Chapter 2: Ringing
Season 1, Episode 1: The Boy With No Power
Chapter 2: Ringing
The sound of tinnitus slowly turned into the phone's alarm—an explosion of sound bursting from the exact opposite direction of silence.
Saito Ren was already awake.
He was lying flat on his back in bed, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. The alarm kept blaring. He didn't reach out to turn it off. He just stared, as if he had seen something in his sleep that he could no longer remember. Only a strange ringing lingered inside his ears, as if someone was rubbing a finger along the rim of a glass from far away.
Finally, he picked up the phone and turned off the alarm. Silence fell over the room. And that silence felt a bit too heavy.
"Another day," he muttered, not aiming it at anyone.
A notebook lay open on the desk. Small doodles in the margins next to college notes. At first glance, they looked like random lines, but looking closer, one could see a symbol drawn repeatedly. A circle. Inside it, a crescent moon, as if someone had half-swallowed it. Sometimes large, sometimes so small it was like the head of a pin.
Ren kept staring at it.
When had he drawn it? Why had he drawn it? He didn't know. He had been drawing it since childhood. As far back as he could remember, really. Whenever someone asked, he would shrug and say, "Habit." But habits have reasons, and he had never been able to find one for this habit.
He closed the notebook.
Twenty years old. In his final year of college. Messy black-and-gray hair, sleep-swollen eyes, and such a calm expression that it seemed he had accepted that everything was fine and turned that acceptance into a way to survive. He glanced at himself in the bathroom mirror. The boy in the mirror stared back at him with tired eyes.
Then he walked out of the room.
Rows of family photos lined the corridor wall. He passed by them every day, saw them every day, and every day he walked past without stopping. Today, he stopped.
Haru's photo showed him with a toothless smile. A little boy laughing with both eyes closed, as if nothing in the world mattered more than laughter. Rina's first-day-of-school photo showed her wearing her school uniform, her brows drawn together in a serious expression. In Ayame and Kaito's wedding photo, Ayame was smiling while Kaito looked slightly embarrassed.
And beside it was another photo. Old, with faded colors. A younger Kaito, not a single gray hair on his head, his shoulders straight and his eyes holding a strange distance. It was as if he wasn't looking at the camera, but at something behind it that no one else could see.
Ren stood still for a moment.
The man in the photo and the man in the kitchen were the same person, yet somehow, something greater than the passage of years lay between them. Ren didn't want to think about it.
The sound of commotion drifted up from downstairs. He started Ringi.
