As Aves started making his way down the hallways of Stars College, he kept on thinking to himself, 'Maybe I was just hallucinating? I'm fine right now, aside from being slightly dizzy. But that was definitely real — I am sure of it... That feeling, the environmen— eh? Environment? That's weird. What did the environment look like again?'
The more he thought back to that experience, the weirder and more confused he felt. It all felt like some illusive dream; it would feel so real at first but slowly become blurrier and blurrier.
He could remember some of the details at first, but even those started to elude him later on. It wasn't long until the only things he could remember were the twisted expressions his classmates had made.
After giving the matter some thought, he decided to put the whole matter to rest as he realised he was going nowhere with it. He thought he would really go crazy if he continued thinking about it any longer. Shaking his head to clear his muddled thoughts, his feet sped up a little as he made his way to the public restroom.
The whole question about whether the vision was real or not aside, he really was feeling a bit nauseated. So, he decided to wash his face with a bit of water to cool down a little.
There was a public restroom on the way to the dormitories, so he planned to stop there for a bit.
No one was around when he got there, so he swiftly made his way inside, stood before the sink and started washing his face.
The sound of water running, with the occasional splashes here and there, was all that could be heard throughout the otherwise quiet restroom.
"Ah!" A sharp gasp of surprise escaped Aves' mouth all of a sudden.
When he had momentarily looked up from the sink and into the shiny mirror on the wall to catch his breath, the first thing that greeted him was a young wet face with average features staring back at him. It was his face. It did not have any facial hair — one of his greatest regrets, for he was sure he would have had a girlfriend by now had he had a beard.
But it wasn't the less-than-handsome face nor was it the more-than-desired, non-existent beard that startled him. In fact, what startled him so much was a minor detail that would have gone unnoticed had he not looked closely.
His irises that normally should have been brown-black in colour lost some of their brownish hue and gained an almost dull silver tinge instead. It was only a small part of his irises, and if one didn't look closely, they would miss the change entirely. Aves, however, picked up on it almost immediately, since they were his own eyes and he was naturally the most familiar with them.
Leaning closer to the mirror, Aves used his fingers to widen his eye lids in order to get a better look at the other parts of his eyes. Having noted that nothing else was wrong — or missing, even — he performed a series of eye tests to make sure his vision wasn't impaired or anything of the sorts.
Eye test was a fancy term considering the fact that all he did was cover each of his eyes with a hand and look around the restroom with the other.
"Nothing is wrong with my eye sight... I think." Aves muttered to no one in particular. "Do I need to call the doctor? A lot of weird things have been happening and I am sure as hell not hallucinating."
The weird vision, the intense headache, and now the sudden but small transformation in eye colour... Any other person would've dismissed those incidents as events that happened to occur one after another coincidentally, or even brushed them off as figments of their imagination.
Aves wasn't one of those people, fortunately or unfortunately. He was the type of person to overthink and fret over every single detail, no matter how small it was. It wasn't as bad as it sounded though, since it did help him a lot in the past. Regrettably, it also meant that his character was a little on the insecure side, but there was no helping that.
'I will call the doctor first thing in the morning tomorrow. For now, I should go take that much needed nap. Tonight's the night I will be video calling mom and dad, so I will need my sleep; they yelled at me for half an hour straight the last time I missed it.' Thinking of his awkward yet loving parents lightened up his mood considerably.
After checking one last time that everything else was fine, and that he hadn't grown a mushroom out of his ear or anything of the sorts, he picked his bag up off the ground, left the restroom and made his way to the dormitories.
---
Darkness, the absence of light.
Aves had always figured that he had grown old enough to disregard any feelings of fear or anxiety towards that certain unknown figure that may or may not have existed in the deepest depths of darkness.
That one dark alleyway you unconsciously sped past on your way back from work in the evening; the shadows, created by the flickering light of a broken lamp, mingling along the wall at the far end of a corridor in an abandoned hotel; the apparitional man lying beneath your bed in the darkest hour of the night.
All those scenarios, all those clichés; he had thought he had outgrown those when he turned 12.
He could remember it clearly, in fact. His small room in that dilapidated house, had a closet which, in the middle of the night, against the backdrop of the moonlight trickling in through the gaps of the blinders, created an illusion that it was open instead of closed. He had always used to make sure to close the closet doors before going to bed, so seeing them open in the middle of the night was terror-inducing, to say the least.
After many nights of getting up from bed, walking halfway to the closet but ultimately deciding to go back and take cover under the blankets, he finally picked the courage up to determine whether the closet was open or closed. It turned out that it was shut, just like he had left it before having turned off the lights.
It was that night that he had thought marked the end of the tyranny of sleepless nights. It was that night that he had thought marked the beginning of a new life without Nyctophobia.
So why?
Why was it that now, of all times, the only prevalent emotion that was running through his head fear?
Darkness. Pitch black darkness.
As Aves turned his head around — he wasn't sure if that was what he was doing, or if he was looking forward the whole time — all he could see was black.
He didn't know what was going on, or where exactly he was. His thoughts seemed to have been frozen in a state of timelessness. No matter what he thought about, it seemed to take an infinite amount of time yet only an instant for his thoughts to form.
'Where am I?' His thoughts — never spoken out loud — appeared to echo throughout the infinite darkness.
His entire being seemed to have been submerged in a pool of cold liquid. It also simultaneously felt as if he was being wrapped up in the drapes of the pitch black that surrounded him.
A bevy of different sensations struck him every passing second — it could've been every passing eon, for his sense of time seemed to have left him — with one in particular that made him feel as if he was part of the darkness around him. It felt like what he embodied wasn't the familiar yet unfamiliar human body he had grown accustomed to his entire life, but the everlasting darkness that constituted this world.
That constituted him...
With his sense of time distorted, he didn't know how long it had taken, but he was finally able to will his body — or whatever he had — forward.
Nothing. Nothing happened.
He tried moving his legs, yet the simple action that he had performed countless times over his entire life eluded him for some reason. The sensation felt so foreign to him that it was hard to even explain.
It was as if he had the necessary knowledge to perform such a gesture but didn't have the necessary body parts to make use of that knowledge.
And that's when it struck him.
'I don't have a body?' A conclusion that might have sounded crazy to anyone, had planted a seed of fear into his already existing garden of anxiety.
And as that seed started to sprout and grow within his consciousness, he felt the ethereal darkness around — or within — him constrict and tighten.
'Where is my body? If I don't have a body, how can I think? How can I still exist without my body?'
Fear, terror, dread... all sorts of negative emotions appeared to mesh together and coalesce into self-doubt.
And that's when it started.
All of a sudden, time seemed to accelerate as his thoughts continued to come and go at a never-seen-before speed. And with every passing thought, the feeling of suffocation grew exponentially.
He wanted to scream, curse — anything to escape this maddening situation but he couldn't, and it only grew worse.
The more he panicked, the tighter the feeling of suffocation became, making him panic even more. It was a death cycle that he wished he could escape from, but to no avail.
It was only when the pitch black condensed into its smallest possible point, and the crushing sensation reached its crest, that Aves finally felt the cold air he so dearly missed invade his lungs in droves.
"Hahh!" Aves' body shot upward, his eyes wide open as he started heaving in air to the point it hurt.
The first thing that entered his field of vision was a dimly lit room with a desk, a little rug on the floor, a closet and a little pouf couch in one corner of the room.
A few wallpapers decorated the wall opposite to him, ones that weren't really discernible to him through the dim light of the lamp on the desk next to him. He didn't need to see them to recognise them, however. In fact, after a brief moment of clarity, he immediately recognised the room he was in.
It was his room.
"So that was all a nightmare?" Aves took a few deep breaths to calm his racing heart as he patted his chest in relief.
Upon making contact with his shirt, he noticed that it was very wet; most likely a representation of how much sweat he had accumulated while he was asleep. It wasn't only his clothes; even the bedsheet underneath him was matted with sweat.
He continued sitting there, on his bed, in silence for a few minutes, his distracted attention seemingly entirely on his even breaths. It was only then that he finally slumped his shoulders, lay back down on his bed, and sighed, "What is happening to me? I think I am going crazy. I feel like I need to tell someone, but who?"
He then muttered, "That doctor's appointment couldn't come here any sooner."
He had originally wanted to lay there for a while to think over things some more, but unfortunately, he was interrupted by the sudden growling of his stomach.
"Hmm, it's five o'clock. I suppose I can go get something to eat." Seeing that there was still some time left until he was supposed to video call his parents, he decided he would go buy some frozen food down from the old man's shop.
'If that bastard hadn't eaten all of my mom's leftover chicken, I wouldn't have had to spend money on some disgusting ready-made food.' Aves once again grumbled about how unfair fate had been in landing him such an unpleasant room-mate.
After taking a hot shower to wash the sweat off his body, he put some clean clothes on, and made his way down to the store.
The shop only took 5 minutes of walking to get to, so the journey was uneventful. Stars College was situated in one of the less busy areas of the city, so the view along the way was quite nice.
It was one of Aves' hobbies to walk down the streets every now and then just to get some fresh air, so he was quite familiar with the route.
The sound of a bell rang as Aves made his way into the shop.
"Who is it?!" A deep but husky voice rang out shortly after.
"It's me again, old man. Can't you say something nice to your costumers like 'Welcome' or something?" Aves asked rhetorically as he made his way to the counter.
"Ugh... it's you again, li'l brat. What's brought you here again? You used to come here every week, but now you're coming here everyday? Can't say I'm happy about that change." The same voice rang out from over the counter again.
When Aves arrived before the till, the figure of a man came into view.
An old man that looked like he was in his late sixties sat behind the till, his legs raised and comfortably placed on one of the shelves of the counter. With a bottle of booze in one hand, and a magazine in the other, he seemed to be living quite the life.
He had a few randomly placed strands of hair on an otherwise bald head. He wore a deep scowl on his face as he took swigs of the booze in a somewhat messy manner every few seconds.
"Well aren't you the nicest sweet-talker I've seen in my entire life," Aves jested. "And no, I won't be coming here everyday. I just need some urgent supplies, that's all. Trust me, I like being here much less than you do."
"Well, well, well... Look who's gotten all cocky all of a sudden, eh?" The old man, Trevor, paused to take another sip of alcohol, and then continued, "What happened to that little boy who used to stutter every two sentences and couldn't even raise his head past the height of his shoulders?"
Trevor's sunken eyes followed Aves' figure that made its way over to the frozen food aisle. His eyes seemed to brighten for a moment as if he had thought of something. "Did you get yourself a girlfriend? No, wait... did you get laid already?"
Aves, who had reached his hands out to open a freezer that contained frozen chicken, almost spat out an imaginary vat of water all over it when he heard the old man's words.
"What the hell are you talking about, stinky geezer?! I don't have a girlfriend, and neither did I get laid." Aves retorted.
"You do seem a little different from yesterday, though I can't tell what exactly..." Trevor tapped his chin with his finger in thought. "Oh well... whatever the case, having a girlfriend isn't necessarily a good thing, ya know? Troublesome folks they are, I tell you."
Trevor then took one last swig off the booze, placed it heavily on the table, burped and said, "You think they give you happiness, but they go on and ruin your life instead."
Trevor hiccupped a little toward the end of his speech.
Aves, who had just come back with a few bags of frozen food in hand, had a sudden realisation dawn on him. A small smile played on his lips as he asked, "Did your wife cheat on you by any chance?"
Trevor, after having heard those words, acted like a cat that had its tail stepped on.
He sprung up from his stool, the magazine in his hand fluttering in the air as it fell to the floor, slammed both his hands on the counter and yelled with an alarmed face, "Who?! Who dares speak such profane lies about me?! Cheat on me?! Me?! Bah, I'm the one who cheats on people, not the other way around!"
'Hehe, got him. He's definitely a cuckold.'
Trevor, now having seen the cocky look in Aves' eyes, narrowed his eyes at him and asked, "Is it you, li'l bastard? Are you implying I've been cuckolded?"
Aves met his gaze evenly and said, "I'm not implying it; I'm saying it's already happened."
The stand-off continued for a few seconds before Trevor stuck out his wrinkly hands. "Give me the stuff."
"How did you know?" As Trevor went through the price tags of the food Aves had bought, he finally asked.
"About your wife cheating on you? Easy. You're drinking much more heavily than you normally do, and, before today, you would always make fun of me for not having a girlfriend, so you basically gave yourself away when you started saying negative things about them all of a sudden."
Aves then shrugged his shoulders with a Mr. know-it-all look and said, "And besides, I've seen your wife once. It was only a matter of time before she left your lanky ass."
The old man scoffed audibly but didn't continue the conversation. It gave Aves the confirmation he needed that he was correct.
"That's $21.00, please." Trevor stated when everything was ready.
"Eh? But it says right here that its $16—" Aves cut himself before he even had the chance to finish off his own sentence. He already had an inkling at what was going on.
"Don't piss off the people who sell you your food." Trevor intoned each and every word slowly with a haughty look on his mug.
"Stingy bastard..."
The ring of the bell signalled Aves' exit from Trevor's store, a frustrated look on his face as he did so.
Back in the store, Trevor had leaned over the counter, staring at Aves as he left. He stayed there for a few minutes, then sighed to himself as he thought, 'That boy really has become quite different today.'