Free Soul | Natasha Romanoff

Chapter 30: i'll follow you anywhere you go

Night time.

Such an interesting period of the day, isn't it?

Folklore enunciates the awakening of what is most terrifying to us; danger, threats, and watching over your shoulder becomes your second nature. The romanticized vision of it provides to the emotional hearts this feeling of security. To be indeed able to lull the world's dreams, you have to possess a kind of warmth, one which cannot be replaced by a few words whispered with music.

That unparalleled warmth, Hyunjae could sometimes sense it wrapping its arms around her fragile figure, as of a mother comforting her child from a nightmare that left them terrorized. But it was a paradox to her, for she feared the dark and what could hide there, yet still found the most peace enlaced by the night's special quietude. Quietude, a state found nowhere else.

Nowhere else, except in the viridescent eyes of her redhead, those irises of clarity able to enlighten her in the most somber of times. Natasha, the woman who Hyunjae could now name her love, her lifehouse, a paradise down on this cursed earth, enveloping her frail body with the gentlest of windblows and the nicest of petals blooming from polychromatic feelings.

Natasha, the woman Hyunjae could now call hers.

Hers. Belonging to someone, having a person to come home to— to consider a home— these concepts lit a lantern of newfound hope within her hammering heart. But, the fire fueling the elevation of the lantern to reach the stars adorning the night sky, it came with its own sense of a sting and inner fight. Having something, someone, was to risk inflicting a stain.

Hyunjae had tried silencing those voices of sharp guilt, to barricade them outside of her fragile mind, to stop them from flooding her in a sea of self-loathing. She had tried with all of her might and hours in her sleepless nights, for days in all of her activities and weeks throughout the healing. But she ceded. And now, now she was awake whilst the moonlight shone on her drained traits.

The lantern had vanished into the canvas of the cold night sky, the festival's atmosphere walked away from her once warmed chest, leaving behind the phantoms belonging to the market of hope. All the lights shaded in the autumnal fires, all the messages of good fortune and glee attached to the fences and walls, all the lives which once shared a common and nice feeling, were gone out.

04:37, was what Hyunjae could read on the bottom right corner of the screen. She had been unable to fall asleep, not even when Natasha had come to the rescue, to hold and to wrap her in her solace, under the drapes of an aged dusk. Hyunjae had fought off the guilt for a month now, she yet could no longer bear it. So the burn turned all of her efforts into self-inflicted injuries.

Scratches. Long and marking red stripes covered the older scars, the recent scars, the bigger and smaller ones, as the irritation made her limbs throb and get swollen. Hyunjae hadn't meant to transform this painful guilt into a physical pain, but her exhausted eyes read files after files of her missions, read articles and news and, anything she could find on herself.

She couldn't have helped it.

Hyunjae tapped on her laptop's keyboard, pressed on the touchpad to feed the ghost market with another reason to stay empty, and consumed more of her confidence to produce anguish. At each web page she hadn't sunk into, her eyes would stare at another result of her past: hatred, mistrust, disappointment, far-fetched theories, opposition and discrimination.

All of her fault.

Her bloodshot eyes were unable to find the force to cry out the dolor, the dark circles being the one remainder of her once determination. The horrendous reality was submerging her with the sniggers of the devious world. She was deceitful, she couldn't be trusted, she couldn't protect when her existence was fabricated to cause chaos and disorder.