enough to be dumbstruck
@avtjay
the separationist rally is disappointingly ordinary.
chaeyoung doesn’t quite know what she’d expected, but it certainly hadn’t been this. there’s almost a forced bravado to this, she thinks, overcompensation for some imagined flaw in each of them. it’s both unsettling and frustrating at the same time. to be fair, perhaps, she looks as ordinary as these people, if not more so – her mutation is an invisible manifestation, and for all she knows they are just like her. at the very least, the one thing she can be certain of is that these are definitely all potentials of some kind.
there are people scattered around who aren’t dressed as ostentatiously. they stand out, she thinks, precisely because they seem to be trying not to, conspicuously inconspicuous. chaeyoung moves closer towards one of them, hood turned up to obscure his face – someone like that, she thinks, is far more dangerous than the loud colours and bluster. she prefers it.
the ringleader (she thinks) is yelling rhetoric that she recognises, half of them catchphrases that she’s seen plastered across the streets before clean-up arrives. the rally riles itself up, predictably. despite herself, she’s bored. there’s no reason for separation when the humans will wipe themselves out sooner or later, losing because they are weak. she doesn’t care for this; she’d simply been curious, but the separationists aren’t quite convincing. the world will belong to them eventually, and separation is only a concession.
she turns to leave, and catches the expression of the man next to her, oddly impassive, the strangest juxtaposition in the crowd that’s fueled by emotion.
“aren’t you angry?” she says, without thinking, pressing her lips together before deciding to push forward with this. “why are you...” she gestures a little at him, then at the soapbox stage, “here?”