Hurt. It hurts. In his chest. When he looks at them, and they look through him. Is he invisible?
He looks at himself.
He's there, so why can't anyone see him?
It feels long. Forever. Standing there. But no one looked. Not even once. Even if their eyes were on him, they were looking past him. At something else. He moved around. A different spot each day. But no matter where, no one looks at him.
Except at the one place. The dirty place. Where people looked with mean eyes at him. At him. It hurt. But it felt good. People were looking at him. He likes it there now. He walks through it as much as he can.
And now he's standing there still. On a different place. The street is empty now as water pours down. His head hangs low but he's smiling, happy.
People acknowledge him there, even if it hurts worse than before.
---
"It's sad isn't it, Iruka?" Stares with clouded eyes, you see the pupils are slits now
Continues, "Even when they looked at him with hate, he enjoyed it. Because people were paying attention to him. Letting him know he was real."
Throws his head back and laughs, you shudder, the spikes of his hair look like fox ears but you shake it away, this is the boy you knew, not the demon
He lifts up a hand and you notice how small it is, how young he still is, yet having gone through so much runs it through the mass of blonde spikes, running his fingers along his scalp.
you shudder again, because you swear, swear, you just saw a flash of red in that mop of yellow
"No one ever loved him.." he muses over his thoughts, smiling, you stand there and yell out that you loved him like a son, because that's what he was to you, still is to you
Turns to you "Iruka, there was a time when you too hated and ignored him. He was the embodiment of the thing that killed your parents, remember? You never forgot that." And you know he's right, there was a time when you hated him with every fiber that was you, when you would have loved to see him die, and you still would, though not as much as before
Gets up lazily, bones cracking in an almost serene manner as he moves. And you run
you run because somehow you know you're going to die, even if this is the boy you have come to love as your own, it is still the thing that killed your parents and it can kill you and you are afraid, afraid of it killing you, of him killing you because you have betrayed him by running away, that's why you're running, and it doesn't even make sense but at the same time makes perfect sense
"Iruka..." its voice is calm, behind you no matter how fast or slow you run, because to him he is exempt from the pulls of fate, he merely watches things turn out, like he's watching you when you steal a look over your shoulder
"Iruka." you try to ignore that changing tone of voice, you don't look back anymore, if you do you'll be caught, caught in his eyes, in his mind and you'll never escape
"Iruka-sensei look at me! Please look at me! Help!" you look back because that's him, and you could never leave him behind, even if he did kill your parents, when he looks like that you would be the monster if you kept running away.
you get caught by his eyes, they pull you in and you can do nothing but shudder because it's so empty in here and the hollowness astounds you because you thought someone cared enough to give him a good memory to hold on to. Instead of all this blankness
you're suffocating in here, you need to get out, GET OUT, before you kill yourself to make the emptiness go away, it hurts so bad a deep aching that you only touched upon when your parents died.
and you're out, staring him in the face, you wrap your arms around him, pulling him into a hug, even when he starts to thrash and cut your arms and shred your skin and slowly kill you
you just stay there, hugging him, letting him kill you because you deserve to die, deserve it because even you abandoned him, left him a lone in that hell of a mind with no happy memory, just emptiness, and you think if you stay here it might make up for your betrayal and he'll have something to hang onto when everyone's gone.
yes, you deserve to die; the whole village deserves to die for what they did to him, leaving him, abandoning him, betraying him,
you all deserve to die
Iruka's body falls to the ground, what remains of it is covering him and staining his skin, he never thought he'd finally get it. But he did. And Iruka earned his retribution through it.
Thank you Iruka,
For giving me,
My first happy memory.
