Salvation
chapter 2: Eri
My first taste of the outside was more fantastic than I had ever imagined in my dank prison cell. I saw the sky for the first time, and I was frightened by the trees, not knowing what they were. The outdoors was a weird and wonderful world, and it both captivated and confused me.
After the initial amazement of the outside world wore off, I came to realize that I had no idea where I was, where I was going, or what to do. I had no idea how to interact with people or what I could eat. I had no clue where I could stay. When nearly a whole day of wandering had gone by, I was worried.
My skin festered and stung, every movement I made a painful endeavor. I could barely move my right arm, the muscles had been so deeply simmered, and I could not hear anything through my right ear. I forced myself to remain strong. I could not die now that my true life had only just begun.
I was not as scared as I think a more normal injured girl might have been in my situation—my life had been a struggle from day one, and I was used to being alone and not knowing when my next meal might be. I was determined to carve a life for myself somehow, in some way, and I would simply have to learn.
I couldn't give up.
On my first night in the free world, I found a hole in the ground and collapsed in it, feeling oddly safe surrounded by the earth.
-.-.-
When I opened my eyes to the light of the morning, standing above my hole was a young girl. When she saw me looking at her she gasped and ran off.
"Wait!" I cried after her, scrambling out of my hole.
She stopped and looked at me, furrowing her eyebrows. "Why are you sleeping out here?" she asked. "What's wrong with your face?"
"Because I don't got a home," I told her.
"Sorry," she said.
"And I burned myself."
"That's dumb," she stated matter-of-factly, putting her hands on her hips. "Why'd you do that?"
I glared at her. "What do you know? I did it to escape. I was a slave."
"A slave?" the girl repeated incredulously. "Are you on the run? A fugitig?"
"No," I said, unsure what was fugitig was. "They kicked me out 'cause of the burns," I told her proudly.
She didn't seem to understand the great thing I had accomplished, and instead seemed disappointed at this news. "Whatever. Wanna play?"
I blinked. "What?"
"Oh, I guess slaves don't play. I'll teach you to play, slavey-girl!" she declared.
"Don't call me that," I reprimanded her.
"Well, what's your name?"
I was silent.
"You don't got a name?"
I shook my head.
"I'll name you!" She stared at me for a minute, then laughed. "You look like a zombie all dirty and burnt up like that! I got it. I'll call you Mukuro!"
"That's not funny!" I screamed at her.
"But I like it! Mukuro! Mukuro!"
She continued to taunt me until I growled and chased her, and we were both running through the forest until we forgot what I was even chasing her for, and Mukuro became a name I wasn't angry about.
-.-.-
I learned that the girl's name was Eri while she taught me how to play. She taught me to play Scream, where one person hid while the other person had to try to find them without being surprised when the hidden one tries to scare them. If you make a noise then you lose. I always won.
Eri got tired of losing so she tried to teach me how to clap hands, except I could barely move my right arm, so she just taught me the rhymes and clapped her hands on my knees to pretend we were doing it.
"Raizen, Raizen, he's the king / But he's big and really mean / Mommy says to stay away / But I'll be Raizen's queen one day!" she sang.
"Who's Raizen?" I asked.
Her eyes grew huge. "You don't know who Raizen is?" I shook my head. "Raizen is the king of everything! He's the biggest baddest strongest demon ever!"
"You mean he's in charge of everyone?"
"Yup," she answered.
I immediately decided that I did not like him.
-.-.-
While Eri was teaching me what the trees and creatures were, my burns began to sting even more and my stomach growled. I was hungry and thirsty and my wounds probably needed to be taken care of. Eri eventually saw the pain on my face, and she asked me delicately, "Does it hurt?"
"Yeah," I told her. "It hurts a lot." It did hurt a lot in the places I could feel the burn. I suppose my nerves had been killed in the places where it did not.
"You don't look like it hurts a lot," she said. "You look like it hurts a little."
"I'm used to hurting," I explained. "But it does hurt a lot. And I haven't eaten in two days either."
Eri sucked on her hair, a habit she had when she was thinking too hard. "Can you hunt stuff?"
"What do you mean?"
"Oh yeah, you never even seen animals before. I guess you can't. My daddy hunts stuff, and he's teaching me, too. Like fish."
"What's fish?"
"Squirmy things that live in rivers. Water," she clarified. "They have big eyes like this." She circled her eyes with her fingers. "And their lips are like this." She puckered her mouth and moved her lips open, closed, open, closed.
If I had been a child that was shown love, I might have laughed at her face, but when I did not, she gave up and sucked on her hair again. "I might could teach you. But I need to get a net. Okay?"
I nodded and she ran off, leaving me in the forest to wait.
-.-.-
It took longer to catch fish than I had hoped for, and when Eri and I made a fire and stuck the fish on twigs and roasted them, I was drooling with anticipation.
The crudely barbecued fish was more delicious than anything I had ever eaten before, and Eri barely had any to eat as I plowed through fish after fish until they were gone.
"Wow! Guess you really were hungry," she commented. I simply nodded and chewed.
We laid back in the grass at the shore of the river and talked as the fire died down, and after a while, Eri told me she had to go home.
"My daddy got in a big fight yesterday so he spends all day sleeping after that, that's why I got to play all day today. But I can't do this every day. Only sometimes. But I can come find you, right? I'll come see you all the time."
"Yeah," I agreed.
I hated seeing her leave, but suddenly the thought occurred to me that for the first time in my life, I was not alone.
-.-.-
When I woke up, I washed in the river. The cool water soothed my burns, but froze the rest of me, and half of me wanted to get out while the other wanted to stay. I thought it was funny, having two different halves of myself. I liked the scarred one better, because it was smarter, and nobody would think it was pretty. The only way it could be any better is if it hadn't taken my arm and my hearing and it didn't hurt all the time. I appreciated my other side for those things. It was almost as if I could go through life with the best of both worlds.
I spent hours trying to grab fish with my only hand, because Eri had to take her net home with her. It was a failure after a failure. Most of the time the fish didn't even come near me.
After the seventh escaped fish, I had become so frustrated that I screamed and hit the water, and it only splashed me arrogantly back in my face. That only made me angrier, and I continued to hit the water, when suddenly I caught a glimpse of a strange red light and the water seemed to explode.
I stood in shock as droplets of river water rained around me, and I stared at my hand. I could have sworn that the light had come from me, but it wasn't there anymore. I didn't understand.
The flopping of a fish on shore caught my attention, and reminded of how hungry I was, I forgot about the light while I scrambled to eat.
-.-.-
I didn't see Eri until the next day. By then I had moved on from fish and was scouting the forest, wondering if I would have better luck with a woodland creature, not that I had any idea of the proper way to eat such a meal at the time. I had just set my eyes on a squirrel when I heard her shout my name through the trees.
I raced after the sound of her voice, and her expression at my disheveled appearance was none too pleased. "What're you doing?"
"Trying to get food," I said, glaring at her.
Eri laughed.
"Stop doing that," I snapped. "I hate that."
She instantly stopped, looking hurt. "Why? That's not fair. Why can't I laugh?"
I didn't like when anyone laughed or smiled.
"Don't you laugh?" I shook my head and continued to glare at her for asking what seemed to me to be such a stupid question. "Why not?"
"Because I don't hurt people like that," I growled.
She looked at me as if I had just said the dumbest thing in the world. "What are you talking about? People don't laugh when they hurt people! It's what you do when you're happy! When you like something!" Eri stuck her fingers at the corners of my mouth and forced me to smile, and I batted her hands away.
"You like me, right?" she asked. I nodded after a moment. "Then you should smile 'cause you like me! 'Cause we have fun!"
I wasn't sure if I should believe her, but I thought I understood what she was saying. I thought maybe I could try to smile and laugh if it made her happy.
-.-.-
Because I hadn't learned how to hunt yet, Eri showed me there were fruits I could eat, and we climbed up in trees, reaching up for apples and pears and dropping them to the ground after we plucked them from their limbs.
Eri climbed past me to reach a particularly healthy-looking pear when I saw the bruise on her arm, and I snatched her wrist to inspect it.
"Let go!" she snapped.
"What happened?"
She wrenched her arm free of my grasp and jerked the pear off the twig.
"Tell me," I pressed.
She avoided my gaze as she dropped the pear and said, "My dad. He gets angry. Sometimes it just happens."
My chest tightened. "He hurts you?" I asked, a little more harshly than I intended.
Eri climbed down from the tree. "Just drop it, okay?"
She didn't understand how I could not bear to.
My chest ached for days, and when Eri got angry with me for not laughing and smiling, I found it was even harder to fake it. The feeling was not behind it anymore. I could not share her joy knowing that she had pain that might have been in any way like mine. She was the first good thing that had happened to me.
I could not let her suffer.
-.-.-
I eventually became better at hunting, and found that I was becoming faster and stronger. When I caught my first prey, a rabbit, I didn't know what to do with it, and it squeaked and kicked in my grasp while I held it at the base of its head. While I had felt incredible and powerful the moment I first caught it, something ached in the pit of my stomach now while I watched the rabbit screaming for its life, knowing that I was going to kill it and it was going to die, and something about that was terrible for me.
I had to face the fact that it was always going to be the decision of my own life or the life of the things I killed, and when I stepped on it to hold it in place and split open its throat with a sharp rock, I knew I had made it.
-.-.-
One night after fishing with Eri, I followed her home. I had developed my skill at hunting to the point where she didn't notice my presence as I moved among the trees, and as she entered her home, I scrambled into the nearest tree and looked out at the village she lived in.
It was mostly quiet, but there were a couple demons shuffling in the paths. I had just begun to observe someone as they brought clothes inside their house when I heard the clatter inside Eri's house.
My pulse quickened and I focused my attention on the sounds from within, and I managed to hear a large voice filled with rage, then a tiny voice spewing apologies.
Another clatter. A cry.
It must have been a split second that I dropped from the tree and raced to Eri's door. Another second that I met bewildered eyes. Another second that light flashed in front of my eyes and the blood was on my hands.
I had never seen this man before, and he was dead at my feet.
Some part of me that must have known what had happened thought that this would be okay, and that I had done a good thing.
I was brought back to reality when I heard the scream.