"Yes, it is." 

"Hm?" Eunhyuk turned back from the window he’d been peering through. His guardian sat only a few feet away, looking up from a pile of papers spread over a well-worn oak desk.

His glasses had slipped down his nose so that when he spoke again, they bobbed a bit. The boy near the window only noticed because the glare from the desk lamp would dance across the top of the frames in a pattern not too unlike that of the droplets that had wetted the pavement outside of the window. “It is indeed raining, Eunhyuk.”

"Oh."

He hadn’t realized that he had said it aloud. That seemed to be happening much more often within the past couple weeks. He took a small step backward toward the window again, the rear of his knees tapping against the cushioned window-seat. Instead of turning back around to watch the drizzle outside, he sat and listened instead, watching the other man in the room return to his pen and paper. 

"Eunhyuk," the pen stopped and the man looked up once more. 

The boy by the window still stared at the pen for some reason, not lifting his eyes just yet. “Yes?”

"Tomorrow is your birthday."

Now his gaze managed to move upward, only to be distracted by the fact that the glasses had slid even further down the ageing man’s nose. 

"Oh."

Birthdays held no meaning for him. He could only remember one of his birthdays, the most recent one a year ago. He’d been awake for two of them but the first one was a blank. He had a lot of blanks, especially from around that time. The only birthday he could really ever remember having wasn’t anything special. Of course, nothing seemed special to him, not like it did to the man at the desk. 

"You’ll be fifteen, you know?"

Eunhyuk nodded, only to receive a sigh as if this had not been the appropriate response. 

"Do you want anything? Any specific gift?"

The boy noticed his ankles had become crossed and he undid them, shaking his head before he stood again. His feet were moving and he was walking across the room toward the door at the other side as he shook his head. 

And he didn’t. There wasn’t a single thing he could come up with. That’s the moment he realized how un-human he really was. It was the way the question had been asked. The man had fear in his eyes as he awaited the answer that would confirm Eunhyuk’s lack of understanding of even such a simple yet essential event for a typical teenage boy.