@synthvtic // continued...
“Why?” The question is meant to come off as hostile, but the fear in her widened eyes is enough to give away her vulnerability. She grips the sad excuse of a weapon with both hands with stop the quivering of her limbs whilst scanning her surroundings for a possible route of escape already. “Who are you? Did they send you? What do you want?”
He’s no connoisseur of self-preservation, but he’s not an idiot, either. So, when the young woman flourishes her weapon, small and deceptively harmless as it were, his hands are immediately up and out in an all-too recognizable ‘self-surrender’, ‘easy-there’ gesture. He’s seen enough of those movies and television shows by now to know what these kinds of people are capable of; but, frankly, he half-sort-of wishes that those very same shows would sometimes teach more of the ‘handling of’ than the ‘horrors of’.
“Hey, hey—no need for that!” Jae finds himself spitting out rather calmly in spite of the instant surplus of fear and adrenaline coursing through his veins, “I’d just like to talk!”
That’s a good question—a very good question. It’s in that very millisecond that he wonders why he’s decided to approach the clearly not-all-there individual traipsing about in the public water fountain, barefoot and scavenging for the glitters making up the bottom of the pools. After all, it doesn’t sound a whole lot like him to take time out of his day to ensure that a perfect stranger was at the very least okay, even if they clearly weren’t.
He takes a breath, slow and steady; keeping his open-faced palms as still and as threat-free as possible. While still mulling over her preceding remark, Jae’s mind begins to fill with unlikely successful scenarios. He thinks about springing forward and knocking her back into the fountain, ensuing a ‘fight for your life’ struggle. He thinks about kicking the knife straight from her grasp. Thinks about this and that, but doesn’t ever stop once to notice that her nerves are just as threadbare, anxious, and fearful as his.
‘Who are you? Did they send you? What do you want?’
Somewhere behind him, a pair of dated lovebirds stop in their tracks at the scene that befalls them, but only for as long as it takes for the male to wrap his arm around his partner’s shoulder and steer her in another direction. And, in the corner of his eye, Jae can see a young woman in a group of four others conspicuously lift her cellphone’s front camera to an eyelevel precision. Sure, there’s an audience, but it’s a silent menagerie. If he’s hurt here (or, if he’s pathetic enough to be subdued by a flimsy-looking woman holding a goddamn pocketknife, worse) there’s no guarantee of a helpful reaction.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Is what he says instead of a real answer, because his thoughts aren’t quite capable of connecting to his mouth when they’re running seventy-five thousand miles a minute, “Please put the knife down.”
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