.Humanum.
Even if there existed other universes, it would all play out the same anyway.
In another world, there are no birdmen. There are no blackouts to distract from reality, there are no superpowers to test and flex, there is no EDEN looming in the distance.
There is a plane crash, though, and a small boy who fell asleep a third grader and woke up an orphan. Despite his survival being nothing short of a miracle, the words that reverberate from the lips of strangers all say the same thing,
"Such a shame."
They say this but do not clarify if they mean the plane crash, the loss of his parents, or the fact that he survived. He'd never expect congratulations, but the weight of the condolences is heavy on his tiny shoulders.
"How are you feeling?" he soon learned, was an adult way of asking, "Do I need to be worried about you?". He saw the way they relaxed when he answered with some semblance of positivity, the way they responded 'I'm here if you need to talk' despite making strides towards the nearest exit.
xx
There's a moment here that happens when he experiences his first blackout in Japan. He's still in his auntie's care, but it occurs before the awkward dance that is the blackouts is solidified to a weekly-ish routine. He's invited to the home of a friend from class because according to the boy's mother being in the company of others is the best cure for grief.
While he is there, though, the sky scars and bleeds a rancid thing of nightmares with a hundred legs and fifteen eyes and so many teeth into being. His friend, poor boy, stares up at the thing and is so inexperienced with the concept that he doesn't know that he should run, dammit. Run away! And all Sou can do is rip into the thing again and again and again until it splinters into black cells and dissipates.
A guttural fear arrests the boy and he runs away from the scary thing, the boy with the glowing red eyes. Sou never goes over again.
In this world, though, the intended meeting coincides with Sou's extended hospital stay. His friend grows bored, because Sou seems physically fine, but the big white casts on his legs and his con-cu-ssion (sound it out, Sou) mean that they cannot play as hard as they want (read: he cannot run, television and fast movements give him headaches). Talking is limited since he can't stay awake for too long without fatigue dragging him away.
This time, the boy complains to his mother that 'it's no fun', and suddenly soccer practice coincides with every phone call Sou makes.
xx
Life goes on because time passes, or maybe it's the other way around. He doesn't know. He doesn't know anything.
The first day he returns to school is much like it was the year before. He's met with sympathetic looks from his teachers who swear "I'm here to listen" but are stretched thin and understaffed and scattered between the other vaguely traumatized, lost, children.
The first month he returns to school, he's alone. They don't want to speak with him because he's weird. He's quiet and they speak loudly when they don't know he's listening. His eyes are red his parents are dead and when they ask "why are you even alive?" he answers "I don't know."
While most of the other children do outgrow crying when they are hurt -and let it be known he's no exception- he's the only one who broke an arm and remained absolutely mum until he was prompted to return for his backpack, only for the teacher to realise no way should it bend in that angle.
His teacher becomes well acquainted with his aunt and the emergency line, and his aunt becomes acquainted with a healthy dosage of fear that takes residence in the form of her father on speed dial.
xx
The Sou-phobia, the fear of—him. Of what he is, of what he does when he disappears in the midday, of what he thinks as he bores into her with red eyes, much like hers but fundamentally unsettling and different, is replaced by another fear. This one is sired from hearing him whimper at night, from watching him huddle into himself and away from other people.
His aunt, bless her, is an impatient woman who's much more suited to whisking him away from the folks who were actually meant to do the parenting thing. She tries hard for "kind and understanding", and without the quiet judgements passed by a jury of nosy neighbours— "Did you see his bruises?", "I heard they found him in Shizuoka last night","Is she even taking care of him?"- he stays a bit longer.
Her apartment is small and could be considered completely inadequate for a child. She hadn't expected one long-term. She had always been the "free-spirited younger sister", and that her brother had one of his own was basically enough. Visits were usually held in his old house where certain drawers have locks and adult drinks are kept safely out of sight as opposed to displayed brazenly in big brown armoire. In her apartment there is a room with his clothes and his toys and a desk, and he convinces them both he doesn't wish they'd return home.
(The big red sign in front screams F-O-R-S-A-L-E, and he's no longer allowed inside.)
As difficult as it is, she tries to be the mother he lost, the brother she lost. She insists it's not his fault when he wakes up howling with the stench of rotting meat, exposed fat, dead parents, clogging his sinuses and he can't breathe. She says it's okay when he stops paying attention mid-sentence and stares instead at the clouds, formless and white. Her success is measured in quiet moments when he breathes and she breathes and they heal.
Her failures begin when he develops into a stoic medley of their traits. When that happens, things burn, clothes remain soaked, her blood runs cold. He doesn't know what she's thinking, he's not telepathic in this world, but his instinct tells him to hug her tight, and so he does.
There are nights where that is all they do, all they can do. There are days they take in strides.
It's a choice, this time, when his grandfather's partner passes away. He doesn't need to go, isn't being (aggressively) hedged towards it. This time, his aunt is not in a straightjacket. She doesn't scream of treacheries he didn't know he committed
("It's him! It's him, I swear! He's a monster!")
She smiles at him and suggests the change in scenery would do him well.
She borrows a car from a person at work and drives him all the way there. When they part ways, she invites him to visit from time to time. Pleads, really.
xx
As it is, the eldest of the Takayama patriarchs takes him in and they live in the little apartment above the workshop and garage. They are identical in features and temperament, so the alliance is more or less like looking into some sort of age-defying mirror. Grandpa speaks sparingly. They get along well. He eats half as much as he would if he spent his evenings in the sky.
The new school attempts to cram his head full of figures and facts, assuming it empty when he stares at the clouds, still formless, still white, instead of pretending to listen to the droning of the teacher. It bounces around in there, knocks for a while, but once it's transferred onto paper worksheets, it ultimately disappears. He does it, though, because it gives him a goal, a big red 'O' that he has to get to. Even if the reward is just a few circles and a quickly stamped smilie. He does not exist between assignments.
In the evenings Grandpa fiddles in the workshop, tinkering on whatever machines he gets his hands on. He moves in a frenzy when he is working. Pauses are rare. Brief. Sparse. A pause happens only for a moment before the next task is underway.
Though technically they are only an autobody shop, the requests they receive are large and small and from everyone in between. The day when Mrs. X needs her lawn mower fixed, and Mr. Y's oven keeps burning things, and Company Z's big-noisy-machine goes haywire, and Grandpa's so busy that he basically sleeps at the workstation, is the day he picks up a screwdriver.
It's smooth and clean, even if he doesn't know what to do with it. The same description applies to the rectangular whatever-it-is sitting on the far back workbench he does homework on. A big metal rod pokes out from it that sometimes rubs against his cheek when his attention is divided. It's been there longer than he has, the only project his grandfather has yet to fix.
He slides the screwdriver into a dip in the otherwise uniform surface and surprise makes him blink when he feels it click on something within. He remembers this part from Grandpa's work, and as if he's being guided by unseen hands, he twists and twists till a small metal screw is produced. He repeats the action three more times for each of the four metal screws that keep the compartment closed. It blossoms into a disorder of doohickeys he doesn't know the name of and wires he doesn't know the connections to, and then the haze stops.
The mess assaults his vision. The wires intertwine like guts and they are an awful, coppery, red. He tries to shove them back into the machine, but the cover refuses to remain shut. The gut wires spill again, and again, and again,
-over his hair, over his clothes, in his lungs-
His actions escape him until he hears the crash of the device on the concrete floor of the workshop, and when he does become somewhat drawn to the indignant noise it makes, he stares at the mangled thing . The body is black -is green and dressed in ugly brown khakis, is yellow and 'you don't need to wear heels on a plane, dear' . The wires spring from some unseen source in the -white dress behind the sunflower coloured cardigan . He reaches down and picks up the -silly cowboy hat from a souvenir store somewhere in the last airport they went to- then sets them all in the -firetruck red backpack, along with a disposable camera because he'd 'want to remember it forever' .
They board the plane and- someone calls his name in the distance. It wooshes tremendously and pops his eardrums as- he feels himself being shaken, slightly, gently. Dad complains about turbulence and Mum promises- that dinner's ready, he's been standing in the same place for a while now.
"Sou? Sou?"
One blink and Grandpa comes into focus, eyebrows scrunched together and mouth an active pantomime. Two and he's in the back of the workshop, the room stained red by the dying sunset. Three and the device is suddenly heavy in his arms.
This happened in the other world, too, but the Sou of that world is lucky, has physically beaten the demon into submission again and again. The machine explodes into a tract of wires but instead of thinking of planes and cramped spaces, he thinks of dripping amalgamations. Head of a cranefly, body of a maggot, legs of a tarantula. That kind of thing.
The Sou of this world does not have the armor that comes with fleeing for your life, but much like the other his fight to survive gives him no rewards.
After assuring that he's fed, he's warm, he's breathing normally, and that he's not floating somewhere far and distant, Grandpa returns to the workshop. Sou follows close behind, not particularly sure of any of these things. He stays a few paces behind Grandpa, who bypasses the truck, the big red what-is-that, and heads straight for the workbench and... that . It hasn't miraculously come back together in the hours they spent upstairs. It's still broken, spilling messily, taking up space. Sou pulls at his t-shirt collar.
Grandpa sighs as he turns the thing over, once, twice. He makes a tutting noise before he settles onto a stool, high and unstable, and begins to take apart the rectangular object. The actions make him uncomfortable but Sou watches anyway, curiosity overwhelming the flips and spins that his stomach makes. Grandpa pulls apart the wires-orange, he can see now, with strands of white interspersed- and places they and the copper slab they connect to on the bench. He observes the dark body of the device, holding it at arm's length and running his fingers over the surface. Seemingly satisfied, he nods and departs from the desk in heavy steps.
While Grandpa is away from the desk, Sou takes his seat. The parts are messy and sprawled everywhere, but in the glow of the incandescent light bulb the discomfort is minimal. Still, there is something unsettling about it being in parts , one there, one here, especially given that it was whole hours prior. He traces the paths his grandfather made on the device and his breath hitches when he gets to a large striation on one of its faces. He thinks back to the crash from before and can make fuzzy connections to his arms raising above his head moments before it. The breath sours in his throat, solidifies and refuses to be released.
"'Was a walkie talkie," Grandpa says from behind him, his voice strong and even, "'Broke when you were young. You probably don't remember it."
He's right. Sou looks up at him, but the mass in his throat resists movement and the question doesn't make it passed his lips.
"I can't fix it." Grandpa states. Then he rubs a thumb over one of his eyelids, "Breadboards are a young man's game."
Maybe he's the telepathic one.
xx
There are a lot of broken things in Grandpa's garage. There's the toaster, the radio, the computer, things with parts that are just a bit too small for Grandpa to see. Sometimes he sighs when he's making the side dishes for dinner and he cracks an egg and the shell splinters. Sometimes he can't hold Sou's homework far away enough and those pages slip through without correction, so Sou compensates by making praiseworthy characters-big and wide, with clean strokes.
He does his homework in the workshop still. The sound of Grandpa's tinkering focuses him. When he's finished and his brain is devoid of knowledge, he spends his extra moments observing the source at work until the device under operation roars again with life. Seeing things sedentary makes Sou shiver, and the thought that the toaster won't toast, the computer won't compute or that the radio won't play awful showtunes all through the night puts a cold dampness on his body.
"I'll fix it," Sou promises one time between maths problems, "The stuff in the garage. I'll fix it."
Grandpa blinks and for once his brow is not pursed into deep crevices. His mouth is still a thin line, but his eyes are not as sharp as usual, "You'll need learn your way 'round the 'shop, then."
His unfurrowed brow is a welcome surprise to Sou.
xx
Third year of middle school comes quickly and goes just as fast.
He gets confessed to. He turns her down. His aunt is all guffaws when he tells her the story.
Three people from his grade die in a bussing accident. The boy with the mechanical pencil, the temple boy (tall, like a pole, weak to cats), and the foreign-looking chatty one. He hears that there was a girl with them too. He hears that they held on for a various states of a week before they finally gave, which he knows is more than a lot of people can ask for. He knows what their families must be going through, can predict the bus themed nightmares in the nights to come, but knows none of them personally enough to mourn or offer condolences.
He opts not to go to the field trip despite his grandfather's suggestion. Without a reasonable point in sight, Sou writes it off as a waste of money and time. Though he knows he would comply in a heartbeat if he did so, his grandfather does not push him to do it.
A professor by the name of Tatsume stops by their class to give a lecture on something he doesn't understand. His assistant has sand blonde hair and jokingly threatens to stab him if he's not careful. Sou appreciates the mans enthusiasm, but isn't displeased when he leaves after third period.
He sees none of his classmates after graduation. Machines and black gunk take their place.
xx
There is an abandoned lot that Sou likes to lie in. Its boundaries are blurred by thistle and long grass. Wildflowers bloom in erratic patches.
When it gets too much , he'd said, referencing blackouts and constant white noise of everything dying that he can't save.
When it gets too much , he says, referencing his own nightmares, broken chains of a past that he can't quite shake.
They reach consensus in their breaths
In
Out.