A/N: Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, D83 – write an AU. Also written for the Becoming the Tamer King Challenge, Looking Around DigiCentral task, part 1: write a piece over 2000 words using the following prompts: rake, place, substantial, olive & "While the Clave disapproves of trespassers, oddly they take an even darker view of beheading and skinning people. They're peculiar that way." – Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel.
Voices Full of Pain
He'd started hearing the voices when he turned eleven. And, in perhaps the most selfish moment of his life, he wished he hadn't.
Because the voices were mostly of pain. People wanting help they couldn't find. Trying to reach things that couldn't be reached, or trying to avoid things that couldn't be avoided. They were suffering things they couldn't speak – but, somehow, he was hearing it all, in a constant but barely coherent stream.
And he couldn't possibly help them all. There was just too much. He couldn't even register it all.
And everyone around him noticed the weight. Though they didn't quite understand why because he didn't explain. He noticed easily they couldn't hear the voices he could. And he could hear the consequences as well. How he worried them. How he confused them. How they only wished he asked them for help – but how could he? That would be just more weight for all of them to carry. And there was also something personal in hearing all those voices, those innermost thoughts. He couldn't share them. He couldn't.
So he simply did his best to help, and help anonymously so those people wouldn't have to carry the pain of their innermost thoughts having been heard by a stranger on top of what scars they already had. He does what he can and laments when the whispers get worse, or when he loses the person entirely. It's rare. People are usually the same places every day, or every week. Working, going to school, shopping, or just hanging around at the park. But then there were the people who were only there once in a blue moon, and him having heard their troubles was a coincidental passing and nothing more. He couldn't go all over Tokyo and it was a relief he couldn't. There'd be even more voices out there. Even more woes.
Akari at some point suggested he keep a journal. He wondered what she'd think when she read the one he'd begun, recording all those whispers he heard that stuck in his mind – and it was always the pained, sorrowful ones that did because he was just that sort of person. It would seem nonsensical if he couldn't remember them, but he remembered. And he added little details for notes as well. The appearance of the speaker. Ideas. Whether he'd succeeded or not. It made him feel accomplished at first. It took off the edge of the weight.
Until its pages were filled with problems yet to be resolved. Then it simply added to the weight.
And that was when he wished he'd never had that gift, or curse. To hear all those troubles but he was unable to help them all. Like the child three streets down whose dog had been sick and the vet hadn't a clue what was wrong with him. He wasn't a doctor either, or a vet. He hadn't known what to do and the dog had died. At least he'd left a flower on the grave but it wasn't the same. The sad thoughts didn't cease, or even slow. And then there were the ones he didn't even understand until it was too late. That that high school girl who'd drowned. He'd heard a swirl of things from her. Love, hate, pain, despair – and some crushing pressure he really hadn't grasped. Until she was dead and, somehow, her thoughts reached him halfway across town. And he felt relief from her.
And then he got it. Life had been crushing her, overwhelming her. Just like the voices and their woes overwhelmed him and crushed him. So she died, and she'd felt only relief. All the other emotions, all the other problems, they'd left her.
He found himself wondering if they'd leave him as well, but luckily that thought didn't get too far because there were his parents and Akari and all her brothers and all the guys at school (and the girls) and he'd only worry them more if they caught wind of his thoughts. Not that there was any reason why they would. He had trouble distinguishing his own thoughts from all the others swirling around him sometimes. He was lucky his body spoke more clearly than his mind.
Because it was so easy to do things, especially when they were things that helped others. He heard less when he was concentrating hard, when he was busy trying to score a goal or trying to reach something too hard or simply struggling to hold too many shopping bags and listen to Akari's chatter at the same time.
Akari was a godsend. She had her share of worries and baggage but she seemed to learn early on what he needed was someone to look out for him, even though he'd never ask. He had to run himself into the ground. He couldn't do anything else because then there'd be the voices asking why he hadn't done more. And he couldn't keep running himself into the ground if he didn't have Akari because his parents couldn't follow him to school and couldn't follow him to clubs and other places, even though they made sure to keep an extra sharp eye on his health and drag him away to quiet places on holidays when it felt like he simply couldn't take any more. The quiet places were good. He could almost relax: it was only his parents' voices…and sometimes Akari's voices, when they invited her. But he wouldn't last even that long if it wasn't Akari catching him with pillows and covering him with a blanket she carried everywhere and endured some laughs due to. And if she didn't stick a straw into his mouth (or nose on occasion) and force some sweet juice into his throat because his blood sugar's running dangerously low but he's too preoccupied to stop… Of course, they'd been doing all that since before he started hearing those voices, before he had the extra weight on top of his shoulders. That was back when he hadn't listened to a different sort of voice.
And now they all had extra weight on his shoulders, wondering where his extra weight had come from. And he had to try and placate them as well as everything else, and his notebook filled. And he made more, even though everything in the first hadn't been ticked off and, possibly, never would be ticked off. They piled up. They drowned him, so that even a quiet corner of the Japanese countryside wasn't enough to make him not think about all the people still waiting for help.
It was too much. Simply too much. Again he remembered that girl who'd jumped off the bridge at Tokyo Bay and drowned herself. Or maybe this was another person. The voice seemed fresher. The person drowning under pressure seemed closer in both time and space. Should he try and stop them? he wondered. He focused; he saw brown hair, pale, almost greyish skin, and he couldn't make out much more. They were about his height, he decided after a little more thought. The skin and hair colour were definitely off. Even though teachers said he looked too pale recently, and his mother gave him more vitamins and a stronger shampoo and combed his hair and hummed nonsensically until the voices were drowned out and the soothing strokes lulled him to sleep.
Was he supposed to stop that boy, he wondered? He still remembered the feeling of relief from that girl. He'd learnt the whole story from the news except the whispers, those precious thoughts, that he'd heard inside his head. And now he was hearing it all again except it was someone else, and here was another chance to change something, to help – but was he supposed to help?
It kept on coming back to that. Was he supposed to help? Or would that person be happier when they came to the inevitable conclusion themselves? That the only way to stop that pressure was to…die…
And then one day he was in the hospital and his parents were crying and Akari was angry – but there were tears streaming down her face as well. She was also crying. And he didn't understand why. But they did. They understood better than him. He'd cracked under all the weight he tried to carry, they said. He'd jumped off some bridge and it was pure luck – because Akari had been sick that day – that had saved him.
And in the hospital, the voices screamed, louder than he'd ever heard them. Maybe it was the medication they pumped him with. And it all slipped out of his loosened, languid tongue in an almost emotionless voice. And everyone listened. Some believing, some not. His mother found his journals, found all those words, all that pain, written in there. But believing or not was irrelevant. No-one cared whether it was a truth or a falsehood or a hallucination; what mattered was that they were raking him alive and leaving wounds that gradually grew deeper and they needed to be quelled.
But then the voices grew quieter, until he couldn't understand then anymore. The weight of their existence was still there, but it was less now that he couldn't hear what they had to say. It must have been the other medications, and that only meant they would be waiting for a vengeance for the time in which they were released.
Why couldn't his head have some shining defender that would deal with all those trespassers? But that was just another thought of selfishness from him. Another uncharacteristic thought of selfishness and he squashed it hurriedly. Maybe he should offer an olive branch instead – but all that assumed a war in his mind. It wasn't that at all. Just the voices of everyone else reaching his ears when they shouldn't. Maybe he should invent in some earwax instead – but he didn't want to ignore those voices, when they were all screaming out like that –
He was confused. Appallingly so, and perhaps it was a good thing that the decision wasn't in his hands during his little vacation in the hospital. And that in itself was a confusing one. He answered more questions than he'd been asked in his life, all odd sorts of questions he didn't really understand and some he hadn't thought about in years. It had been a long time since someone had asked him his favourite colour after all. Red was his answer. Red because of blood, they asked? No, he said. Red because it was life. Vibrant. Enthusiastic. Loving.
Didn't match at all with a guy who'd tried to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge, they whispered. Not his parents, of course. Not Akari either, or her parents or her brother. He wondered if they thought he should have slit his wrists instead. That seemed more fitting with the colour red. His mind was filled with lots of macabre thoughts from before the voices quietened down. Too many people in the teenagers ward trying to die. Not that he was a teenager. But they hadn't put him in the children's ward. Maybe because children, in their view, didn't try to die.
But he was still a child and despite all the snippets of adulthood he'd caught in the pleas for pain, some things were still beyond his understanding. Like why he'd started hearing the voices to begin with. Like where all that pain came from. Like why he couldn't fix all of it – and like how some of it wasn't even worth trying to fix. There were all sorts of things in the hospital and he, followed dutifully by a nurse so he didn't get into trouble and didn't stray from surveillance, found out as he drifted about the ward. Some people were in and out. Others were there a long time. Some longer than him. Some wanted to talk. Some didn't. It was a far more black and white world than outside and he didn't need the voices in his head to see them all in pain. It wasn't like the rest of the world where he hadn't noticed that almost every person in the world had at least ten things that hurt them.
But even though the voices stayed dutifully quiet when he took his medicines after finally being released, he had that knowledge now. He couldn't pass people by without wondering what the voice that only he could hear was saying, and it grated at his nerves. He saw a mother with her baby, smiling, but he'd heard many whispering words from such mothers before. He saw an old man raking leaves in the yard looking content with life – but he'd heard the words of ill-content from others just like him.
Finally, he couldn't stand the silence and flushed his pills down the toilet.
It was almost funny, considering he'd wanted so badly not to hear them some months before.
And even funnier was that when he started hearing voices again, it was his twelfth birthday.