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January had passed so quickly, Björn had missed his 18th birthday entirely. For the most part, so had everyone else. Birthdays weren’t much of an event at Hillworth, less so in the reestablishing of the rules and routines of life at the youth reform penitentiary that followed the December holidays. Boys that returned from breaks to the strictures of the campus were rowdy. It was worse that with the weather turned wintery, many hadn’t much time outdoors and acted out even worse in classrooms and hallways. The school’s birthday present to him had been that the day wasn’t advertised and he hadn’t gotten any black eyes or needed to give any. Not that he had much at the school since arriving. It had turned out true- if you looked big enough, really big the way he was, and spent your days at the gym all day every day, people tended to decide it wasn’t worth their time to bother trying. Anna had been busy fulfilling business orders, the artisan bakery booming, and hadn’t sent a care package as was usually her custom if they weren’t in the same place. It hadn’t mattered overmuch- he was sad to miss out on baked goods, but since his failings at the pre-christmas meets, he’d redoubled his training so much that he hadn’t much time outside of classes for even sleep, let alone sitting long enough to eat a cupcake. And he shouldn’t be eating sweets with an extra push on training anyway- it was empty calories and room in his stomach that was better spent on salmon, eggs, or some other protein. Tofu. Since starting to date Colin nearly two years ago he ate so much tofu. Colin was the lone present for the day, a gift card thing for a tire at the automotive store. While maybe not exciting to anyone else, the strongman was touched and surprised by the thoughtfulness and research- they were used by lifting athletes in training often enough. A new one would have a verifiable weight, not be covered in god knew what, and honestly? He’d never had one to use for training. It was exciting.

Business was as bad for lessons, for keeping up with magazines, for Valentine’s Day. He didn’t know if Colin had found the new dance shoes he’d left him in his bag, decorated with a red ribbon and a pack of cherry lollipops for the dancer to get some extra calories during commutes without bulking food in his stomach. He almost never saw Colin unless they were getting a shower or collapsing to bed together. His love was a small weight getting smaller, leaner. Colin was under the crunch for tryouts and summer dance studios as soon as graduation was done. His schedule was no more forgiving than Björn’s own. What was he going to do after graduation? Keep training for one. But he needed a job or a direction for making a living, not just for his hobby and passion. Something that would allow him both, but still be useful. Something that would still be useful...the rest of his life as well.

March.
He’d entered the fitness game on a lark, not knowing anything about the books that inspired it, something to get out and live instead of existing in a repetitive haze and drone of classes and training. He hadn’t ...expected the change. The people in the back room. The closed doors. How many doors closed- life became fuzzy as that thin, strong hand had reached into each of their chests, but had not robbed them of the prizes there. He had been afraid. The leader they’d all deferred to, Howlite, had seen them all given new names, new lives to walk beside them like shadows and flee along as they chased through the sun. Life became doubly a blur, barely enough time to sleep between daily training and basic. He felt slow. Everything a thousand times slowed to a crawl between blinks of his eyes that were timed to the rising and setting of the sun only. And things that had been clear memories had become indistinct. It wasn’t very surprising, since it was hard for him to hold much water in the dixie cup that was his collective intelligence. Still, he’d thought he had a clearer grasp of at least personal memory compared to general book learning. It wasn’t something he could afford to lose sleep over, so he set it aside as a note in his planner, scribbled in Norsk along with other confusing ‘notes to self’.

He did need to get more sleep, with basic training looming in the evenings or whenever it pleased his general to appear out of the shadows and test if any improvements had been made since the last thrashing. It was slow going, too much training in too many fields left them all hurting, and himself. The only plus to seeing Colin so little of a sudden was not having to come up with excuses for massive bruises or bandages. Otherwise? It felt like they were trying to hold hands while walking on opposite sides of a train track, balanced precariously, and feeling the rumblings of a train coming. He wanted to either leap across or pull and catch Colin to his. There might be a chance with May coming. He had a note written to himself- Colinday May 4th, named like it was some sort of national holiday. But what to leave out, in nice wrapping, for his absent love to hopefully come across on his bed? Unless he could swing their schedules meeting up even for just a weekend lunch or dinner. He scrawled bear-scratch to a grammatically poor note and left it on Colin’s pillow before he shouldered his messenger bag to go again into the dark, to training at Dark Kingdom and the Gym afterwards. Or was it the other way around?