Survival is Crucial

Anything

Wooden panels act as a roof, light shining through a thin crack, beating down on the wall beside him. A variety of clothes and pillows are stacked onto Tyche as he laid halfway through the pile, one arm poking out as his face looked up to the ceiling above him, sitting between two buildings, with a dull expression on his face. His hair spread out across the pillows like tendrils, showing his left eye, revealing a glass eye placed inside the socket as a replacement eye, a tiny scar sitting below his eyelid. He took a deep breath before covering himself in more items of clothing, blankets, and the like before muffled words came out of his mouth, his body completely covered by now. "I can finally rest." He quickly fell asleep under a pile, laying his head on a makeshift pillow, an actual pillow being squeezed as tightly as he could.

"Finally asleep, huh?" A voice filled his ears, it wasn't a voice from outside, he believed this, no, it was something inside of him. As he opened his eyes amidst the dream, he found himself inside his old room in Los Angeles, torn and forgotten, it was not how he had left it. It looked as if people were looking for him in his own home, but he had no idea how he would know what the state of the room would look like since he had not entered it since the start of it all. He blinked and found himself in a room he barely recognized. A baby's crib sat in the corner of the room, right next to a closet while Tyche found himself sitting upon a twin bed, barely able to fit him if he had laid upon it now. The lights in the room turned on one by one, a lamp atop a cabinet, and a light hanging on the ceiling.

A younger boy with long messy black hair and sapphire-colored eyes stood in the middle of this room before grabbing a chair and dragging it to the middle of the room before climbing onto it, sitting down. His legs hung from the chair, swinging them back and forth with a joyous expression on his face. Tyche raised an eyebrow, "Who are you?"

The kid looked at Tyche quizzically, "What do you mean, do you not remember your own face?" The kid paused for a second, "Well, I guess you wouldn't since you haven't been able to properly see your own face for a while now."

Tyche remained silent.

"It comes out as a blur, doesn't it? Your face?"

"You..."

"I'm you, obviously." He laughed to himself as if playing a game.

"You sure as hell aren't acting like me."

"What do you mean, I acted like this around my family and since we're the same person, we're family!"

Tyche made an uncomfortable expression, furrowing his brow and pressing his lips together. "So... because we're the same person, we're family?"

"Yep!"

Tyche scratched the back of his head, his eyelids hanging low as he looked up at the young boy, "Why are you here?"

The young boy smiled, "It's to sort out the thoughts in your head. You have to confirm who really killed our parents. Our family."

"Didn't that one guy confirm it?"

"He said that he was the 'cause', not the one who actually did it because you see, just like you, I wouldn't be satisfied to figure out that one guy involved was dead while the other one wasn't."

"Was he not the one who killed my family?"

"No... he wasn't. Not directly."

"Then who was?"

"Try to remember that day one more time. Live it again, the real way."

"What do you mean?"

Tyche blinked again. He found himself in the living room, his sister in his arms whilst watching the television with his dad, a massive grin coming across his face as his head leaned onto his own father's arm. Tyche's attention was brought to the kitchen, visible through a bar counter as his mother is adjusting and setting up what they were going to eat for dinner while his brother was out in the garage, working out. This isn't how he remembered it, this feels more like a lie, a dream rather than something that is very much real, a memory. Tyche couldn't control his body though, just watch as everything happened, not like how he thought it would, this isn't how he remembered it whatsoever.

He remembered sleeping in his room with his sister until hearing a commotion, in which he decided to hide under the bed with his sister, until her crying alerted the man who killed his family, and then attempted to kill him and his sister. He made it out, but his sister isn't.

"This memory is real, stop denying it and continue." The voice of the child from before commented as if pointing him back to what was real. A ring on the doorbell could be heard, his brother going to leave the garage to check on it per his mother's request, looking through the eyehole of the door. The brother distanced himself from the door before turning to his mother and saying something to her. He nodded, walked over to the father, who had stood up by now, and told him something as well. The father grabbed both Tyche and his sister, putting Tyche over his shoulder before spinning on his heel and running to Tyche's room. As this happened, a shotgun shot rung out throughout the house, blasting through the door and killing Tyche's brother. The mother screamed in horror as wood and viscera is thrown across the room.

The brother collapsed dead on the floor as the father refused to look back, turning the corner before Tyche's mother was quickly dispatched of as well. The father put both Tyche down, putting his daughter into his arms before pointing to the bed, telling Tyche to hide.

Tyche slid under the bed, sister in his arms, crying as loud as she could as the smell of gunpowder filled the air. A few gunshots were exchanged until another thud is heard, Tyche's father was dead. The man stopped at the bed before looking underneath. "Right there!" Everything stopped, adrenaline filling Tyche's whole body as fear had almost overtaken him. "This is when you saw the man for yourself." A shadow was cast onto the man's face.

"I can't even f*****g see it!" Tyche yelled.

"You can... just concentrate. You were able to see his face then and you should be able to see his face now, so concentrate! Even if his face is engulfed by darkness, you can still make out something!"

A silence overtook his dream, staring and staring. An older man with black hair and a disheveled beard, he looked as if he was homeless, a shotgun in his left hand, placed onto the floor as he was looking under it, this was all he could find.

"So...?"

"He's... I can't tell."

"It's not the same guy. It's someone else entirely."

"How do you know, we can't see his eye, plus, his eye could've been normal before all of this as well."

"No, the eye was a birth defect, you know this. There is a massive difference between, you know this!"

"How...?"

"You only have one functioning eye as well. You know that an eye like that couldn't have been possible. Its iris was pink, the color was pink while the rest of it was white, it also was a lazy eye too. It didn't look like glass, it looked like it was actually connected to his eyelids, you can see the pink, you could see the veins. If it wasn't a birth defect, then it would've looked clouded, you would see scarring, you know this Tyche."

"So..."

"Two people and this guy was the main culprit."

"What am I even supposed to do with this information!?"

"Revenge."