Some people are fortunate enough to not face the harshness of this world.
And others bear the full front of such cruelty the moment they draw breath...
This world doesn't favor anyone, they say. But how true is that when those born into rich or loving family don't know what it means to struggle while still a child?
The world isn't fair and it never was to begin with.
The road was empty at this hour.
Sunny had chosen it specifically for that reason.
No witnesses. No one to pull him back. Just the hum of distant traffic and the cold bite of a November wind that didn't care whether he lived or died. He found that comforting, in a way. The world had never particularly cared either.
He stood at the edge of the curb, hands in his pockets, staring at the headlights bleeding through the fog ahead. His legs weren't shaking. He'd expected them to. People always shook in movies that last trembling hesitation before the edge.
But how did it come this far to begin with?
⭐⭐⭐
Sunny, a 11 Year old boy who had slept peacefully after playing with his little brother. Has woken up to the disappearance of his father
There was no dramatic fight. No slamming door. No moment Sunny could point to later and say there, that's where it broke.
His father simply became someone who came home less, then less again, then not at all.
His mother didn't explain it. She just got quieter.
Not sad, exactly. More like she had taken everything she used to spend on being happy and reinvested it into being strong.
Sunny watched her and understood without being told.
He started waking up earlier. Making breakfast before she had to ask. Packing his brother's bag and walking him to school so she could leave for work without the detour.
Small Practical things. The kind of help that doesn't feel like help until years later when you realize a child shouldn't have known how to give it.
He was mature way beyond his age yet he still is at heart that same boy who had a loving father growing up.
He was still doing his homework. Still getting good grades. Still laughing with Chris at stupid things, still staying up too late, still being a little boy in all the visible ways.
Still the boy who foolishly believed that if he just worked hard enough, helped enough, sacrificed enough, he could hold his family together.
He was wrong.
At fourteen he got his first part time job.
A small convenience store three blocks from their apartment. The owner, an old man named Mr. Hassan, paid him under the table and pretended not to notice he was technically too young to work.
Sunny stocked shelves from four to eight on weekdays, and worked longer on weekends. He gave most of it to his mother and kept just enough for bus fare.
She cried when he handed her the first envelope. Not in front of him he heard it through the wall that night, quiet and brief.
the kind of crying you do when you're trying not to be heard.
He layed there staring at the ceiling in total darkness, he felt neither pride nor grief. Rather something bitter and sweet at the same time, responsibility...
It didn't take long for Chris to Wonder why his father didn't come home yet both mother and son couldn't get themselves to tell him the truth.
They came up with a lie that hurt to swallow.
" Where did daddy go?"
"He is abroad in another country "
" Why doesn't he call us then?"
" He can't because that country has no phone service, he will write us letters instead."
They spent years maintaining this fake story and creating fake letters , yet a lie is always destined to be revealed sooner than later.
School was fine. It always was. Sunny had the kind of mind that absorbed things quickly
not brilliance exactly, more like efficiency. He didn't need to study hard because he paid attention the first time. Teachers liked him. He didn't cause problems.
He sat in the middle rows and answered questions when called on and disappeared into the background otherwise.
He had stopped thinking about what he wanted to be.
And started focusing on now, on the paycheck next week, on the school fees and on how his mother cried every night.
This was never a decision made from despair, rather necessity. The same way you cancel a trip you can't afford.
It was an easy choice to make, and it was his responsibility to do it.There was no room left for wanting as the future had become a luxury item...
At nineteen he discovered the hospital receipt for his mom while looking for the electricity bill she mentioned.
Below that bill a strange folded paper that had marks from being opened and closed multiple times.
He read it once. Then again. Then he sat down on the kitchen floor because his legs had made a decision his brain hadn't caught up to yet.
Stage three.
The date on the letter was four months ago.
He sat there for a long time. The apartment was empty, his mother was at her second job, Chris was at school.
The refrigerator hummed loudly and somewhere outside a car horn sounded and faded.
Sunny folded the letter exactly as he'd found it and put it back.
Then he went to the bathroom, turned on the tap and throw his head under the running water so the sound would cover anything else.
He sat there for what felt like hours before stepping away from the running water and pressing his back against the wall as he slid down to the floor.
He didn't cry for long, that felt like a waste of time he couldn't afford.
By the time he came out, his hair had already dried out and his legs were as sturdy as before.
By the time his mother returned he had already looked at the treatment and medicines costs.
Things that their insurance couldn't cover...
The number sat in his head like a Thorn that kept stinging him.
That night he called his father for sheer desperation.
The phone rang twenty seven times before voicemail each call tore a part of his soul. He called again and again. Voicemail after voicemail.
He left a couple of calm specific messages , just the facts and the he costs.
He said please once, at the end, and quietly hated himself for it.
His father never called back...
Sunny stared at the glowing screen with emotionless eyes.he opened the old laptop he had been using for years and started looking for a second job.
Quiting school was the easiest decision he made recently, and that scared him.
He expected to feel sadness like it was a sacrifice. He wanted it to feel like a loss .
But he only founded logical, like an equation that had a single way of solving.
He told himself he could go back later.
He was smart enough to know that wasn't true and tired enough not to care.
The second job was at a restaurant . Nights and weekends. Combined with the convenience store he was working close to sixty hours a week.
His body naturally adjusted the way bodies do when they don't have the option not to.
He slept less. Ate quickly. Moved through the apartment like a ghost .
In late, out early, and always a little more hollow than the day before.
His mother was quick to notice.
" You are working to much ." She called him out one night when he returned around eleven
" I am fine" he said weakly before kissing her cheeks and heading for bed.
"Sunn—"
"I am fine Mama , no need to worry" he said with the practiced fake smile he did every morning. It was a convincing performance for anyone other than his mother...
On a Tuesday morning he decided to confront his brother with their mother's condition.
He thought about it for weeks and came to this conclusion. His brother is sixteen. Two years older than when he started working.
He was old enough to know the truth ,he said to himself but deep down he knew otherwise.
He was tired, tired of carrying this burden alone for so long. He wanted to share his pain with someone who can understand him, someone who can help.
He absorbed the bad news surprisingly quietly.
"Is she going to be ok"
Sunny couldn't bring himself to look at his brothers eyes "the doctor said that if she respondes to the treatment—"
"Is she going to be okay?!!" There it was, the outburst he had expected from the beginning.
"We're going to do everything we can," Sunny said as a matter of fact .
Chris nodded twice and got up towards his room
Three weeks later sunny got a call from an unknown number he picked up and wished he didn't.
His brother had been shot in a gang fight. A casualty in the Cross fire , a case of wrong timing.
He knew better than to believe that stranger.
Chris who had been looking for a job for a way to help, had found the only door that opened fast.
He walked through it without fully understanding what was on the other side and suffered the consequences.
He identified the body alone.
He told his mother that Chris had gotten into an accident. He couldn't tell her the truth. She was already losing too much.
She didn't believe him of course. Mothers never do.
But she didn't push maybe because she couldn't afford to know, maybe because she could see in his face that the truth was worse than the lie.
She died eleven days later...
The doctors said it was the illness. Sunny knew it was both.
The apartment was quiet after that.
He kept going to work. Both jobs. Paid the remaining bills. Ate when he remembered to. Slept when his body forced him.
He wasn't sad exactly. Sadness implied there was something for him left to lose.
He felt like a building that had been emptied out. Still standing with no reason to be.
He thought about taking the pills twice and got as far as holding the bottle both times.
Yet he couldn't do it.
Was it his cowardice or fear of death that stopped him?
Or the remaining desire to not rot alone in the apartment?
either way he desired to die painfully not in that small pathetic way
So one night, three weeks after his mother's funeral, he put his jacket on and walked
⭐⭐⭐
He glanced at the blinding lights that slowly consumed everything like a tide of raging flames, and jumped forward with all his might.
The light got so bright he forcibly closed his eyes.
The sleep deprived driver quickly pressed the brakes as the screech of rubber grasping against the asphalt
A sharp bang slowly followed yet not the pain he was expecting.
He waited confused with his eyes still closed before opening them to the horrific sight of a little girl, rather her corpse...
He was so overwhelmed with dread that he didn't notice the different road nor the sun still barely hanging.
He instinctively tried to grab the little child only to be confused once more.
His worn out hands had become that of soft child.
Then the scream split the world open.
Not from the street. From everywhere from the air, from the ground, from inside his chest.
A sound that wasn't human and wasn't entirely demonic and was made entirely of grief.
Something rose from the girl's body. Something quiet and enormous, a child cursed to become a vengeful spirit.
And now the one who had actual cursed her was gone and it had nowhere left to be.
But that wasn't the case as memories resurfaced out of his subconscious. Foreign yet familiar.
He was sunny a cursed child who caused his family's doom and yuta okkotsu an eleven year old boy who is cursed his friend.
But how did he knew he cursed her?
It's very simple actually, sunny had been a jjk fan. He found some luxury in reading comics and manga in his breaks so he wasn't entirely confused with this type of turning point.
He grasped Rika orimoto's hands and started crying alongside her
The moment their hands touched, the souls locked together completely.
Cursed energy detonated outward like a newborn star ,limitless, overwhelming, far beyond anything this world had ever felt from a child.
A new player has joined the board