Some places are too loud to hear your own silence.
Bangkok — it moved like a fever dream. Neon signs blinked like eyes that never slept. The streets were a slow parade of tuk-tuks, cigarette smoke, catcalls, fruit stalls, steam, and the echo of old sins that refused to die quietly. The city didn’t hide your pain; it danced with it.
That’s where I met him again.
But the story won’t admit that yet.
To me, he was a stranger. A boy named Akiro. Lean, cool, unfazed — the kind of man you couldn’t quite place in the chaos. He didn’t speak much at first. Didn’t need to. His silence came dressed in charisma. Not the cheap, flirty kind. But the kind that makes you think of an unsharpened knife. Beautiful. Deadly. Quiet.
He worked just two stalls across from mine — helping an old vendor sell fried bananas. Always had a bandana around his neck, a cigarette tucked behind his ear he never lit, and a smirk that said he knew something you didn’t.
I didn’t trust him.
I didn’t trust anyone.
Still, every day he waved. Same smile. Same tone.
“Yo, quiet boy. You gonna sell sadness or spices today?”
I looked at him, and sometimes I almost smiled. Almost. But trust doesn’t grow in burnt soil. And mine was ash.
I kept to myself. I worked at my stall—cut fruits and iced tea mostly. The tourists liked my quiet service. I wore a hat low and never looked people in the eye. No one recognized me. Not as Riko. Not as anyone. Just Rin. That’s what I’d become.
A shadow.
Akiro didn’t force himself into my life. He just lingered. Quietly. With jokes, sarcasm, sometimes whistling songs I couldn’t recognize but felt like lullabies for broken boys.
But while Bangkok moved like nothing had happened, somewhere far away, the past finally opened its eyes.
---
Back in my hometown, the sun was unforgiving that day. My father, Namis, had barely slept. The guilt, the dread, the weight of my disappearance had turned his bones hollow. He hadn’t heard from me in weeks. His phone had no messages. My room had no letters. Only silence. And so he went to the place I had last been seen — the all-boys hostel.
No warning. Just stormed in like a man with nothing left to lose.
The room…
My room…
Our room…
It was no longer a room.
It was a story of a war.
Posters were torn. Scratch marks clawed the walls. Paint peeled in ugly patterns that almost looked like someone screaming. There were drawings on the desk — childlike, violent. One was of a boy falling off a rooftop. Another of a faceless crowd pointing.
My father fell to his knees. Something in his chest cracked.
He didn’t cry. He just took out his phone and clicked pictures. One by one. As if evidence could fix absence. He knocked on the door of the warden. Then the principal. Then the staff. No one had answers. No one wanted to talk. Their smiles were too rehearsed.
At the police station, he was called “emotional.” He was told my case lacked evidence. The school had "reputation." The officers had "orders." The money had already spoken.
He went home. But he didn’t know.
They were following.
Two men in fake uniforms. One with a limp. The other with a tattoo of a cobra on his neck.(How do I know?) Sent by Yaitamba’s people. The school didn't want a scandal. A parent asking too many questions was bad for donations. Truth was never convenient.
That night, they broke into my house. No warning. No mercy. They tied his hands. Beat his legs until the bones cracked like branches under boots. He begged, and they laughed.
And then — they silenced him forever.
One held his jaw open while the other took a rusted kitchen blade.
They cut out his tongue.
The newspaper the next day called it a “violent robbery gone wrong.” That’s all they said. Just another tragedy in a city that stopped listening.
---
In Bangkok, I had just finished selling my last bowl of iced papaya.
I sat on the wooden crate near my stall, biting into a mango, when someone passed me their phone. A local paper. Page three.
“Thai professor, Namis, attacked in suspected burglary.”
My father’s face. Bloodied. Broken. Mute.
I froze.
The fruit fell to the ground.
And with it, my breath.
The world around me didn’t notice. Tuk-tuks still honked. Tourists still bargained. Akiro was laughing with the banana vendor across the road.
But inside me, something snapped.
I wanted to run to my father. But how? What if he didn’t want to see me? I was the son who left. The son who kissed another boy. The son who was too afraid to stay and too ashamed to come back.
But this? This wasn’t guilt anymore.
It was rage.
Hot. Thick. Rising in my throat like bile.
I screamed. Not loudly. But the kind of scream that folds inside your ribs and makes your spine curl. My face twisted. I smashed the papaya bowl. I punched the wooden crate until my knuckles bled. I threw everything I had on the street.
People stared.
Akiro turned around. His expression froze. He started walking towards me.
But I pushed everyone away.
I didn't want comfort.
Not anymore.
That night, I went home and ripped the bedsheet. I couldn’t breathe. I scratched my own chest. I wanted the pain to make sense. I wanted to break something. Anything.
And then I stood in front of the mirror.
For the first time in months, I said my own name.
“Riko.”
My voice trembled.
“I’m Riko.”
My past wasn’t gone. It had just changed cities.
They had taken my peace. They had broken my father. They had silenced him.
But I… I still had my voice.
---
Akiro stood against the edge, watching Rin through the cracks of the rusted grill. The boy hadn’t moved in hours—just sat there in the market corner, knees to chest, fingers clenched so tightly they looked like white glass. He hadn’t even cried. That’s what startled Akiro most. The absence of sound. As if sorrow had suffocated even the right to weep.
The broadcast still played in Akiro’s mind—“A middle-aged man, once protesting against alleged abuse in a prestigious boys' hostel, was found unconscious in a ditch today. His tongue had been removed.”
Riko’s father.
Akiro exhaled, and the smoke didn’t calm him. He had seen boys like Riko before—quiet, haunted, braver than they should ever have to be. But this… this wasn’t just pain. It was devastation.
And the worst part?
He’d been a shadow during it all.
He could’ve ended Riko in Bangkok the day they met. One swift move. He knew the art of striking without regret. Yaitamba had given the order with a half-smile: “He’s already broken. Just erase the rest.”
But he didn’t.
Because something in Riko’s silence wasn’t weakness. It was resistance. The kind that doesn’t ask to be saved but dares you to look away.
Akiro had been loyal once. Yaitamba found him when he was just a cocky teen with bloodied knuckles and nothing to lose. Gave him direction, power, a name that scared people. He owed the man his rise. That kind of loyalty doesn’t break easily.
But now, looking at Riko—at Rin—it wasn’t loyalty that echoed in Akiro’s bones.
It was conflict.
He didn't pity Riko. That would be insulting. No, he respected the way he carried the weight, even when it crushed his spine. But something had snapped in Riko after the news about his father. Akiro had seen it in his eyes—the way light shattered, leaving only ash behind.
Akiro didn’t want to be the flame that burned him further.
Not anymore.
> “If I don’t help him now… he’ll turn into something worse than what broke him,” Akiro murmured to the night, more to himself than anyone.
He didn’t know when it happened. When Rin stopped being a name on a list and became someone he didn’t want to see fall. Maybe it was in the way Riko pretended to smile while handing change at the stall. Or how he never asked for comfort, only space.
The truth still hung between them like a dagger behind velvet—Akiro hadn’t revealed who he really was, or why he found Riko. And one day, that truth would be unforgivable.
But for now?
He wouldn’t be Yaitamba’s weapon.
He would be Riko’s shield.
Even if it meant lying again.
Even if it meant losing him forever when the truth finally came.
---
The next morning, Bangkok didn’t stop. The river still moved. The market still laughed.
But I didn’t sell fruit that day.
I packed my things.
My stall. My name. My lies.
And in their place, I packed a photograph.
My father. My real one. Before the silence.
The next chapter wouldn’t be about survival.
It would be about revenge.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
But it did.
The dark I never wanted to meet again…
Had already found me.
“He will rise not because he was saved,
but because there’s nothing left to break.”
~shivirstoriesep6
(THE DISCOVERY OF THE LIGHT)
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