12. Pen
Lance had been going to school before. But it was not a private one.
It was one for designated delinquents who had been in contact with the law.
So he wasn't often there, but as the male lead, he had no problems. The villain and the male lead have to be intelligent, the female lead a white lotus, and everyone else has to be stupid.
That was the gist he got from reading a few romance novels in the weeks before school started. So not only was his character fresh from a template, his good and bad points were too.
He had been lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, asking himself if he was even a person or just fiction that was there for Paige's entertainment. He came to the conclusion that even if a "real" person like Paige were imprisoned in this paper world, he had nothing to worry about. The distance between reality and fiction was not relevant here.
So, he started to think about his 'golden finger'. A term he had known from those novels. And his golden finger was Paige because essentially, what she knew were not only characters in this world but also the future.
He had decided to take a few shortcuts, as compensation for his shitty life so far. You could say he wanted his fee for acting since childhood for every person reading about the traumas he received and spying on his privacy, getting horny at his supposed sex life with the girl beside him, laughing at him from behind their little screens and-.
"Snap"
"Is everything all right?" Natasha flinched and gestured at the pen he had broken in his hand. He smiled at her charmingly and said,
"Yes," Natasha nodded absentmindedly.
He really didn't care about his identity as a male lead. As he thought, he picked up the two pieces of the pen he had destroyed and threw them in the trash can behind him.
The lessons at school couldn't really faze him. What was always a problem was the food on the table.
After the kidnapping when he was a young child, he escaped a few years later. He remembered his name, but he had a long time of aphasia and he couldn't write. But maybe he just didn't want to go back to a family he didn't really remember, or he didn't want to go to the people who failed to protect him. So he lived in an orphanage, where neither the caretaker nor the children had been overly nice. After being beaten a few times there for fighting the children, he lived on the street, getting by with pickpocketing.
Then the orphanage found him. Then he ran away and continued to steal. Paste and repeat. Eating apparently was not a certain occurrence for him. Sometimes he regretted not "letting himself be found" as a child after the kidnapping. But now, with Jace as his substitute, maybe he would have been killed by the person who orchestrated the whole DNA test thing.
"Snap." His next pen broke when he thought of all the scenes that were described from his life in a frickin' book.
"You are so strong!" the female lead praised dumbly. This was another thing: why would he fall for someone—he let his eyes roam over her perfect face with the fingerprint on a smeared makeup spot, left by himself—like this?
He would have never thought of having a romantic relationship with someone. And if it was about future sexual urges, he would surely prefer someone with more... His eyes flickered in Paige's direction. With some more hardware.
He felt rather doubtful. Maybe Paige really is just a fifteen-year-old with chunibyo syndrome? - Another word he learned after making a short trip to the anime world to cleanse himself of the romance novels he had faced.
That... could be really possible.