What is a home?
Even at twenty-seven, I still haven't found an answer to that question.
The only thing I feel inside, if it can even be called that, is absolute emptiness. A depressing, suffocating weight that keeps me from moving forward the way I want, always making me stumble.
Actually, my situation is even more pathetic than that because I've spent my life buried in regret. No. I can't even be sure of that. I don't see myself like everyone else. Not that I feel superior. On the contrary, I don't even know how to feel about it.
I never believed in fate. Everything happens because people make choices. The present is nothing more than the result of all those decisions.
So all that was left for me was to look up at the sky in the rain. Well, what was left of it behind the clouds.
It rains every October 14th.
It starts at night and ends before the day is over. It's as if the sky were trying to remind me of that day. A day so terrible it still chilled me to the core.
With every rain, those memories returned.
A fire. I should have forgotten it by now. Eighteen years had passed, and although the memories were blurry, that internal ache still lingered, impossible to pinpoint.
I found a secluded bench in a quiet square.
"The strong exist to protect the weak..."
When my mother taught me those words, I was barely eight years old.
Why did she decide to teach me that?
Well, let's just say my eight-year-old self was thrilled because his teacher told him he was "the best in the class," and he ran to ask his mother about it. Right then, she also told me, "The people you save will make you feel human. You will feel like you belong with them."
I sighed at the memory of those last words.
"You were wrong, Mom."
I never felt human. No one ever made me feel like one. After offering empty thanks, they simply went back to their normal lives.
"...I miss you so much."
Then the fire happened, and that entire life went to shit along with it.
I only have vague memories of that moment. Before everything caught fire, a strange light led me out of the house. By the time I snapped out of that trance, the place was already engulfed in flames.
"They're inside! Let me go save them!"
The firefighters arrived too late. The flames had already been drowned by the relentless rain. But my parents were found holding each other.
---
Years later, I took up swordsmanship.
Nobody taught me, just the internet and a wooden stick I found in the yard. To my surprise, or perhaps my punishment, I was a natural. By the time the orphanage suggested I join the kendo club, I was already at the top level.
As I walked, a sensation just like that light from the day of the fire stopped me in the middle of the rain.
"Hikari... sapa...."
Every raindrop was leaving me a message.
"Hello." "How are you?" "Can I wash you?" "Are you free?" Questions that didn't stop until I took shelter from the rain under a slender tree.
After that, through those messages, I realized I could control the element of water. No, rather, I communicated with it, and it simply answered my call.
It was part of me. I was part of the water.
Over time, I realized I could do the same with the other elements. It didn't happen out of nowhere. They were different kinds of conversations, and they reached me at different points in my life.
The wind came when I was lost in nostalgia, taking a journey into the past, and it simply swelled around me until it wrapped me in a warm breeze that I can still feel today.
Earth appeared at a specific moment, on a day when I finally felt a room belonged to me. For the first time, I wasn't surrounded by other kids, and because of my good behavior, they moved me into a state-provided room of my own.
And fire...
Well, at first I felt numb to it. I wasn't afraid of it, but I hated it. It was the only feeling left in me before everything went to hell. Before I even realized my parents were gone, I already hated fire for burning our house down.
Did fire really expect me to welcome it like the other elements and just talk back?
Even so, fire kept reaching out, wanting to speak.
In time, given everything, I came to realize fire wasn't to blame for anything. It was just passion, pure energy that gives warmth and simply dies out when there is nothing left to consume. The real culprit was whoever started it. It was no accident. Someone was at fault. Was it my parents' negligence, or someone else's malice?
My parents had enemies. I don't know the full story, but I think it had to do with their work as local police officers in their old city.
And now, as the water brings the past rushing back, I finally feel ready to change something.
"I just want to have a mother who smells like fresh bread again, a father who... hm?"
My eyes snapped open.
"Dad?"
I froze on the spot, staring up at the sky.
Father, you told me while we were playing in the park, in a voice you had never used with me before, words I remember now with total clarity: "No matter what happens, no matter how hard life gets, you have to live, understand? Live fully. Don't just exist. Live. Can you do that, Hikari-kun?"
How could I have forgotten?
I had blindly followed my mother's words, "protect the weak," never wavering from them.
I spent eighteen years without living, merely existing, never fulfilling anything my father asked of me in that park. Why did he say it like that? I don't know. What matters is that I should have listened and tried.
That was when I saw it.
A truck was barreling down the street toward two people, a man and a young girl, moving at a speed it had no business reaching here.
Without giving myself time to think, I bolted forward, using the wind to strip away air resistance. The rain parted from my eyes, and my feet held firm against the slick pavement.
Even if I make it in time, the street cameras will pick up impossible speed. But if I don't push my power harder, I won't save them...
"What if this is my chance?"
"Protect the weak, Hikari!"
My mother's voice echoed in my mind as it always did. Whenever I hesitate, it surfaces, and I instinctively sprint toward the nearest person in danger. But just as I braced myself, another voice cut through.
"Live, son! Don't just exist, live fully!"
If I save these people, I save myself too. I would use this final command to put an end to the programming called my life. Not as something heroic or noble, but as the most selfish and, at the same time, most human thing I could do: proving that I can bleed just like them.
I threw myself between the truck and the girl.
What was I doing?
For a fraction of a second, I saw my mother's eyes in that little girl.
Ending my life. That's what I'm doing.
The elements answered my final wish.
The wind roared against the front grille, building a wall of drag. The water turned the asphalt into pure friction. Fire choked out the engine, and earth thrust stone spikes up through the chassis. That was all it took to stop the truck dead in its tracks. Even so, the impact caught me.
Only one thought remained... maybe two. I couldn't tell anymore.
"Forgive me, Mom, for not protecting anyone else." A dead man can't save anyone.
"Forgive me, Dad, for not living the way you asked." I died without keeping your promise.
Then, the only thing left was the final sensation before death: a high-pitched, piercing ring tearing through my ears.
Finally, I was free...
.
.
.
.
[System error]
──×××──××─×××××─××
[Loss of communication with the elements upon death]
W-what on earth is this terrifying feeling...?
All around me was a world of white, slowly coming into focus.
Where... am I?
I tried to turn my head. I tried to move my hands, but my body wouldn't listen.
"-----! ------, ------ - --- --------!"
When my vision finally cleared, I realized, or at least guessed, that I had been reincarnated, and that my "new parents" had been arguing right up until their second child was born.
Wait... Why can't I hear them anymore?
I tried to reach out to the candle flame, but nothing happened.
Did I lose...? The connection?