Andromeda

XII.

"What will you do, when your time runs out? Where will you go, when the clock strikes midnight? How will you leave, when you know what you are leaving behind?"

I stared at the words carefully hand-painted on the wall of the dusty hallway. This was the one place in the mall that I hadn't been shown, and I could see why. It was the shopping mall equivalent of a back alley, dark and seemingly unvisited. A layer of dust covered the floor. I'm not sure why I stopped to look at it when I walked by, looking for Yoongi. But I did, and then I saw the words written on the wall. It was a strange dichotomy. The paint was new - not fresh, but certainly not years old - but there was a thick layer of dust on the ground that led to the writing.

It had to be Andromeda. Andromeda, the star. Andromeda, the daughter of the moon that I couldn't understand. One minute she was calmly healing a boy's hand. The next minute she was yelling and stormed out of the picture. I was a little used to people being complicated, but that was a new kind of complicated.

That's why the words intrigued me. I had a feeling they weren't directed to me. I had a feeling they weren't directed to anyone but the person that had written them.

As I stared at the dried paint, I thought about what had just happened in the conversations that I had been listening to. For one, Jeongguk and Andromeda had met when he was very young. He didn't remember them meeting, something that seemed to surprise her. She had a short temper that seemed to have arisen from nowhere, considering her usual patience. Or at least, I had thought that she was patient. Maybe I'd had an entirely wrong impression of her, of all of them, this whole time. The more I thought about it, the stranger the idea became.

I thought I had a better understanding of the boys because I had watched so many videos about them. I had read articles written about them, I paged through their unofficial biography. I thought that somehow, doing those things meant I knew them better as people. But I had been wrong. I knew their names and their faces. I knew their odd quirks and funny expressions. But I didn't know them. I didn't know about their families, I didn't know about the things they truly loved, I didn't know about their relationships. I didn't know them, I only knew things about them that were completely irrelevant in the big picture.

Why was I pretending to know them? Why were they pretending to know me? Were we all doing this out of some sort of strange politeness to one another? No, that didn't make sense. If they were polite to everyone that accidentally insulted them in the train station, I wouldn't be the only stranger in the shopping mall.

My train of thought froze when I heard a quiet whispering from a nearby room. It was not a voice that I recognized.

I told myself to keep calm. Strange things happened every other minute in this shopping mall, I stated silently. The whispering was likely nothing different.

I glanced up at the words again and felt a hot rush of shame. I was prying into someone else's business. Again. For once that weekend, I should maybe try to stop putting myself into situations where I didn't belong. I quickly walked away, intending to walk away from the words and away from the whispers. But the voices were following me, I realized as I went to another floor. Or maybe they weren't following me, but they were everywhere.

I walked into the main area of the first floor, and I saw Andromeda. She was kneeling on the floor directly in the circle where the ceiling was a window. Her shoulders were limp, and her downturned head made her hair pool unceremoniously on the floor. The whispers were clearer here, their words echoing off the marble walls in a loud cacophony. Their voices were a harsh yell here. I was only able to catch a few words out of the many, due to them being in different languages that I couldn't understand.