Chara Chapter 1

The Child that Cries When People Call His Name


Rain. The heavens poured down over the city of Ebott, as it had done for days.

Near the top of a high ridge, small hands reached up the wet hillside. Sounds of soft sobs went unheard, obscured by the howling of the wind and occasional cracks of thunder. A young boy crawled on all fours up the steep slope, a filthy, trembling mess. The rain hid his tears; the overcast dusk hid the bruises on his face; the mud on his hands and face hid the drips of blood from his nose. There were no trails here, only a weedy and rocky path between the trees, leading inexorably to the peak of Mt. Ebott, to the child's final goal.
This was his coping mechanism to conflict: running away. He hated himself for doing it, but he always found himself doing it. The boy was only ten — too young to understand his psychological shortcomings, but old enough to be ashamed of them. He knew only shame and fear and pain from the way he was.

The run-down and filthy school adjoining Redhaven Boys' Home was never a pleasant place, filled as it was with young, pubescent lads of all shapes and colors, all of them lacking a proper upbringing, many of them pathologically violent and cruel. The adults attempted to keep their aggression in check through vigorous exercise and sports activities during lunchtime and recess. But rain kept them indoors; and it had been raining nonstop for over a week. Their tension had no release. Fistfights increased. Bullies ran unchecked. The teachers and volunteers were unable to prevent individual fights, only just managing to prevent a full-scale riot.

Chara learned from an early age to shrink away when his name was called. Adults called him by his last name. He had no friends to call him anything. Only enemies called him by his given name, usually before some kind of confrontation. Chara was told that his name was good, that it meant "Joy" in a language nobody in the city of Ebott spoke; and just because it sounded like the start of "Caroline" or rhymed with "Sarah" didn't mean it was a girl's name. All Chara knew was that, when he was doing something and a shadow (or sometimes several) fell over him, followed by someone calling his name, a beating would soon follow. Eventually, the tears started flowing reflexively just by hearing it. Having a girl's name didn't help when the rumors flew about his "feelings" toward the other boys. The colorful drawings he made, the way he looked at his peers, the way he liked Golden Flowers, the way he insisted on growing his hair long, the persistent blush of shame on his cheeks. Crying whenever he was confronted only made it worse.

"No wonder everyone hits me," he said to the wind.

He kept on climbing. Hand over hand, feet slipping and then finding purchase, breaths coming in gasps and pants of effort. Running away again. The same pain of shame in his heart, of feeling useless and powerless and uncared about. It was a pain he never intended to feel again, or even for very much longer. The dangerous path he scrambled up as fast as he could did not faze him, for the risk it carried was lesser than what his final goal would do.

At the peak, he intended to stand at the very top and jump from it. His only experience with the "top of a mountain" was from cartoon illustrations depicting it as a sharp point, from the picture of The Grinch pushing a sled full of toys over one. He had no way of knowing there wasn't really a place to jump that would result in a drop straight down to the floor of the valley; he couldn't know that the top of Mt. Ebott was rather flat. Nobody went up there, and the kids said it was haunted.

But while the shame endured, Chara's fear had not. He did not fear death — he begged for it. In his frantic, mad dash for the top, it hadn't occurred to him that he was doing something that took a courage no other child at Redhaven had inside him.

He stopped as the ground leveled a bit, and his eyes opened wide. Standing up straight, he reached out to hold the side of a tree to steady himself, and looked. There was no top of the mountain to be seen, no point or peak. Only a slight rise, and just below it, some ten paces in front of him, a sinkhole large enough to swallow a house that had opened up from the rainstorms. Unafraid, he walked closer, and standing on the very edge, he looked down. There didn't appear to be a bottom. Only a strange shimmer that seemed to shine from the depths. It had to go down a thousand feet or more, in his child's estimation, if it was so dark down there he couldn't see where it ended.

Tired of running, tired of feeling, he said: "It's good enough."

Chara didn't jump, like he planned to. He didn't dramatically hold his arms out like a skydiver and fall in a dramatic dive, like he sometimes daydreamed about doing. He just sort of crumpled in place from the physical and emotional exhaustion, and when he started to tumble into the hole, just didn't resist the force of gravity, the clutches of the Reaper.

He fell down, silently, with not even a sigh or a rustle. His footprints erased by the rain, nobody would look for him. Boys ran away from Redhaven all the time, and the teachers would probably be happy that Chara did so.

After all, those fights... he probably always started them.