Chapter Text
The ocean had no warmth in the city. Even in July, the wind carried cold salt through the streets, brushing against windows like it was searching for something. Buildings leaned like old bones, and concrete wept moisture from unseen cracks. The air smelled of rust and seaweed all year long, like the shoreline itself had grown tired and started to rot.
Lucian Grange lived in the kind of silence that cities never noticed. He moved through hallways, coffee lines, and late-night sidewalks like fog, shapeless, forgettable, always a little damp. At seventeen, he was all angles and shadows, tall but narrow, with dark hair that spilled over hollow, sleepless eyes. He looked like someone who’d been paused halfway through becoming a person and then quietly left that way.
Most summer mornings, Lucian walked from the bus stop to the law office where he interned without seeing a single familiar face. The building itself was a gray wedge pressed between crumbling walls on a street that didn’t even have a name. A small brass plaque on the weather-worn door read,
BLACKRIDGE —LEGAL SERVICES
Inside, Lucian filed papers. He scanned documents. He typed out case notes often before anyone had even asked. His desk sat tucked into a cramped, windowless back office beneath lights that buzzed with a faint, constant irritation. He never decorated. He didn’t chat with coworkers. And after a few weeks, the others stopped expecting him to.
“Grange, did you run the case transcript yet?” a paralegal would sometimes call from halfway down the hall.
“Done an hour ago, ” he’d reply without looking up.
He was just an intern, unpaid, underaged, and technically not supposed to be doing half the work he did. But he was efficient, if distant. His fingers moved faster than his thoughts, always clicking, always shifting. No one could remember the last time they heard him speak on his own terms. He became something like furniture, functional, unobtrusive, and forgotten.
The days began to blur.
Lucian would sit at his desk, blink, and suddenly an hour had passed. Documents would be saved, files sorted neatly, as though someone else had done the work. He often didn’t remember typing them. Sometimes he’d come back to himself with a dry mouth and a vague sense that he’d just been speaking, but to who, he couldn’t say. Once, he came to standing on the office roof in the rain, keycard in hand, with no memory of how he’d gotten there.
His dreams, when they came at all, were fractured and senseless. No faces. Just scattered sounds, the drip of water, the flutter of pages, a soft, rhythmic thrum that seemed to echo behind his ribs.
He started sleeping worse. Eating less. There was a quiet wrongness inside him that he couldn’t name, like an engine idling too fast beneath the surface. But he told no one.
Then came the blackout.
It was a Tuesday like any other. The office buzzed with fluorescent lights, the bitter smell of old coffee hanging in the air. Lucian was in the lounge, refilling his chipped mug, barely registering the idle voices coming from the conference room. Someone cracked a joke. Someone else laughed.
He blinked.
And then he was on the floor.
The room had gone still, unnaturally so. The hallway lights had died, plunging everything into a washed-out dimness. The air pressed against his skin, heavy and thick, like he’d slipped underwater without knowing. His hands trembled. His shirt clung damply to his back.
There was something else in the room.
Lucian didn’t move. Didn’t speak. He just stared. There, across from him, slumped against the far wall, was a shape he hadn’t seen enter. Slowly, as though his mind was only now catching up, he registered the details, a suit jacket. A crooked tie. One arm outstretched toward the center of the room.
Gabriel Blackridge.
Lucian didn’t remember him walking in. He didn’t remember speaking. But when he looked down, his own hands were shaking, his palms slick with something dark and thick. His untouched mug sat beside him on the floor. His breath caught in his throat.
He didn’t scream. He didn’t even move.
The next thing he knew, there were red lights flashing against the walls and voices shouting his name from all directions.
“Lucian! Lucian, don’t move!”
He didn’t.
They pulled him to his feet. There were officers. Stretchers. The harsh snap of yellow tape. Questions he couldn’t understand yet. They kept asking what had happened.
Lucian didn’t answer. He couldn’t.
“I… I don’t remember, ” he said, barely above a whisper. “I blinked. Then…”
But there was nothing after then, just silence, and the aching certainty that something had happened. Something important. Something wrong. And he’d been part of it.
They took him without a struggle.
The next day, headlines called it a tragedy. An incident. Inexplicable. The trial was fast.
The prosecution had no real evidence. No witnesses. No history of violence. No motive. But Lucian had been found unresponsive, dazed, alone in the room with the body of “Mr. Blackridge” himself. He didn’t testify. He offered no explanation. He barely seemed present.
The defense argued exhaustion. Dissociation. Stress-induced blackout. Maybe even mental illness. But the prosecution didn’t want theories. They wanted closure. They wanted a name on the record.
Six days later, the sentence was read aloud in a hushed courtroom.
Lucian sat unmoving, his face pale and unreadable. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wondered what his mother was thinking. If she was even watching.
The execution was scheduled for the following week. The paperwork was filed. The cell was readied. The public, as they always do, moved on.
And just like that, Lucian Grange was gone.
Or so the record would show.