A/N: Welcome to my first (published) completely new fic in years! This probably won't be that long, I was thinking more like a short story, but it's up in the air. Please note — I haven't done a x reader before. I think this is sort of one? But I guess she's kind of just an original character but with your name. Whoops. Still feel free to mentally change any traits/etc while you're reading.
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Prologue
Humans are expected to fear the unknown.
Many of them do not like the things that they cannot begin to comprehend. It is said that it is best to not dwell on the deeper parts of reality, the parts impossible to be wholly understood by our restricted minds.
But why do we restrict them? Why do we still so readily hand out judgement as to what is real and what is not?
As children we accept it all. Not even questioning just what it is that we are dealing with — how incredible it is to see the things that most people don't allow themselves to anymore.
Of course, time has its funny way of changing things and people.
By the time we are becoming teenagers — if not earlier — most of us have at the very least begun to be turned away from believing. 'You still believe in that?' we are asked by amused adults, or fellow peers who have also allowed themselves to forget it all. It's not real. It's impossible. 'You're not a kid anymore, you're just imagining things.' Without realizing the possible implication of that phrase: if you are a kid, then are you not imagining those things?
Most people don't fully forget these things — it'll always be in there somewhere, deeply engrained in their existence. And then there are those special few, those who, even as they grow older... allow themselves to keep remembering what is real.
But if their continuous beliefs in such things are revealed, then they are bound to only be laughed at, or — heavens forbid — even have people worrying over their state of mind. After all, only kids and the elderly can have friends that others do not see; because for the most part, no one dares to tell them what is real and what is not.
I am not supposed to see things that others don't.
But — just like almost everyone, at some point in time — I used to. And I might have continued to for even longer if that belief — that light, the hope and wonder I had towards everything — didn't let me down. If it wasn't for my eyes being suddenly opened to a darker version of the world. The version that overnight changed the fun memories and dreams I'd always kept close into a mere blur of black and white, casting them into the shadows.
The inside of my own world changed, just as everything has to, eventually. And what I saw in the outside world had to reflect that.
Many times since, I have glimpsed the children in Burgess playing together. Each and every one of them seamlessly interacting with an invisible figure. Most adults don't even bat an eye at them, but that's because they don't truly observe. Either the kids all have to be under a group hallucination of some sort, or they truly are all hearing the same words and viewing the same actions from the same person at the same time. A person that only they could see.
Perhaps the rest of us might have been able to see, too. At one point in our lives.
