Whispering Winds [AkaKuro]

Waking Up

His breathing rasped against the warm, damp inside air. With a wild tug, he sat up in his small and rather shabby bed, eyes wide and his cracked lips parted while staring into the darkness ahead of him. Kuroko Tetsuya had experienced a bad dream – one in which he had encountered and recalled the memory which haunted him so – the demon. What he remembered as a terrible encounter, an unfortunate fate. Despite recollecting the entity’s words, Kuroko could not remember his face apart from those hollow, corrupt scarlet eyes, flashing with mischief.

His heart throbbed. Wincing, the boy fleetingly closed his eyes, attempting to calm both his rapid heartbeat and breath while sliding a hand through a tear in the fabric of his grungy shirt to slide over his chest and across his throbbing scar. Oh, it hurt him so incredibly bad. Making the poor boy flinch more than hearing fingernails scrape over wood, unsteadying his breath more than when being smacked in the head by a frying pan. It burned so much more than laying in the fire itself. Tetsuya wanted to scream, his fingers clawing at the scar over his heart.

That scar was no ordinary mutilation of the skin. It was not of a fleshy colour or smooth texture. It was a deep, ugly purple bruised colour and depicted the roots of a tree, coursing over his chest and deep into his flesh, attacking his nerves, his bloodstream, sometimes pulsing and moving just under his skin so that, when he looked, the poor boy could see the roots grow, move and curl – Tetsuya felt it had to be all of that. On one or two occasions, the pain had escalated so tremendously that the boy had lifted a blunt kitchen knife and rested its tip against his pulsating veins, contemplating whether to cut out his heart, so as to simply end his suffering. The agony it caused him whenever flaring was enough to make him want to end his life – for he was sure that the only thing to relieve such torture had to be death itself… Surely.

But, even after fifteen years of misery due to that mark, Tetsuya still found himself alive – in fact, he found himself lying alive in his bed, like he did every morning. His rancid bed, in his rancid room in his rancid rotten house. And every morning, Tetsuya had to remind himself that the pain in his body could not possibly be any worse than the withering of his mind.

He found his feet on the floor of his bedroom and winced at the ferocious croak protruding from the floorboards. It couldn’t be late yet – the sun hadn’t even come out. But it was early enough for the birds to sing their atrocious melodies, the range of crows, sparrows and occasional hawk and many more unnamed species all screeching to form a symphonic cacophony, and the other side of the road to be visible through the meek window, set on the other end of the boy’s room, one of the shutter’s hinges having fallen off, leaving the panel to dangle and occasionally smack against the rotten wood of the windowsill. Most of Tetsuya’s room was in a similar state – suffering because of the bad care it got. The walls were more than filthy, they were dank and unpleasant, they reeked of smoke, alcohol, urine and sex. Yes, Tetsuya’s room wasn’t really his room. No one considered it to be his territory. The room was used for horrible occasions in the male’s eyes – but perhaps joyous occasions in other’s.

Tetsuya knew however, why his room suffered the most in the desolated house of his. Why his parents got drunk and made love in his room whenever it pleased them – sometimes while Tetsuya still resided in the same chamber – to which he left in a hurry, not wanting to see such graphic and explicit pictures, was because seemed to forget his very existence.

That was his terrible curse. Being forgotten, by his hometown and by his parents.

At times, dinner was only served for two. Such torments the boy had endured for more than fifteen years. Haunted by the fact that he was no longer human – sure, his flesh was warm and his blood flowing, and his skin flushed at times of adrenaline and his mind at times of arousal – but every bit of him was close to invisible. Kuroko Tetsuya had no presence, he was an invisible man, a forgotten being, a phantom.