He’s sitting at a table next to a kind-faced man with greying hair. Dad. And he can hear a soft voice and movement from the next room. Mom? She walks in, carrying the last of the dishes for dinner and Genos stands, reaching to help her put them all down. He doesn’t know how to feel. Relieved, overjoyed, grateful. And he looks down at his hands; they’re... Human. I’m still a human. He wants to cry. He wants to grab his mother and bury his face against her shoulder and let all the pain from the last four years pour out of him. He doesn’t understand how or why he’d dreamed all that, but he’s so, so, so thankful it wasn’t real.
He doesn’t, though. And...he’s not sure why he doesn’t. It’s like he’s rooted to his seat. Frowning and looking down at the food on his place, his vision blurs. He can’t see--can’t remember--what he’d been eating. What he was about to eat. Raising his eyes to his parents, he can hear his mother talking, but it’s like they’re underwater. The words just as blurry as his plate.
No.
She’s smiling and animated and she’s nodding to him. Asking him a question.
No. No, please.
And he feels his jaw moving, his mouth forming words he can’t hear and he’s sure he’s crying. He must be.
Mom, we have to get out of here.
But he can already hear it: a series of crashing sounds from outside, starting far away but gaining a terrifying speed. He wants to reach out to his father, who’s frowning and getting up. Or his mother, who’s following him to the window. And as he moves along with them, slowly--curiously--he’s begging, pleading, screaming...
And in an instant, the world ends.
The home he’d grown up in is a pile of rubble, crushing the only two people who’d ever really loved him. His father is already unconscious; his mother is barely breathing; and he’s...pinned. Trapped. It hurts less than it should. And as he’s taking in the scene, a man appears from behind him, moving silently across the rubble toward his father.
Wait!
But, of course, the stranger doesn’t wait. He kneels down, blocking Genos’s view, and only rises as a ball of white light does, too.
Please, stop!
Again, the stranger doesn’t. Moving to his mother and blocking the view again, Genos watches the second ball of light join the first, hesitate, then float away. And as the figure begins to turn, his eyes widen. His already labored breathing picks up, and more than anything he wants to run. When he sees the stranger’s face, though, that feeling starts to subside.
The man in black approaches Genos, walking silently and weightlessly across the debris and kneeling just beside Genos’s head and shoulders. “I’m sorry you had to see that.” His voice is soft and gentle. Soothing. “Your parents aren’t in any pain, though. And you’re going to be ok. I promise.”
Genos feels himself nod, but there are so many things he wants to ask. ‘Are you the angel of death?’ ‘Do you know how to find the monster that killed my family?’ ‘Would you help me kill it?’ But as he feels a warm hand on his shoulder, all his thoughts just...disappear. He can’t think. He can’t feel anything. And all he can see, when he looks up, is a warm smile and warm eyes and he hears a warm voice cut through the fog of sound to say,
“I’ll stay here with you until someone comes. It won’t be long. I ah...I’d do something for you, but I’m not a doctor.” Rubbing Genos’s shoulder almost imperceptibly lightly, “You won’t be alone, though. Ok?”
Genos feels himself nod again and lean into the man’s hand. He feels like a blanket. Like sunlight. Like life.
And the man seems to notice, moving his hand to Genos’s hair, petting it gently. Some of it’s pinned to his back, but the man’s touch is careful; he doesn’t tug or pull. It’s just a steady, comforting feeling.
Genos closes his eyes. It’s the only way to avoid seeing his parents’ corpses. He can feel his face screwing up as if to cry, but nothing happens. No tears come. Not yet. The man sitting beside him notices, though, and moves in front of him, blocking his view.
“Sorry,” he murmurs, reaching out with both hands to comb though Genos’s hair.
And Genos melts into the feeling, his face relaxing and his head bows forward, into that steady, comforting warmth.
Nothing much happens for a long time. He has no idea how long. It felt like hours, but according to his calculations, it could only have been a few minutes. Regardless, Genos looks up when he hears footsteps. And he turns his head to see Kuseno, approaching slowly with a toolbox in one hand and a medical kit in the other.
And he hears, “I’ll get going,” in his left ear, but by the time he turns his head, the man in black is gone. Like he’d never been there at all.