Aches
Morning found him the way it always found him — stiff, slow to rise, the ache from the night before only half worked out of his limbs by the time he'd climbed the ladder and started the day's small rituals over again. The bucket. The rag. The shirt from the plastic bag, pressed carefully despite everything, because some habits outlived the reasons a person first started keeping them.
He noticed the second thing almost by accident, wiping his mouth after rinsing it with water gone flat and metallic-tasting from sitting too long in the bucket overnight. A thin smear of red came away on the back of his hand, faint, already thinning by the time he looked at it properly. His nose. He tilted his head back out of some old reflex he didn't remember learning, waited it out the way you wait out weather, and it stopped on its own within the minute, same as it had the last two or three times this had happened, spaced out over the last however-many weeks in a pattern he'd never once bothered counting.
He didn't think much of it. Noses bled. His had bled before, from cold, from cracked skin, from any number of ordinary reasons a body found to inconvenience itself in weather like this, and there was no reason this time should be any different from the others. He rinsed the rag, wrung it out, and moved on to the rest of the morning without giving the thought any further room to grow.
The walk to the gate that afternoon felt longer than it should have, though he couldn't have said whether the distance had changed or simply his legs had, the two possibilities equally uninteresting to him and neither worth the effort of untangling. He passed the alley where the notice board stood, the same torn paper still pinned there among a handful of newer ones layered over parts of it now, ACADEMY TRIALS still legible where the newer notices hadn't yet swallowed it whole.
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He stopped this time. Not for long — a few seconds, no longer than it took to register that his feet had, for once, decided on their own not to keep walking past it — and read the line again. Candidates must be under the age of eighteen at time of registration. He was fifteen. He would not, by simple arithmetic, be fifteen forever, and the trials wouldn't wait for whatever version of him existed on the far side of eighteen to come looking for them instead.
He didn't know what made him stop this particular afternoon and not any of the others he'd walked past that same board. Nothing about the wanting felt urgent in him, no sudden hunger for the kind of life a trial like that might lead toward. It simply sat there a moment, a fact considered alongside all his other facts — the bread, the gate, the ache in his legs, the second faint smear of red he hadn't quite finished forgetting — filed without any particular weight attached, and then he was walking again, the notice falling behind him the same way everything eventually fell behind him, whether or not he'd decided yet what to do with having seen it.