Archive of Our Own

Atsushi cannot tell time.

There is no ticking reminder of each second that passes from a clock. There are no windows to show the sun, the moon, and the stars. The temperature is always the same; nothing to indicate if the season has changed into the cooler months of fall and winter, or if it has been even longer than that and the Earth has made a full rotation around the sun.

Even his “foster father” runs on an erratic schedule. He explained it to Atsushi once, early on in his captivity:

“If you can keep track of the intervals in between the things I do,” he said while flicking a needle, “you can therefore tell the time. I don’t want to let that happen.”

He doesn’t know how long he’s been here. At first, he tried to count the seconds himself but he quickly wore out. It’s not easy, especially when it’s broken up frequently in between whatever Shibusawa is doing to him or having Atsushi do. Instead, he operates on a feeling basis - whenever he assumes a day has passed, he scratches a line into his thigh with an overgrown fingernail.

He has one hundred tick marks on his leg.

The silence and loneliness did drive him crazy at first. The orphanage was bad, but at least the isolation came more in the form of social isolation by peers than anything else. The Headmaster was cruel, but the most he’d been locked up was for a day or two. It was inconvenient to keep him alone when there was work to be done to keep the building stable.

This is different. He has not interacted with another human being since Shibusawa picked him up from the orphanage. The only times Atsushi’s world doesn’t only contain himself is when his tormentor is giving him food and water that’s been poisoned, a long, shining needle, or burning hot wires cackling with electricity. Noise bounces in his eardrums only when he is screaming from pain or Shibusawa explains what his torture device does and how much pain he presumes it will inflict.

Waiting in the quiet for his next session with nothing but his own breaths and thoughts to keep him company was nearly worse than the torture itself. He couldn’t calm down, couldn’t rest, couldn’t do anything but sit there and attempt to count the seconds.

It’s been long enough that he’s adjusted to the seclusion. It’s a time for him to rest and patch himself up after whatever Shibusawa had put him through in case his “foster father” hadn’t done it himself. There are bandages in a cabinet beside him, and a pair of scissors to cut the appropriate length. They are blunted; not enough to kill a man. A bottle of painkillers rests beside it. Shibusawa has only replaced it once; Atsushi knows that the more he takes, the more resistant he will become to it. Most of the time, he grits his teeth and sleeps through the pain.

It’s the boredom that catches up to him. When he can’t pass the time with rest, he finds himself getting hungry only because his body can’t do anything else. He doesn’t exercise so he can keep the energy he needs to heal and stay alive. There is nothing to read or write about. He doesn’t bite his nails; it’s the only thing he has left to attempt to keep time. Shibusawa doesn’t know about the scratch marks. It’s all he has that is entirely his own.

His brain is never a merciful organ. It plays through his torture over and over again to keep Atsushi entertained. It shows him children at the orphanage that were never kind but he somehow misses anyway. It reminds him just how alone he is.

It isn’t the silence that kills him anymore. It’s the loneliness and not knowing the time. Because he doesn’t know the time, he doesn’t know how old he is, what year it is, when Shibusawa leaves the house, and when he returns. Not that Atsushi can escape. He hasn’t been able to pick the lock yet.

He sits cross-legged on the metal table that is both his bed and operating table. He doesn’t have a blanket, only his white clothes that Shibusawa replaces every once in a while. He said he doesn’t like the blood stains and soot marks that inevitably ruin the color and material. The ones he wears now are in desperate need of being changed — there is a seared slash in his shirt that starts under his armpit and ends at his collarbone. Old blood has left stains on the pant legs and torso, and a weird yellow mark extends over his entire shoulder.

Atsushi looks down at his hands and his fingernails and wonders how much more of this he can take. He has gone through every possible escape plan, every way to get past Shibusawa when their door is open for a brief second, but he always comes up blank. It’s not for his lack of attempts — which went unpunished for a reason Atsushi cannot fathom — but a lack of materials to aid him.

It’s been a day, he thinks, rolling down his waistband, it has to have been. 

He doesn’t know if enough time has passed or if he’s been so bored of staring at the white ceiling, gray concrete walls that close him in a space so tight he can pace it in three steps that he has nothing better to do than carve a line into his skin. He blinks and drives the thought out of his head; it’s been a day because it’s been a day. He cannot survive if he does not believe this to be true.

When he rakes his fingernail in a horizontal line, a line of beading blood appears in its wake. It stings more aggressively than the other one hundred lines had, even though he hadn’t applied any more pressure than he usually did. Atsushi watches as the blood pools and trickles around his thigh and over the other scratch marks.

He gently taps the tip of his index fingernail with the pad of his other index finger. It’s sharp, he realizes. Sharper than the scissors.   Atsushi doesn’t breathe for a second. He doesn’t even think. Then, he carefully cleans out the red evidence underneath his nail. His blood tastes sweet and familiar on his tongue.

—

Atsushi wakes up to the sound of the door handle jiggling. A jolt of fear shoots up his lungs and into his throat, an uncontrollable phenomenon that he’s grown used to. He will never get used to what comes after, though. It’s impossible to become acclimated to torture.

The metal door opens with a squeaking creak as it does every “day”. A tall man appears in its wake, his long white hair falling around his shoulders in a way that indicates that it’s been recently brushed. Perhaps he’s just had an outing. Atsushi doesn’t know; his “foster father” doesn’t speak of the outside world.

If Atsushi is to escape, he wouldn’t even know how far he is from civilization.

Shibusawa carries bundles of horse-hair ropes in his hands that are going to rub his skin raw. The man doesn’t give any pleasantries as he walks the short distance to the operation table and drags Atsushi off of it by his neck. “I will be stretching you,” Shibusawa says without a hint of interest. “I want to see how far you can go before your limbs dislocate and skin tears.”

Hooks stick out in various places on the ceiling. They’ve always been there, and they’ve been used time and again for Shibusawa to torment Atsushi with. He’s considered what it would be like to hang from there, but not in this way. Atsushi feels sick to his stomach.

He can’t do it anymore.

That’s what he always tells himself, and always he scratches another tick mark into his thigh.

Shibusawa takes his wrist and begins knotting one end of the rope. He doesn’t say a word about the length of Atsushi’s fingernails or the trembling in his arm. He is concentrated in his task of securing the rope as tight as he can.

Days were spent wrapping and rewrapping his body in bandages. Hours were wasted analyzing what parts of his body Atsushi absolutely could not let get cut or broken if he wanted to keep his life. Over his years at the orphanage and one hundred-one days in Shibusawa’s care, he has curated a specific mental analog of all of these spots. He has traced every single one of these arteries and bones over and over again and committed them to his long-term memory by touch. He can find them on any other being if he needs to.

A sheet of glistening white hair blocks Atsushi’s view. It is thick and long, cascading over his face, neck, and shoulder like a gushing waterfall. However, Shibusawa doesn’t seem to realize that his hair is only that: hair. It can do nothing to protect the tender artery that lies beneath its waves.

A thud echoes through his small, gray-set room. An awful gurgling noise accompanies the sound. Atsushi shifts on his feet, and ringing static settles and blocks out all of his senses.

Atsushi cannot tell time.

He doesn’t know how long he stands there, unmoving, mute, blind, and deaf. He stares at nothing and comprehends nothing. There is no ticking clock to remind him of the seconds he is wasting. There are no windows to let in the light or darkness of the day or night. The moon does not exist in his operating room — his bedroom. Shibusawa snuffed out the sun with a single breath. The stars are contained in the lightbulbs forever burning in the ceiling.

Atsushi smells iron and death first. It comes to him in waves, like the hair that once protected a soft throat. The sound of water drops dripping gradually gets louder until he looks to his side and sees the blood falling off of his fingernails. Thick water moves around his bare feet like a stream. He tilts his head down; it’s not water at all.

The once-gushing flow of blood from Shibusawa’s neck has slowed to a trickle. The hands that were trying to staunch the bleeding have loosened and dropped to the ground. His eyes are hooded, not closed, as if he’s only laying on the ground for fun. His hair is splayed in a tangled pattern across the concrete. It soaks up the pool on the floor and leaves the pristine white color blotched with clotted crimson.

Nakajima Atsushi has never killed anyone in his short life.

He takes one shaky step forward. It barely lifts high enough to clear the blood on the floor. He takes another, but this time it has to go over the body on the ground. The man that Atsushi has killed.

The door is unlocked. Shibusawa has never needed to lock it whenever he is in the room with Atsushi; there was no way for him to escape, then. Shibusawa was bigger and stronger than the boy, and he kept Atsushi weak from consistent torture and lack of nutrition. No pushing or shoving would have been enough to break through the brick wall that was his “foster father.”

The edge of the door gets caught on the dead man’s leg, but Atsushi doesn’t need it to be open that much. He’s thin — he slips through the small space available.

Atsushi has only seen glimpses of what lies beyond his room, but there really isn’t much to see. A gray hallway, the same shade as his room, leads to a ladder at the very end. The space isn’t wide nor long — it takes Atsushi twelve steps to reach the ladder, and he can reach the sides of the hall with his fingertips when his arms extend into a t-pose.

At the top of the ladder is a wooden trapdoor that Atsushi struggles to get open. The strength he had when he slashed Shibusawa’s throat open has been zapped out of him. He shakes like an autumn leaf hanging on to the tree it was born on. Once the trapdoor pops open, he has an even harder time pulling himself onto the above floor.

Atsushi doesn’t recall the house that he’s in. When Shibusawa took him in, he’d blindfolded Atsushi the moment he got in the car. He didn’t know how far they’d driven, where they were, or what anything looked like outside of the four walls of his room and the gray hallway he thought he’d never reach.

Blinking away the darkness creeping in at the edges of his vision, Atsushi takes in the space he’s in. It’s a cramped four-walled area with shirts and pants hanging around him. A pair of shoes rests in the corner, and a closed door calls for his freedom. He tries the handle and it gives way easily under his fingers.

The next place he walks into is a bedroom entirely unlike his own. There’s a large bed with a light blue-gray pattern on the thick sheets on one side of the room. The floor is sleek, dark hardwood. A large desk is pushed up against a white wall with a laptop and stationery materials. The room has a dresser, a rug, and a shelf filled with books.

A window.

Atsushi stumbles over to it, knocking his ankle against one of the bedposts in the process but not letting the pain slow him down. He puts his hands against the glass and curls his fingers enough to hear the scrape of his fingernails.

A small stretch of trimmed grass is broken up by a stone pathway to what he assumes is the front door. At the far end of the grass is a forest of trees that Atsushi cannot see far beyond. It’s dark outside. Little bright dots break up the black monotony of the sky above the tops of the trees. Night.

The stars in Atsushi’s room have never all turned off. They burn until one fades out, and Shibusawa replaces it before another one can flicker. He has not known darkness outside of unconsciousness. He parted ways with the moon one hundred-one days ago. His sky was the ceiling with hooks to hang him with.

The rope around his wrist drags on the floor as he unlatches the window and breathes in the outside air. It rushes to him like a loyal dog, enveloping not only his nose but also his mouth and ears and eyes. He wants to throw up, but he forces down his vomit and lets himself cry instead. His salty tears are not enough to distract him from the nirvana outside.

He hauls himself through the window and falls down a short ways onto his back. It knocks the wind out of him, and his vision goes darker than the night sky. He takes a minute, an hour, a day to regain his breath and ease the aching pain of his body. When he refocuses his eyes, he finds a glowing crescent hanging above him.

The moon. His chest heaves as he sobs, and his fingernails leave his face stinging as he wipes away his tears. It takes him longer than he anticipated to push himself up to his feet on the grass, and he forces himself to walk along the stone path away from the house until he reaches a dirt road. A white car is parked at the end of it, the same one that Shibusawa picked him up from the orphanage with.

He stares at it for a second, then turns away before it causes him to hurl. He can’t drive a car, but he wouldn’t be able to get in it anyway. That’s what took him here. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, a year was spent in that car as it drove him to his living hell. He can’t bear another second — minutes, weeks, months —  in there even if his life depended on it.

Grass feels better on his feet than his concrete did. It’s soft against his calluses and gives way in softer patches he steps on. He doesn’t spare a single glance back at the house as he follows the grass as far as he can before the wooded forest takes over. Atsushi doesn’t want to see where he was contained and how much house there is in comparison to where he lived. He doesn’t want to know.

The dirt road is less merciful than the spikes of grass, but it’s worn enough by the passing of vehicles that it’s still softer than the roots of trees that scatter the forest. It’s hard to see it at night,  but he lets the moon and stars guide his way. The real moon and the stars. Atsushi found it hard to take his eyes off of them.

The crescent travels through the sky at a slow pace, slower than which Atsushi is walking. He knows he’s on a hill or mountain; he’s been going down a twisting path for relatively the entire time. Atsushi hasn’t been to many places outside of the orphanage, so he doesn’t know how long it will take him to reach the base, no less to reach civilization. The thought makes his dirty and cracked feet drag on the road.

He walks anyway.

He ignores the hunger pangs, aching feet, and swarming head. Every part of his has hurt for one hundred-one days. It feels good to be outside, to walk more than six steps and not have to turn around lest he run into a wall. The slight breeze brushing his hair and cheeks is enough to keep him going. Wind was one of the many things Shibusawa had torn away from his life.

When the ground evens out and Atsushi hears the sound of a car speeding, he sees the moon has made several of its own steps. The stars have shifted with it like they’re ducklings following their mother. The sky will lighten eventually, Atsushi knows. He wouldn’t mind if it didn’t. The night is so much different from the constant light from his room.

The asphalt road is much harder on his feet than the concrete was, but the sticks on the forest floor hurt more than the little bits of rock sticking out of the asphalt. So he walks along the asphalt and watches the stars and moon. He pays little mind to the empty road and only marginally moves when a car passes by. He didn’t know which way to walk, which one would bring him to civilization or take him further away. But he had to go one way or the other, so he chose to go right so he could see more easily if he needed to move when a car got too close to the shoulder.

The crescent takes a few more steps in the sky, and the edges of the world seem to brighten ever so slightly when a car zooms past.

Then the car stops fully, backs up, and makes a very illegal turn across to park on the side that Atsushi is traveling on. Atsushi doesn’t stop until he hears the car door slam shut and a man shouts: “Hey! Are you okay?”

Atsushi turns and sees the person behind the voice jogging at him. He’s pressing down a hat on his head, and a coat billows behind him. Another car door opens and a different man pops out, albeit much slower. The first man reaches him, and up close Atsushi can see that he has a vibrant head of red hair and short enough that he only comes up to Atsushi’s chin. His height is added on by his hat which reaches Atsushi’s mouth.

“Holy shit,” he exclaims, his eyes roaming all over Atsushi’s body before settling at his feet. “You’re not even wearing shoes. How long have you been walking like this?”

He stares at Atsushi and waits for an answer. The boy glances up to the sky, locates the moon, and somehow finds the voice that he hasn’t used properly in one hundred-one days. Shibusawa didn’t like talking, only his screams of agony. “Since the moon was above me,” he says and points to the sky. The man follows his fingernail, the one he used to kill a man, to the stars above. Atsushi moves his arm down to find the current placement of the shining crescent. “Now it’s there.”

“You look—” the man starts, then stops and shakes his head. He looks bewildered beyond imagination. “What happened to you?”

His gaze finds the rope hanging from Atsushi’s wrist. Shibusawa tightened it fast before dying, and Atsushi found it hurt too much to try and unknot it. It rubbed the skin of his wrist raw and nearly broke his fingernails. He didn’t have the grip strength yet to yank it off, either.

Atsushi doesn’t have the words to explain what happened. There’s too much to say and the man looks too horrified to be able to even comprehend what Atsushi went through. Instead, he says, “What time is it?”

The man reaches into his pocket and starts drawing out his phone when the other person makes it to them. He’s much taller than both the ginger man and Atsushi, and his brown coat is long enough to reach his ankles. He pulls a hand from his pocket, extends it to Atsushi, smiles, and says: “My name is Dazai. What’s yours?”

“Atsushi,” he replies hesitantly. As an orphan, his family name means very little when there is no family to speak of. He introduces himself only by his given name. His hand shakes when he takes the extended offer. Dazai’s hand is warm and forgiving as he clasps it lightly. It's now that Atsushi sees the bandages that cover every inch of his exposed skin aside from his hands and face.

“It’s four-fifteen in the morning. What are you doing out here?” The short man asks, still bewildered but somewhat settled now that Dazai is by his side.

Four-fifteen. “What- what day is it?”

The man looks at him, then at Dazai, then back at Atsushi. “It’s Tuesday, October third.”

There are one hundred-one tick marks on Atsushi’s leg. He doesn’t remember what day he was taken, but he does remember the month. January.

A horrid sound comes from the back of his throat, and both Dazai and the red-haired man are startled by the noise. Dazai lets go of his hand, and Atsushi immediately brings it over his mouth as he tries to fight back the sobs shaking his body.

He should have twice as many scratches. His thigh aches with the thought, and he barely resists rolling down his waistline and dragging his fingernail over and over until he can no longer feel the stinging pain of two hundred-one tick marks.

“Atsushi, how old are you?” Dazai asks, raising a hand that causes Atsushi to take a step back. Instead of hitting him, the brown-haired man rests it on Atsushi’s shoulder. His mouth is drawn into a thin line, and the red-haired man is typing something furiously on his phone.

“I’m…” His birthday was in May, five months ago. He was supposed to turn thirteen. “I’m thirteen. If it’s still the same year.”

Dazai slowly moves the hand from his shoulder to card his long fingers through Atsushi’s tangled hair. It has to be overgrown at this point. His one long bang comes down to his chin, and he can feel Dazai’s fingers move all the way to his neckband before starting over at the top. “How far are you from home?”

“I don’t know,” he answers truthfully. “I- I came from up the mountain. But I’m not– I’m not from there. I’m an orphan."

Neither of the men react to that information. Dazai has his features schooled into a passive smile and the shorter man is too enraptured in his phone to be paying attention. “Is the orphanage up there, or is that where you were being fostered?”

Fostering is certainly not the correct term to use for what Shibusawa did to him. All the same, Atsushi confirms “foster” with great effort. Even the beautiful night sky cannot protect him from the onslaught of memories of each time he was experimented on and tortured. The rope around his wrist is enough testament to that.

“You need a hospital,” the first man pipes up after finally looking away from his phone. “You’ll have to come with us. I know we’re strangers, but I’m not asking you. You’re a hurt runaway whose foster parents will be calling the police as soon as they find out you’re missing. You don’t have much of a choice.”

Dazai’s eyes flickered only momentarily from the rope to his other hand. It has more blood on it than any other bit of his body, and the blood has clotted so heavily that it looks like he’s holding veins. The tall man returns his gaze back to Atsushi without his expression having changed one bit. But Atsushi knows that he knows that his “foster father” will not be calling the police, nor will he ever.

He says with a soothing voice: “That’s Chuuya. He’s the worst! Don’t mind him.” The shorter man, Chuuya, lets out a snarl in Dazai’s direction. “Normally I’d disagree with him and give you a choice, but I also think that it would be wise for you to come with us. You are an easy target for the low-life of this world. It’s not safe for you to be traveling alone, cold, and without food in the middle of nowhere.

“I can’t promise you that Chuuya’s driving will be any good—” Chuuya round kicks him in the back when he says that, and Atsushi breaks through the tears for one moment to comprehend what he just saw “— but I can promise you this: we won’t hurt you, and we will do everything in our power to protect you from harm. Trust us until we can get you in the hospital.”

Dazai’s eyes are warm when he says it, and his hand does not once stop in its gentle detangling of his overgrown hair. He doesn’t ask what happened to him or why, just patiently waits for Atsushi to unstiffen and nod to them that he’ll go along with them. Beside him, Chuuya holds a firm stance, and his one blue and one brown eyes seem to confirm everything Dazai said.

Atsushi cannot tell time. 

He knows the moon and the stars have traveled across the sky, he knows that it was once four-fifteen in the morning. He doesn’t know if a minute has passed or an hour, a day, a month, a year.

He looks at Chuuya and asks: “What time is it?”

It’s Dazai who pulls out his phone this time. Instead of answering, however, he extends it to Atsushi and says: “Whenever you want to know the time or day, tap the screen. It’ll show you at the top.”

Atsushi taps the screen as he is told. Dazai’s fingers are gentle in his hair as he looks at the time displayed at the top. Four-twenty.

He stares at Dazai and Chuuya, and he holds the phone so tight to his chest that he thinks it would break if he were a bit stronger. They could’ve been lying before. Atsushi has never trusted anything anyone has said to him except for the Headmaster. The orphan children would lie and make fun of him. Shibusawa said he would take good care of him, but all he did was torture him. Atsushi has no reason to believe a word they have said.

Except they gave him back the ticking of a clock to remind him of the seconds that pass.

“Can you give me back the sun?” He asks. Chuuya’s lips pull into a deeper frown that could only be interpreted as sadness. However, Dazai answers him calmly.

“Of course, Atsushi.”

Atsushi has reclaimed the moon, the sun, and the wind. He has been given the time. He follows Chuuya and Dazai to their car and presses his body as close to the window as possible. He is no longer alone and isolated from the world. Soon, he will have everything Shibusawa took away from him.