What are you afraid of?

On the scorching dirt ground he was on, Haru Takahashi felt the blistering heat invade his senses, sand rushing against his body. He opened his eyes. The light was blinding, forcing his pupils to adjust to it. After his vision adjusted a bit, he found out he was in a large open desert, the burning sun shining down on him. The ground under his body was red-hot, and he found several blisters on his arms.
He didn't know where he was and how he had got here.

He took off the dirty, patched jacket was wearing, and wrapped it around his head to avoid heatstroke. Apart from this, he was wearing ruptured grey slacks and large sand-filled boots made of cowhide, way too big for his size. He had found them in a dumpster in Mirai City while scavenging for food a few days ago. Mirai City... That reminded him. The last memory he had was wrapping up and going to sleep on a rat-infested pavement near the City Hall in the winter cold. When he woke up he had found himself here, with no explanation as to how or why it had happened. But that didn't matter now. The most important thing right now was to find a source of food and water.

2 hours had passed, or so he thought. He had traversed miles and miles of endless sand, with no end in sight. There wasn't any hope of his survival, and he tried to accept this fact.
The one thing he couldn't afford to lose was his sanity.
But as the hellish, monotonous cycle of walking through the never-ending dunes continued, he got lost in the recesses of his mind. He tried to make sense of it all; try to comprehend the situation he was in. He decided to take a trip down memory lane to get himself together.

Haru was 6 when he lost his parents. His was a nuclear family, and both his parents were engaged in work. They were barely at home, his father working as an insurance agent and his mother as a lawyer. He would spend most of his time alone after school, and his parents would come home late at night. He didn't mind this and loved his parents regardless.
But one night, something else happened.

That night, it was cold and quiet outside, and Haru decided to stay up late in order to skip school the next day. His parents usually would come later in the night, so Haru had hours to fool around. Naturally, he was thrilled at this thought. He spent a few hours playing all by himself and things were going fun until the doorbell rang. Haru was a kid, but he still knew something was off. His parents usually carried the keys and would open the door directly. Only visitors would ring the bell, and his parents always used to warn him to never open the door to strangers.

Haru walked out of the room he was playing in and walked towards the door. He stopped in front of it. There was an eyehole on the door, but he was too short to reach it. He looked around, and his eyes found a small plastic stool in the corner of the room. He ran towards it, dragged it, and set it up in front of the door. He stood on it and found himself just barely managing to reach the eyehole. Struggling to maintain his balance, he looked through it.

There was no one outside. He looked around and found a solitary briefcase on the ground. It was his mother's.
By now he was sure his parents were playing some kind of prank on him, and so he made the decision to open the door.
He spent his whole life wishing he never did.

Inside the briefcase was a black poorly knitted T-Shirt around his size, and a letter. The T-Shirt was knitted with some kind of thick black thread, and there were holes all over it. The stitching was all over the place, and it felt weirdly moist. Haru picked up the letter and opened it. It was a bit hard to read for him but he managed. It read:

Hello, Haru.

A few months later, Haru ran away from the orphanage he was relocated to. Taking to the streets, he got by stealing and gathering food from dumpsters. Sometimes, people would give him stuff like clothes and money, and he would manage the winter cold. Several times though, he was attacked and robbed, even sexually assaulted by other homeless people. He would be grabbed from the streets and raped by a gang of rich people and would be thrown out once they were done. But he never gave up. He made it his life's goal to take revenge on Cowboy-kun, the person who killed his parents, no matter what.

The sand particles crunched under his boots as Haru strode across them. It had been well over 5 hours by now, and there were no signs of life in sight. Haru was famished, and his thirst was affecting his ability to walk. He felt his body weakening, and he was in dire need of nourishment. He was about to collapse when in the distance, he spotted a black object. It looked like some kind of large animal. Using the last reserves of his energy, he sprinted towards it, stumbling and falling on the dunes, but getting back up every time. The animal was a cow, all alone in the middle of the desert.

When he reached the cow, he fell to his knees in front of it, exhausted. The cow turned towards him and mooed. He crawled under the cow and found its nipples. He squeezed them and out came the nourishing, refreshing milk, which he gulped down in an instant. This gave him the energy boost he needed. He got back out from under the cow and scanned his surroundings for another, hoping to find its owner. But alas. There was nothing but sand for as far as he could see. The cow started to lick his arm as the situation dawned on him. His last hope was gone. There was no escape out of here.

The night was cold and dry. So cold in fact that even sticking to the cow to preserve body heat wouldn't cut it. There was no way to make a fire or create a source of warmth. He had to wait till the sun to rise again. He was shivering, with his jacket wrapped around his body. The cow was laying next to him. He thought about his parents and the life he used to live all those years ago. He thought about how much he had taken for granted and ultimately lost. He thought of going to school and playing at home. All of that would never come back, ever again. He put his head to the cow's stomach, hearing its heartbeat. That gave him comfort. The Thump, Thump, Thump, Thump... It was getting louder and louder... Then it hit him. What he was listening to wasn't a heartbeat. It was footsteps, getting closer and closer.

He got up and turned toward the direction the footsteps were coming from. It was a man, dressed in an all-leather cowboy outfit, walking towards him. He made out the silhouette of the large hat in the moonlight.

The man stopped a few meters away from him. Then, Haru heard the man speak in a faint, raspy voice:

"Haru Takahashi, what are you afraid of?"