Chapter Text
Prologue
Shiro is nearly fourteen years old. He sits alone in his room, at the top of the stairs, tiny and wedged in next to the bathroom, and he can hear the old man who lives next door snoring through the wall. Outside there’s a certain amount of chaos, the air raid siren is deafening, aeroplane engines scream into the night air and every now and then there’s a dull thud as a bomb is dropped and ignites on the ground. He counts them.
One. Two. He thinks about the war, how pointless and terrifying it is.
Three. Four. Four homes destroyed and how many lives lost in the last few minutes? Should he stop counting?
Five. Six. Seven. Yes, he should probably stop counting. The news reporters on the radio that morning had said last night was the thirty-seventh night that the city had been bombed consecutively, which made tonight the thirty-eighth. Perhaps they should stop counting, too.
Last night had been awful. The worst so far by a large margin. He hadn’t slept at all, he couldn’t stop thinking about all the families destroyed and homes gone. At dawn he had gotten up to find a neighbour’s house on fire, and helped put it out. He was rather proud of the fact that he had been the one to go in and save the family’s youngest daughter who had been trapped in a room upstairs. A man came to take his picture for the paper. His father called him an idiot.
Downstairs a plate smashes, bringing him out of his reverie. He gets up and goes down to find his parents in the middle of a heated argument. He hovers in the doorway as his mother pleads with his father to take them to a shelter. His father isn’t having any of it, people die in the shelters, he says. They get crushed or suffocated or worse. What if they get bombed on the way, his father asks. It will all have been for nothing.
They both start shouting. They don’t notice their son standing in the hall, watching the whole drama take place in front of him. His mother gets so angry she bursts into tears, which further enrages his father. He steps forward, protesting, just as his father raises a hand and prepares to take a practised swing when a sudden, piercing, mechanical roar makes them all shut up and look at the ceiling.
Then all three of them, and their house, are blown up.
Chapter One
Not for the first time this afternoon, Keith is brought violently and rapidly to his senses. He’d been lost in a daydream of his own devising, floating through a mental fantasy world not entirely uninfluenced by a book he’d recently started reading. However, when Keith’s father decides something is going to happen, it happens. Immediately. And Keith’s father has decided that now is the time to start removing the rubble from their kitchen. He smacks Keith round the back of the head and tells him to get to work.
They moved into this house just under a month ago. It’s over a hundred years old, disgusting and rotting and falling apart, but it was cheap and in a promising part of town. Mr Kogane saw it as an investment opportunity, and here they are.
Keith loves to read. In the first week of him and his father living here he made it his mission to find out everything he could about the place. He learned that it had been built in the 1890s, bombed in the 30s and rebuilt in the 50s. He learned that no one had really lived here in a long time, and all the previous residents inexplicably left after only a few months or weeks.
He wasn’t surprised. He couldn’t imagine ever coming to love this house, tall and thin over three storeys, with its strange separated bath and lavatory rooms, and its steep, narrow staircases and its long, drafty kitchen. The bathroom was right next to his bedroom at the top of the house, and every time they ran the taps it made the whole house shudder and clank loudly as the pipes complained about the movement of water. The lavatory on the other hand, was right down on the ground floor, behind the kitchen and practically part of the back garden. It had clearly previously been an outhouse and had been tacked onto the main part of the downstairs layout as an afterthought. This made going to pee at night incredibly cold, scary, and dark, even with a torch. Keith had yet to make the journey all the way down two staircases and along the cold kitchen corridor without very slightly wetting himself just before he reached the toilet.
The most recent time this happened, his father had come into his room to wake him up a little earlier than usual, and he had seen and smelled the soiled laundry before Keith had had chance to deal with the incriminating evidence.
“Keith.”
He’s awake immediately, and he knows something is wrong before he even opens his eyes. He knows that tone of voice.
“Keith get up now, and explain to me what this is.”
“Dad it’s nothing, I’m sorry, I’ll deal with it” Keith quickly mumbles as he rolls out of bed, hoping that his father will leave alone.
He doesn’t, of course.
“Deal with it? How do you intend to deal with it? I can’t believe you’re still wetting yourself, you disgusting boy, at your age.”
Keith cringes back from his words and opens his mouth to say something but his father just storms ahead, his voice rising, “Fine! Do what you want. If you’re determined to show me you can deal with it, then you can deal with your own dinner, and taking yourself to school, and if your teachers come to me and say a single god damn word, you will be out of this house so fast you won’t know what’s happening!”
“Mum never spoke to me this way! She would never have let you be like this!” Keith tries to bite back, using the one piece of leverage he has left against his father, but he can feel his face wrinkling as he holds back tears. His father suddenly leans down to his level and crowds in very close.
“It’s your fault your mother is dead. Did you know that?” his father growls at him quietly. Keith’s eyes widen in horror.
“What?!” He tries to back away but his father follows and stays in his personal space all the way to the wall of his bedroom. Keith thumps against it with his back and nearly falls over trying to get away.
“You pushed and you whined and you begged so desperately for a brother. How could she refuse? You gave her no choice. She loved you too much and it killed her. She was too good for you. You didn’t deserve a brother and now you don’t have a mother either.”
Keith’s father has his fingers curled tightly around Keith’s upper arms, it’s painful and it makes Keith’s shoulders rattle as his father spits the words into his face. Keith shuts his eyes and screws his face up, praying that he could be anywhere but here. Even though he literally doesn’t see it coming, he still mentally braces himself and is ready when his father slaps him hard across the face.
Neither Keith nor his father can hear the gasp, or see the hands that are suddenly but unnecessarily clapped over the mouth that made it. Shiro has been silently and invisibly watching the little boy and his father since they moved in, and sees how the man has changed so much in such a short time. He observes the whole exchange and recognises a problem that needs to be solved. History is repeating itself. There is another child in this house, taking abuse from another parent, and this time, he is going to do something about it.