You, In My Sight (MXM)

-2025

The morning fog curled low over Calderra like a sleeping beast, thick with the scent of concrete and rust. Streetlights blinked lazily through the mist, their glow refracted in puddles that littered the uneven sidewalks. Somewhere beyond the smog and distant skyline, a siren wailed—faint, urgent, and quickly swallowed by the hush that clung to dawn.

The archery range lay deserted, soaked in silver light.

Oskar stood at the far end, alone except for the bow in his hands—fingers wrapped around the grip like it had a pulse. His posture was a sculpture in precision: spine taut, shoulders squared, eyes narrowed with the kind of focus that made breathing feel optional. He didn’t notice the gulls circling above, nor the wet sting of wind crawling past the collar of his hoodie. His entire world had narrowed to one inhale.

One moment suspended.

Thwip.

The arrow cut the air in a clean, confident arc and pierced the target dead center, splitting the bullseye like it had always belonged there. A shot fired not from impulse, but from certainty—like a memory returned to muscle.

A low voice broke the silence. “Show-off.”

Florian’s voice always came without weight, like mist through a crack. He stepped onto the range without fanfare, his footsteps swallowed by the slick concrete. No jacket, just a faded charcoal sweatshirt with the sleeves shoved to his elbows and hands buried in the kangaroo pocket. His breath fogged in the cold, but he didn’t seem to feel it, like he’d learned long ago how to ignore what wasn’t useful.

“You’re early,” Oskar muttered, not turning around.

“You’re always early,” Florian said, lips curving into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “I adjusted.”

He came to stand beside Oskar—precisely beside, not behind or ahead, not too close and never too far. The kind of placement that unsettled people by its exactness. But Oskar didn’t flinch. He never did. Not with him.

The silence stretched like a held breath.

“I was dreaming again,” Oskar said finally, voice soft, as if the fog might listen too.

Florian’s eyes didn’t move from the target. “About?”

“Someone was holding my draw back. Wouldn’t let go.”

Oskar’s fingers twitched at the memory, thumb brushing over the bowstring as if retracing the restraint.

“Did they say why?”

“No. Just… held it. Like they wanted me to aim forever.”

Florian turned his head slightly, studying Oskar in profile. “Maybe they thought you’d miss.”

Oskar’s jaw clenched. A flicker of something passed behind his eyes—anger, maybe, or recognition.

“Or maybe,” Florian added after a beat, voice quieter now, “they wanted to see what you’d do when the shot wasn’t yours anymore.”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was thick. Taut. Like the final pull before a release.

Oskar turned his head, finally meeting Florian’s gaze. His face was unreadable. “Why do you always talk like that?”

Florian blinked slowly, as if the question didn’t require a fast answer. “Only to people who understand it.”

And just like that, the tension between them fell back into rhythm, an invisible thread pulled taut, not to break, but to bind.

“Did you have breakfast?” Oskar asked, voice neutral but edged with something softer—habit, maybe, or care disguised as routine.

Florian exhaled through his nose. “Yeah. Jonas baked something unidentifiable again. Claimed they were pretzels.” He tilted his head, recalling the taste. “They weren’t. But edible. Kind of like salted clouds.”

Oskar gave a quiet nod, lowering his bow slightly, but not his guard. His eyes still scanned the target, mind moving faster than his tongue.

“Your clicker’s off.” The observation came out casually, but his tone clipped the end of the sentence, like a coach who’d said it too many times.

Florian didn’t bother looking at his equipment. “I know, Oskar. I noticed last practice. It’s just—finding time to replace it is a pain.” He stretched his fingers once, twice, as if the issue irritated him more than the faulty gear.

“We can go today, if you want.” Oskar’s voice was quieter this time. “I’ve got time after lectures.”

Florian turned, a slow smirk curling at his lips. “Sure. I think I finish before you anyway. I’ll wait in the cafeteria. Might even bring snacks. Something better than Jonas’s salt clouds.”

Oskar allowed himself a half-smile, just a flicker. Then, without another word, he lifted the bow again.

He adjusted the grip like it was second nature. Sight lined. Inhale slow. The stabilizer heavy and grounded. The subtle click. A stillness so pure it felt sacred.

Then release.

The arrow flew, slicing clean through the air, and buried itself in the center of the target with a sound like finality.

Florian watched it land, then glanced at Oskar’s expression—calm, unreadable, almost bored.

“Show-off,” he muttered again. But there was no malice in it. Just a familiarity that had settled between them like breath in cold air—always present, always seen.

Oskar packed with the same methodical grace he brought to archery—limbs efficient, movements spare. He slipped each arrow back into its case without clatter, unstrung the bow in one smooth motion, and folded the limbs with practiced ease. Not a wasted gesture. Not a second lost.

“See you later,” he said to Florian, who was crouched nearby, tying a loose shoelace like it owed him something. Oskar’s voice was even, but something in it lingered, like a hook left in the air.

Florian looked up just long enough to nod. “Don’t forget about the clicker.”

Oskar gave the faintest smirk, then turned and made his way toward the locker hall.

The corridor buzzed with low chatter and the scuff of wet sneakers. Most students left trails of damp footprints and disheveled bags in their wake, but Oskar moved like a knife through water—clean, unobstructed. He reached his locker near the end of the row.

It was unmistakable.

While every other door was coated in stickers, layered with Sharpie graffiti and half-peeled tape—inside jokes and passive-aggressive notes—Oskar’s was pristine. Smooth metal. No adornments. The small silver lock glinted in the corridor light like a sealed promise.

He twisted the dial and opened the door. Inside, his equipment sat already arranged from previous days—arrow case to the right, bow limbs stacked by weight, chalk bag, spare finger tabs, everything in crisp alignment. He slid today’s bow gear into its designated slot, tucked the strap away, and snapped the locker shut.

A brief pause in front of the mirror.

He peeled off his base layer and slipped into a heather gray hoodie, soft and minimal, the kind you wear not to blend in, but to keep the world out. His jeans sat just right on his hips, casual but curated. He raked a hand through his hair—jet black, the sides and back cleanly undercut, the top smoothed into place with just enough hold to suggest it stayed that way naturally. The mole beneath his lower lip caught the light for a split second. So did the slight peach flush rising high on his cheeks.

His features were sharp but not severe—double-lidded eyes that looked dark indoors but glowed amber in sunlight, brows that slanted in ways that made people think he was always judging something.

He wasn’t. Not always.

Satisfied, he zipped the hoodie halfway and slung his backpack over one shoulder. The hallway smelled of wet wool and cheap cologne, but it faded behind him as he made his way through the arching glass doors and onto the path toward the east wing.

Chemical biology.

His least favorite class. But his best performance. The irony wasn’t lost on him.

He adjusted his bag, slipped one hand into his hoodie pocket, and disappeared into the quiet foot traffic of the campus—head high, back straight, as though even the fog parted for him.

The lecture hall buzzed low, a sea of rustling notebooks and the lazy tap of keys. Fluorescents flickered overhead, the kind that hummed in just the wrong frequency, and the projector cast washed-out diagrams of metabolic chains onto the wall like they were sacred scripture.

Professor Yvain didn’t look up when Oskar entered. No one did.

He moved to his usual seat near the back—fourth from the window, two from the aisle. It gave him a clean line of sight and minimal exposure. Oskar sat without noise, unzipping his bag, pulling out a mechanical pencil and a square-grid notebook already half-filled with his neat, slanted handwriting.

He flipped to a fresh page. Dated it. Wrote the lecture title.

Then didn’t write anything else.

He stared at the diagram on the board—glycolysis, broken down step by step—and blinked slowly. His focus didn’t drift. It detached.

France had been cold that year. He remembered it, even though he had no real memory of China. One year old when they adopted him—too young to keep the shape of anything before. But France had stayed. Specifically, the outskirts of Toulouse. The villa with iron gates and ivy walls. The taste of heated milk with honey. The quiet hum of looms in the textile workshop on the property.

His mother’s voice—measured, melodic, the kind that soothed through closed doors. His father’s absence—a quiet consistency, like wallpaper.

He’d grown up surrounded by wealth that didn’t want to be flashy. Minimalism made expensive. Rooms arranged by decorators, not memory. Childhood toys donated before they became sentimental. Photos curated into albums where he smiled on command.

They adopted Isak three years later, a baby with a sharper cry and a different temperament. Two Chinese boys in a French household of legacy and linen.

On paper, it was perfect. International adoption, private education, fluent trilingualism by the age of eight. The Dumat name carried weight in fashion circles. Their parents made sure they were seen, but not watched. Protected, but not quite embraced.

Oskar had been their golden child. Smarter. Quieter. Beautiful in that way that made strangers linger a beat too long.

He learned early that performance was not optional—it was currency. Whether at cello recitals or student council debates, he learned how to win. How to say just enough. How to be palatable.

Isak never followed the script.

They clashed often—more so after moving to Calderra for university. The friction between them had calcified into coldness. They shared the apartment like borders in a truce—same walls, different orbits.

Oskar hadn’t minded. He never needed closeness. Not with him. Not with most people.

Except Florian.

His eyes drifted to the margin of his notebook, where he’d doodled a target between lecture lines last week. One perfect circle, bisected by a neat line.

Professor Yvain’s voice slipped back into focus, mid-sentence. Something about enzymes. About regulation.

Oskar wrote the word down absently.

Regulation. A concept. A life.

He rolled his pencil once between his fingers and sat back, expression unreadable, posture clean. From the outside, he looked like any other student lost in thought. But inside, Oskar Dumat had a catalog of memories arranged with surgical precision—adoption papers, cello competitions, the way French lavender smelled in late spring.

And somewhere between them, a pair of dark eyes that always met his like they were measuring his every movement.

Florian.

He blinked, then resumed note-taking.

Professor Yvain paused mid-sentence, marker hovering just above the whiteboard where a string of chemical reactions sprawled in green ink. Her eyes swept the room like a radar, locking onto Oskar in the back with clinical precision.

“Monsieur Dumat,” she said, her voice crisp, cutting across the murmuring keyboard symphony. “Would you care to explain the role of phosphofructokinase in glycolysis?”

A few heads turned—not because anyone expected him to falter, but because it was rare to hear his name spoken aloud.

Oskar didn’t look up immediately. He clicked the end of his pencil once, calmly, then lifted his gaze. His eyes were unreadable, a shade of brown that caught gold when the light hit, but right now, they were cold glass.

“Regulatory checkpoint,” he said. “Catalyzes the phosphorylation of fructose-6-phosphate into fructose-1,6-bisphosphate using ATP. Rate-limiting step. Allosterically inhibited by high levels of ATP and citrate. Stimulated by AMP.”

He blinked once. “Would you like the structural breakdown too?”

A pause.

Professor Yvain offered a small nod, not quite approval, not quite surprise. “That will suffice.”

Oskar lowered his gaze again. The room settled back into its hum, but the air around him felt crisper somehow, like the sound of glass tapping against porcelain. He didn’t smile, didn’t smirk, didn’t shift. Just resumed writing, as if the moment hadn’t belonged to him at all.

But it had. And everyone knew it.

The moment the professor dismissed them, the room swelled with movement—chairs scraping, bags zipping, conversations flickering to life like matches.

Oskar moved slower.

He closed his notebook with precision, slid it into his bag, and capped his pencil before tucking it into its narrow sleeve. His motions were deliberate, unfazed by the buzz around him. He waited until most students had filed out before standing. No rush. He never needed to be first. He just needed to move when he chose.

The hall outside was quieter than before, the fog having receded into mist-streaked windows. He walked with his hands in his hoodie pockets, the soft rhythm of his sneakers echoing against the polished floor tiles. A few students passed him, offering brief nods, half-smiles. He didn’t return them.

He turned the corner into the central atrium—high ceilings, glass panels dappled with condensation, a faint smell of espresso from the student café below.

Florian was already waiting.

He was perched on the edge of a sun-warmed bench near the vending machine, a cup of coffee balanced loosely in one hand, legs crossed at the ankle like he’d been there for hours or just arrived—it was always hard to tell. His sweatshirt had changed; now a faded navy with a small tear at the shoulder seam.

Oskar slowed but didn’t call out.

Florian looked up anyway, like he’d sensed him before he saw him.

“You survived the enzymes,” he said, standing as Oskar approached. He tilted his head. “I assume you dismantled the question and the professor with equal elegance.”

Oskar shrugged. “She tried.”

Florian’s smile curved, lazy but not unkind. He handed him a cup—the second one, still warm. Oskar took it without asking what it was.

The two of them stood in silence for a moment, tucked into the half-shadow of a nearby column as students passed like currents. The quiet between them wasn’t filler—it was weight-bearing, like scaffolding holding up a space no one else understood.

“Want to go now?” Florian asked, nodding toward the doors. “We can get the new clicker, maybe pass by the shop near Rue Équinoxe. You like the one with the upstairs vinyls.”

Oskar gave the faintest nod, took a sip of the coffee. “Sure.”

They didn’t say anything else

Together, they moved toward the exit, side by side—never touching, never speaking more than necessary. Just Oskar, neat and unreadable, and Florian, all quiet intention and watching eyes.

Whatever they were, it was something constant. Something practiced. Like archery. Like precision.

And the city, just beyond the glass doors, waited for the shot.