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Never has a child opted to join Shade and its creeping, growing coils beneath the bed before. With a practiced, effortless motion, Goro slides into dust and lost toys, sends them scattering in all directions like roaches in sudden, abrupt light. He bumps gently into Shade, formless but feathery, with a small “oop”. Bracing himself, he propels himself backwards into a roll that puts space between the two of them; he uses more force than necessary and smacks his head off the boards helping to hold up the bed as his little fingers scrabble for a bedpost.
Goro muffles a yelp against his shoulder and curls forward, a hand held protectively over the new bruise blossoming on his scalp. There’s a moment where the only sound is Goro’s quiet, rasping breathing and his foster father’s loud sawing snores before Shade unfurls its body, snake-like and fluid. It eats up half of all the remaining space beneath the bed, seeping into the shadows as if they’re an intrinsic part of it.
Tendrils of inky black slither over to Goro, undulating and contracting, but the child swats at them before they’ve even made it halfway across the floorboards. His fingers slip through them like they’re made of gas and Goro gasps, the digits on his opposite hand digging into the bedpost until they turn white with pressure. “You don’t scare me,” he says defiantly and Shade laughs, a sound that oozes and crackles like electricity because it’s obvious that it very much does.
How strange to be confronted with a child that wants so strongly he’s willing to brave his fears to get it. How could it resist this indulgence when never before has a child knowingly faced it after they were aware it was lingering nearby? “What do you ssseek?” Shade asks. A multitude of orange eyes open and pepper the darkness around them, each of them focused on the ten-year-old boy with clammy skin and lips firmed with determination.
“What happens after you die?” The words are choked out, forced between teeth grit together like it’s a question Goro doesn’t really want to know the answer to. How curious. Idle curiosity laps at its mind, it wants to know why he has a fixation with death.
“That dependsss on how you define death,” Shade says and the blank look it gets in response quells the impending philosophical riddle it’d been constructing. A laugh ripples through it, coiling its body until its mass takes up all the space beneath the bed that Goro isn’t occupying. “Creaturesss sssuch as yourssself never really die,” it says, an inkling forming in its mind. “You exchange a physssical body for an intangible one. Your energy livesss on and findsss a purpossse; what it doesss with that isss up to it.”
Goro worries his lower lip as he stares through Shade and thinks, his knees tucked up to his chest with one arm wrapped around them. Confusion furrows his brows and frustration blossoms and retracts a sharp contrast across his features. Regardless of his age, Shade knows he’d struggle to comprehend what it's told them; it’s a concept that’s beyond living creatures until they experience it for themselves. “Are they happy?” Goro asks eventually.
“Yesss,” Shade says even though it’s more complicated than that. Some of the energies are too dulled from life’s hardships to be capable of something as complex as thought or emotions. It supposes that happiness for them is the lack of consciousness.
Goro’s expression clears, suffuses into a relief so intense that Shade knows without having to be told that this child has lost someone close to him. “Okay,” he says as if that settles matters and the idea of life after death is inconsequential to him. Goro smiles in its direction like he no longer finds it a threat and, using the bedpost, pushes himself out from under the bed. Shade seeps into the space Goro leaves behind, absorbs the energy that lingers as a small body clamors back into the bed above it. “Goodnight!” Goro says with a breezy sigh, as if a long-held conflict has found resolution. A strange child indeed.