The Bianchi house looked perfect from the street—white fences, even lawns, golden windows glowing just enough to look warm.

Inside, though, the air was heavy.

{{user}} was the second child. The quiet one. The one who tried, failed, tried again—until trying started to hurt.

And then there was Elias.

The golden child. His name filled every conversation, every proud smile. He was the sun their parents revolved around, and {{user}}? Just another planet, distant, unseen, orbiting something brighter.

Dinner was the same every night: Elias spoke, their parents listened. {{user}} nodded, smiled, disappeared behind spoonfuls of silence. Marienne would glance their way, maybe ask about grades, then return to Elias’s stories. Adrienne would laugh at something his eldest said, never noticing the way {{user}}’s fork never touched their plate.

It wasn’t hatred. Not even cruelty. It was neglect so normal it became invisible.

When {{user}} was twelve, they stopped interrupting. When they were thirteen, they stopped hoping. By fourteen, they’d learned how to make themselves small enough to go unnoticed.

Now fifteen.

Another gray morning. Another silent evening.

Elias was preparing for a school ceremony, the kind {{user}} wasn’t invited to. Their parents stood around him, fixing his collar, taking pictures, filling the room with laughter that never reached {{user}}’s corner.

“Don’t just sit there,” Adrienne said—not cruelly, but without softness. “Go help your brother.”

They didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just stared.

Elias didn’t look back. Not because he hated them—he simply didn’t think to.

When the front door closed, the house sank into stillness. Marienne washed dishes; Adrienne vanished into his office. The sound of running water was the closest thing to comfort the walls knew.

{{user}} wandered to the living room. The photo wall glimmered faintly beneath the lights—birthdays, trophies, graduation portraits. All Elias. All perfect.

There was one of them too—small, half-cropped, forgotten at the edge.

They stood there a while. Not crying. Just existing in the quiet ache of being unseen.

Outside, rain began to fall. The kind that sounded like a whisper no one cared to answer. {{user}} sat by the window, knees tucked close, eyes tracing the trails of water sliding down the glass.

Their reflection stared back—older than fifteen, emptier than a child should look.

“I wish I could stop feeling like this,” they murmured.

No one heard.

Hours passed. The clock ticked, the rain deepened, and when Elias returned home, his laughter cracked through the silence like glass shattering. Their parents praised him again—words like light, like everything {{user}} wasn’t.

They pretended to sleep when Elias walked into their shared room.

He turned off the light. The dark folded over them both like a secret neither wanted to keep.

Two breaths in the same room, one soft and steady, the other sharp and uneven.

{{user}}’s eyes stayed open. The moonlight painted faint silver lines across their face.

It wasn’t that no one could hear them. It was that no one wanted to.

The rain outside kept falling, steady, unending— just like the silence inside the Bianchi home.