You can remember every past life you’ve lived. From the first few memories to the very end.
Seems cool right? It really isn’t though.
While you do carry wisdom far beyond your years, you mix up people’s names with their lookalikes’ from said past lives, a lot.
Hatta stares ahead, eyes unfocused, his lips plastered in a signature fake smile.
Around him, he vaguely registered the merry chatter between his peers. Their languid conversations, chuckles and guffaws in between drinking and snacking. It’s supposed to feel cozy and warm. The feeling of home with people he knew cared about him.
He is in the centre, flagged by two friends on both side. All so nice and kind, including him in their group. While he offers little to heightened the atmosphere, no one seems to mind his indifference, all too used with distant mysterious Hatta.
He lifts his head subconsciously, and his eyes sees straight ahead, a looming shadow that is so, so familiar.
Telah sampai khilaf sesalku
He pressed both hands against the bathroom wall, the droplets of water from the steady shower cascaded on top of his head. His chest constricts and even though there’s no other noise aside from the soft, gentle applause of water on stone, Hatta feels the ringing.
“ —ri! Berapa lama lagi kau nak lari, sial?!”
—-------------------------------------------------------------
The chill of early northeast monsoon wrapped its fingers around Hatta, its claws poised to sink into his skin. He walked the streets of Kuala Lumpur on brittle footsteps, shaken by the confrontation he’d just had with Yusof.
When Hatta had first opened his eyes a few years ago in the cramped hovel he called home, it had felt like someone had taken a drill to his skull and stirred his brain around like a grotesque cartoon gag. The pain had been blinding. Confusing. Terrifying.
He remembered stumbling out of bed too quickly, legs giving out beneath him before he crashed face-first onto the cement floor
The room glared back at him in loud, unnatural colors that didn’t belong to him. Pale pink walls. Faded floral curtains. Posters of boy bands and bubblegum pop singers peeling at the corners.
Too soft.Too… effeminate.
Did his mother do this? But, why? She was barely ever home, taking the role of breadwinner while his father was transitioning from different job scopes.
Did Naim do this? To spite him? But they shared a room, was Naim really willing to resort to ridiculous pranks just to get him back? It’s gonna be an eyesore having to see them everyda–.
“Hatta! Bangun cepat! Kau tido mampos ke, ngek?!” A loud shrilly voice that was definitely not Naim called out.
Before him, stood a spunky older but not that old lady? girl? –that he definitely didn’t know.
“Mana Naim?” Fak–Hatta asked.
Nama aku Hatta, he’d told her, repeatedly, because she kept asking what was wrong with him. It’d been the only thing he could have told her, in addition to Aku tahu aku Hatta tapi at the same time aku rasa aku Fakhri. Aku ingat Naim, aku ingat papa, mama. Aku nak balik.
The interrogation had stopped when the pain suddenly spiked again.
Hatta had folded into himself with a strangled noise, fingers burying into his hair as though he could physically hold his skull together. The throbbing in his head became unbearable—hot and sharp and wrong. Surprised by his sudden display of painful discomfort, the teenager, Aisya sent him to his own room, thinking he was sampuk from some sort of ghost or something.
Because from the moment the headaches began—and throughout the feverish haze that followed—Hatta was assaulted by fragments of memories that made no sense on their own.
At first they came like disconnected flashes.
Gum. In his hair. A woman–his mother–mama –A judge. Court. He’s still a kid, but both him and Naim were there, and their parents were arguing–A big house. No papa. He has to live here now, there are new clothes, new toys, new father–But he doesn't stay, he leaves, but he fights first with Naim. He punches him and there’s blood, and over and over he hurts Naim.
And his brother leaves him.
He had a brother. But now he has a sister, a much older sister who acts more like a mother than his own.
He was Hatta not Fakhri, he’d learned, the knowledge forced, roughly, into his brain with each wave of pain. Later, he would come to realize these incomplete snippets of memories a few lifetimes ago.
—----------------------------
Having a sister was both ridiculously underwhelming and humbling at the same time.
For one, Fak– Hatta didn’t really have any good experience with females, plural.
His– Fakhri’s mama didn’t count. He shouldn’t even know who his mama is, let alone who Fakhri is.
For all Hatta knows, all those memories could probably be a sign of some fucked up mental illness he got from the intense silat training that was deep core within the older spiritual teachings. A bunian probably got attached to him and wanted to fuck his life over–but hey, maybe that was his phycosis speaking.
Hatta was smart enough to know that he needed to keep his delirious delusions on past lives or alternate universes under wraps lest his sister actually outs him to their guardian and be shipped to tanjung rambutan in the next hour. Unfortunately, though, he wasn’t as quickwitted enough to mask his paranoia.
“Kau kenapa, dik?” AIsya grasp Hatta’s hand, looking perturbed but the leaking concern was unmistakable.
But he did come close to it.
“Ayah cik push kau teruk sangat ke time silat tadi?” the teenager groused out again, her annoyance now directed towards their father figure. “Ke ade budak training lain yang buat kau.”
For a second, Hatta was amused. One would assumed, having a sister meant that he’d have this overbearing, soft maternal like care, but of course his sister was nothing of the sort. In fact, Aisya might be even more rough around the edges than Naim ever could be.
Aisya was six years older than him, and for all that Hatta mistrust her—his head refusing to accept the lost of his brother– Hatta was tired, as much as a nine year old with a possible split personality complex could ever be.
He was tired of the mounting fear every time he closed his eyes and imagined himself in different planes of existence. A face that lurks beneath his skin like a ghoul waiting on prey to devour, a face that forced him to lie and hurt and take from the people around him.
A monster that destroys everything like a black hole sucking away every inch of reality.
“Eh kau hidup pon bawak sial he laa kat semua orang!”
His sister panics, truly worried about him and there’s little that Hatta could do but melt in her embrace, and it feels wrong because Aisya is too tall, too soft yet too cold in contrast to comfort that Naim gives him whenever he slips into his bed all the times their parents’ scream penetrate the thin walls of their shared bedroom.
Aisya and Naim were as different as fire and water.
But Hatta clings to her regardless, refusing to make the same mistake Fakhri did.
The ringing doesn’t stop.
Hatta has always felt a strange sort of giddiness whenever he was chosen for a fight—an ugly excitement curling warm beneath his ribs ever since he’d first been enrolled into silat by proxy of his guardian. In battle, the only thing occupying his mind is the threat of getting his face bashed in, thus allowing him to fully immerse himself in the motions.
Because there were far too many things in his life that refused to make sense; The haze swallowing his childhood memories, the strange grief he carried for a brother who had never existed, the uncomfortable distance he felt toward a sister he still wasn’t entirely sure shared his blood.
Everything in his head felt fractured somehow, blurred between reality and something dreamlike. Sometimes Hatta wondered if he had simply been born wrong, with pieces of someone else lodged inside him where they shouldn’t be.
But fighting is the only thing that wasn’t as confusing.
In battle, the only thing occupying his mind was the immediate threat of getting his face bashed in. Every instinct narrowed sharply toward survival, allowing him to sink completely into movement and momentum until there was no room left for confusion.
His guardian used to bring him to training sessions at the very edge of the village, where an old wooden rumah kampung stood half-forgotten among overgrown lalang and leaning coconut trees. The house looked abandoned from the outside—its stilts weathered gray with age, portions of the walls warped from years of rain and heat—but every evening, the place came alive with the sound of bare feet against polished wood.
The floorboards always groaned beneath shifting weight.
Crickets screamed from the dark fields surrounding the house while yellow bulbs flickered weakly against the night. The scent of sweat, medicated oil, and damp earth lingered thick in the air.
Hatta remembered standing there for the first time as a child, small and wary, watching older boys move across the wooden floor like flowing water.
Silat had not looked like fighting to him back then.
Every movement curved seamlessly into the next—soft where it needed to soften, violent where it needed to break. Even the older practitioners moved with an almost eerie grace, their hands slicing through the air in controlled arcs while their feet glided soundlessly against the timber floor.
Hatta understood it immediately.
The motions settled naturally into his bones like they had always belonged there. While other students stumbled through forms and lost balance during drills, Hatta absorbed techniques with frightening ease. His body responded before his thoughts could catch up, adapting instinctively to every shift in posture and pressure.
Or maybe it was like coming back home. (where was his home?)
For once in his life, the noise in his head quieted.
Silat demanded complete awareness of the body—the angle of a shoulder, the placement of a heel, the tension hidden beneath an opponent’s stance. There was no space left for fractured memories when every nerve was focused on movement.
The fluidity and repetition soothed him. Heck, even the pain soothed him.
“Kau hancurkan semua yang kau sentuh!”
Because bruises were easier to understand than grief. Exhaustion was easier to bear than confusion.
“Sakit kat dalam tu memang untuk orang yang berani je la boleh tahan.”
Hatta had been content living his life, for the sake of learning silat and how to love his sister.
His contentment lasted three months until one day he woke up screaming from visions of blood smearing his hands and fists and a shadowy figure with dark hair, faceless wearing a school uniform and a partially seen nametag with the words ‘Abdul’.
That was when his obsession first began.
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