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Suguru Geto had been the kind of child that other children either ignored or attempted to bully. His stories of horrific monsters, and the tricks he’d play on the other kids alienated them towards him, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care. So what if they hated him? Suguru was right. There were monsters that would claw at his windowpanes, or reach for him from the sewer grates on the gravelly roads. They were real. Maybe it didn’t help, but he was adamant about it. Suguru couldn’t help but be adamant about things he thought were correct.
Another thing that seemed to freak them out were his eyes. He never saw any problem with them. Wasn’t violet a pretty colour? That was what his mom had told him when he asked her why people stared at him. Because his eyes were pretty.
Suguru soon came to believe that his eyes were not as beautiful as his mom said. Not when other children chanted and jeered at him for them. He would stick out his tongue at them and stomp away, but it still stuck something sharp in his ribs to hear those words.
At school, Suguru preferred to spend his recesses trying to access restricted areas of the school or looking in the windows of closed sheds. There were always creepy crawlies there. Despite their awful appearances, things straight out of the movies Suguru’s parents would watch when they thought he was asleep, Suguru was never afraid of them. Instead, he felt a tug in his gut, as though the monsters were trying to get him to grab at them. He would attempt to do so, but every time he saw a flicker of something, it would vanish from his hands. No matter how many times he tried, it remained the same.
For so long, he was stuck with an insatiable hunger, ever present and more irritating the longer it stewed.
His parents would scoff when he told them he was still hungry, even though his stomach was more than full, and he’d already had thirds of his meals. It wasn’t as though he was a particularly sporty kid either, spending most of his time reading or going on long walks in the forest to find more of the weird creatures nobody else seemed to see- so the hunger wasn’t caused by strenuous physical activity. None of the doctors his parents took him to could tell him why he felt that way, and said he was simply faking it for attention, or it was all in his head.
But he had been hungry.
So, so hungry. All of the time. It became a constant, something he had to ignore or be consumed by. At night, when it was especially awful, Suguru would clench his stomach and do his best to keep tears back at the stabbing pain he endured in his gut, chest, and throat. It was all in his head, wasn’t it? Crying over things that weren’t even real would do him no good.
Suguru became a quiet child when he entered his first year of middle school. He was tired of people telling him he was crazy, or that his fanciful stories of eyes stuck in the doorway were childish. There was nothing he could say that anyone would care about or believe. So, he was quiet.
Being quiet didn’t make the other kids leave him alone. If anything, it made him more of a target for bullying. That was something he wouldn’t stand for though. Bullying was wrong, and just because he was the one being bullied didn’t mean he wouldn’t stop it. See, Suguru had this idea in his mind that most righteous people also tend to be overly self-sacrificial, and honestly, he couldn’t stand that. He wanted to be a good person of course; his parents had made it obvious that being a good person was important, but he wouldn’t let himself get pushed around. People who were harassing others deserved whatever punishment was coming their way, especially if they were doing it for fun.
The numerous amounts of parent-teacher meetings Suguru was forced to attend became rather repetitive. So what if he had asked his parents to be allowed to take taiijutsu classes, and then used those lessons to beat the absolute crap out of anyone who so much as said a singular rude thing to him? Big deal. They deserved it. To Suguru, anyone who did a wrong deed was rightly deserving of being punished. Just because he was the one administrating that justice didn’t mean it wasn’t as valid as say, a teacher condoning the kids. They learnt their lessons, didn’t they?
Suguru ended up skipping more days than not during his first and second years of middle school. There were times where the hunger would become too much for him, and showing up to school felt like an impossible task. His parents thought he was depressed or something. Which, maybe he was. Suguru didn’t dwell on it.
His parents dwelt on it, unlike Suguru, and had forced him to go to therapy. That had lasted all of four months before had been labeled a simple delinquent and told to stop being so lazy.
The label of delinquent made him sound as though he was without a moral compass. Which was entirely untrue. Despite his ear gages he’d gotten without permission, and his tendency to sneak smokes when he was wandering the streets of the small city he lived in while ditching class, Suguru was more than morally aligned. There was a reason he never bullied anyone for no reason, and why he wouldn’t lash out when he really wanted to. He had self-restraint.
No one cared. No one cared. No one would ever care.
Another reason he would skip school was the increasing amount of horrific things he would see lurking in the shadows of every crevice of the building of his campus. It seemed like each turn he made revealed more gruesome things. Like the battered and bruised severed head that hung right above the boy’s washroom’s door. Or the skeletons with malformed ribcages covered in green and purple worms that danced around the soccer net poles. Besides those creatures, there were little ones within almost every desk or locker. His own locker had three little bats with green fur hanging upside down on the top of it.
No one else saw those things. No one else cared. No one listened. It was eating at him. The hunger was eating at him. The tugging and pushing in his stomach was destroying him.
Suguru hated school, he hated the other kids, and he hated having no purpose. Where had been the meaning to everything? He couldn’t live like a regular kid, he couldn’t have friends like everyone else did, or join school sports teams, or attempt to push through the physical pain he endured.
There was something wrong with him, but he didn’t know what.
Something irrevocably, and disgustingly wrong with him.
That all changed, though, on the day he finally listened to the voice in his head and his hands telling him to grab.
The forest had been so hauntingly calling, and the fourteen-year-old Suguru had never been more enticed to go. Despite the sky being asleep, the stars hung and shining above, Suguru had slipped out from his window and onto the cold and dewy grass. His socks immediately got wet, damp and uncomfortable, but that didn’t matter to him as he walked down to the forest. It was only a few meters away from his house, which was situated in a neighborhood just outside the city.
As soon as he made it into the heavily draped over and thick woods, he began walking in the direction he needed to. Needed to, because his entire soul seemed to be pulled in that direction. He had been pushing it down for so long, ignoring the innate need, the thirst and the hunger, and it had driven
him to complete single-mindedness. There was only one thing he was going to accomplish tonight, and it was to satiate himself. For the first time, he was going to end this pain in his body.
He didn’t know how long he walked through the woods, letting his feet be stabbed by the twigs and the rocks he would almost trip over. No, none of that stopped Suguru. He had been certain he couldn’t be stopped, not when the twisting thing inside him kept him going. Not when it guided every single one of his steps, like strings attached to a puppet, making it impossible for them to go any other way.
The monstrous amalgamation he came across wasn’t what he had been expecting to find at the end of his walking. It wasn’t surprising, no. What else could he had found, though? It had made too much sense.
He stopped walking when his eyes first laid upon it, standing in the middle of the smallest clearing. The moon’s crescent light pouring over it as if sinking into the pale skin of the beast.
The monster was shaped like wolves, wolves that had been melted together and stripped of their fur, all claws and teeth and sharp things as it groaned and snarled in its spot. A mess of something incoherent and unnatural in the thickest sense.
Suguru wanted it. He wanted to take it and sink his hands into it and consume consume consume consume. The feeling was the exact same as when he woke up in the middle of a nightmare and needed water. It was the same feeling he’d had his entire life, but a million times amplified in that moment.
Despite the blood that so obviously poured from the numerous mouths of the beast, Suguru wasn’t afraid. He went up to it, almost in a trance like state, and put out his hand.
The thing snarled at him as though it wished to sever Suguru’s head from his body and then eat at every single one of his muscles and organs, but that didn’t stop Suguru from inching closer and closer. It was similar to being stuck in an illusion, unable to break the spell unless he satisfied his one need, but unable to be hurt by it, because it was all fake.
As he outstretched his hand again, something brilliant, bright and blue, crept up his arm and into the pads of his fingers. It curled out and wrapped itself around the shrieking monster, swirling like ripples on a pond. Before Suguru could back away from any of it, the monster was captured in what seemed to be the smallest of grey and black orbs, similar to marbles, if they were the size of his palm.
Suguru had taken the orb, and done what would have initially seemed like a crazy thing to do, in hindsight. He took it to his lips, tilted his head back, and swallowed it in one contraction of his throat.
As it dissolved somewhere within him, Suguru gasped, his hands going to his stomach as he realized the cold absence of the hunger that had pushed him forward for so long. It was the most unsettling and balance destroying thing he’d ever experienced. At the same time, there was a part of him that finally seemed to slide into place.
The sensation was enough to make him stop breathing, his knees becoming feeble as he sunk to the ground, dirt staining his knees.
Suguru clenched at the fabrics of his loose grey sweater, his skin tingling like it was being resorted and turned over and over in a machine of creation. Nothing made sense. None of this had made sense.
Why was taking and reforming and consuming that beast the only thing that had ever soothed his need? How could he then feel the beast crawling around in the back of his mind, ready to be held onto and released whenever Suguru so deemed it?
Suguru couldn’t make any reasonable conclusion that night. No, he wasn’t able to form any reason for why he had done what he did, or how. All he knew was that the monsters he saw creeping in every crevice were now his to control, his to eat, and his to use. They were his. Every single one of them, and no one would be able to stop him from doing this over and over again.
He stumbled home in the early hours of the morning, his feet no longer being pulled by anything else but his own will.
When he knocked on the front door, his parents had taken one look at his disheveled hair, his dirt stained knees, torn black shorts, and assumed he had been up to no good. He didn’t disagree with them, because he wasn’t sure if what he had done was good or not.
Despite that, he went out night after night, searching for more of the larger creatures to take for his own. It was only when he was fifteen, and confronted by a group of people calling themselves “sorcerers” did he learn the true nature of his odd abilities. He learnt why his eyes had been made fun of, why no one else saw the creatures he did, and why he could command them. Most importantly, he learnt he wasn’t the terrible thing he used to think he might be. There were others like him, and he could learn to protect people that weren’t like him.
All he had to do was eat what he wanted to, and then use them against evil.
That made him a good person. He was sure his parents would approve of that. Would approve of him using these powers for something righteous. That was what he was made for, wasn’t it? This righteousness, that came from consuming evil.
(Perhaps that was all a ruse, though, something he only believed in when he was telling it to Satoru. Suguru wanted to believe it was his natural state, to love and hope for others he did not know himself).
Only after he had eaten hundreds, did Suguru begin to grow weary of the taste of bitterness, anger, and grief that coated his tongue. But, taking in those tastes was worth it to keep the stabbing of hunger away from his stomach. To protect himself from the deprivation of something akin to air for him.
How had he survived so long without it? (How did he survive so long once he had it?)
Suguru Geto one day became the monster. The monster that cannibalized its own, having burnt and destroyed everything that had raised him.
There truly was something wrong with him.