Caffeine and Magix

writing-prompt-s:

You were summoned to another world to be its Hero. You attained amazing abilities and powers. Traveled to distant, fantastic lands and exotic cultures. Met and fought alongside incredible allies to stop the unspeakable Evil. Lost friends along the way. But now you’ve returned to your own world.

He’s painfully aware that the sun is different here. Or, rather, was different there since he was technically there second and here before. There’s more yellow and red leaking through his closed eyelids here and there was…less of it there. He can’t describe it exactly but it was different.

His schedule is different too, but not really because it’s the same as it was Before. It just feels new and unnerving because he wakes up every day in the same bed instead of some random dirt patch on the road like he’d gotten used to. And every morning he eats across the table from a woman whose face he’s used to only seeing in his dreams. It lends a whole surreal aspect to his day that magic hadn’t even made him feel.

“Ready for school?” his mom asks. She’s painfully thin, skin pulled inwards around her wide cheekbones. She reminds him of the villagers in Pompet, the stage of the final battle, the day before he left. Hurt and hollowed and trying to find a way to keep breathing. To find a reason to get up in the morning and wash the blood from their hands.

She’s looking at him like she’s thinking he’s her reason.

Charles swallows his cereal painfully, trying to remember how he might have responded before the missing months tore a hole in his memory. “Yeah. Just need to get my homework.”

“You’ll meet me out front at 3:05?” 

“Mom,” Charles says, cereal sitting heavy in his stomach, “you have work today until 5.”

She stands, wooden chair screeching across the linoleum, and turns to busy herself at the sink. “3:15? You shouldn’t need any longer than that, the school isn’t that big.”

He stares hard at his bowl. “Do you think your boss will let you leave work early again?”

“I’m the parent,” she says in her hard voice. The hard voice is new, another gift from months of screaming at uniformed officers and howling his name into the woods that border their town. “You let me worry about that.”

It’d take more courage than he needed to face the Embalming King to ask another question at that moment. He feels the phantom press of a sword in his hand, can feel his muscles locking into place for a fight, but he doesn’t move a muscle. There’s nothing to fight here, not anything he can see anyway.

Some battles, he knows, aren’t his to fight.

His mom would either conquer the fear that he’d disappear from campus again, or she wouldn’t. He didn’t really have any say in that.

“Get your homework,” his mom says, coming around the table to drop a kiss on the top of his head. She lingers a little on the red streaking his dark brown hair, still not asking how they stay without her having seen him dye it, but doesn’t ask again. “I’ll meet you in the car.”

Charles waits until he hears the front door close before he lets his hands, resting on his lap, clench. His heart is beating too hard in his chest as he stares down into his cereal bowl, trying not to let the power overwhelm him as it had too often before.

I can’t use my power. I’m not there, he tells himself fiercely, breath coming in forcefully even inhales and exhales. And I never will be again.

The bowl shatters against the floor before he realizes that he’s standing, before he can tell his arms not to sweep the contents of the table away from him with full strength, before he can really decide whether he’s grateful or angry that it’s over.

All he knows now is that his mom is hurting (still hurting) because of him and this isn’t like when the Embalming King took Tansia. He can’t rescue his mom, he can’t solve this crisis, and everything he went through then– the months of training, the blood and tears, the humiliation, the betrayals– means nothing now.

Nothing.

The front door opens, the sound of his moms footsteps beating in his ears like war drums. She’s probably wondering if he’s run out the backdoor, disappearing again and not willing to tell her (still) where he’s going.

He takes a deep breath and waves his hands over the shards of bowl on the ground just a moment before she reenters the kitchen.

“Charles?” she asks, hands fluttering up to rest on the door frame. “I heard a sound, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he says and is thankful that his voice is even. “Yeah, just putting my dishes in the sink.”

His mom casts a dubious look at the whole, unshattered bowl sitting on the counter. “Oh. Well, come on, kiddo. You can’t afford to be late.”

Charles grabs his backpack and follows her out to the car without another word.