Love Like You: Rohan Kishibe and Daughter Reader

Angel (Part One)

A/N: I want everyone to read this author's note carefully. This and the next chapter (which will hopefully be finished within the next few weeks) are, without a doubt, the heaviest, saddest chapters in this fic. Not 'as of now,' but in their entirety. They have depictions of child abuse and abandonment, and this chapter involves an animal getting hurt. Please take note that these chapters were very difficult to write because of the points I just mentioned, and please read cautiously. Thank you.

In the heart of the woods stood a white house whose fabric overhang was a trampoline for squirrels and insects and a continent for mildew and moss to migrate to. Its walls and windows politely kept eye contact with the neighboring trees that creaked to return conversation, and the trees wreathed their leaves and fruit along the gutters and shutters for the woodland animals to admire, literal home decor. The house blushed with sunsets and prettied its shingles with fallen stars, capturing the admiration of fireflies and eyes that pierced through the night. The house loved its neighbors, and the neighbors loved the house.

However, within its core it kept a secret: a pair of eyes sealed in a bedroom. The bedroom was box-like. It was suffocating. It was boundary-lacking. Shadows emerged, worm-like or eel-like—or a horrible combination of both— from the creepiest corners at nighttime.

But the eyes, a three-year-old girl's navigator, paid no mind to the minimalism of her bedroom, because she was currently questioning the whereabouts of the pair of eyes belonging to the person she loved most.

"...Mama? Mama, where are you?"

The rain sang a song infected with twelve-tone serialism, collecting into puddles in the bedroom.

"Oh, Mama playing a game! She hides, and I find her!"

The girl searched high and low: she wasn't hiding under the bed because it didn't have an underbelly to begin with. She wasn't squeezing herself behind the bookshelf, because one didn't exist in the bedroom. Behind the door didn't make sense, because that was sealed shut, and she was nowhere to be found in the only plausible hiding location, the closet.

So where could her mother be?

She listened to the doorknob wheeze at her useless attempts to leave, clinking as though it was slapping a brass knee. She didn't quite understand the sound or the situation, until an engine revved outside. "Mama?"

(Y/n) waddled to the window, holding her arms out as toddlers do to keep their balance. Headlights passed over her boarded up window like searchlights. Through the rotting wood that granted her eyes access to the view of the trees and boulders below, the girl felt her heart sink upon seeing a car driving down the trail.

The light slowly died in her eyes.

"Mama...? Mama?! MAMA, MAMA!"

She screamed for her mama until it hurt to; she cried until her eyes stung; she stuck her arm through the rotting wood barricading her window and reached until she couldn't hold it up.

Grief is love with nowhere to go, and her arteries whisked the love for her mother throughout her bloodstream; but the reality of her situation poisoned her blood until it was churned into raw grief by the time the veins volleyed it all back to the twitching hive in her chest. Her tears plopped onto her palm, and her fingertips quaked; the shadowy atmosphere teamed up with her sensations to create the illusion that her heart had decayed and fallen straight into her palm like a rotten apple.

And if by some miraculous chance akin to the lottery a hiker had taken the wrong turn on a trail, or a cartographer was charting presumably untouched land, or a vagabond was reconnecting with his ancient roots and living his days out harmonious with nature, and stumbled across the house that shouldn't exist, they would have fled and passed the story of a haunting onto society, from person to person, from friend to friend, because the wails within the walls unveiled the house's act.