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Teddy couldn’t remember what his mother’s embrace felt like. He couldn’t remember the sound of his father’s voice. He couldn’t remember anything except the dread that washed over him when he was watching the news that night.
The clip played in his mind for the millionth time. A shaky camera barely caught a glimpse of the rust-colored pickup truck that his parents had been so proud of their repairs on.
The truck was far beyond repair at that point. So were they. And so was he.
Teddy took another swig of the whiskey he forgot he was holding. It wasn’t enough to drink. He needed to drown.
Though the cameraman was shaking, the quality was as good as any news camera. If one focused at the right moment, they could see the blood splattered across the rocks. They could see the human arm hanging out the driver’s seat window. They could see that the arm in question wasn’t connected to a body.
But it didn’t take an observant person, or even a good camera, to see that the car had been sliced cleanly in half. To see that it wasn’t an accident.
Teddy narrowed his eyebrows in rage and took another long drink. Those newsmen had called it an unexplainable tragedy. A freak accident. A crazy coincidence, because there was nothing alive on that mountain that could have split the truck cleanly in two.
His father’s body was found first. The severed arm was his, and one of his legs was broken. There was clearly a struggle, but no one wanted to acknowledge it. His eyes hadn’t even glazed over- one could still see the fearful determination in his eyes.
His mother’s body was found in the front of the truck. And in the back. She had been trying to climb out of the trunk when the car was split, it seemed. Her spine was cut just as clean as the car was, and Teddy couldn’t get the image of her guts on the ground out of his head.
Teddy didn’t want to think about his youthful, beautiful parents in that way. He wanted to think of them as the people who loved him for his entire life; the people who cared about him no matter how disrespectful and horrid he had been.
But he had to think about what happened.
Because he was the only one who knew what happened that day.
They were all too scared, too stupid to see what was right in front of them. The clouds that loomed over Mt. Itoi didn’t mean anything to the masses. They would rather live their comfortable lives in their urban paradise, hoping they’d pass peacefully of a cold before the building tension could amount to anything.
Teddy brought the bottle to his lips again, but only a single drop fell into his mouth. He scowled, flipping the bottle in his hand and bringing it down onto the windowsill.
The glass sprinkled onto the ground outside, and Teddy’s eyes followed the shards. The grass looked almost black in the dead of night.
The only sounds he could hear were crickets chirping in the woods. Not even the typical violent screaming of Ellay wanted to bother that night.
It was peaceful. Teddy could barely believe that the same world that could produce such a calm night could take his parents in the blink of an eye.
He clenched the bottle’s neck tighter.
Any other day, the feeling of a cold whiskey bottle carved into jagged pieces would have tempted Teddy to go out and distract himself with more mindless violence. But… it didn’t feel right that time.
Actually, nothing with the BB gang felt right anymore. When he was a kid, he was just glad to be able to have a community of people that respected him. When he became the gang’s leader, the reward was amplified.
He was still the leader, but he didn’t do anything anymore. Sure, a lot of the members still hung out with him, and sure, they all loved and respected him, but it was like they were a group of friends instead of a gang at that point. A group of friends that was prone to starting fights and terrorizing the locals.
The BB gang was getting along just fine without him there to call every single shot. Teddy told his best friend Koyano how to keep the gang relatively in check, anyhow. They really didn’t even need him.
But they were still obsessed with him. He was the leader, after all. The entire gang loved him.
And he loved them too. But he could never love them as much as he loved his parents. And maybe he should have been taking more measures to protect what he had left, but he really didn’t feel like there was anything he could do to protect them that they couldn’t do themselves.
So really, the only thing he could do was wonder if there was anything he could do to avenge his parents. Even when he did have other things to think about, it always seemed to creep back into his mind.
Because he was going to avenge them.
As if on cue, a yell resounded from outside his window. He was used to hearing the sounds of the city, so he didn’t bother checking out who it had been. It didn’t really matter.
The only thing that really mattered was revenge. Revenge was imminent. Revenge was necessary.
The only thing stopping him was, embarrassingly enough, his own fear of Mt. Itoi. But he couldn’t let fear stop him. Even though it did. It had for years.
But he had to get up there eventually. And he knew that if he waited just a bit longer, there would be an opportunity.