Chapter 1-A: Curiosity (Day 0)
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He was fifteen the first time he noticed her.
It was not a moment he understood at the time, only one that refused to loosen its hold on him.
Not because she was beautiful in the way people spoke about beauty in his circle, but because she stood out in the environment she was in.
Her olive skin, dark hair, and brown eyes were not a local sight. Not to mention that, at such a young age, she moved with heavy misery.
She worked behind the counter of the small corner neighborhood store, quiet and efficient, never lingering on anyone’s gaze.
She was twenty then.
He once heard the store owner mention her age alongside a few vulgar comments about her visibly pregnant belly, a whore carrying a bastard with no father in sight, and some other comments he did not care to remember.
Twenty, she was old enough to look past him, the curious boy who frequented the store after school far more than he needed to.
She walked with a limp.
Wrote everything down in a small notebook instead of speaking.
Wore the same few clothes in rotation, with the exception of the stable green coat, which always made an appearance in this cold mountainous small town.
When she reached for change or passed him a note in reply to answer one of his mundane questions, he once noticed three small black triangles etched into the inner seam of her wrist.
He never asked her name.But he memorized the way she held her pen.
The exact shade of green of her coat.The three black triangles carved into her skin.
The hollow sleeve of her left arm.Then, one day, without warning, she was gone.
And shortly after, he left the small affluent town of Lundberg for his extended military engineering studies.
Once in a while, especially on cold nights, she would appear in his thoughts more often than she should have, slipping into moments uninvited. Sometimes he wondered if he had imagined her entirely.
He did not know what to make of the feeling when it came bursting back to the surface in the most random of moments.
And thus years passed without ceremony.
