Chapter Text
He had five lives.
His fate was sealed when he was hit by a speeding motorcycle on the eve of his nineteenth birthday. Having driven his own blue Honda out to the edge of the water to watch the moonrise, he could still feel the warm ghost of his girlfriend’s body against his side as they wandered back out into the roadway to his bike. She always smiled up at him with those big, stupid brown eyes like a deer with a fetish for headlights and he thought she was the most innocent thing in the world.
But of course, things are never as they appear. She pushed him toward the other motorcycle when she saw it wasn’t breaking correctly. He could still remember the way her silhouette danced away from the scene in the moonlight while he lay pinned beneath the heavy machine, dying. He grew introverted after this first death- having lost most his pride after pulling his bloodied body out from beneath a busted bike, crawling down the road sobbing for help until he collapsed from exhaustion.
That was when his eyes became stars.
A five pointed, red star replaced his pupil after that incident. It was ugly to him, strange and stupid looking.
Nobody looked him in the eye long enough to tell if the stars were just some stupid contact lenses or if they were real, serious mutations like those freaks in housing sector H suffered with. He didn’t live too far from them, the hive housing in sector F was just as terrible as the places they dwelled. His ‘apartment’ was the size of a closet, literally, and it only cost him fifty credits a month- which was really all it was worth anyway. He didn’t mind that one occupant and a bed barely fit in the place, or that he had to share a communal toilet with the entire rest of the fifth floor. Life was life, and he would live it until all the points on his stars faded out.
Which they would, eventually.
He was not the only one; there were a handful of others with these ‘eye stars’ that passed around tales of madness- with each point lost on the star due to a critical injury, the descent toward full-on mental psychosis grew more rapid. Eventually, the points would fade with age if he wasn’t wounded; it was an uphill battle either way. More information would need to be collected for validity; he’d need to find the others at some point, just like he needed a new seat for the bike and a new job.
Who was he kidding? He’d never go out looking for the other freaks.
If they wanted him, they could come and find him- he was in the population registry somewhere.
All they needed to do was look.