Unwanted Memories

"My father always used to tell me that humans should strive for helping one another. It's a foolish idea, maybe, but I got it after him."

***

The warm smell of ink and coffee filled the small room where a 6-year-old Mamoru sat on the floor, surrounded by scattered sheets of paper covered in his doodles. He had just finished drawing a hero with a crayon, and proudly held the paper above his head. "Look, dad!"

His father, a man with a tired face but impossibly kind eyes and a gentle smile, leaned back in his chair and stretched, his gaze falling upon Mamoru's drawing. "What a drawing, Mamoru. If I hadn't already made the Paladin's design, I'd use yours." He smiled warmly.

"But he doesn't look as cool as yours." Mamoru pouted slightly.

"…A true hero's strength isn't how cool his armor is." his father said, his voice already tired from a brewing illness. "It's the choice to help. To help when no one else will. Remember that, Mamoru."

Mamoru's eyes widened, sparkling with both admiration and revelation, and his mouth fell open. "Then you're a hero too, dad!"

His father laughed faintly, trying not to trigger a cough, which came anyway. "How so?"

"You're helping many people with your manga! Like me and…” he stopped for a while, thinking. “...other people that read it. I was sad no one in class wanted to spend time with me. But then you taught me how to read, gave me your manga, and now I can have fun by myself!"

"Haha. I suppose that's true. It's what drives me to do what I do." He turned his chair to face Mamoru fully and leaned down towards him. "You try to be like that too. Helping others is the greatest thing one can do."

***

"But he was sick. Lung cancer, diagnosed too late. He died later that year. From then on everything went to shit. In an attempt to forget, my mom turned to booze and I lost the thing I cared about most — his manga. I had to go back to a reality where no one in school wanted to talk to me. I had to learn how to live on my own as my mom was always out cold in bed. I had to steal money from her purse just to order food, and that's how I somehow survived. I didn't like my life one bit. I tried to draw and write, to imitate what my father used to do, but I was too bad at it and gave up. There was nothing to enjoy anymore, and so I just wanted to… disappear."

***

Wind at that time of the year was a small breeze, a perfect mix for the warm temperature of late spring. Mamoru was lying on the rooftop of his home, his favorite place to turn his mind off.

"If you could just stay calm now-" Unknown voice cut through the quiet. Mamoru shot up like a rocket, his head snapping around, searching for the speaker. He looked down, right, left, even up, but there was no one beside him. He was anything but calm. "Who said that?!"

"Finding me might be a problem, so like I said, stay calm please." The voice replied, calm despite Mamoru's frantic search.

"Where are you?!" Mamoru yelled, still turning in tight circles, desperate to find the speaker.

"You see, I do have the answer, but you might not believe it."

"I'm going to call the cops if you don't leave!" Mamoru threatened, his voice revealing the rising panic.

"I can't really leave, you see." The voice sighed, a hint of exasperation in its tone. "Okay. Well. I'm in your head. I was thinking of a more grandiose way to introduce myself, but there really seems to be no better way to drop that information."

Mamoru froze. In an instant his erratic heartbeat dropped to normal and his mind stopped racing. ‘I'm standing on the rooftop of my house, screaming to call the cops on a voice in my head. Normally it might have been a prank, but there's no one who'd want to prank me.’ He thought, and a small laugh escaped his mouth. "I finally went insane."

"No one said it's going to be easy… Okay, punch something. That will prove my existence."

Mamoru grew quiet. He stopped looking around to where the voice was coming from. "What?" he mumbled.

"Punch something. Anything. Maybe not something very valuable to you."

‘Better embrace than deny it, I guess.’ He thought, turning and heading back into his room through the window. "Punch like hit something? Or punch like really throw a punch?"

"Try full strength."

‘Alright…’ His eyes started scanning the room for a target. The clothes he'd folded this morning? No. The bed they were sitting on? Too important. His desk? Too useful. The walls? An obvious no. But there was a mini-drawer on the right side of his bed. This crooked drawer with one leg shorter after it had cracked. The bottom drawer always jammed. He never used it for more than holding manga he currently read before sleep.

He took a step towards it, drew a deep breath and rolled his shoulders like they always did in the boxing manga he read. Then he drove a fist straight down for the top of the drawer. He wasn't even sure what to expect. After all, his idea was that he'd finally gone mad and started hearing voices, not that his fist would go through the top of the drawer and shatter it all in half.

He didn't know how to react. All he could do was stare at the mess in disbelief, his arm still in place and hand feeling no sting whatsoever. "…What?…"

"Congratulations! You now have superpowers!" The voice he'd heard in his head for the past few minutes — the one he thought was merely him going insane — now materialized right in front of him. It was a dark and purple mess of a void, swirling and trying to keep the shape of a human, appearing directly before his eyes.

***

"All I could do back then was faint. That was seven years ago. Since then my life got better. My mom went into rehab and married a new man. I met my step-brother who turned out to be an amazing guy, and I started using my powers for good. Echo… he helped me a lot during those years. Not only with my powers; he sometimes really felt like a friend." Mamoru was sitting on the ground in front of both siblings who had been listening to him eagerly for the past minutes. The looks on their faces showed they had expected anything but to hear a story like that.

"He fooled all of us. Don't let it get the better of you… And… I…" Akane's voice went softer, quieter, filled with an obvious struggle to find the right words.

"We're sorry that you had to go through this, Mamoru. That's what Akane is trying to say." Ren offered a warm smile, his eyes closed with it, which was usual for him.

"Spare it. I don't mean it in a bad way, I just don't like hearing stuff like that." Mamoru shifted his hips a bit, changing the positioning of his leg on the ground to sit more comfortably. "What's your story then? I thought there's only one Echo for the world, and one person with powers in it. You're siblings with powers."

Mamoru could have sworn this was the first time he'd seen Akane visibly uncomfortable since they met.

"It's not a story for today." Ren said in a warm tone, getting up and patting Akane on the back, signaling for her to stand up too. "The better question is what you want to do now. You can stay here, accept that you're dead and live the rest of your life like this. Or you can go to the capital and join the King's army. That is why we ended up here, after all." Ren stood tall in front of Mamoru who was still sitting on the ground, looking up.

"…I want to go home." Mamoru said firmly.

"You're dead. We all are, Mamoru!" Akane exploded, her voice sharp with a sudden pain, instantly looking as though she regretted it. "We can only stay here, outside of the capital, and rot until we die for the second and last time, or we go to the capital and slave away, fighting fights that aren't ours, under someone who led to our deaths!"

"And what is that capital? Can't we go there to look for Echo and ask him if it's possible to send us home?" Mamoru pressed with his determined gaze.

Ren's eyes emitted a quiet sadness — something Mamoru hadn't noticed before. He extended his hand to Mamoru, helping him get up. "It's not that simple. The Capital is surrounded by huge, meters tall walls with only one way in or out. It's heavily guarded by people like us who chose to serve under him, and the whole town is swarming with them. And King is King. Even if you somehow manage to get inside the Capital, you won't just get to meet him." He spoke to Mamoru, who was nervously shifting his weight from one leg to another, unable to keep still.

"I know. I figured that much. But there has to be a place where he lives. Like some sort of a palace. Overly big and luxurious. Something you can easily spot from anywhere in town."

"There is." Akane replied instantly, looking over at the destroyed metropolis a few kilometers away from them. Under the light of day it looked even bigger and more surreal than what Mamoru had seen yesterday.

Though she wasn't looking directly at the ruins, but at what was peeking out from behind them. The enormous, round, and golden tower with many rings that looked like balconies, so wide from the tower's base outward, that a house could sit comfortably on each, wrapping around the entire structure like a neighborhood. It was so far away, yet so close, beautifully glistening in the sun. "That's his palace."

Mamoru was both mesmerized by the sight of it and furious at the thought of Echo, the person who had basically killed him, enjoying his life there. "I want to try. I want to go and meet him, and I want to find out if I really am stuck here forever."

"Ren! You know that's ridiculous, tell him something!" Akane could only gesticulate wildly, rushing her movements as she yelled in visible annoyance.

"Many have tried, Mamoru. During our time here, there were two of them. One is dead; we saw the body. The second one is…" Ren looked deeply troubled, the sadness that was usually only visible in his eyes if you looked closely, now evident in his voice. "Doesn't matter. Even before us, there are countless stories of either heroes who wanted to save this world from tyranny or go back home. None end happy. The point is: You should make up with the fact of staying here…"

"Let him go." A very familiar, old, and raspy voice unexpectedly made everyone look back at the bar, where 'Pops' stood at the entrance. His face was calm and warm, similar to how Ren always looked. If someone saw them for the first time, there could have been a mistake for father and son. "If he wants it, then let him. He has proven himself to be more than worthy of deciding his own fate… In fact…" He stopped, looking at the ground for a while. "...I want you to go with him."

"What?! You can't just decide for us!" Akane exploded.

"Akane! Let him speak!" It was truly a time of revelations, it seemed, as Mamoru for the first time saw Ren even remotely angry, let alone with a raised voice. Not something he had expected to happen.

"Thank you, Ren. I don't send you to the Capital with him. All I ask for is for you to go meet with Haruto, get all the things and information needed, and help him travel near the Capital. If by then you still share the same sentiment, you're free to leave him and go back."

"We'll do it." Ren smiled at the grandpa while Akane yelled something at them in frustration and stormed inside the bar. Mamoru couldn't hear what she said, as he was lost in his own thoughts. ‘They seem like good people. If I could really do this, then maybe all of them could return to their homes and families.’ His face turned from a subtle smile to a more concerned and serious one.

‘Mom… Takeru… I'll come back to you no matter what.’