The changes began around him before they began within him.
Voices cracked in the hallway. Laughter grew louder, more erratic. Boys shoved each other with new intensity, testing strength and hierarchy. Girls whispered in clusters, glancing sideways, their conversations sharp with urgency.
Lune observed it all with quiet focus.
Teachers spoke more often about "transitions" and "emotions." Counselors appeared during assemblies, discussing growth and confusion and feelings that were "perfectly normal."
Normal, Lune noticed, looked exhausting.
His classmates were volatile now—angry one moment, euphoric the next. Small slights escalated into conflicts. Crushes bloomed and collapsed in dramatic cycles. Tears appeared without warning. Jealousy simmered beneath friendships that had once been effortless.
Lune felt none of it.
He noted physical changes in himself—height, strength, a deeper register to his voice—but inside, nothing shifted. His thoughts remained orderly. His emotional landscape stayed flat and navigable.
At school, this made him valuable.
Teachers paired him with students who were "struggling." They asked him to mediate disputes, to help calm group projects teetering on collapse.
"You're so level-headed," one teacher told him. "It's a gift."
Lune accepted the compliment with a small smile.
Peers began to seek him out too—not for intimacy, but for stability. They talked at him, unloading fears and frustrations, mistaking his attentive silence for understanding.
"My parents don't get me," one boy complained.
Lune nodded at the appropriate intervals.
"I don't know what's wrong with me," a girl whispered once, eyes wide with panic.
"That's normal," Lune said softly, echoing the counselors' language.
They left relieved. He remained unchanged.
At home, his parents watched him with growing gratitude. Compared to the chaos they heard about from other families, Lune seemed untouched.
"We're lucky," his mother said one evening. "You're handling this so well."
Lune watched her face carefully. Relief sat there, deep and genuine. She needed him to be this way.
He could provide that.
He refined his performance further, incorporating the subtle roughness of adolescence—occasional impatience, mild sarcasm, carefully timed frustration. Enough to blend. Never enough to alarm.
No one questioned his lack of emotional turbulence. They mistook calm for health, control for maturity.
Lune did not correct them.
Inside, he expanded his internal log. Hormones altered behavior patterns, but not unpredictably. Desire, insecurity, aggression—all followed recognizable arcs.
Adolescence was not chaos.
It was noise.
And noise was easy to navigate if you stood still.
One afternoon, as he passed a group of boys arguing loudly near the lockers, Lune slipped by unnoticed, his presence unremarkable. Their attention was consumed by their own turbulence.
Invisible again.
He felt a familiar satisfaction settle in his chest—not joy, not pride, but alignment.
The world was changing.
He was not.
And that, he understood, was exactly how he would survive what came next.