Want: Shadow Hunter

Nico woke at eleven seventeen because his phone slipped out of his hand and hit him in the mouth. He lay still for several seconds, staring at the ceiling while the pain in his lower lip slowly registered. The phone had landed beside his head with the screen still glowing, the last chapter of Ascendant Hunter open where he had apparently stopped reading sometime after four in the morning. He remembered meaning to finish one chapter. Then the protagonist had entered a new dungeon, which obviously meant he had needed to see the first fight, and after the first fight there had been a skill evolution, and stopping immediately after a skill evolution was practically hostile design.

Nico rubbed his face and checked the time again, as if the numbers might improve under scrutiny. 11:18. They had not. An email from the employment site reminded him that the warehouse inventory position he had saved three days ago would stop accepting applications tonight. Another notification informed him that the online course he had paid for in January had released Module Eight. Nico was still halfway through Module Two. Below both sat a message from his mother, sent forty-three minutes earlier.

If you’re awake, can you bring the laundry down? I need to run a load before I leave.

Nico typed yeah, put the phone facedown on his chest, and closed his eyes. Answering and getting out of bed were technically separate tasks. Five minutes would make no difference. He opened his eyes again at eleven thirty-six.

“Excellent,” Nico muttered.

Getting upright made his back complain in three different places. He had fallen asleep half-curled against the wall, one leg trapped beneath the blanket and the other hanging off the mattress. At twenty-five, sleeping incorrectly had apparently become enough to injure himself. He stretched until something cracked between his shoulders, then caught his reflection in the dark monitor across the room. He was average height, despite what Nico considered several compelling arguments that average ought to be taller, with shoulders broad enough that old shirts still gave him a more athletic silhouette than he deserved. He was also wearing the same black T-shirt he had worn yesterday. There were worse things. He could think of several.

That did not make this one better. The laundry basket had been sitting beside his closet since Tuesday. Nico carried it downstairs against his stomach, taking each step carefully because the clothes blocked most of his view. Halfway down, his thighs already felt more involved in the process than they should have. He adjusted his grip, nearly lost a towel over the railing, and tried not to think about the fictional protagonists who ran mountains carrying swords before breakfast.

His mother sat at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee and her tablet propped against the sugar jar. She looked up when he entered, eyes moving from Nico to the basket and then briefly toward the clock above the stove. She did not comment on the time. That almost made it worse.

“Thanks,” she said. “Just leave it by the machine.”

Nico carried the basket into the laundry room. On the way back he passed the narrow hook beside the pantry where his father’s old jacket still hung. Nobody had moved it. There was no particular reason not to. It wasn’t expensive. It wasn’t ceremonial. It was just a brown work jacket with one frayed cuff and a small paint stain near the zipper. His mother had washed almost everything else eventually, boxed some things, donated others, left a few where they had always been. The jacket had somehow escaped every decision. Nico looked at it for half a second too long and continued into the kitchen.

His father’s mug was still in the cabinet too. Blue ceramic, chipped near the handle. Nico had nearly used it twice since the funeral without thinking and had put it back both times. He opened the refrigerator. Leftover rice. Eggs. Half a rotisserie chicken. Yogurt. A plastic container of something his mother had cooked the night before that looked better than anything he was prepared to make for himself.

“You eating before I go?” his mother asked.

“Probably.”

She lowered the tablet. “Probably meaning yes?”

Nico looked into the refrigerator again. “Statistically.”

“Nico.”

“Yes. I’ll eat.”

She gave him the look she had developed over the last few years, not quite suspicion and not quite exhaustion. Mostly it meant she had learned that when Nico said he was going to do something, he generally believed himself at the time.

“Did you look at that job I sent you?”

“I saved it.”

“I know. It tells me when you save things.”

Nico shut the refrigerator. “Then why did you ask?”

“Because saving a job isn’t applying for it.”

“Technically, it is a necessary precursor.”

His mother stared at him.

Nico sighed. “I’ll apply.”

“Today?”

“Yes.”

“Before midnight?”

“That would be required by the deadline.”

Her mouth twitched despite herself. “You know what I mean.”

He did. That was generally the problem. Nico understood what people meant often enough. It was the ritual surrounding the meaning that seemed unnecessarily elaborate. His mother wasn’t asking whether he possessed basic temporal awareness. She wanted to know whether she could trust him to follow through without checking again at nine, ten, and eleven thirty.

“I’ll do it before dinner,” Nico said.

“Okay.”

She accepted that without another question, picked up her keys, then paused beside the kitchen doorway. She looked tired. Not dramatically tired. Nothing cinematic. Just the permanent kind that seemed to have settled more deeply into her face over the last few months. Nico noticed it. Knowing why did not produce anything useful to say.

“Maybe go outside today,” she said.

“I went outside yesterday.”

“You took the trash to the curb.”

“That is outside.”

“You know what I meant.”

“I know.”

His mother shook her head. She was still smiling faintly when she left. The front door closed a few seconds later, and the house became quiet in the particular way it had learned to be recently. The refrigerator hummed. Something in the wall clicked as the air conditioner started. A truck passed outside, bass rattling faintly through the windows. For half a second Nico expected another sound from down the hall. A cough. A cabinet opening. His father’s footsteps moving from the living room to the kitchen. Nothing came. That still happened sometimes. Nico found it more irritating than painful, which then made him feel vaguely guilty because irritating seemed like the wrong response.

He made eggs. He ate them standing at the counter while reading three more pages of Ascendant Hunter on his phone. The protagonist had finally reached Level Forty. Lucky bastard. By one fifteen, Nico had opened the warehouse application in his browser. He had also opened his email, the company’s website, a tab explaining whether inventory associates needed forklift certification, another confirming that this particular position did not require it, and the forum he usually kept open on his second monitor. The application itself had not changed in twenty minutes.

Describe a time you demonstrated initiative in a professional environment.

Nico stared at the empty text box. There were answers he could give. He had worked before. Short-term jobs, mostly. A grocery store after high school. A shipping center for nine months. Call-center work that had lasted just under four. None of it had ended catastrophically. That almost would have been easier to explain. He simply stopped functioning properly after a while. Missed a day, then another. Let laundry pile up. Stayed awake too late. Started arriving tired. Every task became heavier until eventually losing the job felt less frightening than continuing to wake up for it.

His father dying had not fixed that. For a few weeks afterward, people had treated Nico as though tragedy might automatically reorganize him. Relatives asked whether he was helping his mother. Neighbors spoke to him in a different tone. There had been paperwork, phone calls, accounts, forms, things that needed signatures, questions about the house and insurance and what came next. Nico had handled some of it. Then the world kept moving. He had not transformed into whatever kind of person everyone seemed to assume should emerge from a funeral. That remained inconvenient. Nico put his fingers on the keyboard. A notification appeared in the forum tab.

LightQueen replied to you in: Why does nobody test passive skills properly?

His hand moved to the mouse before he thought about it. The thread was sixteen pages long, four of which were mostly Nico arguing with three strangers about whether the protagonist’s passive regeneration likely scaled from maximum health or missing health. The author had never specified. This had not prevented anyone from developing strong opinions. LightQueen’s newest reply sat beneath something Nico had posted at three fourteen that morning.

LightQueen: You have once again invented seventeen mechanics the author definitely did not consider.

Nico smiled despite himself and typed.

ShadeNight: That does not make me wrong.

The answer came quickly enough that she was probably already online.

LightQueen: Unfortunately.

ShadeNight: Also it is six mechanics. Seventeen would be excessive.

LightQueen: Thank god you have standards.

Nico leaned back in his chair. LightQueen had been on the forum almost as long as he had. Six years, maybe a little more. The account existed before they had started talking regularly, back when most of their interaction consisted of disagreeing under recommendation threads and accusing each other of terrible taste. Somewhere along the way she had become the username Nico expected to see. He knew she was a woman. He knew she worked somewhere involving meetings she hated and one supervisor she referred to exclusively as The Lich. He knew she had a younger sister, liked terrible romance subplots while pretending she didn’t, and had once driven six hours for a convention only to spend most of it complaining that the food was overpriced.

He did not know her name. She did not know his. That had never seemed especially important.

LightQueen: Did you apply for the warehouse thing?

Nico stared at the message.

ShadeNight: Why do you remember that?

LightQueen: Because you complained about the personality test for twenty minutes.

ShadeNight: It asked whether I strongly agreed that rules should always be followed.

LightQueen: And somehow you turned that into an ethical crisis.

ShadeNight: Poorly written question.

LightQueen: Shade.

Nico looked over at the untouched application.

ShadeNight: Working on it.

Three dots appeared almost immediately.

LightQueen: You opened it, didn’t you?

ShadeNight: That is part of working on it.

LightQueen: Apply before you start another argument about fictional health regeneration.

ShadeNight: Authorial ambiguity has consequences.

LightQueen: Application.

Nico minimized the forum. The warehouse question remained exactly where he had left it. He exhaled through his nose and started typing. It took forty-one minutes. The actual application probably required twelve. By the time he submitted it, Nico felt less satisfied than he had expected. There was no little flash of accomplishment. No internal shift. Just a confirmation page thanking him for his interest and informing him that qualified applicants would be contacted. That was it. Nico stared at the page, waiting for his brain to acknowledge that he had done the thing he had been avoiding for three days. Nothing. He opened the forum again.

ShadeNight: Done.