The following days for Rei were anything but normal.
At first, he ignored it. He told himself it was exhaustion, stress, the accumulated lack of sleep since he found the books. That seeing those things in the streets was the product of a mind that had spent too long alone. That his father had gone mad, and that perhaps he was beginning to as well.
But objects don't lie.
He would leave his keys on the table and find them in the bathroom drawer. He arrived late to class, sweaty and out of breath, only to glance at the clock and find that the minutes simply hadn't passed. One night he got up for a glass of water and the hallway of his apartment led to a room that didn't exist — dark, windowless, with a smell he chose not to identify. He closed the door. He never opened it again.
Dark circles formed deep beneath his eyes, violet like old bruises. He ate little, slept less. In the mirror each morning he saw someone who looked less and less like himself, and he didn't know whether to be more frightened by that or by the fact that there was no one in the world who was going to notice.
Completely alone. That was the simplest and heaviest truth of all.
It was on a Friday that things changed.
Rei returned to his apartment after class with his head down and his earphones in, like every other day. But before he could fit the key into the lock, something stopped him. He couldn't say what exactly — a tension in the air, perhaps, or something more primitive than rational thought, the kind of alarm the body trips before the mind understands why.
The air was heavy. Cold in a way that didn't match the season.
He pulled out his earphones slowly.
The room was dark on the other side of the half-open door, despite the fact that outside the sky still held the last traces of daylight. And on the floor of the entryway, perfectly aligned as though their owner had just taken them off, was a pair of shoes Rei recognized immediately.
His father's shoes.
He went in.
The smell hit him before his eyes could adjust to the darkness — thick, sickly-sweet, with that nauseating undertone Rei instinctively associated with meat that had been left out of the cold for too long. He brought his hand to his mouth. He kept walking.
With every step the smell grew heavier, more real, until he turned the corner into the dining room and saw it.
It was sitting at his table.
It occupied the chair as though it had always been its own, hunched over the plate with an almost domestic focus. The white shirt — torn at the shoulders, too small for whatever now inhabited it — stretched across a back that didn't have the right shape. The trousers didn't reach to cover the legs, twisted at angles no human joint should allow. And the neck — too long, too thin — supported a head that took a beat too long to turn toward him.
"Oh, Rei. You're here."
The voice came out like something broken trying to resemble a familiar sound. Like a recording of his father played at twice the speed and then slowed down, the vowels stretched in all the wrong places. The throat producing it was clearly not made for speech.
The curse turned around.
Rei had seen things over the past few months. Shapes in the shadows, figures that vanished when he blinked, creatures that his father's books described with a precision that no longer seemed fantastical to him. He had learned not to scream. He had learned to keep walking.
But this was different.
Because the face looking at him from across the room was his father's — or what remained of it. The skin was poorly fitted, tight in some places and loose in others, as though someone had tried to reconstruct a face from memory without ever having seen the original. One eye sat too high. The mouth, when it opened, opened further than it should.
"How was class?"
Rei didn't answer. He fixed his gaze on a point just above the thing's shoulder, breathing through his mouth to avoid processing the smell, irrationally convinced that if he didn't meet its eyes directly, if he didn't acknowledge it as real, some part of this might still not be happening.
"Please, Rei." The chair scraped as it stood. And kept standing. And didn't stop until its head nearly grazed the ceiling. "Don't be so cold with your father. Don't you recognize me?"
"Death is not the end." It moved and Rei didn't see it happen — one moment it was on the other side of the room and the next a hand was crushing his shoulder with a pressure that knocked the air from his lungs. The fingers were too long. They pressed from impossible angles. "It turns out that if you carry enough resentment before you die, it's possible to come back. To truly come back."
Rei tried to move. He couldn't.
It dragged him across the room as though he weighed nothing, as though resistance were a minor and irrelevant detail, and lowered him into the chair in front of the table with a gentleness that was more terrifying than violence. Up close, the remains on the plate were unmistakable. His stomach clenched hard. He closed his eyes.
"You look thin. Why don't you try to eat?"
"D—" The words didn't come. Rei swallowed and tried again. "D... Dad. You really look... different."
It was the stupidest thing he had ever said. It was also the only thing he'd been able to say.
Souta — the thing that had been Souta — opened its mouth into something attempting to be a smile. "I know. It was difficult putting my skin back on after returning." He said it with the same casual tone he once used to ask what Rei wanted for dinner. "That's why I wanted to borrow your body. Just until I can sort that out."
Rei's brain processed that sentence a full second after hearing it.
He saw the hands reach for his throat before he could react — long fingers opening around his neck with meticulous calm, the way someone handles something fragile. "Try not to move too much," said the broken voice. "I don't want it damaged."
Everything went dark.
It wasn't like passing out — it was more abrupt, more total, as though someone had cut the thread connecting him to the present moment. He felt the crack in his neck, dry and final, and waited for the pain.
It didn't come.
Instead, he blinked, and he was standing.
Behind his father.
Feet on the floor, hands trembling at his sides without him having given them that order. It took him a second to understand that he had changed position — that something had moved him, or that he had moved himself without knowing it, without wanting it, without understanding how.
"Oh."
Souta turned slowly. In his expression was something Rei hadn't expected to find: genuine surprise. "That's new." He tilted his head, studying him with that face that wasn't quite a face. "Now that I pay attention..." His voice turned thoughtful, almost admiring. "You're putting out energy like a nuclear power plant."
He took a step toward him. The skin pulled and split with the movement, opening in thin lines along the neck and arms.
"If you had shown me that talent while you were alive," said Souta, "perhaps your death would have been more peaceful."
The blow came before Rei could process the words.
He felt it in his ribs first — a crack that resonated inward, sharp and deep at the same time — then the impact of the wall against his back, then the floor rushing up, and then nothing for a moment whose length he couldn't measure.
When he came back to himself he was sitting against the wall with the taste of blood in his mouth and a pain that throbbed in time with his heartbeat. He tried to stand. His legs didn't respond right away. His ribs protested with every breath, a constant and precise reminder that something inside was broken.
This time he hadn't moved. No blink, no escape. Just the pain, complete and honest.
"Oh." Souta walked toward him with that irregular gait, his feet touching the floor in the wrong order. "Little Rei is angry."
Rei looked up at him from the floor.
And yes. He was angry.
Not in the sudden, hot way one gets angry when something goes wrong. This was an older rage, quieter, that had spent years living just beneath the surface and now, finally, had somewhere to go. He hated him. He hated the man who had walked into his room with a kitchen knife. He hated the man who had lost his mind and left him alone. He hated that a part of him — stupid and incorrigible — had still hoped to find something of the father who raised him in that face.
There was nothing of that man here. Only resentment in ill-fitting skin.
"Why?" He said it quietly, almost to himself.
Souta tilted his head. Then smiled. "Why? Why not?" He began to raise his voice, and in his broken tone the volume was even more unsettling. "I died and reincarnated into this world. That's what fate wanted. I'm just becoming the protagonist I was always meant to be."
Rei stood up.
It hurt. It hurt a lot. But he stood up.
And he hit his father with everything he had.
His fist connected with something that didn't give. Like hitting a wall. Rei felt the pain shoot from his knuckles up to his shoulder and he didn't care. He hit again. "I hate you." Again. "I hate you." His voice came out broken, stripped of the composure he had tried to maintain throughout the whole scene, with nothing left worth holding onto. "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you—"
"Stop it, Rei, you're being patheti—"
Something changed.
He couldn't describe it. It wasn't a decision. It wasn't technique or trained instinct. It was more like a dam giving way — something that had been contained without him knowing it existed, moving on its own toward where he needed it most, concentrating at the point of contact between his fist and that thing wearing his father's face.
"I HATE YOU!"
Black sparks burst through the air. The Black Flash was born.