Kazuma hated red.
He didn't know why. But the color never evoked anything but negative emotions in him.
Disgust.
Hopelessness
Fear.
Maybe it was something about his previous life as a human. Maybe it was something he had known and had been forced to forget.
Or maybe it was something he didn't want to remember.
_o_
"Lying is one of the worst sins! So stop it and confess! Stop lying!"
The slender woman screamed at the boy before him. She looked like a monster from old fairitales with all those wrinkles and angry dark eyes. Her black hair framed her face and body like a dark veil in the dead of the night.
The green eyed boy looked up at her with fear and tears in his eyes. He was barely old enough to form full sentences when talking. And he was always crying. Even as a baby, he always cried. And in the old, rotten building of the orphanage, the equally rotten caretakers never dealt with him.
Always shouting at him.
Always hitting him.
Always beating him.
Never believing him.
The boy was always afraid. He was always alone. He had been abondened on the steps of the orphanage one stormy night. And since then, he had been treated as if he had brought that storm inside the orphanage.
Like a bad omen.
Like a messenger from the devils.
And his talk suited that too. The boy always screamed at random times, pointing at the dark corners and the tops of other people's heads.
He could see ghosts, he said. He could see the demons. But no one believed him. They hit him, beat him, starved him for being afraid. All the other kids avoided him, called him a freak, leving him in the company of the monsters that lurked in the darkness. The monsters with many eyes, the monsters that whispered his name and called him to their side.
As the time went by, the boy grew up. He slowly learned to be silent, to keep his head down, to curl in his own body and to keep his tears and muffled sobs to himself in the darkest of the nights.
He learned to keep silent and watch the monsters, floating all around him.
He learned to never seek comfort from the monsters in human skin.
Later, when he was about eleven, he realised that whenever the numbers of the monsters increased, something bad happened.
The rice fields were attacked by bugs.
The chickens were eaten by wolfs.
The cows died.
The buildings collapsed.
Someone died.
He realised that those monsters always started to surround a person like second skin one or two days before they died.
And that made seeing them unbearable even more than it already was.
"Madam, are you okay? You are not ill right? Please be careful."
"Please be careful. Stop climbing there everyday. You can play down here. It is dangerous."
"Miss, please help her . I think she needs medicine. She is ill. Please..."
"Don't go off to the forest on your own. There are wolfs around there you know?"
But no one would listen to a freak. No one would take him seriously. In the end, that old caretaker died in her sleep. The boy fell down from the rocks he climbed to play and broke his neck. The girl died out of a fevery illness because all of the caretakers thought that she was pretending and he was lying. One of the older boys was killled by wolfs in the forest, half of his body eaten.
In the end, others noticed too. Whenever the green eyed boy talked to someone, they died. Whenever he said someone was in danger, they died. Whenever his cries in the night increased, some calamity fell upon the orphanage and the village it was in.
He was an omen for it.
It was definitely sorcery.
So the caretakers gave him a bag filled with some food and clothes and sent him away, saying they could no longer feed the old kids like him. They were too afraid to kill him for he could curse them all before he died.
The twelve year old boy left the village for another one behind the mountains. No one gave him food and shelter or a job in the one with the orphanage. He was a young man. He could earn for himself, they said.
So he left behind a group of field workers. But he never went near them, afraid they too would hurt him.
In the forests there were a few villages close to each other here and there. They were small ones too. So everyone noticed when a foreigner came.
In the first village, everyone gave him odd looks as his bright green eyes were too noticable and too foreign a trait to be japanese.
He rented a room in a Ryokan owned by an old lady. The woman had lost a son and she gave her love to the young men who stayed there as she couldn't give it to her dead son.
She loved him. She pitied him because he was an orphan and he was alone. He had a kind spirit too. It wasn't fair for him to have a life that hard. She had cried for him when she had listened to his story and hugged him to his chest.
He loved him too. She was the first one who was kind to him. So eventhough he had sworn to never say a word about the monsters again, he gave her a warning when he saw them in the Ryokan. He had wanted to help her.
Though he didn't know she too would be scared.
He didn't expect the rocks that were thrown his way while the villagers were runing after him to "kill the sorcerer".
He had been chased out of the village and when he arrived in the next one, he collapsed. Some woman pitied him enough to tend to his wounds and let him stay one night in her clinic. She was the healer of the village.
And she had told the villagers about him. They had asked around, the word spreading. In the end, they had learned that they had to avoid him.
So he had carried rocks for constructions and worked in the fields again. But it was all he could find for a job in there before the doors started to shut on his face.
He left again and again. Seeking new places to live and trying to survive.
In the next few years, everyone learned that the silent young man with the green eyes was an omen of calamity.
Wherever he went, he took bad fortune and poverty with him. He sacrificed animals to the gods of calamity and devils. He cursed everyone who were bad to him. He could eat their children too. He would make a rift in the ground and make it swallow the entire village if he so wished.
So the young man tied a cloth around his head and kept his head down when outside. He pretended to not notice the whispers all around him and lived his life untill the ayakashi arrived. Then he would leave. He would go to another village and work until someone realised that the green eyed man was him. Then he would hide and leave when he saw the first ayakashi.
In one of the villages, he saw a blonde woman laying on the ground unconscious. But no one helped her. They all walked away not even sparing a glance to her. She was clearly a foreigner. Maybe it was because of that.
So he picked her up in his arms. But he immediately noticed the ayakashi floating around them.
"Smells good!"
"Give her to us!"
"One little bite!"
"You know us!"
"Give her..."
He ran to the closest shrine which happened to be Bishamonten's. An unpopular foreign god. But he hoped that shrine would still protect them from the ayakashi. He had learned that name after being forced to learn religion and make offerings and wishes in the shrines with the other rice workers.
He had realised the ayakashi couldn't get in the shrines always screaming and callimg him back outside.
He had always chosen the most unpopular god and his from both the ayakashi and humans in the lonely shrines. Sitting there on his own. So he was familiar with that one too.
He knew calling for help wouldn't work. There was no one in the shrine. So he had to clean the wounds on the woman's face and arms himself. Maybe he would learn who she was when she woke. Then he could escort her at least near her house.
He pulled some clean fabric he had bought from his bag. Then he dipped it in shrine water and started to clean her wounds.
He was surprised when they all vanished almost instantly. It wasn't possible for the wounds to heal that fast. They weren't mud or dust either.
Was he really a sorcerer?
No.
Of course he wasn't.
What could an orphan village boy know about wounds?
Maybe they were a kind he didn't know.
He had only cleaned his own before.
That was it.
He wasn't a sorcerer.
When he pressed the cloth to her face and cleaned the wounds there, the woman awoke.
From then on, it was a daze.
"Thank you."
"I will never forget this."
"You saved me."
"I will save you somehow in exchange."
"My names Bishamonten. Please make a wish."
"I am a goddess."
He realised the girl was younger than he had originally thought. Was the poor girl crazy? Was that why no one had tried to help her? Where was her house? She couldn't possibly be living in the shrine as she said. Her clothes looked expensive too. A landlord's daughter maybe?
He couldn't leave her there.
Then her stomach growled and she blushed. The young man felt a smile coming to his face. She was beautiful and innocent almost helpless. He said he would find food for her and left the shrine.
When he had returned a few minutes later with rice balls, she wasn't there. She wasn't anywhere near the shrine either. There wasn't a trace of her. After walking around the streets and not finding her, he returned to the shrine once again in the evening. Maybe she would return there. She thought she lived there after all.
In the end, he decided that one of her family members must have found her. So after a few hours, he left the shrine.
And he saw the crowd in front of the shrine. With torches, sytches and katanas. They all had rigid expressions.
And in a few minutes they had cornered and captured him. Beating him for hours untill nightfall after that.
Some threw rocks.
Some punched him.
Som kicked him.
Some tried to use daggers but other stopped them saying he hadn't suffered nearly enough.
Because a perfectly healthy young dauther of one of them had died after talking to him that morning. The girl had fallen down in the river while washing the clothes.
The young man ooened his eyes but all he could see was blood. Red blood. s own blood. It was on his body, his clothes and the ground.
A sickening red.
Then the father of the girl came forward and broke his ribs with some tool made of iron. He couldn't recognize it then. He had red hair.
He was the only one with red hair. But they all had that scary red eyes. Like the ayakashi's eyes.
And the flames in their torches were red as they walked closer to him and hekd the torches out to him. The flames were red as they surrounded him and painted his world red.
redRedREDredRedRedREDreDRed
red
Red
RED
REDREDREDRED
Then after the most painful few minutes of his life,
It was all black.
_o_
Kazuma put the red tie he had gotten as a gift from Aiha and Tsuguha in a drawer and shut it quickly.
He couldn't turn down a gift but he knew he would never wear it.
Its mere color frightened him.