Chapter 2: Somewhere That Isn't Home
1293 Words
The ceiling was wrong.
Lucien noticed that before anything else. Just lay there staring up at it, brain half-online, trying to work out why it bothered him.
The ceiling at home was off-white with a water stain near the corner from a pipe that burst two winters ago. His dad kept saying he'd fix it. Never did. Every time Lucien looked up at it he thought the same thing.
He's going to fix that one day.
This ceiling was stone. High and dark and not his.
Then everything else came back.
Not slowly. All at once, like a door kicked open, the whole night flooding in before he could brace for any of it.
He didn't move.
He lay there staring at the wrong ceiling and his brain, doing something genuinely stupid, produced the thought: my dad is probably wondering where I am right now.
The thought just sat there for a second.
Then his brain caught up with it.
He closed his eyes.
In. Out. Don't.
He opened them again. Closing them was worse. In the dark behind his eyelids everything was already waiting.
His arms had burns on them. Small ones, mostly closing over already, covered in something cool someone had applied while he was out. His throat felt like he'd swallowed smoke and gravel. His left eye throbbed with a deep dull ache that hadn't existed yesterday morning.
Yesterday morning felt like someone else's memory.
He sat up.
A woman sat near the door watching him. Not checking vitals. Not doing paperwork. Just watching, with her hands folded and her back straight and the kind of stillness that doesn't come naturally to people. The kind that gets practiced.
She'd been there for a while. He could tell.
He looked at her. Then at the window.
Outside, buildings. Dozens of them. Dark stone, wide paths, students in uniforms already moving around in the early morning. Hundreds of them, from what he could see. More people in one place than Lucien had ever been around in his life.
He stared at that for a moment longer than he meant to. Not really seeing it. Just looking at it.
"Where am I," he said. His voice came out rough and low.
"Black Veil Academy." Calm and even. "You're safe."
Safe. He turned that word over and couldn't find anything to do with it right now.
"My parents are dead," he said.
He wasn't sure why he said it out loud. Wasn't asking for anything. He just needed to say it to an actual person in an actual room because his brain kept sliding off it, kept refusing to let it land properly.
Saying it out loud didn't help as much as he thought it would.
"I know," she said.
Just that. But the way those two words came out was slightly different from everything else she'd said. Something small moved through them. He didn't look at her long enough to figure out what.
"Who brought me here."
"Someone who wanted to make sure you survived."
"Who are you."
"The principal of this academy." A pause. "My name isn't important right now."
He looked back at the window.
He had a lot of questions. He didn't ask any of them. He was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. The kind of tired that sits behind your eyes and makes the room feel slightly further away than it actually is. Like watching everything happen through glass.
A staff member came in a while later.
Young woman. Mid-twenties maybe. She walked in carrying a tray and immediately looked like she wished she had a stronger reason to be there. She set the tray down. Moved a cup that didn't need moving. Straightened the edge of a small cloth that was already straight.
"Um." She glanced at him and then at the tray. "There's water. And food, I asked them to bring food just in case. You don't have to eat obviously. I just thought." She stopped. Started again. "Some people find it helps. To eat. After. You know."
Lucien looked at the food.
He wasn't hungry. The idea of eating felt almost offensive right now. Like something his body wanted that the rest of him hadn't agreed to yet.
"I also wanted to say." She exhaled quietly through her nose. "I'm really sorry. For what happened. To your family."
Something tightened in Lucien's chest.
Not sadness. Something angrier than that. A quick hot flash of it, at the tray, at the cup she'd moved twice, at the word family coming out of a stranger's mouth in a room he'd woken up in with no explanation.
He kept his face still.
"Thank you," he said.
She nodded too many times and left.
The principal hadn't moved.
Later they told him he was enrolled. Already. Paperwork filed, room assigned, basic schedule prepared. A different staff member walked him through it in a careful organized voice. Lucien sat there listening and somewhere in the middle of the explanation about dining hours his brain wandered completely and he lost about thirty seconds just gone, staring at the wall behind the man's head, not hearing anything.
The man was still talking when Lucien came back.
He took the card they handed him.
Commoner. Unranked.
He put the uniform on in the empty room after everyone left. Dark fabric, well made, slightly too wide across the shoulders. He stood there and looked down at it. Pulled the sleeve straight. Let it go.
He gave himself sixty seconds.
Just stood there and let the whole weight of it press down without trying to push back. All of it. Both of them. The kitchen floor. The warmth of her hand.
Then he walked out.
The main corridor was wide and loud. Students in groups, conversations overlapping, someone laughing at something near the far end. Nobody looked at him at first. He was just a new face in a dark uniform.
Then something shifted.
He couldn't explain it. Just that the whispers started following him about two minutes in and didn't stop.
Commoner.
Did you feel that when he walked past?
What's wrong with his eye?
He kept walking and didn't look at any of them. He had a direction. Left at the end of the main corridor, through the courtyard, east stairwell. He kept that in his head and nothing else.
He made the left turn.
The side corridor was quieter. Long, with carved stone panels running along the walls at shoulder height. Old decorative work, the kind that had probably been there longer than anyone currently alive.
He walked without thinking much.
Something caught his eye.
He slowed without deciding to. Stopped in the middle of the corridor and looked at the wall to his right.
One of the carved panels sat between two narrow mounted lights. The design cut into the stone was circular. Eight lines extended out from the center, each one ending in a small mark slightly different from the others.
Lucien's chest went very still.
He knew that symbol.
He had seen it once. On the inside of a jacket belonging to a man who stood in his kitchen and watched his mother die without changing his expression.
Same lines. Same marks. Exact.
He pressed his fingers against the stone.
Cold. Old. Carved here years ago. Long before last night.
His throat tightened and he made himself breathe through it.
He looked up and down the corridor. Empty.
He looked back at the wall.
Their symbol is on the wall of the place that just enrolled me.
He stood very still, the question sitting in his chest like something with weight.
So which one is it. Did they bring me here.
Or did she.
- Writer
