Like most sane people who had an eye for it, Adam kept it to himself.

His friends were understanding creatures for sure, he was certain he could tell them anything and they'd hardly bat an eye save for a bit of teasing.

'Still,' he asked himself, 'why would I tell them? It's not weird, there's another word for it... psychotic? No... deranged.'

He thought himself deranged most of the time, he enjoyed deranged things after all. He enjoyed cupping Anna's cheeks and whispering the most depraved things he could conjure up just to watch her pupils dilate and her cheeks go a burning red as Hazel decimated her from behind. He loved screams, cries, tears even. But the authoritarian himself liked to stay relatively quiet outside of the bedroom, even if at the bands home he was a bit more vocal.

People watching became one of his favorite things to do as a morbidly suicidal teen. He'd sit and watch the cliques and posses and teachers at school, trying to figure out why he just didn't fit in anywhere besides the obvious. He was shy, and coming out as trans early in his adolescence in a small town hadn't been as rewarding as one might've hoped. His parents were supportive, they always were and they'd taken him out to get all the things that would help him feel more secure in his transition.

It wasn't that most people were mean save for a few he'd rather not think about. It was that once he came out, when Jezibel became Adam, it seemed the trans effect worked backwards. He was more invisible as Adam than he ever was as Jezibel. He could slip by undetected and unacknowledged, and there was a sense of power in that for a while.

Then he'd started to spiral about it.

Sometimes he'd sit in front of the mirror and tug at his hair in sorrow. Being invisible had been nice at first, but when you're invisible, no one can see you. It was a no brainer, but it really sunk in his senior year. He could count on not even a full hand the amount of times he'd been addressed directly from sophomore year to graduation.

During that time, the only emotions that weren't invisible were the darkest ugliest ones: depression, anxiety, self loathing, and done. Most would argue that being "done" isn't an emotion, and he'd sock them right in the jaw for that.

"Done" was whisper crying to himself, curled up in a ball on his bathroom floor trying not to disturb or alert his parents.

"Done" was raising his hand in class and being overlooked over again and again and again and eventually, ceasing the urge to even try.

"Done" was dragging a handcrafted spring lock assisted blade over his pale skin and crying with relief as all of the pain left his heart to find his wound.

And that's when he'd found out a disturbing thing about himself. It became not even about diverting the current of agony, it was the pretty crimson liquid that splattered on the floor and left abstract designs. It was rich, warm and then cool against him. The sight had started to do... things... to him.

It was sensual.

It was horrifying.

It had taken him an official five years to stop doing it.

He'd been caught one day when he thought his mother and father were gone overnight to a couples retreat. He just was making toast, he wasn't really hungry but he knew he should eat and he had some down time. So shing went the blade and then after a few minutes of blissful silence, soundless footsteps turned into a frantic run that startled him.

His father stared at his arms, the arms usually covered by a hoodie every day that he had never even thought to look at. There was so much blood, Adam knew his dad could smell it.

They both stared at the gash, the much deeper cut as a result of being jumpscared, and watched as more blood came. Too much; way, way too much. The last thing he remembered was getting hot and bothered even past the burning stinging pain.

Everything went black for a while. He loved the blackness, he fell in love with it. The kind of thrill he felt at the peacefulness there, real, true peacefulness, was amazing. He knew he was alive and he prayed to every god that he would just die. He was tired of being invisible, but as it turned out, being visible to his father had been terrible too. He couldn't win. There was a dragging shackle of loneliness so intense that even there in the oasis of nothing, he felt its heaviness. So he hoped with all his heart he would flatline.

He just wanted to be done. He was done.

And then the darkness started to brighten up. It was warm and blissful so he imagined himself sitting on a beach soaking up the sun as it grew ever closer.

Adam Johansson was not afraid to die.

As it came close enough to reach out and touch, things got weird. Glitches. Memories that were broken into pieces with random irrelevant details. Singing. He heard music as discordant and wonderful as he felt.

His hand touched the blinding light, or it must have.

Unfortunately– or fortunately depending on how one looked at it— he woke up to a real bright light being shone into his eyes. He wanted to wince away from it, but past a small twitch his body and chest felt sore.

The light disappeared and he started to gain more sensation starting in his toes and fingers. "Adam, can you hear my voice?"

It was unnecessarily loud and ringing, there was no way he couldn't have heard it. He tried to give a thumbs up but a wave of nauseating pain brought him into a cold sweat.

"Welcome back. We lost you for a minute there but you're a real soldier."

The next few days were filled with immense disappointment. He'd died, he'd been done, and yet some cruel force had electrocuted him until he wasn't. His blood transfusion had happened almost immediately. They called him lucky, AB+ was supposedly rare and his rarity had saved his life.

What a joke.

The black sling cradling his left arm was going to be a temporary addition to all of his attire for at least four weeks. He could feel the tingle of pain past the sluggishness of his mind. Looking down at it, the skin was swollen and angry around the cut, but it was stitched together with perfect accuracy. It was pretty in a way.

The psych ward was brutal, but tolerable. Monotonous schedules, simultaneously decent and horrendous food, making eye contact with someone while you pee, and laying awake at night counting until 15 minutes had passed when his door would crack open to make sure he was still alive.

The sling, he'd found, wasn't an absolute nuisance. He's ambidextrous, so anything his left couldn't do anymore his right arm had to pick up the slack. The worst part was showering and hovering his arm adjacent to his body and trying to fight back the nausea from medication and the emptiness of that place.

It was official, he was no longer invisible. They'd deemed he was a danger to himself when he used his superpower, so they'd taken it away for good. But he had enough power, as little as it was, to tell his mother and father to stay away. He didn't want them to see him like this. He didn't want them to see how empty his eyes looked, how hollow his cheeks were getting, how shaggy his hair was now. He didn't want them to be there when the nurses dressed his wound or pressed on his sternum when he'd grow faint and dissociative.

After 3 1/2 months of nonstop intensive inpatient therapy, he was given his ticket to freedom. When his parents were called they asked his permission to come and pick him up, rather than him riding the greyhound home.

He'd expected anger. He'd expected betrayal and hurt.

Instead when he was released, his mom and dad held him for 20 minutes outside of the hospital. They didn't even say anything to him for a long while.

His mother had slid into the backseat of the car with him and held his head in her lap while he tried to cry silently like he was accustomed to. But he couldn't remember how.

"Adam," Daun, his mother, had told him, "We see you."

How did she know? Was she able to see the edges of him fading out of existence?

His dad, Don, readjusted the mirror. "You don't have to hide anymore."

In the backseat of his dad's car, driving 75 miles an hour down the highway, Adam realized he'd been hiding for years. Years.

A mass of memories like he was dying again flew past his eyes in barely legible meaning. He skipped social interactions, he never raised his voice above a low murmur, and he often could be found in the closest thing to the corner of everywhere he went with his hands shoved in his pockets as he watched what he could've had that whole time.

He was pretty much on bedrest for the next month, trying to remember his bedroom and how the quilts felt against the palms of his hands. His bed still had a squeak. Did he think that would've changed? Why?

Abyss was nowhere to be found. Obviously his parents would have thrown it away, but he'd hoped his midnight black knife would've been put back at some point. Not to use it, just to feel its weight in his hands and imagine the blood rushing through him.

He'd be taking iron supplements for the majority of his 20's now, if not for the rest of his life. It was miserable, but it was a task that kept repeating itself enough to become a tether.

The main thing that kept him going was their dog, Andi. He'd sat at the foot of Adam's bed, ready to be cuddled when he returned back to his bedroom to blankly lay in the dark. When he'd returned home, Andi jumped up from his bed and gave him so many kisses he'd had to wash his face twice. He took the sole duty of taking care of Andi: feeding him, watering and walking and exercising at regular and perfect intervals. He found he enjoyed taking care of something, and soon enough those thoughts turned to someone. Dating hadn't genuinely crossed his mind in years, but he knew he was gay. It was a shaky start, but a start nonetheless.

One evening that summer, his parents watched him shovel an entire plate of spaghetti down his throat. Testosterone injections were starting to take their hold even more, and he was constantly eating when he wasn't exercising (mainly to gain muscle tone back in his arm) or writing. One could even call him chipper nowadays, though what he had been through had mellowed the definition by quite a bit.

"Adam."

He glanced up and lowered the fork, carefully chewing as he looked between the two of them.

His father's forehead was a bit shiny with sweat, his lips were tightly pressed together and he was clutching his napkin like it was the secret to life.

His mother's worry lines were showing just a tad, and the smile she had was lackluster at best. She seemed to be on the verge of saying something else if you paid close enough attention, and Adam always paid close enough attention.

They were nervous. And he didn't know why.

"Sorry. I'm so hungry." He'd been making sure not to eat like a complete pig (did guys even care about that?) but triple checked with a napkin. His parents had just looked at each other and back at him. "Is everything okay?"

"We wanted to know... if you'd like to go to college," His mother asked with a prim tone.

Adam chuckled and leaned back in his seat. "You're finally kicking me out, huh?"

"We're well off enough to fund an apartment until you get on your feet, but we'd rather you go to college and fund that. What are you interested in, big guy?" His dad grinned. "Besides boys." He did raise an eyebrow at his poor table manners though, and Adam sighed as he returned to the ground.

"Honestly? Nothing."

His parents started shifting uncomfortably at that. It was the truth, but he knew factually many of his old classmates years ago hadn't known what they wanted either. That wasn't why they were nervous, then.

"Do you know how we told you we went to Golden State Cambridge University?"

Adam nodded quietly.

"W-well. That's not exactly the truth. At all." His dad swallowed and dropped the napkin, his eyes breaking from his sons to dart around briefly.

Adam almost instantly recognized that look of uncomfortable tension: it was the reaction of someone being looked at hard enough for them to feel it on their skin. He wasn't even trying to be weird, he was just looking at him as casually as he could so they'd keep talking. His shackle nurse (the nurses that always accompany a particularly suicidal gentleman like himself) had told him time and time again he had a very intense gaze. When he'd started to feel more human and less hollow, sometimes he'd test that by staring at a random person facing away from him. Somehow he was always caught, and every time it resulted in a small chuff of laughter and amusement.

"Dad, you guys can just tell me. Why is this important for me to know?"

His mother left the table, and at first he'd thought he'd said something to upset her. But her posture and walk held nerves, not upset. She returned with a certificate, one for her and one for his father.

Adam skimmed them once, twice, three times and then turned away. He was sure he'd make it burst into flames if he kept reading. "What?" It was all he could ask.

"When your father and I were your age, we met at Nova Academy. The story is relatively the same, the setting isn't."

Adam cracked a smile. "I guess lay it on me then?"

That January, he started halfway through the school year at Nova Academy. He was a ball of nerves the entire first week until he'd seen her. A girl, which had nudged his gayness over a notch toward homoflexibity.

It was absolutely love at first sight. The way she walked, the way she smiled and giggled was the very best part of every day. He quietly pined for her and even had started talking to her casually during class. She was pretty and fun and street smart like he was. They'd related about the struggles of gender, they sat next to each other in Gender Studies and he'd even almost asked her to the dance that year.

But, of course, for every inch forward he was taking, he had to be kicked back a few miles.

He met those miles when he officially met Hazel.

He and Hazel had barely spoken about it past a couple of backhanded remarks, but the rivalry between them was clear. Every time Hazel so much as looked at her he wanted to haul a desk over his shoulder right into his stupid head. Things were like that for a while.

Then came Steven Universe, the kindest guy with the most genuine personality he'd ever met, no offense to anyone else. Steven had an air about him that Adam sensed others didn't notice.

Ghosts. Not real ghosts, but it was like he had one foot in the past, one foot in the present and one arm in the future. Reaching. Steven Universe reached. No one could know exactly what he was reaching for, not until they saw the way he looked at Connie Maheswaren.

Steven pined after Connie without a single iota of self consciousness in the public eye, and with Connie and Anna being best friends, Hazel being Steven's roommate and Jacob, Jasmin and Alex face planting into the whole affair, it had indoctrinated Adam (to his complete and utter surprise after being invisible for so long and just barely starting to completely come out of his shell). The people around him quickly inspired him to reach for his own wants.

Oh, and on an off-chance, he'd fallen for that overrated asshole Hazel in the process.

Now he was here.

"And that's basically my life story." He punctuated that with a long breath and closed his eyes as he tipped his head forwards. He'd been avoiding their eyes the entire time. His story was dark and sad until the absolute very end. There was always a stink of pity the few times he'd ever told it all, and he couldn't bear to look it in the face. "The floor is open. Ask anything you want."

A voice distinctly Stevens for no particular reason, cleared its throat before he spoke. "Any question?"

"Yeah. I basically have just exposed everything about myself. I've got nothing else to hide."

Steven nodded. "Right." He paused as he formulated the question in a tactful way. "Are both of your parents actually named a variation of 'Don'?"

"Steven!" Connie scolded sharply. "Really?"

"He said we could ask anything!"

Adam chortled and forced himself to at least face them, even if his eyes stayed on the ground. "Yeah, Daun and Don. I actually narrowly avoided being named D-A-W-N."

Jacob inhaled sharply enough that he unintentionally caused attention to himself.

"Jacob, don't you dare," Jasmin warned. "I will deprive you of gratification I swear it."

His eyes darted to hers for a second before they shut. "It's right there. It's so easy."

He ended up letting out the three ominous notes used in cheesy horror movies anyways, prompting a smack and a bunch of giggles.

"Can we hug yet?" Hazel asked miserably. "I just wanna hug my boyfriend."

"Same." Anna and Hazel wrapped him in their arms and soon the entire band was squeezing so tight he almost couldn't choke out for help.

"I'm so glad you're still here."

It didn't matter who'd said it.