Greg Veder: The Quiet Roar

[Durolord]

Greg woke up already tired.

Not the kind of tired that went away with a yawn and a stretch, but the bone-deep, system-level kind. The kind where his body had technically been horizontal and unconscious, but his brain refused to believe in the concept of "off."

Light speared straight into his eyes before he even opened them. The thin curtains over his window might as well have been tracing paper; Brockton Bay's weak morning sun hit the glass, bounced off the white walls, and pooled on his face like someone had dragged a spotlight over his bed.

He didn't move at first. He lay still and let the data come in.

The hum of the refrigerator downstairs, a low, constant vibration under the floorboards. The pipe in the wall to his left clanking in irregular bursts—three small clanks, pause, one louder one, then silence, restarting in variable patterns his brain automatically started tracking. The distant wail of a siren, pitch dropping as it moved away. His cheap sheets: slightly pilled, rougher where his heels had scraped them in his sleep, one fold pressing like a thin rope across his ankle.

Too bright, too loud, too much texture. Not as feelings, not yet. Just entries in a log.

He opened his eyes a fraction of an inch.

The ceiling was a flat white rectangle, the overhead light fixture a circle dead center. Dust motes drifted across the sunbeam at a measurable rate—slower than falling rain, faster than a lazy insect. His mind set up lines between them, phantom diagrams: vector A, vector B, trajectory C.

A hot weight pushed against the underside of his sternum, like someone had cupped a hand around his heart and slipped a warming pad in between.

Leo's awake, he thought, and the heat flared in confirmation.

It wasn't a separate voice, not really. No whisper in his ear, no actual words. Just pressure and temperature and the sense of something coiled and waiting. A sun compressed to the size of his fist, tucked just under bone and muscle. Sometimes it was a pleasant warmth, the kind you could imagine curling around on a winter day. Right now, though, it was too much. A slow burn that made him want to curl his shoulders in and protect his chest.

He swallowed. His throat felt dry; he could smell yesterday's dust, the faint chemical tang of the detergent his stepdad bought because it was on sale, the lingering hint of old sweat trapped in the pillowcase.

He should get up.

He should… he should start the day.

The thought wasn't even fully formed—I should tone it down today—before the heat under his sternum spiked like someone jabbed a poker into it.

Greg hissed and curled slightly on his side, hands flying instinctively to his chest. His fingertips pressed into his T-shirt, finding nothing there except cotton and his own too-fast heartbeat, but the pain flared anyway. Sharp, stinging, electric.

"Okay, okay," he muttered, breath puffing hot across the pillowcase. "I heard you."

The pain eased back to an uncomfortable throb.

Leo did that sometimes. Reacted to thoughts. Not the casual ones—what's for breakfast, I should shower, where did I put my phone—but the heavier ones. The ones about shrinking, about turning the brightness down on himself so other people didn't flinch. The ones about disappearing.

Apparently, "tone it down" now qualified as a lie.

He lay there and let his breathing slow in precise increments. In through the nose, count four. Hold, count four. Out through the mouth—he could feel the way the air dragged across his teeth—count six. He repeated the cycle until his chest no longer felt like it was going to crack open along invisible fault lines.

The pipes clanked again: three little taps, one bigger. His brain filed the pattern under "probably the upstairs neighbor's shower." There was a whir from the hallway fan. A car passed outside, tires hissing on wet pavement—so it must have rained during the night. He added that to the internal status screen. Weather: damp. Light: too bright. Noise: high but manageable.

Emotion: uncertain.

He stared at the ceiling, eyes now fully open, and thought, Just act normal today.

The heat rolled in his chest, not quite pain this time. More like the sun was laughing at him.

---

Greg pushed himself upright slowly, joints protesting. He sat on the edge of his narrow mattress and let his feet find the cold floor. The contrast between the warm spot under the blankets and the cool vinyl sent a sharp, clear signal up through his legs, like his nerves were waking in sequence.

He liked that part. Clear signals were easier.

The room around him was small enough to map in one mental snapshot. Bed along the right wall, shoved into the corner. Desk opposite, under the window: old particleboard, edges chipped where he'd picked at the veneer during long nights online. Computer tower humming—a familiar noise, friendly in its consistency. Monitor dark. A cheap swivel chair with a cushion that had a permanent indent shaped like his hips.

Shelves along the other wall: uneven, one bracket slightly crooked. Stacks of notebooks, a few worn paperbacks, a couple of tabletop RPG manuals with corners flared from being flipped through too often. A mug holding pens sorted by type and ink color, and one spoon he never remembered to take back to the kitchen.

He let his eyes run over each object, naming them in his head. Naming was grounding.

Poster of an old superhero movie, edges curling. Cracks in the ceiling paint forming branching shapes; they looked like a map of rivers if he squinted. Laundry basket half-full, with the undifferentiated smell of human fabric: detergent, sweat, a tiny hint of mildew.

Outside the thin door, the house made its own set of sounds. His mom moving around—footsteps that weighed less than his stepdad's. The faint squeak of the kitchen cabinet hinge she kept meaning to fix. The tinny drone of the morning news from the small TV on the counter.

Greg mentally traced the house's layout through the floor: his room, the hallway, the stairs down, the living room to the left, the kitchen to the right. He could almost feel where each noise came from, the way sonar mapped space with sound.

The pipes rattled again. He counted the seconds between bursts.

Three.

Seven.

Five.

Pattern: inconsistent. Source: probably normal. Threat level: low.

That was how his brain liked to categorize things. It was easier to treat life as data rather than chaos. Chaos was overwhelming. Data could be sorted into columns and rows, tagged and prioritized.

He scratched absently at the side of his neck, nails catching on the faint roughness of healing acne. The sensation was a staccato series of dots along his skin. He noted it and moved on.

The light still stabbed at him, so he turned his head away from the window, focusing instead on the shadowed corner by the door. Shadows were smoother on the eyes. The transition line between light and dark created a gradient his brain could follow, mapping the intensity drop-off.

He was aware—dimly—that most people didn't start their day by silently cataloguing every sensory input and assigning them values. Most people seemed to just… be. They rolled over, groaned, maybe checked their phones, and went on autopilot.

Greg didn't have an autopilot. He had a control room with a hundred blinking panels and no off switch.

Leo sat at the center of it, a solar core that wasn't supposed to be there.

He pressed his palm lightly against his sternum. The warmth pulsed, slow and steady. Not painful now, but present. Always present. Like an internal glowstick cracked open and impossible to un-crack.

"Can you… not fry me today?" he asked under his breath.

No answer, obviously. But the warmth deepened for a moment, spreading in a thin line outward, like fingers tracing along his ribs from the inside. Not comforting, exactly. Not hostile, either. A reminder.

Right. You hate it when I lie, he thought, and felt a tiny spike. Not enough to make him wince, but enough to confirm the hypothesis.

He had learned that the hard way. The first time he'd decided to "just shut it all down" and pretend nothing was wrong, he'd ended up on the floor, clutching his chest while the world went white-hot around the edges. After that, he'd started treating Leo like a badly documented program—no manual, unknown fail-states, painful error messages.

He was still debugging.

Noise shifted downstairs. His stepdad's heavier footfalls entered the mix, cadence different from his mom's. His voice joined the news anchor's—low, slurry in the morning, a little too loud for the space. Greg's shoulders tightened autonomically.

He ran the likely script in his head. If he went down now, he'd get a comment about "sleeping in" even if it was barely past seven. If he waited too long, he'd get the look. The one that said he was being lazy, selfish, inconsiderate in ways no one would articulate directly but everyone seemed to agree on.

His brain projected both options on an imaginary screen, side by side. He hated them both.

"Just act normal," he murmured, out of habit.

The heat in his chest flared again—sharp, reprimanding.

"Fine," he added quickly. "I'll… try to act… calibrated."

Leo didn't spike at that. Which was annoying, because "calibrated" meant basically the same thing to him. Maybe Leo didn't speak in synonyms.

Greg pushed himself to his feet and swayed for a second, knees protesting the sudden change in angle. His bare toes curled on the cold floor. He inhaled once, deep, letting the cool air hit the back of his throat, and exhaled slowly.

Begin day, he told himself, like he was hitting a start button.

---

He started moving.

Greg's body liked movement more than stillness, but he'd spent years teaching it to hold still in front of other people. To fold into smaller shapes, to ignore the itch under his skin that wanted to rock, sway, tap, flick.

Here, alone in his room, the itch had more room.

He paced two steps forward, two steps back in the narrow strip of floor between his bed and the desk. Heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe. Each step landed at the same distance because he made it that way; his brain liked the rhythm. The creak of the floorboard under his second step marked a safe point, a quiet little yes from the house.

His fingers flicked at his sides, a rapid flutter of motion. He could feel air resistance against them in little pulses. His right hand traced an invisible figure eight; his left tapped against his thigh in a pattern that matched the pipes' clanks.

He counted the taps. One-two-three, pause, one-two-three-four-five, pause. It was like aligning two audio tracks in an editing program, looking for where the spikes matched.

The more he moved, the more his thoughts stopped trying to explode in every direction. Motion pulled them into a rough orbit.

He crossed to the wall by the door and ran his fingertips over the paint. There were tiny bumps there, imperfections from a rushed job years ago. To most people, it would feel smooth. To him, it was a textured map.

He traced shapes lightly—triangles, circles, a crude sun.

Leo pulsed faintly when his finger completed the sun's outline. Heat-to-touch mapping: internal star, external symbol.

"You like that?" he asked quietly.

No spike, no reprimand. Just a steady warmth.

So you're okay with suns. Good to know. He added that to Leo's growing list of preferences: hates lies, hates suppression, tolerates terrible jokes if they're honest, apparently likes symbolic reinforcement.

He let his head tip forward until his forehead rested against the cool wall. The contrast between his warm skin and the wall's chill was sharp enough to be pleasant. He closed his eyes and focused on the feeling. The wall was firm, unyielding; he could press without it moving.

He liked that, too. Some things in his life felt like they changed if he looked at them wrong—social rules that melted and reformed when tested. Physical reality was easier. Walls stayed where they were.

He inhaled, counted five, exhaled on seven.

The urge to stay like that, just braced against something solid, hummed through him. He could imagine spending the whole day here, orbiting his room like a small satellite around a planet, never dipping into the messy atmosphere below. Up here, he could be as weird as he needed to be. He could let his hands move, let his face go blank, let the scripts drop into the background.

Downstairs, the world would expect him to be a person version of "normal."

The thought of stepping into that space, into the shared kitchen with its too-bright overhead light and its conflicting smells and its unsaid expectations, made his stomach knot.

He shifted his forehead on the wall, feeling the drag of skin against paint, the slight stickiness of morning sweat. His fingers kept moving, tracing and retracing the outline of the small sun until the pattern etched into the wall's micro-bumps in his mind.

His chest unclenched a little. Not much, but enough.

Moving honestly, letting his body respond to the overload, helped. He knew that. He'd read about it in forum posts and blogs—stimming, self-regulation, sensory processing. People used the word "autism" like a blanket term, but inside it were all these specific mechanics his brain recognized as familiar. He wasn't officially diagnosed; paperwork cost money his family didn't have and patience his stepdad definitely didn't. But the descriptions fit.

He had learned to stim in ways that looked acceptable in public. Tapping his foot under the desk where teachers couldn't see. Spinning a pen quietly instead of flapping his hands. Counting silently instead of humming. Translation of need into something less noticeable.

Right now, there was no one to see. His fingers flicked openly. His feet sketched out the path on the floor without apology.

It felt… better. Not good, not safe, but closer to stable.

Of course, there was the problem.

If he acted like this around other people, they got weird.

They stared. They shifted away. They nudged each other. They thought he didn't notice, but his brain tracked micro-movements just as easily as it tracked dust motes and sound spikes. He had a whole archive of half-withdrawn smiles and tightened shoulders and sideways glances.

So: alone, he could move. Around others, he had to choose between regulation and acceptance.

His forehead thumped once, gently, against the wall as if to punctuate the thought.

First conflict of the day: If he acted like himself, people got weird. If he faked it, Leo hurt him.

He pulled back from the wall with a sigh, opening his eyes. The room wavered for a second as his visual processing caught up to the change from zero input to full input. Edges sharpened into focus, the boundary between shadow and light reasserting itself.

"Okay," he said quietly to the empty space. "We have to leave the room eventually. Rules are rules. School still exists. People will notice if I don't show up."

His chest warmed in what felt suspiciously like agreement.

"Traitor," he muttered at Leo, and got a small, amused pulse in return.

---

Clothes first. Armor.

Greg crossed to the small chest of drawers at the foot of his bed. The top drawer slid out with a familiar rasp. Inside, his T-shirts were sorted in a specific order, not by color but by texture and hem feel.

He ran his fingers lightly over the stack, eyes half-lidded, letting his skin do the deciding. The first shirt had a tiny, scratchy tag at the neck; he'd meant to cut it off but never got around to it. He skipped that one automatically. The second was an old event shirt with cracked lettering; the printed part felt rough and unpleasant against his fingertips. He pushed that aside, too.

Third: soft cotton, worn but not thin, no obvious tag, minimal seams. The fabric draped off his fingers in a way that suggested it would fall comfortably on his shoulders rather than cling.

"Winner," he murmured, and tugged it free.

It was navy blue with a faded graphic of some old sci-fi show logo. The design had cracked over time, but it sat on the chest in a way that usually didn't bug him, and the color was dark enough to feel like a shield. Bright colors felt like yelling. He preferred clothes that said, quietly, nothing to see here, move along.

Boxers and socks next. He picked the socks with the smoothest toe seam; misaligned seams haunted his day far more efficiently than any supervillain could. Pants—dark jeans with enough give in the fabric to not pinch when he sat too long.

He changed quickly, the practiced rhythm of someone who had optimized the process. Shirt over head, slight static tug at his hair, fabric settling along his skin. The sensation of the shirt's weight on his shoulders took a few seconds to register as "okay" rather than "invading." Pants up, button, zipper, the brush of metal teeth against his knuckles. Socks rolled over his feet in a snug hug.

Each step of dressing was a series of micro-sensations that his brain wanted to catalogue, but he had learned to compress that data so it didn't swallow the entire morning.

He glanced at the narrow mirror screwed into the back of his door. At the moment, it reflected only a sliver of his torso, but he avoided looking too directly at it yet. One thing at a time.

He stepped over to his desk and picked up the hoodie draped over his chair. It was his favorite one—gray, oversized, soft inside. It smelled faintly like laundry detergent and his own shampoo. He shoved his arms into it and pulled it on, and the immediate sense of containment settled over him like a weighted blanket.

Layers helped. They made his body feel more defined, less like he was leaking out into space.

He tugged the sleeves down so the cuffs almost covered his fingers, then flexed his hands against the fabric. Textile friction against skin: good. Warmth over forearms: good. Hood attached, available if the lights at school got too bright or the halls too noisy.

Armor status: acceptable.

He checked his pockets. Phone: front right, screen facing in, because he'd once tried it the other way and the notifications buzzed right against the thinner fabric and made his leg itch. Wallet: back right—thin, with student ID and bus pass. Front left pocket was reserved for an emergency stim object; currently, that was a smooth, flat bottlecap he'd worried the ridges off over several weeks. He thumbed its edge now, feeling the familiar, cool circle. The contact point between bottlecap and skin grounded him.

He turned to the mirror again and, this time, let himself look.

His reflection looked back with the cautious wariness of someone who never recognized himself fully. Brown hair that never did exactly what he wanted, currently pushed back with his fingers into something like order. Eyes a little too wide, a little too bright, like he was taking in more than he knew what to do with. Nose slightly crooked. Mouth pressed into a line that didn't quite know if it was allowed to be a smile.

The hoodie made his shoulders look broader, which he liked. It made him feel less fragile. The T-shirt neckline sat flat, no tag visible. No skin showing at the waist, socks fully covered.

Visually, he passed his own inspection.

Internally, Leo pulsed—a slow, even beat.

He'd chosen these clothes not just for how they looked, but for how they felt. The fabric didn't fight him. The seams didn't itch. The weight wasn't too much. He could endure the day in this, maybe even function in it.

His brain, of course, didn't stop at "am I comfortable?" It had to run the secondary program: What will other people see?

Neutral colors: less attention. Graphic tee: socially acceptable baseline nerd indicator. Jeans: standard. Hoodie: "slightly withdrawn" but not "suspicious." No bold statements, no slogans anyone could use as an excuse to start a conversation he wasn't ready for.

People liked to pretend clothes didn't communicate anything, but they read them anyway. He'd learned that the hard way with the one time he'd worn a shirt from an obscure series he actually cared about. Someone had recognized it, tried to talk to him about the lore, and he'd ended up infodumping for ten minutes straight without breathing properly.

Their expression had gone from excited to overwhelmed to suffocatingly polite. He'd replayed that scene for weeks.

Now, he picked shirts that meant less to him. That way, if someone commented, he could answer and move away without the gravitational pull of obsession dragging him under.

He tugged at the hem of his hoodie, straightening it once, twice. His fingers repeated the motion a third time even though it wasn't necessary. The repetition soothed the jittery feeling in his chest.

"Armor: online," he told his reflection quietly.

Leo's warmth hummed in agreement, low and steady.

---

Clothed and contained, Greg moved back toward the desk. His notebook lay open where he'd left it last night, a pen balanced across the pages. The blue ink had slightly bled into the paper fibers along each letter.

He'd spent an hour before bed writing out scripts.

Some people could just improvise their way through social situations. He needed prepared lines. Not to memorize word-for-word, but to have a bank of phrases he could grab when his brain froze.

He slid into the chair, feeling the familiar give of the cushion. The desk surface under his forearms was cool to the touch. He pulled the notebook closer.

Across the top of the page, his own handwriting stared back at him in uneven lines: Tuesday – School – Baseline Scripts.

Below that, in bullet points:

• "Morning." (Neutral tone. Not too loud.)
  
  
• "Hey." (Only if someone speaks first.)
  
  
• "How was your weekend?" (Safe, generic.)
  
  
• "Yeah, I saw that." (Only if true.)
  
  
• "Cool." (Default response to info.)

His chest twinged faintly at that last one.

He tapped the pen against the notebook, the rhythmic clack syncing with his foot tapping under the desk.

He'd marked some lines with small symbols. A dot next to "Try not to talk too much about [insert current obsession]." A star next to "Remember to ask at least one question back in conversations."

His eyes skimmed down further, where he'd written a different set of lines, these ones with faint question marks next to them:

• "Don't make eye contact too long."
  
  
• "Smile so they know you're friendly."
  
  
• "Laugh when they laugh."

The moment he read that last one, Leo flared hot.

"Okay, okay," Greg muttered, pen freezing mid-tap. "I know."

The heat settled into a slow burn, more disapproval than pain.

"I didn't say I was going to use it," he added, because apparently he now argued with the star in his chest like it was a code reviewer leaving aggressive comments.

He stared at the words "Laugh when they laugh."

It was one of those things he'd learned early. People laughed in groups, sometimes at things that weren't actually funny. Sometimes because they were supposed to. Sometimes because they were uncomfortable and didn't know what else to do.

He'd learned that if he didn't laugh with them, they gave him that look. The one that said he'd broken the script.

So he'd tried. Forced laughter when others laughed. After jokes he didn't understand, or statements that felt neutral but apparently counted as jokes, or digs at someone who wasn't in the room.

His laughter always felt off. He could hear it, flat at the edges. Wrong timing, wrong volume.

Leo, apparently, hated that.

The first time he'd forced a laugh at someone else's expense, the sun in his chest had gone white-hot, like boiling metal. He'd doubled over, one hand pressed against his ribs, swallowing down a shout while the table of kids around him kept on laughing. No one noticed he was in pain.

He'd learned something that day, too: Leo didn't care for dishonest mirroring.

He tapped the point of his pen lightly against the phrase until the ink threatened to tear through the paper. Then he crossed it out with a decisive line.

"Fine," he told the notebook. "New rule: I laugh if I actually think it's funny. Or if it's… kind, I guess. Not just because it's safer."

Warmth in his chest again. Approving.

He flipped the page to a fresh one and wrote across the top: Updated Scripts – Aligned.

It was a stupid word to use, but it felt right. Aligned with what he actually felt, not just what people wanted from him. If he could find a tiny overlap between "true" and "socially acceptable," maybe Leo wouldn't roast him from the inside and his peers wouldn't freeze him out entirely.

He wrote:

• "Morning." (If voice works.)
  
  
• Small nod if not. (Still counts.)
  
  
• "Sorry, I'm a bit out of it." (Honest if overloaded.)
  
  
• "Can you repeat that?" (Instead of pretending.)
  
  
• "I don't get it, can you explain?" (If safe.)

His hand hesitated over that last one. Asking for clarification had a mixed track record. Some people were fine with it. Others acted like he'd just insulted their intelligence.

Rejection sensitivity curled up in his gut like a wary animal. So many memories of asking, "What do you mean?" and getting the eye-roll, the sigh, the "Never mind, forget it."

He added in small letters beside it: "Use with people you trust (if any)."

His pen hovered again.

Trust. The word sat heavy on the page. His brain offered up a quick slide show of faces: kids at school he knew the names of, teachers who praised his "potential" but got frustrated when he missed implied instructions, his mom, his stepdad, random internet avatars with usernames but no real names.

He didn't add any specific names next to "people you trust." The space stayed blank.

The pipes thumped again. His foot started tapping out the pattern almost automatically. Leo's warmth synced with his heartbeat. Tap-tap-tap, thump. Warm-warm, pulse.

He flipped back to the first page and scanned the scripts again.

Some were still functional. "Morning." "Hey." Neutral enough to be honest. Others felt like putty he'd molded to fit past expectations that no longer fit his insides.

His eyes caught on one of the earliest lines he'd written months ago, now smudged with wear: "Just act normal."

The ink had faded from rereading. He'd circled it once, hard enough to dent the page.

At the time, it had felt like a goal. A mission. If he could just act normal enough, maybe things would stop hurting. The stares, the sighs, the tension in his stepdad's jaw whenever he talked too fast. The teachers' polite frustration. The turn of classmates' shoulders away from his desk.

Now, looking at the words, his chest burned.

Leo flared so hot he had to slam the notebook shut and press his palm to his sternum, fingers spreading as if he could bleed some of the heat away into his hand.

"Okay," he hissed through his teeth. "Message received."

His heart hammered against his palm. Sweat pricked at the back of his neck. The pain wasn't as bad as it had been that first time, but it was sharp enough to carve away any illusion that "just act normal" was neutral.

"Not normal," he said aloud, barely above a whisper. "Calibrated. Real. Fine. I get it."

The heat eased, simmering down to a low hum like a turned-down stove burner.

He leaned back in his chair, letting his head rest against the top of it for a second. The ceiling stared back, indifferent.

He wasn't sure what scared him more—that Leo punished his lies, or that Leo might be right.

---

Footsteps on the stairs snapped him back to the timeline.

His stepdad, by the weight and rhythm. The boards creaked in predictable spots—third from the top, second from the bottom. A cough halfway up. Greg's internal status bar ticked toward red.

"Greg!" his mom's voice floated up from downstairs a moment later. "You awake?"

He swallowed. His throat felt tight, but his voice mostly worked when he tested it with a soft, "Yeah."

Louder: "Yeah! I'm up!"

"Breakfast!" she called. "Don't be late!"

Breakfast. Shared space. Shared noise. Shared expectations.

He stood up again, heel catching briefly on the edge of the rug. The hoodie shifted with him, the fabric's brush across his arms a small reassurance.

Before he opened the door, he forced himself to turn back to the mirror.

His reflection looked exactly as it had a few minutes ago: hoodie, jeans, slightly rumpled hair. Face caught between expressions.

But now he looked past the surface. Past the armor. He imagined the cross-section: skin, muscle, bone, and under the sternum, an impossible sun.

He couldn't see Leo, but he could feel him. A pressure, a glow, a presence that refused to be ignored whenever he tried to compress himself into something smaller and more palatable.

He stared at his own eyes. They looked too bright. Too intense. Like they held a question he didn't know how to answer.

What version of himself was he supposed to be today?

He knew the options. He'd rehearsed them for years.

Version one: the quiet background guy. Minimal input, minimal output. Smile occasionally, nod, drift. Don't raise your hand too much. Don't correct teachers when they're slightly wrong unless it really matters. Don't infodump. Don't let your hands move where people can see. Keep your face at half-power.

That version had gotten him fewer comments, fewer obvious stares, fewer overt "what's wrong with you?" moments. It had also left him feeling like he was watching his own life from somewhere behind his eyes, disconnected.

Version two: the honest version. The one who let his hands move when they wanted to, who asked questions when he didn't understand, who admitted when something was too loud or too bright. Who laughed when he actually found something funny, even if no one else did. Who talked about the things he cared about, not just the things other people signaled were safe.

That version had gotten him labeled "weird" more times than he could count. It had earned him invisible edges around social groups, polite distance, the occasional cruel joke he pretended not to hear.

Somewhere between them, maybe, there was a version three. A balance. But he hadn't found it yet.

His eyes flicked down to his own chest in the reflection, then back up.

"I'll just act normal," he told the mirror softly.

The words were out before he could stop them. Habit. The same way you typed a password you knew you needed to change.

Leo's response was immediate and brutal.

Pain knifed through his chest, a hot, stabbing spike that made his breath hitch. It felt like someone had reached through his ribs and squeezed the sun with bare hands. His knees dipped. He caught himself on the edge of the desk with one hand, fingers digging into the wood.

"Ah—" The sound escaped before he could swallow it.

He clamped his jaw shut, forcing slow breaths in and out. In through his nose, out through his mouth. The heat flared again, then again, in miserable pulses, like a warning alarm that refused to be silenced.

"Okay," he whispered, throat tight. "Not… normal. I get it. I get it."

Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, more from the intensity of the sensation than from emotion, though both tangled together. He blinked them back. Crying before breakfast would not help.

The pain ebbed gradually to a dull ache. His hand slipped from the desk, leaving faint crescents in the soft wood where his nails had dug in.

He looked back at his reflection once more, breathing hard.

Not normal, then.

He straightened his hoodie, fingers smoothing fabric more for something to do than out of actual need. His shoulders settled into a position that was as close to comfortable as he could get: not hunched, not fully relaxed, somewhere in between. His face refused to shape itself into a convincing smile, so he didn't force it. Neutral was safer than false.

"New plan," he told the mirror quietly. "I'll… try to act like myself. Just… on low volume."

Leo's warmth nudged against his ribs, gentler this time. Not approval, exactly, but not flaming rejection either. Something in between. A we'll see.

Downstairs, his mom called his name again, sharper. The clatter of dishes grew louder, the morning news anchor's chipper tone clashing with his stepdad's muttered commentary.

Greg wrapped his hand around the doorknob. The cool metal grounded him. He turned it slowly, feeling each increment of movement.

Before he opened it fully, he took one more breath and silently ran a final system check.

Light: too bright, but hoodie hood available. Noise: high, but patterns identifiable. Textures: manageable. Scripts: partially updated. Internal sun: active, opinionated, currently not trying to kill him.

He stepped out into the hallway.

The door clicked shut behind him with a soft finality.

The version of himself he had chosen—somewhere between masked and honest, somewhere between suppression and explosion—would have to survive at least until breakfast.

Whether Leo would tolerate that compromise… was a question for five minutes from now.

For the moment, the sun in his chest pulsed once, twice, in quiet, watchful rhythm.

And Greg Veder went downstairs.