Chapter Text
7 Years Ago
It's the middle of the day, and you've never been outside before.
It’s bright. So very bright, more than you ever imagined, and it only hits you after you’ve finished what you forced yourself out to do, now that your vision isn’t entirely tunneled by rage. You shield your eyes a little with your hands until you can get used to it.
It takes a few moments before you remember you need to breathe, and when you do the air is thick and stale and chokes your unfortunately weak lungs. The house had always been dusty; the old man rarely cleaned apart from preventing general bio-hazards, and the body you inhabit is far too small to reach most places. If you'd ever been allowed to do what you were born to do, that could've been different. Maybe. You aren't sure why that's what is bothering you now.
Light streams through the windows, but they’re dirty and it comes through as a dulled yellow. The sun had been gone when you first came to awareness; cast away by a darkness that blanketed the sky and snuffed out the light from the candles the old man had lit in haste before he’d banished the boy upstairs. The candles are still out now, their wicks spitting thin plumes of smoke into the air. You wrinkle your nose at the smell.
Odd. You’ve never been able to do that before. Never been able to smell much either. The old man had made sure of that. He can’t anymore, though.
Acclimating to the brightness of the outside, you shift your gaze to the body on the floor. The old man is twisted and misshapen, lying limp on the creaky floorboards where his prayer beads are broken and scattered, that are slowly being stained with blood. The counter above him is stained with it, too, and it intrigues you. You hadn’t thought you’d hit him that hard. Not that it matters—it’s done either way.
The radio on the counter blares loudly from where it has tipped over. Static shrieks in and out, until it finally settles on a connection once again.
“GINGKA WON IT!” exclaims the overly-enthusiastic announcer, whose voice grates on your ears. “GINGKA HAS WON IT! In the epic battle with the mysterious thing that was trying to destroy the world, Gingka has done it! He has slain the—”
You turn it off. Maybe more violently than necessary. The radio sparks and coughs, and then goes silent. The words it spoke ring in your head, and you think about them as you slowly make your way through the rest of the ground floor. It takes you an embarrassing few minutes before you stop stumbling around like a newborn lamb, but you eventually get your footing. Old floorboards creak underneath even your minuscule weight.
A light breeze hits your face as you open the front door. Little puffs of pollen blow in from the surrounding forest, and you watch as they hover through the air and tickle your nose. You sneeze, and irritably wave them away.
You step outside. There are few clouds now and the sky is clear—the sun is very slowly beginning to set. It smells of faint citrus and earth, and the smell only grows stronger as the wind shakes the trees and a flock of birds takes off into the air and disappears from your view. The wooden chimes hanging from the wrap-around porch clink softly; a calming sound. Then a light rustling meets your ears from above, and you look up to a thick string of rope placed above the entrance, decorated with white paper strips that blow in the breeze. Your wrist twitches with a phantom ache, and you tear down the display before walking forward off the porch and down to the dirt path leaning up towards the residence.
As you set foot on the ground, the nearby animals in their pens become loud, loud enough to draw your attention. Pigs shriek and chickens flap around restlessly, the sheep crying loudly and driving up a ruckus as if they, too, know something is wrong.
You look at them. Their pen is old and wooden, rotting in some places, and filled with mud and droppings. It takes up a fair bit of space beside the house, but even then it is small for a dozen animals with chaffed skin and missing feather, crawling with bugs and layered in dirt. It disgusts you.
You open the gate.
The animals do not seem to know what to do when faced with freedom. A few of the chickens slowly waddle out and into the grass, pecking at the ground for worms and bugs that don’t cover their companions. One of the pigs exits and comes to sniff at the dirt path before moving along to a muddy patch poking out from beneath the house porch; two little piglets quickly run after it, and the rest of the swine remain in the pen for now. A few sheep follow, ears twitching, and their wide eyes look at you, cautious.
They are, technically, familiar with you, but they know something is different. That the one who stands before them isn’t quite the same person who brushed their fur and hand-fed them grains from his palm.
You stare back at them, until they seem satisified with whatever they’ve observed, and wander away from you and into the field. There, they settle down and munch at the fresh, tall grass beneath them. They don’t turn their backs to you, though; make sure they’re always in a position where they can see you.
The wind blows again, ringing with wind chimes and animals sounds. More of them are wandering out of the enclosure. The chickens are investigating a small patch of wildflowers. One of the pigs has ventured away into the house. The words from the radio echo in your ears again.
“…Gingka…” you whisper to yourself, testing the name in your mouth. It almost hurts to speak from how dry your throat is, how seldom-used the voice in it has become. You’ll fix that.
But that name… you’ve heard it before from different radios, from passing news channels in the city, from the old man’s mouth a time or two when he thought the boy wasn’t listening, and until now it had meant nothing. Now it is a weight on your tongue that makes your hands burn, and your head aches behind your eyes and it infuriates you beyond measure.
You look ahead to the forest and the thick foliage that had been walked through time and time again, a small trail covered in footprints and lined with small piles of salt that had been partially blown away and stepped on by animals. Sunlight peeks through some of the trees, illuminating parts of the undergrowth. Welcoming, almost. It will lead you away from here, far from the house and the wards and the body, to places the boy had only ever imagined.
So you walk into the trees, and walk and walk until you can no longer see the house behind you, and it can’t see you, either.