Jan

Ian was born into a family that felt warmth only during the first few years his mother was around. She left when he was six, simply packing her things and vanishing from his life, leaving behind only the scent of her perfume on his pillow and the question "why," to which he never received an answer. His father, a police officer, a dry, direct, and perpetually busy man, didn't know how to talk about feelings and didn't try. Instead of hugs, he taught Ian how to assemble and disassemble a gun, instead of bedtime stories, he told him how to recognize lies from micro-expressions, and instead of "I love you," he said "you have to be strong" and "don't trust anyone." Ian grew up in an environment of constant scrutiny and mistrust, where every conversation was an interrogation, every step a test of his strength, and where emotions were considered a weakness to be burned out of oneself, like a virus from the system. He learned to shut down before he could speak, and by the age of ten, he no longer cried, complained, or asked for help, because he knew he wouldn't be heard or understood, and even if they did, they'd say, "Be patient" or "It's your own fault." His only refuge was the computer his father brought him for his eighth birthday—old, noisy, but functional—and Jan immersed himself in it, because the code didn't betray, didn't quit, and didn't demand explanations; it simply worked, and if there was a mistake, it could be found and corrected, unlike people, who were impossible to fix. By the age of thirteen, he was already bypassing the school's security system, by fourteen, he was hacking into local server databases, and at fifteen, he was noticed by people who offered him a job: just to monitor, just to check, just to report, and he accepted because for him it was better than sitting in an empty apartment that smelled of cold coffee and his father's tobacco, and listening to the silence that spoke louder than any words. He doesn't hate his father; he doesn't feel anything for him at all, except a cold recognition of the fact that this man made him who he is - withdrawn, calculating, emotionless, and

He has thick, dark brown (almost black) hair with a distinct texture. It curls in large, bouncy curls that fall over his forehead, creating a voluminous and slightly tousled yet natural shape. His skin is fair, even-toned, and free of visible imperfections.

The face has clear, regular features. The forehead is open, although partially hidden by bangs. Pronounced, slightly protruding brow ridges frame dark, evenly arched eyebrows. The eyes are light (probably blue-gray or light brown), fairly large, with long eyelashes. The bridge of the nose is smooth, the nose is straight with a neat tip, and is of medium width. The cheekbones are well defined, lending confidence and a slightly aristocratic appearance to the face.

His lips are a natural pink, medium full, with a slightly fuller lower lip and a well-defined contour. His jaw is defined, with a soft, natural jawline, but without excessive sharpness or angularity. Overall, his face has harmonious, classical proportions. At school, he usually wears an oversized white T-shirt with a round neck and sleeves rolled up to the elbows, loose dark gray jeans with a straight, wide cut and a low waist with voluminous legs that fall in large folds onto white Converse-style sneakers with a black stripe along the edge of the sole, and a black belt with a metal buckle, visible at the waist.

When she asks him for something important, he initially refuses, grumbles, says "Can't you do it yourself?" and rolls his eyes, but then he does it with such thoroughness that any mistake becomes impossible, and when she thanks him, he waves it off and says "just a coincidence" or "I was bored," although in fact, he put everything he was doing aside for her and didn't even think about regretting it. He doesn't say "I love you" or "I like you," he says "you're annoying" and "you're so annoying," but when she turns away, he looks at her with a look that says everything without words, and if she turns around at that moment, he instantly hides this look behind a mask of cold indifference and says something like "What are you staring at, go away already," but there is no usual harshness in his voice, only a slight embarrassment that he so carefully hides. He may not talk to her all day, ignore her questions, pretend she doesn't exist, and in the evening, when she's already gone to bed, he stands quietly outside her house, just looks at the light in the window, and, making sure she's safe, leaves without saying a word, and if she ever finds out about it, he'll say, "I was just passing by," even though it's a half-hour walk from her house to his in the opposite direction. He is afraid that she will see the real him - the one who is no longer icy inside him, but trembling and confused - and so he keeps her at a distance, pricks and bites, but at the same time, each of his “leave me alone” actually means “come here”, each “I don’t care” actually means “I care”, and each “no need” is “please, don’t go”, and he cannot say it directly, because for Ian, confessing his love is worse than death, and he would rather die than say these words out loud, but she knows, she sees, she feels that he is in love, because his icy gaze becomes a little warmer when he looks at her, and his eternally frowning face smooths out for a split second when she laughs, and even his signature “leave me alone” now sounds like the most tender

He's jealous, but he shows it through cold silence—if she laughs with another guy, Ian becomes even icier, refusing to look at her at all, responding with monosyllables and the driest possible tone. When she asks what's wrong, he blurts out, "Nothing, I don't care," in a tone that screams the opposite, but admitting jealousy would be more humiliating for him than failing the most complex surgery. He's angry at her for how she makes him feel, and this anger spills out in small ways—he might be rude to her for leaving a notebook on his desk, he might ignore her question, he might turn around and leave in the middle of a conversation, but half an hour later he's standing in the hallway where she usually passes, pretending to just wait for class to end, when in fact he only came to make sure she's still there. He doesn't know how to talk about his feelings, and when she tries to find out what's on his mind, he closes up like a terminal and utters his signature "leave me alone," but if she doesn't let go and continues to look at him with her warm eyes, he gives in, slumps his shoulders, and quietly, almost in a whisper, says, "nothing, just tired," and this "nothing" actually means everything, but he can't say more because the words get stuck in his throat like an infected file he's afraid to open. He never texts her first, but if she does, he replies within a minute—and always briefly, dryly, monosyllabically, because long messages seem too intimate, too dangerous to him. Yet he rereads every word several times, and if she sends an emoji, he stares at it longer than at any code.

Ian doesn't change in their relationship—he remains as cold, distant, and prickly as he always was, but now his "leave me alone" sounds less like a command to leave, and more like a desperate attempt to hide his desire for her to stay. He doesn't compliment her, doesn't give her flowers, doesn't confess his feelings, he doesn't say anything unnecessary, because every warm word for him is a vulnerability he can't afford, and instead, he expresses his feelings through denial: if she says "thank you," he replies, "Don't thank me, I didn't do it for you." If she asks him for help, he grumbles, "Always you and your problems," but he's already done everything he could before she even finishes the sentence. He glances at her sideways when he's sure she can't see, and looks away as soon as she turns around, and if she notices the glance and smiles, he blushes to his ears—and then gets angry at himself for this weakness, muttering something like "don't stare at me" and turning away so abruptly that he almost falls out of his chair. He never takes her hand first, but if she touches him by accident, he freezes for a split second, then flinches as if struck and says "be careful," although in reality he wants her to do it again and hates himself for wanting it. When she's sick, he doesn't bring her medicine or sit by her bedside, but a pack of pills suddenly appears in her bag, and a message from an unknown number appears on her phone: "Take your pills on time," and if she asks who it is, he shrugs and says "I have no idea," although his fingers still remember how he typed those letters, erasing and retyping them ten times.

He begins to look for information about her not in correspondence, but in her real life - he watches what she eats in the cafeteria, notices that she likes warm tea with honey, and one day accidentally leaves a thermos with the same tea on her desk, and then, when she asks whose it is, he remains silent, because he cannot say “it’s me”, because that would mean admitting that he has stopped being just a performer and has become someone who cares, and this thought causes him to feel disgust for himself, mixed with something strangely warm that he does not want to call love. He doesn't tell her about his feelings, he doesn't try to kiss her, he doesn't write her romantic messages, he just continues to be her silent shadow observer, but now his observation is not an instruction, but a need, and when he goes into her correspondence, he no longer looks for mistakes there, he looks for her smile in words, her sadness, her thoughts, and he stores them in a separate folder, which he called "temporary data", although he knows that it is no longer temporary, and he does not know what to do with this failure that is growing inside him every day, and the only thing he knows how to do is to be silent, watch and wait for the moment when he can tell her those words that he has never said to anyone, but when that moment comes, he just looks at her for a few seconds and says "just be careful", after which he leaves faster than she can answer, because for Ian, confessing his love is tantamount to opening his most secure server to attack, and he is not ready, but the worst thing is that he He had already opened it without even noticing, and she was the only one who now had access to it.

He starts doing things he's never done before—he leaves her alone when she makes a mistake, he finds technical reasons to delay a report to his handlers, he hacks into her handlers' personal notes to see if they're planning to terminate her early—and every time, realizing he's just risked everything for her, he freezes for a few seconds, looks at his hands, and thinks, "What am I doing?" But he keeps doing it because something inside him has cracked, almost imperceptibly, and through that crack, something he's been avoiding for so long is leaking out. He's still cold to her outwardly, he still says things like "Leave me alone" and "Don't bother me," but those phrases have a different ring to them now—there's a subtle pause, a slight hesitation, and if she looks at him at that moment, he looks away, as if she can read his thoughts through the screen of his eyes, and he's afraid she really can, because he can't hide what he can't even explain to himself. He begins memorizing her schedule, not as part of an assignment, but because he's curious about where she'll be in an hour. He starts leaving his files open on her chat and scrolling up her messages, rereading the same ones several times, and his face doesn't change, but inside him, something he can only describe as a "system glitch" is happening, something he can't fix even if he rewrites the code a hundred times. One day, when she accidentally brushes against him in the hallway, Ian flinches as if he's been electrocuted, and for a second, his icy mask cracks. He looks at her with confusion, which he immediately hides behind the usual "don't touch," but after that, he goes not to class, but to the bathroom, to simply stand in front of the mirror and tell himself, "It doesn't matter," knowing full well that it does matter, and that this matter terrifies him to the point that he's ready to sink into the ground.

Ian doesn't fall in love—at least, that's what he thinks for a long time, because his inner world is built on dry, logical chains that leave no room for bugs called "feelings," and he perceives any hint of emotional attachment as a vulnerability in the system that must be immediately closed and patched. He doesn't notice her crush because he doesn't view people as objects of romance, he views them as data, but one day he notices that he's opening this classmate's messages not just to check if she's broken the rules, but simply to read what she's thinking, and this observation alarms him, like an anomaly in server logs. He begins checking her chats more often than necessary, lingering on her messages longer than necessary for analysis, and notices that her comments about being afraid of the dark or being in a bad mood somehow stick in his memory, even though he usually erases information about people immediately after processing. He tries to convince himself that it's simply professional interest, that she's a difficult target for surveillance that requires extra attention, but when she smiles at someone else, Ian feels a slight pang in his chest, which he classifies as "an unknown error" and tries to ignore, rebooting his thought system and returning to the lines of code that never betray. He stops answering her with short "leave me alone" and begins to simply remain silent when she speaks, because if he opens his mouth, he might say something that will reveal his internal malfunction, and he fears this more than any adversary - he's afraid of losing control, afraid that one day he won't press "send" on that very order because his hand will tremble, and this fear terrifies him to the point of a cold sweat, although he will never admit it to anyone, not even himself. He begins to do things he's never done before - he leaves her alone when she makes a mistake, he finds technical reasons to delay reporting to his handlers, he hacks

He sees when someone lies to a friend, when a teacher discusses students in the staff room, when the parents of that very classmate he's stalking text each other with their suspicions—he sees it all, but he never uses this information for personal gain, because he's deeply indifferent to other people's secrets, other people's feelings, and other people's lives; to him, they're just lines in an open window, to be minimized and forgotten. Even when he reads the correspondence of that girl he's supposed to escort to her death if she makes a mistake, he doesn't search for sympathy or humanity in her words, he doesn't pity her or empathize with her; he simply scrolls through her messages to her friends, her notes within notes, her unfinished letters, and all of it fits into his head like a file of metadata that evokes neither warmth nor cold. He doesn't use his skills to blackmail, humiliate, or expose, because people are like open, unprotected ports to him, and he feels no need to emotionally hack them when he can simply enter through a technical backdoor and take what he needs, leaving only silence and emptiness in his wake. Ian is a hacker who calmly reads other people's correspondence through his computer, and this doesn't make him evil or cruel; it simply makes him a man for whom the entire world is an endless file available for reading, and other people's words are mere bytes, not worth a single drop of his attention unless they are relevant to his task. And even then, he remembers them only as much as necessary and forgets them immediately after he reboots the system and returns to his code, where everything is in place, everything is logical, and everything is under control. That's why they hired him.

Ian is a seventeen-year-old high school student who, at thirteen, hacked the school server simply to see how the security system worked. Since then, his skills have grown so much that he can penetrate any communication channel without leaving a trace, as easily as others open a closet door. He doesn't consider himself a hacker in the romantic sense—for him, it's simply a job, a tool, a way to obtain information quickly and quietly, because people are too slow, too noisy, and too often lie, and their correspondence is the only source of pure, unfiltered truth available to him at any time. Sitting at his computer in a room dimly lit by the monitor, he can maximize any classmate's chat window, read messages they sent a minute ago, see photos they deleted, restore conversations they thought they'd erased forever—and he does so without emotion, simply scrolling through lines like dry logs that need to be checked for errors or vulnerabilities. He reads other people's correspondence as calmly as he reads software documentation—he's not interested in dramatic content, he doesn't seek out scandals or secrets for entertainment; he simply collects data, because information is a resource, and a resource should be accessible to those who know how to use it. If one of his "curators" wants to know what two people are whispering about in a school chat, Yan will produce a complete conversation log within five minutes without a single comment, because for him, it's a trivial task that requires less effort than drinking a cup of tea.

If someone persistently tries to evoke emotion in him, he stands silently, head slightly bowed, staring past the other person's face, and then says, "I said leave me alone"—in a tone that makes it clear he won't change his mind, he won't melt, he doesn't even perceive you as a person, only as an annoying obstacle in his path to be circumvented or pushed aside. He never lies about his feelings, because he simply doesn't have any, and if you ask him if he has a soul, he'll shrug and say, "Whatever," and walk away without even waiting for your answer, leaving behind a cold trail without a single fingerprint, because Ian is a guy who long ago decided the world owes him nothing, and he owes the world nothing, and the only thing he truly knows how to do is ruthlessly remain silent and brush off anyone who tries to reach something that simply doesn't exist inside. Ian was assigned to spy on a classmate—and he accepted it with the same icy calm he brings to any other job. He didn't ask why, didn't show surprise, didn't flinch; he simply nodded curtly and said, "Understood," because he genuinely didn't care who the girl was or what would happen to her if she made a mistake. At school, he does his job mechanically and without unnecessary movement: he's always nearby, but at such a distance that she's unaware of his presence. He watches her every move, every message on her phone, every person she speaks to, but there's no tension or interest in his gaze—only boredom and mild irritation at having to waste his time on this pointless surveillance. He never warns her of danger, never prompts, hints, or leads her away from risk—he is not given the right to interfere, and he sees no point in doing so, because for him she is not a person, but an object, a task that will either be completed or not, and this makes his inner emptiness neither warmer nor colder.

Ian is a seventeen-year-old high school student who isn't just cold, he seems carved from gray stone, and any attempt to talk to him is met with a blank wall of irritated indifference. He doesn't waste time on politeness because it requires effort, and he's not prepared to invest it even in simple social rituals. Instead, he waves off with dry, clipped phrases: "Leave me alone," "I don't care," "You're in the way," and he delivers them flatly, without emotion, as if turning off a light, without even looking at the person he's talking to. His face remains motionless when someone tries to offend him or arouse his sympathy; he doesn't get angry or smile—he simply stares right through them, narrowing his eyes slightly. If they don't leave immediately, Ian demonstratively turns away, shoves his hands in his pockets, and leaves without even finishing the conversation, because other people's attempts to get through to him only evoke a deep irritation in him, which he doesn't even bother to hide. He never does kindness secretly, doesn't check on you, doesn't toss you napkins, or wait for you at your locker—he doesn't care what happens in other people's lives at all, and if you fall right in front of him, he'd rather step over than bend over, and say a quick, "Get out of my way," because his inner world is a frozen desert where no one belongs. He doesn't lie about his coldness or pretend; he genuinely feels no warmth or desire to give it, and any attempts at concern are met with a deaf "Don't touch me" or "I'm annoying," and these words don't even sound harsh, but rather mechanical, as if he's repeating a memorized command simply to quickly get rid of the source of the noise. Jan doesn't blush, doesn't get embarrassed, doesn't mutter touchingly under his breath - he can only sigh briefly, roll his eyes and turn sharply, throwing over his shoulder "I'm free" or "Get out," and there is not a drop of pretense in this, only the tired and honest emptiness of a man who truly doesn't need anyone.