It should've been just another normal day, even if a shit one.
He hadn't been 'home' in a while now.
Summer at least makes for a perfectly fine time to sleep outdoors, drifting from place to place so as not to be too predictable and easy to find. When he was younger, his uncle was always finding him and bringing him home, but the older and more street-wise he got, the better he was also getting at hiding, slipping through streets and buildings and parks like a bona fide stray cat.
A troubled kid as they would call him, despite that his dad was a doctor and his uncle a cop, both well-respected in their careers and the community.
And then there was him, a delinquent, privileged punk that would rather be wandering the streets getting into trouble than following in the upstanding footsteps of his family or properly attending school to get an education, exasperating everyone that tried to correct him into something better.
A pulled up hoodie hid his unkempt but distinct ginger hair from view, even as stray rivulets of water escaped down his back, his head recently stuck under a garden spigot from some empty yard he'd trespassed onto while no one was around.
(Just because he hadn't gone home in a few days didn't mean he had to go around with dirty, unwashed hair looking like a bum.)
On his own little personal patrol, he came across a scene that boiled his blood.
He may be a street punk already collecting a small criminal record, despite his uncle's best efforts to keep dragging him off the street and get him reformed, but he still has a conscience. He doesn't pick on or target the weak.
He can't say the same for other people, who think bullying younger kids for sport makes them tough.
It's exactly that situation that has him flying at a group of boys a bit older and much larger than himself without putting any real thought to the fact that he himself is hardly any bigger than the kid the rest of them are bullying.
But then, he wasn't as young as that kid, he was just small for his age, and that'd never once stopped him before from getting into a brawl for much smaller reasons and from winning every single time.
Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the other frightened kid go skittering away the moment there was an opening to escape and Chuuya shouted "GO!" at them.
Despite his size, he knows he can handle these guys, outmatched 8-to-1 or otherwise. For all their bravado and chest-thumping, none of them are prepared for the absolute whirlwind of kicks and punches he delivers, his size more of an advantage for him than anyone thinks it'd be.
Yes, he's smaller, petite even, but he's quick, and agile, and he knows how to slip out of an attempted grapple before anyone can actually grab him and slam his slender limbs through even the smallest gaps in their defenses. They didn't stand a chance.
And then something hits him in the side of the head where he wasn't looking. He hears metal ring against his skull, reverberating, and he more distantly registers rather than feels as the opposite side of his head smacks into a wall of brick.
It only feels like a split second that everything goes... not even black. Like existence itself just blips out for a moment, before it all slowly comes swimming back.
Incomprehensible sounds fluctuate above him. He thinks they're voices, but they sound like an alien language being spoken underwater. Nondescript colors bloom behind the backs of his eyes, blurring and twisting like a psychedelic lava lamp struggling to form into shapes that make sense. A painful shot of electricity crackles up the nerves in his neck when his body is shoved by a rough weight against his stomach, and bile bubbles up the back of his throat with nausea threatening to throw up everything he's recently eaten.
A few sickeningly acidic breathes fill his lungs, watching hazy humanoid shapes above him start to take form, and somehow he just knows -- through too much lived experience -- that the shapes are not friendly.
Like some horror monster surging back to life, he leaps from his back to latch himself onto one leg with both arms, curling himself into a ball around it and kicking one leg of his own straight up.
The underside of his boot lands dead center between the person's thighs and Chuuya's head aches with the banshee screech that echoes all the way into the sky while they double over and everyone else around them starts shouting in alarm.
He's not even really sure when or how he stands up, or when he pounces like a mountain lion on another guy and takes them to the floor, nailing them repeatedly in the face with one fist that's red with blood. Whether its his own blood from cracked knuckles or theirs from a cracked face, he doesn't stop to ponder as he's grabbed from behind in a choke hold and dragged off, and in a show of inhuman flexibility, he grabs their forearm for leverage and ducks down, halfway to escape and halfway to kick them straight in the face with the toe of his boot.
Everything after that is a complete black-out, and he wakes up wheezing and panting and surrounded by unconscious, bloody bodies and a chain link fence digging into the back of his shoulders.
It's the only thing keeping him on his feet, halfway slouched towards the ground, and his fingers deftly grasp the wires behind him to force himself upright one sluggish adjustment of his footholds on the ground at a time.
Everything hurts and the world is still pitching and swaying like a ship at sea, but he utterly refuses to go down, even as blood drips from his nose to his shirt.
He's alone -- and then he's not, catching movement in his periphery and curling his lip back with a snarl, blindly swinging a fist at whoever's left that he didn't manage to beat down already.
