An elegance of wit, a gaucheness of hatred

His inundation of elegance that easily spilled out on to the world around him, shaping it to accommodate him, slipped its way into my pocket, and before my cognition could catch up, I had whisked it out into the fresh air.
I felt guilt for how easily the motion had come to me.
And so, I took the note back from his outstretched fingers before they could grasp it, and their clutching at nothing but icy air sent his brows into a furrow of exasperation.
"Delusional, I see"
It looks like my small bit of resistance was worth nothing more than a flick of his ring finger, as the poem was snatched out from, this time, between my own fingers, yet he didn't degrade himself so much as to act himself. Small threads of ice, that I had mistaken for long trails of hair, or rather, were his long trails of hair, slipped into my palm and pulled the paper back towards him, thrusting it carefully before his swimming irises. 
I wasn't able to read his expression, permanently swishing between regal consternation and royal diffidence.
My shaking eyes flittered between him and the shaggy-haired man, his face contorting in a raging flame of emotion, now directed towards the royal thief.
While I had some scruples with abandoning my duty, I was, in an admittedly selfish manner, searching for a clean escape from this bizarre, terrifying situation.
Can you blame me? 
Just because the world's ending, it doesn't mean that I need to be roped into some eccentric tales of murder or disaster-
Just let me die in peace, at the end of times, with everybody else.
...but that was only my outwards persona.
What I mean to say is, that's the me that exists here, in this world, tangibly; searching for work day after day, being a good student, keeping up with society to the best of my abilities.
A many headed woman has torn that miniscule thread from within my beating heart, like pulling a taught, thin muscle from inside the shell of a crab leg. 
Muscles tensed inside my own legs, psychological momentum, one I was unfamiliar with, pushing them through the barrier of fear that halted them- 
into blackness.

Aching throbbed me into wakefulness, like waves pushing me back from the ocean of unconsciousness back onto the smooth, warm sand of reality. 
My back had sunk into the soft fabric, and my eyelids were tightly clasped together with remnants of sleep, while the low hum of a heater made my head and ears feel numb.
Fragments of memory were still piecing together somewhere in my head, and the combination of warm blankets and heated air made it difficult not to drift back into sleep. 
It didn't take long for my cognition to whir into action, for broken shards of remembrance to push only the most embarrassing of moments back into the forefront of my consciousness. Like she could read my mind, even the depths that didn't make themselves known to me, the silky voice of the older lady from the counter twisted around my ears like a scarf. 
"Don't get too worked up over it... I don't know how much you remember, but you didn't faint out of fear or anything. Honestly, most of us are surprised you even had the willpower to move a finger in front of those terrifying men."
How much had she seen? If she knew that much at least, she would have been there for the moment that I left this world momentarily, in which case...
"Then, what happened..."
"Well..." she hesitantly whispered, her vibrant crimson irises looking nervously around the small break room. My own eyes had emerged from beneath the blurry haze of sleep, and I now realised that where I had been laid to rest was the same break room were all those eccentric employees had chatted away only an hour ago. That is, if my sense of time isn't too off. Actually, how long had I been out? In a fashion that was beginning to frighten me, illicit that same uncomfortable restlessness that the man in the alley had provoked, she answered my thoughts like a mother who has too much affection for her pitiable son.
"You've been resting for almost a day now. It was a pretty hard blow, so it's not that surprising, or concerning. Rather, you waking up so quickly is what might be concerning, in its own way. Do you... Do you feel any kind of pain?"
I let my consciousness run through my body, but now aches beside the light throbbing of a headache emerged, and I felt only as if I had woken from a deep nap. 
"It's just... It's very surprising."
She probably meant the fact that I had even survived at all. The words 'errand boy' drifted back into my mind. Of course, I was probably disposable. I'm not trying to villainise these people, but its just how the world works, especially now. They don't want me to be brutally murdered on the job, but that's why I  was chosen for this job, and not one of their more valuable members. 
"Is this job usually so... bizarrely dangerous?" I asked with more irony than sincerity. I was trying to make light of my humiliation, my feelings of insecurity more than anything else.
"No, not at all" she muttered, her eyes focusing intently on my own. 
I blushed a little, looking down at my pale, thin fingers, clenching and unclenching in a bid to wake them from the numbness of sleep. 
I had a bad habit of pushing my hand beneath my head when I slept, which usually resulted in this morning finger-numbness.
"I don't want to assume your feelings," she began, despite having seemingly read and addressed almost all of my feelings since I awoke, but I suppose that's not exactly assuming. She clearly sees my feelings, so she's never assuming them. Maybe that's her logic.
"but, please believe me when I say that this is not the reason we dragged you into this job. This kind of circumstance... is not common, or even rare. It's unbelievable, honestly, that this kind bizarreness would find its way to you so easily,"
"Miss, you really should leave this building more. Bizarreness isn't what it's called anymore. It's normal now; the usual. World is changing." 
From behind the lady came the slightly gruff, had it been a little softer, whiny bit of admonishment. I hadn't met them for more than a handful of seconds, let alone heard more than a handful of words burst from his mouth, but I knew almost instantly it was the ashy-blonde delinquent who had decided to pipe up.
Almost like his voice alone was enough to provoke an unconscious reaction, her face tightened up before he had finished with his juvenile reprovement. It was the expression of a mother who had just been subjected to the knowledge that her studious son dreamed of being a manga author. 
"Don't get cocky. Or did you forget that I'm the one that decided to pay you your wages. If it wasn't up to me, you all would be working for next to nothing."
A company that doesn't pay their employee's wages, or at least, so little as to be inadequate? I guess it's not unheard of, but it didn't seem like it was as simple as that. From her words and his expression, especially his dejected slouch back towards the far end of the room, it seemed like it was something more than inadequate. Rather, was this lady the manager of the entire store? It was quite large, spanning both a cafe and bookstore, including multiple floors above that I assumed were owned by the same manager, or at least the same company. 
"That boy. If he wasn't so efficient, not to mention his unagreeable attitude, I would've made him the errand boy instead" she reprimanded, truly mother-like. 
From almost the moment I had laid eyes on her, and now, seeing her interact with some of the other employees, I truly got the impression that she was acting as some guardian mother to her employees. That is, if they were her employees. The way they were speaking, it sounded more like they had been hired by a parent company, and she was simply their regional manager. 
Kind of like an idol.
Just what was this place? 
What job had I really signed up to?
As the ashy-blonde employee paced across the room, fiddling with something as he put one irritated foot in front of the other, a smoother, more composed voice from behind my head jolted me with surprise. 
"I think you should tell him, miss. Normally I wouldn't be one to rush things, but we really need to get going."
Though I couldn't see him clearly without straining my eyes to a blur, the thick, rectangular glasses and neatly cropped jet-black hair turned down towards me while I raised myself on my elbows, shaking of the warm, fluffy cream blanket that had been laid neatly across me. 
"We would have had to carry you otherwise, so thanks!" came as a muffled yell from a room further detached from this one. 
"Where are we going?" 
I didn't want to be left out of whatever was happening. 
Even if I was just an errand boy, I was still an employee.
But, as prudent as she was, the older lady queried, "Do you have anyone at home that you need to call? We might not be back for a while."
While it hurt to admit it in front of her guileless, comforting smile, I answered honestly that there probably wasn't.
Things were moving too fast. I had no idea where we were going, why I was going with them, or who these people really even were. 
I wasn't one to get dragged into things easily. It was hard to remember the feelings that had drawn me to this situation in this first place. 
But always overshadowing this world, plastering everybody's minds like a wallpaper on a rented apartment, one we couldn't remove even if we desperately desired it more than anything else, was its inevitable end. 
All this strange situation almost solidified that in most people's hearts.
It's possible that all this bizarreness is the consequence of a world thrown into bizarre circumstances, but it could also be that the causal link wasn't as tight as it appeared. 
We were edging towards the point where discerning whether this world was changing because it was ending, or changing because people believed it to be ending, would be almost impossible.
But maybe that line was too thin to see anyway.
This is where I'm supposed to be heading. 
I don't know why, but my heart, though I know I shouldn't put nearly as much faith in it as in my mind, is clasped by threads that are tangled with these people, somehow, despite their objective position as almost complete strangers. 
Around me, the manager had begun to discuss something with the polite employee, while the ashy-blonde-haired one was very obviously annoyed at me; for what, I had no clue. 
He did seem like someone that wouldn't take too kindly to strangers encroaching on his private chunk of the world. 
Maybe he even had a mother-complex.
While I gazed across the break room, trying to align myself to wakefulness again, my eyes fell upon the narrow metal door that I had entered into before my errand. 
It felt strange, and I could almost see an imaginary manifestation of the past, of my small figure hidden behind the manager's, while the inexplicable feelings of halcyon bubbled lightly in my stomach. 
It was a strange nostalgia, like I was pre-empting an emotion I would be feeling far in the future, a shard of memory that I would be reflected in far into the future.
"Tch. It's really too much to ask for to at least get a nap in before a job like this, huh?"
Oh, I see.
No wonder the ashy-blonde delinquent was in such a prickly mood.
I had taken his permanently reserved spot, the only spot on this couch that could fit his outstretched legs, entirely for myself these past twenty-four hours.