He first met her the same way he had met many others.

There was nothing about the encounter that stood out to him; it was the same as any other encounter that he'd experienced in the innumerable years he'd been doing this job.

Dark night, blinking stars. Shadows making shapes on a wall, acquiring forms reminiscent of darker, scarier things. A creaking sound, as the house settled. Insect noises interrupting the midsummer night stillness.

It was often that this was how he first met people, in an innocent childhood nightmare. It was often that this was how people first came to know him.

Or rather, they came to know the feeling, or the taste, of him. The quickened heartbeat, the sweaty palms, the tears (if the nightmare was bad enough), and the metallic taste in the mouth...They were all just effects, and he was the cause, distant and faceless to the ones he visited. Nameless, but no less real.

He'd stopped thinking of them as individuals, these people that he visited. The faces had blurred together as the years passed, their stories and fears bleeding together like colors swirled onto a canvas, until only one big picture remained. When he'd distanced himself from the smaller nuances, he'd learned to recognize the same stories in different people, repeated over and over with only slight variance. To these stories, he added his part...and then moved on.

Some of them, he revisited later, meeting them at a different point in their stories, again coloring their lives, and again departing.

For still others, he was more of a fixture than a temporary guest. These were the ones that most intrigued him, made it harder for him to pull himself away.

The job itself was easy, but the aftermath was not, as he found. For it was afterwards that the effect he had had was made clearly visible, in haunted eyes and shaking fingers. These effects were the weight that he was forced to carry.

He'd learned to shoulder the burden, hefting it, shifting it from hand to hand to even it out and make it seemingly easier to carry.

Some days it worked, and he managed to reduce it to a mere annoyance, something that just 'was'. Other days, it weighed so heavily on him that he didn't see how he could go about his work, adding to the burden as the hours passed.

He forced himself, however, to perform his duties, as unpleasant as they were. He made himself move through the crowd, gently touching the shoulder of the agoraphobic teenager, whispering in the ear of the mother with the missing son, and grasping hold of the veteran who still heard the echoes of explosions and helicopter blades.

And he watched, as the effects of his touch took hold of them. His eyes no longer held sadness.

No, he'd been doing this for too long to be sad. He'd learned all too quickly that any sadness he felt for them didn't help; it only weighed him down further.

Instead, he took hold of their fears, and their anxieties and worries, and cradled them carefully in his hands, bearing them up and feeling every bit of the weight that they carried, right along with them. For that one small thing, at least, he felt he could do. 

He'd visited everyone, at one point or another. He enjoyed the ones that faced him, embraced his effects as if they were old friends. For these were the ones who he was able to visit less frequently. They were the ones who made his burden easier to bear, and gave him less to add to it.

There were others, however, who ran from him. As if they could escape, he thought bitterly. It wasn't any trouble to him to chase them down. It was they who suffered the consequences. For when he did finally meet up with them, they found that their meeting was that much worse.

They all had different names for him, and different ways to describe his effects. Fitting, to say the least, since he manifested himself to each of them differently.

For some, it was social anxiety. For some, it was ptsd. For others, it was a fear of heights. Still others were lucky enough to meet him infrequently, perhaps only before a big event, or some sort of test that they had to face and overcome.

They were all the same to him, and he didn't discriminate. Everyone was familiar with him, in some way or another. Everyone knew him, or had known him, or would soon know him in the future.

He didn't take joy in this fact. It just...was.

A fact that just is:

Everyone will meet Fear at some point in their lives.

The night he first met the girl was just like any other night and, at the time, he didn't recognize the significance. It was only later that he allowed himself to recollect that moment, pulling it from the recesses of his mind and examining it, turning it over and over again.

For, though he hadn't known it at the time, it was only the beginning of a story that would play out in the future.