noun

       • the state of not being present; the time of this; a lack; inattention.

adjective - absent

       • not present; not existing; inattentive.

transitive verb - absent

       •  to keep (oneself) away

Troye stays quiet even as he grows. He learns to listen more than he speaks, learns to fade into the background more than he stands out. He learns that his silence is more than just accepted by those around him, but both welcome and celebrated. They hate it when he speaks, hate it when they have to be reminded he exists at all, and eventually he is raised under the absolute knowledge that his needs fall below the rest of the world's.

He doesn't feel like it's wrong, not for the first seven years of his existence. It's the way life is and he's never known any different, so why should he wish for something else? He doesn't crave love or affection or for anyone to pay him any modicum of attention, he simply watches the couples whose care he falls under brush hands and kiss and speak of adoration and assumes this is how all children live.

He learns to cook before he learns to read, learns to clean before he learns to write, and nothing is taught by anyone but himself and the increasingly apparent need to take care of himself after he realizes someone really does have to, after all. He knows no one around him is concerned with his needs, knows this before he knows anything at all, and he's smart enough to figure out that this simply means he'll have to do the caring for them.

He thinks it's normal, he really does, until his seventh foster home in as many years where they try to teach him differently.

This couple is always there, always hovering over him and asking if he needs anything, trying to educate him in everything no one thought he was worth the time to teach, hugging him and patting down his hair and making him feel like he's walked straight into one of his odd recurring dreams.

He doesn't stay with them for long, only three months before they find a child who isn't so messed up already ('It's like he doesn't even realize he's a living human being sometimes. It's disturbing.'), but it's long enough for him to realize everything he knows is wrong.

Passed around from home to shelter to attic to home in the years that follow, he is all too painfully aware of all the things he doesn't have and never will. There is no one to miss him if he's gone, no one to care if he gets hurt, no one to feed him when he can't make up the money to feed himself.

In the seventh year of his life, Troye learns that love and care are absences he cannot fill within himself. Sometimes, he even finds himself wishing that his entire life was nothing but such an absence gone unmissed in the grand scheme of everything.