Empathy [Josh Dun - Twenty One Pilots]

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Time sequences

Hey guys,

I've noticed a lot of people are confused about the time sequences in this story, so I need to clear that up. I don't want this to ruin the story.

As you've noticed, I alternate two different kinds of chapters in this story. First, the chapters named after numbers, (ØNE, TWØ,...). Those chapters take place in 2014. Tyler and Josh are both high school seniors and they're 18.

The second kind of chapters, those named after dates, take place (as stated in the their titles) in 2012. Josh is 16 and he's writing in his journal what has JUST happened in his life.

To help, here's a little timeline of what's been told in the story, but in the right order:

- Josh gets his weird condition the day after his 16th birthday. He notices changes in the way he perceives other people's emotions and he starts writing in his journal because he thinks it'll help him not lose his mind. We learn that his dad left home with another woman, that his sister is dead, and that he isn't in the best terms with his mother.

- He's dating Debby. He goes over one night, and since her parents aren't there, they're planning (without really saying it) to have sex but Josh gets all weird because of his empathy condition and sex doesn't happen. It eventually leads to Debby not willing to see him again: she avoids him all summer and breaks up with him. In the mean time, during that summer, Josh has some troubles with his friends and he doesn't know if he still has friends when he starts junior year.

[Some events take then place here that you don't know about yet. It covers the whole junior year.]

- When Josh starts senior year, he meets Tyler at school. At this point in his life, he doesn't have any friends anymore, he's still very mad at Debby for breaking up with him the way she did, and he usually gets panic attacks when he has to go to school because many people, including his ex-best friend Ethan, are bullying him.

- His condition is way worse than at the beginning. He can't look into people's eyes without being flooded by their own emotions and it's killing him.

All right, I hope it clears things up a bit (although I just realized that some of you probably got confused because I used "freshman" instead of "junior", my apologies, I'm not really used to those terms since English isn't my first language and I barely know a thing about US school system).