May include a few mature themes

"ғɪɴᴅɪɴɢ sᴏᴍᴇᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ᴡᴀsɴ'ᴛ ᴍᴇᴀɴᴛ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ
ʀᴏᴘᴇᴅ ɪɴᴛᴏ sᴏᴍᴇᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴜɴғᴀᴛʜᴏᴍᴀʙʟᴇ
ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ ᴍᴀᴋᴇ ʜɪᴍ ʟᴏsᴇ ʜɪs ʙᴇsᴛ
ʙᴜᴛ ɴᴏᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴄᴏᴜʟᴅ ʙᴇ ᴅᴏɴᴇ."

It had been quite long since I've gotten inured to observing them, move about like pawns. It's the same thing every day - wake up, eat, do something recreational, go back to sleep. It was like watching a documentary, except... My sole source of diversion was the soul attached to the boy.

Wan Taehong.

He was coping quite well, given the situation he had been trampled under. And I was rapt. A young boy, coupled with such trauma, only gave result to a debacle. In most cases. But he was different. Distinct and atypical. Most people carrying the burden of losing their loved one in the most unexpected of ways would've flicked their senses out the window. I was more than glad; his smiles weren't just a jocose allusion.

"Fores? Is this yours?" Taehong asked, loud and clear, and that was when my attention flicked to the small black notebook in his hand.

The gold border around the taut black leather gave off a peculiar vibe. Such notebooks were queer. Outlandish, even. Things that time were all in small screens, and not paper. Tablets or touch screens, they called it. It looked magnificent, but it ruled their lives and seeing a notebook in the world full of just pixels was aberrant. Seemed like someone did hold on to their roots.

Taehong smiled, and said, "Who even carries notebooks now?"

His inquisitiveness got the best of him. Before he'd even gotten Fores' reply, his digits were flipping the pages that had been thumbed at the edges. The pages had been tainted a slight beige, with a smooth modulation into brown at the edges.

"Hmm?" Taehong hummed as he halted his motions and his finger landed right at the word 'vengeance'.

'I've watched it with my own two eyes. How they go about on their duties, I mean. It's despicable to see that they'd go to such an extend to watch anything crumble down to bits. My home was a castle, with a courageous king, an indomitable queen, and two genteel children - a prince and a princess. But it all stumbled down the moment checkmate happened, and everything was lost. I'm the only one left and I'm going to get it. My vengeance.'

Taehong 's eyes grew wide as he read each and every word with his undivided attention. He'd known about Fores' unspoken past, but he hadn't known anything more about it.

"What are you doing?!"

To say I hadn't been startled by the sudden noise would be a fib. Taehong, as well as I, looked to the source of sudden disturbance - Fores. I watched his eyes go back and forth between the book and her rigid frame, not knowing how to answer.

"I was just-"

"You aren't supposed to look into stuff that aren't yours, kid." She was somber and Rhadamanthine. There was not a hint of emotion to her steely eyes.

He felt iniquitous at her sudden remark. He didn't know what to do, much less what to say. "S-Sorry," he attempted, his eyes cast down.

A few breaths. She let out a few breaths. Her hand came up to swipe her forehead. The beads of sweat that had accumulated there, stuck on to her hands as she sighed. "It's alright."

"Where did you get that notebook from?" Taehong's voice was hushed and he was careful about the words he chose. I could feel the tension resonating in his bones by the way the aura shifted around him.

"I found it lying around here somewhere."

She looked at Taehong. Her green eyes espied the dark blue tones that blended into each other in his irises. A smile came up, and it had the effect of the crack of dawn lighting up the land masses. Her eyes shone, but she was still just as stern as before.

"Why are you smiling?" Her smile found its way as a reflection in Taehong's lips, his lips widening, showing a little bit of his teeth.

Fores shook her head. She said, "Nothing."

It felt surreal - how fast the vehemence of her reaction had changed. But what else could I even expect. Changes happen. If not on humans, then who else? Plants? They're rather predictable, so it's not an inexplicable change. Humans... Not so much.

Taehong seemed to shrug off that particular encounter, his words falling short as he tried to delineate to himself what exactly had happened there.

"What's written in it makes sense... But why hide it?" he asked himself as he walked out of the room. "Vengeance... Right?"

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Unbeknownst to Taehong, there were secrets that Fores had. Her character was a conundrum. Her eyes. They were effulgent when she smiled. But they turned just as grave when things didn't go her way.

The incident had just made Taehong even more nebby about all of it. Sub rosa inspections into her book could work. But it was dangerous, considering how she kept the book at arm's length.

"I'll leave that... That's practically invading her privacy," he remarked, ruffling his own hair. "Let her past remain a closed book."

I watched the brown aura around him. It was still just as zippy as before. It had gained enough strength to have had its color concentrated to the brightest form. His frame was bordered with the mahogany, almost like those that you would see in posters, or advertisements.

Prospects were in his favour, however. The ball wall rolling off to his court. While he had set his mind on not wanting to peep any further into her life, opportunity presented itself. The book landed right in front of him, and he found his fingers inching closer to hard leather cover.

"Really?" he asked, looked at the hand that had initially budged the book in his direction.

Fores withdrew her hand, keeping the book in his personal bubble. Nodding, she said, "You have the right to know, I guess... You're my brother now."

"Oh."

That was all Taehong could manage before he found his fingers turning over through the pages.

He scrutinized the brown edged pages. Upon them was the wisdom of her soul. The weight that she carried. The weight that had been put on her. Unprecedented, unpredicted. Her feelings had been channeled into the small, cursive words. In that humble ink was the liveliness of her brain.

The book didn't open like the early breeze of spring. It opened as dusky and grim as the mornings in autumn. The remorse was evident. Especially when a few of those pages had been tainted by the droplets of water. Or tears, rather.

He stopped flipping. His slender digits stopped right where he'd read before. Right at the word 'vengeance'. More than intrigued, he continued where he'd stopped.

'It was during a summer, I think. A newly radiant sun stepped forth from the spring time, wrapping me in her warm and brilliant rays. I remember that year was hotter than the rest. I was sweating so bad and my father was with me.

In the heat of the day, in the sweet of his company, that was a kind of hot day that was in my comfort zone. Used to be, in fact. We were playing hide-and seek in our small courtyard. It was all so fun, and my mother was inside, with my brother. He was such a fussy baby, though. Always crying for no reason at all.

All throughout the day, we were playing. I don't remember any other day when we'd played like that. It was like a dream come true. Because, once my father left in the morning, he'd come back late at night. After we had all slept. So, I always loved spending time with him. Even if it were for just a short while.

But all that laughing just... stopped. The laughter died down, the running slowed down, and time slowed down too. The only thing whose speed increased was the air. It would be stupid to say that it had grown louder too. Or maybe it was just my ear deceiving me.

A crowd people hovered over my father, and their hands just went about, flying here and there. I could hear him crying. My father, I mean. Crying for mercy. Their uniforms didn't stand for justice, I knew then. It stood for exploitation. It stood for the stinking reality that truth would always be suppressed. The black color was never one of their attributes. It besmirched their status as a human. And I knew, that things weren't going to end good. All that ends bad... Begins bad too, doesn't it?

The next thing I saw was the red color that surrounded my father and the ground that I had been standing on. A red halo formed around his head, his eyeballs shaking as he looked at me. My mother came dashing out to the courtyard. She placed my brother onto the ground before crumpling down in front of my father.

The stab marks on his body... I still remember those. Such crude and amateurish marks, they were. Like they'd stabbed him with a kitchen knife just for the joy of seeing the blood ooze out him until he didn't have an ounce of life left in him.

What had he done? We didn't know. Why had they killed him? We didn't know. Why had my father left me so early? I didn't know.

Things went downhill from there.

My mother, so heartbroken after my father's death, decided it didn't do her any good to be alive anymore. She was alive, yes. But she had been long gone already. She took the kitchen knife. I watched her as she sliced her veins open and dipped her wrist into a tumbler of water. The blood wouldn't stop. She smiled at us. One of the most genuine smiles that I'd seen on her for a while. The water had all turned red and her entire body fell limp before I did something. I couldn't do anything. She'd locked me and my brother outside the house.

My brother, without a care into the world, made the most stupid decision to have walked onto the road. His ball had rolled off and what I saw after coming back from school was his lifeless form. The blood oozed out of all the wounds and gashes across his skin, his body cold. I watched his lips turn blue in the night, before one of neighbors scooped him up and lay him deep under the ground. A flower grows there, now. I hope its him.

I remember their faces, but as time goes by, I remember less and less of them. The only thing I remember the most was that feeling of wanting to pay them back somehow. The people in black. Those ruthless, inhumane creatures.'

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"How people die remains in the memory of those who live on."

- Dame Cicely Saunders

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