She tapped her pencil nervously against the desk and tried not to stare openly at the empty space beside her like so many others had done. Simply removing the desk closest to the window on the right side didn't change the fact that Hope Esthiem had sat there all year until three days ago, it simply highlighted that he was now just a l'Cie –a nameless enemy of unknown power and number. People had filed into class and done their best to pretend as if nothing was wrong; as if one of the kindest people she had ever had the pleasure of meeting hadn't been irrevocably changed and was no being hunted down like a dog because he had gone to see the fireworks.
The Purge had come to Bodhum, countless people had been killed because they had been exposed to the vestige, the Pulse Fal'Cie in a manner that didn't even suit their dogs because of fear. That all-consuming emotion that made them scared of what they didn't understand and made them unwilling to even see a different angle, it made everyone who thought like that a sheep and unfit to life in the world. The mass hysteria that was caused by Pulse was understandable, after all they were taught that Pulse was hell and that anyone exposed to Pulse through the Fal'Cie or l'Cie that it produced had to leave Cocoon or it too would become hell.
A large part of her didn't buy into that mentality. History said that some humans had remained on Pulse and that some went to live in a land created by Lindzei and Eden. If all humans lived on Pulse didn't mean that they were all infected somehow, that their infection was a manner of degree. It must be something like cancer, every person born had cancerous cells inside of their body but it was luck, good genetics, and proper life choices that kept someone from developing the disease that killed so many every year. Did that mean that people were born to a predisposition to be infected, corrupted by Pulse?
That also didn't quite make sense, if Hope had been so virulent that even his desk had the ability to make you sick enough to purge then everyone in the room would have to be purged as well. If that was the case then everyone that Hope had ever been around would need to be removed from society as well, killed by men like her brother for no good reason other than fear. After all Hope hadn't sat in his desk since before going to Bodhum where the people had been taken from to be purged, Bodhum was four or five hours away from Palumpolem by rail depending on the day and influx of traffic.
In her mind's eye an image of the boy who'd been in her class since kindergarten flashed in her mind, the shy kind momma's boy that had always had kind words to say to her, flashed with a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. Her stomach roiled violently and her eyes fell full upon the space where his desk had been, the place where they had highlighted his loss like they had highlighted his face on the news yesterday.
Hope had been her friend, one of the few people that he talked too because of his social awkwardness, and now he was gone. Probably dead with so many others just because he had been in the wrong place, just because people were so afraid of the unknown that they wanted those touched by it killed.
Mass hysteria at its finest.
She remembered her proud, PSI-COM Major brother on his knees in their kitchen crying and throwing up because of what he had done. He had seen people, he had been ordered to kill people who had done nothing wrong besides being too close to the Pulse Fal'Cie.
Now seeing Hope as an enemy of Cocoon, seeing a boy she'd grown up with as a l'Cie the stories about them stopped adding up, stopped making sense. Hope was a boy who got his lunch money stolen and shoved into lockers; he couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag without help. He had been forced into doing something, which made the Pulse Fal'Cie a rapist of sorts. When had they started punishing the raped for the acts of their rapists?
"Miss. Weriv?" the soft intonation of her teacher brought Kaylyn's attention back to the real world, where she was staring at the empty place where a desk should've sat with silent tears streaming down her cheeks. "Are you alright?"
No she wasn't, nothing was ever going to be alright again. How many other empty desks, empty chairs, empty cubicles scattered all over Cocoon were people so studiously ignoring. How much effort were the people in those spaces expending trying to pretend as if there had always been a gap there? How could they do such a thing when her heart was breaking to pieces in her chest as she remembered every walk home, every lunch time conversation, every movie watched, every trip to the gas station, every day at the pool, every moment she had spent with one of her dearest friends. He had been quiet and withdrawn from almost everyone but she had gotten to know Hope, seen much of his depth and understood him.
Hands trembling she began to collect her materials, placing them back with a meticulous precision that was a shallow attempt at keeping every part of her together. Everyone was going to pretend as if Hope Esthiem had never existed and in a few days or weeks they could convince themselves that he hadn't but she wouldn't be able to. Too many days, too many hours with one of her closest friends, her best friend prevented that. Hope had been like one of her brothers, the sibling that hadn't been fifteen years older than her. He was as much a part of her heart as her blood brothers, as her mother and father.
There were whispers now, words that she should be purged too because she felt sympathy for someone who wanted to kill them all. It was how it started; they would be destroyed too for just being around her believing that it had spread somehow to the uninfected populace before the l'Cie had left Palumpolum. Kaylyn couldn't muster the strength to make some comment about how she was worried for her own family since the l'Cie had been found hiding out in the same district that she lived in.
All she could manage was to look into her teacher's eyes with a hollow feeling swelling inside until it had taken up all the room but still expanding onwards. Ready to burst with that sensation and knowing that the agony was only moments away Kaylyn swallowed thickly and willed herself to look him in the eye. "They're going to kill Hope and you expect us to go on with our lives like he never existed."
With that she got up and left the classroom, moved with slow footsteps as desperation grew inside of her. By the time Kaylyn's feet hit the concrete stairs leading up to the front doors of the school she was running, running like the bullies were chasing her and she was seven again, running down the path she always took home with Hope. She ran because she didn't know what else to do with her world falling to pieces around her.