Raquel was a child a little outside the norm, she got on well with everyone, was charismatic and had a tendency to get into fights with the older children, what set her apart from the other children was her small ability to see things that for the others weren't there.
Little monsters that she learned to avoid, it was easy to know where they would be, she just had to pay attention and trust her instincts. When you feel the air heavy with pain and despair, a promise of misery, fear and sadness, when every bone in your body is begging you to run as fast as you can, that's when you know one of these monsters is nearby, whether you see them or not, the catch? If you realize it too late, they realize it too...
It was from this that Raquel learned that she was special, the way she moved, always in silence, how she seemed to be able to make everything she touched stop making noise if she wanted to... A man and a woman showed up at her house one day, when she was seven, to explain what was wrong with her.
Cursed technique, they called it.
Once a week the two of them took it in turns to train her, how to use her "technique", how to exorcise the "curses", the history of the jujutsu community, how and why to hide it... The list was long.
And so her life went on, school, training, social life... A few small uses of her powers to... Borrowing things with no intention of returning them, until she found him...
It all happened when she passed near an alley, the feeling of pain and misery was greater than usual, but this time it was different, the sensation was different, a little more... Human... Raquel was 11, had been training for four years and knew how to trust her instincts. She completely eliminated the sound of her footsteps as a precaution, her phone on direct dial with an experienced sorcerer and the cursed dagger awkwardly in her other hand (perhaps it was time for her to re-train herself to be ambidextrous) and then entered the alley.
Sitting at the end of the alley was a boy, he was short, probably younger than her, hugging his legs and trembling slightly. Raquel approached the boy, and even though she hadn't made a sound, the boy immediately looked directly at her.
Raquel immediately froze under the weight of the boy's eyes. His eyes were red, dark red, dark with fear, despair and distress, almost as if the boy wasn't there with her but constantly reliving some terrible memory that was keeping him in a constant state of panic.
That boy feels like a curse, but he also feels like a human.
Raquel sat down in front of him, put her knife away, turned on the flashlight on her phone, placed it between the two of them and watched, watched as the boy watched her, completely ignoring the calls she knew she was receiving and forcing herself to appear as calm and friendly as possible without seeming too much to handle to try to make the boy more comfortable.
Minutes, maybe almost an hour, later she started playing with her cursed energy control, she noticed that certain patterns seemed to calm him down more, the boy felt cursed energy, that's good, a way to help him without having to talk or touch him... The boy felt like a curse, but as he calmed down he felt more human.
He slowly unwound from himself and Raquel could finally notice more things about him, his eyes seemed to have cleared up, the red was brighter, like genuinely bright, (reflective eyes perhaps? ), by the light of her flashlight she could see that he had something like red stripes down his arms and red spots in his curly, fluffy hair, his expressions were kind of androgynous and little spots of the same shade of red as his arms circled his eyes, the boy was dirty, sand, dirt, parts of his black suit with red stripes were whitish and with little darker spots (his clothes were strange, like those of the protagonist of that little soap opera "Yo soy Franky" that she liked).
He never took his eyes off her, paying attention to every move she made, but now it seemed more like curiosity than panic, Raquel slowly stood up, picked up her phone and slowly held out her hand to him.
Raquel doesn't think her parents would mind if she came home with a little brother, right?
