Chapter 13: A World of Technicolor Scream
"AAAAAAAHHHHHH!"
The scream tore through the silence of the Kurosawa household like a physical wound. It wasn't a cry of pain; it was a raw, primal sound of absolute sensory overload, a brain firing on synapses that had been dormant for a decade.
Downstairs, the sound of porcelain shattering. Aoi dropped the entire teapot.
"Kaito!" Haru roared, abandoning his coffee, sprinting for the stairs with a speed that defied his age. Aoi was right behind him, slipping on the spilled tea but scrambling up, her heart seizing in her chest.
He's hurt. The strain was too much.
Haru kicked the bedroom door open, the wood banging violently against the wall.
"Kaito! What is it?! Speak to me!"
They froze.
Kaito was sitting upright in his bed, his back pressed hard against the headboard, his chest heaving as if he had just run a marathon. His hands were clawed into his hair, pulling at the strands, his eyes squeezed shut so tightly his face was contorted.
"It's too much!" Kaito gasped, his voice cracking. "It's... it's stabbing me! It's everywhere!"
"Kaito, breathe!" Aoi rushed to the bedside, reaching out to grab his trembling shoulders. "It's the migraine, isn't it? The strain? Close the curtains, Haru! Quickly!"
Haru lunged for the window, ripping the curtains shut, plunging the room into dim, filtered shadow.
"It's okay, it's okay," Aoi soothed, pulling Kaito's hands away from his head. She was crying, the terror of the previous night resurfacing instantly. "I'm here. Mom is here. Just keep your eyes closed. We'll go to the hospital. We'll fix this."
Kaito's breathing hitched. He felt her hands—warm, familiar. He heard her voice—shaking, terrified.
But even with his eyes closed, the afterimage burned in his mind. Not a purple shadow. Not a heat signature.
Blue.
A color he didn't know the name of, but he knew it was the color of the blanket.
"Mom..." Kaito whispered. He slowly lowered his hands. His body was trembling, not from pain, but from a shock so profound it rattled his very bones.
"Don't open them if it hurts," Haru said, kneeling by the bed, his hand gripping Kaito's knee. "Don't force it."
"I have to..." Kaito swallowed dryly. "I have to check."
Slowly, agonizingly, Kaito Kurosawa opened his eyes.
The dim light of the room was bearable now. The visual data flooded in, raw and unfiltered. He blinked, tears of reflex leaking from the corners of his eyes. His pupils, pitch black and dilated, darted frantically around the room.
He looked at the ceiling. It wasn't a flat, cool surface anymore. It had lines. Patterns. Knots in the wood.
He looked at the desk. The clutter wasn't a jumble of energy shapes. It was papers, pencils, a lamp. Distinct. Separate.
Then, he looked down.
He looked at the woman kneeling beside him.
For the first time in ten years, he didn't see a warm, violet-hued human-shaped energy field. He didn't see a thermal ghost.
He saw a face.
He saw pale skin. He saw faint lines of worry etched around a mouth that was trembling. He saw messy, light brown hair that fell over a shoulder. And he saw eyes. Two wide, shimmering pools of violet that mirrored his own shock.
He shifted his gaze to the man. Black hair, messy and spiked. Sharp features. Dark eyes that were currently filled with terror.
The silence in the room was heavy, suffocating, and electric.
Kaito raised a shaking hand. He reached out.
Aoi flinched slightly, but she didn't move. She watched as her son's hand moved through the air, not guided by instinct or energy, but by sight. His fingers brushed her cheek. He traced the line of her jaw. He looked at his thumb against her skin.
"You're..." Kaito's voice was a whisper, barely audible. "You're so... detailed."
Aoi stopped breathing. "What?"
Kaito looked directly into her eyes. The eye contact was piercing. It was real.
"Your eyes," Kaito said, a sob catching in his throat. "Mom... your eyes really are violet. Just like Dad said. The only colour I knew.."
Aoi's face crumbled.
She stared at him, her mouth opening and closing, no sound coming out. She looked at Haru. Haru was staring at Kaito, his face pale, his mouth agape.
"Kaito..." Haru choked out. "Can you...?"
"I can see," Kaito whispered, the tears finally spilling over, rolling down his cheeks. "I can see the room. I can see the colors. I can see you."
"No..." Aoi whimpered, shaking her head in denial, terrified to believe it. "No, that's impossible. The doctor said... the nerves were dead. It's impossible."
"I'm looking at you!" Kaito cried out, a laugh breaking through his tears—a hysterical, broken sound. "You're wearing an apron! Dad is wearing a shirt! The blanket is.. I don't know what's the name of those colours.. But I can see it! I can see all of it!"
The dam broke.
Aoi let out a wail—a sound of pure, unadulterated release that had been building up since the day she sat in that clinic with a baby in her arms. She collapsed onto Kaito's chest, burying her face in his neck, screaming his name.
"Kaito! Kaito!"
Haru wrapped his arms around both of them, burying his face in Kaito's hair. The strong, stoic math teacher, the man of logic who had held this family together with equations and calmness, fell apart. He sobbed, his shoulders shaking violently, clutching his wife and son as if they would disappear if he let go.
"It's not the Quirk," Kaito wept, holding his mother tightly, looking at the top of her head, marveling at the individual strands of brown hair. "It's not the purple world. It's the real one. It's the real one."
For ten years, this house had carried a quiet shadow. The shadow of guilt that Aoi carried, believing her body had failed her son. The shadow of fear Haru carried, worrying about a future he couldn't control. The shadow Kaito lived in, navigating a world that wasn't built for him.
In one morning, in one rush of overwhelming, terrifying light, the shadows were burned away.
"I'm sorry," Aoi sobbed into his chest, her words muffled. "I'm so sorry for everything. I'm sorry it was dark for so long."
"It's okay," Kaito cried, squeezing her. "It's okay now. I can see you. Mom, you're beautiful. You're so beautiful."
They stayed like that for a long time, a tangle of limbs and tears on a messy bed, while the morning sun tried to push through the curtains, waiting to show Kaito Kurosawa the rest of the world.
An hour later, the initial hysteria had settled into a fragile, awe-filled quiet.
Kaito sat at the kitchen table. He was just staring.
He stared at the grain of the wood on the table. He stared at the steam rising from his cup—not a heat signature, but actual, swirling white mist. He stared at his own hands, turning them over and over, looking at the lines in his palms, the color of his skin.
Haru sat across from him, watching him with red, puffy eyes, a smile plastered on his face that refused to leave. Aoi was cutting fruit, but she stopped every few seconds just to look at him, to make sure he was still seeing.
"So," Haru said, his voice raspy. "The doctor... we need to call the doctor. But... how?"
"I don't know," Kaito murmured, not looking up from a red apple he was holding. He was mesmerized by the way the light hit the skin. "Maybe... maybe the Quirk didn't break. maybe it... pushed through? Like a dam bursting?"
"You overused the neural pathways," Haru theorized, his logic slowly returning. "You forced a connection. The stress of the exam, the massive output of energy... maybe it jump-started the optic nerve? Or maybe the Quirk rewired your brain entirely to process visual input through the eyes instead of the mind?"
"I don't care how," Aoi said softly, placing the plate of fruit in front of him. "I really don't care."
Kaito looked at the apple. "What do you call this colour?"
"Red," Aoi laughed, a watery, joyous sound. "This is red."
He smiled, and said; "I see, so this is the red colour."
Kaito looked out the window. The street was just a street. Cars were metal and paint, not moving boxes of heat. Trees were green and brown, not vertical columns of life-energy.
"It's so... flat," Kaito whispered.
"Flat?" Haru asked.
"My old vision... I could see through things. I could see behind walls. I could see the heat inside a person. Now... I only see the surface." He touched the glass of the window. "It's beautiful. But it's... limited."
He closed his eyes. He tried to summon the violet world. He tried to reach out with his senses.
Nothing.
He opened his eyes again. The technicolor world rushed back in.
"I can't feel..." Kaito said slowly, turning to his parents. "I can no longer fell the world of purple.."
Aoi froze. "You lost the sensing ability?"
Kaito nodded. "I'm not sure but for now I can't feel the neighbors. I can't feel the toaster. I just see."
Haru leaned forward. "Kaito. If you lost the sensing ability... and you're applying to U.A...."
The realization hit the room.
Kaito Kurosawa, who had crushed the practical exam using a combination of gravity and hyper-advanced spatial awareness, was now just a boy with gravity... and normal, untrained human eyes. He had lost his radar. He had lost the ability that let him fight without looking.
He was normal.
Kaito looked at his hands again. A slow grin spread across his face.
"I don't care," he said firmly. "I can see your faces. I'd trade a thousand Quirks for this."
A wide and proud smile appeared in the parents faces as they looked at each other..
.
.
.