Walking down the road, Sehun couldn’t help but rewind the story Jaelle told them inside his head. There was something wrong: wrong with him and wrong with the story. At first, when Jaelle started it, his heart stung all of a sudden and he found himself short of breath, clenching on his chest in a futile attempt to make it beat normally. And then, as her story went on, his tears rolled down his cheeks and a sudden wish to just lay on the ground and die right there was born inside his mind.

“What’s wrong with you?” He stopped walking, clenching on his t-shirt where his heart was beating heavily. “Why are you… hurting this much?”

“Maybe because it remembers?”

“Jaelle!” Sehun turned around and found the girl standing behind him, hair a mess, her fingers dirty with mud. “What’s wrong? Why is it acting this way? Make it stop! Please,” his fingers squeezed he shoulder while his desperate eyes sought for some sort of help.

“Breathe, Sehun, breathe,” Jaelle’s eyes never left his as she silently helped him sit directly on the asphalt. “Now tell me.”

The boy swallowed hard, closing his eyes while he kept on holding Jaelle’s hand as if she was his salvation.

“I never wanted to come along in this trip,” he confessed with a sigh. “I was fine the way I was. Sincerely! But then Kai disappeared without a trace and I had to follow him. Geez, I hate him so much!” His grip tightened until the girl’s fingers turned white. “But at the same time I’m grateful to him. Does it make any sense to you?”

“There are situations when we tend to have contradictory feelings. We’re too complex,” she shrugged.

“I’m adopted,” Sehun let out all of a sudden, eyes on Jaelle. “When I was four, my mom left me in front of the orphanage. She just… left me there. It was so cold that I could feel my tears turning into ice on my cheeks. And yet, for some strange reason, I couldn’t stop crying,” he turned his eyes to the sky above them. “Kai’s mom found me. She was one of those high class ladies that would donate goods to the kids every month. She still is so – Mrs. Kim.”

And he stopped, realizing that he had opened in front of a complete stranger. No one knew his story, he was a mystery for everyone. But there he was, sitting on the warm asphalt of the street, in the middle of freaking nowhere, holding the hand of a ‘savage’ girl and opening his heart to her.

Strange indeed, but it felt good. The feeling of being stuffed had finally disappeared, leaving nothing else but relief.

“She took me in her house and made sure I was comfortable, that my clothes were warm, that I was eating properly, that I had toys to play with,” Sehun spoke after realizing that Jaelle was looking at him with a strange expression. What was it? It made his heart act weirdly. “And then she introduced me to her son, the spoiled brat Kim Jongin. You probably think he was like this from birth, right?”

“More or less?”

“He was not. He was shy and reserved, looking more of a porcelain doll than the chic guy he is today,” Sehun smiled to the memories he seemed to have kept dearly engraved inside his heart. “Kai was my first friend. It’s strange now that I think of it, how much a broken robot did to us. It may not have been th