The patter of footsteps rang soft against pavement, clean and methodical like some type of message rather than an action on the ground.
The tires hummed over the slick asphalt as they churned the reflections within the puddles still holding their ground in the street.
Life.
The idea of 'life' is one that mankind uses most often to insulate themselves from the void. Humans split it up and break it apart and categorize it based upon triviality, e.g., happy / sad, love / loss.
Underneath every laugh, every shriek of pain, and every heartbeat is simply movement; only instinct and repetition are occurring. Life is not cruel, nor is it kind, it is simply necessary.
Some people look to their life decisions for their definition of life; others view life through the prisms of things they have been through. What about those who escape out from underneath a shape that has been forced upon them?
What about a person that is forced to become 'like' someone else? Will that person be able to regain their humanness? Or will they become something else, something sharp, hard, and cold?
Humans swamp their inefficiencies as they show off their weaknesses. They are fragile and predictable and are living desperately. All their lives, which they call lives, are merely strings and they await being pulled. If you pull on a string, it may unravel completely or it may twist into a different shape.
And so he walked. Step by step, and breathed each time with calculation and precision, while in the sound of the city around him, which had no logic to him yet alive and so chaotic, there was a sound as if they were in harmony, though he did not participate.
There was a large, orderly and symmetrical building before him – Sankt-Halsted Technisches Gymnasium. He stopped at the gate and readjusted the strap on his shoulder.
In the glass reflection, he sees a 17-year-old boy, who is normal in the eyes of everyone else, but the calculation has already started. The steps of his plan were – observe all, analyse for subtle changes, adapt for those changes.
He breathed in deeply. He began his first day.
The classroom was filled with noise, laughter echoing off the walls.
"Did you see the new episode of Chainsaw Man last night?" a girl asked her friend, elbowing her.
"I did! The fight with Denji was amazing. I almost cried," her friend replied, her eyes full of excitement.
At another desk a few feet away, two different girls leaned over, whispering to each other with great excitement.
"You have to read Spy x Family! Anya is so cute, and Loid is just...ugh, perfect."
"No, no, One Piece is so much better! You need to catch up; the new arc is crazy! Luffy is a total legend."
All around the room was chaos and noise, an ordinary teenage world in bright, random chaos. But then the door opened. A woman entered, her presence was quiet but very strong. The chatter in the room began to quiet, the whole room turning downwards, flowing into her calm presence.
"We have a new student today," she said.
A boy walked through the door behind her. His gray hair was very nicely groomed, and he had a nice-looking, clean-shaven face. His aquamarine eyes were moving quickly as he surveyed the room, but there was something very focused and distant about his eyes.
The boy tilted his head to one side. Like his voice, his manner was smooth and measured, calm and steady.
"I'm Karsten Kachel," he introduced himself. "I'm looking forward to being in class with each of you. Aside from that, I can't think of anything particularly interesting about myself; I'm sorry."
When Karsten finished speaking, the room fell silent, the previous noise replaced by tension and all eyes suddenly turned to Karsten. He could see several students casting him puzzled looks, seemingly unsure what to think of the calm and somewhat cold tone he'd used when talking.
KarolinaSchaumann spoke. "Karsten, please sit at the back of the class, by the window."
Karsten nodded once, his motions controlled and precise, and replied: "Sure."
He passed through the rows of desks as he had earlier that evening when walking down the street, and dropped into his chair at the back of the class. Setting down his backpack on the floor, Karsten's gaze tracked across the city outside before returning to look out of the window.
The classroom became very still and quiet as it settled into a routine, and Karolina walked through the classroom calmly, deliberately enunciating each word as though she was throwing it across the room to reach her students.
"Today, we will continue to discuss the unification of Germany," she said, threading a finger down the chalkboard, "By looking at the social and political consequences experienced during the 19th Century and how the Industrial Revolution changed the structure of power in the individual nations that make up Germany."
Sitting at the back of the room, upright in his desk with his hands stacked neatly on top of each other in front of him, Karsten watched Karolina's mouth move his aquamarine-coloured eyes following her pronunciation of the words as he lost his concentration due to the dust on the chalkboard and the noise made by each of the 20+ students in the rooms.
For no reason in particular, he looked at the window, where the physical education field was full of students running around and throwing various types of balls to one another while their voices echoed into the distance around him; students falling down, laughing, arguing about the rules.
In that chaos, there were reoccurring patterns on different types of movement, choices that were identifiable on a typical day, and reactions that appeared to be instinctive. Karsten observed and did not judge; he did not have any curiosity. He used the cold gaze he had learned to give every occurrence: observation, analysis, and isolation.
Just in time, he turned back to see Karolina's brief glance toward him and the almost imperceptible nod of her head indicating willingness before he again looked at the blackboard.
An hour passed this way. It was marked with chalk sheets, her words, and the noise of pens on paper.
Then, the bell rang
The sound was cutting through the room's silence. She softly closed her book and then barely raised her voice above the chatter of her class to say," Good job, everyone. That's it for today.Please read on about the topic. Concentrate on the events around the Congress of Vienna, the territorial negotiations that followed and their impact on modern German identity."
As the students packed up and murmured acknowledgements or "groaned" while already retrieving their required texts from their bags, Karsten remained in his seat with his hands on the desk, momentarily looking out again at the P.E. field, where some learners were running, yelling, colliding with one another, falling and getting back up again sporadic and unstructured but completely alive.
The sounds of the classroom returned - the sound of chairs scraping against the carpet, voices mingling together, bags opening. The boy, Karsten, did nothing. He continued to watch from the window at the hustle of the world outside.
He remembers seeing a chessboard filled with alternating colors/pieces. He remembers watching a tiny hand moving a piece across the board, against the other player.
Then he saw a hypodermic needle with cold metal and a shiny surface. A strong and firm grip secured his wrist as the needle pierced into his flesh. There was no sound, no scream, just the soft whisper of liquid entering his body through the tip of that needle.
Next, he saw a body in a pool of dark water. The body was submerged and the limbs were shaking, but there was no way to escape. The small boy was chained by his arms and there was a lot of weight on his body, pulling him down. Bubbles came from his mouth. Time stretched out forever.
Karsten's eyes closed and everything grew dark in an instant. His eyes popped back open and he breathed out softly and could barely hear it.
"....so peaceful."