Chapter Text
The room was dark except for the pale strip of moonlight falling across the floor.
“Bookie?”
“What now?”
“If I leave one day…”
Book’s body went still beside him.
“Would you miss me?”
Silence settled between them. Thick. Endless.
Then Book shifted his position and stared up at the ceiling.
“No,” he said.
Force smiled into the darkness.
“Liar.”
Book didn’t deny it.
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ under the same roof ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
“Nong… Mae…”
Five-year-old Force stood frozen in the dirt, his cheeks streaked with dried mud and construction dust. His voice had long since broken into something raw and jagged, but he kept screaming anyway calling for his mother, calling for his baby sister.
He had seen it.
The rusted steel rods jutting from the wreckage like the teeth of some buried beast.
He had seen one pierce straight through his mother’s chest as she threw herself over the baby when the building collapsed.
“Force! Look at me!”
His father’s voice thundered through the chaos.
“Phor! Help Nong! Help Mae! Get them out!”
Around them, the construction site had become a nightmare of twisted steel, shattered cement, and choking gray dust. Workers shouted over one another. Others cried out in pain beneath the rubble. Bricks rained from above like death itself, striking down whoever stood in their path.
His father grabbed him without warning, hoisting the small boy over his shoulder.
Then he ran, through the screams, through the falling debris, through the ruin of everything they had been.
And he left the two most important people in Force’s world buried behind him.
When they arrived, the old teakwood house stood behind carved iron gates, tall and graceful beneath the evening sky. Warm lantern light spilled from the windows, soft and golden, untouched by the tragedy that had followed them there.
But Force felt none of its warmth.
He clung tightly to the back of his father’s shirt, his small face buried in the sweat-damp fabric. His eyes were wide and dry, but lifeless, like the eyes of a child who had turned to a stone.
The front door swung open, and a woman hurried down the steps.
“Force… look at Aunt Sunee.”
He didn't move.
One hand flew to the woman's mouth the moment she saw her brother’s face. Whatever hope she had been holding onto shattered instantly.
“P’Kit…” Her voice trembled. “Tell me it isn’t true. Where are they?”
His father stood motionless in the courtyard, shoulders bowed beneath a weight no one could lift from him. He looked like a man who had been buried alive and somehow kept walking.
“They’re gone, Sunee,” he said hoarsely. “Both of them.”
A broken sound escaped her throat.
“Oh, Buddha…Why? Why must this happen to our family?”
As Sunee broke down, clutching at her chest, Force watched her from behind the shelter of his father’s body.
His gaze did not belong to a child.
It was the hollow, distant stare of someone who had already seen the end of the world.
A man stepped forward then, her husband, Yai, stayed composed even in grief. He placed steady hands on her trembling shoulders.
“Sunee, enough,” he said gently. “You’re frightening the boy.”
She pressed both palms to her face, forcing herself to breathe, then lowered herself to her knees in front of Force.
When she took his hands, she flinched at the touch. The boy's fingers were as cold as ice.
“Force…” Her voice softened. “Look at Auntie.”
Slowly, he raised his eyes to meet hers.
From up close, he looked even smaller than she remembered. Dust still clung to his cheeks. His lashes were stiff with dried tears that had never fallen.
“From today onward, this is your home,” she whispered, wrapping his frozen fingers between her own. “I’ll take care of you now. I’ll be your mother from this day on. Do you understand?”
His lower lip trembled.
He bit it hard enough to whiten the skin, holding back something too large for such a small body.
Sunee looked up at her brother.
“Go, P'Kit...” she said softly. “Make merit for them. Pray they find peace.”
For a long moment, he did not move. He stood there like a man whose soul had already been left behind somewhere beneath the rubble.
Then, at last, he gave a small nod.
Without another word, he turned and walked back through the gate.
He never looked back.
Force watched him go in silence.
At his sides, his fingers twitched once, as though reaching for someone who was already too far away to touch.
Sunee’s heart broke all over again. She pull him into her arms and carried him inside, past the small spirit house by the courtyard, where thin curls of incense smoke rose into the humid night air.
An hour later, a bicycle rolled into the courtyard.
"Book Kasidet" is Yai’s sister’s son who had been taken in after growing up in a home where the walls echoed with shouting and violence. Yai and Sunee had brought him here, hoping that distance and kindness might heal what fear had broken him.
But healing had never truly found Book.
He moved through the house like a shadow, rarely speaking, eating only enough to survive. Most evenings, he slipped away to the nearby lake just to watch the sun go down.
He was only six, barely a year older than Force, yet there was something in his eyes that belonged to someone much older.
Tonight, he barely glanced inside.
He didn’t notice the unfamiliar shoes by the door.
Didn’t ask why the house smelled of incense.
Didn’t care why the adults were speaking in low, strained voices.
He simply wheeled the bicycle aside, climbed the stairs, and disappeared into his room. Like always.
That night, the elders watched Force from across the sitting room.
The boy sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the television, his eyes fixed blankly on the shifting colors.
“He still hasn’t spoken?” Yai asked quietly.
Sunee shook her head. “Not a word.”
Near nine o’clock, Force slowly slumped sideways onto the rug and drifted into sleep.
Sunee carried him gently to bed, tucking the mosquito net around his small frame.
For the first time all day, the house fell silent.
But peace did not last.
Three mornings later, the telephone rang.
Then came Sunee’s scream.
“Yai! Come here!”
He rushed from the dining room to find her collapsed beside the phone table, one trembling hand clutching the receiver, all color drained from her face.
“My brother…” she choked out. “He..he followed them, P'...There was an accident on the highway…”
Her voice shattered.
“Force’s father is dead.”
Yai went still.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then, slowly, their eyes turned toward the couch.
Force sat there alone, a fox plushie clutched tightly in his lap.
Still waiting.
Still believing someone would come back for him.
Sunee stumbled toward him and dropped to her knees.
“Force… my poor boy…”
No words seemed crueler than the truth.
How could she tell a child that the last person he had left was gone too? That the father he was waiting for would never walk through the gate again?
She couldn’t.
Instead, she gathered him into her arms and held him close, tears falling into his hair.
“I’ll take care of you,” she whispered through her sobs. “Please, Force… just cry. Let it out.”
After days of silence, Force finally broke.
A cry tore out of him, thin and sharp enough to cut through the whole house.
“Mae! I want Mae! Daddy! Why did you leave me? I’m scared!”
He sobbed in Sunee’s arms, his small body shaking so hard she could barely hold him. Grief poured out of him in broken, breathless sounds, too big for a child to carry alone.
At that exact moment, the front door opened.
Book stepped inside and stopped just past the doorway.
His schoolbag still hung from one shoulder. He stood there quietly, looking at the scene in the middle of the room, Force crying in Sunee’s arms, tears soaking her blouse, his fists clenched tight in the fabric as if letting go would break him completely.
Book said nothing.
His face stayed unreadable, cold and detached, watching the raw display of agony as if it were a scene from a movie he didn't understand.
Then he looked away.
Without a word, he walked upstairs and closed himself inside his room.
The latch clicked softly behind him.
Only then did he let out the breath he had been holding.
Book pulled off his school shirt and stood in front of the mirror. Angry red welts crossed his back and chest, swollen lines carved there by a belt buckle and the hands of those who called themselves his parents. Some bruises had begun to yellow at the edges. Others were still fresh enough to burn each time he moved.
He stared at his reflection. There was a boy in the mirror with wounded skin and tired eyes, but Book felt no connection to him, as if the body in the mirror belonged to someone else.
From downstairs, Force’s cries carried through the walls again. It was the sound of a child grieving everything he had lost.
Book lowered his eyes to the bruises on his skin.
One boy cried because the people he loved were gone.
The other had learned long ago that tears changed nothing.
Under the same roof, in different rooms, two children carried grief far too heavy for their age.