-"They are small, unnoticed, yet they drain without end — tiny vessels of contagion and decay. Their sting leaves no scar, only a quiet fever."
---
The classroom was alive with noise. Not the kind of noise that filled the ears, but a restless drone that pressed against the skin. Words collided, laughter sharpened, paper crumpled into missiles that arced across the air. It was a living hive.
Lucian sat in his place, his back a perfect line against the wooden chair, a pen balanced lightly between his fingers. His expression was mild, faintly amused, but his eyes were elsewhere. He let them wander — across the flicking hair of girls, the restless shifting of boys, the slap of palms against desks. They blurred together into a collective hum. Mosquitoes.
Their joy was shallow, disposable. The sound of it entered him like a whining sting, irritating, impossible to ignore. He leaned his chin against his palm and whispered so quietly he could barely hear it himself:
"Mosquitoes. Parasitic. Sustained only by what they drain."
A few rows ahead, Kael turned a page in his notebook. His golden hazel eyes didn't shift, but his head tilted by the smallest degree, as though he'd caught the whisper in the current of noise. His posture was unbent, precise. His pen moved in silence, as though translating the chaos of the room into something orderly, something he alone could understand.
A boy in the back smacked another with a rolled-up worksheet, laughter shrieking mosquito-thin. The teacher droned on, either oblivious or unwilling to cut through it.
Lucian's mouth curved. Not quite a smile, not joy. An almost disappointed kind of knowing.
---
After dusk the corridors emptied, fluorescent lights flickering with intermittent hums. The laboratory became their cathedral. A place not of prayer, but of process.
The counters gleamed with glassware: beakers, pipettes, rows of sealed containers glowing faintly under harsh light. A faint chemical tang hung in the air, bitter and sterile, the smell of creation and dissolution alike.
Lucian moved like a conductor, his hands sure, every clink of glass deliberate. He set instruments into place, wiped surfaces with unnecessary precision. The ritual mattered to him — cleanliness as sanctity.
Kael was quieter still. He handled vials as though they were extensions of his hands, each motion exact, unhesitating. His notes filled the open pages in his angular script: dosages, reaction times, symptoms, survival rates. Where Lucian thrived in metaphor, Kael anchored everything to data.
On the far side of the room, a cage of mice quivered. One lay unnaturally still, curled into itself. Lucian crouched, fingers curling around the bars. "So delicate," he murmured. "One sip, one droplet too much, and their tiny engines seize. No blood. No wound. They simply… surrender."
Kael adjusted his glasses, his voice even. "It metabolises within two hours. Nothing traceable. No one will know what they've swallowed."
Lucian looked up at him with a strange gleam in his eyes. "Undetectable." The word was reverent. A prayer, almost.
A mosquito buzzed against the ceiling light, throwing its shadow over the counter like a stain of ink. Lucian followed its jerky flight and smirked. "A pest, but ingenious. It feeds unnoticed, patient, persistent. But they all collapse upon contact with pesticides nonetheless."
The corners of Kael's eyes creased into something brief but light-hearted. "Transmission is everything."
---
The cafeteria was too obvious. Too messy, too loud. Their first trial had left gaps: too many variables, too many witnesses, the aftermath too easily brushed off as "bad chicken."
This time they needed something quieter, subtler. Predictable.
The vending machines stood like monuments in the corridor corners — glowing boxes, filled with cans and bottles students bought without thought. Every day, dozens of hands pressed the buttons. Every day, without suspicion.
Lucian had charmed the janitor weeks before, smiling with the kind of warmth that felt rehearsed even to himself. A clever compliment, a casual conversation about responsibility, and the man had handed over the spare key, assuming he would "keep things tidy." Adults liked him; they always had. His brilliance bought him trust before he asked for it.
Kael had done the harder part. Late at night, when halls were deserted, he knelt before the machines, unsealing bottles with needle-fine precision, injecting the clear compound into carbonated depths, then sealing them again with careful pressure. Not a blemish betrayed the intrusion. Every bottle looked factory-born, untouched.
Lucian stood beside him, watching with folded arms. "Beautiful. They will thank us for the lesson."
Kael did not look up. "They won't thank us."
Lucian's smirk deepened. "No. But they'll learn, in their final moments, what it means to consume without thought."
---
The first body fell just before noon.
A girl stumbled outside her classroom, clutching her stomach, her face grey beneath layers of makeup. She slid down the wall like melting wax, her fingers scraping the paint as she dropped. A teacher rushed to her side, shouting, but before help could arrive another boy staggered from gym class, knees buckling, lips blue.
Then came a third.
The halls filled with screams, the sound of them shrill, panicked. Teachers shouted orders that dissolved in the noise. Students crowded, pushing, running, the swarm breaking apart in chaos.
Lucian sat at his desk with his chin propped on his hand, watching through the classroom window as the corridor fractured. Sirens already wailed in the distance, but to him they sounded muted, far away. He catalogued the fallen with the interest of a botanist pressing specimens between glass.
Kael stood at the doorway, his golden eyes reflecting the chaos. He said nothing, but his stillness was its own commentary. He didn't look at Lucian, didn't need to. The silence between them was enough.
By the hour's end, paramedics rushed through the halls, wheeling stretchers, shouting medical jargon. Parents flooded the gates, teachers wept against lockers, the school loudspeaker announced early dismissal in a voice that cracked.
Lucian murmured, just loud enough for Kael as he passed him in the corridor, "Larvae drowning in their own pools. Drowning, and no one sees the water."
Kael answered without pause. "They consumed more than the rest. That's why they fell first."
"And those who stagger but crawl onward?" Lucian's voice sharpened, eyes narrowing.
"Hardier," Kael replied, calm. "Harder to kill. Their struggle reveals them more than their stillness."
Lucian's smile was thin, cutting. "Then let them crawl."
---
By evening the school was cordoned off in yellow tape. Police lights painted the windows blue and red. Helicopters swept the air overhead, their blades chopping the sky into fragments.
The news broadcast was clinical, detached. Words like outbreak, contamination, possible supplier error repeated in different mouths. "Tragic illness" filled the airwaves, anchors feigning solemnity with carefully lowered voices.
Lucian sat in his room that night, the vase of narcissus flowers pale on the desk. The television droned. He leaned back in his chair, letting the anchor's words wash over him like static.
Kael sat opposite, notebook balanced on his knee, writing without hesitation: symptom onset, survival curve, timing. His script was clinical, detached. At one moment he paused, glancing at Lucian reflected in the mirror above the desk. A flicker passed over his golden eyes — not guilt, not pity, but something nearer to memory. Human recognition, quickly smothered.
Lucian broke the silence. "See how little it takes? A few drops, and the swarm collapses. They eat, they drink, and we choose. Who lives. Who dies." His voice lowered, reverent. "It is almost divine."
---
The news shifted to a press conference: a government spokesperson stood behind a podium, face tight with worry. She spoke of youth safety, new regulations, the need for vigilance.
Lucian's eyes narrowed. "The queens reveal themselves. Preening, feigning concern while their drones wither." He tilted his head, voice soft. "They will tighten their nets, but the rot is already in the hive."
Kael's gaze lingered on the screen. He wrote two words in his notebook: potential target.
Neither smiled, but for the first time, their eyes lifted higher than the swarm at their feet.
---
The alley that led to the underground club smelled of spilled beer, synthetic perfume, and damp stone that never quite dried. Neon signage flickered overhead, throwing the pavement into alternating strips of fuchsia and electric green. Shadows moved in clusters: boys with glazed eyes and clenched jaws, girls with glitter streaked across their cheeks, all jostling forward in the same mindless rhythm. The line twisted down the wall like a centipede, each part pushing the next without purpose beyond entering the hive.
Lucian slowed, his gaze raking over them with cool disdain. Ants. Every one of them. Marching toward the illusion of ecstasy. Unaware of the boot above their heads.
"Look how they file," he murmured, lips barely parting. His grey eyes gleamed in the neon stutter. "Each convinced they're different, yet they follow the same chemical trail. One dies, the rest step over it."
Beside him, Kael was still. He leaned against the wall as though it alone kept him tethered to the earth. His pale yellow eyes tracked the crowd without judgment, recording patterns: the repetitive laughter, the shared pills palmed from stranger to stranger, the involuntary shoulder nudges. He noticed the way their breathing quickened as they neared the entrance — a physiological rise in adrenaline at the anticipation of reward. His overgrown hair shadowed his face, hiding the faint crease between his brows.
"They burn through oxygen like parasites," he said finally, voice quiet and flat. "Their intake of stimulants will reduce lifespan by years. Waste multiplied by choice."
Lucian tilted his head, watching Kael watch them. "And still they insist on calling it living."
---
The club swallowed them whole.
Bass shuddered through the floor, pulsing up their legs like a second heartbeat. Lights fractured across sweat-slick skin, strobe flashes cutting every motion into violent stills: mouths open in shrieks, hands clawing the air, hips grinding against strangers. The air was heavy with heat and chemicals, an invisible fog that dulled thought and sharpened appetite.
Lucian moved with fluid confidence, slipping through the crush of bodies without effort. Girls smiled at him — hair brushing his arm, drinks tilted toward him — and he gave them a glance sharp enough to feel like acknowledgment but empty enough to mean nothing. Boys scowled when they saw the attention he drew, jealousy pricking their alcohol-warmed egos. Lucian absorbed both responses with a flicker of amusement. The ants could only react; he could choose.
Kael followed more quietly, and yet he unsettled more than Lucian did. He did not smile, did not dance, did not even pretend to belong. But the sheer stillness of his frame in the midst of chaos made people glance twice, made them shift nervously when they realized he was watching. He wasn't with them, and somehow that made his presence heavier.
They slipped to the bar where Lucian, weeks earlier, had charmed the bartender into trusting him. Tonight, the trust paid. While casual eyes were elsewhere, Kael uncapped a vial under the counter, tilting a nearly invisible liquid into the mixers, the kegs, the glass bowls of sickly-sweet punch. The substance sank in silently, dissolving into oblivion. Tasteless. Odorless. Death, disguised as refreshment.
Lucian leaned against the counter as Kael worked, speaking low but audible over the bass. "They won't even notice. The trail is poisoned, and still they march."
Kael replaced the cap, slid the vial back into his pocket. "Observation begins now."
---
For an hour, they sat in the corner booth, untouched drinks before them, watching the club consume itself.
At first it was indistinguishable from the usual excess: one boy stumbling off balance, a girl clutching her head in drunken laughter. But the signs multiplied. Breathing grew ragged. A dancer's knees buckled, sending her sprawling across the floor; another collapsed mid-song, twitching against the strobes.
Then came the scream.
A girl dropped her glass, shattering it against the tiles, shrieking as the boy beside her convulsed and foamed at the mouth. Shouts rose, muffled under the relentless beat of the music. Panic rippled outward like fire through dry grass.
Lucian watched with eyes half-lidded, savoring the collapse with a softness that might have looked like serenity. "The workers fall," he whispered. "The colony stumbles. And the queen is nowhere."
Kael's gaze remained steady, his lips barely moving. "Intervals consistent. Collapse accelerates with alcohol intake. Outliers may emerge."
One did. A boy vomited violently against the wall, retching until his throat was raw, but staggered upright again. Another girl slumped into a chair instead of collapsing outright, her head lolling but breath shallowly steady. Kael made a mental note: dosage variability. He did not frown, but something within him tightened — the imperfection of it, the untidiness of survivors.
Lucian, seeing them, only smirked. "Cockroaches among the ants. Harder to kill. But the struggle is… delicious to watch."
The panic crescendoed. People clawed toward the exit, trampling those already fallen. Shoes slipped on broken glass and spilled liquor. The DJ finally cut the music, only for the screams to rise louder in its absence. Red emergency lights bathed everything in blood-hued clarity.
---
Kael stood in the shadow of the doorway, golden eyes fixed on the scene. Blank, recording. His lips parted slightly, as if tasting the silence between screams. Lucian brushed past him, their shoulders almost touching, his grey gaze glittering like a blade in low light.
They stepped back into the night.
Outside, the alley buzzed with life of another kind. Ants — real ones — swarmed over a crust of bread discarded in the gutter, their tiny bodies pulsing in frantic unison. Lucian crushed them beneath his shoe without looking down, then wiped the sole against the pavement.
By the time sirens split the night air, they were blocks away, silhouettes dissolving into the labyrinth of streets.
---
At Kael's home, the television flickered blue across the walls. Reporters filled the screen, voices sharp with urgency: "Authorities confirm at least forty casualties in the underground club incident. Preliminary speculation suggests a contaminated drug batch, but no substances have yet been identified—"
Lucian reclined on the edge of the couch, expression unreadable except for the faint upward tilt of his lips. "And so the ants die in their nest, and the world shrugs. Tragedy written off as intoxication."
Kael sat cross-legged on the floor, notebook open, pen moving in precise lines. Transmission successful. Survivors: two. Variables confirmed. His hand stilled for a moment before he wrote again, slower this time: Data inconclusive. Further trials necessary.
---
Later, when Lucian decided to leave, they walked together down the narrow streets toward the train station. The night was quiet now, emptied of revelers, and only their footsteps filled the air.
Lucian spoke with casual cruelty about what they'd seen, describing the deaths as though they were theatre. "The ants twitched, and still believed they were dancing. Their queen would be proud of their loyalty — to collapse, to ruin."
Kael let him talk, listening more to the cadence than the words. His hands were buried in his coat pockets, shoulders slightly hunched against the chill. He should have felt satisfaction. The experiment had worked. The data was clear. But an emptiness gnawed at him in the silence between Lucian's remarks.
He glanced sideways, catching the line of Lucian's jaw under the dim streetlight, the sharpness of his profile against the night. For a moment, Kael considered something he did not name — the desire to work alongside not the crowd, not the colony, but this one person beside him. Someone whose contempt matched his own, whose presence dulled the endless noise of his thoughts.
He suppressed it quickly, pressing the void back down where it belonged. His face remained expressionless. Only his voice, quiet and flat, betrayed the shadow of it:
"Observation continues tomorrow."
Lucian smiled faintly, as though he had heard more than the words.
---
Kael was already there when Lucian arrived.
The laboratory had that still, sharp air of chemicals and silence, its benches lined with glassware that caught the cold light from the ceiling lamps. But what caught Lucian's eye wasn't the polished rows of beakers. It was Kael, folded forward over the desk, his usually precise posture slack, one arm bent awkwardly, a small bottle of pills resting near his hand like an afterthought.
Lucian stopped at the doorway, every line of his body tightening. For once, no words came immediately to his lips.
Kael raised his head at the sound of Lucian's shoes on the floor. His golden eyes were blurred, struggling to focus, the faintest tremor passing through his fingers as he shifted. He didn't smile, didn't flinch. He simply said, in a voice quieter than usual but stubbornly even:
"Sit. Write."
Lucian moved closer, gaze flicking to the bottle, to the slackened lines of Kael's expression. His brain catalogued the scene with clinical precision—pulse unsteady, pupils wider than the laboratory light should account for, motor control compromised. But beneath the analysis there was a knot of something rarer: a flare of concern, so sharp it surprised him.
"You've been experimenting on yourself," Lucian said, low, not quite accusation, not quite question.
Kael nodded once, slow, as though the movement itself dragged against him. "Needed to know… what they chase. Why they burn years for it. No other way to… record it." His hand shook as he pushed a scrap of paper toward Lucian, along with the pen. "Write."
Lucian sat without argument. He had never seen Kael like this—unbalanced, unfocused, yet still commanding the situation with the same relentless logic. So he obeyed.
Kael began to describe sensations. His speech came in clipped fragments, punctuated by breaths where his chest seemed to struggle to find rhythm. He spoke of heat in his blood, of pressure building behind his eyes, of an odd elasticity in the perception of time. Lucian's pen moved steadily, every word captured with precise strokes.
At one point Kael faltered, his voice trailing as his hand knocked against the desk with a clumsy tremor. Lucian didn't pause. He reached across, steadying Kael's shoulder with one hand, grounding him. His fingers lingered, a weight both practical and perhaps reassuring. Kael tilted his head faintly at the contact, not resisting.
Minutes bled into an hour. Lucian wrote in silence, his gaze flicking up often, assessing Kael's pallor, the minute shifts of his breathing. The laboratory's ticking clock counted out the space between them.
At one point, when Kael's vision blurred too badly to keep his eyes open, Lucian shifted again — this time to push his shoulder against that of the other. As if to say "you started this, don't you dare back out". To remind him that "You're in the middle of conducting a study". It was in an almost careless manner, as though Lucian had done it without thinking. But it was enough to get the both of them to smile at the thought of keeping to the task at hand.
Kael's lips quirked, almost imperceptibly. "You look worried," he murmured, tone dry despite his condition.
Lucian's reply was immediate, without embellishment. "Only a fool would treat this as trivial."
"Yet you're calm."
"I'm calm because you need me to be," Lucian said, and this time his voice dipped into something quieter, something meant not for public performance.
When the effects finally ebbed, when Kael's body began to still and the tremors receded to nothing more than faint aftershocks in his fingers, Lucian set the pen down. He had filled several pages with Kael's fragmented observations. The work was meticulous, useful. But the weight in his chest wasn't from the data.
Kael sat back, exhausted but composed, his gaze regaining its clarity. He studied the notes Lucian had made and gave the smallest nod of approval. "Sufficient."
Lucian exhaled through his nose, leaning back in his chair, watching Kael with a look that was difficult to pin down—something balanced between irritation and reluctant admiration.
"You're reckless," he said finally.
"And you stayed." Kael's voice was quiet, almost absentminded, as he reached for the glass of water on the bench. His hand still shook, and Lucian wordlessly slid it closer so he wouldn't spill it. Coordination, like in their work so far, seemed to have become the foundation of their exchanges.
Neither remarked on it.
After some time, they returned to their work as though nothing had happened. The laboratory once more filled with the measured sounds of clinking glass and quiet scribbling. But beneath the routine, something had shifted. Lucian was more attuned to the way Kael's shoulders hunched slightly as he bent over the microscope, to the faint pallor that hadn't yet left his skin.
And Kael, though his face remained its usual mask, found himself noticing the silence differently. But soon enough, he had taken a preference to it over the nonsensical white noise of clattering teeth- no, mandibles of ants in human skin.
For the first time in a long while, Kael wondered if his solitude wasn't quite as absolute as he had convinced himself.