i hate it here so i will go to secret gardens in my mind

(A/N: Please be mindful of the tags. Some of scenes and dialogues are excerpts from the manga itself hence the spoiler tags. I don't own anything from this franchise. Respective ownership belongs to Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Yusuke Nomura for this wonderful manga and Taylor Swift for this inspirational song.)

Quick, quick
Tell me something awful
Like you are a poet trapped inside the body of a finance guy
Tell me all your secrets
All you'll ever be is
My eternal consolation prize
You see I was a debutant in another life but
Now I seem to be scared to go outside
If comfort is a construct
I don't believe in good luck
Now that I know what's what

His startingly blue eyes stared dully at the poor excuse of a house in front of him before he gripped the straps of his backpack and left.

Another day.

Another day of roaming around the streets of the city instead of going back to school to learn something worthwhile and trying to make ends meet.

His good for nothing drunkard father was completely passed out in the living room with the bottle of beer in his hand.

Instead of holding a pen and paper, he's holding a bottle of milk and some inane object he stole from a store and buried it in the confines of his rusty backpack.

The only consolation prize he got from this disgusting ordeal was being away from the cage he was in and the sharp claws of his own father for a few hours.

"Wait? Is that Kaiser?" A familiar voice reached his line of hearing from somewhere among the crowd.

"I think he is. Hey Kaiser! Kaiser!" One of the boys called out his name.

He blatantly ignored his classmates' voices and disappeared from the crowd.

He hated it here.

I hate it here so I will go to
secret gardens in my mind
People need a key to get to
The only one is mine
I read about it in a book when I was a precocious child
No mid-sized city hopes and small town fears
I'm there most of the year
Cause I hate it here
I hate it here

As he flipped to another page of the book he was reading, quick knocks from his bedroom door filled his ears.

"Alexis! Hurry up! You still need to help mom and dad in the lab downstairs for their new experiment! Bring the rest of the equipment to the lab!" Her sister's impatient and commanding voice reached his line of hearing.

With a small sigh leaving his lips, he put a bookmark on the page of his book and closed it, returning it to its shelf carefully before he stood up from his chair.

"Alright. I'll be down there in a sec!" He answered hastily before he heard the receding footsteps of his sister away from his room.

A deep sigh escaped from Ness' lips as he stared blankly at the surroundings outside his windows before his gaze left and lingered on the book he put in the shelf a while ago.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

For a moment, Ness wanted to get lost inside a place where everything was possible.

When all you need was a key to open the wonders and magic of a place with never-ending spellbinding beauty and mesmerizing worth of hopes and dreams in life.