I won't be checking in. Try not to die in the first week.
P.S. That house already has an owner.
Ray read it again from the top. Then he read only the last line, four or five times, and looked up at the door.
The M was on the other side of that wood. He had stood in front of it an hour ago wondering what it stood for, and the whole time it had been somebody's name.
"You couldn't have led with that?" He asked the paper. It was very good paper, thick and cream-colored, and it had nothing else to tell him on either side.
He made himself think before he panicked, and he started with the floor. His own footprints were the only ones in the dust. The ash in the fireplace was packed flat, the apples had been in that bowl long enough to turn into whatever they were now, and the grass outside the door had grown to his knees. Whoever M was, M hadn't been home in years.
And the alternative was outside. He looked at the window, at the black trees past it, and remembered the ground shaking under his cheek.
'So it's a house with an owner who isn't here, or a forest with a thing that is.' Put like that, it wasn't a hard choice.
He was staying. He just wasn't going to be stupid about it.
He wedged the chair against the door, under the bar, for whatever that was worth. He got back on the bed with the sword on the wall side, where he could grab it. Then, since sleep was nowhere close, he practiced.
"Hi. I'm so sorry. I thought it was abandoned." That one sounded weak. "Hey! You must be M. Love the place." That one was too cheerful for a guy caught in somebody else's bed. He tried a third about paying for the carrots, and realized he had nothing to pay with except a dead phone and $212 in a bank that had been dust for a thousand years.
'I'll do the dishes. There's one dish. I can commit to that.'
The rest of the note caught up with him while he lay there. Somebody had picked him up and set him down here like a piece on a board, because he "looked bored". He had been tired. There was a difference, and he would've liked to explain it in person.
But that same somebody had given him a power. A fun one, to go with thunder.
Ray held his hand up in the moonlight and snapped his fingers, and nothing happened. He pointed at the ceiling and thought about lightning as hard as he could, and nothing happened then either. He was grinning anyway, and he fell asleep halfway through a list of things to try in the morning.
...
He slept in pieces that night. Every creak of the roof was M coming home, and twice he sat up with the sword in both hands to threaten a branch scraping the window. By the time the sun came through it, he had rehearsed the apology so often he could have given it in his sleep, and probably had.
Breakfast was four carrots and an apple on the porch. He wrapped his heels in two strips torn off the hem of his T-shirt, got his sneakers back on, and carried the note and the sword out into the clearing.
"Okay. Fun power, thunder-related. Let's go." He cracked his neck.
He started with the obvious. He pointed two fingers at a tree and said "bang". He clapped. He raised both hands to the sky and yelled "Shazam!" loud enough to send birds out of the woods, and the sky stayed blue and empty.
After that he went through everyone he could think of. He puffed his cheeks like Pikachu until he saw spots. He held the sword over his head like Thor's hammer and demanded to be found worthy.
He grabbed his own wrist, screamed "Chidori!" and ran palm first at the apple tree, which cost him some skin. He did Killua's fingers, he did a very bad Storm, and he flicked a slice of carrot off his thumb like a railgun and watched it land two feet away.
Nothing sparked. His hair didn't even stand up. Between attempts he kept checking the tree line, in case M picked this morning to come home and find a stranger yelling at the sky in the yard.
"One more." He was out of breath and out of characters. He drew the fake sword out of its scabbard with a squeak, held it low at his hip, bent his knees a little, and didn't bother with the rest. "Thunder Breathing, First Form, whatever."
The blade wobbled in the morning air.
"Yeah, figured. That one's a sword style anyway. You need an old man to beat you up for ten years first." He slid the sword back in and looked down at the note lying in the grass.
"Fun power, my ass. You're a liar, and your handwriting is pretentious." He folded it into his pocket next to the dead phone.
By midday the carrots had worn off. The garden was good for a few more days at most, and he couldn't cook half of what grew in it. There had to be something else in these woods, berries or fish or anything that didn't need a stove.
He pushed the scabbard through his belt on the left side, the way he had seen it worn, and followed the stream away from the cabin. He looked back twice to make sure nobody had come home.
The woods were quiet. He found mushrooms he wasn't dumb enough to touch, and a bush of blue berries; he ate one and decided to wait and see what it did to him. He was crouched by the water, trying to work out how a person caught a fish with his hands, when the birds stopped.
He noticed it late. When he raised his head, something was standing on the other bank.
It looked like a wolf built by someone who had only had wolves described to him. It was too long in the body, its shoulders came up as high as Ray's chest, and its jaw hung open further back than a jaw should go. It made no sound at all. It looked at him the way he had looked at the carrots.
Ray stood up slowly. The thing stepped into the stream.
He ran.
He ran with the scabbard banging against his leg and branches whipping his arms, away from the water and away from the cabin, in whatever direction had the fewest trees in it. Behind him came four feet hitting the ground in an easy rhythm. It didn't need to hurry.
He went over a fallen log on his stomach and lost time getting up, and he heard the thing clear the same log in one bound. His heels tore open inside the wraps, and he felt it as something happening far away.
The trees ended at a wall.
It was a face of bare grey rock, twice his height, running left and right as far as he could see, with a clearing of flat grass in front of it. He hit it with both hands, turned around, and put his back against the stone.
The wolf-thing came out of the trees at a walk. It stopped about thirty feet away, lowered its head, and started to circle in.
Ray couldn't breathe. He was pulling air in short, useless gulps; his hand had gone to the handle of the sword without asking him. It was a blunt piece of stainless steel from a gift shop, and it was all he had.
There was nothing in his head. Two days of jokes, and now it was empty except for one thing, playing on a screen with 4% battery.
A kid crouching low, a hand on the hilt, and the screen going black in the middle of it.
He had watched that clip forty times in the break room and twenty more by the exit sign, and his body knew where it went better than he did. His left foot slid back. His knees bent until his thighs burned. His left hand closed around the mouth of the scabbard, and his right hovered over the handle.
And the kid in the clip always did one more thing before he moved. He breathed.
Ray forced the gulping to stop. He pulled the air in through his teeth, slowly, one long breath that went past his chest and kept going until it felt like it had reached his feet. It hissed on the way in. Heat came with it, under the skin, running from his lungs down into his legs.
The wolf-thing jumped.
"Thunder Breathing, First Form." It came out on the breath, hardly a voice at all. "Thunderclap and Flash."
The world went white.
There was a crack like the sky breaking right over his head. Ray felt the ground leave and felt his arm move, and for an instant he saw the clearing from the middle of it, with yellow light crawling over the grass in every direction.
Then a tree hit him in the face.
He slid down the trunk and lay at the bottom of it with his ears ringing and bark in his mouth. The air smelled like a burnt wire. Both legs were buzzing from the hips down, as if they had fallen asleep at the same time.
'...I'm alive. Am I alive?' He spat out the bark and rolled over.
He was on the far side of the clearing. The rock wall stood a good forty feet behind him, and a black line was scorched into the grass from where he had been standing to where he was lying, straight as a ruler. The wolf-thing lay across that line on its side. Smoke rose off it, and it didn't get up.
His hair was standing straight out from his head; he could feel it every time the wind moved. Small sparks were still jumping between the bracelets on his wrist, and he watched them until they died out.
Ray looked at his right hand. He was still holding the handle. About an inch of blade stuck out of it, snapped off clean, and the rest of the sword was scattered along the black line in pieces no bigger than a coin.
"...Display only. Not for combat." He started laughing, high and cracked, and it would not stop. "They did warn me."
It took a while for the laughing to run down. When it did, he lay on his back with the handle on his chest and put it together.
He had done the same pose that morning, with the same words. But he had drawn the blade first, and he hadn't breathed. This time the sword was sheathed and the air had gone all the way down, and lightning had come out of a forty-dollar toy.
'In the anime nobody gets it for free. Years on a mountain, getting beat up by an old man. Even the crybaby put in the time.'
So this could be trained. Right now his legs felt like they belonged to someone else, he had stopped by hitting a tree, and he couldn't have aimed that if his life depended on it, which it had. But it was his.
"A thunder power. I got knockoff Zenitsu." He held the broken handle up against the sky. "With a knockoff sword. That tracks."
"Dude."
Ray froze.
The voice came from behind him, at the tree line. It was high and young, and it sounded completely delighted.
"Do that again!"