Shibuya Snapshots

Power

A tad bit late, but I got dragged out for three hours after I had started so I had less time to write than I had set aside. This one is longer, though.

Light surrounds him and Joshua takes a deep breath as the power is transitioned to him.

-xXx-

From the moment he's born, he can see things that others don't. When he's less than a year old, he's barely at peace. For the first year of his life, he cries for the necessities, like you're supposed to do. Because he has no power he needs help from those stronger than him to assist.

But who can assist him when he cries out of fear from the invisible but very real monsters that watch outside and occasionally in his own home?

His parents are undoubtedly confused and they consult many different doctors about the troubles of the helpless human baby in their arms. But none are able to figure it out, a nurse even witnessing the events with her own eyes during a home visit when trying and figure out if the environment was the problem.

They eventually decide on a mental illness of some kind, though his parents are unsure about it and decide to agree, but both mutually agree that they don't believe it to be so. Their personal assessment turns out seemingly true when his cries turn to unnoticeable stares at something in the room that his parents only process as him getting better.

So imagine their horror when their four-year-old son draws animals with graffiti limbs and people with pure black wirey, barbed, jagged wings in scary detail (though the wings have a noticeable lack of detail-- the contours of it making the entirety with the coloring being completely solid, no room for shading of highlights of any kind. Though he's only four, so that lack of detail is completely understandable).

His parents tell their friends of his frightening imagination.

He tells them he can't sleep because of monsters. They, naturally, check under the bed, in the closets, and even outside his bedroom window to humor him, but the powerless four-year-old only tells them that the monsters are still there. He can see them and they're sometimes on the ground in front of them, watching and waiting like observant frogs, or are hovering over their heads like calculating birds.

They insist that there's nothing there because, really, there isn't just look, and he tries to convince them otherwise because, yes they are, you have to believe him, but he finds himself powerless to his parent's lack of perception.

Throughout elementary school, he tries again and again to tell his parents about the monsters and the people that he can see, but that only results in landing himself in counseling which later leads to therapy where the person who has the fancy papers and doesn't understand what he's going through says he's suffering from hallucinations and prescribes medications for him.

And when he receives the bottle of pills, he's actually almost happy. Because what if they are hallucinations. What if they're all just in his head? He can just take these and they'll all go away. They'll go away and he'll finally be free of his torment. He'll finally be normal.

He takes the first one in front of his therapist and parents so they can show him how to take it, and he frowns at the lack of immediate effect. They all assure him that it takes a bit of time to kick in, two hours max, they promise.

So, he complains to them at his next therapy session, which happens to be two days later, that the medicine isn't working, even though his parents watch him take the medicine every morning. They give concerned looks and up the dosage.

The hallucinations don't stop. In fact, they only seem to get worse. The people don't change, he just ends up seeing them more often than he had before. Like he's becoming more aware of them. He begins to see people without wings, too. They look normal except they're scared and have timers on their hands.