Bab 20: The Stranger in my House
Sparrow Truman: March 29th, 20XX
My canvas was full and my head was fuller of ideas I planned to bring to life.
Ever since I’d gotten to work on designing a set for a few internet celebrities a month back, my inspiration had boomed.
Squire, a company that ran one of the most popular social media networks, had launched their first wave of in-house celebrities. This was great because they gave a lot of opportunities for students, whether they wanted to be actual personalities on the site, or just wanted to take part as staff and get some real-world experience.
They had called me in about a month ago to work on a set for a photoshoot. It wasn’t completely out of the blue since I often posted my work and ideas as a visual director on Squire, but I hadn’t expected to get as large of a budget as I had. I also hadn’t expected to get so much creative liberty, but it had been amazing.
So amazing that I hadn’t been able to stop coming up with concepts since. I’d gotten a few offers from other social media influencers and small-scale celebrities that I might have rejected before. But at this point, I was ready to work on just about anything.
My phone buzzed obnoxiously in my pocket and slightly pulled me out of my reverie, but since I wasn’t actively working on anything, I didn’t begrudge it.
It was a text from Melissa, a friend at school. She’d used Squire’s in-site messaging function to contact me, which was rare. Not that the function wasn’t popular, but Melissa was a very… special individual. She would always try to go for the most low-tech option possible when doing things.
From using an antique pen and paper to record her ideas, to using the mobile text function on phones. I didn’t particularly mind her quirks since she was a nice and talented person, but the weird behaviour put me on guard.
[ML: Have you heard? Finn Hall is apparently being ostracized. I thought you would want to know.]
My first reaction was disbelief, and the second was confusion. I rarely saw him at school since we were in different programs, I also spent my lunches in clubrooms.
I knew him, but only enough to know he wasn’t the type to raise a fuss about anything. I couldn’t believe he could have done anything worth being ignored school-wide.
While we didn’t qualify as friends, he visited my house often enough that we were familiar. As well, him being unofficially (and somewhat unwillingly) adopted as Will’s little brother meant he was mine as well.. in a way... probably. I quickly wiped down my hands and texted a reply.
[Me: What? Why?]
[ML: He got into an altercation with Alice Marvin yesterday and I guess she took it seriously.]
[ML: What do you want us to do? We’ll all go along with your decision.]
I scowled at that.
It all started when I was jokingly elected as the department representative to the student council. I’d been so angry that I’d worked super hard to make sure I didn’t make a fool out of myself and get the aggro of all the students in the department. Little had I known that almost four years later, I’d still be in the same seat.
The actual work wasn’t that hard, but dealing with all the brown-nosing people who wanted to weasel out a larger portion of the department budget than I’d allotted them was copious.
While having minions wasn’t bad, it made making friends difficult. It was also burdensome to have to deal with silly things like this.
[Me: Just do whatever you usually do and ignore Alice. It’s not like she actually runs the school.]
[ML: Understood.]
Melissa was about the only one who didn’t talk to me like some immortal or any other non-human figure, even if she insisted on acting like a secretary. Melissa and the quadruplets, Rin, Yuko, Airi and Mori, were about the only ones I regularly hung out with at school.
I somewhat wondered if I shouldn’t have asked them to watch out for Finn, but I quickly dismissed the idea. Knowing the little I did about him, that might have been worse than what Alice was doing.
It was probably better to just leave him alone, as he liked to be. If such a quiet and borderline gloomy guy had made such a big scene, then I was sure Alice or whoever was totally to blame.
A series of loud thumps and obnoxious retching sounds broke my peace and forced me into a state of panic.
I was home alone… right?
“Will? are you home?”
I made my way out to the living room and noticed an unfamiliar bag in the middle of the room. I walked over to it and picked it up, hoping to identify its source. It was as I did I heard the bathroom door open and a few light steps patter toward me.
The smooth material of the unfamiliar bag gently caressed my skin and made it hard to let it go. It was entrancing and desirable, but so was its owner.
My neck hurt from how fast I’d looked up from the bag, but I couldn’t tend to it as I usually would. Right now, I needed to deal with the stranger in my house.
The first thing I noticed about him was the interesting wig on his head. I knew that the metal ‘in’ but I’d yet to see anyone make it into a wig. The thick, curled mental strands should have looked tacky, but the way it waved and bounced as he moved made it look eerily natural.
His contacts were similarly unreal and looked like emeralds with embedded golden. They seemed to bounce in and around his Iris and pupils but never broke through the bright green barrier.
Even before I made it down to his body, I could see a definitive trend.
I noted that his clothing was made of the same oddly fascinating material as the bag I held. It was the same colour as well, being a soft blend of different golds that shimmered in the light. The material swathed his soft and slender body from his neck down to his feet.
The stranger stood frozen as I looked him over, and an awkward smile shone under his nauseous expression.
A few different expressions flashed past his face and his eyes bounced around the room before analyzing my expression. He seemed to have come up with something he liked because his body suddenly relaxed and he took a graceful step backwards.
“You’ll have to pardon my intrusion, I seem to have gotten lost.”
I didn’t see how that was possible considering he had just left my bathroom. Seeing as the lock on the door was still intact, and the bolt was undamaged, I knew he hadn’t come in through my front door. We were also on the fourth floor in a well-populated area, so I didn’t think anyone would have been bold enough to scale the side of the building.
Or well, I knew nothing about robbers, but it was hard to see the beautiful but so far harmless individual as someone so dangerous.
Wait, no.
Being pretty doesn’t make someone any less dangerous.
I took a closer look at his face and finally realized why my guard was so low around him. He strongly reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
“I can’t accept an apology from someone I don’t know. Who are you? And how did you get into my house?”
Well, my older brother was the one that paid for it, but I lived here as well.
I tried to sound friendly and soft, not wanting to irritate the stranger that had somehow made it into a locked apartment on the fourth floor of a decently well-secured neighbourhood without as much of a single sound.
As calm and pretty as he seemed to be, he was likely dangerous.
Despite my best efforts, my voice ended up coming out hostile. I winced at the sound and wished I’d paid more attention in my acting elective, but hindsight was always 20/20 and did little for the present.
I searched his face to see if my tone had set him off, but was surprised to see him visibly relax.
“My name… Is quite an expensive piece of information. I don’t mind giving it to you, but you’ll have to return that to me.”
He held out his hand and gestured at the bag in my hand. His voice somewhat trembled as he spoke, but he locked eyes with me and made me forgive the only flaw in the overall perfect account of a cocky but handsome guy.
“Yeah… It seems like this is pretty important to you, so I’m going to hold on to it for now. How did you get into my house? You didn’t come through the door, and even if you got up to the fourth floor, I’m sure I locked my windows.”
A pensive expression blossomed on his face, and he suddenly extended his arms out to his side and opened his palms flat. He was so terribly flamboyant for a trespasser, but I somehow couldn’t get angry at it.
The upper corners of his thin but pleasantly shaped lips tugged up into a smirk and he opened his stance even more.
“I can’t tell you all that, but I can show you something even better.”
Before I could deny the offer or even close my eyes, the stranger took a step toward me, and what I’d thought was a cloak suddenly twitched and expanded toward the walls of the room.
I took a few steps backwards out of surprise and tripped over my feet. The impact of the hardwood floors on my backside was painful, but I was too entranced by the sight in front of me to give it any attention.
They, the wings, were gorgeous. They were also huge and stretched from a few feet above his head to around his knees.
Their golden and emerald pattern sparkled in the dull fluorescent lights of the living room and twitched and bobbed naturally as he moved towards me.
He took advantage of my overwhelmed state of mind to lean in toward me and grab the bag from my hands. I felt the soft material leave my hand and tried to tighten my grip around it, but it was too late.
Before he pulled away, he gave me a beatific smile and poked me on the forehead.
“What did I say? It’s interesting, right?”
He reached into the bag he’d just rescued from me and pulled out a smaller bag that had a drawstring at its top.
The intense eye contact he’d maintained for so long finally broke as he looked down at the bag and measured out a pinch of the sparkling dust.
“They said you would think this was all a dream, but it’s fine if you remember, I guess.”
He muttered something ominous to himself before bringing the handful of dust to my face.
“It was nice to meet you, miss…”
He trailed off and let me fill in the rest of the sentence. If I’d been in my right mind, I wouldn’t have given this psycho my name. But the sudden revelation of wings and sparkling dust and the overall ridiculousness of the situation made it hard to keep my thoughts in order.
“Sparrow. Sparrow Truman.”
The stranger gave off one more blinding smile before sparkling the dust over my eyes.
“It was nice to meet you, Miss Sparrow.”
Hadiah
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