They reached a house.
Two floors. The kind of old village house that stick to memory from first look — white paint faded and peeling from the walls, flower boxes at the windows, a wooden door that carried that particular smell only old village buildings have. The kind of smell that belongs to a different, slower era.
Torch stepped inside and immediately ruined it.
Days of walking and sweating , not showering — all came through the door with him. Whatever warmth the house had held in its smell shifted the moment he entered. The kind of shift you notice at a train station when someone walks too close.
Two maidens met them in the entrance hall, dressed in traditional uniform. Torch wasn't surprised — he had clocked Veuren's money the moment he saw her clothes at the bridge. The maidens began their greeting, then stopped mid-sentence.
Maidens: "Welcome ba—"
Both covered their noses.
Maidens: "Mrs. Veuren — what is that smell?"
Veuren stepped aside, revealing Torch standing behind her.
Veuren: "Ladies — take care of him. He is my personal servant now."
Neither maiden questioned it. Neither objected. They took him to the bathroom .
For days[1], the only liquid that had touched his skin was sweat, rain, and tears.
His body reacted to the water strangely — skin itching as the warmth hit it. In the shower, he couldn't stop the questions from coming. Why is this happening to him. Does he deserve it. There are countless homeless people — why did she choose him. She was there when he needed someone. Will he ever pay this back.
Forty minutes later he stepped out and dried off to find a butler's uniform laid out for him. White and black. Slightly larger than his size, but not enough to matter. He looked at it for a moment.
On the chest pocket, a name tag.
Torch.
He put it on and stepped out. One of the maidens was waiting directly outside the door.
Emma: "Mrs. Veuren is waiting for you. She asked that you come as soon as you were done. Please follow me."
They went upstairs together. The staircase was the kind with wooden steps that announce every single footfall — that low, creaking groan underfoot that old houses never apologize for. On the second floor, seven doors. Three on each side, and one smaller door at the end for storage.
Emma led him into a room. Inside, Mrs. Veuren sat beside a white metal table on a single soft sofa, composed and waiting.
Veuren: "Thank you, Emma. You may go."
Emma left and closed the door behind her.
Veuren: "Torch. Your room is number thirteen. You begin your shift as my personal servant tomorrow. Six twenty-five[2] — one minute late and you are out. I don't host losers. Now go."
Torch didn't ask anything. Didn't say a word.
Room thirteen.
Cold. Dark. No mirror. No furniture beyond a bed sitting in a wooden frame. Not even a window.
He slept well anyway. All those days of walking until his body gave out had made unconsciousness easy to fall into. He was asleep before he had time to think.
In the morning, at exactly six twenty-four[3], Torch was standing straight as a nail beside Mrs. Veuren's door.
She opened it and stepped out without looking at him.
Veuren: "I drink only fresh milk. The only farm I trust is forty-eight minutes and six seconds[4] from here on foot. Breakfast at eight fifteen."
She didn't wait for a response. She didn't need one.
Torch turned and left the house, pack on his back. At eight ten he returned with two liters of milk.
No thank you. No well done. No acknowledgment at all.
That was his first day.
The days that followed were hell — by any reasonable measure. For a normal person, they would have been breaking. But for someone already broken, already trying to outrun his own thoughts, they were something close to mercy.
She ordered him like a machine. What a person could reasonably do in thirty minutes she gave him two hours to accomplish with the worst conditions and tools, if she even gave him tools. — not out of generosity, but out of expectation. His body began to respond to the pressure. Not muscle — something quieter than that. Neural adaptation. The body learning new tolerances, new reflexes, new thresholds for what it could endure.
He began to operate on instinct.
A noise — he reacted before the thought formed. Something moved too fast in his peripheral vision — his body was already responding before his mind had caught up. Sleep grew thin. Not restless, not broken by nightmares — just light. Paper thin. Any sound, no matter how small, pulled him back to the surface. But It came with downsides.
When you're always on high alert, you stop distinguishing between safety and danger
One of the other butlers tried to break the ice by spooking him. He hid behind a door, waited for Torch to pass, then lunged out screaming — "BOO."
A fist stopped an inch from his face.
Not a slow warning. A full reaction — fast, committed, already mid-swing before the brain had issued any order. Then stopped. Pulled back at the last possible moment, one chain of instinct canceling another in the space of a millisecond.
Torch didn't apologize. Didn't acknowledge it. He lowered his arm and kept walking, as though nothing had interrupted his path.
The people who witnessed agreed to never spooked him again. But they also couldn't help noticing something else — how clean each reaction had been. Not just the speed, but the control at the end of it. The stopping was as precise as the striking
He changed his uniform every day. It smelled of sweat and unpaid labor by evening. Sleep at night was less sleep and more collapse — the difference between choosing to close your eyes and simply running out of the ability to keep them open.
Every morning at six twenty-four. Every morning — the farm, forty-eight minutes away. The furniture rearranged. The tasks that had no pattern except that they were always demanding and always his to finish.
But there was one thing she never did.
She never asked him anything. She looked at him the way you look at something that has only just popped into existence — four months old at most. No history. No past worth addressing.
And so did he.
He never asked for anything. What he received was enough. The work spoke. The silence spoke louder. Peace hidden beneath an unhealthy disguise.
The maidens understood it too, without being told. It became the unwritten rule of the house — don't speak to the hollow one. He is barely there to begin with.
One night, just before Torch received his command to go and collapse into sleep, Mrs. Veuren stopped him.
Veuren: "Tomorrow. Four ten in the morning. Downstairs."
Torch understood. To him, Mrs. Veuren was someone who walked in straight lines — when she curved, there was always a reason. He went to sleep knowing that tomorrow, there would be no milk run.
In the grey before dawn, Torch was standing downstairs in front of the house door at four ten exactly.
Mrs. Veuren came down looking — not quite sad. It was difficult to read anything on a face that carried only determination as its default expression. But something was there, briefly. She looked at him for a moment, the way a person looks when they are waiting for something to appear. She found nothing. She turned toward the door.
They got into a car. Mrs. Veuren drove herself.
Forty minutes on the road. Neither of them said a word — which was nothing new. But Mrs. Veuren had decided, she couldn't allow the silence this time. Without looking away from the road, she tossed something into Torch lap.
A Rubik's cube. He caught it before it could fall into his lap.
Veuren: "That cube isn't a normal one you'd buy in a shop. Solve it."
For the remaining drive, the only sound in the car was the quiet clicking of Torch turning the cube, working at it with steady hands.
They arrived at four fifty. A train station — large, busy, cold in the way large open buildings always are in the early morning.
For a normal person, it was unremarkable. Crowds, echoes, movement, the smell of coffee and metal and strangers passing too close.
For someone who had been living on high alert for four months, it was something else entirely.
Every sound pulled his eyes toward it. Every echo off the high ceiling registered as a potential something. Every movement at the edge of his vision demanded to be checked and cleared. Every few seconds he found himself scanning for Mrs. Veuren — even though she was directly in front of him. The smells layered and competed. The noise never stopped coming from all directions at once.
It was a war his brain was fighting against itself, quietly, the entire time they moved through the station.
Ten minutes later they boarded the Train.
On the train they sat in comfortable seats facing each other. Mrs. Veuren put on her headphones — ASMR, from the faint sound of it — closed her eyes, and was elsewhere. Torch kept working the cube. The soft mechanical clicking of it filled the space between them for two hours and thirty minutes until they finally pulled into the station and disembarked.
A large city waited for them outside — wide and low, barely a building taller than eight floors anywhere in sight. A car had been left parked for them. They got in. Mrs. Veuren drove again.
Another two hours. The cube kept turning.
They arrived in a quieter area. Fewer houses than the village, but newer — fresh walls, a garden with small, well-kept trees. In front of the house, a two line of butlers and maidens stood waiting.
Mrs. Veuren parked and stepped out.
Veuren: "Hello, everyone. I'm back."
Staff: "Welcome back, Mrs. Veuren."
Torch stepped out from the other side. No greeting offered, none expected. He simply appeared — standing beside her, present the way a shadow is present.
Veuren: "Unload everything into room six."
Torch moved immediately toward the car and began carrying things inside. As Mrs. Veuren greeted the staff outside, she glanced once in his direction and spoke quietly enough that only he could hear it.
Veuren: "Welcome to your new home."
Torch said nothing.
[1] The days he spent in the forests being a Coward
[2] 6:25
[3] 6:24
[4] 48:06