind looping back to words, gazes, memories, the petri dish writhing with maggots. He thought of how easy it would be to scale what they'd seen—to prove that the pests could be used, directed, burned through.
They were not like the others. They had never been like the others. He repeated it like a prayer to his own ideals.
And the world will know. That not everyone can be categorised as the same empty-shelled flickers of routine.
At least that's what Kael hoped, the desparation pricking tears into his eyes.