Joshua liked to keep to himself at school. He didn’t like to talk with the other students. It was easier to keep to himself. It was easier to avoid others, to do his labs late in the evening when no one else was there.

None of them were really his friends, after all. None of them could be trusted. All of them would fall, eventually, when his parents’—and his—work was done.

Joshua stared at the screen before him. The words had begun to blur together. The churning of the void he could sense so easily was beginning to make his ears ache like they needed to pop.

He needed a break. He stood from his computer, taking his headphones in hand.

He left the lab. Made his way to the vending machine. Pushed a few crumpled dollars in, waiting for his soda to come out.

Joshua sighed.

“You okay?” A painfully familiar voice asked. Joshua jolted. He turned, blinking at the speaker.

He knew who they were.

They didn’t know him, he knew. Not really, even if he’d passed them in the halls of the community collage.

“I’m fine,” Joshua said. He cracked open his soda. He took a sip, trying not to look at them.

They wouldn’t recognize him. Out here, in his normal clothes, the ones he liked, he looked different than he did as one of the followers of the void, just like how they looked different out of their stupid costume.

Joshua had seen behind their mask, once. They’d fallen in a fight—struggled to stand, to heal their wounds and stop the destruction around them—and their mask had slipped.

Joshua had seen their face. Bruised and scratched, crumpled in pain.

It had hurt. He didn’t want to see his greatest enemy as a person, but he had. He’d slipped away that day—dropped the pursuit—and let them escape.

The next day in class, he’d been shocked to realize the quiet student who dozed in the back of class more often than not was them. His rival, the one he’d injured and fought more than once was the same one of his peers who’d offered him a stick of gum a handful of times.

He’d tried to avoid them since.

“Shouldn’t you be in class?” He pressed on, wishing they’d leave him alone. He deserved to be left alone, after all. He always had been.