Killer Protector: REDUX (JTK story)

Chapter 1

[Say hello to the start of something new. Please don't spam high school musical.

...

You're already doing it, oka—]

Chapter 1

All it took was a blinding light.

A circle. Two lines. One. Two. Burning hot like a  fresh branding iron. The sensation didn't last for very long, but its meaning has been singed right into my identity. Through muscle, through veins, through the bone itself right into the that crimson marrow. Since that single moment, since that blinding light, this circle and two lines have become one with me.

Dark eyes—nearly black—were all that stared back at me in awe, and I'm sure I returned the same look. I had thought he did this to me, but his grip on my wrist was only a catalyst. My chariot into the truth, into hope and despair.

A circle. Two lines. One. Two. They were bound to appear. Inevitable. Sempiternal.

A full circle that narrows and widens across the line. Expanding yet going nowhere. Two lines. One. Two.

One.

Two.

One.

"Ellie."

A low, quiet voice stirred me awake and for a second I couldn't recognize where I was. Looking up, I saw my dad looking down at me with a soft smile on his fair-toned face. Nudging my shoulder, he said, "If you're tired, you shouldn't be taking a snooze on the moving boxes like that. You'll get aches later."

I blinked at him for a moment, just a little confused. Then I finally responded with a simple nod of my head. Dad just chuckled and walked away to continue unpacking everything for the house. I'm sure Mom was somewhere around doing the same thing. It was just me, alone on my new bedroom floor, thinking about Dad's voice calling me out of my sleep, except it didn't remotely sound like Dad at all. Dad's voice isn't that deep, is it? But maybe my brain was being weird in the seconds before I woke up. Freaky.

With a sigh, I scoot myself away from the boxes I was dozing off against, then looked to the other boxes in the corner of my new room. My bed laid in the other corner opposite the door, no bedsheets or blankets on it yet, hell, not even a bed frame. I kind of like it on the floor though, it seems cool, though I'm sure Mom will complain about it if I leave it like that.

Groaning, I stretched and laid on my back, looking up at the white ceiling. Even though this ceiling and the ceiling of my old room back home surely are made of the same materials, this one is too foreign to me. I remember certain spots on my old bedroom ceiling—that one bump that juts out from the rest of the level surface, that one scratch from when Dad was trying to fix the ceiling fan, an old sticker I somehow stuck up there—and now I can't help but look for those same spots despite that they're not here, because it's a different ceiling, part of a different house, in a different sleepy town, in a different state far off from home. Everything different, foreign, and uncomfortable.

Then again, it's not as if our old home had anything to offer either. There's no one there that I'll miss. No one there that will miss me. After sixteen long years, nothing and no one ever stuck with me. People knew each other and I knew about them, and I knew of all the things that they knew about each other, but no one knew me back.

And yet, despite having no friends to miss and to miss me, I wanted to be back home. I didn't want this move ever since the news escaped my parents' mouths. It never dawned on me until I finally saw this new house, that I didn't want to be in a new place where no one would know me once again. I got used to the solitude back at home; it was familiar despite the emptiness. Now I have to endure a new state of that same feeling, and it terrifies me.