Ethan Kane sat at the back of a physics classroom in Gotham City Academy, his pencil scraping across a notepad whose pages had curled at the edges from being shoved in and out of his bag.
The room smelled of chalk and the sweat of too many bodies in too little space.
Ms.
Hargrove, a tired woman in her forties with a voice like a rusted hinge, walked the class through thermodynamics in the same tone she used for everything.
Ethan was not listening.
His pencil traced the sketch of an engine design, one he figured would run fifty percent more efficient than current combustion designs, but the act was a charade.
He was here, surrounded by faces and voices and people, and yet he was nowhere.
A boy-shaped placeholder.
The class, the school, the city, all of it was a stage, and he played his part because not playing it took more energy than playing it did.
The Boredom was the constant.
Not the restless, pacing kind that other kids complained about, but something more numbing, something that sat on his chest and made every idea, every person, every act feel pointless.
He sketched turbines and pistons and circuits because that was what Ethan Kane, scholarship boy, smart kid, was supposed to do.
But in the end it didn’t matter the engine would never get built.
It was just another prop.
His childhood had been miserable but he wouldn’t say it contributed to the way he felt.
His Parents were drunk or high more often than not, he was raised in a home that reeked of vomit and whatever they’d burned in the kitchen the night before.
He’d hidden in his room and taught himself the entire high school syllabus by twelve, then most of an undergrad physics curriculum by fourteen, mostly out of some half-formed hope that they’d notice.
They didn’t.
Around ten he’d figured out he was different, not because of the books but because of what was missing: he didn’t feel what other kids felt.
Not joy, not grief, not the connection they all seemed to take for granted.
So he watched them.
Studied their laughter, the way their faces moved when they cried, and he copied it.
He thought maybe if he acted human long enough, he’d become human.
It hadn’t worked.
He was seventeen now, and tired.
His black hair past his ears, his blue eyes that flicked up when a teacher said his name and went dead again the second they looked away.
His body was lean and scarred from fights he’d picked not to win but to feel something other than the nothing he felt consumed by.
He sat slumped in the chair like a marionette someone had set down and forgotten about.
Hargrove’s voice cut through his thought.
“Ethan Kane, care to tell us the second law of thermodynamics?”
Her eyes had narrowed on his doodling.
She thought she’d caught him.
He didn’t look up and he didn’t stop drawing.
“Entropy of an isolated system always increases.
Heat doesn’t flow from a colder body to a hotter one without work.”
“Correct,” she muttered, and went back to her lecture, but he could feel the class looking.
The whispers.
The poor kid, the weird kid, the one who didn’t belong.
A small smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth, more reflex than reaction.
*You think I care what you think?
The fact I have to even notice you makes me sick to my stomach.*
He stared at the sketch and once again boredom rose up like water in a flooded basement.
He crumpled the paper and tossed it over his shoulder without looking.
It hit the trash bin, a clean arc, though he hadn’t aimed.
Some kid behind him made a small impressed sound.
He slumped lower with his eyes on the ceiling tiles.
He thought about his parents, the way he couldn’t love them even when they were sober.
He thought about the fights.
He thought about the people who called him a friend, though he didn’t have any, because to be a friend was to feel, and he didn’t feel anything.
Once the school bell rang, he stood up as fast as he could, his body moving on habit alone.
He was halfway to the door when a voice stopped him.
“Ethan, hold up!”
He turned snd wanted to let out a massive sigh as he knew once again he was going to be asked to care for something he didn’t know how to care for.
Barbara Gordon was an objectively beautiful girl with ginger hair she often wore in a ponytail.
She was nice, and friendly, always making time for people no matter who they were.
In short she was the exact opposite of Ethan.
“Hey,” she said.
“I was wondering if you’ve thought any more about joining the science club.
You’re, like, crazy smart, Ethan.
You’d be a great fit.”
It wasn’t the words that he didn’t like.
It was the assumption underneath them, that he was like her, that some passion lived in him that her invitation could light up.
It pressed against the mask he wore and reminded him there was nothing behind it.
He gave her his rehearsed smile.
“Uh, yeah, sorry.
I’m kinda busy, I have a lot going on at the moment.
Maybe next semester.”
“No worries.
If you change your mind, you know where to find me.” She waved and walked off.
He watched her go, not with want but with a kind of dull, frustrated curiosity, the same way he’d watch an animal at a zoo.
*What makes you like that.
What makes you real.*
He didn’t get an answer.
He never did.
Whispers trailed him into the hall.
*Why’s Barbara talking to the street rat.
What, she slumming it now.
Bet his junkie parents sold his science books for a hit.* He didn’t react.
Their words were nothing, just air, but they landed anyway, because they weren’t wrong.
He wasn’t one of them.
He hated them for seeing it, and he hated himself more, because he couldn’t even hate them properly.
He couldn’t feel anything.
Just the empty space where the feeling was supposed to go.
He went to his locker, a dented metal box in a corner where the paint flaked off in flat gray chips, and he was shoving books in when a hand slammed him against it.
Justin Blake, neighbourhood bully and quarterback of the football team if it could get anymore cliche.
“Watch it, Kane.”
Ethan sighed.
This, too, was just a part of the script.
“What do you want, Justin?”
“You’re a fucking junkie, just like your parents.
Bet they’re sucking dick for crack right now.
You don’t belong here, street rat.”
The friends snickered.
Ethan stared at him, face blank.
“You done?
Can I go now?”
Justin wasn’t done, and like usual he swung.
A clumsy fist aimed at his face and like usual Ethan moved without thinking, a small shift of the head, and Justin’s hand hit the locker door with a dull metal clang.
He screamed and blood welled up across his knuckles, dripping onto the floor in fat red drops.
His friends went quiet.
Ethan picked up his bag and walked away, their cursing fading behind him.
He could’ve broken Justin’s jaw.
Could’ve put him on the floor in two seconds.
He didn’t, because violence, like everything else, was empty in the end.
L
At the front entrance another voice caught him.
“Ethan, a moment!”
Mr.
Patel.
A thin man with glasses fogged from the heat, held a stapled paper in his hand like it was something incredible.
“This is extraordinary work,” Patel said.
“I’ve got contacts at Harvard, and they’d be very interested in—”
“Yeah, yeah, do whatever you want.
I gotta go.” Ethan kept moving.
He’d written the paper on nanotechnology in an afternoon because the assigned homework had bored him into a stupor, and he didn’t have the patience to listen to Patel talk about a future he couldn’t picture himself in.
He pushed through the doors into Gotham and left the finer parts of the city before he walked through the bad part of town, where streetlights blinked on and off and graffiti covered every wall.
His apartment building was there on the edge of the east end, a sagging stack of broken brick and cracked windows.
He walked into the lobby and was unsurprised to see one of the only people he had come to know in this city.
Artemis Crock was leaning against a wall scratched up with knife marks, her blonde hair tied back with her arms crossed over a faded tank top.
Ripped jeans, tight, a stomach cut with muscle, hazel eyes that flicked up when he came in.
She was tough, raised on the same streets as he was, and the important thing was she didn’t ask for anything he didn’t have.
Meaning she didn’t care that he never called her or never visited more than what he currently did.
He didn’t know why she stuck around.
Whatever it was, her being there didn’t make his skin crawl the way most people did.
“Hey,” he said.
“Yo.” A small smirk made its way onto her face and they stepped into the elevator.
“Rooftop?” she asked as the doors scraped shut.
“Yeah.”
“See you up there.” She let him out on his floor.
She didn’t push him to talk.
Didn’t expect him to act happy.
That was more than enough to make her a good companion.
When he got to his apartment door he unlocked it and went inside.
The place was a wreck.
The air smelled like moldy food and vomit.
His mom was on the floor with her eyes half-open, a needle still in her arm.
His dad sat at the kitchen table with shaking hands, muttering about money he owed.
“Where’s the fucking money, Ethan?” His dad stood up, swung a weak fist at his shoulder.
Ethan stepped aside.
“Move, old man.” He kept walking.
His mom’s hand closed around his ankle.
“You hiding shit from us, you little fuck?”
He pulled his foot free and walked to his room and shut the door.
His room was a small space with a sagging mattress and water stains on the walls.
He locked the door and stripped off his uniform.
Revealing his lean body and hard muscles, ripped from the work he put in every day.
“Time to lift…”
He grabbed a protein shake from the mini fridge and drank it wuickly, the cold of it hitting the back of his throat.
His parents were the reason he did this.
Why he came home and lifted weights and hit the bag until his knuckles bled.
He couldn’t end up like them.
Couldn’t fall apart.
He didn’t know what he was fighting for, exactly, but stopping felt like surrender, and surrender felt worse than being nothing.
He started his routine.
Deadlifts with weights that left rust streaks on his palms, pull-ups on a bar wedged in the doorframe, punches on a heavy bag held together with duct tape.
Sweat ran down his chest and dripped onto the floor.
He kept going.
Jab, jab, elbow, jab.
Each hit was a way to fill the time, to keep the voices in his head quiet.
*why do people keep living when none of it means anything.*
His parents’ voices punched through the wall.
“You fucking took it!” A crash, probably a bottle.
His mom screaming back, words too slurred to make sense of.
He wiped his face with a torn towel.
Opened the fridge, pushed past a sandwich, and pulled out a small case of vials filled with green liquid.
He drew it into a syringe, slid the needle into his arm, pushed the plunger.
He’d made the stuff at fourteen, in the school chem lab, when he realized he was never going to eat enough at home to fuel the kind of body he needed.
The vials kept him strong and provided a supercharged dose of all the vitamins and nutrients he needed.
A workaround for the life they’d given him.
He shook out his arm and pulled on a black vest, before he climbed out the window onto the fire escape, and went up.
Artemis was already on the roof, lying on a blanket, looking up through the city pollution at where stars should’ve been.
Her tank top had ridden up exposing the underside of her bra, her blonde hair was fanned out.
She looked, objectively, like someone people would want ti mate with.
He could see why.
He didn’t think he’d ever want to himself, but he could see it.
He lay down beside her and put his hands behind his head.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
A pause.
“You ever wonder if there’s a city out there, somewhere in the universe, that’s as uniquely shitty as Gotham?”
“Probably not.” He kept his eyes on the sky.
Crime, junkies, rich kids who acted like they owned the place.
Why anyone built a life here was beyond him.
He didn’t know why he stayed either.
“How was your day?” he asked.
The words were automatic.
A way to keep her talking so he didn’t have to.
She sighed.
“Rough.
My sister’s back in town, sniffing around, probably up to no good again.
It’s killing my Mom.” She kept going.
Her shift at the diner.
Some guy who’d grabbed her ass and gotten an elbow to the face for it.
Her mom crying at the kitchen table again.
He nodded sometimes and said nothing.
He couldn’t relate to any of what she was going through so who was he to give her any advice.
She didn’t expect any though which was why he felt comfortable relaxing here.
She yawned and rested her head on his shoulder.
“Gonna nap.
Wake me if I drool.”
He stayed still and listened to the city around him, but all he heard was the sounds of shouting, of glass breaking and gunshots in the far distance.
*This place really is a shithole,* he thought.
Why did people fight for this city.
Why live in its dirt when it gave nothing back.
He thought about leaving.
Starting over.
But what would actually change.
He’d still wake up bored.
He’d still watch people laugh and cry and not know what either one was for.
After a while she shifted, she then woke and wiped her mouth.
“Fuck.
How long was I out?”
“Forty-seven minutes, twelve seconds.”
She snorted.
“That’s creepy as hell, you know, knowing it down to the second.” She stood and stretched, tank top riding up, showing a scar across her stomach.
He stood too and brushed gravel off his jeans.
“You ever think about leaving Gotham?” He looked out at the dark buildings.
“Hell yeah,” she said, hands on her hips.
“This dump’s a sewer.
If I had the cash, I’d grab my mom and split.
Somewhere with trees and actual nature.
Not just needles and piss-stained walls.”
“Aren’t you afraid it’s all the same?”
She shrugged.
A broken streetlamp caught the edge of her face.
“Can’t be worse than this, right?
You telling me you’d miss this shit?”
“I guess not.”
He didn’t know if he meant it.
Gotham was all he knew, and leaving felt like stepping off a ledge without knowing what was below.
“You know what I don’t get about you?” she said.
“What?”
She leaned against the railing.
Flakes of rust came off in her palm.
“You’re building a drone out of literal trash.
You made that steroid juice.
Guys at the gym would pay a fortune for it.
You’re smarter than anyone I know.
You could leave Gotham, sell your stuff, make a real life.
Why the fuck do you stay?”
His jaw tightened.
He didn’t have an answer that made sense.
“It’s not a steroid,” he said.
“Just nutrients and—”
She punched his arm, grinning.
“I know, smartass.
I’m just saying.
You could be out there, living big.
What’s holding you back?”
He looked at her.
He didn’t know why she cared.
Why she asked.
“Maybe it’s for you,” he said.
She stared.
Then she laughed, bending over, holding her ribs.
“Oh my God, you’re too much.
You almost had me there.”
He smirked and looked back out at the city.
Her laugh cut through the boredom for a second.
The question stayed though.
Why didn’t he leave.
He didn’t know.
“You kill me, Ethan.” She caught her breath.
“I’m out.
See you tomorrow.” She climbed down the ladder.
“See you.”
He stayed put.
Walked over to the edge and stepped up onto the ledge.
Fifty feet down to a street covered in glass and crushed cans.
If he jumped, would it change anything.
Would it take him somewhere new.
Or would he still be stuck.
Still bored.
Still watching people live lives he didn’t understand.
His heart kicked up.
A spark of something almost real.
He leaned forward.
Then he stepped back and the feeling went out like a match.
He climbed down the fire escape, went to his room, and dropped onto the mattress and wuickly fell asleep.
(AN: My new story, each chapter is about 10k words so I’m breaking them up into 3 so I can post regularly.
Support if you can on my P under captainalfie78works