The boy's father was black. That was as much as the child-like conception could understand in that moment. That familiar skin that was so taut, so full of life and hope and joy, was now black. It was still the shape of his father, he could recognize that much, but he couldn't understand why his skin was black.
There was also a bit of white under his neck. If he knew what the concept was he would have described it as a frock, but he didn't and all he knew was that his father was covered in black with a tiny pinprick of white under his neck.
The boy took a few steps closer, the lapping of the ocean behind him as his bare feet trod through sand. He was trying to get a better look, trying to understand why his mother was leaning over his father's slumped form, trying to see why his father's skin was so damnably black, and like any curious wide-eyed child, he began to understand. The black skin wasn't black, it was charred. The white dot on his chest wasn't a friar's cloth, it was his collarbone poking through his crackled skin.
The boy tried to reason it out, tried to figure it out, but there was no solution that provided itself aside from the obvious. He whimpered a bit as he realized what the scene represented. In perfect clarity from a noonday sun, he could see what it was. His father's corpse, burned to a crisp at the hands of his mother.
It was at his whimper that she turned to see him. In a moment of absolute terror her face fell. She had not been prepared for this. She hadn't been prepared for any of this, that much was obvious. She had not been prepared to be a mother, much less a mother to a being such as her son.
The boy turned around and leaped into the air. His flight was slow and inarticulate, but he was powered by fear. That was all he needed to get away, or so he thought. His mother's hand slammed into his neck and the two of them careened to the mainland. The boy's face was dragged through the silty sand of the beach as the waters calmed around the two of them. He struggled under her grip and tried to writhe himself free.
He thrashed, threw a hand that could break bone towards her face, and she didn't put up any defense. He turned, trying to twist himself free of her, but all he ended up doing was shoving his face into a position which only revealed the corpse of his father. His mother realized this, only too late, and with quick movements grasped both of his wrists and turned him the other direction, towards the trees and rocky shore.
The force caused him to scream. The realization that there was nothing he could do caused him to panic all the more and try and do something. With imperfect movements, the sand and stones around them began to vibrate with internalized intensity. With rage and fury they began to throw themselves at her. His mother would have been proud, if she could perceive it through everything else she was feeling.
She closed her eyes against the barrage and curled her son closer into her chest. She tried to understand the tears emerging from her eyes, she tried to understand her own emotional state. She wasn't crying tears over her husband. He was human, she had been the idiot entrusting him with limitless power, but her son...
She tried holding him tighter, tried getting him to stop moving, tried to explain using frantic grasping swaddling motions that it was alright, that everything was fine, but all that the boy understood in that moment was the threat he was in.
"Satoshi..." The boy's mother eked out through gritted teeth and shut eyes. She could sense the stones that were shattering over her shoulder. She used her own force to protect any of the debris from colliding into his childish face.
"Satoshi..." She called out into the chaos of their emotions. She opened her eyes and looked upon his black hair. Her own eyes recalled the image of the boy's father.
"Satoshi...please..."
The boy couldn't hear her. He couldn't hear her pleas, he could only feel her body against his and he could only feel the threat they produced inside of him. He didn't understand anything anymore, he wasn't in a place to understand. He simply felt, and perceived the feelings at his disposal. There was no more rational thought, only animalistic instinct and desire to run away.
His mother thought back to his birth, his persistent wails, his thrashing when he was young, his childish tantrums over the mundane. She thought to his father, how many times he had gone to the hospital after breaking an arm trying to hold him, how he never could get too close without potentially getting seriously injured, about how her son had always looked up to him instead of her. She gripped her son's wrists tighter and with clenched teeth and furious passion she finally shouted. "IronStar Bastard!"
The boy stopped moving. The name had called through the storm within him, and like a blanket falling upon a fire, the fury was gone. Everything inside of himself was dead now, almost as dead as the damnation that continued to rot on the stony outcropping beyond.
"Satoshi...I'm sorry..." His mother relented after a moment, her tone apologetic, but her movements not. She still held onto his wrists and continued to lay with him in a fetal position grip.
"I'm sorry..." She said again.
Both her and the child could feel the rapid panicking breaths pacing through their lungs. Hers were emotional, and she could understand that, but his were instinctual. She could feel those breaths and she could understand their pattern. He was still an animal that needed to be trained.
And yet this animal asked through haunted, whimpering tones. "Why did you kill him?"
His mother's grip tightened on his wrists. "Do you remember..." she began, not really knowing the best way to explain something like this to him. "Do you remember when we talked about...our family...about...how we aren't like other people?"
The boy didn't want to listen. He wanted his father back. He wanted to go home and pretend this never happened. But he was trapped in her arms and didn't know what else to do.
"Do you remember that I said if anyone ever found out about what we could do...that bad people would come for us?"
Sniffling but trying to control his voice, he said, "Dad isn't a bad person, you know this..." He whimpered
"Your father..." She struggled with the words. "He was going to tell everyone our secret, Satoshi. He was going to put you in danger."
"That's not true!" The boy's voice shook with anger more than confusion. "Dad said we could help people who get hurt in disasters. He said it was wrong to just watch when we could do something."
"That's exactly what I mean," his mother said, her voice getting harder. "If we help those people, then everyone will know about us. And then what happens to you? What happens when they take you away from me?"
The boy's lip trembled, but his voice was steadier now. "You did talk to him, didn't you? You told him not to go." His voice was growing cold with understanding. "But he went anyway."
"Daddy was wrong," she cut him off sharply. "And now he can't make those mistakes anymore."
"He's really dead, isn't he?" The boy's voice was quiet, resigned. "Not hurt-dead like when he broke his ribs. Actually dead."
His mother's face softened slightly at the raw understanding in his voice. "Yes.” She said with certainty, loosening her grip on his wrists slightly. “He's not coming back this time."
"You've hurt him before, but he always forgave you," the boy said, his voice getting steadier, angrier. “We…We can take him to the Keep, remake his body and then—”
"This is different, Satoshi."
"No…No, It’s not, We can just…" His voice wavered slightly. "Dad was…” He realized something he shouldn’t share with his mother and then went quiet. "Why…” He teared up again. “Why did you do this?”
His mother closed her eyes. How could she explain that humans couldn't be trusted with promises? That their emotions made them unpredictable, unreliable? “Think of your friends Satoshi. If your father had his way, you could never see them again. Kenji, Masato, Kenta, they would all be gone” She felt him tearing up and the rage building once more. She prepared herself and tightened her grip. "I had to protect you." She admitted.
"I don't want your protection!" Rocks began to splinter around them as the boy began to fight again. "You killed him because he was showing me what it meant to be a hero. Dad protected me from you! That's why you killed him!"
The raw accusation in his voice sent another wave of destruction rippling outward in concentric circles of devastation. Ancient pine trees that had weathered decades of storms suddenly splintered with explosive cracks, their trunks splitting vertically before toppling with thunderous crashes that shook the ground. The sand itself seemed to liquefy and churn, creating small whirlpools that swallowed shells and seaweed whole before spitting them back out in grotesque patterns.
A family of crabs scuttling near the waterline simply burst, their shells imploding with wet pops before their remains dissolved into the disturbed sand. Seabirds that had been pecking at the retreating tide froze mid-step as their hollow bones collapsed inward with delicate crackling sounds, their bodies crumpling like paper bags before being swept away by waves that suddenly turned red with their blood.
The very air seemed to thicken and pulse with each ragged scream the boy took. Flowers disintegrated, their petals turning to ash that swirled upward in spiraling columns before being scattered by winds that shouldn't have existed on such a calm day. Even the rocks embedded in the sand began to vibrate with an ominous humming, hairline fractures spreading across their surfaces like spider webs before they cracked apart with sounds like breaking bones.
His mother held him tighter as debris scattered around them. "I know you're upset. I know you are…” She whispered, her own stone faced form begining to tear up.
"You're lying!" he shouted as he arched his back trying to get away. “You don’t know anything about me!” He screamed again as he fought for freedom. "Dad never lied to me, but you do. You lie all the time." He looked over at her with eyes that seemed older than his eleven years. "You were jealous, weren't you? Because I liked Dad better than you."
The words should have hurt her, but she felt only a distant acknowledgment. He was a child having a tantrum. Children said things they didn't mean when they were upset. Once they were back in the Keep, once he was away from human influences, he would understand. He would see that everything she did was for him.
"I HATE YOU" he shouted, again trying to wrench himself free. "I'm never going to stop hating you!"
But the boy's voice broke on the last word, and despite his mature accusations, he was still just a child who had watched his mother murder his father. He couldn't stop the tears, couldn't stop the images of his father's burned body from replaying in his mind, couldn't understand how the person who was supposed to love him most had done the most terrible thing he could imagine. The shivering of the surrounding environment finally came to a close as the emotion began to flow out, away with the lapping waves of the ocean.
Through it all, the two of them remained locked together—mother and son, predator and prey, the last remnants of a family that had just been torn apart forever, surrounded by the physical manifestation of a child's world ending.
Through the chaos, his mother's expression shifted between relief and something darker. She tried to think of where they were, what the nearby military bases would think of this strange sight, if any passing tourist would see something bizarre, but there was so much coastline and this was such a vacant outcropping that no one would ever come here, especially if she made it difficult. Soon they would leave this place. Soon she could raise him properly. Away from the kind of bleeding-heart idealism that had gotten his father killed. Everything was going to go according to plan.
But the weight of her son's small body against hers felt different now. Heavier. His father used to hold him like this when Satoshi had nightmares, when his powers first manifested in terrifying bursts. She had watched from doorways, telling herself she was giving them space, not admitting that she had never known how to comfort without controlling.
Her husband had been weak, yes, but he had also been... gentle. Patient in ways she had never learned to be. The boy had laughed with him, trusted him, run to him first whenever something went wrong. And now that bridge was ash.
She told herself this was necessary. Her son would understand eventually. Children were resilient, adaptable. He would forget the softness his father had taught him and learn the strength only she could provide. He would become what he was meant to be.
But even as she convinced herself, even as the shivering around them stopped and the normal lapping waves resumed their course, the small, broken voice kept whispering "I hate you" into the ground, over and over, and each repetition felt like a countdown to something she couldn't name. Something that made her hold him tighter not out of love, but out of the growing certainty that she was losing him.