Predetermination

[BlizzardeyeWonder]

[Daniel Ozanne continued from Cast Call]

He put his open lunch bag on the desk and took out the empty tupperware containers.

"I'll take care of those." His mom walked into the kitchen, and put a hand on one of the containers.

Daniel looked up at her, a bit quizzically. He thought he was going to wash the dishes today, like he usually did - alternating between him and Genevive. Well, as of late, that wasn't quite the schedule, because more and more his mom would hurry into the kitchen just like this and say I'll take care of those.

"...did you like the lemon bars?" she asked, with an awkward smile. She just wanted to fill the silence, surely.

That was another thing that'd been happening weirdly often now, the homemade "just-because" desserts that his mom packed into his lunches and put on the dinner table. Daniel slowly nodded - honestly, he was surprised he liked his mom's cooking as much as he did.

To be honest, before the past year, he didn't really remember mom cooking anything by herself - and whenever he remembered Genevive asking her to help with dinner or dishes or other chores, he also remembered mom grumbling about how if she wanted to be a maidservant, she would have stayed in her marriage. There was the white-hot yet inert rage of maybe not as much at him and Genevive being expected to do everything around here but at the implicit accusation leveled at both of them - that they were like her ex-husband. Technically and biologically speaking Daniel's father, but no, just... no. It left a bad taste in his mouth to even think about. And the fact that he really was that horrible, that she really had suffered that much, was the reason neither of them could fire back at her for accusing them such a thing. Well, mom couldn't take what she dished out anyway, but- well, it was just a shitty deal all around. Bad in a way that was hard to untangle with words, as much as Daniel tried.

He placed the last of the tupperware boxes on the desk and took the lunch bag away. "Huh-How was your day?" mom called after him.

Still walking away, he called back "Alright."

When Daniel got back to his room, a laptop was already open. Probably because he forgot to put it away - this morning he was fiddling with Desmos while checking over his math homework. That was annoying, it'd probably been losing battery power this whole time and slowly grinding to an overstuffed halt like any computer left on too long. He tapped the spacebar a couple of times and the screen came to life.

The intensity of its blue light starkly reminded Daniel how dark his room was, even with the blinds open, in these recent winter-y afternoons. He cringed a bit. Mom would have a lot of shit to say if she caught the room like this. He could almost hear her muttering about screen radiation and how the video games and the internet were ruining his eyes even more than they'd already been ruined, or ruining the eyes and brains of his entire generation. She probably believed that even before he got his glasses, but she was a lot more vocal about it afterwards (and from the way she talked you'd think Daniel was legally blind without them! Truthfully, it wasn't so bad, he really only needed them to read from a distance).

...but actually, he wasn't being fair. She hadn't said that sort of thing in a while. Maybe having to call Genevive even though they were in the same house because they had to stay physically divided for everyone's health brought her around on those pesky phones. Maybe? Good for her...?

(Though it was kinda selfish of him to feel this way, he was still bothered that she only came around when it became vital to her because if she ever paid any fucking attention to the world and, you know, her own son's life, she'd realize things like phones and computers already were vital to so many students, but...)

Anyway, on the laptop itself the graph thing he was messing with this morning was still there, along with a couple of open tabs with science articles he was planning on reading in some vaguely defined "later". Daniel had a theory, that he could make lightning strike twice (or he guessed for the third time) - if one weird book he was obsessed with got him to care about English, and a hobby of card games got him to care about math, maybe finding an interest in science articles (even trashy pop science ones) could get him to care about the sciences.

The titles ate at him, in a way. He didn't need to read them, but he did. "Can you predict personality with genetics?", the article's title asked. From the short blurb, it sounded like the article's answer was going to be in the ballpark of yes - specifically, a more than you think!, maybe.

The writers weren't thinking about him. "It's not about you," he mumbled under his breath. No, they were thinking about the fun and neutral traits like, taking a guess, bravery, cautiousness, kindness, predisposition to anger...

...they couldn't not have at least once thought about, you know, people like him, right? Well, not the writers, pop-science writers are there to drum up excitement and spread the word and get clicks or whatever. He meant the people who studied this sort of thing, who hypothesized that maybe they can predict who a person is going to be based on who their gene-donors were. Did any of them hypothesize that genetic science could spot criminals, lowlifes, and monsters before they ever acted?

(He shouldn't be dwelling on this before even reading the article, that's just unfair. He should know perfectly well that article titles are often misleading.)

A lot of science seemed to be the formalization and expansion on things a lot of people, on some level, already knew.

When his mom's face flashed a look of disgust or when she spat the words "like him" when she thought he wasn't paying attention, was she right all along?

...no, no, of course she wasn't. Of course she wasn't. She knew fuck all about him until last year - no, why the hostility? He knew none of this was her fault, really. Well, none of this was his fault either. So there! They were in this together. Mom didn't ask to be mom, Daniel didn't ask to be born, the one person who you could call responsible was far away, and she was better than ever now. Daniel closed that tab and shook his head lightly, reaching for the math homework in his bag. He really, really needed to just let it go.