Suna was alone in the forest. It was a fact he was achingly aware of. Not alone in the sense that he was the only living being, nor alone in the sense that he was the only sentient being, but alone in that he was the only human who frequented the forest. He didn't need any innate sense to know that, just basic logic. Everyone else in town avoided anything off the beaten path like it would bring about their demise; maybe it would. His aloneness rang through the trees and echoed around him as he spoke to the graves and cleaned the temple, all by himself. Sometimes, he wished that his was not the only voice to be heard among the leaves. But the fact remained that no other people dared enter the forest, not in the way that Rintarou did oh so often.
The problem with that statement, however, came with the other voices. Not the screams, no, he knew those were not human, but the voices. They sounded so real, so close by, so achingly human. The voices spoke to him like another person might, just without body. Which was why they were so strange; the human voices didn't come from human forms; they didn't come from anywhere at all. Suna had long since shunned the idea that he had gone mad, the townsfolk may have referred to him as such, but he knew he was perfectly sane. His intact sanity, however, did nothing to explain the voices. Where did they come from? What did they want? Who were they? It did not take him long to find answers.
The voices came to him at the edge of sleep, in that hazy gray area between the waking world and dreams. He would lay in the fountain, minutes away from a deep slumber, and they would talk to him. Gentle voices whispering sweet nothings to his groggy mind and keeping him from sleep. For the longest time, he could make out their words; they were just human voices, noise in the background that he could identify as not belonging to the forest. He would fall asleep to indistinct murmurings in his ear and would wake up with knowledge he had not known previously. They were comforting, almost, if he didn't think about what they were and where they came from. It was a good arrangement.
When he could finally make out their words, when he learned to understand what it was that they said, Rintarou realized the voices were less than benign. They grew louder before they became clearer, sometimes insistent, other times gentle. The words spoken, once he could understand them, whispered a vastly different message. They spoke in the same tones, enticing and light, but Suna could hear the underlying hate and cruelty there. Something was incredibly wrong with the voices, and he was not so stupid as to believe their meaningless offers and demands.
Perhaps the voices would have been more effective if they had better methods of tricking him. The voices relied on predetermined familiarity, it seemed. Always they crafted themselves into a poor mimicry of the people Rintarou knew and cared for. The voices never sounded quite right, though, his father's grumble just a tad too gravely, his mother's keen too shrill. They didn't always mimic his relatives, but when they tried to use Kita's voice or those of Suna's other former classmates, they too came out wrong and slightly garbled.
The words they spoke and how they spoke them were wrong too. They would mimic his father, Git outta here, boy. His not-quite-father's voice would rumble too roughly, You don't ever try and come home now, ya hear? His accent was all wrong although the voice was similar, Suna's father spoke like someone from the city, not with the lackadaisical and drawling accent of the country folk. Their impression of his mother was no better. Come home to us, my sweet, the voice called out, slightly too nasal, do you not love us enough to stay? Their mimicry spoke too fast to ever match his mother's candor. His father was the one who could shoot out words rapid-fire like a gun; his mother spoke slowly and sweetly, a habit she picked up from the local people. She never called him 'my sweet' either, always darling or sweetheart. Their impression of his sister was by far the worst. Come on Suna-nii, play with me! They had made her voice in too high a register; she had always had a deep voice for a little girl. More importantly, she never called him Suna, always Rintarou, and she never asked to play; she just brought over her toys and fiddled with them until he noticed. Sometimes the voices of his mother and father would join together to tell him how lonely they were with no children in the house; it seemed then that the voices forgot his little sister just as often as they posed as her. No, the voices were all wrong.
The contents of the messages were confusing too. Sometimes they would croon in dulcet, saccharine tones and encourage him to stay in the woods forever, to stop returning to his family. Other times they were airy and desperate; they begged him to go back to humanity, to turn tail and never look back. Most unnervingly, they would ask Suna to follow them, voices laced with unhidden loathing and glee. When those failed, they tried to coerce him with more material things. Food, all his favourites and without end, water, clean and cold, clothes, jewels, any possession imaginable. Failing that, they offered him things they thought he truly desired, adventure, knowledge, safety. They bounced between the options like a child of divorce seeking stability. None of the offered possibilities were ones that Rintarou cared much to entertain; he was happy with the arrangement he had now, thank you very much.
Eventually, Suna took to fully hiding in the fountain at night. It did not stop the voices, but the fountain made him feel safe and the voices quieter. He always ignored the voices, too clever and too nervous to respond. He did not know what would happen to him if he answered them, and he did not want to know, he decided. To follow them, to give them a reply, was surely a death sentence regardless of their origin. So, in the fountain he remained, dutifully ignoring the voices as they increased their efforts tenfold every night.
They got closer, always closer. When he heard them first, they sounded far away and underwater, bleary and nothing more than noise. Every night they drew closer until it sounded as if they had found a way to speak directly into Suna's ear. They were so close, all the time, almost on top of him, suffocating him. They grew in multitude as well, one at first, now a chorus of familiar and wrong voices overlapping in a dissonant jumble. The choir made his head ache and shook his bones so much that it became unbearable. He could not sleep, hadn't for days, not with that gut-wrenching racket clamouring for attention in his tired head. He had to leave, had to find a place where they couldn't get to him.
Desperate and deprived of sleep, Suna stumbled off into the night, headed for the temple and for rest.
