// Faceless // (h.e.s.)

// Chapter Two //

It had been two weeks. Two weeks since I had witnessed that poor man die right in front of eyes. His death had brought up memories I had tried to forget. It felt like I was 16 all over again.

It had been a rainy Friday in 2042. I hadn't seen my parents in the morning, since they had gone off to work before I had even gotten up for school as usual. It had been a morning as any other. I had been scared to go to school, afraid of the insults that my class mates had come up with that day to hurt me. But I had had a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach the whole morning. It had been more than just the fear of encountering my bullies. It had been something like a foreboding, I had known something was going to happen. It had been the reason why I had been uneasy throughout the whole morning. The later it got the more I had had the feeling my tension and uneasiness was building up, getting bigger and bigger, before it would eventually come crashing down on me like a tidal wave, leaving devastation in its wake.

And then it had happened. It had been at lunch. Our principal had entered the room, his eyes scanning the room, looking for someone.
In that moment I had known. The wave had come crashing down on me and I had known that he wasn't looking for anyone. He was looking for me. As to why he had been looking for me I had made up the most awful scenarios of what my bullies had done this time. Was I gonna be expelled? Had they blamed one of their pranks on me? Between the principal laying eyes on me and him actually coming over, I had come up with a thousand possible reasons of why he would seek me out at lunch, one more horrible than the other. But no matter how gruesome my imagination had made the reasons out to be, the real reason had been so much more awful. From one second to another I had suddenly become an orphan.

Men in black suits had picked me up and taken me to a laboratory to identify the bodies. My parents' skin had been as white and cold as marble. They no longer had looked like my parents, they no longer had looked like human beings at all. They had been like statues. No emotions, no warmth, no life. The normal reaction would've been to break down and cry over the dead bodies of my parents. But everything had seemed so unreal, so out of place, the tears hadn't come. Only after I had been interrogated by the men in suits and had received the money to keep up my life in our home and only after I had gotten home and my parents hadn't and the realization that they were gone forever had sunken in, did the tears come and then I couldn't stop crying through the whole weekend.

It had taken the incident with the man dying in front of my eyes for me to realize something.
Two years ago, the day my parents had died, I had been woken by coughs in the morning. Both of them had been fine the day before but I remembered hearing them cough in the morning, considering to get up and look after them but going back to sleep in the end. What if I could've helped them? What if I had forced them to go to a doctor? Would they still be alive? I should've gotten up. I could've seen them one last time before they had been ripped from my life so forcefully.
The men in the black suits had said it had been cancer. But if both my parents had had cancer, wouldn't I have known? And how high even were the chances that two people in a relationship got cancer at the same time and died the exact same day?

The man's death had opened so many questions. Back when I had been 16, I had just accepted what the authorities had told me. But now I was 18. I had a head of my own, I didn't just believe everything I was told. And something was incredibly wrong.

I just wished my boyfriend was home. He would've helped me sort out my questions. After the incident I could've needed some emotional support, especially after the memories it had brought back. But sadly his job required him to travel a lot these days. And with him being gone for weeks I was left alone with my thoughts and theories.

//

It was cold. Just as it always was. I was wearing a big scarf and an even bigger sweater, all of it topped by a woollen coat. Still, the cold seemed to be creeping in through the layers of clothing, making me feel cold to the bone. That's why I decided that a detour to a coffee shop to get something warm to drink couldn't hurt.