Series of one shots

Timeless Trauma- R's backstory

Unlike the thoughts of certain people, Rin had not been born heartless. He was created as such by society, and the cursed that was nicknamed his ability. Once upon a time, he lived an almost-normal life, and once, he longed for even more normalcy. Until one day, his world had almost literaly wrung itself inside-out.

The sky was a pale gray. There were no rifts to suggest clouds, it looked as if the sky was never a deep blue to begin with. Despite this fact, the colours around him were quite vibrant as he strode accross a street in his neighbourdhood. The area he lived in was boringly simillar to each quadrant in the sector he resided in: all of the houses had a maximum of three rooms, and were built in rectangular complexes, baring the image of rows upon rows of beige cardboard boxes. He strode quickly accross the street, keeping his hood up. He felt a breeze shift along past him, along with a particular feeling. Today was the day. The day where everything will change. The day that he will finally be normal.

Normal was such a complex term. What defined and individual as normal was subjective to each and every individual. To Rin, being normal meant conformity, and blending in to the world around him. Unfortunately for him, as his definition declared, he was very far from normal. No matter how much he tried, he and his family always stood out from the rest. He never quite understood the reason; there were plenty poor people living on the west shore of the Grand Continent, as a matter of fact poverty was quite common. But for some reason, those better off than he seemed to latch onto that manner and used it as a form to project how unpleasant Rin's "difference" was to them. He kept to the shadows of the large cardboard boxes as he strode through shortcuts and zigxagged through tiny passageways, taking small routes to avoid being in the familliar crowds of people from his neighborhood. Of course, that greatly conflicted his desire to mold into the masses, however he could not do so quite yet, as things such as fights and outbursts seemed to happen during his futile attempts at doing so.

After around twenty minutes of scurrying like a rat through alleyways and tunnels and passages, he finally bustled his way to the main route that led to his school. He looked up at the dull gray, yet oddly bright sky. He repeated the words that sang through his mind like a mantra since he woke up that morning: today is the day, today is the day, today is the day...

Over the past four days, he had memorized his target's face and identity. She was a girl named Viola, who was the picture of "normal" that Rin aspired to be, as she didn't attract attention, or had any particularily noticeable traits. She had friends, and was never caught alone, or in strange moods. The other day, she had turned around in her seat at her desk in front of his and had asked him for a pencil. Meeting her eyes was the catalyst of his idea.

Growing up, he was never particularily fond of girls. At the age of fourteen, most of the kids in his school had boyfriends or girlfriends or something similar to the like, but the concept of such a thing was something Rin could never grasp. He had never loved, and was starting to believe such feelings never existed. He wished that they did, as that was one step closer to dissolving into the normalcy of a highschooler's life. All five of his sisters have had boyfriends, even her youngest sister Camila, at the ripe age of seven, was engaged to the most popular boy in her class. Being with this girl, and acting out feelings of love could be the thing that finally convinced his classmates that there was nothing "odd" or "dangerous" about Rin, and they would stop their heinous behaviour towards him.

Ah, the bullying. Rin had been a victim of it ever since his peers had started to learn to listen to their parents as they gossiped at the dinner table. He was pretty sure even his peers did not understand what was so strange about him and his family, that they were just mimicking their parent's behaviour. Whenever they would go too far, Rin would ask his mother why they would do such a thing. She would always respond with a melancholic, knowing smile, yet would never directly answer his question. Many times, Rin had contemplated whether it was perhaps the absence of his father in their lives, but then again, many of his classmates and those who lived in his neighborhood had single mothers: it was something quite common.