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It was little more than an inconvenience for me. Food for thought when the nights drew too long or my head throbbed in agony from the impending weight of its own endless knowledge, which was becoming more frequent than I care to admit. There was some useless detail I didn’t know, something I didn’t care about, yet something to occupy the time I had nothing better to do with to.
My classmate’s mysterious disappearance.
When the loop of missing persons reports and dread came about, it was originally assumed that Kaidou Shun had run off somewhere like the clueless and hopelessly naive puppy of a person he was, gotten lost in the winding streets of S Prefecture and hadn't inevitably found his way home yet. The only concern was that one day stretched into two. That extended to a week. His mother called the school and screamed into the ear of our principal for far too long. When her language turned wretched and foul, I tuned back into the ramblings of our homeroom teacher like his voice was a radio station. I never cared for that harpish woman in the first place.Kaidou Shun was officially declared missing after two weeks. That’s when I decided to use my clairvoyance to half heartedly look for him. What I got was not what I expected, a mystical rarity in a life filled with monotony and sameness. He was out of range, had entangled his fate in a place I could not pinpoint; in other words, I did not know where Kaidou Shun was and I, an all powerful ESPer and psychic with limitless abilities, had not a clue as to where he could’ve been. And occupy my mind it did. I had never hit a wall. Was I not all powerful? Omnipotent, the most awe-worthy human in existence, able to destroy the world as many times as I pleased with no repercussions?
Soon, we would be interviewed by police and that was a conflict I didn’t want to bother with. I hated getting involved with law enforcement because of my own personal distaste for their methods, combined with my general distaste for people that sucked, which most law enforcement employees do. I had a real problem for the first time in my life and it should have filled me with a vigor I had never known. Instead, it filled me with an apathy that tasted more volatile than usual at the thought that I’d ever have to exert effort for the likes of Kaidou, infinitesimally small (on a universal scale) Kaidou who was thinking about running his fingers through my hair, and thinking about how my mouth might taste. I searched the whole world. Not even a trace of him remained. The whole class was interviewed, myself included, and I followed up on the investigation after making myself seem unsuspicious and sincere. They also had no definite leads. They took his father into custody on less than legal terms under the assumption that he’d kidnapped his son out of spite in having lost him in his recent divorce, what with Japan's borderline cruel custody laws that goaded most parents into kidnapping their own children. Soon enough the man was released because there was absolutely no evidence to trace the disappearance to him. In the words of some younger cop chatting with another, more weathered officer, "I don't think that cold fucker gives a rats ass that his own flesh and blood is probably getting a train run on him in some dingy perverts' basement".
The police were baffled, with Kaidou Shun’s mother increasingly hopeless as the rage made way for the sorrow. A month passed. Two. I considered this my chance to escape the annoyance of a classmate that dreadfully considered me his friend (and as I read his mind more and more, he was starting to consider me something more meaningful to him, thinking about Saiki-kun's handsome face, Saiki-kun's soft looking hands, Saiki-kun's cool and unshakable personality), so I took it enthusiastically. The head of the investigation got the random idea prompted by my psychological tampering to register for a search warrant on Kaidou’s father, where they found a hidden compartment in the father’s house containing very convincing traces of Kaidou Shun’s DNA. His body was discovered buried beneath the house in a gruesome state of decomposition. Two months worth of it, exactly. Being more knowledgeable about the various stages of rot that comes after the dearly departed are laid to rest than a mortician (or a really dedicated necrophiliac) finally became useful as I exercised my expertise to fake Kaidou's death.Kaidou Shun was declared dead. Not that I knew if he was or not; that wasn’t important. What was important was that everyone else was so distracted by their own shock, guilt, and mourning that they left me to “cope” with my “friend’s” “death”. Had I staged the death and put an innocent man in prison? I absolutely had. If it makes you feel any better, Kaidou’s father was the type of person who bought the last coffee jelly as you were reaching for it --a corrupt business man who specialized in landscaping and ripping off hard laborers, in case the unjust coffee jelly heist isn't enough to sate your morals. If anything I was doing the criminal justice system a favor, killing two birds with one stone. He was ironically held in a prison he'd invested in after a short series of court hearings wherein he was deemed irrefutably guilty. And no one would ever find out about the hoax because Kaidou Shun seemed to be gone forever, Kaidou Shun and his hopeful eyes, Kaidou Shun and his rose colored musings.I resigned him to whatever damning fate he had gotten himself entangled with. As mysterious as his disappearance was, it was almost a relief. I didn’t have to worry about his wandering mind or keep track of how close he came to unveiling my abilities. The biggest obstacle bobbed to the surface in the form of his memorial. People crying everywhere, tears, snot, and insatiable liars.A girl who had never done anything but laugh as Kaidou cried out of embarrassment and frustration sobs crocodile tears at her desk, claiming to have had feelings for him for years. A crowd of girls in likeness comfort her. A boy behind me whispers to his friend, “You think that freak’s dad did stuff to him before he killed him? Or after?” They burst into venomous chortles. When asked how they were holding up, they'd hang their head to hide their grins and say, "It's just so sad".In front of the school a teacher sells memorial t-shirts, thinking to herself, “I’ll make a fortune off of that brat!”Humanity is a sick, sick joke. But oh well. I was never wounded by Kaidou Shun’s absence so I didn’t have to heal. I just accepted it and moved on, hopefully to never be piqued by his pathetic, love-struck existence again. No less pathetic than the existence of the rest of these parasites.That was a year ago. Now my current concern was finding the least bothersome university to attend, not the fake corpse buried in the ground in some lackluster cemetery or the father rotting in prison, probably in some same sex arrangement for the sake of self preservation or plain old primal relief. The concept was almost understandable but not quite because I would never, ever be in the father’s situation, and even if I was, I wouldn't suck a tattooed convicts' dick just to live another empty, imprisoned day. Coffee jelly stealing behemoth. The list of B-grade universities was draining to even look at. I’d want one relatively close to home because god forbid I stay in a dorm with some random peon --my parents were at least charted territory even if they were as insufferable as parents came.
Speaking of the nuisances, they had begged me to set up a date night in the kitchen for them until I managed to fake reservations at some high end restaurant just to get them to crawl out of the home they’d made in my anal cavity, Kusuo this, Kusuo that, our little boy Kusuo going off to college. I could use the night off from my never ending babysitting duty. This was, of course, after checking thoroughly for bugs; the nasty little vermin always seemed to lurk just outside of my awareness until I was alone and vulnerable to their schemes. Eventually I grew bored with my selection of colleges and went downstairs for a snack. I could gorge myself on anything from the fridge but I’m more disciplined than that. I feast on my coffee jelly with a bottle of strawberry milk at the kitchen table, the self restraint few are capable of. Then I get back up for a bowl of ice cream. Discipline and self restraint isn't that important to me, now that I think of it. I'm building up my protective layer of fat, actually, and it'll probably take a second bowl of ice cream to sustain.A knock bellows out through the hollow wings of my home. I realize that Nendou must be upon me and gaze out to the front porch using my clairvoyance. It’s not Nendou but the purple haired hentai addict, a perverted and desperate excuse for a bastard medium. My personal devil in the hills. What could he possibly want at this hour? I’d read his mind but that's a waste of my limitless power, considering I'd probably just get some very disturbing imagery involving some woman he passed on the way to my house. I just answer the door without moving from my spot at the kitchen island.Torisuka enters without hesitation, the frown on his face unbefitting of his girl ogling, careless demeanor. It occurs he might’ve missed a chance to grope a lady’s chest and he’s wallowing in his regret. Humans are simple, men of his particular mindset even more so.
“Saiki, we need to talk.” Torisuka says, closing the door behind him. He approaches me, anxiously looking down to the floor. A small amount of communication is based around speech. The rest is body language. I’ve never understood that second part without dedication. “About… Kaidou."My instinct is to roll my eyes at the absurdity of his meager concerns but I hold it back. This night is officially qualified as ruined --I’m obligated to at least hear out his delusional spiel so that I can discredit him and hope to spare a few more hours of much needed alone time. “Yes. What about him?”“You know how I’ve never really believed he was dead.” He looks back up at me and makes eye contact. I focus on the space above his eyes so that I can keep my sanity in tact. If I looked every person I came across in my chaotic life in the eye, I'd surely go mad. “Because I couldn’t find him in the spirit world. And his guardian spirit wasn’t quite gone either. It’s a feeling like… like his existence was paused, in some weird ass limbo. Kaidou’s still missing somewhere and I-I feel it tonight.”Ah yes. We’ve had this same discussion before. “We’ve have this same discussion before. Should I repeat myself?”“Don’t be a stone cold bitch.” Toritsuka narrows his eyes and adjusts his head band. “He really liked you.”And I really like coffee jelly. “And I really like coffee jelly.”“I’m serious!” Toritsuka flails his hands out animatedly. I huff. This sure will be a long discussion, if Toritsuka's claiming he's serious.Over the years we’ve grown more casual with each other. With this absolute moron, I see little reason to hold up a front. He knows I’m an ESPer. As long as I force myself to endure his presence, we remain at a stalemate of mutual understanding. I could almost consider him a comrade if he weren’t so annoying. Our friendship is just for the sake of upholding appearances, and occasionally sharing the burden of my power with. Like all the pedophiles I walk by on the street, thinking about how much they want to nail pre-teens while revealing none of their intense perversion on their face.“All you have to prove your theory are feelings. And you don’t know where Kaidou is or how to reach him.” I shrug my shoulders. “So even if your theory wasn’t hastily tied together conspiracies, it’s not like I could help.”One thing I’ve been careful to not tell Toritsuka, no matter how loose my mannerisms become with him, is that I am the mastermind behind faking Kaidou Shun’s death which lead to his father being falsely(?) imprisoned. I don’t think he’d approve and his disapproval would be quite the conundrum. He seems to be the only one still clinging to the thought of Kaidou being retrievable. Even I’ve forgotten and I’m the one who faked his death. That takes dedication. Maybe I should reconsider Toritsuka’s sexuality if he’s that interested in our former classmate. But I don’t care enough to look further into that. I’ve mastered the art of not caring where people put their genitalia, as long as it’s nowhere near me.“But you-haven’t you even tried to look for him? Do you care at all?”Oh, now he’s digging around for my morals? This is coming from the same guy who tries to steal our female schoolmates panties and gym clothes, probably to get good long whiffs of them while he’s sexually relieving himself. My morals are none of his concern. Toritsuka should be working to fix his own skewed mortal flaws and keep his perverted, grubby ghost whispering hands away from mine.“I’ve allowed myself to believe that Kaidou is dead.” No, I don’t actually care as long as I never have to face him and his desperate feelings for me again, all that blushing done in my honor. “You should too. I assume you’ll find more comfort in grieving rather than grappling for loose ends.”“Then how do you explain his absence in the spirit world? Everyone has a soul! Everyone! Well, except for you. I don’t think you have one. I’m not quite sure if I have one either.” Toritsuka slumps down beside me. I’ll be lucky if this ends in one of his existential ramblings where he winds up raiding my parent’s liquor cabinet and drunk, cried out, dead asleep on my lap. “To sum it up, I’ve never met a ghost who had special abilities when they were alive. So, when people like you and me die… We might just be gone forever. Kaidou didn’t have those powers, right?”“That’s correct.” I could care less where I end up when I die. I could care less about if I have the ability to die at all. Actually, no, that would suck if I was immortal. “He was delusional. I can confirm that.”“So he should’ve ended up in the spirit plain! The dimension that’s laid right over top of ours.” Toritsuka rockets up from his spot on the sofa so fast it makes me dizzy, then takes off into the area behind the stairs. Seconds later he emerges with a dry erase board and a dry erase marker. Good God, please not this time. I can feel the soul I probably don’t have leave my body at the size of his blazen purple eyes as he begins his diagram. I take the opportunity to steal Toritsuka’s spot on the sofa and marinate in the warm area he left on it.He begins by drawing four horizontal lines, one on top of another. “The bottom layer is just the dimensional plain that all living mortals exist on. Like Nendou and Kokomi! We also exist on this plain, you and I, right?” Toritsuka labels it ‘Normal’ and moves onto the line on top of it, looking back at me to make sure I’m not spacing out. I know from experience that if I show the slightest hint of dozing, he’ll start over. I’m not ready for the unspeakable horror of this miasma of noise and never ending emotional dilemma repeating himself ten dozen times. “The second plain is the things I can see! Guardian spirits, imps, ghosts, lost souls, and demons! Yes, there’s a difference between all of them. This is the plain you can’t see.” He labels it ‘Spirits’ and moves to the next line. “This is the plain that your mind is on! It allows you to tamper with the mortal dimension and gives you super cool things like telepathy, telekinesis, pyrokinesis and stuff! Right? It’s a very, very small dimension laid directly on top of the spirit dimension, so it’s out of reach for most people.” He labels it the ‘Psychic’ plain and then extends the last line into a huge box laid on top of the three other line. Though he’s given me this presentation many times, the box is a new feature. I almost show interest but then I notice my ice cream is starting to melt into sweet liquid in my bowl. The night is officially ruined.“This entire box is stuff that I don’t know about! This is where you can tamper with timelines and neither of us have any clue of how to reach it or how powerful it is!”I can do that. Mess with time, or at least reverse time for objects, I have premonition in my dreams. But it’s not really as strong as my presence in the third plain. I pick up another marker with my mind and draw a little notch about a centimeter into the ten inch box. Toritsuka looks at me for an explanation. “That’s about how much I can extend my presence into the so-called fourth plain. I can see pieces of the future and sometimes reverse time but I only see the future in dreams and when I reverse time I chance causing irreversible damage to the space time continuum. So, don't ask me to demonstrate.” That last parts a lie. I don’t really chance anything, I just don’t like to do it. Makes me tired.Toritsuka shakes his head. “What? Why didn’t you say anything?”I shrug my shoulders. “You didn’t ask.”“I have! I have, Saiki,” He rubs his temples and labels the inside of the box as ‘Time/Unknown’. “I think Kaidou encountered someone who has a complete presence in the fourth plain and they trapped him there. But since you and me-er, just me, I guess, don’t exist in that dimension, we can’t find him. I don’t even think you have enough presence there to really know, right? Kaidou could totally be there!”“Or, please consider that he could be dead. Very dead. Buried, there was a funeral, and we have a memorial by the ESPer club room. Though, he was the only member so that club was terminated, effective immediately.” Even I thought that was a little harsh to have the memorial by the club room that had been taken over by the weight lifting club. Even in death, Kaidou and his beliefs were pushed around. “Why is this important to you, Toritsuka?” And more importantly, why do you think it should be important to me?He whips around to look at me. “Because if I have powers, I should use them to help people! Because we’re graduating high school and I’ve spent most of my informative years peeping on girls in the locker room and trying to get into our classmates pants’!” His shoulders tighten and his fists are clenching. Emotions sure are ugly. “Isn’t that messed up? That I can do all that but I can’t even help when I think my friend might be… really gone?”“You’re in denial because you’ve never had to deal with death.” I rattle off monotonously. It only enrages Toritsuka further and he's thinking of how dismissive and unsympathetic I am. “Everyone comes back. Why would you have to deal with their passing if they just came back in the spirit plain? So you don’t. Now that Kaidou seems to have died in both body and soul, you can't come to terms with it.” And have resorted to becoming my new personal pest.“That’s not it!” Toritsuka rubs his palms down the hollows of his cheeks and groans, pulling down his eyelids when his hands slide down his face then hang limply at his sides. “That’s not it, I swear and I know you’re only shutting me down because you think it’s all petty emotions and not facts but these are the facts. This is weird and you won’t even agree with me!” Toritsuka shoves the dry erase board and I hold it in place before it can clash to the floor. “Where’s your alcohol? I’m gonna get shitfaced and puke all over your living room like I’m possessed.”“You are possessed, it’s called being annoying.” I shoot back, putting the dry erase board back behind the stairs.“I don’t know, Saiki, maybe it’s just because it’s the anniversary of Kaidou’s ‘death’.” As if he isn't an unwanted guest, he riffles through the ice box, voice growing fainter as he walks further from me. Unfortunately he comes back this time with a bottle of cheap sake and no glasses to drink from. “I don’t even mind that you didn’t remember because honestly? I’m the only one that did. I-I don't even know if his own family remembered. And all his dead relatives... they're waiting for someone who's never coming to them.”He opens the bottle and takes a gulp, then winces. I don’t doubt that this habit will carry into his adult life and that his liver will begin failing. I sincerely doubt that mediums are immortal but the absence of a soul wouldn't be surprising. He’ll waste the life he has in this dimension and won’t ever bounce back. Maybe that’s what I’m doing, just barely struggling through the perpetual annoyance and exhaustion of living. I don’t find joy in anything and I am a simple person, deep down, although that’s shrouded in my unusual powers. I'm the most underwhelming waste there has ever been.
“I wouldn’t even know where to start.” Tortisuka plops down beside me and lays his head in my lap, guzzling down another portion of the bottle as the excess drools down the sides of his mouth and wets my pant leg. And so the cycle was coming to an end. He pushes his headband up, off of his forehead to reveal the nubs of his horns. Yeah, he has those but they’re 'sad and small and not even the cool type', as he had explained to me. 'Chicks would not dig them', apparently.“Finding Kaidou? Wherever he is, I couldn’t get to him if I tried. All I’ve ever been able to do is watch, Saiki. Watch as lost souls sobbed their hearts out from the misery of being stolen from their lives. Watch as ghosts are stuck in an infinite loop of walking onto the train tracks they killed themselves on. Watch as guardian spirits fail and scream and cry into the emptiness as their human dies right in front of them. I could never be anything more than a useless bystander.” Toritsuka's already starting to cry, tears rolling down his face to mix with the wet spots of sake on my leg. I look away. I don’t need to see this. “I can’t save living people and I can’t save dead people. What can I do, Saiki? Do I just waste away? And when I die, do I just cease to exist?”During episodes like these Toritsuka usually just cries himself out and falls asleep. So I don’t respond to him and wait for his ultimate crash. It comes slower every time. His words never sink in because I can’t care about the things he’s struggling with. I can’t relate and I never will. If I happened to die, which wouldn’t happen unplanned, I would feel relief to never have to think again. For my entire self to be whisked into the emptiness of a dark hole in the ground. I would never have to pretend again. Death sounds quite sweet when you spend your whole life just trying to be invisible. The dead are forgotten so quickly. I could vanish into thin air and it would be considered normal.Wherever Kaidou Shun ended up, I’m almost jealous that he’s too far away to see the damage he’s caused and the damage he hasn’t. The people who are thrown into existential crises by his passing and the people who let him fade away like dust blown into the wind within days of hearing the unfortunate news. Having a physical impact is so exhausting that I entertain the thought of taking my life whenever something even slightly bothersome stands in the way of my gray life. There’s a word for that, I’m sure. With everything I know it would be easy to unveil my problems. I just know I’ll never be able to solve them because I’ll never truly care about myself. The living days are just a formality.When I look back down, Toritsuka’s drool is mixing with the alcohol and tears on my leg. I scoot him off and he sprawls his limbs across the sofa like a starfish; they hang off the edges like dangling pieces of meat over an alligator exhibit. I wish I had some beast just to watch it pluck his gropey fingers off, obnoxious prick. With that, I move to the kitchen to drink my melted ice cream, then return to my room without the second bowl that I had been previously considering. I'm no longer in the mood. I decide on some vague university with a name so gray I don't bother to bookmark the tab and power my laptop down. I crawl into bed. After a moment of thought, I float my laptop into bed with me. The heat against my bare stomach is welcome. Sometimes I become unsure of myself. Of my personality. I insist I don’t have one.My end goal is dying alone, unrecognized. But I’m surrounded by people all the time. It would be easy just letting my supernatural abilities show and becoming talk of the town. It’s almost as if I get the excitement that all humans chase after relentlessly from the struggle of fending off the eye of the public. I’ll be fighting intrusive stares off with a stick until the day I die. The fire will never cease. And maybe I’ll be found out anyway but I’ll be too tired to care.People annoy me. That’s always been my reasoning. I still have needs. I socialize for the sake of self preservation, not unlike Kaidou's father in the prison he paid for and now resides in. Everything takes a backseat to it; morals, ideals, and the like. I’ve been craving another humans touch ever since puberty hit me like a freight train but I don’t care enough about the emotional aspect of a relationship to really seek a proper mate yet. I’ve never felt strongly about anything and the only passion I have is the flexible isolation I can only ever get a faint taste of --so, is there anyone in this universe who could draw a reaction from me?
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
If there was one thing that had remained consistent about Kaidou Shun throughout the entire length of the time I had been forced to endure his antics, it would be that his presence had never demanded attention. Not without effort had he ever been picked out of a crowd. The only noteworthy things about him stemmed from deep rooted insecurities about his own plainess --self made and completely unnecessary modifications. Things like falsities, stupid eyepatches and red bandages wrapped around his hands to protect the meek world from the overwhelming surge of supernatural power he didn’t have.Had it been any other person his reappearance would have struck them like a thousand bolts of lightning at once, catching them in a terrible web of unawares. However, I am not like other people. I have the upper hand in every conceivable situation, which has led to my dangerously inflated ego and chronic inability to feel joy. And even though I had the heads up, I still found myself completely unprepared for the day my careless lack of regard for the well-being of others would turn around and not only bite me, but rip me to shreds with the ferocity of a rabid dog.As soon as the presence of another person registers, I am completely awake. The type of awareness that takes hours to chase back away. If it was just Toritsuka drunkenly stumbling in to beg me for a place in my bed I still wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep without some sort of influence. For the sake of self preservation, I’d become an extremely light sleeper because when your driving force in life is living shrouded in secrecy you become an expert in
hiding things. The core of these beliefs is that unawareness will immediately lead to my unraveling.
There’s tapping at my window and in my general grogginess, I check outside using my clairvoyance. Confusion is something rarely ever recognized in the gray smear of my mindset but it's clear and simple at this time. There's nothing, at least not on my omnipotent radar but I still feel the pull to at least check for myself. I trust my own body to not call false alarms because it’s done a rather dependable job of letting me get along semi-peacefully. Escaping the warmth of my bed is a hurdle that I can never master surpassing, only growing to be a heavier weight around my sluggish ankles with each passing day. There is a word for that. I don’t apply it to myself for fear that I've lost my immunity to those typical human afflictions. I can't catch the common cold. I can only speculate about whether or not I'm vulnerable to sicknesses that can't be seen.Another series of taps persists and I shove my dangerously overheated laptop off of my bare stomach. May as well, even if it was just Nendou. The thing about being this far into an ongoing and relentless game you don’t even care about is that caring at all about anything, including your own wellbeing, becomes a game of its own. An effort that takes a considerable amount of peril to even scrape the surface of. If there’s something unexpected and horrible outside of my window waiting to devour me, I’ll disappear just like Kaidou did. If that upsets the world around me, I just don’t have the capability to feel anything about it.Although it was clear I had mastered the apathetic teenager persona, the gritty reality was that I was quite tired of trying to perform the impossible. Hiding and indulging these powers all at once. Acknowledging my superiority was fun for a brief moment and all the moments that came after it were bland. Unlike a king with enormous fleets and endless power, my crown can't be stripped from me. It's infused into my existence. As much as I dread the power, I let it define me without letting it be exposed to others at all which is probably why if asked what type of person I am, every single person in my life would have a different answer, save for maybe my parents and Toritsuka. I've left my own personality up to the imagination of my peers and they draw their conclusions about who I really am, and I listlessly allow the death of everything I am, the misanthropy, the aching hollowness, the power, to unfold.The floor is cold under my bare feet. There should be a building pressure or tension of any kind; there's none. Just my desire to get this done with as soon as possible and try to lull myself back to sleep. At the window, I pull up the clasp and stick my head out. The air is humid and heavy, it falls like a thick blanket on me. It amplifies my exhaustion. The approaching summer is going to be painful. Even glacial loneliness can't soothe the ache of heat stroke.Just as I assumed, there’s nothing. My clairvoyance is dependable. Unfortunately I’m still human so my instincts must’ve glitched and now I’m up too early for any man to be happy with. So early the sun isn't even up.Then something happens.There’s a shape. There’s still nothing there, just some distortion under the streetlamp across from my house. I blink hard and the shape still doesn’t smooth out. I pride myself on being intellectually above my peers, above most humans but this becomes the first completely unexplainable phenomenon I've ever encountered and I can't take my eyes off of it. There's no words to describe it. The image, or lack thereof, floors me and for the first time in my life I'm stunned.
It distorts and shifts until it becomes a human shaped black hole filled with stars and a gravitational pull erupts, yanking everything into it. It pulls me out of my house and I'm paralyzed, there's no need to put up a fight because it's not a giant hand gripping me, it's like I'm a liquified puddle of Kusuo and I'm dripping helplessly into the unknown --I sort of assume it's from the shock of such a bizarre feeling but I feel the work of the supernatural is the cause of my unwilling willingness. As my world becomes dark and all consuming, a single person peers through the void I'm being sucked into.“I want to see, Saiki.” Kaidou’s grin is the last thing I see before the opening closes and I’m alone.The suffocating emptiness of the black hole is short lived. Everything around me spirals until I’m sat down in the counselor's office before Megumi and a detective who won’t stop thinking of how badly he wants to get into Megumi‘s pants. I’m watching the memory from a first person point of view. I’m not used to the lack of control --to the captivity. Something distinctly powerful is lingering behind the memory Kusuo, who is none the wiser. Dumb bastard.“Don’t think of this as an investigation.” Detective Namikawa says with a smile that wrinkles the edges of his eyes. His eyes look empty and hollow like fish eyes. He’s thinking about all the things he would do to Megumi on the very desk she’s sitting at. Memory Kusuo scoots back slightly on instinct, directly into the imposing figure behind us. Hands lay over my shoulders and they radiate overwhelming power --they’re covered in red bandages.“Kaidou-san gave a full list of those Shun was close with. And you sure were at the top! You two must’ve been close friends.” The counselor's hands are folded in front of her. Her smile is sorrowful and soft. She’s thinking about what she’s going to say, what she’ll do if Kaidou is dead, how she’ll comfort me, why I’m staring at her like I don’t really see her, if these are early signs of depression. Her job requires a little more emotional awareness.“Sorry, sorry, Saiki-kun,” The person behind me says fondly into
my ear, “I love talking about you, ‘bout how cool you are, how we’re gonna defeat Dark Reunion together… She doesn’t like that, Saiki-kun. You got me in so much trouble.”If I had the ability to react, I’d be shivering and on the defense. Instead, I bob my head up and down and say, “I went to junior high with Kaidou-kun.”“We’ll get right down to the nitty gritty, son.” The detective leans his palms onto the desk he’s thinking about railing Megumi on. “Kaidou-san is pretty distraught and she’ll start causing trouble for everyone until Shun either shows up or we open an investigation. Is there any reason Shun would run away from home?” Now Namikawa is thinking of pounding Kaidou’s mom on her kitchen table. I begin to wonder if he’s more attracted to sturdy furniture than middle aged women.“Reasons he would run away?” Unwillingly, I knew more about Kaidou than I was comfortable with. But his personal issues had never been accessible on the surface layer of his thoughts. If I did some digging, surely I could find the source of his problems but I didn't care. So I hadn't. “Kaidou-kun was quite happy. And I don’t know much about his family, he didn’t talk about them much.”Fingertips brush my antenna and my breath catches. Both me and memory Kusuo could feel it. “You didn’t know, did you? Did you even see Her? I try to ignore Her but she’s so loud sometimes… It helps that you pretend not to hear Her at all.” Let it be known I have no clue what any of this means. The only thing I lie vehemently about is the PSI usage and the lengths of my dislike for most of humanity. “Dark Reunion shouldn’t have brought Her back, not like this. I was so scared, Saiki-kun, haha!” There’s something dark and chilling about the chuckle this thing punctuates it’s sentence with. That voice, both eerily familiar and alien, is nothing that could ever come out of Kaidou Shun’s mouth. I have to believe this is some elaborate dream my psyche has constructed to make me feel at all, like a last attempt death rattle at resuscitating the corpse of my will. Dreams became so few and far between to come by as every night, I went to bed more tired with less energy for my psyche to construct something fluffy for me to fall into. Maybe my psyche decided nightmares were the way to go.“Have you ever been to Shun’s home?” Detective Namikawa’s unblinking gaze might’ve made weaker men falter. Yeah, memory Kusuo sounds pretty cocky. Present Kusuo is no better but my resolve has definitely been knocked down a few pegs by my assumed dead classmate locking me in a memory while whispering sweet nothings into my ear. “If so, what was the atmosphere like? His living environment?”“I’ve visited Kaidou-kun’s home and it was normal. His mom was nice and we did some homework. I wouldn’t know if there was anything too bad happening.” Memory Kusuo said.“Saiki-kun!” The loud volume of the eager shout from behind us is enough to startle memory Kusuo and I. Our shared body jumps in alert, but memory Kusuo shows no other signs of having heard him. “We’ll visit there, together, again, without Nendou this time! I’ll show you my room and Her room and mama can see that you’re real, too! I also have some cool movie posters -maybe we could watch movies in the living room with the kotatsu! Have you ever seen that old samurai movie with all the stunts?” “Okay. And the school environment? How did the other students treat Shun, son?”“Less than ideally, I suppose.” Memory Kusuo shrugs his shoulders. “Sometimes they’d make fun of his stories.”“Stories?”“Stories?” Kaidou’s voice echoes.“About psychics and ESPers and telekinesis. Supernatural stuff.” Memory Kusuo thinks it’s necessary to throw in some of the massive shit show that was Kaidou’s unfortunate academic life. So they have some goose trail to follow. A runaway chuunibyou boy chased by his bullies.“I see.” Namikawa nods. He’s thinking of the lotteria burgers he’s going to get after this.“How creative!” Megumi preens. She’s thinking of how badly she has to make a bowel movement while regretting all the coffee she drank just hours earlier. “I just wish he’d spoken up about his mistreatment… I would’ve loved to hear Shun’s stories!” Now she’s grateful he’s gone because she doesn’t want to hear his stories, not really. She apparently has enough on her plate, too many teenagers with unfettered creativity making her job of guiding them towards successful careers a pain in the ass.“You’ve definitely given us some leads, son. I appreciate your cooperation.” Namikawa just wants to get something to eat. He knows he should ask me, the alleged best friend of a missing kid, more questions about the whereabouts of Kaidou Shun but he’s hungry and tired. That brat is probably dead in a ditch with a needle in his arm anyway, Namikawa thinks to himself. “We’ll find your friend. I swear it, Saiki.”“Thank you so much, Saiki! So sorry to steal you from class, have a wonderful day and don’t hesitate to come and talk to your counselor Megumi-chan, ok?”Memory Kusuo and I avoid their gazes. This world is made of liars and we’re just another liar among the millions. Maybe we’re the worst liar of them all because we’ll always get away with it.Something wet hits my shoulder and I’m finally able to look up. Tears drip down Kaidou’s face. After a year, I’m not sure what I was expecting (I wasn’t expecting anything, none of my fortune telling dreams could’ve prepared me for this), but I am completely caught in unawares. My consciousness ejects from memory Kusuo’s and the office turns into a complete grayscale with the only specs of color being Kaidou and I.The most noticeable thing is that his clothes are a patchwork of a bunch of different clothes. I can spot the pattern of our middle school uniform around the collar and breast pocket, then the high school uniform pattern on his waist and cuffs. There’s one more uniform pattern I don’t recognize. Everything else is random textures of various casual and hospital clothes alike. His red bandaged fists are clenched tight at his sides as he hiccups and cries like a child on the verge of throwing a tantrum.“How could you say that, Saiki-kun?” Kaidou asks in a dejected tone as snot runs over his wobbly mouth. I try to read his mind but there’s an iron wall that blocks my path. I throw my hands up to use my powers but in whatever this place is there’s a cork stuck in the bottle that holds my limitless abilities. All I can do is stand there feeling helpless and stunned. It would’ve been so freeing if I wasn’t completely dependent on my powers for survival at the moment.Kaidou looks up at me and the second thing I notice is that his crimson eye is full of rejection. I don’t understand his emotions. I’ve always been able to make up for my shortcomings with bountiful knowledge and the ability to backtrack, fix my mistakes, hold myself in a higher regard than I hold other people. I have nothing and Kaidou put me here.“I always believed you- e-everything you said because you’re so cool.” He sobs and stomps his feet. “But, you won't even believe me, Saiki-kun. All I want is for you to be my friend and think I’m cool, then you go and say that? Care about me, care about me,”“I-“ I’m at a loss for words. Please let this be a dream. There’s no way this is real. This is some hyper realistic nightmare. “I can’t. Sorry.” I’m not sorry. I want a way out of this stupid situation, this hypothetical encounter that is completely impossible, unfathomable. My subconscious deserves to be recycled for conjuring a nightmare this stupid. Kaidou isn’t scary, I’m not scared, but this powerlessness is causing panic to erupt. I’ve never panicked. Even when I’ve been face to face with death, I’ve been stone still and looked right into the smoldering flames of hell. I’ll never be scared and definitely not of Kaidou.“You have to, Saiki-kun! Care about me like I care about you, I’m like you now, I’m cool, aren’t I?” He stomps his feet again and the room shakes. He wipes his wet cheeks on his messily sewn sleeve and looks at me pitifully. I’m not inclined to social norms but he’s the last person I’d think of to fit the bill of cool. He’s shaking with rage but wailing his heart out at the same time. He feels so much emotion. I’m tempted to ask how he does that. If Dream Kaidou is half as useless as normal Kaidou (dead Kaidou?) then my efforts would’ve been wasted anyway. “You’re not playing fair! You treated me like a stupid joke with stupid stories, b-but now I’m just like you! You have to-““We’re nothing alike, Kaidou-kun.” There’s something happening inside me. I feel like I’m going to explode. Maybe I’m feeling something, anything, everything, but I have no idea how to let it out. So it trembles within me, festering. It makes it hard to breathe. “So, let me go home. Let me go.”This is apparently the wrong thing to say. And without my powers, I’m just a socially inept man with no way to fix my mistakes.Kaidou explodes into pained wails and stomps furiously like the toddler who’s tantrum is at its peak. I grab the edge of the ashen desk to steady myself but the corner breaks off like a brittle twig and I crash to the ground on my ass instead. He’s crying out furiously, “I
want to go home! I want to go home! I want to get out! Let me out! Saiki, you have to! I’ve been so st-stuck!” There’s a plethora of other phrases but they fall on deaf ears. The structure is collapsing and memory Kusuo, who has been frozen thus far, stands up and plops down on top of me, perched on my hips. It's supremely weird and ridiculously uncomfortable to be straddled by yourself in black and white edition.“You’re so powerful, Saiki-kun! Why didn’t you ever come and help?! It was only a year for you, you have no idea how long it’s been for meee-“ The last part comes out in an elongated and brattish whine. It’s nothing more than the gibberish of a crazy person to me. The only conclusion I can reach is that Toritsuka’s outlandish theories were correct and Kaidou has been trapped in some sunken space for a year --or longer, if I take what he says at face value.“Watch this, Saiki-kun! Watch this and tell me it’s not real, and maybe you'll finally, finally, understand it!”Then, I watch myself deteriorate.Memory Kusuo’s skin starts to break apart like ceramic glass, then melts off in pale globs all at once to stain my pajamas. His raw muscle goes next, the meat there pulled apart with a terrible squelching noise and it all drips into my lap like squishy uncooked beef --his jaw starts to break and creak like a rusted structure then that falls off too. His skinless shoulders dislocate with twin pops and the ligaments all melt apart easily under Kaidou's powers, like butter on a hot pan. His- my antenna fall off and distantly, the world is falling into shambles. I’m watching myself die. As I lay sprawled on the floor at the mercy of a missing kid I’ve never given a second thought to, my mortality sinks in even further. Ink black bits of viscera slip out of skeletal abdomen, my heart tumbling out of my rib cage and rolling to a stop after leaving a decay colored trail next to Kaidou's shoe. Soon enough all that remains is a skeleton with chunks of hair, the color sucked out of it, stuck to the skull. Then, even that breaks down into dust. My heart beats for a while, but eventually it gives a final, desperate wheeze and stops. My heart stops beating in front of my eyes.I lay in my own remains, absolutely fucking horrified.Kaidou stands above me, looking down with a curious crimson eye. Then his face is full of glee. He kicks a pile of dripping muscle and it plops to the corner of the room wetly.“See, Saiki-kun? Wasn’t that cool? You aged super quickly. I can do all sorts of stuff now.” Kaidou kneels down over me and I’ve tried convincing myself that I’m not scared of him. It hasn’t been working. I’m so scared my current heart feels like it’s going to break a hole through my rib cage, roll away, and then stop beating. I’m scared of Kaidou and I’m scared of dying. And how weird is that? I was just thinking about how much I want to die. Maybe I wanted to die on my own terms all along, and maybe I'm a liar.“Don’t kill me.” I don’t even have an argument, not this time. I just don’t want to die. Not because I have something to live for and not because I’m a good person --all I have to justify my claims is my own sudden fear of my humanity. Without my powers, I’m like every human I’ve ever looked down on. Death doesn’t care about how powerful I am.Kaidou hums and lifts his stupid fake eyepatch up. In the split second before it completely comes up, I’m expecting him to do something dumb like wink at me. But there’s a very real lack of an eye beneath the patch. Something has changed and Kaidou is unlike the Kaidou I remember, the Kaidou who was sure he loved me.“I wouldn’t ever kill you, Saiki-kun… I didn’t mean to scare you, sorry, sorry,” He smiles his big, stupid lopsided smile and flips his eyepatch back down, “so don’t worry about that… We have to defeat Dark Reunion together! Jet Black Wings and my best friend, Saiki-kun! I'm still working on your cool hero name, you know!” His expression softens into something recognizable and I feel like retching until I puke. This sputtering should humanize him. It just makes him feel like more of an imposter. “I just want you to care, you know? That’s all I’ve ever wanted… If I have your approval, I can do anything. E-Even when I’m scared. Even when I’m unsure.”Anyone would want a response to something so heartfelt, preferably just as heartfelt.“Sorry.” I’m not sorry. I’m a liar, I'm a filthy liar. Without my powers, I’m just like every other cockroach infesting earth. As much as I loathed my abnormality when all I wanted was peace, this normalcy scares me. Had I sought comfort in my powers being revealed on my deathbed all along? I assumed I would just fail eventually. If I die here, even if Kaidou claims to have no intention of killing me, no one but the drunkard on my couch and the parents fucking savagely in a love hotel (probably, I don't really watch stuff like that, that would be incredibly weird) would know of my powers. I would die. I would be forgotten. I’d be human.
At least being all powerful gave me an excuse to feel nothing. Take away the powers and I’m not some God. I’m just someone who’s empty. I’m empty and I’m going to die. I died. I just watched myself die.“Sorry I don’t care.”If there was one thing that had remained consistent about Kaidou Shun throughout the entire length of the time I had been forced to endure his antics (through his death and his rising from the grave I buried him in), it would be that his mood swings were chronic, they blissfully still are.“Ok, Saiki-kun.” His eye is now full of resignation. He looks up at the frozen faces of Detective Namikawa and Counselor Megumi. He laughs and it’s once again too happy for this tainted version of Kaidou. “What even happened to all this stuff? Ahh, I don’t even know how long I was gone, a year, maybe? Would you mind if I kept looking?”Kaidou stands and holds a hand out to me. I ignore it and stand on my own, although I feel so sick my legs are shaking. My remains have vanished. The only glimpse I can catch of their decomposition is the Kusuo meat Kaidou had kicked into the corner melting and slinking through the floorboards, leaving no trace.Once my breathing is steady and I can straighten my posture, my superior thinking speeds up again. “Kaidou-kun, are we in one of my memories?”“We’re in your past.” Kaidou snickers behind his bandaged hand. “Neat trick, huh?”If we’re in the past… then why am I still alive? Even though I just saw my past self die. I hold my hand over my throat and my pulse is still strong. Still alive, even though it doesn’t make sense.His nonchalance is unsettling. It’s the same chuunibyou I’ve known since middle school, the same thorn in my side. This time it’s stuck even deeper and it’s sharp enough to cut. “Indeed. Would you mind bringing us back to the present?”“Actually, Saiki-kun,” Kaidou sheepishly clasps his bandaged hands together, “I wanted to see some more! I need to follow up on the investigation and I trust your perspective the most! I gotta plan how I come back from being missing for a whole year, dude. Do I just show up? Man, it’s gonna be awesome! I’ll tell everyone how cool I am now and how- how no one can laugh at me anymore! Now that I’m just like Saiki-kun, hehe.”The realization hits me like a million bolts of lightning this time. I faked Kaidou Shun’s death. With his newfound abilities, if he takes a tour through the past, if he even lingers in the present for long enough, he’ll know someone faked his demise and if he sees it all from my perspective he’ll know exactly who, exactly how. Not to mention the false imprisonment of his father, who he's probably grossly sentimental towards.The grayscale office feels twenty degrees colder even though I’m a genius and logically, that isn’t possible. Every receptor on my body goes off at once. If Kaidou showing off his power included a graphic hallucination of my own death, I don’t want to see the result of his anger.Stupidly, I try to convince myself I can still fix it. Still, I underestimate Kaidou’s capabilities. Before I can conjure an excuse, any way to stall the inevitable, a Kaidou shaped hole opens up in the counselors office and sucks me in. It dredges me through space and spits me out under the streetlamp on the warm summer bleached concrete. Instead of laying there frozen by shock, I testingly try to bend the street lamp; the metal strains and creeks and the light shines a yellow stream across the nights sky as it cranes upward.My powers are back. They won’t work if I allow Kaidou to pull me back into the past. On this terrain, I’m still able to hold my own and there’s no reason to be afraid of the blue haired dork who’d followed me around like a puppy from junior high all the day into high school. I gracefully lift myself off of the sidewalk and smooth the wrinkles out of my sleep shirt while straightening out the street lamp. Generally pretending I hadn't just feared for my life and watched my past self age super quickly and die. When it shines back over me, Kaidou is there at my side. It seems he’s had another mood swing in the minute we’d been separated.Kaidou looks straight ahead but there’s nothing to be seen there unless he's seeing something I'm not. He looks as empty as I feel. For a moment, I contemplate the possibility that his supernatural abilities have sucked the color from him just like they’d done to me --it seems that’s a damage specific to current Kusuo. Something ugly twists his face, a horrible mix of melancholy and confusion. He spins in one fluent motion and when he’s facing me again, I know he’s done another supernatural “neat trick” in just the second his back had been towards me. He’s holding a piece of paper in his shaking hands, powder blue brows knitted in utter despair. It crinkles under his bandaged fingers.“Saiki,” Kaidou starts in a faltering tone, dropping the missing flier with red x’s drawn through the vivid and kind crimson colored eyes, “why am I dead?”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Kaidou Shun had never been particularly strong. If anything, he’d been particularly (and laughably) weak, the weakest boy in our grade and growing weaker it had seemed. The purple bags beneath his eyes growing thicker as his boyish cheeks grew more hollow. There was some affliction unfurling within him and it was eating Kaidou alive --on more than one occasion, I’d seen him stand and stumble from the difficulty of just that one movement, the sudden lightheadedness. He could have been Nendou’s skeleton if he weren’t comparatively midget height next to the muscle bound giant. And somehow, he looked even worse before me, the hollows of him cut sharper and deeper and his mincemeat uniform sagging on him in some parts, painfully tight on his bony body in others.
He looks bad --he does not look weak as realization flashed in his eyes all at once. He gazes at me, wide red eyes and a face that's quickly screwing up with anger. But what can Kaidou do in the present? I have that much to find out. The fear of being unknowing collides with the excitement of finally having new information being presented to me after years of stagnation in a spectacular display of raw human emotion. It feels like something ripping and tearing inside me, it feels like genuine pain even though I’d somehow escaped unscathed.
“They… they marked me off as dead?” That isn't the proper terminology in the slightest but I nod my head regardless. His teeth, tinged yellow from a mix of malnourishment and lack of care, grit. “Did- did they even look?! I was right there- I was always right there- living, over and over and over again…” I think back to Toritsuka’s diagram and the time dimension. I think of Kaidou’s newfound powers and feel my brow crease worriedly. For lack of more adequate language --where the fuck had Kaidou gone and who the fuck had sent such an unstable specimen there? “Do you know what it’s like?! Living my life until I was strong enough to break out of the fucking loop?! It was hell and it was pain like no one has ever experienced before! Being beaten up and being able to do nothing over and over again… suffering right in front of people and them looking straight through me… and all along, I could always feel you. Knew you were there, couldn’t see or hear you, just felt you-” Kaidou grips his chest and rips off a patch of the middle school section of his uniform-- it grows right back like skin mending itself together. “In my heart! And I knew I had to suffer through it to get back, back to you, back to mama, even- when- th-they-” Something raw and terrified flashes in his single carmine colored eye.“That has nothing to do with me.” Immediately, I regret my words and go as far as covering my mouth. But more words bubble out immediately following like they're being strung out on a fishing line from the bottom of my stomach, an impulsive place where words have never before come from. I even speculate for a moment that this is yet another effect of Kaidou’s newfound powers-- the ability to make me an idiot. But that seems to just be a side effect of my newest emotion; fear. “I just want to go home and sleep. All I ever want to do. It all… tires me out. I-I’m exhausted, you don’t understand, no one does.” Did I just stutter?
“Exhausted? Exhausted from being strong, from never feeling unwanted, from never feeling at all?! You bastard!” Kaidou’s horror blinks into something furious. Furious --at me? “I’ve been in love with you and I know that you know! They told me all about you! Told me how truly powerful you are- how you could read my mind that whole time and didn’t even think to let me down slowly, how you could’ve saved me a hundred times over if you wanted to! You- You just ignored me. Just- like- everyone else.” He starts foaming at the mouth with rage --bubbling saliva at the corners of his red, wet mouth glistens under the streetlight.
“Your feelings aren’t my responsibility.” I plead with him tiredly --truly, I'm tired. These emotions are being squeezed out of me as if I were an empty toothpaste tube and I'm feeling the fatigue in crushing increments. It feels like with every sentence I'm becoming smaller and Kaidou's growing larger, stronger, sucking the energy out of me and using it to become more menacing. I wish then that the world would just swallow me whole, not because I'm bored, but because something truly horrible is being shown to me. The consequences of my selfish actions. “Why should you be my responsibility at all? Why should I have looked for you? Why should I have saved you from your mess?”“We’re friends!”“We are not! I don’t have friends, not you, not anyone.”“You won’t even give me that much?” That much? It’s more than anyone else in my life has ever gotten from me and then some. Kaidou drags his fingers through his hair and tugs --he’s ugly crying again and for some reason that expression is all consuming in its raw despair. I lose all sense of everything outside of his wobbling lower lip and dripping eye and nose, red spreading from the tips of his ears to the slope of his nose as the tendons in his pale neck begin to strain with his words. “I’d do anything for you, Saiki-kun! I would die if you asked! I’d open my stomach and give you my ribs and my intestines on a platter and I’d even tell Her no for you, and you wouldn’t even be my psychic knight?! I would’ve been fine just being a- a side character but they made me a freak, look at me! I was supposed to be a hero in my own time! I was supposed to- s-supposed to-” Kaidou rips his eyepatch off to reveal the smooth skin that now covers an eye socket that held an eye at one point --vein riddled and deeply disturbing to look at-- and he snatches the collar of my sleep shirt with a weakness I remember so clearly, pulls me so close to him that I can count his eyelashes. His entire arm is shaking, from his tiny wrist to his shoulder. “I WAS SUPPOSED TO SAVE THE WORLD!”My parents have infamously bad timing, I know, but the car pulling up is just crappy luck on my part.
With Kaidou’s attention caught and his head whipped in the direction of the driveway, I shove him away by the face with enough force to send him rocketing so hard into the concrete it splinters under him. Unfortunately, the commotion also draws my parents nearer to the scene, my mom first. My heart is pounding so hard I think I can feel it trying to climb up my throat as I gaze down at Kaidou- his blood starts to fill in the cracks in the pavement. I didn’t even notice I was on the ground, curled up like I’d had a horrible nightmare and couldn’t even bare to put the weight of the earth under my feet, until my mom scoops me up in a hug. I don’t notice that my eyes are wet either until I’m crying and snotting into her shoulder, like I'm four again and Kusuke's just played an awful prank on me.
“Ku?” She asks, then sucks in a sharp breath. And pushes me away. I know then that she’s seen Kaidou’s limp form and I reach out for her anyway, crawling towards her on the ground because fuck, if I’ve ever needed her overwhelming optimism enough to kill for it, it’s right now. I need a mother I’ve taken for granted my entire life and I want nothing more than for her to hug me so tight I can’t breath and tell me this shitshow will all turn out okay. “Wh-What the fuck have you done?!” She curses so rarely. The air is sucked from my lungs at the sound and her mind... so furious I can't even read the thoughts as they flash up spectacularly.“I didn’t mean to. I- He-”Dad clutches mom as he trembles, looking suspiciously green in the face before he throws himself forward and vomits. I make him sick. I’m so horrible I make my own father puke his guts out in the street. Mom fishes for her phone, hands shaking as she struggles to help dad back to his feet, taking careful backwards steps to put more distance between us, dials a number and cries,“119, please, my son just murdered some boy, some poor boy… please, h-he’s dangerous! He has- abilities! He’s done it before b-but… oh God, please help us!”“Why?” Dad still has stringy yellow bile clinging to his chin. His eyes are so wide and so dark I can see my own reflection in them. I’m covered in hot blood and I can smell the iron stench as more blood seeps out of Kaidou, building puddles in the pummeled concrete. Is that really me? Dull violet eyes and flat pink hair and an unmoving expression even after I’ve killed someone. Has that been me for eighteen years? Have I been a murderous monster this whole time and I didn’t even know it? I thought I was just trying to live my life simply, not bothering others, trying to receive the same treatment. People die all the time, was it supposed to be my responsibility to save them all, all the time? It was never that I couldn’t save the world --it was that I didn’t feel like it. I wanted to watch T.V. and press my warm laptop against my stomach and stop having to listen to the entire planet and all of it’s fucking problems! It’s not my fault that life is constant suffering with brief moments of reprieve! How could I stand there and watch so many things fall apart? What’s wrong with me? “How could you do this to us?”I try to step forward and mom pulls out the swiss army knife she keeps on her key ring, bursts into hysterics, and pleads, “Don’t hurt us! Please, god, don’t hurt us!”Dad joins in. “Please Kusuo, please stay back, I-I’m so sorry, you’re scaring me- I’ll do anything you want- I tried, I tried so hard to be a good f-father, I couldn’t save you, I’m sorry, PLEASE,”“PLEASE, KUSUO, PLEASE DON’T-”They won’t let me get a word in. If they did, could I explain this? How do I explain this? How do I explain that every bad thought they've ever had about me, every inkling of fear they felt at the extent of my power, it's all been completely justified? That this whole time I thought I was neutral, I was evil by nature of my goddamn apathy?
“DON’T DO IT, KUSUO-”I don’t want to hurt them, that’s the last thing I’ve ever wanted. My eyes fill up with tears faster and faster and I try so hard to use my powers to reach out --reach out in a way no one could ever resist. It won’t work.“DON’T MURDER US-”People can’t leave me if I’m omnipotent but I can’t reach them. I can’t hug them. I push harder, hard enough to hurt them along with anyone caught in the psychic crossfire, but I’m utterly powerless. Will they love me again if I’m normal now? Is it too late to be a person? I push and keep pushing --the world can take my powers back, I don't want them, I never wanted them in the first place.
“TORTURE US-”“RAPE US-”“PLEASE, A MONSTER, A MONSTER, MY SON IS A MONSTER-”I’m screaming myself hoarse and covering my ears but I can’t stop hearing my mom, my dad, as they beg for their lives. I would never hurt them. But I could. Is that enough evidence than I am a monster? No parent should ever have to plead with their child like this. I want the domesticity back. But I deserve this, the doubt, the fear, the anger, because I'm covered in blood and it's been collecting on me for a while.“PLEASE!”Something comes up behind me, wraps me in a hug that feels more like a chokehold, soothes the side of my face that’s wet with tears with a clammy hand --my parents disappear and so does the body of Kaidou Shun along with the smell of iron. It’s just me and the thing that's holding me, the thing that I only call Kaidou because there’s nothing else to fucking call it. My house is nothing but rubble along with the rest of my neighborhood. I know Kaidou’s not possibly strong enough to have caused this. The only reasonable explanation is that I did it. I’m the only one capable of destruction on a mass scale. I knew that from the beginning and all these years I've done everything I could to contain everything I am, everything I could be. The street lamp flickers from the pile of massacred pavement it’s buried in and Kaidou asks in a voice thick with tears,
“How do you like it, Saiki-kun? Does it feel exhausting- living in hell?”I would’ve continued to cry and wallow in my pity in the cage of Kaidou’s thin arms if I didn’t remember that Toritsuka was still in the house. Buried under ten tons of ruined city. And neither of us knew if he even had a soul to salvage. I’ve clung so tightly to my friendless ideals but as Kaidou slowly withdrawals from my trembling, pathetic body and blinks out of existence in a star filled Kaidou shaped hole, I realize I have never been more alone than I am right now. I put myself here, at the end of the world because as much as I claim to not care... I'm so scared of myself. I've confirmed all my fears --smoke cascades across a starless sky. I can't stop sobbing as if all the frustration from eighteen years of stumbling, emotionless, through a miserable life is catching up to me all at once. The funny part, if you have a really sick sense of humor, is that I wish Kaidou had at least stayed to hug me and give me the physical comfort I crave so horribly right now. But I've driven even him away.And I’m the only one alive to blame, as far as I know.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Once I’m finally able to take a step without faltering, once I mop up the two rivers of snot that are painting slimy trails from my nose to my chin, I rummage through the rubble. My streak of crappy luck seems to have relented because Toritsuka is absolutely peachy, if one could ignore the puddle of pee he’s sitting in as he curls up in the fetal position. He startles when I lift a hunk of dry wall to reveal his pathetic state --the dust on his cheeks is split with tear tracks.
“Saiki-kun?” He asks hoarsely. “Please- please tell me you know what happened.”I’ve never been the most socially ept person. Maybe the real reason I wanted to avoid human interaction to the best of my abilities was because making just the right amount of eye contact was a hurdle, psychic powers be damned. They were impossible to please and impossible to comfort during times of inherent and soul crushing misery. I never bother with the niceties but in this particular circumstance when they’re boiled away, it’s clear to see that I’m the cause of this destruction.And any person would be discomforted by a statement like that, delivered in the lackluster way I deliver all of my words. Toritsuka has been my only real friend, the only friend who’s seen me as I am, unfettered by my lackadaisical disguise I parade around in, and I don’t know if my parents are alive. I’m scared to check, the hallucination still a fresh, pulsing wound on my mind. I don’t think I would be able to handle being rejected here and now.“It’s complicated.” I determine with uncertainty, hoping that Toritsuka, in his fragile and terrified state, will let the unsatisfactory answer glide past his mostly non existent radar until I can concoct a better one. “You were right. Kaidou was never dead. He’s back and he has powers that I can’t put into words.”It’s unsettling that Toritsuka just continues trembling and staring straight ahead when I figured he’d be over the moon to hear me finally admit that he’s right about something. I just sift through his thoughts instead of bothering with trying to ease him out of his psychological comatose.
Shut up, shut the fuck up, I can’t even hear myself think.
Good thing that I can, I comment dryly in my head. He’s probably being verbally assaulted by a torrent of ghosts and a wave of nausea passes through me --I whip around and further assess the damage. My neighborhood is demolished. My neighbors are most likely dead, along with anyone else who was caught in the insanity of my deluded meltdown. That probably means that an influx of human souls were just sent to what Toritsuka had called the spirit dimension.
I zero in harder on his thoughts.
Oh god, it’s so loud. So loud. I hear them all, I hear everything. Please, I can’t help you. I can’t, you’re dead now and there’s nothing I can fucking do. Please, leave me alone. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m so useless. Oh god, please, god, buddha, anyone, if anyone’s out there, let this suffering end. Why, no matter how much or how hard I pray, do you keep forcing me to hear these melancholic wails? I can’t do it, I’m not strong enough. I’m begging you to leave me alone.
He’s catatonic, as he focuses on nothing, face screwed up in agony, and if his shoulders weren’t jerking up and down with his panicked, erratic breathing, I would’ve assumed he was dead. In an act of complete and utter weakness, of tender humanity that I seldom indulge in, I create a dry space beside Toritsuka and sit next to him as he’s dragged through what I can only assume is hell. We’re close enough that our thighs are touching and that’s really as close as I can bring myself to get, considering how unsettling most forms of contact are to me, and the unbearable heat blazing a humid path through the night air.
I engage in some semblance of productivity while he chokes on sobs and gasps beside me. I use my clairvoyance to check up on Japan’s political figures --a major few of them are dead. The S prefecture and the small towns on the border of it are nothing but rubble, and even the rest of Japan is littered with structural damage, though most of it's citizens are alive. I had a theory the moment that my most daunting fears came to fruition about this but I test it out anyway. I try to reverse the time on my house, bring it back to its original, untampered with form, but there’s an iron wall that prevents me from doing so. It must have something to do with Kaidou’s freakish time powers, the fact that mine are now inaccessible. I cross my eyes and try to steel my nerves for what I’m about to see.Kusuke’s always out of the country, so it’s no surprise that he’s just fine. My parents have been crushed to death and I have to massage some feeling into my eyes after being assaulted by the image of their broken bodies, splintered bones jutting out of crimson drenched flesh, their terrified eyes still open. But I expected it. I think I’ve been expecting something like this for a while, the instance when something absolutely miserable would befall me and I wouldn’t be able to fix my mistakes. I just never assumed it would be this bad.
More dead bodies of people I knew flit into my vision. Nendou is holding his mother’s corpse and crying harder than I’ve ever seen him cry before. Teruhashi is in excruciating pain, holding a dish towel to a half of her face that was blown off by an electrical explosion triggered by the psychic tornado. She may die from blood loss but it’ll take a horrifically long time. Hairo is trapped under what remains of his own ceiling, his legs crushed beyond repair, and he’s trying fruitlessly to pry himself out. Yumehara is battered but mostly in tact.
Saiko is dead. Akechi is dead. Aren is dead. Chisato is dead, and one of her younger siblings is alive, pleading for her to wake up. That younger sibling will probably die too, considering there’s a particularly bulky hunk of rumble on his lower abdomen and there’s a pool of blood around him. Most of my classmates are dead, just a few random faces incredulously having survived.
Toritsuka grips my arm and if I weren’t impervious to most forms of physical harm, it would be crushing.
“Saiki?” He asks, still shaking. “Your parents want to talk to you. Do you think you can…?”I nod but my heart feels like it’s in my throat and my stomach immediately ties in a knot. My gloves were already considerably ripped, so I just claw off the threads of them that are left, and I grip Toritsuka’s arm.
My parents are dead. It’s a little unnerving seeing them, just fine and looking as dumb as usual, when I just witnessed them looking like they’d been put through a human meat grinder.
“Kusuo?” Mom reaches out and I’m still holding Toritsuka. I know she can’t touch me and it’s painstaking to watch the way her face twists when her hand phases straight through my shoulder. “Oh… I guess I can’t give you one last hug. Th-that’s fine.”“You’ve made such a nice friend.” Dad praises and he’s beaming but teary-eyed as he pulls mom into his side, his hand stroking her arm comfortingly. “You know, Kusuo… you’ve made a lot of nice friends over these past three years. I know I’m just your idiot dad with the I.Q. of a farm animal to you, so it probably doesn’t mean much, but I’m so proud of you. I know it wasn’t easy. And… you know, I don’t need to know why this thing happened, if you had anything to do with it, or it it’s just the world being it’s unpredictable self. I just know that if anyone can make things better, it’s you. Not because you’re all powerful but because you love humanity.”My lower lip wobbles and I swallow hard, eyes widening as my eyes begin to prickle with phantom heat. “I… what?”Mom laughs and it dissolves into a sob but it’s full of far too much affection to be regarded as a sound of melancholy. “You love humanity! It’s so obvious, Ku, to everyone but you. You could leave us all behind if you want, and you could use your power for anything, but you made the effort to just be human. I, we, your dad and me may be wrong but… we always had this feeling you only ever wanted to be an average human. That you only ever wanted to be like us.”I’d read their minds plenty, so I always knew they held those weird sentiments towards me even though I’ve always been sure that’s not the case. That’s not it, is it? I just don’t feel like being fawned over when I can barely tolerate just having the normal amount of social interactions much less the amount of social interaction that’s required of a celebrity.
But the fact that dad openly admitted he’s speculating that I had something to do with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and they both still think I’m just their son, just a human they gave life to and nurtured as best they could, makes me want to hug them. It makes me want to rip Kaidou out of whatever star filled hole he’s hiding in and make him wish his dad really had killed him a year ago. I know that this was technically all me but Kaidou had incited it. Maybe it’s not a righteous thought to have and it’s definitely not what my parents would want but it’s a purpose, a shining beacon that’s going to keep me from wallowing in my own misery for any longer. Or at least until after this heartfelt discussion is over.
“I’m sorry.” I say because it’s the only thing I can manage to get out through the thickness in my trachea. “I was supposed to protect you.”Dad gapes and his transparent hand smacks me. Or, it tries to, it just goes straight through my face. “Is that how we make you feel?! We’re the parents, dingbat! Your only job is to live your life the way you want to, it was never to protect us. Now I feel like a glorified purse dog!”“Don’t sulk!” Mom admonishes and when she elbows him in the ribs, it actually lands and dad hacks. She wipes at her wet cheeks and points at me. “Don’t apologize! Of course it’s terrible and upsetting and I never thought I wouldn’t live to meet my own grandchildren that you and Kusu have yet to give me but life, and death I guess, isn’t fair and it doesn’t operate on karmic energy.” Her smile is gentle. “All we can do is our best, Ku. So, don’t dwell on what could’ve been. We’ll be watching, so don’t do anything I wouldn’t, you know?”“Watching?” My insides turn dry and the sinking feeling returns. “From where? You’re not saying- I could just-”“Ku, we… we can’t stay here.” Dad purses his lips and Toritsuka tugs at me.“There’s different categories of spirits and sometimes, they stay here on earth until they’ve served their ultimate purpose. For some spirits, it’s guiding humans down the right path, and sometimes… they’re fulfilled from the moment they lose their physical bodies. They don’t get anymore time on earth.” He explains and it would’ve been incredibly awe-inspiring, how much wisdom he’s been storing away, if he weren’t still so nasally from crying himself hoarse earlier. “Your parents… well, I guess raising you and your brother was their purpose. They’ve been fulfilled for a while.”I hate to be cliche but just because they’re ready to pass on doesn’t mean I’m ready for it. Not because I need their guidance, or their advice, or their help, I’m more capable than both of them combined, really, but because my mom gives the best hugs and as much as I constantly insult him, I love when my dad messes up my hair after I’ve meticulously brushed it in the morning. And I love seeing them cooking together, my dad tickling my mom while she’s in front of the stove, and her squealing, paddling him with her wooden spoon as he pretends to be scared of her wrath and she pretends to be mad at him, until they both dissolve into giggles. I love their love, how normal it is.
Thoughts of Kusuke flit back, dad doing this thing where he’d pretend to play the piano on his stomach even though he clearly did not know how to play the piano, at least not adequately, when Kusuke was off sulking or just generally had a bitch look on his face. Which was pretty often. Most times, Kusuke would kick him off and proceed to be a bitch in a different area of the house, but there were times he just giggled and squirmed around on the sofa until miraculously, his infamous bitch look cracked to reveal the beaming, flushed face of a little kid with a dad that didn’t quit.Mom’s medicine ball teas, I never got sick, but she made them for me whenever Kusuke got sick so that I didn’t feel left out. And I’m more of a sweets person but somehow, the fact that mom was thinking of me, thinking of how I’d feel if I didn’t receive one and paining over it, made it taste sweeter than any soda. If I think hard enough about them, I can taste them, can taste the culmination of her love in every meal she’s prepared, every snack, every tea, every dumb nitnack she saw and bought because it made her think of me. And if I close my eyes and concentrate, I can feel dad hugging me from behind with his arms around my stomach and hefting me up, then acting like it made him strong even though he knew I could fling him into the stratosphere if I wanted, he was just doing it to be goofy.
The thought of my days without them really does make me cry. It’s a far less dramatic cry than when I quite literally sat in the ruins of my town and realized I was finally at war with a force that had landed a brutal hit on me, realized it didn’t feel as awesome as I was expecting. I try to swallow, once, twice, as if I can swallow back tears when all I’m doing is making my throat twitch and shift uncomfortably, and then the prickle in my eyes morphs into a miserable fire, and my preventative measures prove to be meaningless, just like crying. Crying won’t bring my parents back but I sure as hell can’t seem to stop it.
“It’s been so long since I’ve seen you cry.” Mom says, her brows knit and her compassionate eyes glistening. “Ku, you know people die.”Of course I do. Who doesn’t? Knowing that death is inevitable doesn’t make the thought of having to live without the people who’ve been on your side from day one any less unfathomably painful. I shake my head, sputtering like a toddler, and feeling pathetic. “But it didn’t have to be you two. Not yet. Not now. I’m- I don’t know what to do and you’ve always been there. I need you.”“Good thing we’ve made so many good memories.” Dad replies, ever the optimist, his thin eyes squinting in upturned slits with his wide smile, his wrinkles standing at attention. “And you know what? I think the bad memories count for something too. You know, all those times I bugged you to help me move furniture, or take me to work…”A wail claws out of me and I think it surprises everyone. It’s like an explosion in my lungs and I’m barely able to catch my breath afterwards, my own ribs closing in on me while I gulp down air and choke on it. Out of the corner of my eye, Toritsuka is thinking about how I hate to be touched, but I look like I need a hug, and he’s wondering if hugging me is worth getting potentially punched. My words come out cracked, whimpering and flimsy. “Those are my favorites ones. My favorite memories.”
Dad’s eyes widen and then he gets teary. He swallows, once, twice, and I’m less ashamed of my way of crying, knowing that I inherited it from him. “See? A-always knew… it wasn’t any…” He trails off and then holds mom’s hand tighter than before. “I love you, Ku. There’s no more time, though. If you see Kusu… tell him that he was always my favorite.” Dad’s always been an ugly crier, so I wonder if I am too. Snot drips down his face. “He’ll get a kick out of it.”Then they disintegrate, my mom still looking like she has more to say, my dad gazing at me and clearly wishing he could make me feel better, and I think that’s far more distressing than seeing their dead bodies. Seeing the purest form of them, their spirits, turn into soul dust and get swept away in a nonexistent early summer breeze. Toritsuka throws caution to the wind and he hugs me. I’m glad he grew a backbone, if it’s just for a few precious moments, where I’m completely at the mercy of a world that I’ve collapsed all on my own and I’m struggling to carry my own weight, let alone the rest of the humanities'. I cry harder, and in a moment of weakness that’s quickly becoming a common theme, I tell him everything. The faked death, my part in the destruction, I even tell him that Kaidou’s probably only this angry at me because he wants to fuck me so bad. I couldn't get one last hug from my mom and her hugs are... or rather, were, legendary but this hug is new and it's coming from someone who's still a little scared of me, which makes it count for so much more than just some meaningless skin on skin contact.
Coming clean, as they call it, ironically enough doesn’t feel very clean. Especially when you can read peoples thoughts. Even if the people you’re confessing to say the right things after carefully thinking about their words, their thoughts are often spectacularly judgmental and soul crushing. And the fact that Toritsuka's still filthy with urine, dry wall dust and other muck doesn't help either. I can’t call him out on being a straight-up Bundy-style sociopath. Not while he’s crying like this. God, what a pussy move. Boo-hoo, my actions have consequences and I can't mindlessly screw people over anymore. Toritsuka thinks, then backtracks. Fuck me, he can read my mind. Saiki-kun, I’m sorry, you’re not a sociopath, but you are a pussy. This is just kinda fucked up and you’re throwing me for a loop. Did your parents know that you faked his death? No one knew. I reply telepathically, too tired to speak. Because deep down, I knew that it was wrong. I just wanted… I wanted to be done. I was tired. Saiki-kun, that’s not an excuse. I’m… I’m not saying Kaidou-kun had any right to do what he did but you started it. Whatever the hell this is, or whatever the hell it’s going to become. Toritsuka thinks, still hugging me. It’s insane to think that just a few hours earlier, I was the one comforting Toritsuka while he cried. Several tables are being turned today and none of them are turning in my favor. You know that thing that I do with you? Where I talk about my problems and I cry and I let it all out? It’s called fucking venting and you probably should’ve done that before you created a fake Kaidou-kun corpse and buried it in Kaidou-kun's dads’ basement, you massive dick.
I don’t cry. Not really.
You’re doing it now, the evidence is right here on my shoulder. And Toritsuka wiggles it for good measure. And I bet it feels nice. When’s the last time you were completely honest with someone? What do you do when the demons come?I lie. I lie a lot. I’m already so abnormal. I shouldn’t go around bothering people when I do so much to stay under the radar. I admit, my cries having since died down to sniffles and hiccups. My parents already have so much on their minds. It doesn’t help that I can hear everything, every struggle. I know what everyone’s going through, at every given moment. I can’t imagine adding onto the pile of problems. I can’t imagine becoming their new biggest, most annoying problem.
You’re not a problem, Saiki-kun.
Everyone becomes a problem, eventually. I know it best. I know that people get sick of hearing other people talk about their meaningless, selfish, often unjustifiable issues. I know that you’d just get sick of me. I get sick of you a lot.
Gee, thanks. Toritsuka snorts. You know what happens when I get sick of you, Saiki-kun?
You leave.
I go home, jerk off, talk to a ghost about you being a gigantic sourpuss kill-joy, and then I come back the next day for more time with my best friend. Toritsuka sighs. Don’t make this gay but love takes effort. I love a lot of people, including you, and sometimes, I want to bitch smack the everloving fuck out of those people, including you. That doesn’t mean I stopped loving them. It just means I need some alone time. Preferably with a bottle of lube and an onahole and a used pair of panties. I cringe and pry away from Toritsuka. “You have an addiction.”“I’m an orphan so I can’t know for sure but I’m pretty sure it runs in my blood.” Toritsuka loves being the comic relief, I can hear him thinking about it every time he makes someone laugh, or brings the mood up in a room full of so called sourpuss kill-joy’s, but his face falls. The enormity of our situation falls over him again and he tries to smile but his lavender colored eyes are full of doubt. “Ready to face the world?”“I’m ready to save it.” I correct, collecting myself and standing. “Most of our friends are dead. Let’s go pick up the ones that aren’t and go from there. I think… I think I’m done lying.”“About?”“About everything.”The doubt eases, just a little. I’m warming up to the truth already.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
We teleport to Teruhashi first, considering her wounds are the most dire. She’s still conscious, if just barely, and for a moment I’m at a loss at the sight of her state. I can’t just fix her by reversing the damage and I have a pretty extensive list of psychic abilities but I’m not a plastic surgeon. I’m able to mind control her into a deep sleep, so that she at least can allow me to assess the damage without struggling, but she was already close enough to trauma shock that her reactions were sorely lacking anyway. I think I’m more concerned about the psyche shattering amount of pain she’s in. At least if she’s asleep, she’ll get a break from the agony.I won’t sugarcoat it because I don’t think I’m capable of doing such a thing --it’s stomach turning. Her teeth are exposed and one of her eyes was caught in the blast too. And for an appearance privy person like Teruhashi, she’ll be devastated, maybe even traumatized by the fact that she’ll more likely than not be hideous for the rest of her life if she survives.
Apparently, Toritsuka is a lot better at handling the sight of severe gore than I would’ve given him credit for. When he sees the red innards, the sinewy muscle and pink tissue of Teruhashi’s wounds, he just thinks to himself, Demons are much uglier. It makes me glad I’m not a medium, though I suppose I am right now. I’ve been able to block out the ghosts constantly traveling in my peripheral vision, even phasing through me on occasion. I have more important things to deal with and I’m relatively good at compartmentalizing, considering my informative years were spent under constant siege by the atrocious thoughts of the frightening humans around me, every dark fantasy on loop in my head, with nowhere to run where I could escape the grisly side of psychic abilities that no one seems keen on exploring.Eventually, I give up trying to find a solution that will be aesthetically pleasing and just work with what I have. Her teeth are all intact but the surrounding area, her left mandibular area, is completely fleshless. Her once plush and rosy lips are mostly gone, a blood transfusion would be pretty helpful, and it’s finally a good thing that I have X-ray vision because I can see all the nerves I need to avoid as I start burning her blood vessels closed. It’s rudimentary and is dangerous even for someone with as much precision as I’m capable of but it’s the first and fastest way I can think of to stop the bleeding. It’s only a surface level injury, I’m glad because I don’t know if I have the stomach to try and mend bone together, dig around in human tissue to find bits of her mandible, but the end product leaves something to be desired.She’s more or less the same in my eyes. The biggest risk to her life in the following days will be the risk of infection but I’m sure that I can just teleport to some pharmacy in another part of Japan and snag a strong enough antibiotic to fight off any foreign offenders. And eventually, once things settle down and some sense of normalcy returns, she’ll probably want reconstructive surgery. They’ll take some skin from her ass or something and put it where her cheek and lips used to be. But this will do. She’s alive and that’s more than could be said for most of our friends.I keep her asleep. I probably will for at least as long as it takes for the most daunting, painful areas of the wound to heal.
Toritsuka is staring at her, feeling terrible.“What?” I ask.“Her life will be ruined, you know.” He replies solemnly. “She was the prettiest girl in school. She could’ve been a model.”“She’ll get over it. I think she’ll be grateful to just be alive when her own family probably isn’t.” A thought occurs to me and I audibly groan, going cross eyed. I zero in on Teruhashi’s creepy older brother, who’s somewhere in some lavish part of Aoyama, looking like he’s losing his mind as he screams at the employees flocking around him, demanding for someone to go and rescue his precious Kokomi. Of course the one person I wish had died is just fine. “Her gross, incesty older brother is alive.”“For real? That sucks dick.” Toritsuka replies. He probably would’ve figured it out with enough snooping considering his impressive network of ghosts, that Teruhashi’s older brother is a freak, but I had told him not long after I discovered it because it was just so disturbing. I had to tell someone. I think I was actually venting then, that thing Toritsuka had insisted I start practicing. “At least she has someone. Don’t you have an older brother?”Toritsuka’s thinking about his own lack of family other than his tradition bound father, about how the monks had most likely perished and how he didn’t like them anyway. I knew that. I read too much about how they were overly strict and slightly perverted and if Toritsuka, who had thought on more than one occasion that he should sift through the girls bathroom trash can for things to introduce to his nightly jerk off sessions, considered someone perverted, they had to be pretty bad. Celibacy rarely ever works in the case of the average human man and while that’s no excuse to be a creep, it’s probably why those monks are so handsy.
It would be pretty inconsiderate to complain about Kusuke when he’s my own blood and Toritsuka has virtually no one, at least no one that genuinely cares for him, and I do have some semblance of compassion somewhere in the generally vacant area where most of my emotions should be. So, I shrug. “He’s always out of the country for work. I barely know him.”
Toritsuka snickers within his head, he knows I’m covering up the truth once again, and the triumph distracts him from his unpleasant thoughts concerning the monks and his father. I’d have to do a little more digging than I cared to do if I wanted to know exactly why he wasn’t his fathers biggest fan. “I thought he was only, like, two years older than you. Didn’t you grow up with him?”Crap, I have to start keeping track of the information about my personal life I’ve disclosed to this perverted little ghost whisperer before I go and lie about it. I relent while I start gathering rubble and miscellaneous items from Teruhashi’s demolished house in small piles. “If you’re that desperate to know, my older brother actually hates me. Kusuke builds military weapons and robots for a living, and the thing he wants to build the most is something that will permanently take away my powers and render me helpless and inferior to him. And he probably doesn’t really care that our parents are dead and that I’m the most scared I’ve ever been with my circumstances, our circumstances. If he does come to Japan, it’ll just be to laugh in my face.”“Oh.” Guilt assaults Toritsuka, and he opens his mouth to speak but I stop him.“Don’t apologize. I lucked out in the family department, other than that sociopath, so I don’t need you to apologize to me. My parents did everything they could to raise us with compassion but Kusuke just had a screw loose from the moment he left the womb and I never had a chance at being normal for obvious reasons.”“Still can’t feel nice.” The medium mutters, watching while I meticulously gather piles of varying sizes, with varying values. “Sure, I get jealous of you, who wouldn’t? That doesn’t give him the right to hold so much… so much hatred against you.”I shake my head slowly, considering that. “There’s just something wrong with him. I stopped trying to convince him that our parents had room in their human hearts for two children because I realized he was never going to get it. He has an obsessive need to be the most powerful person in the room and I can’t help him. It’s not my problem.”“You really think he won’t come? To Japan… to try and help?”
“I know he won’t.” I reply icily. “You can’t do something out of the kindness of your heart if you never had one to begin with.” Which, sure, I’m not exactly a model empath either, but I at least have the backbone to try and be different than what my nature is insisting I be. Whatever. If he wants to let this imaginary competition he’s devised in his deranged little human skull consume him for the rest of his life, he can be my guest.
“Yikes.” Toritsuka says, then decides a change of subject is needed. I agree. “What are you doing? She’s still… well, her eye is a little…”I hum. “I can teleport objects to my location but I can only do it by putting an object, or objects, of equal value in its place. And I need some more medical supplies to safely remove the damaged eye and sew it closed. Not to mention we still have Hairo-kun’s condition to worry about.”The medium looks up and makes an aggravated face, thinking about how he wishes I’d explain stuff to him without him having to ask. I have nothing to say to that, really. I’m the one pulling the weight, he should just shut up and be grateful I’m letting him go on a ride he’s too short for. “What about it?”“Both of his legs are broken. I should be able to set the bones so that they all heal correctly but I can’t speed up his healing process, or rather, speed up the time clock of his body’s natural healing abilities. I don’t have that ability anymore and I’ve come to the conclusion that it has something or other to do with Kaidou-kun.”
With that, I start gathering the things I’ll need. We’ll be traveling so I’ll have to keep our load considerably light. Along with some more adequate medical supplies, I gather some bottled water and non-perishable canned goods, and a couple of bags to hold everything in. The truth is, I don’t know when I’ll encounter Kaidou again and if our second meeting stretches on, or I’m injured, these useless dopes will be left with nothing but their own microscopic survival skills. So I could just gather things like food and water as they’re needed to make the load even lighter but that would put them, my companions, in a pitiful position if I vanished.
Everyone needs fresh clothes and clothes that can sustain some wear and tear without being unwearable, as well as something that won’t make them melt under the boiling hot summer sun. That’s less urgent, though, so I just throw a fresh t-shirt and pair of shorts on Teruhashi (and I must have some sense of sympathy because I force Toritsuka to face away from her unconscious form while I do it). I take the opportunity to get Toritsuka a fresh pair of clothes, too, along with a washcloth since he’s still covered in his own dried pee.After that, the eye has to come out. It’s already blind and it’ll just be another wound vulnerable to infection if I leave it in. While I sew Teruhashi’s eyelids together, I start to reminisce on my short time with Kaidou. His eye hadn’t been sewn closed, it was just gone as if there had never been an eye there to begin with. It was more disturbing than if he looked like Teruhashi does now, a neat line of stitches where her eye once was.
The antibiotic I picked out for her is an oral one, so I just float it down her throat along with a bubble of water to help it go down smoothly.
Then, I cross my eyes and start looking for somewhere habitable. Nendou’s apartment isn’t too damaged, other than his mom’s room, but it’s way too small for four teenagers of average build, plus Nendou himself who is the approximate size of two gorillas stacked on top of each other, my house is pretty much pulverized, Toritsuka’s ‘bachelor pad’ is both too small and mostly rubble… though, a thought occurs to me that is rather disturbing.
I look at Kaidou’s home.It’s not without some minor structural damage, but it’s actually been spared from the whirling psychic vortex of destruction. If that on it’s own weren’t unsettling enough, that I’d managed to destroy my home and the homes, the lives, of everyone close to me, and unconsciously spared Kaidou’s home and family the same treatment, it’s also not particularly comforting that to my knowledge, Kaidou is not there. I humor the idea that somehow, Kaidou’s new powers allow him to not appear when I use my clairvoyance, but the more I allow the thought to marinate, the more outrageous and ridiculous it sounds.
I’m not exactly any sort of authority on how much power is too much but wouldn’t it be ridiculously OP for Kaidou to have robbed me of my ability to turn back time and be immune to my clairvoyance? Though, he had proven to be immune to some of my other psychic abilities in certain circumstances.In a last minute judgement, I decide that because Kaidou’s room is still perfectly untouched and kept in its original pristine condition (his mother had never gotten rid of any of his dumb comics, for sentimental reasons, I guess), he isn’t there. When he vanished, he was frantic, a Kaidou shaped mass of overwhelming emotions and destructive energy. Why would he go home and leave everything perfectly untampered with?“We could use Kaidou-kun’s house to hideout.” I mention to Toritsuka, who’s been watching me zone out with my eyes crossed for what must’ve been minutes.Even before he thinks it, the words flood out. “Saiki-kun, that’s about the stupidest shit I have ever heard in my life.”“It’s one of the only buildings still standing in the S prefecture. And wherever we go, Kaidou-kun might just follow me, it would be irresponsible to flee to a prefecture the damage hasn’t touched and risk more massacre.” I’m reasoning but honestly, I don’t think it’s a good idea either. There’s just so few other ideas, that this one’s starting to feel like the best one.Toritsuka sucks at a water bottle, wiping the spillage on his chin thoughtfully. “Mm. And what about Kaidou-san? You know, the one who owns the house.”“Kaidou-san can kiss my ass if she doesn’t want to let us intrude. She’s not really in any position to refuse guests, not under these circumstances. Besides, she lost most of her backbone when Kaidou-kun died.” “‘Died’,” Toritsuka reminds me, then continues with, “and what about the actual problem at hand? You know. The younger, crazier Kaidou? He’s not at his literal house?”I shake my head, even though it doesn’t make much sense to me either. “He could be hiding out somewhere, hiding from me. Knew I’d check his house first.”“Right, he’s hiding from you.”
“Shut up.” I reply because really, truer words have never been spoken, Kaidou sort of annihilated me in every sense of the word, but can’t I pretend I didn’t take an L from virtually every side? I’m still scary. “Maybe he’s hiding from someone else. Whatever put him in time prison in the first place.”Inwardly, Toritsuka’s preening at the fact that I’ve fully admitted his theory is plausible and possibly deserves to be taken seriously.
“Now’s not the time to rub being right in my face.”Toritsuka visibly deflates, bows over, banging his fist on the floor dramatically. “It’s never time to rub being right in your face! You’re such a killjoy!”“That’s because you’re never right.” I deadpan.That’s where the domestic, slightly comforting, bickering ends.
Teleporting to the Kaidou residence is full of all sorts of tension, mostly because I bring us straight to the Kaidou residences’ living room, which immediately triggers an ear splitting scream from Kaidou’s mom. It rouses Kaidou’s two younger siblings, and they join in the pitchy cacophony with screams of their own.Once the screaming dies down, Kaidou’s mom, with her hand over her heart, demands an explanation. It’s a little insulting.“Well, to be quite honest, you’re not in a position to demand-“Toritsuka shushes me and it’s then when I realize he’s having a passionate fantasy about Kaidou’s mom, a bed surrounded by rose petals, and she’s… oh. I’ll keep that particular interest of his to myself, that’s kind of personal. Sorry, gang. “Explain yourself to Kaidou-kun’s lovely sister.”Pervert.Once I’ve run through the condensed version of everything that’s happened over the course of 24 hours, dealt with the disbelief, and then the begrudging and horrified acceptance, I set Teruhashi up in the guest room. The affected areas of her face are bandaged, if only to spare the Kaidou siblings the trauma of seeing her trauma.
The rest of the night is spent similarly. I don’t have much time to process the fact that I’ve decided to camp out with Kaidou’s family while simultaneously seeking to destroy him and that at any given time, he could just manifest out of a black hole and do the same trick all over again. I work on Hairo next, and the Kaidou siblings end up taking residence in Kaidou-san’s room, because Hairo, his massacred legs, need the room.
Similar to Teruhashi, I knocked Hairo unconscious to spare him the pain of being awake and aware as I crudely casted one of his legs, and was forced to amputate the other far more crushed one from the knee down. It was cruel, really, both of them robbed of what they had centered their entire existences around. Appearance, athleticism. Neither would be the same when they were able to wake up.
Then, Yumehara and Nendou.This is about where things will start to get difficult.As anyone would be, they’re scared- Nendou still bares his mothers blood on his shirt, his hands covered in it from when he cradled her crushed body. Yumehara’s at least spared from the shared trauma of having seen her parents' corpses- the pair apparently traveled a lot and conveniently were in Thailand, for something or other. If she wishes to join them, I’m not going to force her to stay and witness whatever shit show ensues.“How did I get here?” Nendou, ever the tension breaker, asks, looking around. “Kaidou-kun’s house? What the hell..?”“I’m an all powerful psychic.”
Always good to get that out of the way. I’m glad I got a couple practice rounds in with this story telling thing because I’ll be honest, I’ve always sucked at it.And then I got to explain everything else. And watch Nendou’s face as he realized that I was not only responsible for the fact that he got to attend one of his best friends’ funeral despite the fact that he wasn’t dead, got to mourn Kaidou’s death mostly by himself because I’m emotionally unavailable. What was also my fault was virtually the most important person in his life to him, his mother and the person who had comforted him through the brunt of the mourning, being super dead.
While I’m watching Nendou’s expression, watching his comically sloped brow start to crinkle, his bloodshot eyes growing wet, as he moves his lips but says nothing, I’m focused on him. It’s weird, how I keep insisting that Nendou’s the equivalent of an amoeba to me, and yet I feel genuine fear at how he’ll react. If he’ll feel as though I’m a shameless liar, a shitty friend, a sociopath. Because I can’t read his mind, I’ve never been able to know how exactly he reacts to my behavior at any given time. I can only assume that this is the end, no matter how blindly forgiving he is.
So, I don’t realize Yumehara’s reeling her hand back until I feel a sudden blunt pressure, and a heat in my face. She’s red, fists curled at her sides. Her mind, I can read. And it’s manic with anger.I might’ve been concerned about the wrong one.”Did you just punch me?”