Death As We Know It

TROIS: LE VIOLONCELLISTE

An impermeable silence descended upon the large room, swathing us in a layer of quiet so thick it seemed to reach its arms down my throat and strangle me. Despite the feeling of cotton balls in my mouth (Which made me want to gag), I pushed onwards, doing my best to ignore it and focus on the work in front of me, but it was no use. My mind had begun to wander, and there was no reeling it in.

"You should go back."

I turned to seek out the quiet unfamiliar, accented voice that came from behind me.

"What?" Ahmet asked from my left, turning also. Journ looked up.

The boy, who couldn't have been older than sixteen or seventeen, sighed slightly, as if the effort of just talking was enough to exhaust him mentally.

He was quite pretty. You might be thinking, 'Pretty? You surely mean handsome.'

No, I mean pretty. On their own, his features weren't particularly remarkable, chapped lips and a thin, hooked nose, but when put together, he looked as if he had just stepped out of a renaissance-era oil painting, each brushstroke placed with care, designed to make the viewer feel something inside them.

He was small, but not thin, with an athletic build. His tanned skin was dark, not so dark as Ahmet's, but enough to shimmer faintly under the laboratory lights. His wide, brown eyes followed us awkwardly, wringing his hands so that the knuckles turned a sickly

yellow-white colour

'Oh' my brain said to me 'Il est très joli.'

"You can try to.." He trailed off, glancing down at the small phone he held in his hand. He looked back up at us. "You should try to base the serum on the short telomere. Rather than the long" Finishing his point, his shoulders slumped slightly with relief, in seeing that we had understood him.

Ahmet turned back to his table, dark eyes skimming over the numerous experiments he had already conducted. He hummed quietly to himself, which I learnt later, was a sign of nervousness in my usually calm partner. "So you're saying that we should try to repair the telomeres, rather than prevent them from shortening in the first place?"

The boy nodded.

Falling silent, Ahmet turned back to his table again.

Journ raised a hand to stop the boy from speaking again, though I doubt he would have anyways. "Sorry, but can I just ask, who the actual fuck are you?" He asked, but there was no venom behind it.

"Journ" Ahmet hissed. Journ shrugged.

The boy stuck out a thin hand, and quickly withdrew it when no one else followed it through. "Yevan Nikolaevitch Vlashenko."

Ahmet turned to him again, having thought through Yevan's suggestions. "And you, you're a medicine major?'

He shook his head.

"Mortuary?"

Shook his head.

"Biology?" Ahmet guessed, getting increasingly exasperated.

Yevan shook his head again. "Classical music." He said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, which I guess it was. I only realised later, that, in comparison to the rest of his body, his hands were that of a musician. Long and lithe fingers, steady and quick, whereas the rest of him was uncertain, shaky and flighty. Those same hands were twisting anxiously into the other, in a gesture I knew all too well.

Journ raised a condescending eyebrow, Ahmet tapped his hand, telling him without words to refrain from saying anything. And he was right. Who were we to refuse the help and ideas of someone who offered them, especially in our current position?