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Douno Cheung thinks there’s something fundamentally wrong with him.
It’s like there’s a thick pane of glass in between him and the rest of the world. He can look through and, to an extent, understand what he sees, but there is an insurmountable distance that will always separate him from everyone - everything - else.
At eight, he doesn’t have the words to describe what his life looks like from his side of the glass.
Anyone would say he’s always been a standoffish person, preferring to play alone rather than with peers. Polite rejections, “No thanks,”
“I’m fine,” if anyone asked to include him; no reaction beyond a mild and perfunctory acknowledgement to explicit exclusion. Perfectly mediocre academic results, minimal but unworrisome class participation and no obvious discord with his classmates made it easy to fade into the background of his school setting.
When his mother is on a business trip, his father brings an unfamiliar woman home. It’s never spoken of.
The government labs under the protection of his father’s unit are on the cusp of successfully advancing an important experiment. Even Douno is invited, if invited means dragged along by his father and summarily ignored.
At thirteen, looking at his father in - for him - animated conversation with a scientist, her young daughter clinging to her coat between them, he thinks he’s starting to understand.
It’s like telly. Analogies and metaphor are things he struggles with, so it’s not perfect, but it explains the feeling of glass, of being able to watch others but never feel personally affected. However, unlike telly, it’s not what’s on the other side of the glass that’s manufactured.
It’s he who is fake.
His life.
The strained silence ever-present in his house; his parents, co-stars in a fraught, almost antagonistic relationship who only tolerate each other to keep the show going; and he, a child with no drive, no wants, no emotions. A puppet to complete the illusion. A boy who stops existing when he’s no longer needed.
It’s easy to follow the path set for him by his father. His mother had, almost immediately after giving birth to him, rejected the responsibility of raising him, after all. Legacy secured, job done. But his father, shallow as it was, still expected things of him.
So he accompanies, like a good accessory, whenever he is asked. To the labs, even after the experiment fails in some disastrous way he has no way of understanding; even after the little girl he knows he can’t acknowledge as his sister stops showing up; even after the extras in the background - who will always be more real than him - turn from tired but bright-eyed and hopeful to dour, burnt-out zombies.
When the world goes to hell in a handbasket, and his father tells him to stay put while he looks for her - because she will always be more real to him than his own son - he thinks he finally understands his role is over.
He’s no longer needed.
Maybe he was never needed at all.
Douno watches, impassively, from behind his window as his body carries on, as if on autopilot. He eats (barely), he sleeps (too much), he exercises (too much), he finishes school (barely), and he somehow manages to get into a local college, moving into a small student flat nearby. Through it all, he can’t muster a single word.
He’s not upset that his father decided that his son was a mere afterthought to his plan of getting half his face blown off in a futile search for the safest woman on the ship. The pane of glass inundates him from ever feeling like anything he’s going through is real, after all. He doesn’t really feel anything at all.
He got into college, but he still doesn’t have any plans of his own, so he follows the same script as he always has, no matter that the set burned down, all the other actors quit, and the show was cancelled.
Somehow, he gets a pass on shutting up. He has regular visits with a counsellor, but he seems comfortable being the only one to talk, or sit completely in silence, and says he understands. It doesn’t appear to matter, as long as his coursework is delivered, complete and on time.
Siresa, one of his flatmates, a woman who claims to be studying a little bit of everything, says she’s determined to drag him out of his shell. Not him exclusively, part of her attention is focused on their merely shy Comp Sci third flatmate, Jasna, but she pays him more heed than he is used to.
She talks to him constantly, about her classes, about gossip, about her adorably grumpy baby brother. Anything else, he tunes out automatically, but the brother topic, he finds that he can’t.
It takes him weeks of staring at that pane of glass, half focused on the real world behind it, half on his own reflection, trying to make sense of either, before his mouth opens and he says the first words he’s said in years.
“I have a sister.”
Douno Cheung knows there’s something fundamentally wrong with him.
But it doesn’t seem to matter to his flatmate, who asks him an infinite number of questions he can’t answer about his sister he’s never known, who asks him even more questions he can’t answer about himself now that she knows he’s capable of speech, who drags him and their other flatmate to parties where they stand awkwardly in the corner, silently sipping the drinks she pushes into their hands.
It doesn’t seem to matter to his other flatmate either, who slowly, gradually unlatches from her computer setup to quietly and fondly gripe to him about Siresa’s forcefulness. And less fondly about her social anxiety.
“It’s not like an algorithm, there’s no absolute if/thens in interpersonal communication so it’s always a little unpredictable,” she groans weakly one morning, clearly not having slept all night.
Douno doesn’t quite understand, having never needed to be particularly good with computers, but he lets her get it out of her system.
“People always expect something, but they can’t make that clear because it’s rude, but if you don’t fulfil their conditions you’re the rude one, and you can’t bugtest or check error codes because there aren’t any error codes, just facial expressions, so it’s like trying to figure out which end bracket you’ve missed without being able to look at the log or, or your code at all.”
She reaches for a cup of coffee that must have long gone cold by her expression as she drinks it, but when she’s done, she gives him a small, tired smile.
“Sorry for rambling,” she mumbles. “I just, sometimes it feels like I’m the only one that doesn’t understand how to be human.”
Douno sits with his mouth open, restarting his sentence a few times because it feels like he’s still relearning how to use this part of the puppet that is himself.
“You’re -” real, he wants to say, “definitely human.” But for a moment, it looked like the woman in front of him and his reflection in the glass between them overlapped. “But I… think I understand.”
At twenty, he thinks he might finally understand Pinocchio.
He has his hand on the glass, looking at his flatmates, real humans full of life, and he thinks it might be nice to be one of them.
Even though he has no idea how he’s possibly supposed to achieve such a transformation, his thoughts must show in his actions somehow. One day, after a comfortably trailing silence following Siresa teasingly explaining that reorganising one’s drawers is not, in fact, a hobby, she fixes him with a stare that feels like it hits the untouchable version of him trapped behind the pane.
“Stop me if I made a mistake,” she says as she leans in.
The glass is never thinner than when she has her hands or mouth on him.
He learns other strategies, too. It doesn’t work as well if it isn’t the skin of her thigh or a plush lip, but running his fingers or tongue over something does help to ground him somewhat. She gifts him a strangely textured plastic heart on a necklace on his birthday. He never takes it off.
He doesn’t know if it’s something he’s capable of, but he thinks he might be in love.
It starts with a simple prank, one extra outfit ordered for a Halloween costume party Siresa’s making her flatmates go to.
“I didn’t expect you’d actually put it on,” she admits in an uncharacteristically small voice, as he leaves his room in the pastel princess dress she’d tossed at him.
He hadn’t thought about it, simply changed on autopilot, and didn’t realise what he’d changed into until he took a look in the mirror to find someone he barely recognized.
“I’m a little pissed, actually. Someone as fit as you shouldn’t be able to suit this kind of thing, too.”
He barely hears her through the rush of something indescribable in his head. The person he’d seen in the mirror hadn’t been Douno. She may have worn his face, but she was so far removed from the role he was slated to play, for her to follow his script was unthinkable. She had no script.
She could do anything.
The prospect was, and the idea surprises Douno, both scary and exciting. He’d flipped the channel and found himself playing a videogame all of a sudden. Overwhelmed, he follows his impulses, doing, for the first time, the first thing that pops into his head without thinking about it.
An hour later, with his face planted in Siresa’s pillows, sore from the waist down in all the best ways and the plastic dress rumpled beyond salvaging, he finds himself breaking into sobs for the first time in as long as he can remember, with no understanding of why.
Strangely, pulling on his own skin afterwards comes easier. When Siresa reveals the costume she’d actually intended for him - a mime - a chuckle escapes his throat unbidden. The glass is still there, but it’s a window rather than a television screen, and it’s open just a crack. Enough to be able to appreciate humour instead of merely intellectually understand something is funny.
It doesn’t last, and some days he’s still locked more firmly within himself than others, but it no longer feels like an insurmountable obstacle.
There might be something fundamentally wrong with Douno Cheung, but he‘s no longer alone.
“I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” he tells her on a good day.
She’s not easily taken aback, but this gets her, and she has to take a moment to compose herself, but she quickly fans the blush off her cheeks and grins. “On one condition. I’ll be the groom, you be the bride.”
He allows himself the thought that his father probably wouldn’t come even if he was invited.
“I have been told I look good in white lace.”
Other than Jasna and the brother Siresa left back in Finland, Douno actually isn’t sure who would show up.
“I’m so jealous you can say that with a straight face!”
She doesn’t talk about her parents either, and while she always has a party to go to, she’s never invited any of her other friends over to their flat.
“You’d use that power for evil.”
In the end, Douno decides it’s not worth thinking about. They have a graduation to worry about first, and then there’s plenty of time for planning after.
Siresa goes back to Finland with her journalism degree, just for a while, to make sure her brother is alright. He’s not worried about the spotty communication between them. Finland is a long way away.
It must be hard work, taking care of a sibling, he reasons. That’s why she often doesn’t answer the phone even when he has the time and money for a long distance call. It’s fine. He doesn’t like to talk over the phone anyway.
“The number you have dialled has not been recognized.”
Douno stares uncomprehending at the receiver in his hands. He tries again, making extra sure he pressed the right numbers, but the tinny robotic voice on the other hand repeats the same nonsense.
He expects to feel more upset, especially now that he’s more familiar with what feeling is actually like, but the glass pane is as thick as it ever was, and he thinks that, actually, this is how the show that constitutes his life would go. Pretending it wouldn’t only displays a shocking lack of pattern recognition.
His neck feels strangely light, strangely tight, like he’s being strangled by an absence, when he puts his necklace back in the box he’d received it and stores it away in the back of a drawer he never uses.
He chooses not to recognize Jasna’s surprise when she enters their still-shared living room to find him reorganising their bookshelf in a pink floral A-line dress, ignoring that he’s kept that aspect of his life between just him and Siresa for understandable reasons until now.
“I really don’t want to be Douno right now,” he eventually says, when he’s done organising the shelf by genre.
“Okay.”
Her unquestioned acceptance of this particular one of his quirks hangs in the air between them even as she treats him no different. He’s the first to admit that other people are like a different species to him, but he at least understands how they’re most likely to act, even if he can’t quite comprehend why.
The question slips somewhat more easily from his lips because he is not himself, though it’s still a halting, awkward blurt, like all his other off-script lines.
“Why do you accept this so easily?”
Jasna looks up from her takeaway curry, her eyes darting around his face for a second before rooting themselves to the grain on their dinner table. Her fingers tap a light staccato on the rim of her bowl.
“The answer to that is both complicated and simple, I think,” she says quietly. “For starters, if you think about it, sexual dimorphism in humans is relatively minor, even if you take intersex individuals out of the equation. Spiders, mantises, lions, ducks - practically all birds, really, all of them have much more pronounced differences compared to human beings stripped of societal influences like clothing and style. Now the anglerfish on the other hand, you could never mistake a male for a female.
“But even then, even when it does seem cut and dry, there are a lot of animals where, for one reason or another, those lines blur. Clownfish are among a few species of fish that will change sex depending on circumstance; there are species of bird that have a subset of what we’ve labelled as males that present as females and will mate with both; and then there’s bees, of course - and if we do consider the intersex individuals that have been found in the majority of species including humans -”
She has to take a deep breath. Her voice had been increasing both in volume and speed, as it usually does when she talks at length about a subject of her interest. As usual, her speech is full of assumptions of familiarity with the matter at hand, but Douno knows she just has to get through the muck so she can summarise her thoughts at the end.
“Basically, I think, seeing things in binary means you’re not really seeing the full picture, just a simplified representation,” she concludes.
“And that’s easier, I suppose, but it’s not accurate. So, you’re just a little more, um, nuanced, than I’d previously understood.” Her voice becomes more unsure, tapering off into a question towards the end of her last sentence, before levelling out again.
“That was the complicated part of the answer. Other than that, well… you’re my friend, and whatever helps you feel better, as long as it’s not hurting anyone, I want to support that.” She looks up at him, making as direct eye contact as either of them can manage. “I want to support you.”
Douno thinks he’ll never get used to crying. The pressure building in his head, the burning sensation in his eyes, the constriction in his throat, as if he were being choked from the inside, yet not enough to prevent wracked sobs escaping lungs that feel like they’re lined with thorns. His stomach, tight and tense, coiled like his muscles. It’s experiencing his entire body without the glass barrier he can’t otherwise break through. Deeply unpleasant, but undeniably present.
He doesn’t know how to feel about it.
Being held, though, feels… nice. Apparently that’s not just a quality Siresa had, though he refuses to think further on the matter as he twists his fingers into Jasna’s soft cardigan and presses his face in the crook of her shoulder, and keens as she strokes his hair with a fluttering hand.
“Don’t leave,” he whispers.
“I won’t.”
Even a fool doesn’t trip thrice on the same stone.
Still, he’ll take her soft edges against his frayed ones, and her warm embrace around him, for as long as he can get it.
When he’s calmed down, as far as everyone is concerned, she invites him to see her room.
“I feel like, I owe you some, ah, reciprocity, if you will?” she mumbles as she makes to open the door that’s remained closed for as long as they’ve known each other. “It’s not - I don’t think it should require quite as much courage, but, I think, I worry that you - not you specifically, general you - would think less of me, so, I choose to, well, trust you, like you trusted me with… you know.”
Jasna’s computer setup in their makeshift office corner is pristine. The desk houses her two monitors and one volume of folder storage alone, her keyboard, mouse and mousepad tucked onto the pull-out shelf below, and her PC tower in a shelf compartment to the side of where her rolling chair tucks in. Even her cable management is precise and contained. He’s only ever even seen a mug of coffee placed, delicately on a coaster, on top of the desk during an all-nighter.
Her room looks like a bomb went off in it.
Every surface is covered with paper. The majority is books: stacked books, loose books, hardcovers, softcovers, closed books, open books, books with all manner of bookmarks in them, books used as bookmarks for other books. Encyclopaedias, books on programming, books on biology, books in other languages, books with no title, self-help books, anthologies of research papers, science fiction novels. Some clearly in better states than others.
Some of the books are covered in sheets of printer paper, loose or stapled together, containing densely packed paragraphs of denser language, words with more syllables than he cares to count, or diagrams he thinks he might need a degree to comprehend, most of it annotated in a spidery scrawl he can’t decipher.
What isn’t covered in books or print-outs is covered in sticky notes, dirty laundry or food wrappers. Her bed is unmade and hasn’t been spared from the paper onslaught. There’s a small cactus in the windowsill.
She has another computer desk in the corner of the room facing the door, monitor lights casting shadows of energy drink cans on the walls behind it, walls plastered with a rainbow of sticky notes.
“I try to pull it together a bit more when I’m around people,” Jasna says quietly, “but, as you can see, I’m really a huge mess…”
“I don’t think any less of you,” Douno says, for lack of anything better.
“I’ve been told it’s creepy…”
For her to treat herself with so much less grace than him is baffling. “You’re a human being with nuance,” he reminds her.
She gives him a smile, wan and thin but oh so warm, that he thinks he remembers from a similar conversation some years ago.
“You’re always so nice.”
He doesn’t think he’s anything of the sort.
There is something fundamentally wrong with Douno Cheung, but at least he’s not alone.
Afterwards, it’s like some sort of barrier between them has vanished. He’d always thought they were both naturally disinclined to touch, but he thinks now he must have been wrong. She takes to putting a hand on his shoulder, or resting against his arm on the sofa, or giving him a hug before she leaves for work, and he finds himself leaning into the sensation, allowing himself to act on the impulse to lay his head on her lap so she can stroke his hair while they watch game shows on the telly after dinner.
More often than not now, he traces the stitching on the sleeve of her flannel pyjamas as she has her arm slung over his side in slumber. He doesn’t care to stop this indulgence when he’s ready to start being himself again.
He starts his training to be a military officer like his father in earnest and it’s, in a word, simple. He follows the script he was given, and he doesn’t have to think or feel, he just has to do what he’s supposed to. It’s easier than breathing.
When he comes home, he lets himself fall into Jasna’s arms while she tells him about her day, her work, her ambitions.
“I’d like to work at the same lab my parents work, one day.”
A prestigious, government-funded facility doing cutting-edge research behind a fortress of NDAs. Unfamiliar with that world beyond what his father had dragged him to as a child, Douno once naively asked her if this was the same place his father, now honourably discharged, worked security at. To both their surprise, she’d confirmed it was.
“Why?”
A small huff escapes her lips and tickles the crown of his head. An involuntary action he can’t discern the meaning of.
“The things they’re working on - whatever they’re allowed to say about it - sound amazing. Challenging, frustrating, but world-changing, and rewarding. I’m so curious, about all of it.” She pauses for a second, a breath stopped in her throat, before carrying on. “And, I… I want to spend more time with them, if I can.”
It’s a sentiment as alien to him as most of the analogies that come out of her mouth, but he accepts that it makes sense to her. Since she’s willing to support him despite her lack of understanding, he won’t let something like that get in his way either.
“Then I’m sure you’ll make that happen.”
She breathes a warm thank you into his hair.
Douno gets stationed halfway across the country on assignment for some months, during which he feels his personhood slowly bleed out of him. When he realises for the fifth time in a day that he’s reached for his throat only to be met with a starched collar instead of whatever his subconscious was expecting to find, he makes the decision to do something about it. By the end of his next day off, he has a pair of freshly engraved (actual) dog tags around his neck, stainless steel rectangles to distinguish them from the circular ID tags he’ll be given on active duty - and also because the resistance his fingers meet on the corners just feels nicer.
When he returns, his first order of business is changing into a pastel T-shirt with ribbons on the sleeves and the pink shorts with the word “aegyo” on the butt that Siresa never explained to him. His second order of business is dropping face-first onto the sofa.
He’s moved onto his third order of business, spooning dry cereal into his mouth while watching daytime dramas, when Jasna emerges from her room like a wraith, shambling into the room in a faded maths-pun-print T-shirt and leggings, her hair in a messy bun on her head, stringy flyaways scattered around her face. She reaches for her glasses, atop her head first, then where they actually sit on her nose, and merely adjusts them when she seems to realise she doesn’t need to put them on.
“It’s Thursday already?”
She usually puts on more of a composed front, even after an all-nighter, so Douno assumes she’s let some of her pretence drop in his absence.
“You should sleep,” he says, and he gets up to herd her back to her room.
“With you?”
“Sure.”
She watches him with a strange expression dulled and drained of meaning by lack of sleep as he manoeuvres her into bed and climbs in himself. Before he can settle down on his side in their usual arrangement, she drags herself half over his chest and collapses into the sleep she’s staved off too long.
It turns out she’d lost track of time because she’d made an - in her eyes - exciting breakthrough in a project she’d been working on since before he’d left that he’ll probably never understand, but that her superiors were apparently very interested in. Something about neuroprogramming live tissue, he thinks.
She ropes him into helping her with it in his free time, help which mostly consists of sitting silently in the same room while she talks technical terms at him for a while before abruptly reaching for her keyboard with a breathy exclamation of, “of course, it’s so obvious!” or bringing her a non-energy drink every so often whilst she’s in the midst of typing.
Eventually she manages to finish whatever it is she was doing, and some weeks later, she informs him with glassy eyes and a blush high on her cheeks, that her mother said she was so proud and all but shoved Jasna’s paper in her own superiors’ faces to get them to read it.
He’s glad for her. Really.
He tells her. “You deserve it.”
But he thinks he’s spent so long pressed up against the glass, too long indulged in the fantasy, that he’s beginning to feel - something, about having been treated as the marionette he is.
It’s not the time.
He celebrates Jasna’s accomplishment with her and lets his nebulous internal reaction fade into the static at the back of his mind.
Maybe it never has to be the time.
Letters come, Jasna has an interview, they talk about what ifs.
She crushes his fingers in her hands as she sits ramrod straight through a phone call. After she hangs up, she collapses in on herself immediately, as if all the bones in her body abruptly turned to mush. Fortunately, as Douno isn’t sure what he’d do if his fingers fell off.
“They… want me,” Jasna whispers breathlessly, like she can’t believe it. “They want me.” Like she’s blind to the clear fact of her own genius.
“Anyone would.”
One moment she’s looking at him, something strange in her eyes like she’s trying to figure him out, the next he’s on his back, one of her hands in his hair, the other cradling his jaw as she kisses him. Despite the initial surprise, it’s a strangely natural progression of their relationship, and his hands find their way almost instinctively to the nape of her neck, the curve of her hip.
When she pulls back, it’s slowly at first, then all at once.
“I’m so sorry! I don’t know what - I should have -”
He quiets her with a gentle squeeze of her thigh, and a small shake of his head. She still has her mouth open, and her eyes are still wide and twitching all over the room to avoid looking at him, but at least she’s not tripping over her words anymore.
“It’s fine,” he says. “I don’t mind.”
She still looks just about ready to bolt. He strokes smooth, soothing lines over the folds of her skirt, as much for himself as for her. Don’t leave, his fingertips write on the barrier between their skin. Stay.
He’s not quite sure why he says it exactly, “I just… don’t want to fall in love again.”
The furrow in her brow softens from fear to a sympathetic pity for him that he sees more often than he thinks is warranted, and she lays herself down on his chest.
“I understand.”
He strokes her hair, hoping it gives her the same comfort it gives him. Thinks with some level of disappointment that the both of them will probably retreat into themselves after this spot of awkwardness. Remembers something he’s forgotten.
“Congratulations,” he says abruptly. “On the job.”
Her chuckle tickles against his throat. “You’re such a dork.”
Maybe all women are eternally surprising, infinitely faceted jewels. Douno wouldn’t know, since, before Siresa strong-armed her way into his life, he didn’t know any at any but the most distant level of intimacy. Both of the women he knows have complained about how little a small sample size counts for when it comes to drawing broad-sweeping conclusions, though, so maybe the whole thought is pointless.
Regardless, when Jasna is the one to suggest a friends with benefits arrangement, Douno is surprised.
In his eyes, she comports herself as a sexual conservative. Through her style of dress: no form-fitting or revealing clothes - even through the perpetual summer, she rarely loses her cardigan anywhere other than the sanctuary of her own room. Through her style of speech: no swearing or crassness - Douno doesn’t think he’s ever even heard her make an innuendo. Through her relationship history: as far as he knows, she has none.
So he says, “I didn’t think you were the type.”
He doesn’t know if he’s the type. Times like these, he thinks he doesn’t know anything about anyone at all.
“As long as all parties involved are aware and content, I don’t think any kind of relationship should be an issue,” Jasna mumbles. From the way she says it, he gets the feeling it’s not the first time she’s said as much. “Have I ever told you about my parents?”
“They’re not really together,” Jasna starts. Douno thinks he understands, until she continues. “Mum just really wanted to have me, so Dad helped her. They’re… essentially just best friends, who are married and have a child together. When Dad said he fell in love with someone at work a few years ago, Mum encouraged him to do something about it. Mum herself doesn’t want a relationship at all; says the one she has with her work is enough.”
It’s not a kind of relationship Douno has any familiarity with, or so he thinks at first. But if he turns the explanation over in his head, strips all the communication and care from it and replaces it with a sense of obligation and tradition, he can see a crude reflection of the family he himself was born in.
His parents were only ever together to have their caricature puppet show. If they ever loved each other at all, that flame snuffed out well before his first memory. He knows his mother is intelligent. If she hasn’t confronted her husband’s infidelity, she’s quietly condoning it. Maybe even welcomes it.
They’d both probably been happier if they’d never had him at all.
“So, since I grew up with a different idea of what a happy family and a good relationship looks like than most, I guess I don’t really feel like a traditional relationship is the most important thing?” Jasna continues. “Definitely not the only acceptable thing. I’ve been with girls I didn’t see a future with before.”
“Huh.”
“I know how I come across, but I’m just private, not prude.” She’s started rambling in what might be embarrassment or conviction, or some sort of blend of the two. “If, for example, I had a somewhat inebriated one-night-stand with my attractive and charismatic flatmate, that’s between me and her and no one else. If everyone’s happy, it’s nobody’s business if it’s typical or not.”
Douno is reeling. He’s reaching his limit on revelations.
“And, maybe the boat has sailed on keeping feelings out of it entirely, since I’ve had a crush on you for years now, but I can understand and respect boundaries.”
“Alright.”
He doesn’t want to think or realise or understand any more.
“Let’s do it.”
It… works out well in the end, Douno thinks. Like it’s nothing more than the next step their friendship takes. They come together with a comfortable ease and return to their individual lives just as smoothly. They don’t go on dates - Blockbuster and chill doesn’t count, they’ve watched movies with Douno’s head in Jasna’s lap for months at this point - and the core shape of their relationship feels unchanged.
Jasna seems to truly not mind, despite her confession. He trusts her and her trust in him enough at this point to speak her mind, even if it’s him, even if it’s about them, but even the small signs of disappointment or displeasure never appear. She treats him as she’s always done.
She comes to the end of her contract and he’s assigned to a base on the coast near Salisbury, so they end the lease on the flat that’s been their home since college. There’s an apartment complex in Corsham for lab employees that has a space reserved for Jasna, and when she saves the address under her contact in his phone, it’s close to where he sends the barebones birthday cards to his father.
“I’ll call.”
Jasna hates phone calls.
She calls.
Like clockwork, every evening at half six, her name shines up from his phone screen. Their conversations are usually short, simple catch-ups on the day. Her work is challenging but exciting; she’s making connections with other techs; she watched a fun movie the other day. He’s doing a lot of paperwork, but there’s something soothing about it; he got a commendation from a superior officer; a woman let him pet her cute dog earlier. It’s the highlight of his day.
Getting swept up in the comfortable routine of days is easy. Weeks, months pass with what feels like very little conscious effort, not that Douno has ever had much of a grasp on the passage of days. Time flows around him, people move and age and develop in the world on the other side of the screen, while his viewing chamber remains static.
He’s promoted to second lieutenant, his responsibilities increase, he remains detached from it all. Life feels like a montage.
“I met the woman my dad fell in love with,” Jasna says over the phone one day, her voice unexpectedly small. “I don’t know. She’s not what I expected. Maybe she just made a bad first impression, I shouldn’t…”
She quickly changes the subject, and Douno understands it’s something she doesn’t want to discuss further until she has a better idea of what she’s dealing with. The conversation returns to its usual lighthearted tone, and the topic is not revisited.
The montage continues.
He’s not sure when he realises Jasna is distracted, her mind somewhere else during their calls. He only knows that when, on a visit to her, he wakes up to an empty bed and pallid light and Polish mumbling coming from her computer station, his immediate thought is, “ah, so that’s why.”
They remain in daily contact, but something within that contact makes the barrier between them thicker and more cloudy with every day that passes.
“I got a promotion,” she says one day, her voice muffled and toneless behind a wall of fog.
“You don’t sound happy.”
“It’s the position I wanted; that I’m - uniquely qualified for.” Her voice hitches on the word, burdened with so much meaning and emotion Douno couldn’t hope to find himself capable of understanding. “I should be happy.”
She takes a deep, moist breath that crackles over the phone connection.
“There’s no way I could be happy about replacing my mother.”
That is something Douno can understand, though he assumes not for the same reasons. But he still feels like he’s missing half the story.
“Why are you replacing her?”
“She was transferred to a different department,” Jasna says, in the cold, matter-of-fact tone that really means: “that’s classified.”
“I see.”
He’s not going to get answers, then.
It’s something he understands and accepts; that people keep secrets. It’s usually for the best.
But Jasna feels like she’s slipping out of his reach, and he has no idea what he can do to hold on.
“I hope things go well.” He makes a clumsy attempt. “I’m always available if you need to talk.”
“Thanks. I know. I appreciate it. If it’s ok, though, I have… a lot of documentation to go over…”
Douno can recognize an escape attempt when he sees one.
“Of course. I need to go over my schedule anyway.”
He lets her go.
It’s a good thing he decided all that time ago not to get attached.
It means he can still function as himself, remain appropriately normal around his colleagues, while he processes the change in the situation. No need to bother anyone.
It means he doesn’t have to be surprised the first time she misses a call.
Life goes on, and Douno plays the role he’s been cast as well as he ever does. His detached, analytical mind appears to serve him well in training scenarios, as he finds he doesn’t lose his cool where some of his peers do when it comes to making difficult decisions under pressure. It’s easy to make the small sacrifice for the big gain when you have no attachment to what you’ll lose.
Some of the other soldiers have words to say, of course, but it’s nothing Douno hasn’t heard before. His projected success rates are still at the top of the chart.
A promotion is in sight, and he’ll soon be stationed elsewhere.
“I’ve been thinking about an old short story I read a long time ago,” Jasna says as soon as the line goes live. “Of a fantastical city in which everything is perfect and wonderful and everyone is happy, at the cost of the wellbeing of one single child.
It’s meant to make you think. Is all that splendour really worth sacrificing a child for?”
Philosophy has never particularly agreed with Douno.
So, “pragmatically speaking, yes,” he says.
It’s an obvious answer. An entire city in which every single person but the one is happy and well? That would be a utopia.
“...Yeah, I kind of thought you’d say that.” She sighs. “Of course, that’s taking the story told of the city at face value. That things truly are that good, and that there truly is only one child suffering. That this truly is the best possible option, and that there is no option in which the child does not have to suffer for the city to thrive as it does. That it is better for one person to suffer miserably and everyone else to be jubilantly happy, than for everyone to have a moderately good time. That this is as good as it gets.”
“A city in which only one person suffers is a lot better than what we have right now.”
“...It’s a metaphor, Dodo. And again, that’s if the thing about only one person suffering is even true in the first place. And what if you had to make that child suffer at your own hands?”
Douno thinks it’s far more likely for him to be the sacrificial child than the one to sacrifice it.
“If those were my orders. I don’t presume to know best.”
Jasna goes quiet for a bit. Douno knows she’s disappointed in his answers; that saying he opposes all suffering would make him sound like a better person, but Jasna has already seen him at his most disgraceful.
“...I thought I had a strong moral code, you know?” Her voice in his ear sounds far away. “In the story itself, the narrator told of those who walked away. Unable to stomach the one person who suffered. Looking for something even more unbelievable.
“I always thought I’d be one of those people…”
Douno swallows the questions he has. She can’t answer, and it’s better if he doesn’t put her in the position to lie anyway.
“But it’s always so much more complicated than it seems. What if a child is going to suffer anyway, and if you choose to be the one to make them, you can make them suffer less? What if that one child is all that stands between us and total global destruction?
“But does a world whose continued existence hinges on the suffering of children really deserve to exist?”
She sounds defeated as she asks that, no longer rhetorical but genuinely asking him for an answer he’s in no position to give.
“It’s philosophy because there are no clear right or wrong answers, isn’t it?”
And it’s because of this that it’s practically torture.
Jasna chuckles weak and humorlessly. “Yeah, I’m starting to get your dislike for it. Sorry for all of that.”
“I’ll always hear you out.”
For a while after the line goes dead, Douno stares at the phone in his hands. The higher ups agree to his request for his next placement.
There’s something fundamentally, unfixably wrong with Douno Cheung, that’s the only explanation.
What he's doing, where he's going, will end with nothing good. Maybe this is why he's always followed his script so faithfully - when he improvises, he makes decisions even he can tell are bad.
Wiltshire is quiet. Everywhere is quieter now than before the impact, but Douno has previously been stationed near hubs of some civilization; cities the military would want to defend. Wiltshire is empty.
Its only inhabitants are staff and those few unable or unwilling to move away, for one reason or another.
An older woman gives Douno a dirty look when he steps off the train platform after she sees his fatigues under his jacket. He catches only some of the vaguely discriminatory remarks she makes to her partner beside her, but enough to understand she believes they're making a weapon here.
She's right.
After a litany of NDAs, the force Douno is assigned to command is finally revealed to him. Two hulking machines, each easily as tall as a building, submerged in an alien fluid, deep in the bowels of the emergency shelter underneath Corsham.
His own father speaks of their combat potential with greater pride than Douno has ever heard him before. More powerful than a nuclear bomb and more precise than a tactical missile, in the hands of a competent pilot. The combat test data seems to support this, at least in theory, since these machines, Evangelions, have never been used in the field.
Ezra Douglas claims these weapons will be our only defence against the extraterrestrial threats that decimated humanity in the second impact. She invested every penny her Nerv made with its revolutionary power source into these things and forced cooperation with the UN to set up bases the world over.
There has been resistance to her goals, his father tells him with a scowl of disapproval, to the point where they've only managed to place an Evangelion and pilot in one other location thus far, off a connection with one of Nerv's founders, but when the first attack comes, the other countries will change their tune.
There is something hauntingly familiar about the sky blue metal mask that makes up the head of the humanoid machine. It gives him shivers.
The blue Evangelion, unit 01, doesn't have a pilot, he learns. The one pilot they have, one Kane Christobal, pilots the black and red prototype unit 00 instead. Something about compatibility. Some amount of bureaucratic red tape prevents him from meeting with the man to assess his capabilities and personality, so Douno requests reports in the meantime.
It's Jasna who delivers them, and in her shock at seeing him she nearly drops the folder.
"What are you doing here?"
It's a question that gives him pause. There are a few answers he could give. "Misery shared is misery halved" if he wanted to be trite. "I missed you" if he wanted to be sentimental. "I had to know what made you so upset" if he wanted to be uncomfortably honest.
He settles on, "I was reassigned."
She stares at him in silence for a few seconds, then sighs.
"...It's good to see you again."
The first thing Douno notices is that much of Christobal's file is redacted. His background and previous experience are illegible, and all Douno can glean about his character is that he follows orders well. The second thing is that the evaluation of his practice with the Evangelion is full of acronyms and numbers that are completely unfamiliar.
The third thing he notices is that Kane Christobal is fourteen years old.
"This is not a typo." He knows better than that.
"A special exception given the unknown threat, since adults aren't compatible, only those born after the impact. They…" Jasna swallows the rest of her words with a frown. "He's not supposed to see actual combat, just training, but… if… another one of those things comes down, and conventional weaponry is as effective as last time…"
She trails off with mild reluctance. Douno finds the energy of some suppressed emotion thrumming underneath her expression. Her disapproval is plain as the bags under her eyes, but it doesn't complete the picture.
Douno taps the key card on his lanyard, proudly emblazoned with Nerv's signature maple leaf.
"Security clearance level 4. If there's more you want to say, you can."
Jasna takes the file from his hands and flips to the charts. She circles a few with a finger.
"These are some of the vitals from synchronisation tests." She launches into an explanation that as usual, for the most part, goes completely over his head. He understands the important parts, though. "The synchronisation process places an immense amount of stress on the participant, both mentally and physically, even when it goes well. It's too much to put on a child."
When she returns the file, Christobal's headshot stares back at him. A serious, guarded expression on a face still round with baby fat.
"It's not that I don't understand what's at stake, but it looks… I don't know if I could keep coming back to that…"
"He is here voluntarily?"
"According to all the info I have. I can't say I don't have my doubts, but… I think it probably wouldn't matter, anyway." Jasna gives the photograph a thin smile. "He reminds me a bit of you."
Douno acclimates to life at Nerv HQ. He learns to move with the rhythm of the place, the people, and the undeniable gravity of Commander Ezra Douglas, whose orbit every single employee is caught in, whether she's present or not. Without ever seeing her, the whole base revolves around her movements.
Since his father appears glued to her side these days, Douno doesn't see much of him either.
The first time Jasna drags him into her office to de-stress, he's caught by surprise. By the third, he's worked it in as part of his routine, and with Jasna in charge of the computer system, he's sure they won't get in trouble.
He's a little concerned about the amount of empty energy drinks on the floor, more when she refuses to leave the office for days at a time, but figures he has no room to speak when sometimes he has to bite down on his dog tag until his teeth hurt and the metal is the only thing he can taste.
When he finally gets to watch a training session, Christobal is not the only noteworthy figure there. Overlooking the training room from the window, given a wide berth by almost every other observer, is Nerv’s very own sun. Douglas hasn’t changed much since he last saw her: the lines in her face are only slightly deeper, and she’s swapped her lab coat for a suit jacket, but the dominating energy she now commands is worlds apart. His own father stands like a shadow at her side, the scars dominating half his body proof enough he doesn’t mind burning to bathe in her light.
Christobal is a quiet boy, polite and obedient. He responds only when spoken to, and never says more than he needs to. He follows orders expediently and without question. He greets Douno with a “nice to meet you” and “I look forward to working with you” that feel rehearsed and empty.
Douno has never suffered mirrors well.
His attempts at communicating with the boy are even more stiff and awkward than usual, and he’s not surprised when the two of them avoid each other more than not.
The boy is emancipated, Douno learns, asking after his parents. Idle curiosity, and an inability to deny that the fact he himself is the way he is has a lot to do with how he was raised. Christobal has his own apartment in the complex, not too far away from Jasna and himself, and hasn’t been assigned a guardian.
But it’s clear he, too, is caught in Douglas’ orbit. He performs better when she watches, in conversation with her he actually engages, and his eyes seek her out where she goes. More surprising is that she reciprocates, in however small an amount. She can, sometimes, almost pass for a parent.
The sensors, more and more, pick up on a signal that should not exist. An advance warning, Douglas insists, and decides to bring in a second pilot.
Using justifications of biometric compatibility data and ease of access, the child chosen is her own daughter. Initially, the plan is to accommodate Stella Douglas the same as Christobal, with an apartment of her own, but Douno finds himself offering to take care of her instead. Despite her reported independence, she’s still a minor with no experience living on her own, and he can help ease the transition from civilian life, or so he rationalises to his superiors.
Christobal is frustratingly out of reach, and he may be a decade too late, but he should at least try to be a good older brother now, if he has the chance.
And then a routine training exercise goes horribly wrong.
Christobal’s synchronisation rates fluctuate out of control, his vitals are all over the place, and all of the chaos is causing the system to go berserk. Even though the dummy Eva being controlled is literally disarmed to the point of harmlessness, this extends only to those on the outside of it. Inside, Christobal is screaming.
His brain is overloaded through the mental link, his neurons fire haphazardly, causing his limbs to seize up or shudder in a way that looks like it might tear his body apart, and the temperature control fails to the point where the fluid he’s suspended in threatens to boil him alive.
The security failsafe ejects the control pod before a real Evangelion could start a rampage, but the boy is still stuck inside. The hatch won’t automatically unlock until the temperature is stable, but every single person in the observation room knows that by that point, it’ll be too late.
It’s Douglas who rushes out to the pod before anyone else can react.
Douno watches in a stunned haze as she grabs for whatever’s nearest and prises the hatch open with that same quiet, intense determination she does everything else. The equivalent of hacking into an active pressure cooker leaves its marks on her, but she presses on with no less fervour, until the hatch opens and the boy at long last spills out onto the floor.
They’re both taken to the medical ward, and Douno is the one to seek Jasna out for a palate cleanser.
There’s something fundamentally wrong with the world. It’s not just Douno, or maybe it’s everything around him, but things go from bad to worse.
The code blue alarm sounds sooner than expected.
Conventional weaponry barely scratches the creature it heralds.
Christobal is nowhere near cleared for combat yet.
There’s still some time between when the angel is slated to reach HQ, at least, and Stella Douglas is on the train to Wiltshire.
Douno leaves to meet her.