Chapter Text
Waardenburg Syndrome.
Type 2 Waardenburg syndrome.
When Sakura was young, it was something the doctors had told him he had. (With pen and paper, because it wasn’t something he’d be able to hear them say anyway.) But they didn’t give him much explanation after that, only that it was the reason to his… obscene… genetic traits.
The two-toned hair, mismatching eyes, and most of all, his loss of hearing.
Sakura had never been born with hearing to begin with, so it’s not like it was something he could ever miss. Still, even so, he could make out noises and phrases, like everything was underwater. Profound hearing loss was something he could not fix nor fight, and even if he had the chance to buy cochlear implants or hearing aids, no one would waste the money on him.
So it was why he bounced around from foster home to foster home, each departure with the excuse of "He's too much for us… not the right fit.” And while Sakura couldn’t hear enough to make out the exact words, he could clearly see them written on their faces.
So he had learned.
He learned to communicate with his own language (his fist) and learned what people portrayed through their body languages, the disgusted looks they shot at him, and most of all, their lips. Sakura could hear voices and blurs, but the way their mouths moved told the story.
Even if sometimes, ‘Sakura’ looked to him like ‘Sucker,’ he was still perfectly capable of communicating, as long as he could fight whatever got in his way, because his fist worked as his mouth and he had nothing nice to say, in the end.
At least, not to the people whom he had met the first fifteen years of his life.
It was the night he had graduated from middle school (something that none in his crowded overpopulated city thought he would accomplish) that things in Sakura Haruka’s life came to a fever pitch.
The foster family (his last, he was afraid) hadn’t shown up, of course, and when he returned to the house late that night, there was a single duffle bag sat out on the front porch with the little belongings he owned. It was a silent affair, no arguments, no fights. The front porch light was flickering, and it cast a long shadow to hide how small he truly felt at the moment.
In the end, though, it was fine, because he was used to taking care of himself. He took the hot summer to disappear completely from his hometown, like a ghost. It was large and bustling, so it was easy to pretend he had never lived there in the first place. Simply an urban legend parents told their children (their biological ones that they kept, and didn’t throw out when they noticed their hair and eye color) to go to bed on time.
The foster parents were forced to send him checks every month of the bare minimum amount he needed, but they would rather set some money aside every month than see his face. (Ugly, hideous, unnatural.)
It didn’t take him long to find a small town, far away from his old one, where no one would know his name. He wasn’t looking for a fresh start at Bofuirin, simply a way to express himself through action and get to the top of the hierarchy, so that before he died, he could say that at least he was the best at something.
He took his little duffle bag, wired a new town PO box to his old foster parents before blocking both of them and their biological children (twins, who made him sleep out in the dog house every night while the family dog slept in their beds.) And hopped on the closest shuttle to get to the small town.
Sakura knew his way around dangerous situations, toed the line of them every day, so he found a run down apartment complex just on the border of the town and the railroad to another section of the red light district. The apartment was so shady that he wouldn’t need to sign anything to keep ownership, nor show an ID, only present cash once a month to cover the proper expenses. (There was no AC or water heater, but Sakura could work with that.)
By the time he claimed the small apartment as his own, set his duffle to the side to unpack for a later time (he wouldn’t, he would live through it) and lay his weary head down to rest on the cheap futon the apartment came with-The last guest left it, they had probably passed away on top of it- he could only sleep and sleep some more.
Summer was sweltering and school started in a few days time.
He took extra care to hang dry the school uniform that he received through the town's mail system on top of the window rail. There was no real window, it had been broken and never fixed. Anytime it rained, he simply moved his bedding to the corner of the room and hoped the downpour wasn't torrential enough to breach past the first few feet of the broken window.
A day before school was set to actually start, that was when Sakura decided he would finally emerge from the run-down complex he had been sleeping the summer heat away in. He could get a good look at the town (aside from the mail house that he had visited multiple times before) he would be residing in for at least a month before the people here chased him away as well.
Maybe he could find a cheap fan to battle the summer heat with.
So, like every night, he closed his eyes and ignored the chirping of crickets and cicadas directly outside. He couldn’t hear them all too well, like white noise in the background of his screaming mind, but he could feel their vibrations.
Ignored the humidity bearing down on him, even without a blanket, and ignored the stinging in his eyes because he was used to this by now.
At least he was no longer living in a dog house.
It was dark around him when he next opened his eyes, and at first he had expected to be back in that lonely broken down room, but instead, he found himself balancing on an all too familiar tightrope.
A recurring dream he’s had since he could remember.
He couldn’t see much aside from the tightrope under his feet, utter darkness surrounding him. Strange, because while the rest of his senses were shitty, Sakura had better than average vision despite his eye discoloration.
It creaked as he inhaled deeply, attempting to squash the rising nerves under his feet as he took yet another step. Steady. One by one. As long as he didn’t fall, he wouldn’t have to face them.
He felt a cold wind blow on his skin like a taunt as it brushed his hair back, goosebumps rising on the back of his neck as the rope swung from the right to the left.
The breeze grew even more violent until the tornadic winds sent him flailing until he lost his balance. Ultimately, this dream always ended the same, so he didn’t bother in a last ditch effort to reach up for the rope as he fell.
He blinked once, twice, three times.
There was a group of girls in front of him, wearing the uniforms from his middle school. Their mouths moved, spitting vile insults at him, and with his haze he could only make out a few of the words they were saying. “Ugly… scared… hideous.” They were all familiar words he was accustomed to seeing roll off of people's tongues anyways.
Then there were the adults, all criticizing him for repeatedly getting into fights. At the time, no one had actually sat him down and tried to explain, write, or even sign what he had done wrong. He had only been defending his own honor, but adults never understood that.
Then there was the foster parents, who had attempted to put on colored contacts and dye his hair, even if it wasn’t his own fault he looked like this besides the two who birthed him. He had no idea what they even looked like, they were long gone.
By the time Sakura finally blinked awake he was already tired and wanted to go back to sleep, though sleeping meant he would see their faces again, and he would rather avoid that. Forcing his tired muscles awake, he decided he would get ready to have his first look at the town.