Crippled

Chapter 1

Issei could still very much remember the exact moment that changed his life forever. It was cliché, almost disgustingly so even. It was in the break of his last year in junior high, a few months away from first year High School. In fact, it was actually when him and his friends, Matsuda and Motohama had just finished taking the entrance exam to Kuoh Academy and were talking about what they would do at the bountiful harvest of women in the only recently co-ed school when disaster struck.

A drunk truck driver, a few moments of ignorance brought on by the happiness of talking to one's friends about topics of interest, a careless lack of belief in their own mortality inherent in the youth who had no need to contemplate the inevitability of death. Through all this little, inconsequential things that it happened.

Issei could still perfectly see the image mere frames before it happened. A joke told by Motohama that caused both him and Matsuda to laugh, taking their eyes of the road for a few seconds, the desperate honking of the horn by an inebriated driver, driving far too fast to be safe, that recognized moments too late what was going on in front of him. Issei's sudden realization that whatever he did, it would ultimately futile as the front of the car was almost upon him.

In a moment of pure adrenaline, pure reflex of his body, in what he believed to be his final act of life, he shoved away both Matsuda and Motohama, pushing them out of the way of the moving vehicle.

The hurtling truck slammed into his body a single frame of time after.

After that, it became cloudy.

All he remembered was being in a haze of pure agony, his body hurting everywhere. No, that wasn't true. He couldn't move anything and the lower part of his body, his right leg, was frightfully numb.

He was sure that that cold meant he was on the fast track to whatever afterlife there was, so imagine his surprise when he woke up nearly a week later, drugged to the gills with painkillers, morphine or something and what seemed like his entire body wrapped up in bandages like a mummy. He didn't really remember that one. He remembered his parents crying over him at his bedside, in sadness at the pain their son was going through and in relief, knowing that he was going to survive a freaking truck slamming into him at roughly a hundred kilometers per hour. If he was slightly more religious, he would thank whatever god he believed in for his intense luck. As it was, the experience simply gave him a much better appreciation for life in general.

His friends visited him too, occasionally even bringing along some of their treasures and giving it to him. Honestly, Issei found it a bit much but they insisted, saying that it was the least they could do since he did save them and all.

Occasionally, a doctor that he didn't know the name of came by, asking the usual stuff, 'are you eating right?', or, 'have you experienced any blinding pain recently?'

It was yes to the latter and a no to the former.

When asked by the concerned doctor, Issei told him that it was rather hard to eat when your insides feel like it's killing you with every swallow. That kind of thing kind of makes you lose your appetite.

The doctor agreed with the point and wrote something down on his clipboard. Issei hoped that it was something more professional than, 'patient experiences blinding pain: feed him oatmeal' or something.

A few hours later after yet another visit by the doctors, right when his parents where in the middle of telling him about what was going on in their neighborhood, which lady got pregnant, which boy dropped out of school, the usual gossip, he suddenly fell unconscious, convulsing and frothing at the mouth. At least, that's how he pictured it. That was what happens in the movies.