Anomaly

Chapter 2 -The Accidents

Before the rooftop. Before the chase. Before the word anomaly had been carved into his memory.

There had been signs.

He hadn’t understood them then. Nobody had. But looking back, they stood out like flares in the dark.

The first came when he was eight. A summer afternoon, all sun and heat and freedom. He had been racing his bicycle down the street, too fast, too reckless, the wind stinging his eyes. Gravel scattered beneath the wheels as he lost control. He remembered the sickening lift, the crash, the tangle of handlebars slamming into his ribs.

The world spun. Asphalt tore at his arms and legs. He felt the impact — the kind of bone-deep thud that promised hospital visits and casts.

But when he opened his eyes, he was already sitting up. His breath came fast and shallow, but the pain was fading too quickly. His mother, running out from the porch, had gasped at the sight of him, rushing forward with trembling hands.

“Oh my God, you’re bleeding—”

Only he wasn’t.

Scrapes that had streaked his arms were already closing. Raw red patches turned pink, then pale. By the time she dragged him inside for antiseptic, there was nothing to clean. Just skin smooth as though the fall had never happened.

She pressed ice to him anyway, her face pale, her lips pressed tight. Later he heard her whispering to his father in the kitchen, her voice unsteady. It’s not natural. He should’ve been hurt.

The second accident was worse.

He was ten when the fire happened. A pan of oil left too long, flames l*****g the cupboards, smoke curling black against the ceiling. His father had shouted, grabbing for a towel, but instinct made him lunge first.

The oil splashed across his arm. He’d screamed — a high, raw sound of certainty that his flesh was gone. The stench of burning should have followed.

Instead, when his father yanked him to the sink and shoved his arm under the cold water, there was nothing. Not even redness. The water ran clear, no skin sloughing, no blister rising.

His father froze, staring at the unmarked skin as if it had betrayed him. “You should be—” He stopped himself, gripping his son’s shoulders too tightly. “Don’t touch the stove again.”

It sounded like a warning, but the fear in his eyes said something else. Something he didn’t want to admit.

The third accident was the one he never told anyone about.

Fourteen, walking home with music in his ears. The crosswalk light was red, but he’d stepped out anyway, lost in a song. The screech of tires jolted him back, headlights flaring as a car swerved too late.

He should have been broken. He should have been scattered across the pavement.

But in that frozen instant, something inside him shifted. His body felt… loose, blurred, as if every part of him had become less solid, less fixed. The bumper struck him — yet it was like being brushed aside, weightless, the force diffused. He rolled across the asphalt, dazed, his heart hammering like it wanted to break free.

When he scrambled up, his knees scraped, but there was no blood. No fracture. No agony that matched what had just happened.

The driver had leapt out, shouting, panicked, demanding to call an ambulance. But he had shaken his head, forced a smile, insisted he was fine. Anything to escape the questions, the disbelief.

Because he wasn’t sure how to explain it himself. He only knew that, for a breathless heartbeat, he hadn’t felt human.

He told himself they were miracles. Luck. A body that healed well.

But the whispers at home told another story. His mother always watching him too long, his father growing quieter with each doctor’s appointment. Files thick with inconclusive test results, bloodwork that “didn’t match expectations,” X-rays that showed nothing broken when something should have been.

Teachers called him resilient. Doctors called him unusual. His parents called him special, but in the brittle way that made the word sound like a warning.

And he had believed them, or tried to. Tried to swallow the unease, tried to be normal, tried to stop wondering why he didn’t break the way other kids did.

But the memories stayed.

And when the man on the rooftop called him an anomaly, every accident came flooding back with the clarity of a blade.

They hadn’t been coincidences. They hadn’t been miracles.

They had been glimpses. Hints of something inside him, waiting for the day it would no longer hide.

But there was another memory. One he tried harder than the others to bury.

He was fifteen, in the chemistry lab at school. Rows of burners, glass beakers filled with colored liquids, the hiss of gas valves and the chatter of bored classmates. He had been careless — maybe too restless, maybe too curious. A flask tipped, spilling its contents into the flame.

The explosion was small but violent. A burst of fire leapt across the table, glass shattering, liquid spraying in arcs of orange light. Students screamed and ducked. The teacher lunged for the extinguisher, voice breaking as he shouted for everyone to get down.

But he had been closest. He should have been burned, shredded, scarred.

Instead, when the smoke cleared, he was standing. Shards of glass littered his clothes, but none had pierced skin. His hair was singed at the ends, but his face, his arms, his chest — untouched.

The girl at the next bench wasn’t as lucky. Her hand had blistered instantly, and she wept while the teacher wrapped it in gauze. Everyone had turned to him, wide-eyed, asking if he was hurt. He shook his head. He forced a laugh. He said he’d ducked in time.

But that wasn’t true. He remembered the heat. He remembered the fire curling over him like a living thing. He remembered it passing through him instead of burning him.

That night, he lay awake staring at the ceiling, listening to the hum of the streetlamps outside. His hands clenched at the sheets, waiting for the delayed sting of burns to surface. For the pain that never came.

It was the first time he thought: maybe something is wrong with me.

His parents never learned about that accident. He told them it was routine lab safety practice, nothing more. But the lie burned heavier than any scar might have.

Because deep down, he knew.

All those times he should have been hurt. All those times his body refused to break. They weren’t flukes. They weren’t miracles.

They were warnings.

And if accidents could no longer touch him, then what would?

He never spoke of the lab accident again. Not to his friends, not to his parents, not even to himself when the memory clawed at him in the dark.

But silence didn’t mean it was forgotten.

Sometimes he would catch his parents whispering late at night, their voices low but sharp, their words drifting through the thin walls. His name would surface, followed by fragments that never made sense: “tests,” “not normal,” “what if someone finds out.” Once, he had heard his mother choke back a sob, his father answering in a tone too flat to be comforting.

He had lain awake, staring at the ceiling, hating the way the house felt less like a home and more like a waiting room. As though they were expecting something — something they couldn’t stop.

Doctors had come and gone. Blood had been drawn so often he had grown numb to needles. Examinations, consultations, whispers in hallways where he wasn’t supposed to hear. Each time, the results were the same: inconclusive. Abnormal. Anomaly.

That word again. It had followed him like a shadow long before the man on the rooftop spoke it aloud.

He told himself it didn’t matter. He forced himself to forget, to bury the memories of crashes and burns and collisions that never left scars. He learned to play normal, to answer questions with a smile, to laugh when classmates teased him about being “indestructible.”

But deep inside, he knew the truth.

The accidents had not been accidents. They were glimpses — warnings that something inside him was not like everyone else. That something was waiting for the right moment to break free.

And now that moment had come.

The rooftop, the man in the coat, the fall into open air. All of it was just the continuation of a story that had started long before he realized.

A story that would no longer let him look away.