Hana stared, her eyes widening at the sight of the creature before her. Its arms were open wide, tugging at her, pulling her into its embrace.

“It’s where you belong,” She heard a rough voice whisper. “It’s where you should be.”

And then the lights went on, and Hana found herself screaming.

“Standard time; the lights get every morning at 6:00 AM and close at 11:00 PM.”
 A woman yelled from the outside, rather annoyingly, as she rapped on Hana’s door.

“Yes, Housemother.” Hana replied robotically, climbing out of bed and systematically picking out her socks and putting them on before running out to the shared bathroom.

“Glasses,” Housemother sighed, after having Hana run into her for the fifth time that week. Well, it was Friday, and Hana basically ran into SOMEBODY every single morning. As clever as she thought Hana was, though hidden, Hana was extremely keen on forgetting about a lot of things when she was not fully awake.

It probably wasn’t intentional, but truthfully, The Housemother didn’t understand how Hani could continue being so forgetful, even after moving in for 2 years.

“Oh, yeah,” Hana yawned, barely having opened her eyes, as she waddled back to her room, using the walls as support.

The Housemother was attending to her plants, carefully arranged atop the largest windowsill, as Hana reappeared nearly 3 minutes later, claiming that she forgot where she had placed her glasses.

It was amazing how Hana’s time in her apartment had passed by so fast, and in the two years, Hana had never changed. This was the same girl that got exactly 71% in every single class, and spent all her free time in her room. Of course, this was also the same girl that kept everything to herself, including her opinion. 

To any other person, Hana was a voiceless, opinion-less, and, practically thoughtless teenager that was, in no way, special. Who knew what this average person, of average appearance was thinking? To Hana’s amazement, her own plan worked out perfectly, flawlessly. She was a face amongst billions, a speck of dust in the grand scheme of things.

Only in this way…. would she survive.

Hana had convinced herself to put the incident behind her, to cast the raw feeling of death in the air far away from her memories. She was to forget… something she never willed to want to forget. She should let go, shouldn’t she?

But the dark shadows kept appearing, maybe not in the corner of her eye, when she crosses the street, huddled behind her layers of clothing, scarves and hats, but these shadows reappeared in her mind’s eye every single night. From her dreams, they carried messages. These messages told her to leave, to hide, to fear, and so, she would never forget.

Wiping away at the fog on the mirror, Hana looked herself in the eye. She couldn’t recall how many times she used to refuse eye contact with herself in the mirror when she looked in the mirror.

When she was younger, she used to see a killer, a murderer, a devil in the mirror, and she thought she saw pure evil in her own eyes.

After all, whose fault is it that so many lives were lost?

“It had been 13 years since the incident.” She told herself, sighing to the bitter coldness of the morning. She almost winced at the boring, orderly, systematic lifestyle she had been following for these last 13 years. Every morning, she would wake up at 6:00 AM, brush her teeth and take a shower till 6:30 AM, grab a piece of bread, and make it to the school library by bus, usually arriving at 7:15 AM. Then, she would spend 45 minutes on researching about these creatures, and relevant information, whilst the library was empty except for the librarian doing some cleaning up. Luckily, this librarian never seemed to care much about Hana. Every morning, she huddled in the same corner, looking through the books relevant to the same topic. Every morning, she routinely went to class, from 8:00 AM till 3:00 PM, and then returned to a bookstore near the Housemother’s apartment to work until 8:30 PM. Lastly, she would return home to cast herself away from all the others in her apartment, eating dinner in a lonely silence. From 9 till 11, she did only homework, finally attempting to sleep at 11: 30 PM.

What had she become? She had become a robot that functioned with two major goals: revenge and survival. And this life was fairly simple, as she didn’t have to look forward to too much. She wouldn’t be let down, if she was never given the chance for revenge, and so, in that, she would never have to face danger, and she would successfully become a nobody in this world. In the end, she would die in peace, wouldn’t she?

But this all changed. This all changed with the day she saw the new kid, Jaejoong, being laughed at, poked at in a crowd. The joke had become too carried away. Before, she always found a way to prevent the bullying by interfering anonymously, either by getting a teacher or by doing random things like throwing a beehive in the attackers’ way, but that day, someone had brought a knife to school. 

~ 

Sorry for the rather short chapter, as I decided to start sort of slow, so as to introduce the character :P 

Hope it was enjoyable, and I'm currently on the second chapter, which is a little more exciting, and you get introduced to Jaejoong :) 

Sorry for grammatical errors!

- ICEDCOFFEE