. temporary .

( juvenilegod / First Time Interaction Starters )

All he wanted was to make a deposit.

He doesn’t make a lot of money at the pub, despite working late at night and well into the start of mornings, but every bit always counts. There was only one other person between himself and the counter when everyone started screaming and three warning shots were fired skyward. And now, as he remains crouched under a desk with hands over his ears and brows knitted together in worry, Kyungsoo realises that the stranger who had been behind him in line hadn’t been entirely delusional. In all fairness, though, very few members of even the metropolitan police carry firearms, let alone seemingly normal citizens in a little, family-owned bank. But the boy’s unsuspecting nature hardly matters matter when a dozen people are being held hostage while four masked men stand guard, their presumed leader plundering every shelf and drawer in the back.

It doesn’t make sense--why anyone would rob such a tiny bank when much larger, more prosperous banks can be found just a few blocks down. What’s even more confusing is that the people robbing the bank are armed, despite being surrounded by defenseless citizens in a relatively quiet district of the city. They could probably get away with thousands of dollars just by raising their voices and maybe waving steel bats around if they felt the need to use force. But it’s difficult to focus on any of these things when the man in the back is yelling and throwing files everywhere, threatening to use his gun if anyone moves.

( wndrlzt / First Time Interaction Starters )

“N.. No, I’m– I’m okay.”

It’s a lie. It’s such an obvious lie, but Kyungsoo hopes the stranger will turn a blind eye to the bruise on his elbow and the scratches on his face. He hopes with every fibre of his being that the taller male will ignore the chalk dust all over his fingers and clothes, that the stranger will fail to notice the fact that he’s also missing a shoe. These aren’t important things and he doesn’t want to bother anyone. No one really has to know what’s going on, where he just came from, or why he looks like he’s narrowly escaped a horrible, painful death. (Which he has, but that’s not important.)

/nods once and leaves him for several minutes, cleaning the other tables as they emptied; the boy would be their last guest for the night. Hmm. /she observes him a moment and returns, holding a glass of red wine and setting it in front of him. You looked like you needed something a little bloodier than water. It’s on the house.

     A storm is coming, Frank says            A storm that will swallow the children

     And I will deliver them from the            Kingdom of pain

     I will deliver the children back            To their doorsteps      And send the monsters back            To the underground

     I’ll send them back to a place             Where no one else can see them...

                                                                             Except for me.

"Wake up." A voice calls to him, distorted and undulating, like the ringing of cymbals after the crash. The consonants and vowels slur together in an unsettling fashion, but Kyungsoo listens to the voice in silence. "I want to show you something."

A series of images flashes before his eyes, each one lasting only for a fraction of a second before turning to the next, and Kyungsoo stares in a daze, letting the images ingrain their forms into his corneas. Ocean waves fold over a shore, sending a hundred million drops of salt water in every direction. Next, a cartoon rabbit with brown fur and beady eyes stands tall, turning its head to the right with alert ears. The rest of the images consists of a pair of hands around a woman's neck, a pupil dilating to more than twice its original diameter, and flashes of a home in distress, picture frames strewn about and piercing screams ringing in the corridors.

When Kyungsoo wakes up, the first thing he notices is that his feet are cold, wet. He fares poorly in the freezing weather when all he has on his figure is a set of thin pajamas but no shoes. He's standing on a patch of grass just outside a house that bears an uncanny resemblance to the one in his dream, and the fingers of his left hand are curled around a ballpoint pen, while the right clutches a piece of paper. It takes him another second to realise that the lot has been cordoned off with yellow tape. Warnings of DO NOT CROSS scream at the back of his head, because he seems to have unknowingly crossed the barriers while in his sleep, and there are people everywhere, all working for the police department. A few curious neighbours who have been stirred from sleep gather by the tape as well, and they ask one another if another murder has taken place.

Chalk dust coats his palms and creeps into the beds of his fingernails. A soft, nearly inaudible scratching noise reaches the boy's ears, and the world begins to bend and fold. Pinched between his index finger and thumb is a short stick of chalk, which he drags along a brick wall to create a circle of around one metre in diameter. Light shines from the area of the circle, and the boy pokes his head through the space, curious eyes darting this way and that. Directly in front of him stands a television set, complete with speakers to either side of the device and a loveseat just a short distance away from it. To the right is an entrance into a kitchen, and to the left lies a mannequin, limbs bent as unnaturally as the grin painted onto its face.

Kyungsoo pulls his head out from the circle, then sweeps the sleeve of his sweater across the brick to erase his drawing. That was not his home. With pursed lips, the pale-skinned boy crouches down and etches a circle into the pavement around his feet. A soft gasp is all that rings within the empty city when the boy falls through the portal, and the chalk falls from his fingers as he descends into darkness--down, down, down...

When the boy wakes up, he is greeted with a gust of cool wind and the unpleasant sensation of hard pavement beneath his bare feet. Somewhere to his right, he hears a woman, but it takes him several slow blinks to regain the ability to perform fine motor skills, eventually turning his gaze in the direction of the stranger. She's hurt, Kyungsoo guesses from her mumbling, and he is only mildly surprised when he realises that there is an unopened bandage between his fingers. After another drowsy blink, the dark-haired boy toddles towards the woman and gently tugs on the end of her shirt when he is close enough, mind hazy from sleep and muscles aching faintly from traveling while unconscious.

Kyungsoo is no master of human development.

He could probably recite the approaches, theories, and stages of human growth, from both a physiological and cognitive perspective, but if he were to make any guesses about what stage any one human was at in their life, Kyungsoo would probably guess wrong. Of course, his propensity to incorrectly estimate someone's age does not exempt him from making such assumptions when met with strangers, and his first conclusion about the male before him is that he can't be old enough to neither purchase nor smoke cigarettes.

(Of course, Kyungsoo is most likely wrong.)

He has only glanced once at the stranger's face, gaining but a glimpse of large ears and a prominent nose bridge, but the features stick with him as he turns just slightly to rummage through his schoolbag. Faint rustling fills the silence around them, pale fingers leafing through notebooks and colour co-ordinated folders until they take purchase of a half-empty plastic bag, which he holds out towards the taller male.

Legally, he's only been allowed to buy cigarettes for a handful of years, and even then, he's never once touched any such things. Even if he were, for whatever reason, to purchase one pack of those cancerous agents, it's highly unlikely that the clerk would believe him to be over eighteen, given his unfortunate lack of any real height or signs of normal aging. It sounds neither healthy nor pleasant to buy things like cigarettes.

Socialisation is not his forte.

Throw a nervous wreck of a boy into the streets, and the results will be as expected--failure. It's written in the weak, too-quick beating of his heart and coded into the tips of his fingers as they worry at the hem of a dark blue, oversized sweater: failure. Be it with three strangers or three hundred, the efforts of a wide-eyed boy built on anxiety-riddled bones and trying to function in social settings will always produce the same results. Failure.

Kyungsoo is already near tears when the fair-skinned stranger shoos him off, who clearly cannot be bothered to entertain the company of another. But Kyungsoo is on a mission, just a syllable or two away from completion, and the thought of having to speak to another stranger terrifies him so close to his core that he remains with the male before him now, desperate to finish his assignment.

"But," he starts, only to fall silent in the next beat, his throat seeming to close up while his tongue swells between his teeth. The feeling is a little more than unpleasant, leaving him short of breath and without any real motivation to remember what he'd meant to say, so he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small candy wrapped in bright red plastic that crinkles in his palm. He holds the treat out for the stranger and fixes his gaze on his shoelaces, wondering briefly if he should replace them soon. The aglet on the left shoe is almost broken completely.

It hits you at two in the morning--a sudden wave of inexplicable remorse, rushing through your blood vessels and buzzing in your ears like a bullet in the chamber. You sit up in bed, startled, shaken, and then you stare at nothing, racking your brain this way and that for an answer. Why do you feel guilty? Is this grief haunting you, or are you only feeling it just now? And where does it come from? What have you done? What have you done?

Perhaps you will learn one day that these feelings haunt you because you have experienced them before, because you exist everywhere at once, making new decisions at every given opportunity. In one universe, you may turn left instead of right. In another, you may use a household object to crush the skull of a neighbour in a fit of blind rage. Regardless of your choices, be they seemingly inconsequential or fatal, you are forgiven. You have been granted a second chance only through the sacrifice of a stranger, whose nights are haunted by your decisions and whose life is spent in repentance for you. That is why you feel guilty.

These phantom emotions are yours, but they are not your own.

Many of you will not remember, but the Traveller, the stranger who suffers for your peace, will remember. They will always remember.

Kyungsoo wakes up to silence--a deafening absence of sound that rattles his rib cage and strains the sinews of his cold muscles. In this absolute silence accompanied by the inability to lift even a finger, veins pulsating with the erratic pounding of his heart against his chest, the boy can only recall a handful of moments when he's faced anything nearly as terrifying as this. He's alive, there's at least that, but his limbs still refuse to move no matter how much energy he puts into it, no better than anvils and sewing thread. And as if moving weren't already two breaths away from impossible, sight is in an entirely new realm of its own. Regardless of how hard he strains his surely-open eyes, his efforts to make out any figures in the vicinity are all in vain when absolute darkness envelops his form.

After what feels like an hour of fruitless struggling, Kyungsoo finally begins to entertain the possibility of having gone blind, of having his sight--and perhaps even his hearing--robbed while he'd been out cold. It isn't impossible, after all, and there are about a thousand souls in this universe and elsewhere that would slaughter a million for shelter. Possession has always been at the top of his mile-long list of fears. He can't imagine what it would be like to watch his own fingers curl when he wants them to reach out, or to house the thoughts of another being for so long, until he can no longer differentiate between theirs and his own. There's nothing more terrifying to the boy than losing control of his own life.

It can't be more than a minute after Kyungsoo has decided that he's lost everything when something unbearably bright pops up in the corner of his vision, and after blinking rapidly for his eyes to adjust, he realises it's a cell phone. And everything passes by so quickly after that, as if he's entered a drug-induced rush, muscles struggling to contract as he desperately tries to reach out for the device. His fingers curl sporadically, clawing at the cold, hard surface of the ground beneath his body, but they fail to grab hold of the phone. He feels like crying, eyes already moist with either the effort of working so hard or the frustration of not being able to properly move his own limbs (he can't tell which), but a weak noise of relief escapes him when, within a minute, he succeeds in grasping the mobile phone, devoting every ounce of strength left in his body to bringing the object closer to his face.