Chapter 52: Memories ll
He looked around. Waited. Listened.
Nothing. No one.
He climbed down carefully, crouched beside the bundle, and looked at the face inside it.
The baby did not cry.
Which was strange. Which was, frankly, the strangest part of any of this, stranger even than the crater, stranger than the cloth, stranger than the hair color.
Newborns cried. That was what they did.
This one just looked up at him with those dark eyes like it was simply waiting to see what happened next.
The old man cradled it carefully.
"Who left you here," he said quietly, to no one.
No answer came.
He straightened up and carried the child home.
---
**Tokyo, Japan.**
Eight years later.
---
The market street was busy the way Tokyo market streets always were, packed and loud and smelling of food and exhaust and the specific energy of too many people moving in too many directions at once.
A man pulled out his wallet to pay for groceries.
A hand was faster.
The cash was gone before he’d finished the motion, and the kid attached to the hand was already three meters away and accelerating, dark hair, small frame, moving through the crowd like water finding gaps.
"THIEF!"
The word hit the street and seven men, the particular kind of men who spend their days looking for an excuse, were already moving. Not because they cared about the groceries. Because something to chase had presented itself and they were bored and angry and that combination rarely needed more reason than that.
They chased.
They couldn’t keep up.
The boy smirked without looking back.
Six days.
Six days since he’d eaten anything solid. Water from public fountains, that was the sum total of his diet since last week. Some cash would fix that. Some cash would fix everything, at least for today, and today was what mattered.
He was still smiling when he ran directly into something solid in the middle of the road.
He went down hard, flat on the ground, the cash scattering from his grip and landing several feet away.
He reached for it.
A shoe came down on the notes first.
He looked up.
Seven pairs of eyes looked back down at him.
’...Ah,’ he thought.
The first kick came from a dirty sneaker on his left side. Then another. Then it stopped being individual kicks and became something less organized and more sustained, the kind of thing that continues because stopping requires deciding to stop and nobody was making that decision.
It went on for a while.
Then the leader of the group crouched down and grabbed a fistful of his dark hair.
Something snapped.
He hadn’t eaten in six days. His ribs were complaining about at least three of those kicks. He was eight years old and on the ground in a Tokyo side street and by any reasonable measure this was not the moment to draw a line.
He drew one anyway.
"Don’t," he said. Low and flat. "Touch my hair."
"Boss." One of the lackeys. "I think the brat said something."
"Don’t touch my hai—"
"Leave the kid alone."
A girl’s voice. Clear and unhesitating, cutting straight through the scene with the particular confidence of someone who hadn’t stopped to calculate whether this was a good idea.
The men looked up.
The men left. Not dramatically, not with dignity, just the quiet dispersal of people who had decided that whatever this was, it wasn’t worth a police call.
Footsteps came toward him fast and a face appeared in his field of vision, framed by long dark hair, looking at him with an expression caught between concern and urgency.
She looked about ten.
"Are you alright? How badly did they—" Her hands moved quickly, checking, the way someone does when they’ve had some practice at assessing damage. "Can you hear me?"
He was too tired to answer. Too hungry. The kind of tired that goes bone deep and makes words feel like more effort than they’re worth.
She seemed to remember something. Reached into the bag at her side and held out a bread roll.
He grabbed it before she’d finished extending her arm.
He ate it in approximately four bites.
She watched him without commenting on this, which he noted.
"Why were they chasing you?" she asked. "Don’t you have parents?"
He looked at her.
She was strange. That was his first assessment. Most people who saw what had just happened crossed the street. This one had walked toward it, alone, and was now sitting on the ground next to him asking questions like they were old friends.
Strange.
"By the way," she said, apparently taking his silence as an acceptable answer. "My name is Mira. Mirajane Cross."
She tilted her head.
"What’s yours?"
"Leon," he said.
"Do you have somewhere to stay, Leon?"
He shook his head.
She stood up immediately, brushing off her knees, and extended her hand toward him with a smile that did something inexplicable to the weight he’d been carrying for six days, made it feel, briefly, like it wasn’t entirely his to carry alone.
"Then let’s go to my place," she said simply. "Come on."
He looked at her hand.
Then took it.
And she pulled him to his feet like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Since then, Leon lived with her.
Mira’s family wasn’t rich. Small apartment, enough rooms, her parents were decent people who didn’t ask too many questions about the quiet dark haired boy their daughter had dragged home one evening.
They fed him. That was enough.
He and Mira were inseparable after that. Not in the dramatic way people describe childhood friendships, not with grand declarations or sentimental moments. Just the quiet, unremarkable closeness of two kids who had decided the other one was worth keeping around.
She talked. He didn’t, much.
She dragged him places. He went, mostly without complaint.
She got into trouble occasionally. He got her out of it, mostly without comment.
That was it. That was all it was.
His one and only childhood friend.
That was until it happened.
The scene shifted.
All three of them watched it unfold in front of them, the white space of the mindscape replaced by something else entirely, images surfacing like memories rising through deep water.
