Red Panda

The Unspoken Directive

It started because no one else would deal with him.

The Cleaners' headquarters had a rhythm to it, a chaotic pulse of footsteps and arguments and the constant clatter of someone fixing something that had broken five minutes ago. The new trial member disrupted all of it. Not because he was loud or aggressive or particularly threatening, but because he would stand in the middle of the room with sweat beading at his temples and his eyes darting frantically from person to person, and then he would start to cry.

"I-I just need someone to tell me what to do," Fu Orostor stammered for the fourth time that morning, wringing his hands so hard his knuckles had gone white. Hii, the ugly little doll strapped to his shoulder, swiveled its head and screeched, "You're embarrassing yourself again, Master! Pathetic! Absolutely pathetic!"

Several Cleaners walked past him without acknowledgment. One muttered something about Raiders under their breath. Another shot him a look of pure disgust and said, loud enough for him to hear, "Why is that guy still here?"

Fu's lower lip trembled. His shoulders hunched. He looked like a man two seconds from crumbling into a heap on the floor.

You watched this from your usual spot near the supply shelves, a half-disassembled pocket watch forgotten in your hands. You had been watching him for three days now. Not out of any particular interest, at first. You just noticed things. You always had. Growing up in a room where nothing ever changed had trained your eyes to catch every flicker of movement, every shift in a person's weight, every micro-expression that flickered and died. Fu Orostor was a symphony of nervous tells.

No one else was going to help him. You understood what that felt like.

"Organize the bandage rolls," you said. Your voice came out flat and hollow, the way it always did. "Sort them by width. Smallest on the left."

Fu's head whipped toward you so fast you heard something crack in his neck. His eyes were wet and wide and pathetically hopeful. "R-really? You'll give me orders?"

"You asked."

"Yes! Yes, I did! Thank you! Thank you so much!" He practically sprinted toward the medical supplies, Hii bouncing on his shoulder and wailing, "Finally! Someone with a functioning brain! Though the bar is on the floor!"

You did not respond to the doll. You went back to your pocket watch.

That should have been the end of it. You gave him a task. He completed it. You expected him to move on and find someone else to order him around the next day.

Instead, he found you.

It was early morning, the light filtering through the grimy windows in pale yellow strips. You were sitting on a crate near the back entrance, repairing a tear in your sleeve with slow, methodical stitches. You heard footsteps approach, hesitate, approach again, stop. When you looked up, Fu was standing six feet away, his hands clasped together so tightly his fingers were turning purple.

"What do you need," you said. It was not a question, really. More of an acknowledgment.

"I finished the bandages," he said.

"I know. I saw them."

"I-I also organized the suture kits. And the splints. And the—"

"You did a good job," you said, because it was true, and because you had learned a long time ago that saying true things was easier than navigating the labyrinth of social expectations most people seemed to live in.

Fu's eyes welled up with fresh tears. "No one else has said that. No one else has said anything. They just look at me like I'm— like I'm—"

"A Raider," you finished.

He flinched.

You looked back down at your stitching. "You're not one anymore. That's why you're here."

"I— yes. Yes, that's right. I'm here. I'm trying." He sniffled loudly. Hii squirmed on his shoulder and hissed, "Stop sniveling, Master! You'll short-circuit your own brain!"

"Sorry," Fu whispered, to the doll, to you, to the air.

You pulled the thread tight and bit off the excess. "The supply room floor needs sweeping. There's a broom in the corner. Start near the door and work inward."

His entire body straightened like a soldier receiving a wartime command. "Understood! I'll do it perfectly! You won't regret this!"

"I don't regret things," you said, but he was already gone, Hii's cackling echoing down the hallway.

The trinkets started two weeks later.

You had found a rusted key with a decorative handle shaped like a bird in flight. Its wings were chipped and one eye was missing, but the shape was still beautiful. You did not know why you picked it up. You did not know why you cleaned the dirt off it with your sleeve. You did not know why, when you saw Fu later that day nervously rearranging the same crate for the fourth time because no one had given him a new task, you walked up and held it out to him.

He stared at the key. Hii stared at the key. Then Hii swiveled its head toward you and shrieked, "What is that?! A bribe?! An insult?!"

"A key," you said.

"I can see that! But why—"

"Hush, Hii," Fu said, and his voice was softer than you had ever heard it. He took the key from your palm with the careful reverence of someone accepting a sacred relic. "Is this... for me?"

"Yes."

"But... why?"

You considered the question. Feelings were difficult. Words were difficult. You had spent so many years not speaking that the act of translating emotion into language felt like trying to build a bridge out of smoke. "It looked like you," you said finally.

Fu blinked. "It's... a bird."

"Yes."

"Master, she's calling you a bird brain," Hii supplied helpfully.

But Fu was already smiling, a wobbly, watery thing that made his whole face crumple with an emotion you could not name. "I'll treasure it," he said, and tucked the key into his breast pocket, right over his heart.

The next trinket was a marble with a crack running through its center that caught the light and scattered it into tiny rainbows. The next was a single glove, too small for any hand in the hideout, but the stitching was intricate and someone had embroidered a tiny star on the cuff. The next was a button carved from bone.

Every time, you handed it over without explanation. Every time, Fu accepted it like you were handing him something priceless instead of garbage. Every time, Hii made a snide comment, and Fu shushed the doll with more confidence than he had shown before.

The other Cleaners noticed.

"Why do you keep giving that guy junk?" one of them asked you, leaning against the doorframe with an expression caught somewhere between confusion and amusement.

You did not look up from the shelf you were organizing. "He doesn't think it's junk."

"That's because he's weird. And you're weird. Actually, you're both weird. Maybe that's why you get along."

You did not answer. You were not sure it was an insult.

The dragging started because you needed to run errands and Fu looked lost whenever you left him behind.

"Come with me," you said one afternoon, and Fu immediately abandoned the crate he had been alphabetizing with a look of profound relief.

"Where are we going?" he asked, falling into step beside you. Hii bounced aggressively on his shoulder, grumbling about being taken places without consent.

"The market. I need thread."

"Oh! I know where the textile stalls are! I memorized the entire market layout when I first arrived because I thought someone might ask me to fetch something but no one ever did and—"

"You can show me," you interrupted, because his rambling seemed to be spiraling toward a place that would make him cry again.

He straightened, a determined gleam in his eye. "Yes! Follow me! I know exactly where to go!"

He did not know exactly where to go. He got lost three times, nearly walked into a stall that sold live eels, and at one point Hii had to screech directions at him while he apologized profusely to a woman whose cart he had almost knocked over. But eventually you found the thread, and when you handed over the coins with your usual flat expression, Fu was beaming like he had accomplished something monumental.

"Thank you for letting me come with you," he said on the walk back. "No one else ever... I mean, most people don't want to be seen with me. Because of what I was."

"You're not that anymore," you said.

"Yes. You keep saying that." His voice had gone strange, quieter than usual. "Why do you keep saying that?"

You looked at him. His eyes were watery again, but not with panic this time. Something else. Something you did not have a name for.

"Because you need someone to say it," you said. "And I don't mind saying things no one else will."

Fu opened his mouth, closed it, and then promptly burst into tears.

"Oh, great, now you've broken him," Hii cackled. "Waterworks! Flood warning! Someone get a bucket!"

You stood there, not sure what to do, while Fu sobbed into his hands and apologized and sobbed some more. Eventually you reached out and patted his arm twice. It was stiff and awkward and probably not comforting at all, but Fu looked at you with such overwhelming gratitude that you had to look away.

The biting happened on a bad day.

You had not told anyone about your childhood. You did not know how. The words existed somewhere inside you, buried under years of silence, but whenever you tried to dig them up they crumbled to dust in your mouth. Today something had triggered it, a sound or a smell or the way the light hit the floor, and you had spent the whole morning feeling hollowed out and raw.

Fu found you sitting on the floor of an unused storage room, your back against the wall, your knees drawn up to your chest. You had not given him any orders today. You had not given him anything.

"Are you... are you all right?" he asked, hovering in the doorway with Hii squirming under his arm. "You didn't come to breakfast. I waited. I saved you a bread roll but then someone took it and I was too scared to ask for it back but I found another one and—"

"Sit down," you said.

He sat immediately, cross-legged on the dusty floor, close enough that you could feel the warmth radiating off him. Hii crawled out of his grip and perched on his knee, its beady eyes fixed on you with unsettling intensity.

"Something's wrong," Fu said. It was not a question. "You're... you're always so composed. But right now you look like you're somewhere else."

You did not answer for a long moment. Then, without planning to, you started to speak.

"When I was young, I lived in a room. It was small. The door locked from the outside. People came to give me food sometimes, but they never stayed. They never spoke. I think I was there for years. I don't remember faces. I just remember the door, and the silence, and learning not to cry because no one would come anyway."

The words fell out of you like stones, heavy and flat and final. When you finished, you did not look at him. You stared at the opposite wall and waited for him to leave.

He did not leave.

Instead, he made a sound. It was not a word. It was something choked and pained, like the noise of an animal that had been kicked. When you finally turned your head, Fu was crying. Not his usual panicky, flustered tears. These were slow and quiet, tracking down his cheeks in steady lines.

"That's not fair," he whispered. "That's not fair. You were just a child. You were just—"

"Hush, Master," Hii said, and for once the doll's voice was not mocking. "You're going to make yourself sick."

"I don't care," Fu said. "She was alone. For years. I know what that's like. Not the same way, but I know. I know how it hollows you out. I know how it makes you feel like you don't deserve— like you can't ever—"

He could not finish. He was crying too hard.

Something swelled inside your chest, hot and overwhelming and completely foreign. You did not know what to do with it. You did not have words for it. You had never learned the vocabulary of affection, of comfort, of the desperate need to close the distance between yourself and another person.

So you leaned forward and bit his shoulder.

Fu yelped. Hii shrieked, "VIOLENCE! ASSAULT! MASTER, DEFEND YOURSELF!"

You pulled back, face heating, and stared at the faint indent of your teeth in his jacket. "Sorry," you said. "I don't know why I did that."

Fu touched the spot with trembling fingers. His tears had stopped from sheer shock. "You... bit me."

"Yes."

"Was that... were you trying to say something?"

You looked at your hands. "I don't know how to say things. Not the things that matter. So I just... did that."

A long pause. Then Fu let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. "You're very strange," he said.

"I know."

"I like it," he said. "I like that you're strange. I like that you give me broken things. I like that you let me follow you. I like—" His voice cracked. "I like that you don't look at me like I'm still a Raider."

Hii let out an exaggerated groan. "Oh, wonderful. Now they're both emotional. I'm trapped in a soap opera. Someone end my suffering."

You ignored the doll. You were looking at Fu, and he was looking at you, and the space between you felt smaller than it had before.

"You can stay," you said. "If you want. In here. With me."

Fu nodded, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. "I want to. I always want to."

You sat together in the dusty storage room while the light shifted and Hii grumbled about the lack of action. Neither of you spoke much. You did not need to.

The next day, you gave him a broken compass that no longer pointed north. He held it like it was made of gold.

The day after that, when you passed him in the hallway, he held out his arm without a word, sleeve pushed up to expose his wrist. An offering.

You bit him, very gently, and kept walking.

Behind you, you heard Hii shriek, "What is WRONG with you people?!"

Hes so cute guys look at him thats my goat right there