Chapter Text
“You know, your mom called me last night.”
That’s the first thing Cyrene tells Phainon this morning, after he emerges from his bedroom to come plodding into their apartment’s kitchen. He’s still a little bleary with sleep, but he’s nonetheless dressed for the day, and she’s sitting at the kitchen island chomping down on breakfast, holding a half-eaten slice of jam toast in one hand whilst the other idly scrolls through her phone where it rests on the tabletop. Phainon pauses only briefly at Cyrene’s words before he continues on to grab his mug off the shelf and make for the fridge. If the call had actually been about anything serious, Cyrene would have woken him up at the time.
“Oh yeah?” Phainon says, grabbing the milk carton and pouring himself a cup. “And how is she?”
“She’s fine. Sounds like both of your parents are healthy and hearty, as always. She just mentioned that you hadn’t really been replying to her texts, is all.”
Phainon lightly winces at that. He’s received various messages from Mom over the past few weeks, and he’d responded to many of them with only a brief reply whenever he was busy, or even no reply at all whenever he was just too out of it to bother. His first couple months at college have been…overwhelming, to say the least. He’s not quite fully adjusted to life in this Okhema, the coursework is already demanding, and he’s still struggling to decide on his major. Not to mention, there’s one particular professor whose mere presence has been bringing Phainon a truly ridiculous amount of stress.
“Ah, right,” Phainon mutters, sheepishly rubbing the back of his neck. “I keep meaning to actually get back to her, but then I never do. I’ve just been sort of preoccupied lately.”
“I figured,” Cyrene says, now glancing up from her phone to meet his eyes. She’s not judging, never judging, just tender and patient and calm. “I told Auntie Audata as much, and she seemed to understand. But you should try to message her back whenever you can. Maybe even give her a call, just to give her some peace of mind. You know she worries about you.”
Of course Phainon knows that, and he can’t even pretend like his mom doesn’t have a good reason. His childhood stint in the hospital was a brutal one, and both of his parents have spent practically every day of the last thirteen years fearful that he might someday have to go back. Phainon never did relapse, at least not to the extent that it ever required him to be hospitalized again, but their entire family’s lives were never quite the same afterwards.
“Yeah, I’ll make sure to call her today,” Phainon promises now, smiling apologetically, as he grabs a fresh slice of their own homemade wheat bread for himself and shoves it into the toaster. “I’m sorry that you had to get caught up in the middle of us like that.”
“I’m not ‘caught up’ in anything, Phainon,” Cyrene replies, both her gaze and her tone suddenly pointed like a knife. “I don’t want to give your mom any more reasons to worry, but I’d look out for you regardless of whether or not she asks me to. You know that.”
Phainon does know that. Cyrene could have gone anywhere for college, and Phainon could have simply stayed in the countryside of their childhoods forever, but neither of them could stand the idea of being apart from each other. Both of them enrolling at Marmoreal University in Okhema, the best school that would accept Phainon’s application, was their compromise. This, like so many other things, was a decision that the two of them made together—but even so, Phainon still feels guilty about it.
Phainon still feels guilty about a lot of things.
Before he can go spiraling too far down that rabbit hole, though, Phainon is mercifully snapped out of it by a telltale ping resounding from Cyrene’s phone. Her dating app. Cyrene immediately looks back down at her screen, and an eager grin spreads over her lips as she swiftly starts typing with her free hand.
“New lady friend?” Phainon asks playfully as he brings his mug to his lips.
“New chatting buddy, at least,” Cyrene says, not even glancing up from her screen or so much as pausing in her typing. “With very pretty eyes.”
Phainon sighs in amusement. “Just text me if you’re bringing her home tonight so I know to clear myself out.”
“Oh please, Phai-Phai. Even I don’t move that fast.”
Phainon chuckles, the tension that had loomed now rapidly dissipating, and the morning from there settles into an easy, comfortable silence between the two of them. He finishes off his own buttered toast and cup of milk, dutifully washes his mug in the kitchen sink, and goes to grab his backpack before heading out. It’s in the living area, leaned up against the coffee table that’s become covered in notes and worksheets from all the study sessions he and Cyrene have there together, and Phainon swiftly bends down to lift the bag up onto his shoulder.
But as Phainon does so, the bag’s flap—which admittedly had been only half-zipped—abruptly falls open and sends all of the contents spilling out in a noisy clatter. Folders and notebooks and textbooks chaotically tumble across the surface of the coffee table, and Phainon curses under his breath as he bends down again to hurriedly sweep everything back into his bag. From the direction of the kitchen, Cyrene’s stifled laughter floats up to his ears.
“I keep telling you to zip that thing up properly,” Cyrene calls, half-teasing, half-chiding, and 100% acting like an overbearing older sister. “If you’re not careful, one of these days your stuff’s gonna fall out without you noticing and you’ll actually lose something important.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve got it this time,” Phainon grumbles, making sure to pull the zipper all the way closed before slinging the whole hulking bag onto his back. “Right, I’m heading out now. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck,” Cyrene shoots back readily, her gaze sympathetic. They both know full well what Phainon’s first class for today is and just how much it drains him. On the other hand, Cyrene’s Tuesday classes don’t start until the afternoon, so she still has plenty of time to kill getting comfy on the couch and messaging pretty girls. “I’ll meet you at the quad for dinner?”
“Sounds good,” Phainon agrees, and after a wave goodbye, he sets out for the bus stop.
Their apartment is about a half-hour’s bus ride out from campus. It’s not the most convenient arrangement, but living in the dorms simply wasn’t an option when he and Cyrene needed to be able to live together without being bothered by anyone else. Usually, Phainon would spend the commute catching up on some reading, but today, he figures he might as well use the time getting the most pressing of matters over and done with. Once he’s got a seat on the bus, he pulls his phone out from his pants pocket and hits speed dial.
The other line picks up on the fourth ring. “Hello?”
“Hey Mom,” Phainon chimes, putting a smile on his face so that a sense of cheer will more readily seep into his voice. “Sorry I haven’t called in a while. How have you been?”
Phainon doesn’t actually remember his childhood stint in the hospital all too well, so what details he does know about it come from what his mom and dad have told him over the years:
He was committed when he was five, after his parents brought him to the nearest emergency room, which even then was still more than an hour’s drive away from their countryside wheat farm. Phainon had collapsed in the fields during a routine controlled burn, and though he hadn’t seemed visibly injured at all, he wouldn’t stop sobbing and screaming and shaking, acting as if he was in horrendous pain. He remained delirious and inconsolable throughout the entire drive over, and once at the hospital, he even had to be sedated when he ended up lashing out violently at a nurse who was trying to calm him down.
When Phainon awoke in a hospital bed nearly twenty-four hours later, he was a lot less disruptive, but still extremely disoriented.
His parents worried at first that it might have been some sort of adverse reaction to smoke inhalation, but the longer he spent as an inpatient in that hospital, the clearer it became that Phainon’s affliction was more mental than physical. When he slept, he had horrific night terrors. In his waking hours, he would tell his doctors about various fantastical and disturbing delusions where he would have to watch everyone he loved die right in front of him, or worse, where he would have to kill everyone he loved with his own two hands. Occasionally, he would simply go rigid and unresponsive, his eyes terrifyingly blank as he endlessly babbled on to himself in incomprehensible gibberish.
The doctors were at a complete loss. For months, they cycled through several different diagnoses, none of which seemed to stick around for very long before being replaced by a new one. For a brief period, his parents were even suspected of child abuse, although that thankfully didn’t end up sticking. Eventually, Phainon was transferred to another hospital in Janusopolis, one that employed more experienced specialists in child psychiatry, which was so far away that it required his parents to temporarily leave their wheat farm in the care of Cyrene’s parents and rent an apartment in the city so that they could still be close to him.
About a year into his treatment was when Phainon’s condition suddenly and rapidly improved. He no longer seemed to be experiencing delusions or psychosomatic pains, so once he was considered stable enough, he was finally allowed to go home. None of the doctors seemed to really understand what had been wrong with Phainon in the first place, but nobody wanted to question his miraculous recovery.
In retrospect, Phainon now has a much clearer picture of that whole situation. He knows that the “gibberish” he was speaking in the hospital must have been the native language of his past self, a language that he still remembers crystal clear but that does not exist anywhere in his current world. He knows that he never actually stopped seeing those “delusions”, but once he realized that nobody was taking him seriously, he simply decided to stop talking about them. He knows that when he walked out of that hospital at age six, he was still bearing all of those scattered, fragmented, torturous memories.
Even that young, Phainon already understood that he would never be able to go back to normal, but he did his best to pretend anyway. Everyone in Aedes Elysiae knew that he’d been hospitalized, but he only ever met their sympathy and concern with bright smiles and boyish assurances that he was perfectly okay now. He managed to get away with it most of the time—either all of the other adults in town genuinely believed him, or it just served them fine enough to act like they believed him.
Except, of course, there was Cyrene.
Phainon and Cyrene had always been close. Their parents were both neighbors and friends—still are, in fact—and with an infant Cyrene having been adopted by her parents a mere three months before Phainon had been born to his own, the two of them basically grew up together. But they’d not been able to see each other at all while Phainon was in the hospital, and though they’d spoken occasionally over the phone, he’d been so guilt-ridden by how he had killed all those other versions of her, all those other Cyrenes from Phainon’s memories who had shared her same face and voice and name, that he never stayed on the line for long before bowing out with the excuse that he wasn’t feeling well.
Once forced to interact with Cyrene face-to-face again, however, Phainon simply couldn’t keep up his smiles the same way he could with everyone else. He couldn’t so much as glance at her without being reminded of her limp body in his arms, her blood spilling out of her in a pool that gleamed golden instead of red, the color of her divinity and his sin painted all over his trembling hands. He couldn’t truly act like just a normal kid in her presence, and initially, his way of trying to deal with this was to avoid her entirely.
Thing was, Cyrene refused to let him avoid her. She saw straight through to how strangely he was acting, and she repeatedly tried to coax him into talking to her about it, but how could Phainon possibly tell her the truth? How could he curse her with the knowledge of their past lives, of the sheer tragedy of their previous world, when he himself wished that he had never remembered any of it at all?
In the end, though, it turned out that this had never been up to him. Because after only a week or two of Phainon making increasingly desperate plays at evading Cyrene, she was the one to make matters clear once and for all. She was the one who found him hiding in the forests after his first day back at school, snagged him firmly by the wrist before he could flee from her, and hissed at him pointedly, “Please don’t run away, Khaslana.”
Phainon froze up instantly, because Khaslana was his true name only in that inscrutable world from his nightmares, and in this world, their current world, his name since birth had only ever been Phainon. So with his heart stuttering in his chest, Phainon whirled back towards Cyrene in shock, and the moment their gazes met, they both saw the understanding dawn in each other’s eyes. They both knew.
“…You remember?” Phainon whispered in the tongue of their past, testing the waters to see if she would understand, even as it scared him just how easy it felt to curl his tongue around syllables that were ostensibly foreign to it.
“I do,” Cyrene professed, following his lead in speaking their old language as a soft, sad smile crossed her face. “In fact, I remembered before you ever did.”
Phainon keeps on chatting with Mom up until the very moment he has to step off of the bus at his stop, and after she agrees to let him go with a pleased giggle, he hangs up feeling reasonably confident that this will be enough to tide her over for a while. Phainon talked about his classes and life on campus, Mom talked about her and Dad’s work planting the new wheat crop, and the entire conversation was nice and familiar and comfortable. It was a way to prove to both his mom and to himself that Phainon is holding it together just fine out here.
She doesn’t need to worry about him. Really. Phainon was able to endure over thirty million cycles of the Flame-Chase. There’s no reason he shouldn’t be able to endure something as utterly mundane as college.
With renewed determination, Phainon now pockets his phone and soldiers down the block to face down his next challenge of the day: Philosophy 101. His single most harrowing class of the semester, not necessarily because of the subject matter itself, but simply because of the professor who teaches it. In fact, Phainon’s first instinct when he recognized the name on his schedule was to try switching to another class section, but there’s evidently only one instructor teaching introductory philosophy right now. And although Phainon hasn’t yet decided on his major, he knows that if he ends up anywhere, it’s going to be on the humanities track, so he might as well just get this class over and done with as soon as possible.
Besides…some part of Phainon does appreciate being able to see how Anaxa is doing.
Today, like always, it seems that Anaxa is doing just dandy. Today, like always, Anaxa sweeps into the classroom a few minutes late, all bombast and show as he immediately launches into his lecture without so much as greeting his students first. Today, like always, Anaxa litters his lesson with complaints about his department head, the dean of the school, and university policy in general, but somehow still manages to circle right back around to making all of his unhinged tangents be about philosophy again.
He’s a headache. He’s a whirlwind. He’s so many students’ absolute worst nightmare. In a lot of ways, he hasn’t changed at all from how Phainon remembers him.
And yet, Professor Anaxagoras Skemma, as he’s called in this new world, doesn’t actually remember that old version of himself. Or at least, he showed not even the slightest hint of surprise or recognition when Phainon first showed up in his class, and he has given no indication since that he might have recalled anything of their previous lives. It’s certainly not impossible that Anaxa could simply be pretending not to recognize Phainon, but even if that is the case, Phainon is not about to go purposefully shattering the man’s peace.
To this day, neither Phainon nor Cyrene knows for certain why they both came to remember—and perhaps they never will—but they have reason to suspect it might have something to do with their previous statuses as Chrysos Heirs of the Prophecy. After all, both of them recalled their past lives at very young ages, but Phainon’s parents and some of the other villagers of Aedes Elysiae, who had recognizably also existed in that past world, never displayed even a hint of remembering. Perhaps Anaxa throws a wrench in that theory, as he’s about a decade older than Phainon and seemingly hasn’t remembered anything himself, but if there’s even a chance that those horrifically tragic memories might still return to him, then Phainon desperately wants to prevent that from happening for as long as it can be helped.
So Phainon has to consciously make an effort not to do anything that might trigger Anaxa’s memories to come back. He has to bite his tongue down on the ever familiar Professor Anaxa to instead always address him properly as Professor Skemma. He has to dutifully attend class but actively stop himself from participating during discussions, simply blending in quietly amongst the other thirty or so students. He has to carefully water down his essays and purposely get a certain amount of answers wrong on tests so that he’ll earn the most average grades possible, high enough to pass the class but low enough to make him utterly unremarkable in Anaxa’s view.
Phainon’s goal is to come off as the single most boring, uninspired, mediocre student that Anaxa has ever taught, so that after the semester is over and they both move on past this class, Anaxa won’t even remember him. And sure, it’s exhausting for Phainon to constantly have to curate his own behavior, but it’s all worth it if it means that Anaxa will continue to live simply as his current self, entirely unburdened by the past.
“I hope you all found that suitably enriching,” Anaxa proclaims now, evidently drawing his lesson to a close a good five minutes late as he pulls out a stack of papers from his briefcase to set atop his teacher’s desk. “Now, I’ve graded your latest essays, so when I call your name, pick yours up and take your leave. Don’t hold everyone else up by asking questions. If you wish to discuss your score, you know my office hours.”
With that, Anaxa picks up the top paper on the pile to call out the first name, and that poor student has to come running up to take the essay from Anaxa and then fearfully flee the classroom. As Anaxa continues to read off names and point students out the door, Phainon quickly throws his pencil case and his notebook into his open backpack in preparation, and he doesn’t have the time to properly zip it closed before the call of his own name has him immediately tossing his bag over his shoulder and rushing up.
Phainon’s first instinct is to shoot Anaxa a sheepish little grin, but as he’s always actively fighting his first instincts whenever he’s in this class, he instead winds up simply grabbing his paper with little more than a stone-faced nod of acknowledgment. Phainon could swear that Anaxa shoots him a pointed look as they lock eyes—still not recognition, Phainon doesn’t think, but there’s definitely some sort of judgment weighing down that one-eyed gaze. The very next second, though, Anaxa is already calling the next name, so Phainon hastily hauls ass out of there, and once in the hallway, he glances down at the score written in red pen at the top.
Seventy-two percent. It’s not significantly worse than the scores Phainon had gotten on previous essays, which were all in the seventy-five to eighty range, but it is worse, so perhaps Anaxa was simply expressing some mild disappointment. Phainon might have to aim just a little bit higher next time, then.
Geez. Acting like a perfectly unremarkable student is actually a lot harder than it sounds.
There are more detailed critiques scribbled in red further down the page, but Phainon will have to look at those properly later. For now, Phainon simply sighs, lets his still-open backpack slide down his arm, and searches through it until he finds the correct folder to pull out. He puts his graded essay inside before slipping the folder back into his bag, and this time, remembering Cyrene’s warning from this morning, he makes sure to zip the flap firmly shut before slinging the bag back over his shoulder.
His next class for today is across campus and starts in fifteen minutes. Best get moving.
Where exactly Cyrene came from has long been something of a mystery to the people of Aedes Elysiae. Everyone in town knew the story of how she’d gotten adopted—a married couple had discovered an infant in the forests outside of town, and after rushing her to the nearest hospital to ensure she was alright, that couple kept in touch with her nurses, petitioned for custody, and ultimately wound up adopting her as their daughter. But it had never quite been clear just how a baby had been left in those forests in the first place, because as far as anyone had known, nobody in town had been with child, nobody from out of town had recently come into the area, and furthermore, her pointy ears and vaguely elfen features that weren’t shared by anyone else for miles suggested that her lineage originated from someplace well beyond the borders of Aedes Elysiae.
“Mom and Dad like to tell me that I’m a child blessed by the fairies,” Cyrene told Phainon, in the immediate aftermath of the reveal that she remembered their past lives, too. “They say that they saw something in the forest that day, something that led them to me, and they think it was a fairy that wanted me to end up with them. Perhaps that sounds like a tall tale, like they’re trying to soften the fact that I was wrapped up in a trash bag and abandoned in the woods, but…I can tell that they both truly believe it. That’s probably why they’ve never batted an eye whenever I’ve said strange things to them.”
The way Cyrene explained it, her own memories had sort of always been there, and they had come back to her slowly, gradually, over the course of her life. She had sometimes mixed up what was her reality with what was a past memory, but her parents, rather than outright dismissing those moments as fantasy or delusion, had simply guided her through learning to tell the difference. Her parents hadn’t necessarily realized that what Cyrene was experiencing was visions from over thirty million past lives, but they’d both accepted that their daughter had a special, perhaps even genuinely magical way of seeing the world, and thus, they’d never really made a big deal of it.
“So, your memories never made you freak out the way I did?” Phainon asked, bitterly picking at strands of grass as the two of them sat side-by-side beneath the trees.
“Not as such,” Cyrene affirmed. “Even if the memories themselves were sad or frightening or horrific, they returned to me in a manner that was…gentle, you could say. Like steady ripples on a pond, rather than a massive, crashing wave.”
Great. Meanwhile, Phainon had basically had the most painful and violent and traumatizing of his memories slam into him all at once when he’d been five, and then he’d spent all of the next year surrounded by doctors who could only pathologize him for it.
Phainon huffily threw the torn-up grass to the side and swallowed hard. “But…you do remember what I did to you.”
“I remember the promise that we made together, Khaslana,” Cyrene said, rephrasing his words with pointed emphasis. “I remember that we both chose to start the cycles, but you were the one who had to keep bearing the burden of it. I can never truly understand what you went through, but I know it must have been horribly difficult and unimaginably lonely.”
It’s not like Phainon, at age six, was able to remember every single detail from every single cycle. Even now, at age nineteen, Phainon knows that the memories he’s recovered over the years are blurred, incomplete, piecemeal. A collection of assorted jigsaw pieces taken from over thirty million different puzzles, where it’s inherently impossible to fit everything neatly together into a single coherent image.
But even as a child, what Phainon remembered more clearly than anything was how heavy it had felt to carry all those millions of Coreflames. He remembered, not necessarily in detail but just in sheer overwhelming totality, what he’d had to do to get all of those Coreflames. He remembered his conviction, his despair, his anger, and most of all, he remembered the crushingly horrible weight of guilt, guilt, guilt.
As Phainon tried to blink back the rapidly rising flood coming to his eyes, Cyrene reached over to tuck her arms around his neck, firmly yanking him into a tight and tender hug. “I’m sorry,” she whispered into his ear. “I’m sorry that I left you alone for all of those cycles. I’m sorry that I couldn’t help you when you remembered. I’m so sorry for everything. But I’m here now, Phainon. I’m here.”
That was the last straw. Ugly tears finally spilled over, and as Cyrene rubbed one hand over his back and ran the other through his hair, Phainon was helpless to do anything but curl up against her and bawl like a baby. He buried his wet face in Cyrene’s shirt, sobbing uncontrollably into her shoulder, his mind still wracked with sorrow and shame but also awash with a newfound sense of relief. He was six years old and yet so many lifetimes older, but Cyrene was in the exact same boat. And although Phainon still wished deep down that he had never remembered any of this at all, at least if he did have to remember, he didn’t have to do so alone.
“Phainon,” Cyrene murmured once his hiccupy sobs had calmed down, “there’s something I want to show you.” She shrugged her bright pink schoolbag off of her shoulders and opened it to pull out one of her notebooks, the cover light blue and adorned with a six-pointed star that had been drawn in pen. “Here. Take a look inside.”
Curious, Phainon took the proffered notebook into his hands, and when he turned to the very first page, he was met with handwritten words that he recognized a little too quickly for comfort. The scrawl came off as childish, clearly written by an uncoordinated hand, but the actual letters on the page were instantly far more familiar to him than the ones that he had only barely started to learn before he’d been hospitalized. He knew this alien alphabet so intimately and instinctively that he could read it without even having to think.
After taking in a couple of haphazard sentences, Phainon glanced back up to meet Cyrene’s gaze. “Cyrene? What is this?”
“You could call it a journal, I suppose,” Cyrene answered. “Recently, I’ve started writing down everything that I could remember. Some of those memories might not have been important. Some of them might not have even made any sense. But I…I just needed a space to let them all out.” Her hand reached out towards his own, gently caressing the back of it as his fingers curled around the notebook. “And I think…I think I’d like for you to share this journal with me.”
Phainon furrowed his brow. “Share it? What do you mean?”
“I mean, take it home with you tonight. Read my entries, and then write your own, and then give it back to me at school tomorrow so that I can read your entries and write new ones myself. Back and forth. Rinse and repeat.” Cyrene smiled at him, earnest and hopeful. “An exchange diary, written in a language that only the two of us can read. It’d be our perfect little secret.”
“But what would I even write about?”
“Anything you might want to vent. Anything that you struggle to say out loud. Or you could simply write about how your day was, if that’s all you feel like sharing. Whatever you want.” Cyrene put on a puppy-dog pout, her eyes wide and her lips quivering. “I just…I think I’ve needed this all along, really. I needed to share this with someone. And now, I can do that with you. That is, if you’ll agree to let me.”
Well. How could Phainon possibly say no to that?
From that day forward, their exchange diary would always exist in some form or another. Always a blue notebook with a hand-drawn star on the cover, always written solely in the dead language of their shared past, always to be meticulously destroyed by fire once all its pages were full to then be replaced with a fresh new blank notebook. All throughout elementary, middle, and high school, writing in it was their important tradition, a way for both Phainon and Cyrene to discuss all the things that they could only tell each other, without anyone else being able to decipher their words.
Even now, in college, the exchange diary remains an important part of their lives. Even now, writing to each other is an ingrained habit that neither of them can shake, because when it comes to so many topics about their previous world, it still just feels safer to jot things down than to discuss them out loud. Even now, a star-marked blue notebook has a dedicated presence in their shared apartment, usually placed somewhere that they can both easily access and only hidden when one of them—usually Cyrene—brings a guest over.
All these years, it really has been their perfect little secret.
That’s how it should always stay.
Phainon’s second class of the day is taught by a professor who is not nearly as stress-inducing as Anaxa but who’s a stickler about students not looking at their phones during class. Thus, it’s only afterwards, when he turns his phone back on after having already found a seat in the canteen for lunch, that Phainon realizes he received a text from Cyrene a little over an hour ago:
[Cyrene:
Phainon, PLEASE tell me you have the exchange diary with you. I left it on the coffee table last night and it’s not here anymore. I think you might have packed it into your bag by accident.]
That’s entirely feasible, considering his little mishap this morning, so Phainon promptly zips open his backpack to check if the diary might have snuck its way in amongst all his class notebooks. But he flips through the entire bag, twice, and then he takes out everything and piles it all out on the cafeteria table just to make sure he’s not somehow missing it. Even then, there’s no sign of any blue-covered journal.
There’s a bad feeling forming in the pit of Phainon’s stomach now. He quickly texts Cyrene back.
[Phainon:
It’s not with me]
[Phainon:
You’re SURE it’s not anywhere at home?]
[Cyrene:
Positive]
Well, shit.
If it was up to Anaxagoras, he would focus solely on his own research rather than spend time teaching classes, but teaching is what will get him tenure here, and he actually likes Marmoreal University enough that he’d prefer not to get kicked out of this one. He doesn’t even dislike teaching in and of itself, as he has had the pleasure of guiding some truly bright and fascinating young minds, but encountering such students is a disappointingly rare occurrence. It’s especially rare in Philosophy 101, where just about everyone enrolled is a freshman, here either out of idle curiosity or simply to satisfy some base degree requirement.
Today, Anaxagoras returns those students’ latest papers as he sees them off, and once the last student has piled out the door and he’s left alone in the classroom, he slumps back against the blackboard and sighs. Most of those essays demonstrated only a rudimentary understanding of the topics, and it was clear that their writers had no real desire to deepen their knowledge. A few had genuine potential, but only time will tell if those students wind up going anywhere in this area of study. One particular student’s paper had concealed sprinkles of truly original thought amongst the same uninspired drivel parroted by his peers, and Anaxagoras doesn’t know why this boy seems so insistent on actively sabotaging his own performance in this class, but it’s not really any of his business.
So the 101 students are tiring, and worse, incredibly dull, but that’s only to be expected. For now, Anaxagoras takes the time to recover from them by staring up at the ceiling and letting his mind flit through rote thought experiments before abruptly snapping out of it, re-energized. He pries himself away from the wall and snatches his briefcase up from the front table so he can leave, but as he’s walking towards the door, something catches his vision out of the corner of his working eye.
A splotch of bright blue stands out against the mundane white of the classroom’s floor tiles, and that’s curious enough to prompt Anaxagoras to stride closer to get a better look. A composition notebook, most likely left behind on accident by one of the students just now, though he doesn’t know which student seeing as the front label where one might typically write down their name or a class subject simply has a hexagram scribbled on it. Anaxagoras picks the notebook up off the floor to check the back, just in case there might be a label there, but no such luck. Normally, Anaxagoras wouldn’t want to snoop, but he’s sure whoever lost their notes would rather get them back intact than see them thrown out by janitorial staff, so he opens the notebook to the first page on the off chance that the owner’s name might at least be written there.
Anaxagoras does not leave the classroom for a very long time.