— Hey.
One short word — and the air in the hallway thickened.
Jacob didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. He simply stepped in front of Simon, blocking his path to the saving turn, and the whole world obediently contracted around that moment. The nearest students slowed their pace. Someone cut their eyes sideways, someone hid a smirk in their palm, someone turned away just in case — but stayed to listen. Everyone knew this performance by heart: if he had found his entertainment, the audience was expected to watch it through to the end.
And right here — Jacob felt it rather than thought it — the grey, dull morning gained flavour for the first time that day. That flat, blunt void beneath his ribs, the one that had been gnawing at him since the moment he woke, suddenly retreated, driven out by a hot, tight pressure he refused to name. He stood over this quiet, hunched boy, and through his veins spread a long-familiar, shameful, utterly singular rush — as though only in this second, here, had he finally truly woken up.
He didn't ask himself why he needed this. He knew it without asking, on a bodily level: . And that was enough to keep coming back to him, again and again.
Jacob didn't even know how long this had been going on, but the figure sat somewhere nearby, worn as an old callus — nearly three years. In that time he had broken quite a few spines — bullies, the proud, those who thought they could stand level with him. And they all behaved the same way: snarled, reached for a fight, threatened, ran to complain. They resisted. That was normal, that was understandable, it didn't even excite him properly — it simply put each one in their place and bored him quickly.
But this one — no.
This one never answered back. This one simply accepted. He stood and absorbed the blow, the mockery, the humiliation, shoulders and eyes cast down, quiet and compliant, as though his whole shrunken body was saying: do with me what you will. And it was this — another's wordless non-resistance — that dried Jacob's mouth out, that drew something dark and hungry inside him taut, something he preferred not to examine too closely. He only knew that he wanted more. That he wanted to watch this boy bend lower and lower beneath him. And every time he got what he came for, he left with a hollow, shameful ringing in his blood — and despised himself for that ringing until the next time.
— Jacob, leave me alone.
Simon's voice came out quiet, foreign, barely audible through the hum of the corridor. He wasn't looking into his tormentor's eyes — he was looking at the collar of his jacket, at the red-and-white fabric, at the proud gold letter. That was easier.
— I haven't done anything to you.
Jacob smiled. Slowly, with pleasure.
— Dude. — He spread his arms with feigned amazement — wide, for show, so the whole gallery could see. — I just asked how you were doing. And you're already telling me to get lost?
And on that word, with no wind-up, no transition — he drove his fist into Simon's shoulder, short and hard.
Pain flashed white and rolled down his arm all the way to his fingertips.
Simon swayed, lurched sideways, the notebook nearly slipping from his damp hands. But he stayed upright. And — said nothing.
That was the strangest thing about him, the most shameful. His body knew what to do from childhood, knew it better than his mind: don't flinch, don't cry out, don't answer back. Freeze. Make yourself smaller. Wait it out. And somewhere very deep, beneath the crust of fear, a wild, absurd, stubborn hope still smouldered in Simon — that . That Jacob would simply get bored. That one fine day they might not be hitting and running, but simply... talking. Like people. This hope was absurd, humiliating, bearing no scrutiny against reality — and Simon clung to it, because there was nothing else to cling to.
He had no idea how his submission looked from the outside. How his dropped shoulders, his downcast gaze, and that silent do with me what you will were read by those who stood over him. He couldn't see what was obvious to the predator: his silence was not taken for capitulation. It was taken as an invitation.
And, as had happened more than once before, something else stirred beneath the pain — the thing Simon hated in himself more than anything in the world.
There, where someone else's fist had just been driven into his shoulder, the skin responded with more than pain alone. Beneath it, against his will, something warm and shameful pulled — as though any touch from Jacob, even this, the body accepted with a hunger he dared not admit to himself. Simon ground his teeth until they creaked. No. I hate him. I hate him. But the words sounded rehearsed and hollow, and the warmth beneath his skin did not go away.
He didn't understand what was wrong with him. Didn't understand why , intertwined so tightly that one could no longer be separated from the other. He only knew that he was sick. That something inside him was broken and rotting, and that it was his own fault.
— Jacob.
Priscilla's voice came out lazy and bored. She tugged him by the sleeve, not even deigning to glance at Simon — the way one doesn't deign to glance at a wet patch on the pavement, at dirt underfoot, at emptiness.
— Lecture in two minutes. Let's go. I have no interest in watching this.
For her, this boy simply didn't exist. Background, furniture, an obstacle not even worth contempt. But from the corner of her eye, as she turned away, she noted the same thing she had noted that morning: how reluctantly Jacob tore himself from his toy. How his gaze lingered and stuck. And again, somewhere at the very bottom, something cold and uncomfortable chimed faintly — and again Priscilla crushed it before it could take the shape of a thought. Nonsense. He's just having fun. He always does this.
Jacob yielded. Lazily, like a satisfied beast, he allowed himself to be led away. The performance was over; the crowd, instantly losing interest, flowed onward about its business.
And it was then that Simon did the thing he had never done before.
Maybe it was the pain in his shoulder, throbbing dully through the fabric. Maybe it was that shameful heat he hated so much in himself and for which he hated Jacob even more fiercely.
Or maybe it was the pills.
A couple of weeks ago — after Craig, grinning, had put his sneaker squarely into Simon's ribs, and Simon was found sitting on the floor of an empty corridor, hunched, with a blank, switched-off face — someone had finally taken him to the university doctor. The doctor shone a light into his pupils, listened, asked a couple of routine questions about how he was feeling. And Simon said what he always said, what he had learned to say before he learned to lie: just overtired. Not sleeping well lately. Nothing serious, really. The doctor nodded wearily, not looking closely, and wrote him a prescription — mild antidepressants, to level out sleep and mood. Simon left, carrying in his pocket a small paper rectangle in which .
Since then the world around him had grown quieter. Duller. As though someone had — had pushed other people's voices behind glass, blunted the sharp edges of things, blurred both fear and pain. Simon did not resist this deafness; it was easier inside it. Less to feel. He only didn't notice how, with each passing day, he dissolved further into that quiet murk — and how the voice inside him that had recently still clung to life and cried that this wasn't right grew day by day weaker, more distant, less distinct.
Or perhaps, beneath all these years of silence, one single smouldering ember had survived — tiny, stubborn, the last scrap of the Simon he had been before all of this — before the bruises, before the sleeplessness, before that day in the first year when he had still believed it was possible to reach out to someone. And this ember, against his will, breathed out through clenched teeth — quietly, almost soundlessly, but loudly enough to be heard:
— Idiot.
Simon was frightened by it before it had finished sounding. His heart plunged somewhere downward, into cold. Why. Why did I say that. God, why. All these years he had been silent, had survived through silence, had hidden in it like a shell — and now, in one stupid second, he had opened his mouth himself and let the storm in.
It was too late.
Jacob stopped.
He had heard it. In the silence that had fallen for just the two of them, that short word had rung out louder than any shout. He turned — slowly, very slowly — and Simon watched his face change. The lazy triumph of a predator that had fed on easy prey suddenly slid away, giving way to something else. Something sharp. Focused. Almost hungry.
Because the prey had snarled back.
The mouse he had been methodically chasing for three years, quiet, voiceless, always submissive — had bared its teeth for the first time. And this, contrary to all logic, contrary to everything Jacob knew about himself, did not make him angry.
It caught him. Deeply. In a place quite different from where it should have.
In one short, dangerous second the opaque, faceless freak suddenly came through to him as a living person — with his own anger, his own pain, his own stubborn smouldering fire beneath the ash. And this flash of life turned out to be more desirable, more frightening and more compelling than any submission Jacob had beaten out of him over all these years. He didn't understand exactly what had just happened to him. He only felt how the hunger inside him, from blunt and habitual, suddenly became sharp, directed, having acquired a name and a face.
Simon's face.
— Baby, — he said quietly, and in that word there was more threat than in any punch, in any slap. He didn't take his darkened eyes off Simon. — I'm not finished with you yet.
Priscilla had been waiting for him a few steps away — and had seen everything, heard everything.
First — how this grey, always-silent boy suddenly snarled. Idiot. Quiet, trembling, but distinct. Priscilla had nearly spluttered from the surprise: in all the months she had lazily watched this performance, the mouse had spoken for the first time. Amusing. Even sweet in its hopelessness — as though the doormat had tried to bite.
But then she heard the second word. And the laugh stuck in her throat.
Baby.
Jacob had let it fall so easily, so naturally, as though he weren't saying it for the first time. Not freak. Not loser. Not hey, you. Baby. You don't say that through gritted teeth to someone you despise and want to crush. You say it to someone you keep coming back to.
By the time Jacob drew level with her, not a trace of a smile remained on her face.
— Why did you call him baby? — she asked. Her voice came out level, but beneath its levelness rang an irritation she hadn't expected of herself.
Jacob blinked. He looked at her with genuine, almost bewildered confusion.
— I did? Called him baby? — He frowned, as though listening for the echo of his own words, which he couldn't remember. — Come on. I didn't even notice.
And that was the worst of it.
Not insolence, not defiance, not an excuse — but the plain truth. He genuinely hadn't heard the word slip from his tongue. But Priscilla had heard it very clearly. And she heard what it was.
The chill she had been suppressing in herself all morning finally took shape as one short, very unpleasant thought.
She said nothing more. She simply took Jacob's arm — more tightly than necessary — and led him away, toward the lectures, carrying with her a new, uncomfortable knowledge.
And Simon remained standing alone in the middle of the indifferent, flowing-past stream. He pressed the notebook to his chest, his shoulder was burning, and the echo of a stranger's threat was still settling in the corridor around him. But the most frightening thing was not that.
The most frightening thing was what was kindling beneath his ribs — there, where over three years something had carved that invisible channel in him, open only to one person in the world. Instead of relief, instead of belated fear, in that place something was slowly, inexorably growing — a premonition, heavy, dark, inescapable.
He had just thrown a spark into dry grass with his own hands. Now Jacob would certainly not leave him in peace — and Simon didn't understand why this thought echoed in him not with terror alone.
The screen goes dark.
To be continued in the next episode.