- 'The lab rabbit is scientifically closer to a person than a rat, but not totally representative of a human organism nonetheless.'
---
The laboratory clock ticked with an almost judicial precision, its thin black hands slicing the air into segments of judgment. The official work of the day had ended, the overseers long since retreated to their homes and their comforts, but Lucian and Kael remained. They always remained. The white walls of the lab gleamed like polished bone, sterile, impassive, containing within them the quiet hum of machines that never slept. To others, this place was only a workplace. To Lucian and Kael, it was the workshop of evolution, a crucible where human fragility might be exposed and annihilated.
It was Kael who drew the syringe that night, tilting the vial with the delicacy of a jeweler appraising some rare gemstone. The liquid was colorless, the faintest shimmer passing through it when caught by the overhead lights, as if it contained distilled silence. His hands, though steady, bore faint stains of the other prototypes they had burned through—failures discarded like useless carcasses in the waste bin of history. Lucian stood at his shoulder, arms folded, his shadow stretching long across the floor like a dark overseer.
"This one," Kael murmured, pale-yellow eyes reflecting the light, "will not speak. Not in the blood, not in the marrow, not even in the breath of the corpse. It vanishes upon completing its purpose. No trace. No signature."
Lucian's lips curved, not into a smile but into that slight, surgical gesture he reserved for moments of confirmation. "Finally. A weapon worthy of permanence. Clean. Absolute. It will do."
Their test subject that night was not human. A rat, gray and shivering, blinked at them from its cage, nose twitching, claws scratching faintly against the metal grating. Lucian regarded it with the same expression he reserved for the insects he catalogued—detached curiosity sharpened by disdain. The rat, to him, was merely a smaller insect wearing fur. Nothing more.
Kael drew the dose and inserted the needle with a clinical grace. The rat gave a tiny squeak, a twitch of resistance, then stilled. Within moments its breathing slowed, faltered, stopped. Its eyes remained open, strangely glassy, as if death had arrived with an almost polite efficiency. Lucian leaned over, observing every detail.
"Look," Kael whispered, almost reverent. "No seizures, no frothing, no convulsions. Only sleep. Then silence."
Lucian took the body and began his own examination. Needles, scalpels, vials of blood—all turned up nothing. No discoloration, no chemical signature, no disturbance in the predictable balance of fluids. He set the tools down one by one, his movements methodical, his eyes glowing with something dangerous.
"It is invisible," he said at last. "The perfect ghost. The rat is simply gone, as though life was a switch turned off."
That was the moment they understood the true scope of what they had made. Not a drug. Not a poison. A key to rewriting reality itself—death without fingerprints.
---
Katya entered their plan as if summoned by inevitability. Or, by Lucian's previous observations of her, the "bunny".
She was fragile already, a creature carved of translucence and silence, a girl who drifted through school corridors like a shadow left behind by a brighter figure. Others whispered about her, not with cruelty—at least not always—but with that curious disdain the healthy reserve for the visibly breakable. Her diary was her most constant companion, its pages smudged with the ink of countless late-night vigils. Words of despair, longing, resignation. The confession of a bunny trapped in a world of hawks.
Lucian had noticed her before. Not because she interested him—no human did, save Kael—but because she bore the unmistakable markers of one already fraying. He saw the blue veins that traced delicate paths under her skin, like fragile rivers beneath snow. He had previously noted the faint white scars etched across her wrists, attempts already made to slip free of existence. Katya was not so much living as she was waiting for someone to grant her permission to leave.
"She will not resist," Lucian said to Kael one night, while their books lay open between them. "She is begging for it. All we must do is ask."
Kael tilted his head, a strand of oak-colored hair falling into his eyes. "You think she'll walk to her death willingly?"
"She will bring it with her," Lucian replied. "Her diary is her prayer book. We need only answer the prayer."
The plan unfolded with terrible simplicity.
---
Saturday afternoon. The rooftop of the school stood quiet, the city sprawling endlessly below it. The sky carried the soft ache of early autumn, clouds drifting like heavy thoughts across the pale expanse. It was the hour between noise and silence, when most students had gone home, when the building itself seemed to exhale into vacancy.
Lucian had written the note himself, folded it neatly, and slipped it into Katya's locker: Come to the roof. Bring your diary. I will listen.
And she came.
She climbed the last flight of stairs as though ascending to judgment, the worn leather book pressed tightly against her chest. Her eyes were wide, impossibly blue, their edges reddened from sleeplessness. She looked like porcelain that had been cracked and repaired too many times, hair pale as frost against her thin shoulders. A bunny walking into the lion's den, unaware—or perhaps fully aware—that she was about to be consumed.
Lucian was already waiting, standing by the railing, Kael half in shadow behind him. The breeze teased strands of their hair, lifted the corners of their coats. They looked, to Katya's eyes, like figures of another world, not students but something higher, darker, terrible.
"You came," Lucian said, voice low and even.
She nodded, clutching the diary as though it were both shield and offering.
"You want peace," Lucian continued. "You've written it often enough. Freedom. Silence. You have begged for it, Katya."
Her lips parted, trembling. "I… yes."
Kael stepped forward, syringe glinting in his hand like a shard of moonlight. "We can give it to you. No pain. Only sleep."
She stared at the needle. For a moment, hesitation quivered in her body, a faint instinct of survival. But then her shoulders sagged, and she extended her arm, pale and thin, veins a map laid bare beneath her skin.
"Please," she whispered.
Lucian took the diary from her hands. He did not open it. He simply held it as Kael slid the needle beneath her skin. The plunger depressed. The liquid entered her veins.
Katya exhaled, the sound soft, almost grateful. Her eyes widened once more, then slowly glazed, pupils dilating into oceans. Her knees buckled, her body sinking into Lucian's waiting arms. She weighed almost nothing, a bundle of bones wrapped in fragile skin.
"It's beautiful," Kael murmured, watching as her chest rose, fell, and then did not rise again. "Like a candle extinguished."
Lucian brushed a strand of hair from her forehead, his face unreadable. Then he lifted her easily and carried her to the edge of the rooftop. Below, the courtyard stretched, empty and silent. He glanced once at the diary still in his hand, then hurled her body outward.
She fell like a discarded doll, limbs weightless, hair streaming behind her in a pale halo. When she struck the ground, the sound was distant, muffled, as though the earth itself wished to hush the truth. From above, Lucian let the diary slip through his fingers. It fluttered downward, pages scattering like white wings, settling beside her broken frame.
To any who found her, it would be simple: a girl, despairing, had jumped. The diary would confirm it. No needle, no chemical, no hand guiding her fate. Only her own despair.
---
That night, Lucian and Kael sat in the perfect order of Lucian's room, the glow of the television casting pale light across the narcissus flowers on his desk. The news anchor's voice was calm, detached:
"…tragic suicide of a student, Katya Morozova, discovered this evening on school grounds. Investigators cite her diary as evidence of long-standing suicidal ideation. Authorities have declared the case closed, pending routine formalities…"
No mention of toxicology. No suggestion of anything but her own will.
Lucian muted the screen. Silence expanded between them.
"They believe it," Kael said softly, leaning back against the chair. "Completely."
Lucian's reflection gazed back at him from the black surface of the screen, his grey eyes like fragments of a storm. "Of course they do. They see only what they are told to see. They hear only what they are told to hear. Insects, every one of them. Blind. Deaf. Irrelevant."
Kael turned toward him, pale yellow irises glinting back. "So it works. We have a key to open any door, and no one will ever know we walked through."
Lucian's lips curved again in that cold approximation of a smile. "Yes. Today, a bunny. Tomorrow…" He let the thought hang, unfinished, suspended like a blade.
The narcissus flowers on Lucian's table swayed faintly in the breeze from the open window, their whiteness immaculate, untouched.
---
Morning light fractured through the tall classroom windows, splintering into angled beams that highlighted dust floating idly in the stale air. Kael sat at the far edge of the room, where shadows pooled more generously. His desk was neatly arranged — a pale notebook squared perfectly against the wood, pens aligned, his posture straight but unreadable. He didn't fidget. He didn't look around. His dark eyes followed the teacher's notes with the kind of sharp focus that made silence gather around him.
To most of the class, Kael was invisible — not because he blended in, but because his presence unsettled them in ways they couldn't name. He wasn't shy. He wasn't timid. If asked to answer, he would deliver responses crisp and precise, as though language itself had bowed into submission. But outside the necessary exchanges, he simply withheld himself, leaving an emptiness in the shape of his existence. People often mistook it for coldness. Some whispered he was arrogant. Others, with more honesty, admitted he unnerved them.
The teachers, however, adored him. "Brilliant," they said, every time his test papers came back, every time he solved a problem the rest of the class had given up on. They called him "reliable," "serious," "a model student." In the staff room, his name was shorthand for excellence. Yet Kael carried their praise as though it weighed nothing at all, an accolade he'd never asked for.
Beside him — though "beside" was perhaps the wrong word, since Lucian did not belong in any static arrangement — Lucian occupied the classroom like a stage. He leaned back in his chair, one arm draped lazily across the backrest, his smile slow and deliberate, his voice low when he spoke but loud enough to draw attention when he wanted it.
And people noticed. They always noticed.
The girls gravitated first — drawn by the confidence that shimmered off him, the unshakable way he met eyes and never looked away. He carried himself like someone who had already won, though no one could quite say what game he was playing. His hair caught the light; his smirk suggested secrets worth chasing. He had the sort of presence that was both alluring and irritating — because for every admirer, there was another boy whose jaw clenched whenever Lucian spoke too smoothly, whose shoulders stiffened when laughter followed him down the corridor.
Lucian thrived on it. Admiration, envy, dislike — it all belonged to him, and he played with it like cards in his hand.
Kael sometimes wondered if Lucian ever grew tired of it. Of the eyes. The expectations. The ceaseless attention he both commanded and demanded. But whenever he looked at Lucian, he saw no cracks, no hesitation, just a restless hunger that devoured every moment.
Where Kael's silence invited distance, Lucian's voice refused it. Where Kael watched, Lucian performed.
And yet, in the quiet margins of their shared life — in the laboratory after hours, in the shadows of stairwells, on rooftops where the city lay indifferent beneath them — their roles reversed. Lucian was the visionary, but Kael was the architect. Lucian's words could charm, but Kael's precision built. Together, they were balance and imbalance, chaos and calculation.
---
It was lunch break now. The corridors echoed with footsteps, the clang of lockers, the shrill chatter of overlapping conversations. Kael walked at his own measured pace, ignoring the current of students pushing past. Lucian drifted beside him, hands in pockets, wearing that faint smile that said he knew every whispered word trailing them.
"Do you ever notice," Lucian said suddenly, "how predictable they all are?"
Kael glanced at him. "Who?"
Lucian nodded toward a group of girls clustered by the vending machine. One caught sight of him and immediately looked away, then back again a moment later, laughter bubbling in her throat as if she hadn't noticed herself staring.
"People," Lucian said, as if the word itself amused him. "They think they're subtle. They're not."
"You don't make it difficult," Kael replied flatly.
Lucian's grin widened. "Exactly."
A boy passing by muttered something under his breath, sharp and resentful. Lucian caught it, his head tilting just slightly — a predator acknowledging noise. His smile didn't falter, but his eyes sharpened. Kael saw it, though he knew the others didn't.
"They hate you," Kael said quietly.
"They envy me." Lucian's voice was casual, but edged with satisfaction. "It's not the same thing."
Kael didn't answer. He was thinking, as he often did, about the contrasts between them — Lucian drawing every gaze, Kael repelling them. But where Lucian thrived in the chaos of others, Kael found relief in detachment. He didn't want to be adored. He didn't want to be hated either. He wanted only to exist without the interference of eyes. Yet Lucian's presence was a tether pulling him back into colour, into motion, into schemes he wouldn't have pursued alone.
Maybe that was why he stayed.
---
That afternoon, in biology, the teacher called on Kael to explain the mechanism of an enzyme. His answer was brief, exact, without hesitation. The teacher smiled, praised him, noted his clarity. The students groaned.
Later, Lucian raised his hand for a different question, one not aimed at him, and wove his response into something clever and persuasive, bending half-truths into elegance. The teacher nodded, impressed despite the embellishment. Some of the boys in the back row rolled their eyes, whispering about how he always had to show off.
Lucian noticed, of course. He always did. And when the bell rang, he walked past them with a pointed smirk, the kind that stung more than words.
Kael trailed behind, his mind already half-removed, drifting toward the lab they would soon retreat to.
---
The laboratory after hours was a different kind of stage — not Lucian's, but Kael's. Here the silence was thick with chemicals and glass, with the hum of ventilation and the faint scrape of metal against tile. The overhead lights bleached everything sterile.
Kael moved with ease, measuring, recording, adjusting with an almost reverent precision. His hands, though pale and slender, carried an assurance that came only from hours of repetition. He looked alive here, in a way he never did under classroom fluorescents. His stillness wasn't absence — it was focus, distilled.
Lucian leaned against the counter, watching him. "You change when you're here," he said.
Kael didn't look up. "How?"
"You come alive," Lucian murmured. His voice was softer now, stripped of the theatrics he wore at school. "Everyone else only sees the ghost of you. But here…" He trailed off, letting silence finish the thought.
Kael's lips curved — not into a smile exactly, but into something like acknowledgment.
---
By the time they packed their things, night had already gathered at the windows. The city beyond looked indifferent, its lights blinking like distant signals.
As they left the building, Lucian asked, "Do you ever wonder if they'll remember us?"
Kael tilted his head. "Who?"
"Anyone. Everyone. These people who think they know us."
Kael thought for a long moment before answering. "No."
Lucian chuckled, low and sharp. "That's why I deem your attitude sufficient."
The conversation stopped that that, but they both knew that it's easier to be remembered for devastating society than supporting it.