What is a home?
I'm twenty-seven years old and I can't even answer that. I'm nothing more than an empty man sinking into the regret of a lifetime, considering himself as "someone who isn't human." Or at least, a man who believes there's no salvation for him.
I never thought I was a good son. I still remember it. That gift from twenty years ago. When my mother gave me a stuffed animal, to my eyes it seemed so ugly, but for her, it was an effort I still can't forgive myself for. I had the audacity to pretend I liked it, with a fake smile, and hugged it tightly.
"I love you, Mom."
Since that day I felt miserable, and I still feel that way. I tried to forget it countless times, but I never could. That scene is engraved in me. My fake smile...
I'm so sorry...
This is something I'll take to the grave.
Perhaps fate took them from me as punishment for my selfishness. Or perhaps not.
For me, fate doesn't exist. Everything happens because of decisions from the past. The present is the result or consequence of the past. Nothing happens because "it's written."
And now, under this rain, in the only thing that still connects me to what I was, when I still had blurry memories left, I look at the sky.
The rain began to fall on October 14th, exactly at 7:47 PM.
It's as if the sky wants to remind me of what happened that day. It always rains on this date.
Fire.
An immense fire.
The smell of ashes... my parents' screams... still echo in my ears.
Eighteen years have passed since that fire. Years of a nameless void, but one that weighs heavy.
I was standing on the sidewalk, while people from all over the world ran for shelter, covering their heads with newspapers or using plastic bags.
"Shit, I should have known..."
"I'll get home late and I'll definitely catch a cold..."
They cursed at the sky. And the people passing by me never looked at me twice. Never. I've perfected the art of being "invisible."
"Excuse me, are you alright?"
I heard a young woman's voice breaking through the sound of the rain and my thoughts. With a mechanical movement, I slowly turned my head and looked at her with curiosity. She was holding a flowered umbrella and offering it to me, as if I were going to melt with five seconds of water.
She was a beautiful woman. Probably around twenty-five years old.
"I'm fine," I said, almost robotically.
And there it was. The moment I learned to recognize. The slight adjustment in her expression. The backward tilt, almost imperceptible. As if her body had made a decision before her brain.
"Ah, well, I'm glad. Take care."
She left quickly. I don't blame her. Emptiness is contagious, it gets under your skin. It's like the edge of a cliff. After a while, you feel the need to jump. Just to end this damn tension.
After that attempted conversation, I decided to start walking. The streets were desolate, it was nighttime and quite cold, but at that moment I didn't care about anything. I just wanted to think a little. I arrived at a small park, and the memories assaulted me again...
"Don't forget to live..."
"The strong exist to protect the weak..."
I sat on a bench somewhat set apart. It was a pretty ugly bench... no, it was comfortable. That's what mattered. I remembered I shouldn't judge things beforehand, simply accept them.
My mother taught me these words when I was only eight years old. I had only asked her what it meant when the teacher said I was the best in the class.
Mom said I was special, unique. But she never answered whether I should calm down or think about what I wanted to be. She only said:
"The strong exist to protect the weak, Hikari. Your strength isn't just for hurting, it must have another purpose. The weak will remind you that you're human."
At that moment, I nodded without really understanding what she was saying. I was just a kid excited because I could run faster than everyone in the schoolyard.
I'm sorry, Mom, I have to say this, but you were wrong... No one could make me feel human. And since you left, everything became darkness. My name no longer made sense. I was no longer light, only darkness... as if I had disappeared in that very instant.
"Mom... I miss you so much."
And then... it happened. Like a machine that detects a fault and automatically corrects itself, my mind readjusted. The pain simply vanished, and emotions were filed away.
But I wasn't always this faded existence.
In elementary school, they always said I was very smart, quite strong, and always cheerful, even when hungry. I was the type of kid who made teachers smile without meaning to.
One day, Kenjirou's group tried to mess with me, with his typical group of friends who followed him like subjects to their king. But it didn't work for them. Not because I was strong. Simply, they couldn't break something that had no cracks. They were looking for a shadow for me to hide in. I didn't have one. I was too pure, too positive. That irritated them more than any violent reaction. And they always ended up leaving.
But then, the fire happened.
I was in the front yard. Mrs. Tanaka, the one who always gave me candy, held me tightly, even though I bit and scratched her. I kicked and screamed...
"Dad! Mom! They're inside! I have to help them!"
"I'm sorry, little one..."
Damn it... the firefighters arrived too late. By the time they got there, the flames were already dying down. The fire chief wrapped me in a blanket and asked me over and over if there was anyone else. I could only point toward the house.
They found my parents three hours later. On the second floor. Embracing. Mrs. Tanaka tried to keep me from seeing, but I heard someone vomiting in the bushes.
But the worst was the funeral... Everyone said "poor thing." "They're in a better place." As if death were a prize.
"At least they didn't suffer"... but I had heard the paramedics. Later I looked up the meaning of "smoke inhalation" in the dictionary. They breathed until they fell asleep... but before that they had to cough. They had to be afraid. They had to think I was going through the same thing. They didn't know if I was safe.
"Hikari is a strong boy."
I let out an ironic sigh. An eight-year-old boy didn't want to be strong. I wanted my mother. I wanted my father. I wanted my bed. Strength was all that remained when you could no longer cry.
Standing in front of the closed coffins, I felt nothing. They said it "wasn't appropriate for a child." My parents became a secret hidden in a box. I couldn't even dress properly for the funeral. I only wore borrowed shoes.
The psychologist, after making me draw with crayons, called it "dissociative trauma." I call it the day I stopped being Hikari and became something that looked like a child but had forgotten how to be one.
Afterward, I arrived at the orphanage.
I lay down on a bed in a corner and stared at the ceiling. The moisture stains formed continents. My mother used to play that game with me with the clouds.
"What do you see, Hikari?"
Before the sky became something meaningless.
"Hey, new kid."
A voice pulled me from my thoughts.
"There are rules here, squirt. The new ones obey the veterans. Give me your lunch dessert... and tomorrow too, and every day."
He was the typical leader. But at that moment, when I nodded to his orders without protest, without reacting, I stopped being his target. They only saw a disturbing void.
"You're weird... you know? There's something not right about you. You look like one of those kids from horror movies who wouldn't hesitate to burn down a house."
Fire...
He was right. But I didn't know if that had a cure.
Three months later, something happened in the back courtyard that changed me completely. It was the turning point at which I finally stopped being human.
It was a blind spot in the orphanage, where the cameras didn't work and the teachers looked the other way because "it was better that way." Or at least, that's how I interpreted it. Even though it was called "Hope Orphanage," there was nothing that honored its name.
That day, the courtyard was quiet, there wasn't much noise. Until I passed near the back courtyard. I stayed behind a column and listened carefully to what they were saying.
Cornered against the wall was a defenseless boy, with broken glasses repaired with adhesive tape. He hugged a bento box against his chest, as if it were his last sacred object. Takeshi was in the center, with his friends flanking him.
"My sister... made it for me before we were separated. She comes to see me once a month... it's the only thing that connects me to her. Please..."
At least he had someone who visited him. But that answer only enraged Takeshi more. He raised his fist with a tired sigh. Of course, if he couldn't get it the nice way, he'd have to resort to the hard way. But just as he raised his arm, something clicked in my head. Like a light switch, like a computer turning on.
──────────────────────────────
[INITIATING SITUATION ANALYSIS...]
Multiple threats detected.
→ Hostile group: 5 individuals.
→ Composition: 1 aggressor + 4 accomplices.
Primary aggressor:
→ Measurements: 4′11″ | 84 lb
→ Status: Unstable | Aggressive.
Victim:
→ Measurements: 4′5″
→ Status: Extreme terror | On the verge of paralysis.
─────────────────────────────
That appeared in my head in less than a second. Not literally projected on my retina, but inside my mind, as if I knew everything. Back then, I didn't even know how to measure a person's height, but somehow, I knew.
When I realized it, I already had Takeshi immobilized on the ground. My hands were in the perfect position to neutralize him.
I didn't even know I was capable of doing that, but there it was: him, with his face against the pavement, bleeding from the nose. When I finally became aware of what I was doing, I released him immediately, as if he were burning me.
He left crying, calling me a monster: a boy almost thirteen years old, humiliated by a nine-year-old boy who had never fought in his life.
A monster, is that what I am? No. Yes. I am...
I signed up for kendo, not because I wanted to, but because the orphanage counselor said I "needed a healthy way to channel my energy." As if the problem were an excess of energy and not the lack of everything else.
A few years later, I had become very good.
"Don't flow like water... seek your opponent's openings, move before they know their own intention, as if you could read it."
That's what my master said. And to my surprise, and as a punishment, I became the best in the club. Trophies and championships became one more burden. I didn't stand out for my effort or talent, but because I saw the world in a different way. When my opponent's bamboo sword moved, I had already dodged it before my mind processed the threat. I counterattacked exploiting openings I shouldn't have been able to see.
"Perfect, unreachable... inhuman."
Well, my master didn't exactly say that last part, but I saw it in his eyes. He felt disconcerted because it was something he had never witnessed. After all, in front of him was only a "talented" boy with no brightness in his gaze.
At seventeen years old, I realized an undeniable truth. One that had the potential to dehumanize me.
I was training in the dojo one night when they always allowed me to stay, even when there was no one there. Like a kind of therapy. They still believed my problem was excess energy, but life decided to give me another bullet. And it was much crueler.
That day, with the dojo in silence, I was meditating, trying to calm a mind that no longer had anything to calm. Until it started to rain.
I remember that day: October 14th, the same day I lost my parents, and since then it always rained. The wind was so strong that day that I decided to return to the orphanage. I was prepared to get wet, but it was a peculiar sensation in the middle of the incessant rain that stopped me.
When the drops hit my skin, I could feel each one of them. Not the sensation of being wet, but something more, as if they were speaking to me.
Since that day, I realized I could control water. But it wasn't something I gave orders to. It was a means of communication. Not a strange power that manipulates abstract concepts as if they were a story. They were part of me and I was part of them.
Then I realized I could do the same with the other elements, but with fire there was still a doubt or rejection.
How could fire, the same fire that took my parents from me, want to communicate with me and expect me not to reject it?
But with time, I understood that fire wasn't to blame. The therapists expected me to hate fire or tremble before the small flame of a candle, but that never happened. I couldn't fear fire. I understood it right away. Fire is a living passion, a pure energy that gives warmth without asking for anything in return. It's simply there, in the same way that I exist.
It didn't choose to destroy my family that night... so I couldn't hate it.
...
And now, at twenty-seven years old, under this rain soaking me to the bone, the words escaped me without measure.
"Again..."
I want to be that boy again who smiled without pretending.
"If I could..."
I ran driven by happiness, joked without restraint, and asked out of curiosity. I didn't ask "are you alright?" in a robotic tone while saving others.
"I want a second chance..."
To have a mother who smelled like bread and always tried to do her best. And my father...
Wait.
I froze instantly. My father had told me something a few days before the fire... how could I forget it? We were in this same park, right where I am now.
"Higher, Dad, higher!"
"If I push you harder, you'll go flying."
"I don't care!"
He laughed, and when he brought me down, his face became serious. As if he had a premonition.
"Hikari, listen to me carefully. No matter what happens, no matter how hard life gets: you have to live, understand? Live fully, not just exist. Live."
"Dad?"
"Promise me."
"Y-yes, I promise."
If my father knew that I forgot his promise and instead followed my mother's: protect the weak. That I spent eighteen years not living, only existing. I think, somewhere, he already knew. He was good at understanding people, of course he would understand his own son.
I tell this as if it happened to someone else. Perhaps because I feel that Hikari also died in the fire.
But my thoughts were interrupted by the characteristic sound of a truck skidding on the wet road.
"What...?"
My head turned faster than my thoughts, and by the time I started processing what was happening, my body was already moving.
It was a little girl. Helpless, with a broken ankle in the middle of the road. Her desperate father positioned himself between her and the danger, not realizing that a truck was approaching at full speed.
With the roar of the rain and thunder, and the truck's lights off, he didn't see it.
When I started running, I only had three seconds to save them. In those three seconds, my mind went through dozens of possibilities, desperately searching for a way to succeed. Any way.
I could use my powers to stop the truck without having to get physically close. But if I did, I would have no escape.
Cameras, cell phones, the terrified look of the girl and the father who would witness a man defying the "laws of nature" crowded into my head like an inevitable vision.
Oh, at first they would see me as a "savior," a "chosen one," but I knew that over time that idea would turn into fear. They would investigate me, draw my blood to experiment. I would finally stop being human to become something there's no escape from. They would look at me with eyes of terror. I was an anomaly. I couldn't let them see me like that.
"What do I do?"
I only had two seconds left.
I could save her and, at the same time, save myself. Execute the last command, the "end" of my life's programming. The end of non-existence. An act that wasn't heroic or noble, but the most selfish and, at the same time, the most human.
Protect the weak.
I positioned myself between the truck and the girl. For an instant, in a cosmic flash, I saw in her brown eyes the same thing I saw in my mother's.
"I'm... sorry."
I waited for the impact. The end of everything. Nothing mattered anymore. Only the last program executing: flesh against truck.
In those last seconds, the elements responded to my call, as if they understood my last will. They accepted my destiny without resistance, granting me one last wish.
Then came the impact, and for the first time, I felt a pain so intense that every nerve in my body exploded. I broke completely. In that moment, I stopped being something more and became a fragile human again. A human who could die.
But then, the elements rose by their own will: the wind roared against the truck, the water turned the asphalt into pure friction, fire choked the engine in an instant, and the earth created the perfect pothole to stop its charge before it reached the girl and her father.
The driver was drunk and, through his negligence, almost killed an innocent girl with a whole future ahead of her. So the elements didn't care if he survived or not. They only had one priority: the girl.
My last wish.
Now only the last sensation that precedes death remained: the sound, a high-pitched, loud ringing that breaks your eardrums.
Forgive me, Dad.
I couldn't keep my promise. I didn't live. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.
Forgive me, Mom.
Because a dead man can no longer protect anyone. My life ended in a contradiction.
"—×××——××—×××××—××"