"Johnny!"
A voice screamed from somewhere in the house.
His room was filled with posters, the kind that covered every inch of the wall. One showed a tattooed man with thick four arms squaring up against another man with white hair and cold blue eyes. There was something about that image that always pulled the eye, something about the stillness of two people caught just before a fight. The room itself was tidy and organized for a boy's room, with a bookshelf packed with dozens of manga novels standing neatly on its shelves, their spines worn from being read too many times to count.
In the middle of the room sat a single bed.
Lying on it was a boy with black hair, eyes closed, buried under a heap of large white blankets. His face was calm in the way faces only are during sleep, the kind of peace that disappears the moment the eyes open and the day begins.
"Johnny!" The voice called again.
The boy stirred at the sound but still didn't open his eyes.
"Elizabeth, go wake up your brother before I throw cold water at him—that's if I am even able to fetch water." The voice belonged to a middle-aged woman.
Then his door burst open. A small figure rushed in and slapped the lights on.
The boy's sleeping expression twisted into a frown at the sudden shift from darkness to light. He pulled the blanket over his face.
"Brother, good morning! Wake up! You have to drop me to school." The little girl said.
"Just give me a few more minutes…" His voice came out muffled under the blankets.
"It's already 7:30 and my school starts at 8! I'll get scolded if I arrive late because of my lazy brother, and mind you, Mom will come wake you up by force if you don't move right now."
Johnny still refused to leave the bed.
Elizabeth stood there, dumbfounded, as her bait went ignored.
Seeing that normal methods weren't working… she had other ways to handle this.
She took a few steps back, stretched her body, then broke into a full sprint toward his bed. Just before she reached the frame, she launched herself into the air, folded her knees tight to her chest, and dropped like a cannonball straight onto Johnny's stomach.
"Ugh!" He screamed as pain tore through his gut.
His eyes snapped open, black eyes, sharp and startled, as a jolt of pain erupted from his stomach. His whole body convulsed, lurching against whatever had landed on him, and just like that he was wide awake, not a single trace of drowsiness left in his mind.
"What the hell are you doing, Elizabeth?!" Johnny said, his gaze landing on a pale-skinned girl with matching black hair and black eyes just like his.
"Good morning!" She said with the biggest smile on her face, swinging both her feet playfully. "You wouldn't wake up when Mom or I called you, so I decided to try something different, hehe."
Johnny was about to curse but stopped himself. He couldn't do that in front of his little sister.
He was genuinely annoyed, though, especially because he felt like throwing up from where she'd landed on him.
Why didn't Dad just drop—
He cut the thought off before it could finish.
I guess I'm still not over it. He thought somberly.
Johnny looked at his sister. "Get off. I'm already awake."
"Are you sure you're really awake?" Elizabeth asked, tilting her head to the side with a grin.
"Yes, I am. Now get off before I throw you off myself."
Not wanting to be tossed to the floor, Elizabeth hopped off him and landed lightly.
Johnny yawned and ran a hand through his short black hair before sitting up and standing.
He was quite tall, at least 1.8 meters, with a lean physique. Paired with the looks he'd inherited from his mother, he was, by most accounts, quite handsome.
He looked down at his little sister smiling up at him.
"What? Go on, shoo. I'm getting dressed."
Elizabeth giggled and ran out of the room.
"I still wonder how she runs so much on those legs…" Johnny murmured before stepping into the shower.
He kept it quick. He had a sister to drop off in time.
After a cold shower he put on an oversized black hoodie, black track pants, and pulled a black cap onto his head.
Before leaving his room he stopped and looked at the man on the poster.
"Go/Jo."
He said that and walked out.
Their house was big, three large rooms each with their own bathrooms, and a wide kitchen that opened into a spacious living room.
Johnny walked to the kitchen and found a woman there, packing food into a pink lunch box. She looked like both him and his sister rolled into one person.
He always wondered how his mother could still be so beautiful at 55. She looked closer to her thirties. She had long wavy black hair that fell to her shoulders, pale skin just like his, and grey eyes that looked slightly unfocused, as though they were searching for something they could no longer find. Her movements were slow and deliberate, each hand placement careful, every reach across the counter measured before she committed to it. She navigated the kitchen the way a person navigates something memorized rather than seen.
She looked like the perfect mother, if not for the missing left arm.
His jaw clenched at the sight.
His mother sensed his presence. She turned her head in his direction, her face pointed toward him, but her eyes not quite meeting his.
That hurt more than anything else ever could.
"You finally woke up. Geez, how can you sleep for so long?"
Feeling guilty, he apologized. "Sorry Mom, I slept late yesterday."
His mother sighed, then smiled. "It's okay to stay up at night, but don't abuse it, okay?"
"Okay." He nodded.
She raised her right hand.
He walked over, kissed her on the forehead, then gently took the lunch box from her hands and started packing it himself.
"You can rest, Mom. I'll do it."
"Thanks, son." She said with a warm smile.
As he worked, he spoke carefully. "You know I normally handle this. You don't need to bother yourself with it."
"I know." Her hand drifted across the counter, then found the chair to her left and she sat down. "I know I'm blind and I only have one arm. But I can't just sit here at home doing nothing while my baby son handles everything on his own. As a mother, I just can't let you carry all that weight alone."
His heart clenched at her words. But then he smiled, bitterly, quietly.
"You know I'm already 25 years old, right? A bit old to still be called your baby."
His mother pouted. "It doesn't matter how old you get. You will always be my baby boy."
Johnny smiled at her.
She was a strong woman, his mother. He thought about that often, more than he ever said out loud. The word strong felt too small for what she actually was, but he didn't have a better one. After everything that happened, she still smiled. She was still happy, or at least, she made it look that way. Whether she was faking it or not, it seemed genuine enough that he couldn't tell the difference. And maybe that itself was a kind of strength he would never fully understand.
Losing your sight and an arm were not small things. They weren't things you just got over. Most people would have folded. Most people would have stayed in bed, turned inward, let the grief eat them from the inside out. But she hadn't. She kept getting up. She kept trying to pack the lunch boxes, kept asking how their days were, kept smiling at voices she could no longer put faces to. But she behaved as though nothing had happened at all.
The most striking part was that despite being blind, she still moved through the house with ease, never bumping into things, never losing her footing. She had memorized every corner so well that the entire layout of the house existed like a picture in her mind.
After finishing the lunch box and fastening Elizabeth's bag, Johnny picked it up and slung it over his shoulder.
"Don't forget to change your sister's legs." His mother said.
"I will."
He walked to the living room where his sister sat eating cereal in front of the TV, completely unbothered.
He reached out and pinched her right cheek, making her squeak.
"You know you should be getting ready for school, not watching TV."
"Ow! Yes, I'm sowwy." She said, then immediately tried to bite his hand before he snatched it away.
He kneeled in front of her and looked at her prosthetic legs.
"Your legs, Elizabeth."
She sighed with the full weight of someone being deeply inconvenienced, which was impressive for a child her size, then moved them without complaint and continued watching her show as if he wasn't even there. The volume on the TV was too loud. It was always too loud. He had told her that at least a dozen times and she had nodded seriously every single time and done absolutely nothing about it.
Johnny began removing both prosthetic legs, and then he noticed it. A small crack running along the material.
He frowned and pinched her cheek again. "You need to stop jumping around, you're going to break these things, idiot."
"Ow! Ow! Yeah, yeah, let my poor cheeks go." She tried to bite his hand again.
He dodged her teeth effortlessly, the way he always did.
He sighed and moved to one of the drawers in the living room, pulled out a fresh pair of prosthetics from the storage box, and fitted them carefully onto Elizabeth's legs. Once done, he asked her to stand so he could check they were properly attached. Then he dragged her out of the living room.
His mother also had a prosthetic arm, but she rarely wore it.
They both said their goodbyes, burying their mother in hugs and kisses before heading for the door.
"Drive safe and come back safe, my babies. And Johnny, always protect your sister."
"I will. Always, Mom."
Johnny grabbed the car keys and they left the house together, heading into the garage.
The door slid open automatically, revealing a four-seater black car.
An Audi RS7.
Johnny's family was doing well financially. His father had held a decent job, and Johnny himself had become a neurosurgeon by the age of 21. He was that kind of smart.
They both got in — Elizabeth in the back, Johnny in the driver's seat.
"Please drive really fast, like, vroooom, vroooom!" She said, imitating engine sounds with her mouth.
Johnny chuckled. "I wasn't planning otherwise. We only have 15 minutes and your school is an hour's drive away."
"Yay! Start the car, start!" She slapped his shoulders repeatedly, only stopping when the engine turned over.
Vroom. Vroom.
They pulled out and hit the highway instead of the normal road, faster that way. Johnny kept his eyes forward, one hand relaxed on the wheel. In the rearview mirror he could see Elizabeth pressing her nose to the window, watching the city blur past in streaks of grey and morning light. She did that every single time, like the world outside was something new and worth looking at no matter how many times she'd seen it before. And lucky for them, the highway was clear, so they made it to her school in 15 minutes, right at 8 o'clock.
Johnny parked outside and walked Elizabeth through the school gates.
Whenever they passed people in the corridors, eyes would drift down to her legs and linger just a moment too long. Pitying looks. Whispered comments.
"What kind of terrible accident did that poor girl go through?"
It was grating, badly enough that Johnny's hands curled at his sides, the urge to turn around and say something sharp rising hot in his chest. It wasn't pity he hated so much as the casualness of it, the way strangers looked at his sister like she was something to feel sorry for, like she was defined entirely by what she was missing rather than everything she still had. But Elizabeth touched his arm and stopped him before he could act on it.
"It's okay, brother. I don't mind." Her face went quiet for just a second, a brief flicker behind her eyes and then it was gone, replaced by her usual wide grin. "Come on, let's walk to my class so you can apologize to the teacher for bringing me late!"
She said it to calm him down. But it only made his chest ache more.
She had been so young when the car accident happened. The one that killed their father, took both of her legs, stripped their mother of her arm and her sight.
Elizabeth had only been six years old. He had been eighteen.
Watching his father die had been traumatic for him. But he knew, without a doubt, that Elizabeth had suffered more than he ever had.
Behind all that playfulness, behind every loud laugh and teasing grin, she was hurting. He knew because she was his sister, and he knew her better than she probably knew herself.
His mother was the same. She hadn't moved on from their father's death—he was sure of that—she just never showed it.
I still don't understand why it wasn't me. Why wasn't I the one who died? Why wasn't I the one who lost the limbs, instead of them?
In the accident, he had somehow come away with only a broken spine and now held together by metal hardware. Without that surgery, he could have been bedridden for life.
But even so. Even after everything, he was still the one who had gotten lucky.
It hurt like a bitch every single day, watching his mother and sister carry their pain quietly, without complaint.
After their father's death, the company he had worked at continued supporting the family. That had been surprising. Most companies didn't give a damn about their workers unless they were valuable enough to matter. But this one had stepped up, and it had made a difference.
Johnny had turned that moment into fuel. He stopped being lazy and buried himself in his studies. The hard work paid off when he qualified to study at the best medical school in the country. By 21 he was already working, having finished early because his mind simply worked faster than most. He started earning over a million dollars a year, more than enough to keep his family on their feet.
His father would have been proud.
They walked through the school corridors, Elizabeth's hand tucked in his, until her classroom came into view. But before they could reach it, they found the doorway blocked, a man in white robes was arguing loudly with a middle-aged man and a woman who stood in the hallway.
Johnny and Elizabeth stopped.
"That's the principal and my teacher," Elizabeth said, studying the figures. "The other man looks like the parent of my Arab classmate. I don't know why they're arguing so early, though."
Johnny frowned and kept walking. As they drew close enough, the words became clear.
"My son has been bullied in this school by some of his classmates and you people do nothing when he reports it! Allah should punish you for this!" The man in white robes shouted.
The middle-aged man, the principal, raised his hands gently. "Sir, please try to calm down. There are children here. Why don't we step into my office and discuss this properly?"
"Calm down? You want me to calm down? When my son has been starving himself because of what those kids put him through?! Allah have mercy on me because I might commit a crime today!"
The principal and teacher both stiffened visibly at that.
The tension made sense. A man speaking like that in a school, it wasn't hard for the mind to go somewhere dark.
He switched into his own language then, his tone sharp and clipped, the words spilling out in what sounded like heavy, forceful curses.
Then he turned and left, walking right past the two siblings without a glance.
Johnny watched the man's back as he moved away, catching only a faint murmur beneath his breath. He couldn't make out the words.
But he felt something. A bad feeling, quiet and persistent, that he pushed aside.
They reached the classroom. The principal was still standing outside with the teacher.
"Good morning, Principal Julius. Good morning, Miss Anna." The siblings greeted them together.
"Good morning, Mr. Specter." The principal nodded. "I hope that scene earlier didn't disturb you."
"Not too much, though it's left me a little concerned. I just hope no child in this school is being genuinely bullied."
He meant it. If Elizabeth was being picked on because of her legs, he would pull her out of this school himself and have the institution's name dragged through every legal channel available to him.
The teacher sighed. "Honestly, his son isn't being bullied at all. If anything, it's the other way around —his child causes problems in class, and my guess is he told his father a story so the man would come down here and throw his weight around. He's wealthy and he knows it."
Money was power in this world. Without it, you were at the mercy of those who had it.
Damned capitalism. Johnny thought with a quiet frown.
After talking with the principal a little longer, the man excused himself and left.
Johnny crouched down in front of Elizabeth. "I'll pick you up at 1pm, okay?"
"Promise to take me to the ice cream shop after?" Elizabeth raised her pinky finger.
Johnny smiled and raised his, hooking it around hers.
"It's a promise."
"Hehe, you promised!"
She threw her arms around him and held on tight. He held her back just as hard. She barely reached his chest. He had always found it quietly funny how small she was and yet how much space she managed to take up in a room, in a house, in a life.
And for some reason, some quiet and unexplainable reason, that hug felt different. He held it a beat longer than he normally would. It felt like it could be the last one.
Johnny stood up, handed the lunch bag to her teacher, and watched Elizabeth disappear into the classroom before he turned and made his way back down the corridor.
He was nearly at the school entrance when he crossed paths with the same man in white robes — only this time, the man was heading back toward the school corridors, and he was carrying a black backpack.
Johnny's eyes dropped to the bag.
His steps slowed. The bad feeling from earlier came back — stronger now, sharper, pressing at the back of his throat.
Why is he carrying a bag back inside? Why does every part of me feel like something is wrong?
He stood still for a moment and watched the man disappear into the corridor. His mind reached for a reason, some sensible explanation. The man had left something behind. He was talking to someone. There were a hundred reasons a person might carry a bag back into a building. Johnny knew that.
Then he shook his head and dismissed the thought.
"I'm probably overthinking."
He opened his car door and got in, letting out a slow breath as he settled into the seat.
He was reaching for the ignition when the memory hit him, not a clear one, just a fragment. A voice. Words spoken low and underneath the shouting, something he had caught without fully registering, the way you sometimes hear a sound and only understand it seconds later when the brain finally catches up.
"I'm going to bomb this place."
Johnny repeated the words aloud and his eyes went wide.
That was what the man had said. In the corridor. Under his breath. Right before he walked away.
Johnny shoved the car door open and ran out of the car as fast as he could.
Back through the gate, across the lot, through the school entrance and he ran harder than he had in years. His feet stumbled twice and he barely slowed, recovering mid-stride each time.
"No, no, no, no!"
His heart was slamming against his ribs by the time he hit the corridor.
Please be okay. Please be okay, Elizabeth.
Huff. Huff.
He prayed. He prayed the man hadn't meant it, prayed he was wrong, prayed there was still time.
He rounded a corner and collided hard into someone.
"Get out of the way!" He didn't stop.
Elizabeth's classroom came into view — and so did the man, walking toward it with hurried, deliberate steps, the black bag hanging from his shoulder.
Johnny ran faster.
The man heard his footsteps and glanced back.
Their eyes met.
And the man started running too.
"You bastard!" Johnny screamed, pushing his legs until his lungs burned.
Even if it meant tearing his ankles apart.
Even if he couldn't breathe afterward.
He had to reach that door first.
But the distance was too great.
The man got there before him and kicked the classroom door wide open. The children screamed.
"Allahu Akbar!" The man shouted — and threw the bag inside.
Then he ran.
Johnny's heart dropped at the sound of the children's screams.
He caught the man before he could get far and threw a punch straight into his face, breaking his nose clean. The man's back cracked against the wall and he crumpled, unconscious.
Johnny didn't waste another second. He ran into the classroom.
The bag sat in the middle of the room. He found his sister immediately — she was pressed behind her teacher, her face white with fear. But the moment she saw him, something in her eyes softened.
"Brother!"
Relief poured through him. She was okay.
But it didn't last.
Throw it. I have to get it out of the window. Now!
He had promised his mother he would protect her.
He had promised Elizabeth ice cream after school.
He thought of her face when she had seen him walk through the door. The way the fear had broken apart for just a moment and something warm had replaced it. The way she had said his name.
Johnny moved toward the bag, reaching for it and then he heard it.
BEEEEP.
No.
"Elizabeth—!"
He screamed her name as the realization crashed over him.
Then—
BOOM.
The explosion swallowed everything; the classroom, the light, the sound.
And then there was nothing. Only black.
****
Good day lads.
Sigh, new book. I started this new book in case my other one got rejected and guess what, it got rejected. However, I will still upload but not as consistent like usual since there's people who read it, I can not just drop it.
This will probably be my last book because if it does not work out I will just quit lol but one thing I promised is to deliver a decent story, not the best yet because I am still learning how to write and I want to improve, so please don't flame me when I make a lot of mistakes, we learn from it after all.
What you need to know is that this story has no smut, no harem and no cliche shenanigans but a likable mc and quite depressive ahaha. So don't be surprised when I kill your favorite character, I warned you just incase you say I didn't.
So please add this book to your collection and I promise you won't regret reading it and if you don't add it to your library you are gae! why are you gae?!
(╯‵□′)╯︵┻━┻