The Boy With The Blank Stare: Future

Chapter Twenty Seven: The Coming Age

Saihara's POV:

The night was young, but one of the first things you lose after becoming a detective is a proper sleeping schedule. That's one of the harder things to adjust to because sometimes the job demanded you to be up before the sun could ever threaten the horizon, while at the same time be wide awake long after the moon had graced the sky with its presence. Black coffee despite its bitterness ran through my veins as much as blood, with infrequent naps in between making me finally understand why my father always looked the way he did. But for a detective, there isn't any sort of pity to be given through the job, because your job is to be the deliverer of bad news or to provide that comfort and sympathy to those who cry out for answers.

Even if those answers aren't pleasant ones.

Themis was the reason why.

Four thousand nine hundred and twenty-three children ranging from as young as eleven years old to as old as seventeen were killed in what was now known as the purity cleanses of the country. In addition to those casualties is an unmeasurable amount of people who might've been threatened like I had been the night Ouma had told me the truth. There had been a gunshot, and from what pieces I could find there was a correlation between unnatural causes of death or strange disappearances to those connected to those victims from fellow class members, to teachers, and neighbors. To those who learned too much, they were silenced till it became clear that the whole world knew, and Themis's greatest strength of being small enough to remain under the radar became its greatest weakness when the country at large all knew of its existence and the organization that had relied on its tight hold on corporate heads and politicians lost their grip and fell from those same people it preyed on. 

You can't reason with a madman is another important lesson you have to learn fast.

While you can argue with an intelligent man, those who had fallen to insanity such as the heads of such an organization were clearly to at least my eyes were far from any kind of revelation as to the atrocities they committed. 

Themis was born from suffering, however.

In a broken world that had been frequently torn apart by war, poverty, and corruption desperate people tried to gain what control they could from their situation. And that's where my sympathy had to end because the only people those same individuals found they held power over was children. Children, the hopes for the future, and in their eyes they saw those same children as a garden. A garden that needed care to, but not from nurturing and giving time and compassion to, not with gentle teaches but with killing and removing the imperfections to create a manmade world down to the finite core. 

Yet by inflicting such suffering on the surviving youth, and continuing to push the line of corruption they potentially had created an even worse world. One that still needed fixing, and if I ever got to truly take a break once for the rest of my life I would consider it a miracle. But I would rather save all those miracles left in the world for a violet-haired boy with eyes full of unknown and unseen strength and perseverance. 

Two years. He had been missing for two years and the world had moved on without him.

But his absence was noticed. In the shut-down abandoned school that he once frequented every day for nearly his entire life people for months had left candles, flowers, and organized prayers that he would find his way home. And when that school had finally barred its doors and fallen due to the crimes they had committed, those same windows that also had been hurled stones at had been refashioned with soda bottle cap curtains from those same classmates that were too young and too scared to know how to help him. Those cracked and once charred walls were painted over, and a large mural now stood with slightly weathered paint, one of a giant mask of a clown. A clown mask I never once saw in life.