Time Stops For a Never After

Chpt 2

Who protects whom? 

Stopping in his stride, Tao looked at the watch on his wrist and sighed.

After that first phone call, both Tao and Kris began seeing more of eachother. After each of his missions-which Kris knew nothing about of course-Tao would stop by Kris' restaurant and chat with him. Their conversations were always small and formal, but neither cared as they had just met.

In their last conversation, they had agreed to meet up at the local amusement park so they could talk in a casual situation. The set meeting time was 3pm. Glancing at his watch again for the nth time, he saw it was 3:45. Tao did recall that Kris had said that he would probably be late, but this was just plain being stood up.

'Hmph, I knew it was too good to be true, ' the lone boy thought to himself. All his life was similar too this moment.

  When he was only two year old, his father had taken him to the park. 'We are going to play a game' the man had said. The game was that he would hide Tao somewhere and see how long the boy could remain there. 'I'll come get you in a bit' his father had told him as he hid him under the slide and walked away. 

He never came back. 

For seven whole hours baby Tao had sat under that dirty slide smiling, 'Daddy will come back soon and we can play more, ' he kept thinking to himself. After a day, reality began to sink in. The young boy cried for an hour. 'No more crying, Tao' he encouraged himself. Wiping his tears, he stood up and walked out of thr park with his head high.

Shaking his mind from the memories, Tao prepared to leave the amusement park. 'I should have expected this much, ' he thought as he walked to the entrance. 

Right when he was at the gate, he heard someone call his name.

"TAO!" a voice said. Wait, not A voice, THE voice. The voice Tao had waited all day to hear. Turning around, he saw a tall figure running up to him that was no other than Kris. As the older reached him, he doubled over in exhaustion from running. 

"T...Tao...I'm sorry....I'm late, " Kris said between big gulps of breath. 

"What kept you? " the younger asked innocently.

 Surely he must have a good reason as to why he was late, maybe an emergency-

"I over slept, sorry."

Or he over slept. That could explain it too.

Tao stood there, looking at the hunched over boy. He should be mad, furious in fact. He had almost missed thier meeting because he SLEPT IN. But strangely enough, Tao wasn't mad. At all. If anything, he was happy. So, so happy; he hadn't been stood up. Kris was here, right in front of him.

And in all honesty, the older's reason for being late was pretty laughable. 

And that's exactly what he did.

Kris raised an eyebrow at the boy in front of him. The younger had burst out laughing all of a sudden and had doubled over in the proccess to meet his crouched position. 

"What's so funny?," he asked looking away.

"You, your reason