The ride in the truck was quiet for Ren-Shai as he tuned out of the conversation his parents were having. Mary seemed to be deeply relieved when Thomas had explained what the doctor had said. She hadn't lost her son. Tyler - or Ren-Shai as he called himself had ended up with something more than their poor family could have provided. A future. Becoming a potential genius meant he'd be able to succeed in school and maybe even have a scholarship to college. To have all that potential in just her five year old son gave her not only relief, but hope. When she couldn't bear it anymore, she turned in her seat and hugged Ren-Shai tightly.

  "This isn't logical!" Ren-Shai exclaimed, flailing as his mother held him and some of her long, blonde hair got into his mouth as he spoke. A new sensation - surprise. After a moment, he stopped flailing and closed his eyes. Obviously, she was showing affection for her offspring. She expected it back. What felt like an eternity to him was seconds to her. Ren-Shai awkwardly returned the gesture to not let her feel the supposedly same hurt Thomas had in the doctor's office.

  "What the fu-" Thomas began as someone ran the red light, coming toward them. For that one moment, time froze. The world itself stood still, all except Ren-Shai.

  "One minute," Ren-Shai said out loud, not that anyone could hear him, as he opened the door to the truck and unbuckled his seat belt. He expended one of his four remaining minutes. Three left. Ren-Shai walked over to the human's car who was about to T-bone itself directly into Sasha's seat. "You three are lucky that you have to raise me," Ren-Shai commented to nobody. Ren-Shai bent down, pulling off the air cap to the man's front-right tire, pressing the center button to let the air out as he chose to let time flow there. With the tire near-flat, Ren-Shai touched the car. "You are interrupting my experience of being human. Begone," he said, sending the car back in time one minute in its crippled state. Two minutes left. Doing such a thing took even more time.

  Ren-Shai froze time for one more minute as he strode back to his family's car, seated himself, and buckled in. As he walked, he noticed something. A black-haired, pale-skinned man standing at the corner of the walk-light turned his head, following the boy with his eyes. "One of the lessers. Of course they'd be around," Ren-Shai said to himself. He snapped his fingers and time went back to its flow, the man vanishing as it did.

  "CK!" Thomas shouted, blinking as he saw no car. The sound of squealing tires happened behind him as what he thought was the offending car veered violently to the right and into the front of a small minivan. Thomas pulled over and stopped. As did most of the traffic.

  "The trouble for us has been solved. Why are we stopping?" Ren-Shai asked.

  "To make sure that family's okay!" Thomas exclaimed, stunned that Tyler could care so little. Thomas climbed out of his truck and ran toward the van. Ren-Shai, curious of the development, climbed out, avoiding the reach of his overprotective mother as he followed after his father. Thomas barely noticed his son walking onto the site and the sight of such a gruesome scene.

  A mangled man and woman didn't even have time to realize they had died. The whiplash to their spines had killed them. Only Ren-Shai was aware of this - out of everyone in the small crowd. He was Fate itself. Ren-Shai had seen such things over and over. While everyone screamed in horror, the sound of a girl screaming behind the two mangled bodies caught his notice. To the crowd, they watched a five year old boy crawl over the bloodied body in the front seat - Thomas quickly trying to grab him, but failing.

  "Tyler! What are you doing?!" Thomas asked, only to be ignored as Ren-Shai pivoted his body through the mangled wreckage.

  "You, girl," Ren-Shai said, fitting himself into a neat, small spot in the crunched mini-van. "If you die, my body's father will be hurting again. I do not want to risk him dying before this body grows old," he said to the girl who was screaming.

  "H-Help!" she cried out, looking at her mangled leg and at her right arm. She appeared no older than he was.

  "You're meant to die here today," Ren-Shai told her as he heard the sounds of people working together to try and open the crushed doors and get to him. "Those wounds are going to kill you," he commented as if he were talking about the weather.

  "Please… please! It hurts!" the little girl cried. "Please make it stop!"

  "As I said, my body's father will be hurt if you are found dead. I can help you, but that leg will never heal… your arm will, however. If you are fine with this life as a cripple, I will change your fate," Ren-Shai told her.

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  "Please! Help!" she begged, not understanding what he was saying in the slightest. She was only five years old.

  "As you beg. Be honored. You are the first I have ever spared their fate out of concern for another," he said, reaching out. He placed his hand and gripped her mangled leg. While he should have only had the strength of a five year old, he had the will of a much greater being. Will was a funny thing. It allowed someone to overcome their limits, push on when they were injured, and… most importantly… override their brain's protections.

  The girl screamed in absolute agony as she passed out from the pain of a five year old boy who was three times stronger than he should have been. Ren-Shai felt his bones lightly cracking under his skin, his muscles ripping, and his ligaments tearing slightly free from his bones as he made each grip and shift. To the onlookers - it looked like Tyler was torturing the poor girl. The frantic attempts to get to him intensified. The truth was… he was setting her bones as best he could. Her knee was forced back in place, her thigh bone set, and her shin was adjusted as best he could with the angle her foot and lower shin were trapped.

  "One minute," he said, closing his eyes. When life and death were on the line… one minute could feel like eternity. Though the body couldn't do much in one minute, Ren-Shai knew it could do enough. He gripped her leg one last time as he expended the last minute of his power for the week, speeding up its mending and the clotting in her body - one minute faster than it could have been. The internal bleeding that was going to kill her had been slowed just a bit. Just enough that the sounds of the sirens of the ambulance could be heard. "I have spared your life, girl. You should be honored," he told the unconscious girl, before he looked at the door the people were trying to pry open to get to him.

  "Tyler! Stop what you're doing to her! Can't you tell you're hurting her?!" Thomas shouted, yanking at the door. Ren-Shai regarded him calmly, despite the blood on his hands from where he had set bones back under flesh. The fact Ren-Shai's hands were turning purple from the minor fractures and torn muscles he had given himself from overriding his brain's limits - was nearly invisible from the amount of blood.

  "You will have to ask those medics to look at my hands and feet, Thomas," Ren-Shai said, looking at his confused father.

  "Your fe-" Thomas began before his eyes widened in shock. A five year old boy set his hands on an extended piece of metal on the floor of the car and struck both his heels against a door being pulled on by several people. The door flew open as Ren-Shai let out a small shout of agony, having cracked his heels and several bones in his feet.

  "Be blessed. You do not need to hurt. This body is about to shut down from its own, however," Ren-Shai told Thomas, before his vision blurred and he fell onto the asphalt beside the crowd. For one brief moment, however, he understood how the girl must have felt as he set her bones.

  "Little monster!" one person shouted. The paramedics moved the crowd and made their way to the injured girl inside as a firefighter pried up the seat her leg was trapped under. The sight of her lower shin and foot caused many in the crowd to vomit violently.

  "Who… did this?" the paramedic asked.

  "Messed her leg up more? That brat!" one woman shouted, pointing at the unconscious Ren-Shai.

  "I'm so sorry! My son doesn't know any better!" Thomas said, almost on the verge of tears, that his son was some sadistic monster.

  "Messed her leg up? Sorry for what? The rest of her bones are set perfectly! This shouldn't even look like a leg!" the paramedic said, before looking at the unconscious boy. "Get the girl into the ambulance. Call another for him," she said, pointing at Ren-Shai.

  "We can't afford an ambulance," Thomas said, looking down at his feet in shame. His son had been hurt again. "We have a family doctor, though, he's right down the road," Thomas said, extremely scared he had lost his son again - from the mixture of blood, swollen hands, and tightening shoes - where his feet were swelling.

  "Get him there, if you can, then," The paramedic said, setting the young girl gently on the stretcher. Since she had been knocked out from the pain, the paramedic didn't have to deal with a struggling child who'd un-set her bones.

  While they spoke, Ren-Shai's body slowly began mending on the inside. With the power of a deity giving the body substance, he would never be down for too long. Ren-Shai's eyes opened briefly as he looked not at the scene around him, but at the pale-skinned man with black hair he had seen before. The man was standing beside the girl's stretcher. A pair of pitch-black eyes stared down at her, then looked at Ren-Shai with shock.

  "You dare violate the natural order, you anomaly?" the man asked, his voice high-pitched and scragging like a crow trying to speak like a person. "I let the last instance go because three lives were to be lost and this incident was going to take three. Yet, you saved one? The balance is broken," he said.

  "I am the natural order," Ren-Shai said. Though he wasn't controlling time, the being in question had paused it. "My will shall be done in all matters of Fate and Time," he told the being.

  "We will see about that, Anomaly. I will consult with the Reaper. If you find yourself dead in your sleep, you will know why," the man growled. A pair of black wings extended from his back and he flew off into the sky, the tails of a trench coat flowing behind him.

  "Tell Lan-Shai that Ren-Shai says hello. I actually miss my brother!" Ren-Shai called after him. The creature's equivalent of blood turned cold. Not that it believed that the Anomaly before him had been Ren-Shai, but that the Anomaly knew the names of two of the Three. The Forbidden Names. Time began to pass once more as the creature released its hold on time.

  "Tyler? What just happened?" Thomas asked. He was not aware of what had transpired when time had been frozen.

  "Besides the Crow, I just saved a girl's life by setting her bones and speeding up her recovery just enough to save her," Ren-Shai said. "Now, if you could please bring me to that physician… I have cracked almost all the bones in my hands and feet to make sure you wouldn't be hurt from seeing that young girl die. I do not want you to die from being hurt like humans are likely to do."

  Thomas stared in confusion, ignoring the crow talk, before he hugged his son closely. "Son… I can't die from being sad," Thomas said, laughing awkwardly. That was the proof he needed that Tyler was still there somewhere. That Tyler still cared about others. Even if he was dead wrong.

  "Wait. What?" Ren-Shai asked, staring flatly as he was laid down in the back seat of his father's truck and brought back to Doctor Sullivan's clinic. "I did all of that for nothing?" he asked himself. "This is only my first day being a human? How do these beings not break down by the time they're ten?" completely unaware that everything that had happened were direct results of his choices.