Lune began reading crime reports by accident.
A headline surfaced while he was scrolling idly through the news—another brief article framed in familiar language: investigation ongoing, authorities declined to comment, no suspect identified. He clicked without intention, expecting to skim and move on.
He did not.
The article was sparse, deliberately so. Dates. Locations. A sequence of facts arranged to suggest order without explanation. The absence of motive lingered between paragraphs like a withheld confession.
Lune read it twice.
Not for shock—there was none—but for structure.
He noticed patterns immediately. Timing irregularities. Geographic spacing that suggested intention rather than randomness. The language used to reassure rather than inform. The careful avoidance of detail.
He searched for a second article. Then a third.
Soon, he was reading analyses, timelines, forums where speculation replaced official narrative. He did not engage. He observed. He mapped.
Crime reporting, he realized, functioned like performance.
There were roles—victim, investigator, public. There were beats—discovery, fear, reassurance. There was an unspoken agreement about what would and would not be shown.
Violence itself was rarely the focus.
Control was.
He found himself intrigued not by the acts, but by their aftermaths. The way silence followed. The way communities recalibrated. The way narratives rushed in to contain uncertainty.
The people who committed these acts—anonymous, faceless—interested him only insofar as they disrupted systems and then vanished into them.
Disappearance fascinated him.
Lune began setting aside time to read. Late at night, when the city softened and his phone stopped buzzing with industry updates. He read police statements and noted their limitations. He read about suspects who were never named, cases that went cold without explanation.
He noticed how quickly public interest waned. That, more than anything, caught his attention.
At a certain threshold, even violence became background noise.
Lune felt something shift—not excitement, not arousal—but focus. His thoughts sharpened, aligning around a new axis. Crime presented variables that fame did not. It introduced unpredictability without requiring emotional participation.
It was intellectually stimulating.
He did not fantasize. He did not imagine himself involved. He observed from a distance, the way he always had—with curiosity unmarred by feeling.
One case, in particular, held his attention longer than the others. The details were minimal. The pattern precise. The silence afterward complete.
He closed the article and sat back, considering the shape of his own life.
Fame insulated him.
Visibility protected him.
Silence surrounded him.
The contrast intrigued him.
Violence, he understood dimly, created silence through entirely different means. Not managed. Not curated.
Earned.
The thought did not disturb him.
It lingered.
Lune shut down his phone and lay back on the bed, eyes open, mind active. The void he had noticed earlier had not filled—but it had narrowed, reshaped by curiosity.
Violence intrigued him not as desire, but as concept.
As a system.
And systems, he had always been very good at understanding.
Somewhere beyond his awareness, another man had already mastered that system completely—had learned how to use violence to regulate himself the way Lune used fame to disappear.
Their paths were not crossing yet.
But the alignment had begun.
And Lune, for the first time since the applause faded, felt something approach—not emotion, not longing, but anticipation.
Something was missing.
And now, he was close to seeing its outline.