Things. [Weak Hero Content]

Umbrella AU (Lightning + The Black Card) Shortened Rerelease

It exhausted Gray. Searching. Hacking away at an endless field. Hitting wall after wall.

He had spent a good portion of his relatively short life reading as much as he could, absorbing information like a starved sponge.

He had thought amassing knowledge about everything there was to know would help him. But elementary taught him people were severe, floated through middle school to understand people were untrustworthy, and now entering his second year of high school with no friends...he wondered what the point was.

Gray wasn't really the type to get metaphysical. He never feared if someone up there existed or if every life form was a random occurrence in the grand scheme of the known universe. Those weren't the questions he wanted answers to.

Instead, he wanted to know if there was a point to being who he was. He wasn't quite a wallflower. His genetics had people taking second peeks at his chest and trying to not-so-subtly guess if he was a girl. He had found a few business cards at his front door from entertainment companies asking him to be a trainee. A few beatings from individuals too bored to leave him alone and too cowardly to pick on someone their own size.

However, it didn't matter to Gray if others noticed he existed. What stood out the most was he felt he was an empty husk of a person. There was a crater a thousand meters deep inside him he struggled to occupy. His entire life had been dedicated to finding the key to the water source that would fill the void and create the mass ocean he knew he could be. He craved to be an ocean...his entire life...

But not anymore.

It was raining outside. Two hours ago, Gray had closed his natural science textbook and decided it was time to abandon his mission. Class wasn't over yet, but he was. Gray was five weeks ahead of the syllabus, having double checked and triple checked his assignments, picking apart the choices and piecing them back together again like a puzzle.

He scanned the classroom. It had the same view as middle school. Some posturing thugs sitting on tables and threatening their peers with dead glances. Cram school students with their noses deep in their textbooks, worrying about their probable failure for the next test. Regular kids trading lewd jokes with their friends and planning to meet at the PC cafes scattered through the district.

Gray pursed his lips.

Friends.

Two hours later, he stood at the entrance of the school, watching the rain come down in vertical tides and flood the streets. Kids who had sensibly checked the weather and brought umbrellas (of which were few and far between) huddled with their classmates who hadn't been as foresighting. Most threw caution to the wind and were running through the rain, splashing through deep puddles, dying of laughter. Gray imagined they felt they could be in a teen indie movie, being free as birds.

Or something like that.

Gray hadn't brought an umbrella. He hadn't checked the weather. He hadn't seen the point.

He stepped into the rain and it wasted no time doing its duty to drench him. Not a single square centimeter of his uniform escaped and rivulets of water streamed from his hair to his face in a matter of seconds.

The walk home would take twenty minutes. At that point, he'd be waterlogged beyond repair. The books and assignments in his backpack wouldn't survive but then again, they had recently hit his "giving a damn" expiration date.

Gray took about ten steps forward before giving up. The crater was too large to repress. It was as if a black hole was turning him inside out, stretching and tightening him all at once. Languid emotions flattened and crescendoed like a misshapen orchestra, performing a dramatic ditty of "why bother?"