Prologue (0)
Rain. Loud, grey, annoying rain. That was all the man dubbed 'The Monster of Ikebukuro' saw as he stared blankly out the window. What time was it, around noon maybe? He didn't know, nor did he bother to care. He just sat there quietly at his kitchen table with a glass of milk. The only sounds that could be heard were the rain against the window and the ticking of the clock... Until, there was a knock at the door.
Have you ever had that moment when someone tells you they know what you're feeling? Did you stop to wonder if they really did? Or were they just being sympathetic? Not that there's anything wrong with trying to show someone you care, but a lie is still a lie, no matter how much sugar you drown it in. Nobody truly understands.
He was born just as most other babies. Fragile, crying, and healthy.
"Congratulations Mrs. Kadota, you've given birth to a healthy baby boy." The doctor had told the mother as he held the infant. She smiled happily and glanced up at her husband who was holding her hand firmly in his grasp, wearing the same expression.
"May we see our child now?" The father had asked. The baby was handed to the mother, wrapped in a blanket. It was so small, so frail, so innocent. She almost seemed mesmerized by it.
"Have you picked a name for him yet?" Keeping her eyes on her child, the mother answered. "Kyohei. His name is Kyohei."
She smiled softly at it. The baby was calming down and falling into a deep asleep, the mother too seeming to drift into slumber. As her eyes closed she muttered a few low words. "He's special. I know it."
Little did she know just how right she was.
It started when he was three years old. His parents were having a fight when he came in complaining that he felt hot. After checking his temperature and getting a reading of 102, they decided to take him to the doctor to see if it was just a fever or worse. But on the way his fever disappeared, almost instantaneously, and was replaced by a headache.
Back then they didn't pay much mind to it. They were just relieved that it didn't turn out to be something serious. Nothing they could catch anyway. But it didn't take them too long to notice something was wrong.
As time went on, the child would experience strange pains that would disappear almost as quickly as they appeared. And medicine seemed to have no healing or soothing effect on the pains. Nobody understood why this was, not even the boy himself.
But what he did understand was that he only felt these pains when he was around other people. So he grew distant and avoided contact with other humans as much as he could. He would even avoid his own parents, since he often got headaches around them, and lock himself in his room with a stack of books. He never once felt lonely. To him, those bundles of paper with words were the only companions he needed.
Yet he never felt happiness either. He didn't understand it, or really any other emotion for that matter. Only how to avoid discomfort. That's how his life was. And that's how it would've stayed, had he not met someone who would become special to him...