Torn // exo x reader

Introduction; Highway Overpasses are For Meeting New Friends

The phone clattered to the floor with a desperate clang, making everyone around her look up. She looked around absolutely mortified more than one person had their eyes on her at once, and mumbled out a sheepish apology before rushing away from the beady eyes of people she didn't know that were practically cutting through her like knives.
She knew she shouldn't cry, it was just a phone hitting the floor. It wasn't like it was broken either, the phone was completely unscathed, and was probably feeling better than she was right now. Nobody thought anything of it, and she tried to convince herself this was true. She tried to slow down her breathing, to tell her mind to catch up and that potential danger had been escaped, but her palms were still sweaty, and her mind was still going off on tangents she couldn't explain, thinking of all the things those people thought of her.
They just looked up because it's a library, because it's quiet, right?
She tried to keep all the sketched of the worst possible situation out of her head, but images of women screaming at her, people shushing her violently all came barraging through her head, making her clutch it in a desperate haze to attempt to drive these bad scenes from their current residence.
Needless to say, it didn't work.
Her mind was still cluttered with problems and the sound of the phone dropping and all the eyes of those ten people on her. She couldn't tear her mind away. And suddenly, her mind was warping those states into glares, and those glares into potential harsh words whispered in menace about her after she left, and she wanted to cry even though a dropped, crackless phone wasn't anything to cry over.
The numbers she resorted to in usual efforts to calm her lungs down were useless and she made a mental note behind those terrifying images to pick new numbers that seemed calming and nice, like eight for example. Yeah, eight was nice.
She's suddenly cut out of her mental scrutinization by a hand grasping her shoulder, and just at the touch of someone she doesn't immediately know, all the air is knocked out of her lungs in one fatal sweep, leaving her huffing in this stranger's grasp.
She's just about to yell when she realizes it's the old woman from the check out desk, handing her a phone charm she barely recognizes belongs to her through her hazed vision.
"Is this yours?" The woman's voice is gentle, seeing the girl's tears and trying desperately not to spark any more.
The girl in her grasp just barely forces a nod, not even bothering to stutter out a shaky 'yes' because it'll only add to the embarrassment she's feeling in the wake of this old woman and her kindness and why couldn't this old woman sell it or throw it out?
She manages somehow to seek out the woman's name tag that reads 'Hyorin' and despite the fact she wants to walk to the schoolbook section and lay down there and die, she manages to wheeze out "Thank you, Hyorin."
The woman's mouth spreads in a grin, her eyes sparkling and the shape mimicking crescents in the presence of this girl that just managed to speak properly. The woman looks enthralled, and the girl she's looking happily at looks even more terrified as she opens her mouth, and she's afraid the woman's going to try to engage in another conversation.
"You're very welcome, dearest!" Her voice sounds a lot less terrifying when she's happy, thankfully.
She just manages to weasel herself way away from the happy woman to try and seek refuge from her own kind in the previously mentioned schoolbook section, when she runs into a wall of boys she recognizes that graduated from her school last year. She can't tell whether they're all boys or there are some females mixed in, but she doesn't want to stick around to find out, even when one of the people in the crowd, a female, latches onto her.
"Oh my gosh! I haven't seen you in forever!" She vaguely recognizes this figure, and she does her best to retain conversation and to not burst out into tears at all this contact and eye contact and she diverts her eyes as much as she can in a valiant effort to keep her distance.
The girl keeps on talking, but it soon becomes awkward, and without so much as a goodbye, the girl is leaving to seek out anybody else she knows, halfway down the library yelling out a "See ya!" and then getting violently shushed.
She wonders how this girl does that, makes a public fool of herself and then just laughs it off. It's some skill she wishes she had, and she knows this girl getting scolded by Hyorin isn't afraid of the spotlight, and somewhere deep down, she realizes he did it on purpose, for attention. She realizes that this girl just interrupted everyone for no reason.
And as the girl turns around, sheepishly murmuring expletives about the librarian so loud even the librarian herself could probably hear, the boys roar in laughter and pat her on the back.
They don't notice her sitting back down at a table, and she's slightly glad. She doesn't know what she'd do if this girl and her rowdy band of misfits were to start engaging with her openly and expect fifteen minutes of conversation.
And despite being a strong advocate of it in public places, she doesn't like the silence that follows those boys' departure, so in a last-ditch effort to find peace and maybe a place to curl up and die after that whole phone incident, she puts in some earphones and plays a song and she doesn't realize she's singing until somebody's rounding the corner and laughing. At her.
She closes her lips immediately, registering the laugh of "YouTube'll love this," and she's bolting out of the library in the biggest hurry she's ever been in, hot salty tears bursting down her face in lines reflecting the rain outside. She pushes past Hyorin, and doesn't bother to apologize, since she has a feeling Hyorin knows what's going on, and she doesn't want to be there for this old woman to console because she doesn't need consoling, she needs to be fixed. She need desperate help and she's not sure who to even seek it from, but she knows the eighty-year-old woman at the library who she hears talking to herself often sure as hell is not the right person.
She alternates between walking and jogging for at least an hour, and she doesn't know where she's going but all that registers is the need to get away, and the water soaking her to the bone. She's probably cold, and her legs burn but she can't force herself to stop or to shiver, because all she can keep doing is running and sobbing and she hears her phone go off twice, three times, four. She keeps hearing it ding and she faintly recalls it getting dark but doesn't notice until she's reached the sidewalk by the freeway and she sits under the overpass, the same music that she sang to playing on loop and she throws her phone onto the grass and slumps with her hands on her knees and her head pounding relentlessly against her skull, as if punishing her for being such an idiot as to put on a show for whoever wanted in the library.
And she cries a bit more, but soon enough she can't even force herself to do that, and she's sneezing and coughing and her vision's dotting with black and her eyes and closing on their own.
When she comes to, she's under the same freeway overpass, and she's still wet but she's under a blanket, and she's sitting up frantically, looking around for a weapon or answer as to who laid her under this blanket and wondering how this will be explained to her parents.
"You slept awhile, sweetheart." The man's voice is soft, but with a tinge of huskiness in it, and the tone of endearment at the end kills her, making her wince.
She sits up, rubbing her eyes like a child and she looks to see the sky dull and grey, just like earlier.
She opens her mouth, and tries to even squeak, but nothing comes out. It's not because she's scared like back at the library, but because her throat is so dry and she dryly, not unlike her throat, notes maybe she cried all the water out of her body, before a water bottle's thrown her way and it hits her straight in the eye.
"Oh my god, are you okay?!"
She nods quickly, taking the cap and drinking down to the beginning of the label, quietly. The man that threw the water bottle at her scowls.
"What, you're not going to thank me? That was my water bottle, one of the last ones, huh Baekhyun?" He looks over to the other man, the one who asked her if she was okay previously, and the man nodded. 
After her lack of response, he leans over to Baekhyun.
"Do you think she's deaf?"
She bites back a laugh, and tries to steady her voice as much as possible.
"T-T-Thank you."
Baekhyun's face lights up, just like the old woman's at the library.
"She can speak!" The one previously insulting her stated, his voice higher than earlier.
"I'm Chen, this is Baekhyun." He introduces himself, pointing.
She's about to say something back, but she's cut off by a voice behind them, and what sounds like feet running full speed.
"Chen! Tao's trying to murder m-oomf!" He runs right into her, knocking both of them to the ground. The boy on top of her is like a giant, with his long, gangly limbs and big ears, completely engulfing her form. As if he didn't just land on her, he addresses the other two.
"Who's this?"
"Chanyeol!!" Baekhyun and who she can only assume is Tao, are scolding him while Chen doubles over with laughter, falling against another boy she doesn't remember meeting.
"So, kiddo, where you from?" Chen uses that term when he looks only a few years older than her.
"Seoul."
"Woah, you were running? How'd you make it two cities over?" The one Chen was previously slumped against exclaimed, mirroring the rests' looks of shock.
She shrugs, but she's alarmed too. Her mother wouldn't be coming back for a few months, and her father hadn't come back from a business trip since she was ten so, she wasn't particularly worried.
"Yixing, be quiet, you could probably run faster." She's lost track of names by now, all these people and she counts seven more coming from behind them and she can't help but wonder where they came from.
"W-Why are you here?" She only stutters once, and calls it a victory.
One of the other ones, Luhan she thinks they called him, walks to her, pointing to thewoods.
"We saw you from there."
The other boys yell at Luhan, throwing him to the ground and kicking him lightly, and Luhan makes a noise, not one of pain, but she recognizes it as giggling. What is his problem? Such luck she has, running away from that literary hell to run into a group of absolute psychopaths.
"How could you give that away?!" One of the younger ones say, blond hair falling into his eyes as he huffs, rolling his eyes exasperatingly.
"She doesn't look like she'll be going anywhere, she can stay with us!" Luhan says, his eyes those same crescent moons as the old woman from the place she desperately wants to forget, despite the fact seconds ago he was being brutally abused by this pack of boys.
They look at her expectantly, a few racking their eyes down her body, and in a burst of confidence she snaps out, "excuse me, eye contact." and Chen and everyone but the three she called out who's eyes fall to the ground, as if wishing it would swallow them up, laugh hysterically. She feels bad after those words come out. Doing something and perhaps not noticing, getting laughed at. She knows how that feels.
"Sorry," she murmurs, "but, if you don't mind, I'd love to s-stay with you." she stutters on that last part, but that's better than before.
"Are you kidding? You sold me on yourself when you annihilated Kris, Jongin and  D.O!" Tao giggles out, since Chen was still on the ground wheezing in laughter at the three. D.O? That was an odd name. She assumes it's a code name, since it didn't seem like a birth name.
"D.O, w-what does that stand for?" Her voice is quiet, and they ask her to repeat herself, so she does. All eyes fall on the flustered boy, and he blushes even harder than he was. She feels bad for him, so speaks before he does.
"S-Sorry, you don't have to tell me." She stammers and Chanyeol walks up and pinches her cheeks.
"She's so cute!" He cooes at her, smile so big it makes her form one too.
"What's your name?" One of the ones at the back, Xiumin she thinks is what Luhan giggled at him.
"Y/N," she doesn't stutter, and she smiles big at them, stunning half and amusing the other half, "Y/N Y/L/N."