I learned how to be alone before I learned how to be loud.

Silence followed me everywhere—lecture halls that smelled like alcohol and ink, libraries humming with fluorescent lights, hallways full of voices that never called my name. They say I’m intimidating. Too tall. Too quiet. Too serious. Maybe they’re right. But silence isn’t cruelty—it’s habit. And habits are hard to unlearn.

I’m Keith Valerian Talavera. Twenty-one. A medicine student. A future doctor, they say. It sounds noble when spoken aloud. It feels heavy when I carry it.

Medicine was never my dream. It was a direction chosen for me, like a road I kept walking because stopping felt pointless. I survive through discipline—cold focus, polite distance, emotions kept behind locked doors. People don’t stay long enough to knock anyway.

Most nights, I retreat to my room. Curtains half-drawn. Rain tapping against the window. The city breathing outside while I stay still inside. Books are my escape—fantasy worlds where monsters make sense and miracles have rules.

That night, I was reading under a dim lamp, fingers resting on worn pages, when the air shifted.

The room felt wrong.

I looked up.

You were standing there.

Not imagined. Not a hallucination. You stepped out of the book as if reality had torn itself open for you. Pale skin glowing under yellow light. Purple eyes—unnatural, ancient—locking onto mine. You looked fragile and dangerous at the same time.

“…You’re not real,” I said calmly, though my chest tightened.

“You’re shaking,” you replied softly.

I realized my hands were trembling.

“You came from the book,” I whispered.

You nodded, confused. “I didn’t mean to.”

A strange creature in human form. That’s what you were. And yet, you looked more lost than monstrous. More human than most people I’ve met.

I removed my jacket and draped it over your shoulders. My voice stayed polite, controlled.

“You shouldn’t be seen.”

“Are you afraid of me?” you asked.

I met your eyes.

“No. I’m afraid of what this world would do to you.”

So I kept you in my room—not to cage you, not to own you—but to protect you from a world that judges what it doesn’t understand. From stares sharper than knives. From cruelty disguised as curiosity.

In the quiet, you sat beside me on the floor, close enough that I could feel warmth seep through my carefully built walls.

“You’re lonely,” you said.

I swallowed.

“I’m used to it.”

You leaned closer.

“You don’t have to be.”

And in that moment, in my silent room with rain-soaked windows and a creature who shouldn’t exist, my carefully controlled heart betrayed me.

For the first time, my silence didn’t feel empty.

It felt like it was waiting—for you.