#futuresight

Choi Han

you have the same vibe as Cale-nim, where you know more than you let on

it’s pretty obvious as any plans with you two involved goes swimmingly well, almost as if luck’s twisted in your favor

Choi Han’s a sword master and he’s more than confident he can dodge bullets in milliseconds, but you’d be the type to warn him to watch his right shoulder two days before the actual fight

because of this foresight he worries, as he does for Cale, that you’ll act out a plan without consulting them first

he knows you’ll be fine but at the same time he can’t help but worry that because of your knowledge you’d take on most of the burden the same way Cale-nim does and what if one day you bite off more than you can chew?

it really would give him a peace of mind if you’d feel comfortable enough to trust them to help you share some of your burden 

because in the end they’ll never force you to explain 

he’ll just fret silently and swear to keep a tighter eye on you so that hopefully when the time comes, he can be fast enough to protect the both of you from all the dangerous stunts you pull

Alberu Crossman

Alberu grew up scarred by some stupid misinterpreted prophecy that haunted him since childhood

So is he going to care a lot about prophecies, fortunes or oracles? not really 

Alberu makes his own future and you know this very well, so you’re more than content to sit back and watch the story of Alberu Crossman unfold

That isn’t to say you won’t give a hint or two from time to time

and he’s not so tactless to reject a helping hand

you both know he’ll take what he needs from the information you give and use it however he wants

“Hi little Seer,” she coos as she opens the door and reaches in to grab the front of his shirt. He wishes she wouldn’t call him that. It’s not his name, but his name was stolen from him long ago, so the nickname was the closest thing he had. She uncuffs his ankle and pulls him to his feet. Blood rushes back to his legs, sending stabs of pins and needles through them. He’s unsteady, but she holds his arms and guides him to where she wants him. The room is too bright with the cheap florescent lamps. With a pull then a shove, he thuds into the wooden armchair. Adrenalin starts to rush his head, making his nose flare as he tried to control his breathing. Victoria grins and pinches his nose.

“Good, get all worked up for us. It goes quicker that way.” He twists and struggles uselessly to get away from her grip. His lungs burn and he can feel heat pushing behind the skin of his face. After a brief moment, she lets go and he wishes he could gasp for breath instead of having to scramble to get air through his nose. Tyler comes out of the bathroom and leans against the door frame.

“How many orders today?” he asked absent mindedly as he dries his hands. Victoria cuts the tape around his writs and pulls them down to tape them to the armrests, palms up. He groans internally, more and more layers of tape that will get ripped away later. Heaven forbid they get actual cuffs for his wrists. How many hotel chairs had they left sticky residue on?

“Five,” she responds as she finishes his other hand. A shudder ripples down his spine and digs into his bones. Three was his hard limit for one session, which meant this would happen multiple time today.

“Any specials?” asks Tyler as he pulls his bag from the floor and starts to gather his tools. The boy squeezes his eyes shut and hopes none are a special order. Maybe if he focuses, he can manifest it…

“Two.”

Shit. Uninvited tears well in his eyes and threaten to spill over. A hand strokes through his curly hair as he tries to shake his head. He can’t do five today, he doesn’t have the strength, they never let him truly rest.

“You’re getting popular, honey! Isn’t that great? And you’re getting fans, both our specials are from the Southwest Syndicate.” Victoria plays with his hair, scratching lightly with her acrylic nails. It would feel nice, but she already plays with his head too much; it’s all too much. “Do good with these, and they said they’ll set us up in one of their places. Wouldn’t that be nice? Not moving around from hotel to hotel?” Her voice is sweet and condescending, like she’s comforting a child that dropped their ice cream cone, not a shuddering boy that she tied to a chair.

“Where’s Vince?” Tyler asks as he sets out his tools on the side of the bed. A knife, a taser, a short length of strong rope, an eyedropper bottle, two small canisters. The tears overflow and fall from the boy’s eyes as he desperately wishes they weren’t there.

“Hell if I know. Probably buying lotto tickets somewhere.” Victoria is somewhere behind him, although she’d taken her hand off his head at this point.

“We’ll do two regular ones and the last one a special. We can finish the other ones in a second round later.” Tyler’s voice is as smooth and bored as if he was simply planning the meals for the week, not the torture of the shaking form in front of him. He moves to sit on the bed across from the boy, arranging his tools within reach. Victoria pulls out the headphones and slips them over the boy’s ears. Before they turn on, Tyler snaps his fingers in front of the boy’s face, forcing his attention to the photo he holds.

“Now, little Seer, you’re not going to look away again, are you? Gonna keep those little eyes open?” The boy nods desperately, begging with his eyes. He doesn’t know what he’s begging for, but he begs, nevertheless. The headphones are turned on, startling him. A low, masculine voice starts to speak, so loud in his ears it’s all he can hear. The rumble fills his head and digs into his mind.

It’s the man in the picture that’s only inches from his face. Details for him to focus on, find this man out of all the strangers. Pick this man out of space and time instead of himself, as he accidentally does sometimes. It’s not his fault; they’re twisting his ability to something that it’s not supposed to be. It’s not for other’s gain, but instead to protect himself when he’s in danger. Just a quick vision of his future to show him what to do when he’s threatened. The boy knows this, but it seems like it’s about the only thing that he knows for sure. He knows this is wrong. He also knows it will be so much worse if he doesn’t comply.

He locks his eyes on the picture and tries to focus on the sound of the voice as it rattles useless information. Most of the time they say insignificant things; their name, their address, work title, parent’s names, any identifying information. Sometimes they just list numbers that mean nothing to him. He studies the glossy photo of an older man in a boring black suit. He begs and pleads with his brain, Please, please just do it. Don’t make this hard on me this time. Please.

Movement in his periphery, but he doesn’t dare move his eyes from the photo. He doesn’t look at the knife, but he can feel it when it cuts into the skin of his arm. A whimper fights its way out from behind the tape, but he still doesn’t look away. Panic creeps around his mind as he stares intensely at the thinning hair, the suitcase, anything to trigger the vision. He can feel the blood circling its way around the curve of his arm, bumping along the other scars. Another slice, centimetres away from the first. His heart pounds in his chest, beating as if its going to try and escape through his throat.

Another and another, crossing over each other adding to the latticework etched into both his arms. Each slice gets deeper as Tyler starts to lose his patience. Tears stream down the boy’s face as he can feel sweat build on his forehead and his back. Desperation digs its’ claws deep, and he frantically searches the details. It was getting to be too long; Tyler was getting impatient. Danger! Danger! This is danger, goddamn it. Do it! A bead of sweat drips into the cuts, pushing his over the edge.

Like a hit to the gut, the air gets knocked out of his lungs. The world fizzles out and he’s floating. Listing, tumbling through a void with no sense of up or down. He’s lost, grappling onto something, anything to ground him. Threads slip through his fingers, fleeting and ethereal. He doesn’t have a body. He doesn’t have borders. He can feel his consciousness ooze away and stretch thin.

Sight crashes back into focus jarringly. The man eating at the large table of a fancy estate alone. The man driving a golf cart around, chatting with another man of equal age holding onto the handle attached to the roof. The man in a nursing home alone.

The real-world crashes back into vision just as sharply, as if he was slammed full force back into his body. He slumps against the back of the chair, too disoriented to even sit up straight. The room spins as the vibrant, saturated, inhuman colors shift back into normal hues, swirling and bubbling around in a way only he can see. Uneven breath catching as he tries to breath through his nose.

He can see the room around him, but it doesn’t register. All that registers is the pain in his arm and the hand that slides through his hair. The tears in his eyes feel foreign. Like he shouldn’t have a physical form but was forced into one anyway.

Without giving him time to recover, he can feel Victoria invade his mind. He can’t see her, but he can feel that she’s there. He feels her move through his memories. He can feel the tracks that she leaves like footprints. She isn’t just browsing this time; she’s searching for that vision. He tries to focus on it, to keep it in the forefront of his mind. He learned not to fight her long ago, she’ll leave when she finds what she came for. He latches onto the details, knowing they’ll be upset with him if he forgets them.

A snap like a recoil in his mind and it’s gone. It’s all gone. An empty vacuum is left in place of the memory. His panic riddled brain scrambles to fill it, short circuiting and fumbling at the space that was a memory only mere seconds ago. It needs to restart and re-evaluate, fix the files, it’s too much, too quick. It shuts down and he blacks out.

Seconds later, his nose is assaulted with a painful sensation. A heatless burn that creeps down his throat. He jerks awake again, head and arm throbbing in unison. Tyler takes the smelling salts from underneath his nose and puts them back next to the knife on the bed.

The bed. The hotel room. Tyler. It comes back to him in pieces, where he is and what’s happening.

The boy closes his eyes and focuses on his breathing. He knows that this is his time to try and recover, that they won’t give him much more. He only really has the time it takes Victoria to project the memory on the TV and record it with the cheap camcorder they use. Especially today if they have five orders to fill. God, he wishes it could go back to when it was only a few visions a week, not multiple a day.

“Meh, it’s not much but it doesn’t look like his life has much more in it. Poor dude. Imagine paying all this money just to learn you’ll die a lonely old man?” Victoria laughs. The boy doesn’t even try and put the pieces of the vision back together again. That vision is gone just like the hundreds of others, and trying to get it back will only hurt and confuse him more in the long run. It’s like his brain is screaming at him, I’m not made for this! You keep messing up my files! Just stop before I can’t function anymore!

His breathing evens out and he feels those hands on his shoulders, centering him in the chair.

The second time is worse. Tyler pours salt into the fresh cuts and grinds them into his flesh until it triggers the vision. Flashes of a woman’s life and a car crash that feels like it hits the boy himself. His chest heaves miserably when he comes back to his battered body. Even the hint of Victoria in his mind crashes the delicate web of synapses. Blackness.

Soft hands this time, rubbing circles with thumbs on his temples. He wakes in stages, slowly pulled from the inky darkness. His eyes close and he tries unsuccessfully to retreat into nothingness.

It’s a delicate balance for them. Do they push him every day and grab the most money they can? Or do they take care of their asset and ensure that he can function for another day? It doesn’t help that they never ask for his opinion, or how he’s doing. If they did, maybe they would slow down.

Or they wouldn’t.

He almost wishes his breathing doesn’t return to regular. Regular breathing seems to be their cue that he’s ready for the next round. Hands come from behind him again to set his shoulders back center. He’s not, he wants to scream that he’s not ready. He can’t do it. His eyes flutter open to see Tyler’s attention fully on him, so he meets Tyler’s cold brown eyes and begs. He knows he looks pitiful, sweat dripping from his brows, shaking and crying, dark circles permanently dug into his face. His eyes are all that he has, and he learned to use them years ago. They rarely do any good, but he tries every time.

“Oh, come on. One more then you get a break, m’kay?” Tyler chides as he thumbs some tears away. The boy nods, at least there was some sort of response this time. A loose promise of relief at some later time.  

The hand in his hair guides his head back until his looking up at the ceiling. The special requests are the worst, rivaling even when they try to push his limits to fill more orders in one session. Tears run down his temples, and he can start to feel his nose grow stuffy from crying. Victoria hears the sniff and her head bobs into his vision.

“Hey, hey, hey, none of that. You want to breathe, don’t you?” She smiles a sickly white smile to him, her red hair pooling around her face as she looks down on him. The florescent lights highlight her hair and allude to a false halo. He doesn’t respond. “Actually, on second thought, go ahead. It’ll go faster.”

A hand with an eyedropper appears in his vision, and he shut his eyes tight. It stings, it burns, please don’t. Please. Please don’t. A tsk. Fingers dig into the soft skin around his eye and force it open. He whines, but the drops fall anyways. Quickly, the hands shift and put that acid in the other eye. He knows its not actually acid, but it feels like it. They all know it’s not good for his eyes, hence the higher fee for special requests. More money, more danger, but also more detailed information. Whatever the liquid is, it focuses the vision and makes it stronger. Clearer.

He can feel it working as the light in the room starts to hurt his head. He blinks quickly, desperate for some sort of relief, but that only works to spread the burn more evenly around his eye. Headphones slip on again, another photo inches from his face. His vision is blurry, shapes and colors roll with the greasy film on his eyes. Even the tears that slide down his face seem to burn tracks into his skin.

Another male voice, listing locations, times, and names. This photo is not a person, but a place. An empty warehouse. He tries to focus, but his body is begging to cave into exhaustion. The lids of his eyes drift down slowly, so slowly. They close for just a moment, just of moment of reprieve from the overwhelming senses that drill into his mind.

Fingers dig into his brows and pull his eyes open once again. The world is bleary and dizzy, shifting and slanting like a ship rocked by waves. The voice echoes in his head, destroying whatever shred of himself he had left. Any shred of the person that he was before he was their Little Seer.

He can feel the hard plastic and cold metal dig into and almost under his ribs. His mind is too far gone, to panicked and desperate to even respond to the threat. All he can do is shake and accept whatever will come. Whatever will be done to him. Pray that it will be quick.

The taser needs only flick alive for a moment, seizing all control of his lungs and surging pure electricity through his veins. His eyes bulge out before they relax and a haze like silver storms clouds overtake his blown-wide pupils.

Falling, grasping, tumbling, lost.

This time, he might as well be standing in the warehouse with the men. Their stoic expressions, their rumpled and wrinkled suit jackets, their stiff posture. It’s a meeting, an exchange of some sort. The man closest to his perspective, the shortest one with standard black wire glasses has a black brief case by his side.

It’s 3:56 pm, three days in the future, far too warm for the season. The short man shifts, restless and uncomfortable. As he moves, the white button down he’s wearing shifts and a small black wire blinks into view. It’s a sting. It’s a trap.

Black cars, a mat black Jeep Wrangler with custom trim and G-140 rims and two black Lincoln Navigators with tinted window pull into view of the open cargo doors. The farthest Navigator has a dark scratch covering half of the wheel well of the back, left tire. A man in a tailored black suit steps out from the passenger side. He has long blond hair tied up in a low knot at the nape of his neck. The short, wired man’s breathing hitches slightly, only visible when seen from a specter’s perspective.

They meet in neutral ground and exchange words. Too late, the other notices the pucker of his shirt collar and the shadow of a wire. Guns are drawn, shots are fired. Neither man makes it out alive, others are wounded, only the driver of the jeep escapes. Sirens blare in the distance, but the scene is starting to slip away.