Caspian Krawley - Capitol [FINISHED]

Lab coats and ties and smart shirts. Perfectly polished boots with a gold-plated watch to finish. Trousers, jeans, nothing too fancy. Square-shaped glasses for a square-shaped jaw line to finish, perched on top of a bumpy nose, huddled over a microscope with one eye shut in a wink. Fine fabrics, patterns, materials - the hints of a rich but subtle man. Smart and sophisticated. Just the way I like it.

A hard-set line of a mouth, an almost-permanent crease between my brows in a concentrated scowl - squinty blue eyes searching, searching, searching for answers. Weary, tired, bloodshot-lined pupils from hours and hours of work. My hair is combed neatly into a brunette mop under control for work - other days, day's off (but I've never had a day off in my life), it's another story in itself. Nothing more than a slight trace of a genuine smile has ever crossed my lips. I'd rather not pretend to look happy.

I don't feel.

At all. My parents would joke that it was because I loved science so much. Focused on elements and liquids and numbers than people and places and things. Instead, I chose inanimate, lifeless things. But cells are living things, I'd point out. Humans are living things. Emotions might be living things, too. But I wouldn't know. My insides are made of stone, concrete, metal that is freezing to the touch. I am ice, numb. Heartless. Blood courses through my veins. My pulse almost deafening in my ears. There's a beat, beat, beating that proves I'm alive. But am I really? Physical pain, yes. Stab me with a knife, my nerves scream. Leave me in the water too long, my lungs ache. Make me run and run and run until my muscles want to collapse. But emotions? Not a chance. I don't even know if I feel them or not. How can I? I study and study and study and think I know what I'm looking for - but perhaps they're there. Perhaps I'm looking too hard. But I've spent 25 years looking, searching. Almost to the conclusion that I'll never find them. That there's nothing in there. If you opened me up, my insides would be in pieces that somehow fitted together, yet lacked something you couldn't put a finger on. There is something missing inside of me, right between my ribs. Something empty, waiting to collapse.

I've never really had friends. Unless you count co-workers and the lab equipment as friends. I don't need friends. I never had. To me, it's normal to be alone and it frustrates me that people don't understand that. Blunt, straightforward, emotionless. Someone may crack a joke and I'm the only one who doesn't succumb to an eruption of laughter. Compliment me on my work with a friendly smile and I'll choke out a thank you. My habitat is the water and my habitat is the walls of a laboratory. Places you can be alone. Escape. But what am I running from? I spend my days answering question after question with fact and evidence and detail - yet I can't even answer my own.

Don't get me wrong - I want to feel. I want to feel. More than anything else in the world. Just feel, for a moment. Hour after hour I spend studying, researching, finding, finding, finding. Searching for answers I may never find. Answers I may never know, may never uncover. There's a scientific explanation for everything. So there has to be one to explain me, right?

I can't remember a day in my life in which I have not worked for hours on end. All I know how to do is work. Work, work, work. It's tiring, but at least I serve a purpose there. Even growing up, I worked on my own little projects. My own experiments. Making people trick others and reading their responses. Hunting down the kids that cried and asking them how it felt. Recording them all down in a teeny little notebook hidden under my bed. Studying the tributes. Watching them cry, scream, yell. Wandering how it felt. Wandering what feeling was.

Little notebooks moved on to text books, folders, folios, whiteboards and screens with data jotted down in scrawly handwriting. Statistics, numbers, figures, facts, graphs and lines and colours. Trying to understand. Wanting to understand. Wanting to feel mad that I could find any other answer but this. Wanting to feel frustrated that I could work out the hardest, most complex math equation, yet still not understand the practical side of my science. Emotion became my greatest fear, my worst enemy, my friend and accomplice. Something I did not want to meet, yet longed to learn more of. So I stored those great big files in great big cabinets and vowed not to stop until my task was complete.

When the lab did not beckon me, the water did. I always valued places you could be alone. Uninterrupted. At peace. I'd slip into another world and be on my own. Let my thoughts glide smoothly like the currents that streamed past me. And only then did I realise that perhaps I was feeling, but I didn't know it. Perhaps I had been feeling all along. But others could not see it. Or, maybe I just wasn't showing it. Had my life been so constricting, so caught up in work that I had failed to learn how to express them? More questions piled up and up and up into a sea of confusion that I plough through day after day. Experiment after experiment. The ocean is large, and it’s hard to find one little pearl when I've never seen one.

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lyrics; comfortably numb - pink floyd
fc; sebastian stan