Festive
Qia
Rekkuza
NoriWasHere
Mixtape Ghost N
Estylwen
webboysurf
Marx
Lord Wraith
FernStone____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Location: Turning Winds Home for Youth - Joliet, Illinois
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Human #5.088: Carrying a Piece of You
Anabel’s jaw had tensed while she listened to Alex speak.
Her mind was waging war with her heart as the wind carried his words away. Trust was rarely given in their world. Anabel herself knew the beauty and danger of it. She’d been burned before, evident in the way she carried herself in the halls of the home and made little to no effort to interact with the other teens. Perhaps it was the understanding between them, the way they had been able to read each other easily from the start, that made it possible for Anabel to speak to him. She understood him through her history, with the kind heart that had fought for another and was then trampled when it had been left behind, and he understood her with his ability. While she may not know the truth of what he was able to discern in her presence, and would likely shut him out if she did, it was obvious that they were connected through it. What she seemed to struggle with now was whether she wanted to open herself further to him, as just Anabel and Alexander, and without any other influence to coerce her.
Despite her reservations, she pressed onwards.
“The girl that escaped years ago… She was like a sister to me. Younger, but wiser in different ways. She struggled with her… ability. It made her feel alone. I couldn’t be there for her when she really needed me.” She took a breath, her eyes peering out into the city like she might catch a glimpse of that friend among the lights. Her body language remained rigid and aloof, and yet her words were revealing a side to Anabel that Alex had never seen before. “I wonder… if I could have helped her with an ability like you have.”
“Maybe.” The word barely left his lips. Hushed. Noncommittal. Alex wasn’t in the business of giving people false hope. Hope was a dangerous thing—something fragile that shattered too easily in the wrong hands.
But then his fingers twitched against his knee, restless, his mind chewing on the thought, turning it over like a stone in his palm.
“Or maybe it’s not about what you could have done,” he continued. “Maybe it’s just that some people are gonna slip through no matter what. No matter how much you care. No matter how hard you fight for them.”
He let out a short breath, half a laugh, but without humour. “But if you had an ability like mine? I dunno, Anabel. Maybe you’d have saved her. Or maybe you’d just know exactly how much she was slipping before it happened. And maybe that would have been worse for you.”
Because knowing what was coming didn’t mean you could stop it. It just meant you had to live with it longer.
“But if she was like a sister to you, then I’m guessing you did more for her than you think.” A pause, then, almost to himself, “People don’t always get saved. But they do get remembered.”
His gaze found hers again, searching. “Maybe that’s why you’re still here.”
Alex’s fingers curled against his knee again, that same aimless restlessness, like his hands should have been holding onto something that was no longer there. The cigarette the other had tossed away, perhaps. Or something older, something lost before he even knew to grip it. His mind, too, wandered, gnawing on the gaps in her words, on the pieces she hadn’t given voice to. Something about it stuck to him, and before he could convince himself to leave it alone, the words had already slipped free.
“You never talk about what you can do.” It wasn’t an accusation, just an observation, laid bare between them. “That girl you lost… you said she struggled with hers.” He hesitated, then asked the question carefully, aware that he was treading on ground he might not be invited to walk.
“What about you?”
Anabel’s brow rose just a fraction in response. A moment of doubt flickered in those green eyes, a shadow of the guarded nature she used to protect herself from those kinds of questions. It almost seemed like she would brush him off, or that she would shut him out again to keep her secrets safe once more. Yet she answered him, her words chosen carefully, as if he couldn’t see the flickers of memories attached to her awakening and the consequences of it.
“It’s not mental, like yours. It’s… passive, in a way, but I need to focus to use it.” Her eyes shifted between his, as if searching for his motivation behind the question. “If I push too far, I could also do something I’d regret.” A hint of a smile played on her lips. “There’s a reason I was transferred here, after all.”
For a fleeting second, that small smile caught him off guard.
Not a smirk, not a sneer—nothing laced with sarcasm or built as a wall. It was something real, stripped of pretense, and that made it stick. He didn’t know why. Didn’t know what it was about that moment that felt like the first thing in this whole damn place that wasn’t performative. But it did. And something about that truth, small as it was, unsettled him.
And before he could stop himself, Alex reached.
Not physically. Not with intent. But with that automatic pull—an instinct woven into the places where his ability lived like a second heartbeat. His ability moved the way breathing did. He didn’t mean to touch anything, didn’t mean to reach beneath what was visible. But the whisper of awareness extended outward before he could rein it in. A pulse. A brush against something he shouldn’t have touched.
And then—
It hit him back.
Not with force. Not with rejection. But with weight.
Like knocking against something that didn’t just resist—it outright refused.
It wasn’t a barrier, wasn’t a wall meant to keep people out. It was something deeper than that, something intrinsic. It was pressing his palm to the trunk of an ancient tree and feeling, in his gut, that no matter how hard he pushed, it would never be moved. Not because it fought him, but because it was simply rooted too deep to be swayed.
His breath snagged. His mind recoiled, snapping back like burnt fingers yanked from a flame. His grasp curled into nothing, nails faintly digging into his knee before he realized he’d clenched his hand at all.
That had never happened before.
For a moment, all he could hear was the low hum of the city, the distant wail of sirens somewhere in the streets below, the rush of wind clawing at the rooftop. His grip loosened—had he even realized he was holding on to something? To what?
Slowly, he ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek, flexed his fingers, and let out a half-breathed chuckle—casual, but off.
“Huh.”
That was all he said. All he could say. But it was enough. Enough for the unease to coil beneath his skin, slip into his bones, and settle there.
He forced his shoulders to relax. To let go.
But something had changed.
It wasn’t just in the moment—it was in the way his mind kept circling back in search of an explanation that wasn’t there. Instinct told him to brush it off, to shove it somewhere deep where it couldn’t touch him. But instinct also told him something had moved beneath his feet, even if he couldn’t yet name what.
Because for the first time, he had been on the other side.
For the first time, something had made him feel small.
Not powerless, not weak—but insignificant in the way that a wave is insignificant to the shore. A force colliding with something vaster, something immovable, something that did not need to fight back because it did not need to move at all.
His hand dragged through his hair, fingers lingering at the nape of his neck as if they could loosen the knot of tension winding through him. He exhaled slowly, piece by piece unwinding himself. He wouldn’t ask. Wouldn’t pry. Wouldn’t try to untangle whatever the hell had just happened.
Some things weren’t meant to be picked apart.
This felt like one of them.
Finally, after a long moment, his voice slipped out—shaky in ways that only he would notice.
“That sounds… rough.” A breath, a humourless chuckle, something weightless enough to pass as normal. “But at least that means you’ll never have to worry about something giving, I guess.” His fingers flexed again as if testing a grip that wasn’t there. “It’s all in your hands.”
Unlike it was for him.
“Everything comes at some sort of cost,” Anabel murmured, her smile having faded quickly. Her eyes lingered on his hands. Ever observant, even if she didn’t understand the meaning behind their movements. “Control didn’t come easily.”
Alex ran his fingers along the seam of his hoodie. No shit it didn’t.
“Yeah, I get that.” His voice was even, but there was something in the way he said it—like he wasn’t just agreeing, but understanding.
“When my ability first kicked in, it felt like I had to be on top of it every second, or else it’d run me instead of the other way around. ” His thumb pressed against the stitching, the smallest pressure. “Took me too long to realize that half the time, I was just making it worse.”
He shrugged like it was nothing. Like it was just something that happened.
“Anyway, still figuring that one out. But if you ever wanna compare notes….”
A corner of Anabel’s lips tugged upwards, but she neither acknowledged his proposal nor accepted it. Instead, she offered another piece of wisdom, another part of her history lost to the system they had been placed in.
“My friend’s ability came around before mine. Hers was physical, something outward instead of inward. It grew like it had always been a part of her, like it was just under the surface her whole life.” Those green eyes of hers were glossed over now as she looked forward. Lost to bittersweet memories. “She tried to control it, too. Kept it hidden until she ran out of ways to hide it.”
“Eventually she lost control of it, but… It freed her, in a way. She coexisted with them.”
Glimmers of the small and wary girl from Anabel’s memories sparkled at the edges of her mind, except this time Alex saw a glimpse of a different version of that girl. Her skin was unmarked by cruelty, hazel eyes shined with admiration, and a shy smile danced on her lips. Anabel’s younger hands were there, turning the girl, gently smoothing sleep-tousled golden brown hair back from her face before travelling downwards to do the same to adolescent tawny feathers. Faint giggles could be heard before Anabel’s voice broke the silence that had fallen while her mind wandered.
“Maybe you could learn a lesson from her,” she said before taking a breath. “Or maybe she was just one of the lucky ones, and the rest of us will be grasping for control our whole lives.”
Anabel stood straighter now and tucked her hair behind her ear, mentally brushing the nostalgia away as the bitter overcame the sweet. “She left before I could decide.”
Alex’s hazel eyes lingered on her, studying the way her words oscillated between wistful reminiscence and something tangled in the fibres of the past, left unresolved. They seemed to reveal the kind of burden people carried without realizing how deeply it had woven itself into their being. He recognized it—not in the specifics, but in the way it clung to her, refusing to be shaken loose.
“Guess she simply made her choice before you could,” he eventually murmured, his voice edged with something close to understanding but not quite sympathy. “Not much you can do about that.”
The boy tipped his head back slightly, gaze tracing the vast stretch of sky that had long since devoured its stars. “I really do think now that some people are just born knowing when to run. The rest of us…we hesitate. We hold on. Even when we shouldn’t.” A pause, thoughtful, before he added almost absently, “Maybe that’s why some walls, even if they’re more like doors really, just…stay closed. Maybe…that’s the true difference maker here and the reason why you’re still here.” And her friend, whom she still clearly cared for, was not.
The thought uncoiled deep in his gut, something that didn’t sit right but didn’t yet have a name either.
What happened when someone buried a part of themselves so deeply that even they couldn’t reach it? When a wall wasn’t built to guard against intrusion but to entomb something that was never meant to be let out?
And if—by chance, by force, by fate—someone came along who could pry it open…
Would they be ready for what was waiting on the other side? Would opening something that’s been potentially shut for so long even be a good thing?
Alex hummed.
It was just a thought. Just a question. Nothing to do with him.
And yet, he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that one day, it might. That one day, he wouldn’t have the luxury of another one of his maybe’s.
“I only hesitated once,” Anabel began with a frown. “I wanted to run when she did. Thought that maybe I could find her before she went too far.”
“Then I realized that I would have tethered her to the earth if I did. I knew that on her own, she had a freedom that most others don’t.” Anabel smiled wistfully. “There’s nothing out there for me, really. Not unless a place that teaches us, accepts us exists. I’ve stayed because I know how to survive here. It may not be a home, but it’s comfortable. If they decide to send us on our way at eighteen, I’ll figure life out then.”
“So what happens when eighteen rolls around and comfort’s not an option anymore?” Alex asked. “You wake up one day, and suddenly there’s no ‘here’ left to stay in. No safety net, no familiar walls. Just… choices.”
He let that hang for a beat, watching her out of the corner of his eye.
“Where do you go then? Do you pick the place that promises you a future? Somewhere that looks at what you can do and says, ‘Hey, we’ll make something out of you’? Or do you pick the place that lets you disappear?”
Anabel turned her body to fully face him. Her arms rose to cross in front of her, a sign that her brief moment of veritas would soon come to an end. The questions, while they weren’t wrong in any case, seemed to have become a bit too uncomfortable for the ink-haired girl.
“What if I don’t want anyone to make something out of me? What if I want to choose my own path?” Her tone was flat, not accusatory or abrasive, but near hypothetical. “The system has watched us our whole lives. Disappearing doesn’t sound so bad.”
Alex watched her intently, picking up on the minute shifts and microexpressions most people wouldn’t notice. Her posture, loose just moments ago, had begun to stiffen. The openness she had let slip through the cracks was already retreating, pulling back into something more fortified.
He was almost out of time then. Shame.
With an exhale, he shifted his weight, pushing off from his perch. His sneakers met the rooftop with a muted scuff. He stretched his legs, testing the stiffness that had crept into his joints from sitting too long, then raked a hand through his hair, tousling it further—not out of any particular thought, just another idle habit, something to keep his hands from betraying anything else.
Then, without hurry, he cast one last glance toward her.
“Take it from someone who barely exists…disappearing’s not the same as being free, and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. You can go where no one’s watching, sure. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you stop being what they made you.”
And it sure as hell didn’t mean you get to be who you were supposed to be.
He didn’t push it, however. Some truths didn’t need force—they only needed to be spoken aloud or seen for themselves.
And whether she let them in or shut them out, that wasn’t his call to make. It never had been.
If his words made any contact with the immovable barrier within Anabel's mind, Alex couldn't tell. Anabel's defenses were raised once more, there to protect her from questioning herself or even raised purely out of stubborn pride. She offered him a single nod, to acknowledge his words, to respect what he'd said, and yet she turned to face the city once more. No goodnight, no final quip to be made. She leaned back against the wall, her silhouette outlined by the lights. Alone in her thoughts once more.
Little did he know, what he said would soften that immovable wall within her over time.
The single wave of his influence continued to dance against her mind, eroding the barrier she kept herself hidden behind, and eventually reshaped the shoreline into something new.
Only for it to be washed away completely shortly after her eighteenth birthday. By the place she believed would allow her to build a foundation for her future.
