xxxHOLiC; Doumeki; favor me with silence, chapter one
Fandom: xxxHOLiC
title: favor me with silence
rating: Yeah. R. Warnings under that R rating--though warnings will be posted at the beginning of each chapter: Language, violence, rape/sexual abuse, normal abuse, graphic images, even a little guro, but it too is nonconsensual and purely for plot purposes. So, gross stuff and general suckiness.
Summary: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread." Doumeki Shizuka is an Undesirable, a blind one, a cursed child. Pure, unadulterated evil. Eventually Doumeki/Watanuki kid!friendshipromance, though mostly friendship. Hardcore CLAMP crossover.
prologue
chapter one: The Underworld
They dragged him out into the street and across the road to where an armored truck was parked. As they crossed the street, Shizuka realized that all the passerby were watching him, whispering. There was fear in their eyes, and hatred.
The guards wore the blue uniforms of the police that Shizuka recognized from his rare moments of television-watching, but they had white armbands with black embroidery declaring them part of the mayor's guard. Their utility belts had guns, handcuffs, a phone, and ofuda, just like the policemen on television, but they also had a long knife and what looked like a pouch to hold a whip.
Shizuka observed this all detachedly, his mind a million places and yet nowhere at once. What was going on?
Was he really being dragged away from his grandfather, across the street? Had he really just hurt two students just by being near them? Or was it some joke, or a bad dream, or just…not true?
A car sped up and pulled up next to the truck to which he was being dragged. The black letters on the side of the door read Tokyo Coroner.
Oh.
"Look at that," one of the guards sneered. "You killed one of those kids. Maybe both."
Shizuka swallowed. The world was suddenly blurry and fading.
Shizuka had killed someone.
He had killed someone. A little kid. Just like him, but probably with parents and without a cook but they loved and laughed and played and went to school and Shizuka had killed him!
A guard swung open the back of the trunk. The inside was all metal, with a window of hard iron mesh and a hard bench across from it. It was perhaps as long as Shizuka and as wide as him, not very big. The guard pushing him forward swung him around and cuffed his hands in front of him, and then shoved him into the truck, slamming the doors shut.
You are not evil. You are not!
Shizuka set his arms on the bench and pushed himself to his knees. As he moved to climb onto the bench, the truck began to move with a jerk, knocking him down and ramming him into the back door. His head hit the bench and his left shoulder slammed into the handle, and he winced.
He pushed himself to his knees again and the truck stopped abruptly, knocking him back down, and his left shoulder once again hit the floor hard.
Shizuka swallowed back tears. He had to be grown-up. He wasn't going to cry.
He curled onto his side, right hand cupping his aching left shoulder, the handcuffs chafing his wrists.
Grandfather…
His eyes were stinging. The truck jerked around a turn and Shizuka lodged himself underneath the bench so he didn't have to be tossed around anymore.
He was cold. It was fall, after all, and here in Tokyo the winds blew hard in from the sea and it was cold in the fall. Usually Shizuka had a soft wool haori he wore at home, but at school he didn't really need it. It was warm in the classrooms, stuffy almost, so all he had on were his t-shirt and old jeans with holes in the knees because they were supposed to be painting in art in the afternoon and sneakers and old, thin socks. He shivered and curled up tighter, head banging against the bench when the truck hit a pothole.
He wanted Grandfather. He wanted to go home and take a hot bath and eat the cook's onigiri and sit on his futon and meditate like Grandfather had taught him. He wanted to stand out in the middle of the archery range and watch the sun rise over the trees in the estate.
The truck jerked to a stop and the door opened with a clang. A guard-the one who had cuffed him-reached in and grabbed Shizuka's left arm, yanking him out from under the bench.
Shizuka more felt than heard his shoulder pop and pain rushed down his arm and side and he screamed; nothing had ever hurt so badly. He tumbled out of the truck, falling into the guard, who caught him and jerked him up by the arm that hurt. He cried out again.
"What?" the guard snapped. His arm felt disconnected from his body; he couldn't move his fingers.
"My shoulder," he whispered, tears stinging his eyes, finally unable to hold them back.
The guard glanced at it and frowned. "Oh," he said, pushing Shizuka to sit on the edge of the truck. Setting one hand on the bruises Clef-sensei had left and the other tightening around his bicep to the point of pain, he did something and his shoulder popped again, hurting even worse, and snapped back into place.
Shizuka screamed again, hoarsely, grabbing his arm.
"Shut up, you little freak," a second guard said as she came around the truck. The first guard shoved Shizuka in front of him, pushing him forward.
Shizuka clutched his left arm to his chest, wincing as his shoulder began to throb. He could practically feel it swelling underneath his t-shirt.
He tripped over something and barely managed to keep from falling down. Pulling himself to his feet, he looked up.
They were in front of the mayor's complex: the mansion that was his house, the east wing connected to the government building like he'd seen on television. He was shoved to a small door on the far eastern side of the government building and pushed into it.
It was like entering another world. It was the landing at the top of some stairs, dark, lit only with faint lights nowhere near strong enough to light up the entire space. The stairs were dark stone, crumbling a little on the edges; obviously this area was much older than the rest of the building.
Shizuka was shoved off the landing and nearly fell down the steps; only the guard's hand grabbing the back of his t-shirt hard enough to rip it stopped him. He was picked up and slung over the guard's shoulder as they went deeper into the ground, the air getting cooler with each step.
It was shadowy down there, and the air smelled stale and metallic. Shizuka wasn't scared of the dark, really, but the smell was odd and made him distinctly uncomfortable, a curl of nausea rising in his belly.
They reached the bottom of the stairs and he was set back on his feet and dragged by the handcuffs down a short, dark hallway with a dirt floor, his left arm screaming.
The hallway opened into a large room with thick wooden doors every few feet. A rack of clothing stood across the room, and he was dragged over to it, his handcuffs suddenly dropped as the guard rifled through it.
Shizuka grabbed his shoulder and winced, blinking back tears, and then frowned.
Someone was crying.
Sobbing, actually, without restraint, like a toddler or small child. It was muffled, coming from behind one of the doors, and it was punctuated with gasping breaths and coughing. They'd been crying for a long time, Shizuka thought.
He looked around, and listened.
Someone was singing quietly, a lullaby he vaguely recognized. Mostly there was silence, but he could occasionally hear shifting and from the door closest to him, the sounds of labored breathing and gasps, the sounds of a child in pain.
Something was shoved in his arms.
"Wear that," the guard said. "Go on. You can keep your t-shirt."
A pair of sweatpants and a ragged gi.
Shizuka looked around and sighed, and then unbuttoned his jeans and yanked them off.
"Shoes too," the guard said impatiently. Shizuka pulled them off as well, in only underwear, socks, and his ripped t-shirt. He slid the gi on and then pulled on the sweatpants, wrapping the gi and tucking it in.
The guard nodded and pulled out a ring of keys. Grabbing one, he dragged Shizuka over to a door, and unlocked it.
"Every day you'll get one meal and a bucket of water to use as you please. If you need to piss, do it in that hole in the corner."
He pushed Shizuka into the room, the boy tripping and sprawling across the floor.
The door was slammed shut behind him and locked.
He was alone.
He rolled onto his back and looked up. The cell was square, about three times as wide as he was tall. A small lantern hung next to the door, but it wasn't nearly enough to give the room any light. On the other side of the door, near the corner, were two sets of rusty manacles, one attached to the wall at the floor, and the other about three feet off the ground, for ankles and wrists. The ceiling was high, so much that Shizuka couldn't see it, and a tall, thin window-taller than him and perhaps the width of his body-was across from the door.
For a brief moment Shizuka contemplated escape, and then came to his senses as he realized that the window was perhaps twenty-five or thirty feet up, which put it at ground level. Though the walls of the room were stone and crumbling, there was no way he could climb up. Especially with his shoulder how it was now.
He heard a horse-drawn carriage rush by, the unmistakable sounds of wheels and hoofbeats quiet but there. As the carriage passed, several clods of dirt tumbled through the window, spattering across the floor when they landed.
Oh.
Snow and rain, Shizuka thought.
Shoot.
He sat up, moving over to the door, so he could sit under the light. He pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, left shoulder crying in pain.
He wanted Grandfather.
Shizuka finally cracked, and the tears that had been threatening to fall since he had hurt the students finally tumbled down his face and he cried, burying his face in his knees, shoulders shaking, his entire body aching, until he was hoarse and empty.
More than anything, Shizuka realized on his third day, it was boring. There were no books, no archery, no playing, nothing. It was lonely, too, but Shizuka had spent so much time alone as a child that he didn't register loneliness until he remembered where he was, and why, and that he would never go home. His shoulder was nothing more than a dull pain in the background anymore, as long as he didn't sleep on it.
He cried a lot. Feeling miserable was more interesting than anything else. He practiced his hiragana, writing in the dust that was layered on top of the hard dirt floor. He slept until he wasn't sleepy, and then he cried some more. When he was crying he wasn't thinking of how bored he was. He was thinking of Grandfather and the cook and home and that was better than being bored, even if he was sad.
He was hungry, too. The water he drank, mostly, using some to wash his face in the morning and at night, and his hands after the meal, which came at midday, but all he ever got was stale soup and a slice or two of bread.
He liked food. This food was okay, but the cook always said that he would eat anything. There just wasn't enough of it.
His days took up something else as well: when he wasn't crying, or writing hiragana on the floor, meditating or sleeping, or trying to avoid the cold wind when it blew trash and dirt and occasionally rain in through the window, he thought about food. Inarizushi and fried egglplant and yakisoba and mochi and onigiri and that Western cake that Grandfather brought home from the bakeries on nights when work had been hard for him…he missed that food.
It got colder. Shizuka had lost track of time, but he figured it had to have been a month or so. He'd lost weight as well; he'd had to rip of the edge of the gi to use it as a belt to hold up the sweatpants, as the elastic was now too loose to stay on his waist. He was cold all the time now; his socks had holes in the toes and his underwear was gross and he wanted a bath really badly.
Outside he sometimes heard fighting or crying or the sounds of someone being dragged across the hard dirt floor or a cry of pain or a slap or yelling. Yelling a lot, actually, and the occasional burst of laughter. The first time he heard such laughter, it had been late at night, waking him from a fitful sleep under the dim lamp. Curious, Shizuka had stood up, and stood in front of the door, trying to see through the little hole in the wood at the top of it.
It was still a good two feet taller than he was, but there were two thick crossbars on the door, one a foot above the ground, and the other just beneath the glassless window. Shizuka jumped up and latched his fingers onto the upper crossbar and used it to hold himself as he pulled his stockinged feet onto the bottom one. There was plenty of room for him to stand-he had his toes and the balls of his feet on the crossbar. Digging his fingers into the wood, he peered through the hole in the door.
Several guards sat in a circle in the center of the room, all of them holding wooden bowls and matching spoons and a couple six-packs of some Western beer in the middle of the circle. They were laughing and talking and wrapped in coats and gloves and hats, their breaths making puffs in the air.
Their voices traveled to him, and he realized they were laughing about the one who was always crying, by the clothes rack. It was a little girl, apparently, only four or five, and she apparently did not cry for her parents or her dolly, but for milk tea.
And they talked of hurting the boy who always fought back, wondered why the Chief-Fei Wong Reed?-hadn't taken action yet, and they spoke of their children and their spouses and how they so rarely got to see them and how the job paid well but was lonely and through nights of listening, Shizuka became confused. Because sometimes they were cruel and spoke of their charges, of the Undesirables, as less than human, and then they spoke of their own families and their own homes.
But Shizuka knew he was a human. He had to be; he saw nothing else that was like him other than humans.
Did they know that? Would they believe him if they told him?
Of course not.
You are not evil. You are not!
Grandfather.
He missed talking. He and Grandfather used to talk all the time; well, as much as Shizuka talked, at least. Grandfather would tell him stories and they talked about books and archery and the weather and they sat in silence and drank tea and ate inarzushi.
He had not spoken to anyone in days. He'd never been one to speak, not even to himself aloud; even as a toddler, in his earliest memories, when he played imagination games, he never spoke aloud, always his nonexistent friends spoke in his head, and he back to him as well, never opening his mouth.
But now he contemplated it, speaking, if only to not be so lonely, wanted to talk about how he was hungry all the time, how he wanted food, how he thought that maybe he was forgetting his hiragana even though he wrote for hours every day, covering every single inch of the dusty floor with words and characters and sentences, his name and Grandfather's and math problems and school-
He hated this. He was so bored. He wanted to go back to school. School had been interesting, at least a little bit. It was interesting to watch the other students, watch kids like he'd never seen before. It was interesting, funny even, because they were so loud and so funny and so energetic, always running and giggling and yelling and he had enjoyed watching them.
It snowed. A huge snowdrift built up against the window before finally collapsing in as he slept one night. The wind blew and then there was snow all across the floor, all over him.
He was cold all the time, wrapped in his gi. He was curled against the door one day when the guard opened the door to give him his soup and noticed that his fingers were turning blue and his teeth were chattering.
He shut the door and went out and Shizuka heard quiet talking: "Frostbite…sick…can't let them die, no matter how much we don't care…"
And then he was dragged outside and undressed by gloved hands and plopped into a hot bath until he thawed out, and then he was taken out and redressed, still damp, his dirty clothes chafing his skin, and his fingers and toes wrapped with dressing, and given a blanket, and tossed back into his cell.
His hair froze, at first, but it thawed after he burrowed under the blanket, which was the most wonderful thing he'd ever experienced.
Maybe a month and a half now, Shizuka thought.
He wanted to go home.
And then there was the boy.
previous| next
title: favor me with silence
rating: Yeah. R. Warnings under that R rating--though warnings will be posted at the beginning of each chapter: Language, violence, rape/sexual abuse, normal abuse, graphic images, even a little guro, but it too is nonconsensual and purely for plot purposes. So, gross stuff and general suckiness.
Summary: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread." Doumeki Shizuka is an Undesirable, a blind one, a cursed child. Pure, unadulterated evil. Eventually Doumeki/Watanuki kid!friendshipromance, though mostly friendship. Hardcore CLAMP crossover.
prologue
chapter one: The Underworld
They dragged him out into the street and across the road to where an armored truck was parked. As they crossed the street, Shizuka realized that all the passerby were watching him, whispering. There was fear in their eyes, and hatred.
The guards wore the blue uniforms of the police that Shizuka recognized from his rare moments of television-watching, but they had white armbands with black embroidery declaring them part of the mayor's guard. Their utility belts had guns, handcuffs, a phone, and ofuda, just like the policemen on television, but they also had a long knife and what looked like a pouch to hold a whip.
Shizuka observed this all detachedly, his mind a million places and yet nowhere at once. What was going on?
Was he really being dragged away from his grandfather, across the street? Had he really just hurt two students just by being near them? Or was it some joke, or a bad dream, or just…not true?
A car sped up and pulled up next to the truck to which he was being dragged. The black letters on the side of the door read Tokyo Coroner.
Oh.
"Look at that," one of the guards sneered. "You killed one of those kids. Maybe both."
Shizuka swallowed. The world was suddenly blurry and fading.
Shizuka had killed someone.
He had killed someone. A little kid. Just like him, but probably with parents and without a cook but they loved and laughed and played and went to school and Shizuka had killed him!
A guard swung open the back of the trunk. The inside was all metal, with a window of hard iron mesh and a hard bench across from it. It was perhaps as long as Shizuka and as wide as him, not very big. The guard pushing him forward swung him around and cuffed his hands in front of him, and then shoved him into the truck, slamming the doors shut.
You are not evil. You are not!
Shizuka set his arms on the bench and pushed himself to his knees. As he moved to climb onto the bench, the truck began to move with a jerk, knocking him down and ramming him into the back door. His head hit the bench and his left shoulder slammed into the handle, and he winced.
He pushed himself to his knees again and the truck stopped abruptly, knocking him back down, and his left shoulder once again hit the floor hard.
Shizuka swallowed back tears. He had to be grown-up. He wasn't going to cry.
He curled onto his side, right hand cupping his aching left shoulder, the handcuffs chafing his wrists.
Grandfather…
His eyes were stinging. The truck jerked around a turn and Shizuka lodged himself underneath the bench so he didn't have to be tossed around anymore.
He was cold. It was fall, after all, and here in Tokyo the winds blew hard in from the sea and it was cold in the fall. Usually Shizuka had a soft wool haori he wore at home, but at school he didn't really need it. It was warm in the classrooms, stuffy almost, so all he had on were his t-shirt and old jeans with holes in the knees because they were supposed to be painting in art in the afternoon and sneakers and old, thin socks. He shivered and curled up tighter, head banging against the bench when the truck hit a pothole.
He wanted Grandfather. He wanted to go home and take a hot bath and eat the cook's onigiri and sit on his futon and meditate like Grandfather had taught him. He wanted to stand out in the middle of the archery range and watch the sun rise over the trees in the estate.
The truck jerked to a stop and the door opened with a clang. A guard-the one who had cuffed him-reached in and grabbed Shizuka's left arm, yanking him out from under the bench.
Shizuka more felt than heard his shoulder pop and pain rushed down his arm and side and he screamed; nothing had ever hurt so badly. He tumbled out of the truck, falling into the guard, who caught him and jerked him up by the arm that hurt. He cried out again.
"What?" the guard snapped. His arm felt disconnected from his body; he couldn't move his fingers.
"My shoulder," he whispered, tears stinging his eyes, finally unable to hold them back.
The guard glanced at it and frowned. "Oh," he said, pushing Shizuka to sit on the edge of the truck. Setting one hand on the bruises Clef-sensei had left and the other tightening around his bicep to the point of pain, he did something and his shoulder popped again, hurting even worse, and snapped back into place.
Shizuka screamed again, hoarsely, grabbing his arm.
"Shut up, you little freak," a second guard said as she came around the truck. The first guard shoved Shizuka in front of him, pushing him forward.
Shizuka clutched his left arm to his chest, wincing as his shoulder began to throb. He could practically feel it swelling underneath his t-shirt.
He tripped over something and barely managed to keep from falling down. Pulling himself to his feet, he looked up.
They were in front of the mayor's complex: the mansion that was his house, the east wing connected to the government building like he'd seen on television. He was shoved to a small door on the far eastern side of the government building and pushed into it.
It was like entering another world. It was the landing at the top of some stairs, dark, lit only with faint lights nowhere near strong enough to light up the entire space. The stairs were dark stone, crumbling a little on the edges; obviously this area was much older than the rest of the building.
Shizuka was shoved off the landing and nearly fell down the steps; only the guard's hand grabbing the back of his t-shirt hard enough to rip it stopped him. He was picked up and slung over the guard's shoulder as they went deeper into the ground, the air getting cooler with each step.
It was shadowy down there, and the air smelled stale and metallic. Shizuka wasn't scared of the dark, really, but the smell was odd and made him distinctly uncomfortable, a curl of nausea rising in his belly.
They reached the bottom of the stairs and he was set back on his feet and dragged by the handcuffs down a short, dark hallway with a dirt floor, his left arm screaming.
The hallway opened into a large room with thick wooden doors every few feet. A rack of clothing stood across the room, and he was dragged over to it, his handcuffs suddenly dropped as the guard rifled through it.
Shizuka grabbed his shoulder and winced, blinking back tears, and then frowned.
Someone was crying.
Sobbing, actually, without restraint, like a toddler or small child. It was muffled, coming from behind one of the doors, and it was punctuated with gasping breaths and coughing. They'd been crying for a long time, Shizuka thought.
He looked around, and listened.
Someone was singing quietly, a lullaby he vaguely recognized. Mostly there was silence, but he could occasionally hear shifting and from the door closest to him, the sounds of labored breathing and gasps, the sounds of a child in pain.
Something was shoved in his arms.
"Wear that," the guard said. "Go on. You can keep your t-shirt."
A pair of sweatpants and a ragged gi.
Shizuka looked around and sighed, and then unbuttoned his jeans and yanked them off.
"Shoes too," the guard said impatiently. Shizuka pulled them off as well, in only underwear, socks, and his ripped t-shirt. He slid the gi on and then pulled on the sweatpants, wrapping the gi and tucking it in.
The guard nodded and pulled out a ring of keys. Grabbing one, he dragged Shizuka over to a door, and unlocked it.
"Every day you'll get one meal and a bucket of water to use as you please. If you need to piss, do it in that hole in the corner."
He pushed Shizuka into the room, the boy tripping and sprawling across the floor.
The door was slammed shut behind him and locked.
He was alone.
He rolled onto his back and looked up. The cell was square, about three times as wide as he was tall. A small lantern hung next to the door, but it wasn't nearly enough to give the room any light. On the other side of the door, near the corner, were two sets of rusty manacles, one attached to the wall at the floor, and the other about three feet off the ground, for ankles and wrists. The ceiling was high, so much that Shizuka couldn't see it, and a tall, thin window-taller than him and perhaps the width of his body-was across from the door.
For a brief moment Shizuka contemplated escape, and then came to his senses as he realized that the window was perhaps twenty-five or thirty feet up, which put it at ground level. Though the walls of the room were stone and crumbling, there was no way he could climb up. Especially with his shoulder how it was now.
He heard a horse-drawn carriage rush by, the unmistakable sounds of wheels and hoofbeats quiet but there. As the carriage passed, several clods of dirt tumbled through the window, spattering across the floor when they landed.
Oh.
Snow and rain, Shizuka thought.
Shoot.
He sat up, moving over to the door, so he could sit under the light. He pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, left shoulder crying in pain.
He wanted Grandfather.
Shizuka finally cracked, and the tears that had been threatening to fall since he had hurt the students finally tumbled down his face and he cried, burying his face in his knees, shoulders shaking, his entire body aching, until he was hoarse and empty.
More than anything, Shizuka realized on his third day, it was boring. There were no books, no archery, no playing, nothing. It was lonely, too, but Shizuka had spent so much time alone as a child that he didn't register loneliness until he remembered where he was, and why, and that he would never go home. His shoulder was nothing more than a dull pain in the background anymore, as long as he didn't sleep on it.
He cried a lot. Feeling miserable was more interesting than anything else. He practiced his hiragana, writing in the dust that was layered on top of the hard dirt floor. He slept until he wasn't sleepy, and then he cried some more. When he was crying he wasn't thinking of how bored he was. He was thinking of Grandfather and the cook and home and that was better than being bored, even if he was sad.
He was hungry, too. The water he drank, mostly, using some to wash his face in the morning and at night, and his hands after the meal, which came at midday, but all he ever got was stale soup and a slice or two of bread.
He liked food. This food was okay, but the cook always said that he would eat anything. There just wasn't enough of it.
His days took up something else as well: when he wasn't crying, or writing hiragana on the floor, meditating or sleeping, or trying to avoid the cold wind when it blew trash and dirt and occasionally rain in through the window, he thought about food. Inarizushi and fried egglplant and yakisoba and mochi and onigiri and that Western cake that Grandfather brought home from the bakeries on nights when work had been hard for him…he missed that food.
It got colder. Shizuka had lost track of time, but he figured it had to have been a month or so. He'd lost weight as well; he'd had to rip of the edge of the gi to use it as a belt to hold up the sweatpants, as the elastic was now too loose to stay on his waist. He was cold all the time now; his socks had holes in the toes and his underwear was gross and he wanted a bath really badly.
Outside he sometimes heard fighting or crying or the sounds of someone being dragged across the hard dirt floor or a cry of pain or a slap or yelling. Yelling a lot, actually, and the occasional burst of laughter. The first time he heard such laughter, it had been late at night, waking him from a fitful sleep under the dim lamp. Curious, Shizuka had stood up, and stood in front of the door, trying to see through the little hole in the wood at the top of it.
It was still a good two feet taller than he was, but there were two thick crossbars on the door, one a foot above the ground, and the other just beneath the glassless window. Shizuka jumped up and latched his fingers onto the upper crossbar and used it to hold himself as he pulled his stockinged feet onto the bottom one. There was plenty of room for him to stand-he had his toes and the balls of his feet on the crossbar. Digging his fingers into the wood, he peered through the hole in the door.
Several guards sat in a circle in the center of the room, all of them holding wooden bowls and matching spoons and a couple six-packs of some Western beer in the middle of the circle. They were laughing and talking and wrapped in coats and gloves and hats, their breaths making puffs in the air.
Their voices traveled to him, and he realized they were laughing about the one who was always crying, by the clothes rack. It was a little girl, apparently, only four or five, and she apparently did not cry for her parents or her dolly, but for milk tea.
And they talked of hurting the boy who always fought back, wondered why the Chief-Fei Wong Reed?-hadn't taken action yet, and they spoke of their children and their spouses and how they so rarely got to see them and how the job paid well but was lonely and through nights of listening, Shizuka became confused. Because sometimes they were cruel and spoke of their charges, of the Undesirables, as less than human, and then they spoke of their own families and their own homes.
But Shizuka knew he was a human. He had to be; he saw nothing else that was like him other than humans.
Did they know that? Would they believe him if they told him?
Of course not.
You are not evil. You are not!
Grandfather.
He missed talking. He and Grandfather used to talk all the time; well, as much as Shizuka talked, at least. Grandfather would tell him stories and they talked about books and archery and the weather and they sat in silence and drank tea and ate inarzushi.
He had not spoken to anyone in days. He'd never been one to speak, not even to himself aloud; even as a toddler, in his earliest memories, when he played imagination games, he never spoke aloud, always his nonexistent friends spoke in his head, and he back to him as well, never opening his mouth.
But now he contemplated it, speaking, if only to not be so lonely, wanted to talk about how he was hungry all the time, how he wanted food, how he thought that maybe he was forgetting his hiragana even though he wrote for hours every day, covering every single inch of the dusty floor with words and characters and sentences, his name and Grandfather's and math problems and school-
He hated this. He was so bored. He wanted to go back to school. School had been interesting, at least a little bit. It was interesting to watch the other students, watch kids like he'd never seen before. It was interesting, funny even, because they were so loud and so funny and so energetic, always running and giggling and yelling and he had enjoyed watching them.
It snowed. A huge snowdrift built up against the window before finally collapsing in as he slept one night. The wind blew and then there was snow all across the floor, all over him.
He was cold all the time, wrapped in his gi. He was curled against the door one day when the guard opened the door to give him his soup and noticed that his fingers were turning blue and his teeth were chattering.
He shut the door and went out and Shizuka heard quiet talking: "Frostbite…sick…can't let them die, no matter how much we don't care…"
And then he was dragged outside and undressed by gloved hands and plopped into a hot bath until he thawed out, and then he was taken out and redressed, still damp, his dirty clothes chafing his skin, and his fingers and toes wrapped with dressing, and given a blanket, and tossed back into his cell.
His hair froze, at first, but it thawed after he burrowed under the blanket, which was the most wonderful thing he'd ever experienced.
Maybe a month and a half now, Shizuka thought.
He wanted to go home.
And then there was the boy.
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