Mission Wall-E || Jakehoon

Fourteen: Iris

At the eye of a hurricane, it's silent. Everything is calm and still. Even though you know that soon, in maybe an hour or so, or even minutes, the walls of the hurricane will come to you again, and possibly drown you.

When Sunghoon went to the ice rink, he saw the beginning of the eye, its colors were rainbow, just like his friend who passed on, who he often thought of when rainbows appeared to him. He saw the opening, the calm, the silence. He even experienced it for a moment, a brief moment. The turning point he called it, where he finally felt like something was going right. The eye was beautiful, and he wanted every part of it.

But when he actually put the first foot into the eye when he sat by a fire, hands molded together with another, the rest of his body still was in the wind of the storm around him. He told Jake that he felt a storm in his head, which was true, he couldn't seem to pull the rest of himself out of the storm and into the eye quite yet, it seemed too fast. He realized then that even though he hated the confinement of chaos that was the hurricane, he felt safe in it, he felt safe in the chasing of thoughts he had, cause it was all he has ever known. The Hurricane was his home.

Sunghoon remembers reading about a story once. It was the 'Allegory of the Cave' written by Plato. In it, it showed a story of how a group of prisoners being held in a cave, chained and not able to see themselves or their fellow prisoners, were only able to see the shadows cutting through the glow of a fire behind them on the cave wall. It described how one prisoner finally was able to leave the cave. He saw everything and was overwhelmed by what was actual reality.

Sunghoon felt like he could relate to it now, as his body moved further into the eye of his hurricane. He suddenly felt overwhelmed with how happy he was feeling, and how many new emotions were surfacing within him. He wanted to go back into the storm that he was used to. And hide away in his cave. And not feel the happiness. But the hurricane doesn't work like that. The hurricane has a mind of its own and doesn't listen to anyone, not even him. He didn't like the eye, no matter how calm it was.

With silence, and calm comes the abyss, or nothingness. He felt lost in the calm sea the hurricane once covered. It was vast and had endless possibilities. He didn't feel so grounded anymore. He felt lost and scared.

He knew the second he started feeling this. It's when Jake put his hand over his and moved closer. He realized that very moment that there was no logical reason for him to be afraid of affection, or uncomfortable with it. Especially since he knew Jake and how nice he was. It clicked in his head that he'd never actually been overwhelmed by the physical sensations, but by the sensations he couldn't see, the ones that were hard to read and differentiate. The ones that had no validity, and popped up whenever they wanted to, with no warning.

For most sensations, he could sort of tell what they were, minus the vagueness. When Jungwon touched him, he felt a painting full of colors, he felt peace and nervousness all at once. When Heeseung touches him, he feels an overbearing need to comfort, or to just be, he feels alive and free. When Jay touches him, all though rare in number, he feels confident, sturdy, and protected. But when he touches Jake he gets confused, he gets overwhelmed with thousands of different emotions, colors, and temperatures of mind. And all of them made him feel like he needed to lay himself out in front of him and give him his entire soul like he was handing it to him to judge. Which was possibly even scarier than the eye of the hurricane, even though it existed within it. Because he was never in a storm in the first place, he just convinced himself that he was, and all the people who rushed into his life all at once were trying to yank him out of it.

Even the new boy he met this morning, the one that Heeseung and Jay were friends with. The one that offered for them to stay at his house in Vietnam for however long they needed. Hanbin. He was quite talkative and shameless. He asked a lot of questions. Lots of personal ones. Which made Sunghoon feel like a spotlight was being shown on him. Exposed.