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When Nana first held out her hand toward him, he thought he got a fresh start. That he could truly earn that watch ticking by his hand. Her tears spilled over as he seemed to bestow her a solace; a silence she never experienced.
I hope we can be friends, he thought. Thinking that it relayed itself to her.
And then she pushed him.
Her hands ran through her hair, pushing it up to her sea-green eyes. And all Nanao could truly think while looking at them was that, perhaps, that's what the colour of the depths of raging waves that would swallow him would be.
Why?
Perhaps it was obvious; perhaps the girl called Nana heard the cry of his soul that has nothing to with the supernatural and everything to with being a human.
So she answered. Stood beneath the bleeding sky and atop the cliff’s maws and the dying him.
She told him as his sweaty palms tried to hold on to the torn, broken, split off rope. Every little thing that he never thought to think about, small gestures that made her know.
In Nanao’s opinion, he’d still call her a mind reader. An extraterrestrial that was referred to as human.
“—Because you all are the enemies of humanity.”
His hands slowly, slowly, slowly slip off the fracturing rope.
“For humanity’s sake, please die.”
His watch fell off on the way down.
He sank through the ocean that he’d been admiring since he had first arrived, it received him with salt, suffocation and terror.
And as he descended into depths of murky chilling water; Nanao thinks that he had screamed.
He woke up.
Then he ruined everything.
Ambulance; an ambulance might help—but the grip of evil on his shoulders told otherwise. He’s helpless in the fact he has lost all the human in the aquatic slumber that forever would change him.
Confined in the wrongs that made up his shell, that he exists without the time tick by on his wrist.
He dully notes the objects in front of him.
Fallen mangas strewn about; that he thinks that he mentioned to his father only because he never could discuss the novels written by the greats that his brothers could talk about for hours on end. (Ah, he could picture it even now, the smell of father’s cigar over a cup of earl grey and a chess game that made his head spin.) His console with his games he poured hours onto but wiped clean when he went to the island, a fresh set of clothes he’d ought to change into instead of this hospital gown. Snacks that he’d only eaten at 7 years old, when his sweet tooth was on its peak.
Now all he can taste is salt. Unique to tears and oceans, it clung to him—the acrid taste of salt and the smell of darkness that came from the blood spilt from the innocent.
And so, Nanao faced the reality of all of it: He’s a monster.
Truly an enemy of humanity indeed.
(It wasn’t him was it?
He didn’t know.
He just didn't know.
Was it that much of a sin?)
He turns left. In the direction of the man that smiled. Dooming himself into a marionette that will only be the shadow of Evil. Forsaking what was right, the surface where his family laid awaiting, his mother and two brothers still blissfully ignorant of what he’d just done.
He forgoes the light. Fated to be swallowed whole within the darkness.
But he turns left. Clutching at his chest that tightens and heaves so harshly that he almost thinks his talent might be trying to kill him as well, with his teeth grit so that he doesn’t scream the feeling swirling in him into life because he doesn’t know if he's allowed do that anymore. Eyes blurry with tears that sting him like he still hasn’t escaped that wrathful ocean.
He’s drowning.
But he turns left. Even if he limps forward, even if he crawls there, even if his head, legs, body, heart, soul all scream to turn away from the darkness.
Because—because he still needs an explanation.
(And he realizes much, much later that when he fell across that edge; that cliff, that mistake—his voice, his cry, his scream was silent for the very beginning. Destined to be devoured by his own foolish emotions before the water and darkness even had a chance.)
So, he turns left and turns his back from right.
He wishes he could nullify some of himself too.
Perhaps he’ll stop hearing the ticking of that watch catching up to him with all his sins.
And then, he became a hound to the man skilled at true evil. (Still, even Evil is somehow less of a monster than he is.)
He wades through the wretches of the darkness. Everything that once was Nanao Nakajima slowly, slowly, slowly fracturing. Nullified.
—Dead.
And where the light cannot touch, the place that only envies Nana, the part of Nanao that calls himself useless. The part of him that he can only call Talentless.
It collects the dead, rotten pieces. And it turns him into an abomination. The personification of the monster that resides in his talent, the one that nullified—the thing that killed—awakening within the walking dead that was him.
He’s so tired.
So tired.
Perhaps he’ll kill Nana.
But something tells him, in the small, niggling part of his soul, that no matter how seriously he actually takes that sentiment, he’ll fail. And for some reason, that makes him want to laugh—and maybe, only just a bit, relieved.
He hopes someone still feeds the cats on the island.
Come to think of it, he hadn’t really hated the island. It had people—monsters—that he perhaps didn’t think of in a good light, if only because he himself was shadow; an encroaching darkness that ruined everything that cared and was innocent—the true people. (Something he wasn’t.)
A void that was null of good. An emptiness that cannot be called anything but a monster, an enemy.
He so dearly wishes that he could’ve saved his watch. If only to see when it would tick down to his end, the last moment before he becomes nothingness in the truest sense rather than the entity he is.
He is a monster, void, darkness, hound of Evil, dead and buried in salt.
Null.