January 23rd, 2013
Dublin, Ireland
Darren woke up like someone had dropkicked his brain into gear before his body was ready.
Groggy. Fuzzy. Blanket half-off. Hoodie twisted around his torso like a straitjacket. A cold patch on the pillow that definitely wasn't drool. Probably. Hopefully.
He groaned. Reached for his phone.
Big mistake.
The selfie was everywhere.
Well, not his selfie. Sentinel's.
That blurry, half-shadowed, casual-ass photo he'd taken the night before with the redhead he saved. She'd captioned it "HE'S REAL 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 #SentinelSpotted."
And naturally, someone had brightened the image. Boosted the saturation. Zoomed in on the mask.
Now his white-lensed eyes were all over Twitter. Instagram. Facebook. Reddit. A TikTok remix he hadn't even had time to emotionally process yet.
Outside the café near Trinity's gate, he passed two students mid-argument.
"Bro, it's real. Look at the angles. The exposure lines up..."
"Nah, viral campaign. For a movie or somethin'. Too cinematic. Lighting's too good..."
Twitter was a minefield.
Notifications. DMs. Tags. A photoshopped version of the selfie with glowing red eyes and an Irish flag waving in the background. One user had dubbed him Captain Ireland. Another was selling Sentinel stickers. Actual stickers.
I haven't even brushed my teeth yet.
Darren flopped back onto the pillow and screamed into it. Then sat up and immediately bonked his head off the wall.
"Okay," he croaked. "Yep. We're doing great."
Adrenaline hit like a motherfucker. He flailed out of bed, stubbed his toe on the chair, kicked it out of spite, then hopped toward the kitchen like a wounded goblin.
He had seven minutes to get dressed, eat, and not explode from anxiety.
Easy.
Breakfast was half a slice of bread. Straight from the bag. Dry. Cold. Possibly fossilized. One bite in, he was already chewing while yanking on a fresh hoodie.
No stains. Probably.
Close enough.
Fidget ring on. Backpack shouldered. Time?
Late.
"Fuck it," he muttered, mouth full of sadness-bread.
And then he bolted.
The Dublin air slapped him awake, cold, sharp, the kind that snuck past your hoodie and nested in your bones.
He marched through Trinity's front arch with his head down and hood up, backpack swinging, thoughts already sprinting ahead without him.
He should have been panicking. His guts were doing somersaults. But the brain gremlin in charge had thrown up a sign that read "In denial. BRB."
His phone buzzed.
Liam [09:14]
Sentinel's viral again.
Also, new Tower of God chapter is flames.
Still better than One Piece. Fight me.
Darren snorted. Thumbed a reply as he speed-walked toward his 9:30.
Darren [09:15]
You constantly pushing Tower of God is harassment, btw.
Liam [09:15]
You love it. Now go learn about dead Irish poets.
The door to the English Lit building groaned open like it was older than Ireland itself. The inside was warm and dusty. It smelled like old paper and tobacco.
Darren slid into a seat at the back. Opened his notebook. Told his leg, politely, to stop bouncing.
It didn't listen.
The lecture kicked off with Ulysses.
Darren immediately wanted to throw himself into the sun.
Not because he hated Joyce, well, okay, maybe a little, but because trying to read Ulysses out loud, at 9:30 in the morning, with exactly three hours of sleep and a brain held together by coffee fumes and impulse control issues?
Yeah. That's not exactly ideal. Yet...
"'Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead…'"
Darren read aloud, voice dry, monotone, trying not to sound like a GCSE audiobook with depression.
His mouth moved, but his brain was already sprinting elsewhere.
Why "stairhead"? Who says "stairhead"?
Buck Mulligan sounds like the name of a 1920s gangster who sells illegal sausage rolls.
Why is this sentence still going?
Please let the floor open up and swallow me whole.
He tripped over the word scrotumtightening and nearly choked on his own shame.
Some lad in the front snorted.
Darren resisted the urge to hurl himself out the nearest window.
He stumbled through the next few lines, sweating bullets, then practically threw the page back onto his desk when he finished.
The professor smiled politely. "Good effort."
Effort. Ouch.
Darren slumped. "Cheers," he mumbled.
The rest of the lecture was filled with him Zoning then snapping back to reality over and over again.
Darren tried to listen.
He really did.
But halfway through the professor's breakdown of Irish Gothic symbolism, he noticed a spider on the wall and became convinced it was judging him.
Then he had to spend five minutes arguing with himself internally about whether spiders could be passive-aggressive.
Spoiler: they can.
By the time he tuned back in, the topic had shifted to Yeats, colonial legacy, and some metaphor involving haunted houses.
He nodded along like he understood anything.
He spent the rest of the lecture doodling cursed spirals and writing 'Buck Mulligan is a prick' in the margins of his notebook.
At some point, he accidentally drew what might have been a very depressed wolf.
Or possibly his own soul.
His leg bounced. His fidget ring spun. He blinked, spaced out, blinked again.
His notes for the final 20 minutes just said:
Joyce?? Why like this
Is this horror or just Irish
Need food
I hate mornings
Fuck Buck
When the lecture finally ended, he shot upright like someone had hit the eject button. His pen flew across the desk. His paper nearly came with it.
And he fell flat on his face.
He didn't mean to.
He just stood up too fast, got tangled in his bag strap, and nearly clotheslined himself with the desk.
Luckily he only fell on the floor.
Unluckily, the floor was cold. And hard. And way too loud when your skull bonks off it.
Shitshitshit Get up get up get up everyone's looking you're gonna go viral again but like in a fail compilation way
He scrambled to his feet, cheeks hot, heart doing the cha-cha slide.
Darren bolted from English Lit like it was on fire.
He was pretty sure his bag was still half-unzipped, his notebook only halfway inside it, and his dignity rolled under the desk.
"Graceful," someone muttered behind him.
They definitely saw. You are 100% the drama. Good job. Who even trips like that? Are you eight? Are you dying? Should you fake an injury? Oh God. Don't look back. If you look back you'll combust. Just go. GO.
He gave a thumbs-up without turning around and power-walked down the hall like it hadn't happened. Like he wasn't seconds from a full-on "the floor is judging me" meltdown.
His legs moved fast. His brain moved faster.
Celtic Myth now. Different people. Fresh start. You're just some dude. A normal dude. With a working nervous system.
The corridor buzzed around him, full of footstep echoes, rustling jackets, and the ever-present possibility of social death.
The corridor was its usual mess: echoey, dusty, a blend of footstep thuds and distant lecture murmur.
Darren's hoodie was slightly askew, one shoelace untied, and he was chewing a stale piece of gum he found in his pocket that tasted like nothing.
Celtic Mythology next.His happy class. The serotonin zone.
His phone buzzed as he turned the corner.
Liam [10:42]
Did you survive Ulysses or are you currently haunting the halls of Trinity as a bitter literary ghost?
Darren [10:43]
Haunting. Spitefully. I knocked over a bin on the way out and whispered "Buck Mulligan is a prick" into the void.
Liam [10:44]
A true Irish legacy.
Darren [10:44]
Celtic Myth now. If they don't talk about Cu Chulainn decapitating people while glowing I'm walking out.
Liam [10:45]
If you don't come out of that class with a personal geis and an urge to fight cows, I'll be disappointed.
Darren [10:45]
Mood.
He pocketed the phone, grinning faintly as he made his way toward the small lecture theatre in the older wing of the building, the one that always smelled like wet stone and dusty books, which, honestly, kind of ruled.
There was something about walking into a class where the material felt like blood memory. Myth. Battle. Fate. Doom.
Darren pushed the door open.
Celtic Mythology was in one of those weird lecture halls that felt too grand for its own good, high ceilings, stained windows, and creaky wooden seats that threatened to eat your notebook if you dropped it.
The room was low-lit, the projector already humming, and the lecturer, Dr. O'Hanrahan, legend, beard like a wizard, was scribbling something on the board:
CU CHULAINN & THE BLOOD-GEASA OF HEROES
Darren's brain perked up like a dog spotting a squirrel.
Fuck yes.
He slid into his seat. Opened a fresh page in his notebook.
Hyperfocus mode: activated.
He wasn't fidgeting. He wasn't bouncing. He wasn't even aware he was breathing. Just eyes wide, pen twitching in his grip, notes scrawling way too fast and definitely unreadable later. Scribbled keywords like: warp spasm, blood-geasa, doom, wolf rage, heroic death = sexy???
The lecturer was halfway through a tangent about the Táin Bó Cúailnge and how Cú Chulainn basically single-handedly bodybagged half of Ulster while cursed and probably twelve years old or something, and Darren was drinking in every word like it was Lucozade.
This wasn't just mythology. This was histhology.
Guy gets cursed. Goes feral. Dies tragically but cool as fuck with a spear in his guts and tied to a rock so he can die standing up?
Relatable content, Your Honour.
He was so deep in the zone he didn't even clock the ripple of laughter at first. Not until someone near the front said, loud and casual:
"Do yis think Cú Chulainn would've posed for a selfie?"
The class cracked up. Even the lecturer chuckled.
Darren, mid-doodle of a half-warped Sentinel sketch with glowing eyes and wolf ears, froze.
Shit.
Shitshitshit. Don't react. Don't look weird. Don't make a face.
Too late.
You're making a face. Your face is doing something. Do neutral. Be neutral.
What is a normal face?
I've forgotten how faces work.
He didn't laugh. Didn't blink. Just slowly flipped the page of his notebook.
He added a little caption under his doodle:
ADHD Cú Chulainn