Empath

Chapter 1

The harsh wind pushed against the young man's dirty-blonde hair as he rode his motorcycle through the vast desert. Right when he began to wonder if he should turn back, since the desert seemed to be endless, he climbed a hill, and on the other side, he could see a small house in the distance.

William MacAlistair was meditating on the floor of his living room. He jumped when he heard an unexpected knock at the door. Not having heard the sound of a visitor in a long time, it took him a second to recognize the source of the sound. "Strange," he mumbled to himself. "I didn't sense anyone coming." He got up, hesitantly, and cautiously approached the door. "Who's there?" His deep voice roared through the wooden door.

"I'm a traveler!" Yui's comparatively high voice yelled in response, as he hoped to be heard above the wind. The fact that his throat was dry didn't help. "I've been riding through the desert, and I need to take a pit-stop!"

Alistair was hesitant. He could hear Yui's voice clear as day, but the problem was... he couldn't sense him. Normally, he'd be able to sense a person's presence from this distance by their emotions. Going by this stranger's voice, and what he was saying, Alistair should be able to feel his stress from the urgency of his situation. No one could travel this many miles through this wasteland without feeling mental fatigue and stress... But Alistair couldn't feel anything from this stranger. It felt like this person's voice was just a figment of his imagination.

"Please, I'm dying of thirst!" Yui whined. He wasn't lying. He ran out of water a while ago, and he felt very dehydrated. Even so, he seemed to have plenty of stamina left, because he was doing a little jig of impatience outside of the door.

Alistair sighed. What could be the harm in opening the door? He was a large man who could protect himself. If he really was hallucinating for some reason and this guy was a figment of his imagination, that's even less reason to think he might be dangerous, right? With that in mind, Alistair opened the door.

He was greeted by a beautiful boy with large, upturned mint-green eyes. The boy ran inside as if he'd die if he were out there for another second. Alistair shut the door behind him, without taking his eyes off the stranger.

Yui removed his sand-covered brown traveling cloak, and moved to put it on the chair by Alistair's desk on the right side of the room.

"Hey," Alistair raised his gruff voice, and his slightly wrinkled face scrunched in irritation, "that doesn't go there." He roughly grabbed the cloak from the boy's hand and put it on the coat rack by the door.

"Could I have some water, sir?" Yui asked, impatiently.

"Hold your horses, brat," Alistair replied, irritably. "I'm getting there." He walked to the kitchen, while looking back at the stranger. He didn't like the idea of a stranger being alone in his living room. But that wasn't the only reason he couldn't take his eyes off him. The boy cut a striking figure. His slender physique was adorned with a shocking red leather jacket with a fur collar and matching red pants with black and red biker chaps and fur-cuffed boots. Alistair couldn't help but wonder: Where on earth was this kid going, dressed like that?

He got his unexpected visitor a large glass of water, which took longer than it should have, due to how frequently he kept looking back at him. The boy eagerly grabbed the drink from his hand as he had barely crossed the threshold from the kitchen to the living room. He chugged it in a heartbeat. "Phew!" He exclaimed. "I needed that!" And without further ado, he plopped down on the man's beat-up black couch. "You've got a nice little pad here, in the middle of nowhere!" He looked around, ignoring the middle-aged man's bewildered expression, and noticed the door to the left of the kitchen was ajar, through which he saw a toilet. "Oh, I gotta use your bathroom!" And as quickly as he sat down, he got back up, and practically leaped to the door.