This (*) symbol will be placed at the top of any chapter I have placed a courtesy warning on.  If you are a sensitive reader and may be affected by certain content, please highlight after the symbol to reveal the white text (ending in the same symbol) to look for warnings. The content consists only of mentions and should not warrant an M rating, but for the comfort of all readers, the option to have a preview of sensitive content will be provided.  I will only be placing the symbol (and not this description) in future chapters. 

(*) Mention:  suicide (*)

Hansol’s senses have tunneled.  He can’t feel his hands holding his head or his elbows pressing into the table. His breath hitches.  His mind is stapled to the present and he’s almost forgotten why which makes it all the more difficult to pull himself out.

He’s not sure how long he’s known that Gohn is crouching next to him.

“Talk me through how you’re feeling.”  

Hansol’s voice staggers, “My head—really warm. . .”

There are footsteps, but that’s all he can process.  He wonders how long he’s been answering Gohn’s questions.  He peels his hands away from his head to test the nausea that threatens him like those old voices.

A heavy hand settles on the back of his neck. He hiccups a gasp and a flinch.  The clutter of thoughts and raw feelings freeze.

“Sorry.”  

The signals to Hansol’s brain are scrambled and lethargic, so he finds out seconds afterward that Gohn had asked him if he could touch him and he had already nodded.

As the fact sinks in, he forces his shoulders down from his ears, trying to piece things into order.  The hand on his neck is colder than the cloth held to his forehead.  His thoughts start to untangle and run out like sand.  Hansol almost collapses as the pinpoint world starts to gather and expand.  He takes a long, shaky breath and releases it of his own accord.

“Okay?”

Hansol nods in a way that makes his head spin.  Nothing else is said for a while as he feels his body falling into his control, leaving him hollow and drained.  He swallows down the acid in his throat.  

“I’m sorry,” he says to Gohn who is holding the cold cloth to his forehead.

“It’s alright.” Gohn’s voice is light.  “My sister used to get these.” 

Hansol’s mouth dries.  “Oh.”  The ‘used to’ is stale.

Gohn ushers the conversation along, “Don’t worry about it is what I’m trying to say.  I know my way around malfunctioning brains.”  There’s something teasing to his words but the joke is heavy. 

Hansol’s nerves are frayed and sensitive so the smell of sorrow like trailing candle smoke pinches a cough from his throat. 

He presses the side of his hand to his upper lip:  partially to connect his body to itself again and partially to dab at the line of sweat there.  When he lowers his hand again he asks, “What happened to your sister?”  If Gohn had been sitting in front of him he wouldn’t have asked.  Somehow with just Gohn’s voice and the half-forgotten hand on his forehead as evidence of his presence, Hansol can say it.

“She killed herself,” Gohn says frankly.  He shifts his weight between his feet.  “That’s the thing.  Different people react in different ways to us.  I guess being around me for too long drove her crazy.  Back then I had the same question you did earlier, “it’s my fault?” but it’s not, really.  I don’t need to know what happened to you or where you came from, but if you think making people angry is your fault, then you have to tell me that my sister’s death is my fault and I don’t think you could do that. . . and I’d like to think it isn’t.”

By the end of the speech, Gohn has removed the cloth from Hansol’s forehead.

Hansol tries to pin down the small shivers that run across the surface of his paper skin.  “Did she ever try to hurt you?” Hansol feels distant and fragile as he asks, but he wants so badly to believe that it’s really not his fault.

“Not me,” he answers.

Hansol knows Gohn chose those words precisely as the implication trickles like ice water down his spine through the hand forgotten at his neck.  Gohn had used the same definitive note of protectiveness earlier and Hansol thinks he’s done it again on purpose:  to tell him without telling him.

“My parents used to lock me in the crawl space.”  The words tumble out, but Hansol doesn’t want to take them back.  Gohn has been honest with him.   

He can feel the sigh Gohn doesn’t vocalize.  His heavy hand ruffles at Hansol’s hair affectionately.  “I’m sorry to hear that, kid.” 

For a moment Hansol wants to say more.  He wants to pour out everything from his mother’s grudge against his hair to the nights spent waiting for sleep to come over his father so he could sneak back into the house.  He wants to but he can’t.  Things are too calm.  They seemed like words you save for a storm. 

When Gohn walks back over to the sink, Hansol listens to his footsteps and says, “Earlier I thought you were talking about P Goon.”

“When?”

“When you said we make people angry.  I thought you were saying that’s why he was upset.”

“Nah,” Gohn pauses as the sound of water interrupts, continuing only after the clunking of the pipes ends when he shuts the sink off again. “He’s got his own problems.  He’s a good guy but he has his demons, I’m sure.”  He comes back beside Hansol again and holds the cloths out to him. “But then again, don’t we all.”

Hansol reaches up and accepts the newly dampened cloth.  The blood rushes out of his arm from the effort of raising it so he settles on flipping over his opposite arm and pressing the cloth to the underside of his wrist over the red stain.  He’s vaguely feverish so even though he’s trying not to shiver, the path of his veins are like fire.  He muses on how the coolness chases out the ghosts of panic.

When Gohn goes back to his former seat, Hansol subtly rubs the cloth against the red mark on his wrist.  The stain remains stubbornly ingrained.   

“It’s not possible for us to make each other crazy, right?” Hansol wants to make sure.  He has to know before—he catches himself before he can think about staying for longer than a night.  P Goon had told him to be gone before tomorrow anyway. 

“Do you mean like someone from lion line making a dragon line person go crazy?  Like what we do to regular people?”

“Or even two wizard line or something.”  He knows he’s being too obvious so he avoids the older’s eyes and stares at his own fingernails.  

“Not really.  Are you talking about Xero?   Because he’s always weird.”

“No.  Not Xero.  I just—Are you sure?”

Gohn folds his hands and leans onto the table.  His shadow leans with him. “You knew someone else like us before, didn’t you?”

Feeling like he’s going to explode, Hansol mumbles quickly, “Kind o—can you keep a secret?”   He freezes once the words escape into the air.

Apparently oblivious to the backtracking in Hansol’s expression, Gohn answers, “I’m usually pretty good at that.”

The pressure builds up in Hansol’s throat as he tries to hold down the words.  He can feel the anxiety start to wash back into his body until he blurts out, “My job is to deliver things.  Words or packages or whatever.  But it’s better if people don’t remember me.  You’re not supposed to remember the messenger.”

Gohn blinks at Hansol, countering his surprise at the outburst by joking, “I find it hard to believe that people wouldn’t remember you.  Your hair. . .”

“Out there being remembered is how you wind up dead.  If people remember you they start to connect you with the message you’re giving.  Sometimes people like to tear up bad messages.”

“So you don’t want people to remember you.”

“It’s better if they don’t.  It’s safer.  Being remembered is how you get hurt.  It’s how people hurt you.  How you hurt them.”

“Is this the secret?”

“No.”

“Then what—”

“He remembered me.” 

“Who did?”

“B Joo.”

There is silence as if Gohn understands the power the word has for him.  Finally the older presses gently, “Who is that?”

“We were. . .” there isn’t a word though.  “He’s like us.  I met him out in the city.”

“Where is he now, then?”

“I don’t know.”

Suddenly Hansol is spilling everything.  In one short breath he says he was kicked out of his house, not wanting to mention the times he went back or the time before he ended up on the street.  He talks about meeting B Joo for the first time.  That long gone night that someone had decided they didn’t like his message.  B Joo had found him.  He’d saved his life. 

B Joo had been new to that world then.  Hansol doesn’t feel it would be right to tell B Joo’s story for him, so he only says that the other had decided to leave home.  Back then Hansol had held onto his philosophy not to be remembered.  He’d taught B Joo the same thing. It wasn’t safe to get attached.  If they ran into each other so be it, but they couldn’t try to find each other on purpose.  Overtime they’d figured out they were similar.  The street was only so wide.  The city only so big.  Emotions were palpable for both of them.  Hansol could use his ability to navigate the situations he walked into as messenger; B Joo, he would come to find out, sold emotional highs to whoever would pay for them.

They survived.  They ran into each other.  They parted ways.  Time passed.

He doesn’t want to get into the details.  How they were almost too similar.  Their energies pulling on each other the wrong ways.  Hansol realized too late that maybe he’d just never let them have enough time to settle.  His stupid rules. 

He glosses over joining the Boyscouts as much as he can.  He doesn’t mention the group by name.  Gohn doesn’t question it anyway.  There were too many groups out there with the same purpose.  Hansol doesn’t make excuses for himself for joining.  He doesn’t say that he’d been afraid.  He doesn’t say that he’d run into a ghost at the post office and had his entire world tipped on its side.  He only says, “I joined some gang.  I didn’t see B Joo for a while after that.”  The truth was he’d avoided him until his nerves were stripped bare.

They met again under a smog-yellow sky  Come to find out he had taught B Joo his number one lesson too well:  don’t get connected to any particular group.  Hansol was part of the Boyscouts, then.  He was connected.  He let B Joo leave with the understanding that they wouldn’t run into each other again.  After all, he was the one who taught him to walk away:  Don’t be remembered.  Don’t get connected.  It’s bad for business.  Don’t need people.  Needing people gets you killed.  You have associates, not friends, not. . . there aren’t words. 

The next part of the story is in fragments even for him.  It’s too fresh.  He can’t imagine that the rain has dried from his clothes.  Even though this time he had learned better, he’d let B Joo walk away a second time.  Hansol doesn’t know how to put into words what happened.  There were three figures and B Joo in the alleyway. The boy had been splattered in purple and reds.  Hansol had scared off the three and tried to help the bloody and bruised boy with the fading purple hair—until B Joo used the power in his hands to make Hansol lash out at him too, shaping his emotions into rage. 

“I think he really wanted me to kill him.” He doesn’t mention the gun.  How he almost did it.  “I let him remember me and it hurt him in the end.  He was so mad at me.”

“I don’t know,” Gohn’s tone is careful.  He’d listened patiently the whole story and now spoke for the first time.  “You said you were part of a gang for a while.  They must have remembered you.  The clients you worked for must have remembered you.  Even if they didn’t pay much attention, they kept hiring you and nothing bad happened to them.”

“Being recognized isn’t the same as being remembered.  They recognized me.  He remembered me.  He knew me.”

“He was already picking fights when you got there.  I think he just had a breakdown:  maybe just the pressures of living on the streets, maybe his ability.  Manipulating emotions sounds pretty complex. . .”  Gohn ran out of options and Hansol sighed into the space his words left.  If Gohn had seen what he had, he wouldn’t have called it picking fights.  B Joo was trying to break himself open.

“What if I affect people like us, too.”

“If that was true your friend wouldn’t have gotten worse while you were away.”

Hansol hadn’t thought of that.  It should make him feel better, but he feels afraid.  Afraid that B Joo will just continue to get worse.  He’s not sure where he went wrong.  Should he have stayed further away him or never stayed away to begin with?

“I know you don’t want me talking to the others about this but maybe tomorrow you can come on my rounds with me if Jenissi is still down for the count and we can keep an eye out for your friend.”

“Really?”

“Don’t sound so surprised,” Gohn laughs, “I’m just offering you a chance to get out and look around.”

“I don’t know how to find him.”

“Normally that’s where I’d be of help to you, but I don’t know your friend, so I won’t be able to track him.”

“Could you, though?  If you did know him?”

“I probably could.  My senses aren’t nearly as fine-tuned as Seogoong, he’s like a blood hound when it comes to tracking but only when he’s focusing.  Honestly we’re lucky it’s a focusing thing because it would be miserable super smelling everyone’s disgusting foot odor at all hours of the day.”

A rush of something between excitement and fear rises in Hansol’s already overtaxed heart.  He might be able to find him.  He might be able to make it right. 

He might not ever know what had caused the problems in the other.  He’s learning that even the answers don’t always have understanding in them.  He’s okay with not understanding.  He’s okay with being wrong.  He’s not okay with not knowing.  He’s not okay letting him go.  At the same time, he’s terrified of finding him.

“I take it that you weren’t actually looking for the bathroom.” Gohn quips.

It takes Hansol a second to even realize what he’s talking about.  “I was.” 

Gohn looks at him skeptically.

“Not at first,” he corrects, “I draw in other people’s energy.  It just sort of happens.  And I was in the bunk above Xero and he’s really—” He waves his hands to demonstrate the kind of energy he’s talking about.  He’s decided to leave out the story about the living room and P Goon.  He’s told Gohn more than enough about his secrets.  He doesn’t think he wants to mention the dye stained into his wrist.

“Take the extra bed in my room.”             

“Why do you have an extra bed?”

“There are lots of empty beds and rooms here.  That’s just how the place was when we got it.  Apparently we do not take up as much space as a small army.  Hard to believe but it’s true.”

“There was a small army here?”

Gohn laughs, and Hansol wonders again what he’s said wrong.

“You’d have to ask Seogoong about that.”

Hansol’s eyebrows furrow in confusion.

“Come on.”  Gohn grabs the forgotten cereal box and stands up, going to put it away in one of the cabinets.

“Wait,” Hansol glances toward the opposite wall. “What about. . .”

Gohn turns and stares at him questioningly.  All at once Hansol realizes that Gohn had no intention of staying up this late.  He had said earlier that Hojoon had already checked on Jenissi and that he could go to bed any time.  Gohn had made up the part about listening for nagging through the wall.  He had stayed up to talk to him.

“Never mind,” he corrects. 

Thinking nothing of it, Gohn says, “Alright.  Well, if you actually don’t have to use the most important room in the house, I can show you where to crash.  Do you need to grab anything from Xero’s room?”

Hansol shakes his head.

“Alright.  Let’s go before the sun gets up.  We have work to do tomorrow.”


 

A/N I'm terribly sorry this one took so long.  I will post another chapter before the end of the week to try to make up for it.  Thanks for sticking around <3 --coraroc