Chapter Text
Everything was normal before the new guy moved into the house across the road from Dan.
He woke up at lunchtime as he usually did and checked his blood pressure, temperature, heart rate and oxygen saturations like he did every single day. His mother was at work so he made his own breakfast and lounged lazily on his bed as he ate, she hated it when he ate in his room but she wasn’t there to judge him today so he was able to do it without being lectured. When Dan was younger he had a nurse, who would come in to check his vitals and make him something to eat and keep him company during his mother’s work hours, but now that he was twenty-one it was decided that he was mature enough to take responsibility.
It hadn’t been easy to convince his mother, she was a doctor and knew about the dangers of Dan’s condition all too well, but as he had told her, what would be would be, he was old enough to take care of his own health and smart enough to decide when his health was at serious risk. He missed his old nurse though, she had been a plump woman with kind eyes and a plethora of stories to tell. Whenever Dan was feeling down she would instantly make him a cup of tea and tell him about the time her daughter decided she wanted to be buzz lightyear and how she wore the costume every single day without fail, for an entire month. Or how her son had suddenly decided eyebrows were ugly and had shaved his off, needless to say he had immediately regretted that decision.
So, deciding that it was time for Dan to look after himself, even with his mother’s input, it was a difficult move to make. For Dan, his nurse had been the only person, other than his mother and various doctors that he had seen when he was much younger, that he got to talk to. She had promised to stay in touch but Dan had ended up never hearing anything more from her. He missed her.
His life had turned into a boring pattern of waking up, checking his vitals, forcing himself into the shower and staring out of the window at a world that was so close to him and yet utterly unattainable. It was like showing a dog a bone and telling them that they couldn’t have it. All Dan wanted was to step outside and smell the fresh air, but that was impossible, he would have to make do with the filtered, temperature regulated air that was being pumped around the house. The safe air; the air that wouldn’t kill him.
Dan was allergic to everything, actually that wasn’t the right term to use at all as usually an allergic reaction was brought about by an increased immune response caused by exposure to an allergen but in Dan’s case he had no white blood cells, he didn’t have an immune system to create the mass response. The tiniest little bacteria that even a baby could fight off would have a field day in Dan’s body, replicating itself unprohibited and taking over entirely.
He had a condition called Severe Combined Immunodeficiency, or SCID, it was a genetic mutation that meant the white blood cells in a person’s body were either damaged or non-existent. It hadn’t bothered him at all when he was younger, he had thought that a genetic mutation had sounded cool and for a long time he pretended that he was a new member of the x-men. He had waited by the window to be taken away to learn how to control his new superpowers.
Unfortunately, that never happened and Dan grew out of the childlike innocence that had once given him some optimism about his condition. He was older and now knew the truth, he was going to die in the house that he had spent his entire life in. It was a hard fact to swallow and the first time Dan had asked his mother if it was true she had cried, but Dan knew it was going to happen. He considered himself lucky to have made it to the age that he had.
Dan used to find it interesting to look up SCID on his laptop and learn about it, there were even a few chat rooms where he could talk to people that were going through the same thing as him, many of them lived in hospitals as they were slightly less well-off and couldn’t afford to make the appropriate renovations so that their homes were safe to live in. Dan hadn’t spoken to them for long though as it had upset his mother too much. She had spent the week after he told her that he was making friends crying and talking about how she was losing him and she wished that he wouldn’t look at all that stuff because it would just worry him unnecessarily.
So he stopped looking, he knew most of what there was to know about his condition, he didn’t need to talk to other people about it if it was going to make his mother upset. She was right, it would just worry him and make him think about all the things that he may possibly end up going through. He was safe in his house, he didn’t need to worry about the things that were happening outside.
Or at least that’s what he tried to tell himself for her sake.
In reality Dan would spend hours gazing out of his window at the world around him. He knew everything that was going on in the street and everyone’s routines. So when he gazed out of his window that morning and saw the large moving van parked in front of the house opposite them his heart started to race.
Someone new as moving in.
It was sad that that was a source of excitement for him, the fact that a new person was moving onto his street, but when you had nothing to do, it was potentially the best news. Dan would have liked his neighbours to change every few months so that he could have new people to watch and get to know.
Was it creepy to know his neighbours’ schedules? Probably, but it wasn’t like he could stalk them or anything, he was confined to the house.
There was two burly men who were unpacking boxes from the van, they were the moving guys Dan decided judging by their uniforms. Besides them, there was one other man. He was tall, it was hard to judge from the distance but Dan reckoned that he was maybe as tall as himself. He looked surprisingly good for an adult who was sporting an emo fringe that looked like it had gone out of fashion ten years ago.
He didn’t look young, but he didn’t really look old either, Dan decided that he must have been around his own age. It was strange to see a guy his age straightening his hair, but it suited him. Dan had long since given up on making any effort with his own hair as there was really nobody to impress, he let the curls live and that was that.
He supposed that that was one bonus of his condition, if there were any, he could do whatever he wanted with his appearance and the only one who could judge him was himself, he didn’t have to go through the bullying of high school or change himself in any way to fit in. He could be unashamedly himself and there were no repercussions, which was a good thing as he did go through a myspace phase when he was younger and he had had the worst haircut known to man.
The new guy could pull it off though, and Dan admired that.
Dan wondered what it would be like to move to a new house, it was never going to happen for him but he wondered whether it was exciting. Did people perceive it to be an adventure? Or did they miss their old home? He supposed that it depended entirely on the circumstances leading up to their move. He liked to think that the guy across the road was starting a new adventure in his life. He was smiling and chatting happily to the moving guys so Dan figured that it wasn’t a sad move for him. If he cracked the window open a little bit then he would be able to hear what they were saying but there was no chance of him being able to do that, he wasn’t allowed to let the unfiltered air from outside in.
Living your life indoors was something that was impossible to imagine unless it was reality for you. Dan found it normal to live inside, he knew that it was the safest thing for him but there was always the temptation of the outdoors.
The only bits of the world that Dan had seen was that of the world on the TV, it was torturous and he didn’t watch it that often purely because it made him feel depressed that he would never be able to experience life like the people from his favourite shows.
He would still live his own life to the fullest though, there was nothing stopping him from being a productive member of society from his own bedroom. He could get a job which allowed him to work from home, something online possibly, there was a lot of opportunities out there.
He had done all his school work from home and even sat his exams from the comfort of his house with an external examiner coming to watch him and make sure that he didn’t cheat, the examiner was notably concerned when he had to undergo the decontamination process and he kept his distance from Dan as though he was afraid of catching something. That had frustrated Dan because he was the one who should have been concerned about catching something from the examiner, who knew what diseases he was carrying, despite the rigorous process of decontamination there was always a small chance that something would slip through. What if he had lied about not having a respiratory illness? Then he could have breathed on Dan and spread an illness that could result in his death.
It was hard to be treated as an outcast from society, that’s essentially what he was, he was trapped in his house unable to go out and talk to people, he couldn’t even order something online without it having to be decontaminated and specially packed before being delivered and even then his mum would open it and hand it to him so that he didn’t have to touch the packaging that the postman had touched.
It was a hard life but Dan was one of the luckier ones in a sense. As his mother was a doctor who specialised in his exact disease, he wasn’t forced to make risky trips to the hospital to see specialists, his mother was the one to oversee all aspects of his care. She had decided to specialise when she had learnt about his illness and Dan was touched that she had redesigned her career around him.
He wasn’t forced to make his way into a plastic bubble of filtered air for the journeys. He didn’t have to suffer through the stares from the people who didn’t understand his condition or the fact that if he didn’t have that bubble he would die. He didn’t have to experience the confused stares or the pitying glances. Honestly, he wasn’t sure which one was worse? Was it worse to have people make fun of him for something they didn’t understand or have the sorrowful glances from people who seemed to think he was on his deathbed.
It was frustrating, everything in Dan’s life had lead him to believe that life wasn’t worth living unless there was some great adventure going on. He had read all the books, the ones about people like him who had some sort of medical condition that caused them to be different from everyone else. It was fine at first, the representation was something that he appreciated, it was bringing awareness to the fact that there were young people out there who were suffering through something that not everyone would be able to relate to, something that many people didn’t even know existed. Where Dan saw problems was when authors changed the ending of their story so that the ‘ill person’ went on some huge adventure that was entirely improbable, just to further the plot or for the sake of a dramatic love story, or they were miraculously cured.
Those were the worst, in his opinion.
Miraculous cures didn’t exist, nobody suddenly woke up one morning and was free from the illness that had restricted them so much throughout their life. It just wasn’t realistic, and what was even worse was that it portrayed the idea that people with illnesses or disabilities where somehow lesser and that they were only truly living their life once they were ‘cured’. What sort of message was that?
What did it mean for Dan? He was doomed to live in his sterile environment for the rest of his life, so did that mean that his life wasn’t worth living? Did it mean that he wasn’t as human as someone who was able to take a day trip to the Bahamas or fly half way across the world to tell the girl of their dreams that they loved them? Most young adult fiction writers would have him believing that if he was a little younger and less mature.
Maybe if he had been younger he would have tried to run outside the house, just to enjoy himself for a little while, because the novels that surrounded him were telling him that that sort of behaviour was normal and signified a fuller life.
That was another problem.
Why did he have to risk his life for it to be meaningful? Why was almost dying something that had to be done in order to make his life worth more? He had another name for that, it was called suicidal tendencies and there was nothing romantic or exciting about it.
He was terrified of leaving the house.
Leaving the house in his current condition was the last thing he wanted to do, he wasn’t ready to die, and he knew that it would be painful. It would be an infection that would kill him, he wouldn’t just walk outside and drop-down dead all of a sudden, that wasn’t how his life-long condition worked. It was complicated and messy and it would end up with him lying in his bed with his mother worriedly trying to do everything that she could to prevent him from dying, the chances were that she would be unsuccessful.
Normally if someone with SCID caught an infection then they would be hospitalised. They would get a negative pressure room, one that sucked all the bugs out and filtered in clean air, and they would be carefully monitored and treated with intravenous antibiotics, antifungals and antivirals as the medical staff valiantly attempted to save their life. Not Dan. His mother had told him horror stories about the bugs that lurked in hospitals and the places they would hide. He never wanted to step foot in a hospital, so it was comforting that his mother had agreed with his request to be treated at home.
Dan was too relieved to even question how she had managed to pull that one.
Despite the relief, it didn’t change the fact that he dreamed of a day when it would be safe for him to go outside, he was lonely, and that was a strange thing to say for someone who preferred their own company to that of other people.
So as Dan watched the man across the road carefully carry a little plant out of the back of the moving van, his hand curled protectively around its thin leaves to shield it from the wind, he wondered what it was like to have plants. Dan wasn’t allowed any as they provided the perfect environment for bacteria to hide, and it had never bothered him, but as the giant of a man carried the delicate plant as though it was made of china he found himself intrigued, both by the person and his plant.
What was the guy like? What sorts of things was he interested in? what did he hate? Did he have any little pet peeves? Why did he treat his plants better than Dan treated himself?
He had so many questions, questions that he was dying to hear the answers to but realistically he knew that it would probably never happen.
It wasn’t all bad though, Dan could create a character in his mind to satisfy his curiousity. Maybe the guy was an undercover agent moving in to survey the area so that he could build a case against Dan’s neighbour Mr Robinson who was so creepy that Dan was sure that he was a secret murderer, but that was another story entirely. Maybe he was in the witness protection programme and was forced to move into that house under an alias to protect him from the drug dealers that he had sold out. That would be an exciting twist, maybe Dan would get to see some action if they somehow managed to track him down.
Or he could have been a secret wizard who sucked the life out of plants in order to extend his own life, maybe he was a thousand years old but he looked younger because he was feeding his life force off the Earth’s. Maybe that one was a little farfetched, but honestly it was the most interesting one in Dan’s mind. What if the wizard was able to teach Dan his tricks? Dan could feed his own life force thus resulting in a healthier body that wouldn’t kill him if he went outside, would it work like that? Maybe, maybe not, it was his fantasy so in the end whatever he decided was law.
No that was a dangerous line of wishful thinking and it was going along the line of having to change himself in order to be happy.
He could be happy as he was.
In that moment he was happy, he was happy thinking about all the possible backstories for the man who had no name, and he was favouring the wizard one, even though it was entirely impossible and there was less than a zero percent chance that the guy was really a bizarre magical being, it was interesting to Dan.
He was already creating a personality in his mind for the guy.
His nurse used to tell him off for doing such things, she would tell him that it was a dangerous line of thought to follow because the more he tried to imagine a personality and life for a stranger then the more he would actually want to speak to them and learn about them.
She encouraged him to stop. She said that if he wanted to let his imagination run wild then he should just write a book, but that was easier said than done. Dan had given it an honest attempt but there was the problem that he didn’t know enough about the world to make a book even slightly realistic.
“Make it up, Daniel, isn’t that what you’re doing anyway when you watch your neighbours?”
It had been what he was doing but that was different, that was curiosity about someone who was real and breathing. It wasn’t creating a new person in his mind.
As Dan stared at the mysterious dark-haired man and pondered again why he had moved there and who he was, he found himself feeling desperate for the truth, he knew that he wasn’t going to give up until he knew everything there was to know about the guy.
So when the man, still cradling his plant, glanced up towards Dan’s window and seemingly straight at Dan, he let out an inhuman squeak and ducked down so fast that he banged his chin on the window sill and bit his bottom lip.
“Fuck,” he muttered to himself as he tasted blood. He wasn’t cursing the fact that he’d hurt himself though, no, he was annoyed that it was only day one and he’d already been spotted. It was going to make learning about the guy a lot more difficult.