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"Bet you didn't know," says Ryouga, "I died once."
He's nine years old, in the alley-space behind the orphanage where the older kids sometimes trade cigarettes. There are still a few years between now and the disqualification incident that will spark the explosive bitterness in him that will earn him the nickname "Shark"; but there is already a wild, aggressive pride in him, something that carries itself above and apart with regal disdain. His supervisors will say he and his sister behave with an arrogance above their years, as though furious to find themselves in such a small and weak position as that of a child. "I died once," he says, moving forward, just in case the other kid didn't get the hint.
Said other kid is a couple years older than him and rather heavier. An unlit cigarette, a stubby attempt at rebellion, hangs between his fingers. “Yeah?” he sneers, but without as much bite to it as it would normally have - there is something in Ryouga’s gaze that makes it all rather serious.
“Yeah,” reaffirms Ryouga, his chin high and jutting, and takes another step forward. “You know how I ended up here, right? My parents, in the car crash? I died in that car crash too. I was dead, for five minutes. Then I came back, on my own, no defibrillators or nothing, just woke up in the hospital bed when they were about to send me off to the morgue. You can ask anyone at Heartland Hospital if you don’t believe me, they’ll tell you, I’m a legend there now. The kid who came back from the dead.”
The sun is framed behind him in such a way as to cast his face in shadow, and the sheer certainty in his voice - the stone-hard confidence in the truth of what he is telling - leaves little room for doubt in the other boy’s mind.
“And you know what else?” says Ryouga, and takes another step forward, and whatever intimidation was being tried on him before is now being returned double. “You know what else happened?”
“What else?” says the other boy, scornful, but with a trace of real fear beneath it.
“I went to hell,” says Ryouga, nearly growling it.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I went to hell,” says Ryouga, confident, arrogant, secure in his invulnerability, “and it was dark and red and there were crystals everywhere, and the ocean was made of acid, and I fell down and down and THEN - I came BACK. I went to hell and then made it right back.”
Again there is the ring of truth, of conviction, in his voice, that marks his words as no ordinary bluff. His senior pauses. “You really mean… hell?”
“Yep.”
He believes this; he really believes it, somewhere inside him when he bothers to think about it. There is not much other sense, in his mind, to be made of the crystalline-chaos world that lingered inexplicably in his and Rio’s dreams for months after the crash. Fragments of memories, wispy and disjointed - what other narrative was he supposed to construct from them?
“So you better not mess with me, got it,” says Ryouga, and he’s entering personal space territory, small and bristling, like a young king with street-boy toughness. “You don’t know what I could do to you, when I’ve been to hell and back. I’m invincible, and I won’t ever forgive anything you ever do to me, all right? I’ll come back for you like a -”
He’s said enough. The other boy throws the cigarette to the ground, grinds it beneath his heel as though it had ever been lit, and turns back towards the door. “All right, all right, enough.” The fear is showing through in his words, and Ryouga grins inside of him, although he doesn’t let it show. He’s in no more danger.
It used to trouble him, that he’d died, that he’d come back, that he’d, in his childlike conviction, gone to hell for a time; he used to pore over the remembrance of it in whispers with Rio late at night. Now it has faded into the back of his mind, and he only thinks of it to use it for intimidation; in a couple more years he will have forgotten about it entirely.