Ari began watching bodies the way he once watched sound. Not with curiosity at first—but with necessity.
He needed to understand why some actions produced silence and others only produced more noise. The difference mattered now. He could not afford mistakes. Mistakes drew attention, and attention brought interference.
So he observed.
At school, during physical education, he watched how students fell when they collided—how momentum transferred, how balance failed. He noticed which impacts caused sharp cries and which resulted in stunned quiet. He cataloged the difference between panic and pain, between shock and fear.
He did not smile. He did not react.
He simply noted.
When a boy tripped and scraped his knee, Ari watched the aftermath more than the fall itself. The blood drew adults immediately. The crying escalated the response. Noise multiplied.
Later, another student hit their head lightly on a locker—no blood, just a dull impact. The student went quiet, disoriented, blinking rapidly.
The hallway settled faster.
Ari felt the difference register internally, precise and unsettling.
He began noticing how bodies responded under pressure—not emotional pressure, but physical. Which movements stopped sound quickly. Which created chaos. Which left marks that demanded explanation.
He did not frame this as cruelty. He framed it as mechanics.
At home, he paid attention to his own body too. How his muscles tightened when overwhelmed. How his breathing changed under stress. How certain sensations overrode others completely.
Pain, he noticed, was efficient. It simplified things.
The world became smaller when pain entered the equation—reduced to immediate sensation, stripped of complexity. Sound flattened. Thoughts narrowed.
Ari understood why it worked now.
During science class, the teacher spoke about anatomy, about systems and responses. Ari listened intently, eyes fixed on the diagrams projected on the wall. Nervous system. Reflex arcs. Fight-or-flight responses.
His pen moved quickly, sketching shapes he did not need to label.
After class, he lingered, staring at the poster near the door showing the human body in clean, color-coded layers. Skin. Muscle. Bone.
The structure fascinated him.
Not aesthetically. Functionally.
Bodies were systems. Systems could be disrupted. Disruption produced predictable outcomes.
This was different from breaking objects. Objects shattered randomly. Bodies followed rules.
That night, Ari lay in bed and replayed the day—not with excitement, not with revulsion, but with focus. The observations aligned with something already forming inside him, something that felt inevitable rather than chosen.
The noise hummed softly beneath his ribs.
He did not act on it. Not yet.
But his attention had shifted permanently. He was no longer looking for release alone.
He was looking for precision.
And as the thought settled in, Ari felt a faint tightening in his chest—not anxiety, not pleasure, but fascination sharpening into something more durable.
Understanding, he realized, might offer deeper silence than impulse ever could.