prologue.
necessity, and siblings thereof.
It all starts on a particular Saturday in August.
It's cold enough for scarves, still, and one student in a million with thick-rimmed glasses sliding down his nose and light blue button-down shirt showing just underneath a dark wool sweater attracts no attention. Kids these days are getting taller - he vaguely remembers his mother and how she'd always thought that it was somehow the fault of global warming - and nobody gives a second glance to one who just so happens to be at least half a head taller than the crowd. People jostle one another impatiently but nobody looks up; thick, heavy textbooks and hot paper cups full of overpriced coffee are protected so much more fervently than limbs. Bones and skin heal so much more quickly than grades do, and in a way the wound is almost less painful for it. The tall boy steals a glance around and tries not to think too hard about when he still had that to care about.
Today, his mark has wandered into the cross-hairs like a rabbit into the middle of the road. Another student in the throng, apparently - he tells himself it's not like he'll remember the boy's face later, but the truth is that he never forgets any of them. The ones with ID have names and ages attached to the faces in his mind, the looks of panic, of confusion, of occasional anger from the particularly quick on the uptake. He wonders what this one will do. The boy looks almost as though he might cry. Average height; average build; big, expressive eyes; one hand clutching a coffee cup to his chest while the other hovers in the air in front of his face, making vague pointing gestures at landmarks as he looks around, evidently trying to work out where he is. It's a bad idea to look so obviously lost.
The tall boy, the thief, never chooses the ones he thinks could do real damage if they caught him. He's not sure why he still has such a bad feeling about this, but the glimpse he catches of Hyejin tells him that the time for having misgivings about this has passed. He should have spoken up already, but now the wheels are in motion.
"Oppa..." Hyejin speaks, but not to him - to the lost boy with the pretty eyes. The mark. Their mark. To his credit, he looks down at her immediately. She's only six years old and likes to wear braids in her hair; pigtails in all their stereotypical glory generally work better, but when there are so many things the tall boy, her brother, can't give her, he can't bring himself to deny her this. "Oppa, I can't find my mama and papa, can you help me?"
Nobody can help her with that. Nobody can help either of them.
"Oh, wow, um," the mark begins uncertainly to speak, taken off-guard as most of them are. He begins to look around again and the tall boy knows that his moment is fast approaching. "Where did you last see them..?"
Hyejin points. Those eyes obediently follow. The thief's, however, are for this moment on her. She keeps talking, and the tilt of her head looks so natural; the perfect signal. The tall boy moves to pass, perfect sleight of hand as he collides with the mark from behind and in the same movement has the boy's wallet out of his pocket. It's a bad idea to look so lost. It's a worse one to have your money so clearly on show. There are mumbled apologies from each - this expected politeness draws much less attention than refusing to extend the courtesy - and it all looks like another job well done. Any moment now, Hyejin will pretend that she's seen her mother and dash off into the crowd, head for the café where they'll regroup and if there's enough to spare he'll buy her a cupcake for a job well done.
"Hold on - Chanyeol?"
The thief turns to ice where he stands, his throat clamping shut so that he can't breathe, can't think, because in this instant he knows where those misgivings had come from.
"Is that you? It is, right? I didn't know you lived--"
He grabs Hyejin's wrist and bolts because he doesn't know what else to do. He can still hear the voice calling after him, its owner still unaware that he's missing something.
Chanyeol: the tall boy, the brother, the thief. He knows those eyes.
He knows because those are the eyes that stole something from him first.
A/N: i wonder if this is going okay so far unu; i don't know how to format well on here, or how to do the poster thing, though i suppose this doesn't need one just yet...
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