He was aware of her, she noticed. But she knew also he had been a King – everyone in the meeting would speak behind his back about his life, back in the Homelands – and if there was one thing she had learned with her Father, was that Kings like to be pleased and it doesn’t mind how good and fair they are, they know they are better than the others around them. And she was pretty sure that wouldn’t exclude him, the one she couldn’t remember the name yet.
So she waited, as he waited for her, until he finally replied her and then again, with a nod, when he told her about finishing the cigarette. It was comprehensible, and she took two steps back so this way she wouldn’t be hit by the disgusting smoke.
Her eyes followed the burned tip until it met the snow grass beneath them, and then they went to focus on the store’s owner again. He acted just like a normal human, as he had never been a Fable, and he was so good at that. Soojung got somehow jealous at this ability of his – and a little content he was like everyone had described him, so that way he’d be able to help her as she thought. Hopefully.
The King entered the store and exited many times, and the mermaid only looked, not daring to do anything – until she realized she was being slow again. As he stepped inside the library, she followed him, kicking the snow off her boots as she did so. She remembered glancing at him once or twice, before her eyes started to fall on the few vestiges of white on the black of her shoes – and then he spoke, and she had to face him again, and she wasn’t sure if that face of his had been always that harsh.
His soft tone combined with such direct sentence caught her off guard. The red-haired woman took a strand of hair, combing it with her fingertips before placing them behind the shell of her ear. “I think you’re good at catching up stuff.” She replied simply – or hoped it would seem like so, at least.
Clearing her throat once was the best she could do to keep speaking formally and in a way he would understand, not forcing anything. And introducing herself would be the best way to not stumble over herself and call him by a name he didn’t had. And so she did. “But it’s not completely true. I still need something about the World War II. But if you’d prefer discuss something else—I’m Soojung, or Ariel, as you may know me.”
“I think you’re good at catching up stuff.”
He watched as her eyes turned back to his, though he assumed her attention had been on him this whole while regardless. The fable chuckled slightly, yet with a bitter undertone before she spoke. “I have to be, or else I do not survive.”, the truth tinged quite heavy on the small sentence but reality was harsh.
As she introduced herself, her scarlet hear suddenly made sense to the male. “The little mermaid.” A tale from the country of Hesse, a neighbouring country to his own homeland. “My name is Won Bin, although I’m sure by the amount of whispers whenever I appear you would know my other name.” He wasn’t a fool, and like she had herself mentioned; he picked up on things very well. And there was no hiding he wasn’t a lot of fables favourite King that had escaped into the Mundane world, not by far.
“Well, ” he began and folded his hands together on the wooden surface of his counter. “first of all, what do you need help with Soojung?” For now he would put his discomfort to the side and actually do what he had offered to do for the good. To provide guidance and information about the Mundane world and it’s history. A history he had personally experienced and seen through to the very second they were now standing in.
“If it’s about the second world war I have several books on that, both non-fiction and fiction.” The topic was vast and the entire world had their own way of writing the outcome. Such a great war, almost much like the one they were in the midst of themselves, had taken it’s toll on the Mundanes. Even though the fighting generation were soon to die out. But he remembers those day, even if it was calm in the US compared to the European continent, you clearly saw the events even here.
A seemingly doomed war.