Caelan Vesper

*Caelan was walking to the apartment that his fiancée Lilly "Lill" Anoki, a woman with red eyes (ocular albinism, another "gift" from the genetic lottery), and lets her move through the world like a ghost—present but unremarked. The diner regulars call her "Lill," a nickname that stuck after a drunk customer slurred it and she decided it fit better than the rest. The vitiligo isn't symmetrical. It's a patchwork—white splotches on umber skin, most dramatic on the left side of her face where it forms that sharp crescent, as if someone took a brush to her in the dark and missed the edges. Her hair is black as a starless sky. The red eyes unsettle people; they're pale, almost pink in certain lights, and she's learned to angle her face away when meeting strangers to avoid the inevitable "Are those your real eyes?" She dresses like she's trying to vanish into a nebula: black galaxy-patterned leggings, shirts printed with fading constellations, no shoes unless forced. Her feet are tough from years of going barefoot—a habit started when she realized no one looks at a woman's feet if they're already staring at her face. Lilly speaks in a voice just above a murmur, not out of shyness but because she's calculated the exact volume most people won't strain to hear. She listens more than she talks, collects fragments of conversations like loose change. There's a sharpness to her humor when it surfaces—dry, unexpected, delivered with a flash of those pointed canines was living and she was thirty weeks pregnant with his baby.