Ritsu meets a boy and is forced to stew in the consequences of his own newly found power.
tags: fan fiction, angst | word count: 1891
Crying. Ritsu’s eyes flutter open at the sound. His name brushes past his ear with a mischievous lilt and he shoves himself from his pillow as though burned. The crying of his alarm clock grows louder. Ritsu shuts it off.
Somehow, the silence is worse. It stitches itself into his skin, slowly, as he drags himself from the bed. He scratches at the tacking stitch in the palm of his hand. He wishes it would tear and bleed, and listens but does not hear his name again. The four suffocating walls of his room are silent. He decides it’s for the best despite the weight he feels tugging at his arms.
He listens to the news as he fixes his collar and switches it off when it turns from crime stories to the weather. His father protests but does not turn it on again when Ritsu remains silent.
He slips into his shoes like always and taps the fronts on the ground twice before opening the door. He realizes he skipped breakfast and he pauses. He can hear the sound of clattering kitchenware and chopsticks as his parents eat. The thought of it makes Ritsu flinch and slam the front door behind him.
Still, Ritsu goes to school.
The sun is warm on his back as he walks and the scent of it buries itself in his clothes. Birds and footsteps and the low hums of cars is all Ritsu should hear, but there is a roaring in his head that leaves him dazed. It repeats itself, over and over. The ringing of rebar against steel and cement. Shattering wood and splintering glass. He places in earbuds. The music and the pounding in his head scream at the same time, and the noise melts into the rhythm of the song. He can think again.
It does not distract him from the metallic taste that fills his mouth and nose.
Still. The boy had lain still after.
Ritsu looks down at his hands. They’re clean. He knows they’re clean. He washed and washed and dried and washed again. Over and over. They sting, a little, from the scrubbing, though they do not give it away. They are pale and clean, yet he cannot help but see it—the redness. The warm, dripping redness from that night. He wipes his hands on his pants.
There had been a spoon in the boy’s hand, the first time they met.
An aura flickered to life around him, shifting and green like leaves in the wind. It wound itself around his fingers, vines, and exploded into golden flowers when the spoon bent into itself. The boy had grinned at Ritsu with a flush on his cheeks, the way any boy does when trying to impress someone. His aura broke apart in the breeze like dandelion seeds.
Ritsu turns a corner and the shadows greet him hungrily, eating away at the warmth of the sun clinging to his clothes. The chill of it pulls the strength from his feet and he stops. Ritsu cannot help but to look up into the shadows, searching desperately again for the sun.
It filters through the overhanging trees and scatters a warmth across his upturned face that leaves him ever colder. A chill rides down his spine as the warmth follows the curve of his cheek and neck. It drips and stains his shirt collar a dirty copper but there’s nothing on his hands when he wipes it away. He knows there’s nothing there. He wipes at it, anyway.
When he steps out of the shadows again his back remains cold in the sun.
The boy’s had eyes sparkled when Ritsu gently straightened the spoon, his aura spidering over it like ice. The boy laughed when Ritsu told him he was always fixing utensils.
The boy asked to meet again.
A girl from the garden club is plucking weeds and grass from beside the school gates as he enters. She greets him with a dust of red on her cheeks.
He steps into the building quietly, toes off his shoes, and replaces them with school slippers from his locker. He takes the small, pink envelope that had been hidden inside and turns it over. A yellow sticker in the shape of a flower seals it shut. The letter crumples in his hand like a dead leaf, and he drops it on the tiled floor without a second thought.
Ritsu’s ears rang from laughter, then. When he did not answer the boy quickly enough, he moved closer and asked again. Ritsu nodded mechanically, unable to speak. He wanted to meet him again, too.
Still, he meets in the council room. The meeting is brief and boring and he looks over the stray newspaper someone brought instead of listening. There’s nothing of interest. He checks each article to make sure, with the spare time he has before first bell. He checks twice.
Still, there is nothing of interest.
Still, Ritsu goes to class. He takes notes. He writes and writes and shakes his leg and taps his foot. He bites the top of his mechanical pencil and looks out the window, once, into the blue sky. There’s not a single cloud. Last night it had been impossible to see anything at all.
Each period passes by in a blur of paper and pencil and whispers. Occasionally, Ritsu hears a particular voice and he turns. The soft syllables continue, even when he confirms they come from nowhere. Ritsu taps his foot harder to drown out the sound but still he can hear its sweet nothings. The stitch in his palm had broken sometime during the day. It itches, in the middle of his hand.
The boy had shown up once, twice, three times in a row at the school entrance in an olive green gakuran. He crouched at the fringes of the gate and whispered sweet nothings to the weeds and grass and flowers while he waited for Ritsu. The plants had gotten more unruly by the day.
Ritsu always wondered what, exactly, he told them.
The school gate is pristine, now, and Ritsu walks home alone.
Still, Ritsu eats dinner with his family. Curry. As he sets the table, Ritsu tells his mother about his day. Yes, he went early for a council meeting. Class was uneventful, though his classmates were more talkative than usual. It was distracting. He got a confession. He declined graciously, of course. No, he doesn’t plan to stay out late again, his friend is–
The spoons are cold in his hands and they burn his fingers as he places them next to the plates. They stick and pull at his skin as he lets them go. He sets a pair of chopsticks next to his own plate, meeting his mother’s eyes with a smile as he does so. Their smooth wood soothes his stinging, blistering skin.
When he takes a bite it feels like broken glass in his mouth and tastes of blood and bile. He chews. He swallows. He takes another bite.
The echoes of twisting, snapping wood replays as his fingers slide across the chopsticks. It’s punctuated by the clatter of spoons on plates and glass scraping against glass. His head pounds under the pressure and his eardrums want to rupture. He laughs at a joke his father makes. He takes another bite.
Ritsu does not fix his brother’s spoon when it bends.
Still, Ritsu does homework. He sits down at his desk and opens a notebook. His notes from the day are clean. Headers are highlighted and important formulas are starred. Everything he needs is written down between doodles of suns and trees and leaves.
He picks up a pen and scribbles it all out. First the suns, then the trees, then the leaves.
Something went wrong last night. Everything went wrong. Ritsu barely remembers.
He scratches out the stars and formulas next, pressing so hard the paper tears under the weight of strokes. The pen snaps in his hand and ink drips down his arm like blood. He’s not sure if it snapped by physical force or psychic will.
He remembers his powers had splintered and cracked and broke from him like ice calved from a glacier. He remembers screaming. He doesn’t remember why, why, why it had call come crashing down.
He’d tried desperately to hold onto that avalanche of power, to contain it, but the force of gravity was much stronger than he. Ritsu was forced to let go, like a hand slipping from his grasp, and with a roar everything was replaced with the sound of fracturing ice.
Ritsu clenches the broken pen until blood mixes with the ink. He let’s go and belatedly wonders if he’s become like this brother. A power too much to control.
Cement and rebar had groaned from beneath their feet and trees reached their branches out in vain to shield his friend. Ritsu couldn’t look away as fingers twisted and snapped around the well-used spoon still in his friend’s hand.
There had been no closing his eyes, then. It had happened too quickly and now it replayed in his mind over and over and over.
Still, Ritsu goes to sleep. He lays down and shuts his eyes and he drifts away to the sound of his friend’s soft laughter in his ear. His dreams consist of sunshine and dandelions, watermelon and the beach.
Screaming. Ritsu wanted nothing more than to drown it out. The ring of rebar against steel and cement. Shattering wood and splintering glass. He tried to cover his ears. He tried to make it stop, then, but he had no idea how.
Still, above it all, he could hear his friend crying. He could hear his name, called in a desperate and wavering voice.
Ritsu only came back to himself when the world was dark and deafeningly quiet.
He wakes up in the morning and wonders how many more times he will do so. He wonders how long he’ll continue to check the news and the paper. How long it will be until he can use a spoon again. He wonders if anything else will ever remind him so much of summer.
Still, Ritsu gets ready.
Ritsu had dropped to his knees next to his friend, brushing the red frost from his cheek. His blood was thick and warm on Ritsu’s fingers. He was so still.
His hand did not tremble. There were no tears in his eyes. There was only the silence, threaded into him one tacking stitch at a time. Flakes of cement and glass and snow drifted down from above him and the surviving trees were bent low, weeping. He ran his clean hand through his friends hair before gently taking the spoon from his grasp.
Ritsu opens a desk drawer and stares down at the twisted spoon inside. He hears his name whispered across his ear and he closes it shut. A single tacking stitch snaps and he feels the snow hitting his cheeks just like that night. It melts and rolls down his face and the stench of copper fills his nose. He wipes away the tears and fixes the string himself with a back stitch. He doesn’t know what else to do.
Still, Ritsu goes to school.
Epilogue
Author Comment
This is a fan piece I did a long time ago, that since then has become an original plot all on its own. I’m still fond of the original here, however.
Shrimp Syrup 
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