Fate. A predetermined supernatural power. The will of the universe. Fate is order. It writes, and rewrites, gives and takes. It spins vibrant red strings that flow into the world and connect people who are destined to meet, to love, to share a story...
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When we first met, I was eleven and she was twelve. I was a pitiful boy, stifled by repressed anger, restricted to the walls of the prison erected by my parents under the pretext of home-schooling. Forced into a routine I didn't want any part of.
Learn, practice, behave.
She was an older sister, who had just been separated from her little brother.
Back then, I spent all the free time I was given slumped against the sole window in my room, staring listlessly out into the open. I wasn't allowed to go outside, because if I wandered too far away or hurt myself, it would keep me from pursuing my studies. Keep me from earning whatever degree makes people eligible to inherit factories. Keep me from doing my fucking duty. Because that's what's important when you're eleven years old.
I had nothing else to do. No toys to play with, no person to talk to. Mine was a quiet neighborhood. There was nothing much to see either, so once I picked out names for all the stray dogs roaming about — Shiro, Pochi, Pon-pon, Kedama — boredom left me on the verge of madness.
Until she came along.
I watched her with keen eyes the day she skipped across my street, an inflated red ball in hand. As if sensing my gaze, she raised her head and spotted me. I felt a strong urge to duck out of her field of view right then. But I'm so fucking glad I didn't, because — she smiled. Stretched her lips into the widest, brightest smile I had ever seen. It lit up the neighborhood like a light bulb, and I gaped at her from above.
My parents only ever treated me with cold indifference. It left me feeling like I had something to prove. I'm real. And I'm here.
Back then, I stomped around spitting out all the vile words I'd heard my father utter, cussing and screaming and barking retorts. It left me isolated with the label "problem child" cupped in my hands, but at the time, it felt like the emotions that flashed across the faces of my tutors and classmates — irritation, impatience, fury — made it all worth it. Because it meant I could make people feel things too.
By that point, I was used to it. Drawing reactions out of people. But this was the first time I had received a positive one.
Mother and Father left for work at the crack of dawn without saying a word to me.
But she...she talked to me, from below, cupping her hands over her mouth and shouting her words so that they would reach my ears. Words meant especially for me. I grasped them and held onto them like they were made of glass, and replayed them in my mind, over and over, after it was time for her to leave. I replied to her by mouthing my answers or folding my hands into gestures, and like that, we conversed.
Sometimes, I'd find myself slightly attatched to one of my parents' hired workers. The gardener, or the housekeeper. They would talk to me, give me a toy car or bear that I could run around with. But they always left, because they had their own sons and daughters to return to, and that took priority. Sometimes they never came back.
