Chapter Text
Then
Shinsou Hayato’s only son turns four years old and he watches as, with each day that follows, it changes something in his wife.
It’s not a sudden shift. It comes slowly, as the months leading up to his fifth birthday begin to creep up and the seasons meld into one another. Passive comments said in that same offhand manner that she used to use, in the beginning, to bring up his delayed growth. How long it took for him to say his first words, how easily distracted he already was, and oh, Hayato, how long has it taken for him to manifest his quirk?
Too long. But the doctors say it’s any day now.
Long enough that it almost feels taboo to mention the topic of quirks at all, regardless of whose. It’s as if the very estate knows; the walls groan in warning the moment Hayato decides to seek out his sister for answers.
His wife is gone for the night, out in a neighboring district with her family and their long-standing business partners to discuss what the future may look like moving forward, and Hayato hasn’t stopped pacing, haunting the halls, since she kissed him and Hitoshi goodbye.
He stops in the doorway of his son's room, leaning against the doorframe. Hitoshi, fast asleep, stirs gently as the moon cuts through a crack in his curtains and illuminates his cheeks, plump with baby fat and puffy from dinner. Hayato steps inside, quietly, and pulls them shut.
Hayato thought he knew what he wanted out of life. Having a son, having Hitoshi , changed that. It changed a lot of things.
He finds Himari in her room, predictably awake despite the late hour, surrounded by dozens of torn-out pages from her sketchbook. She’s sprawled on the hardwood, hands covered in the dye she’d been making from flower petals she stole from the gardens when she thought no one was looking. Her shoulders tense at the creak of floorboards as he approaches, before something in her seems to recognize his presence and she relaxes, straightening up from her unnatural slouch to turn and face him. It’s the little things like that that remind Hayato that his sister would rather be anywhere else but here.
“You have a spirit lingering right by your left ear,” she says airily, in lieu of a greeting. “best get your katana cleansed before you sneak out tonight.”
“Watch your volume,” he hisses, pulling her door shut. “some members of the family are still around—word spreads fast.”
“In these halls, yes,” Himari hums, shuffling her papers into a neat stack. “you can’t hide anything forever, just as you can’t hide from everything.”
She does things like this to him when she’s angry—speaks in riddles that she knows he won’t understand. Puts on the same act she puts on for everyone else.
“Give it a rest, Himi,” he sighs, sitting heavily at the foot of her bed. It’s hard for him to forget, when they’re alone, that she’s only nineteen. He fiddles absently with the stuffed elephant that rests against her pillows as she finishes tidying up. He’s twenty-six now and feels like he’s lived forever.
“Okay,” she says slowly, coming to sit beside him. “What’s going on?”
“I’m sorry,” he begins, and then he wraps an arm around her shoulders to hold her in place, leaning so close his lips brush against her ear. “You are having a vision about Hitoshi and his quirk. You want to tell me what you see.”
Himari’s body goes rigid in his arms, choking on the gasp that tears itself from her throat as her eyes glaze over, glowing a sickly white that matches her steadily paling skin. Predictably, her hand finds his arm to dig her nails in, pressing hard enough he’s sure that she’ll draw blood. He soothes her with gentle murmurs and a kiss pressed to her hair as the vision wracks through her, as his quirk intrudes on her own—it’s a painful process for her.
It's the only way for her to have specific visions at specific times.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, then again, “I’m so sorry.” Like a promise.
And then it’s over, and the room goes quiet. He waits for her to tear away from him, to smack him across the face the way he deserves to be. He waits for her to scream at him for using her like that after he had promised that he would never, ever do it again. Her silence is both a worse punishment and a mercy he hasn’t earned.
“Himi,” he tries to begin first, but his next words fail him. Because his sister is crying—because his sister has never in their entire lives looked so horrified. Because somewhere across the city a deal is being called off, an empire is itching to retire, and a woman’s heart is turning to stone.
“ Oh ,” Himari says. “Oh god .”
—
Now
Hitoshi is going to die because he is too much of a coward to flee.
The air in the container has grown stale; days (Or maybe it’s been weeks. Months. An eternity.) of letting his vomit and other fluids fester around him have him gagging if he breathes in too deeply, something he finds himself doing often in an attempt to stave off his gnawing hunger with shallow gasps.
He hasn’t moved from that spot on the floor, tucked behind the boxes, since he watched his father be taken away from him. He’s not going to die because he hasn’t eaten, hasn’t had anything to drink for a while, and is lying in his filth; the hole in his chest is going to kill him first. There are a few moments, while he’s suffocating from the weight it, where he thinks that he’s already dead.
Hitoshi does not sleep, but awareness doesn’t grace him often, either.
When he can ground himself enough to form a coherent thought, usually when his body gives out on him and the fist around his heart squeezes hard enough for the poison to spread to the veins of his wrists, he thinks of the night that his aunt was taken, too. The look on his father's face when he found him, how he didn’t allow himself time to mourn his sister until he and Hitoshi were both out of there, appearances were changed, and they were safe , at least for the time being.
( When you find yourself being chased, you have to promise me that you won’t stop running. )
Hitoshi is seven years old and understands why his father said when rather than if. He thinks of the way Sakai spoke to him, the spark of familiarity that had appeared in his slitted eyes when he used his quirk and got that man killed. He thinks of newspaper clippings and his father’s teachings, sparse and yet chillingly serious, warnings to keep himself small and hidden.
( Serial Kidnappings Rein Terror Upon Musutafu: The Trail of Dozens of Young Boys Grows Cold. )
He finds himself consumed entirely with the memory, connections forming in the forefront of his mind that he wants so badly to sever but knows that he can’t because they’re true . He may have played a part in his aunt’s disappearance, pulling the stunt that he had, but there was no other way to explain his father's other than it being entirely his fault. They’d gone there for him, and his father was brave enough to leave in his place, weaponless (Hitoshi wants to go and get his katana so badly it burns—but the fear of what else may be waiting out there for him leaves him rooted, and the fatigue doesn’t help). Maybe he’d even trusted Hitoshi enough to run away, to escape to another community farther down the tracks, the way he was supposed to.
Don’t stop running, Hitoshi.
He knew that he could never be like his father no matter how hard he tried. Days spent training, copying stances, working himself to exhaustion were all for nothing in the end. Hitoshi realizes for the very first time just how much he really, truly hates himself.
The part of him, the part that’s still so young, is what keeps him in place. The naive belief that his father will come back and slide open the door with the sun cast behind him like a halo, a smile on his face, gives him the desperate need to stay. How could his father find him again, after all, if he up and left? It’d been a question that had haunted Hitoshi after they’d abandoned their first home. A recurring nightmare that kept him awake; as they slept soundly, miles away, was his aunt crawling home, bloodied and hopeless, searching for them?
It’s that unfeasible image of his father doing the same, a hallucination that hits him along with a fresh wave of nausea, that spikes the adrenaline in Hitoshi’s veins just enough for him to shift in position. He heaves, gagging on saliva as his body tries to retch out whatever it can, trembling like a leaf as he attempts to push himself up to sit. Suddenly it's all too much—everything is. The stench, the darkness, the feeling of fresh urine soaking through his already soiled clothes and he manages to drag himself to his feet, swaying as the world tips on its axis at the motion. Something wet seeps into his sock and he grimaces, swallowing back another gag at the possibilities of what he might be stepping in, and he stumbles blindly towards the door on autopilot; it’s as if he’s seeing himself from above. His body takes over for him—the primal urge to survive that manages to take control for long enough to get him out .
His knees scream with exertion from only a few steps, but it can’t compare to the agony he feels in his neck and back, the way that his throat feels like it's on fire and he can’t even muster up enough spit to attempt to satiate it. His hands come into contact with the cold metal of the door, and he has to use his entire body weight to pry it open as, a deep, guttural groan of pain rips itself from him with the strain.
Hitoshi goes blind for one long, terrible second. And then his knees hit the gravel.
He takes in greedy gulps of fresh air as he rolls onto his back, heaving. The sky is an impossible shade of blue, entirely void of clouds, and Hitoshi feels like maybe it’s coming down to meet him the longer he stares up at it. Or perhaps it's him going up, rising off of the earth, taking flight.
It takes him so long to reach the river that the sun is already beginning its afternoon drag downward, the late August air cooling as dusk approaches. He drinks from it slowly, shoving his entire face into it rather than cupping it in his hands, breathing heavily with relief between each gulp. He drinks until his stomach hurts, until the coals in his throat begin to cool and the knot of hunger in his gut starts to release.
His reflection swims, blurry in the water below him as he splashes it up onto his face. He looks just as terrible as he feels, cheeks far more gaunt than he last remembered them being, and eyebags so dark that they almost look black. A gentle breeze sweeps through his tufts of violet hair, stuck at an awkward length as it continues to grow out. He stares at the unfamiliar color until images of his father and aunt, so young and innocent without any knowledge of what was to come, begin to appear beside him. Hitoshi leans further towards the water, visions of his family dissipating around him like smoke as he falls in.
Hitoshi takes his time bathing, shielded by the thick brush and trees. His clothes are wrung through and scrubbed, turning the water a nauseating shade of murky brown before it’s washed further downstream by the current. He doesn’t think beyond what’s right in front of him—he feels almost possessed, a bystander in his body as he wipes furiously at patches of dried blood caked on his skin. He’s not sure when he got so many scratches, but the bits of brown and red stuck beneath his nails give him a good idea of where they came from.
He finishes as the sky is turning pink, pulling on his still-damp clothes. Barefoot, he wanders deeper into the forest, stopping to inspect clusters of mushrooms gathered at the foot of a few trees and taking the ones he remembers to be edible. Numb and tired, he wants nothing more than to return home and curl up on his futon for a few days. Then he remembers the state of it and has to pinch himself to get the image out of his head, lest he throw back up the mushrooms.
Instead, Hitoshi settles with curling up on a patch of grass, grateful for the warmth of summer that manages to linger even as night finally falls and the moon's bright gaze shines down through the trees. Being outside helps, but there's a pit of dread deep in his chest where the black hole has begun to grow; he thinks that maybe he’s always had it, rotting at his bones and organs. I must be cursed , he thinks. It’s the only logical explanation.
His body must sense that he’s teetering towards the ledge, ready to dive headfirst into self-destruction, because he’s hit with a sudden wave of exhaustion so strong that he can no longer keep his eyes open. The breeze brushes against his cheek, reminiscent of a soft, thin hand cupping his face, and Hitoshi sleeps.
For one reposeful night, he does not dream.
—
When he wakes, the forest is silent.
Hitoshi knows, with horrific clarity as his mind returns to his body, that he’s being watched. He doesn’t let it show, eyes still held firmly shut, limbs lax as he stays on his side. He’s the most conscious he’s been in days, adrenaline managing to bring his brain back online, and it only spikes higher as he hears the soft crunch of plants being disturbed just to his left, something approaching. Something disturbing the unnatural quiet.
His body tenses then, ready at any moment for him to jump to his feet, brain running a mile a minute. He might make it to the city if he starts to run now—he knows the tracks well enough that he could lose any potential pursuers if they were less familiar than he was. But what if they’re armed? Hitoshi thinks, and the black hole in his chest begins to pulse even quicker. He can see the shape of a familiar gun in his mind's eye, pointed directly between his aunt's eyes.
Another crunch, and this time Hitoshi knows that he’s waited too long because it’s right beside him, it’s right next to his head. And so he does all he can, braces himself for the co*ck of a gun. Thinks of something happy, his last birthday in the city, the last time he was blind— pure .
But the bullet never comes.
Mreeeooowwwwww.
Something tickles his face, and Hitoshi’s eyes flutter open cautiously to land on the culprit. “Seriously?” he whispers, raspy with sleep and disuse, and the cat blinks back at him with a seemingly equal amount of bewilderment in its single hazel eye.
Then it takes it upon itself to crawl onto him, forcing him to roll to his back so it doesn’t fall off, and tucks its legs beneath its grey body to lay itself down on his chest. It meows again, voice scratchy just like Hitoshi’s, and starts to purr. She’s small, much smaller than most other strays he’s seen wandering along the train tracks before, and where it’s missing an eye it’s also missing half of an ear, seemingly bitten off by another animal.
She reaches a clammy paw out to swat at his nose.
“What was that for?” he grumbles, bringing a tentative hand up to run his fingers against her fur. She’s not soft by any means, very clearly filthy, but he’s in no place to judge, considering the condition he was in only a few hours ago. Seemingly satisfied, she leans into the touch, purrs picking up in intensity.
He lets out the breath he’d been holding when the feeling of being watched finally ceases, the call of a bird in the distance relieving the eerie silence that had befallen the forest. “Are you hungry?” Hitoshi asks, fingertips grazing where her bones stick up from her shoulders. She stares lazily up at him, and he hums. “Yeah, me too. I think I have some tuna at home. Do you want some?”
The cat blinks.
Having something else to care for other than himself gives Hitoshi the necessary distraction he needs to attempt to pull things back together. He spends the rest of the early morning, after talking himself down from a blind panic at the sight of his father’s discarded katana, airing out the shipping container; he scrubs it down with water collected from the river with his breath held to block out the stench while the cat, newly named Chisana after her small size, watches and devours an entire can of tuna.
His futon is ruined by the various fluids that had managed to spread and soak into the corner, and he has to transfer dozens of books from one of the boxes he’d been hiding behind that’d suffered the same fate, but everything else seems to have remained relatively untouched. He’d gotten lucky, in his opinion; most of the damage was internal. His aunt and his father's belongings were saved from being added to the growing list of collateral damage caused by his hands.
He’s only just sitting down in the doorway to eat breakfast when Chisana starts to wander, sniffing the gravel as she walks. He watches her through tired eyes, forcing down his canned pumpkin. Everything tastes a little metallic, a little like mud.
Chisana circles the area, prancing with a bit more energy after she’d eaten, before coming to a stop before a row of brush, fur bristling. She looks back at him, one pupil sharpened into a slit, and meows. A buzz of discomfort begins to rise along Hitoshi’s skin, raising goosebumps, and he pulls himself to his feet.
Despite her reaction, Chisana doesn’t move away from the bushes even as Hitoshi gets closer, instead staying pressed close to Hitoshi’s feet, gaze trained on whatever it is she’d seen. She continues to stalk it as Hitoshi bends down to her level and, skin itching with dread, pushes aside the leaves with the end of a stick. He’s met with the sight of a discarded gun, dusty from the rocks and dirt. The breath is knocked out of him; whether it’s out of relief or sick familiarity with the thing, he’s unsure. He scratches Chisana behind the ear, satisfied when her fur relaxes down and she leans into the touch.
“Good find, Chi-chan,” he says, pulling it out from the dirt gingerly. He’d already dragged his father’s katana back inside, where it remained resting against a corner, waiting for its true owner's return. Inspecting the handgun, heavy with bullets, Hitoshi hums. This one he wouldn’t feel so guilty keeping.
Chisana stares up at him.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Hitoshi glares. “You weren’t there .” His voice breaks on the last word. The unwanted memories are a fresh wound, and he feels like he might be sick again at the mere thought of it. Cleaning out the shipping container had been hard enough, picking his father's blade from where he’d dropped and left it behind had been harder. The most difficult part of all, however, is trying to find the motivation to stay standing. It’s tempting to go right back to where he’d been the day before, to shut himself inside the shipping container, crawling into the hole he’d only just dug himself out of.
But he’d rested that photo of his parents and aunt on a book right beside his pillow. He couldn’t let them see what he’d become in the aftermath—and it scared him, too. So Hitoshi swallows back his nausea, brings the handgun inside, and places it gingerly atop a stack of clothing boxes.
Chisana pads up to him, rubs her face against the bare skin of his calf in apology. Her face is covered in juice from the can despite her efforts to lick it off, and Hitoshi feels something warm creep up on him, something both equally endeared and terrified by the amount of care he knows that he’s capable of feeling for her.
He scoops her up into his arms, wiping at the muck on her fur with the end of his t-shirt. “If you’re going to stay with me you have to promise not to leave,” he says, very seriously.
She doesn’t answer, of course, but something in her eye shines brightly with intelligence. She seems content to rest against his chest, bony head against his sternum. Hitoshi is content to pretend, for a moment, that he’s done anything right enough in his life to deserve it.
—
It’s not what he wants, not really, but Hitoshi drags himself back into the clearing a few days later. Because what he wants isn’t what he’s been taught to do—curling up on his futon for days at a time, hoarding what's left of their food aside from what he can spare for Chisana just in case his father comes home and needs it .
He unsheathes his father's katana from behind his back and sags beneath the sheer weight of it in his arms. It’s a world away from training sticks that couldn’t so much as dent a tree. Hitoshi feels disgustingly small. His attempts in the days that follow, trying to complete his old training regimen with the real blade in place of the wood, are so grueling that he can’t sleep at night from the pain in his muscles. He bites down on his tongue so often to keep himself from crying out that he’s sure it’ll be scarred permanently. Hitoshi decides to work with the katana only twice a week instead, using the training stick throughout the rest.
There’s so much loneliness that follows him into autumn, and he feels it like a ghost floating over his head as the leaves turn from their bright green to deep crimson, descending to the floor of the forest as the sun sets earlier. A month later, and there is still no sign of his father.
Chisana paws at Hitoshi from where he’s laying on the ground, drenched from head to toe in sweat despite the way his breath is coming out visibly in front of him in sparse little clouds. The sky above him, painted hues of pink and orange, seems like it will swallow him whole if he stares up at it hard enough. Maybe he wants it to, by now.
He cranes his neck back to look at her as she meows, swatting at his forehead again. “Hungry?” he whispers, the loudest he can manage to get his voice nowadays. She blinks once, an affirmation, and he drags himself to sit with a grimace.
Hitoshi had pushed himself into training much later into the evening than usual, typically pulling out long before dusk, if not to feed Chisana or himself then to escape the unease that falls over the forest when night comes. That old feeling of being watched disappeared the same day his father did—the fear that it might return at any moment did not.
Fighting through his sore muscles, Hitoshi trudges home, Chisana weaving between his legs with excitement.
She's proved to be a wonderful addition to his life, even if she can't fully fight off the solitude of an empty shipping container; she doesn’t bother him if he needs the time to think for himself, and every night she sleeps in the crook of his neck, fur tickling his cheek, or curled up on his chest, purring in that strange and broken way of hers until he falls asleep with it reverberating in his sternum. She doesn’t eat much either, about as scrawny as Hitoshi is, even if he’d managed to put on some extra muscle in the last few weeks. It’s difficult to keep food down when every bite makes him feel so guilty—it’s the food that his father worked so hard to earn, that he’d put his blood and sweat into in the fields and in those fighting cages, and Hitoshi wants to save it for his return much more than he wants to satiate the gnawing black hole that’s been growing in his stomach.
But Chisana doesn’t deserve to starve. He scratches her behind the ear as she dives into his last can of fish, licking it up with greedy, contented purrs.
“We’re running out,” Hitoshi mutters, sparing a fleeting glance toward the photo of his parents, leaned up on the wall closest to his pillow. His father had warned him they likely wouldn’t make it into the fall without the extra funds—Hitoshi hates how he’s always right just as much as he’s comforted by the certainty that he always used to bring.
Chisana pauses her meal, blinking up at him through her one bleary eye, and Hitoshi nudges the can closer to her with a frown. “Eat.”
She sits back on her hind legs, mirroring the way he’s squatted with his knees to his chest, and lets out a huff so human that he almost wonders if she’s learning from how often he’s been sighing as of late. She’s such a proud cat, raising her chin in defiance.
“Chi-chan,” he croaks, trying to be firmer. His throat aches with the effort. “You need to eat, or else you’re gonna die.”
She blinks again, unimpressed. She’s the most head-strong animal Hitoshi has ever met; he thinks she and his father would get along perfectly, with how often they disagree.
“Don’t give me that,” Hitoshi argues. “It’s different when it’s you.”
But he knows that what he has won’t last long enough even for a cat her size. They have until the start of October, if they’re lucky, and Hitoshi knows well from cold nights spent clutching at his stomach when he was younger that the human body can only last so long off scraps. He’s terrified to find out how much it differs between animals.
The katana, perched in the corner where he’d rested it after training, stares down at him with a sense of urgency. Something dark, inevitable, makes it’s way into his chest and begins to take root. If it could grow down into the earth, it’d stretch all the way to vines that crawl up the cracked walls of the cages.
Chisana growls, foreign and low in her throat, like a warning. Sometimes Hitoshi really does think that she can read his mind.
“You’ll stay here, then,” Hitoshi decides for her, getting to his feet. His knees pop with the movement. His muzzle, dusty from misuse, gleams dangerously in the light of the gas lamp as he picks it up, placing it on his tongue and over his jaw with much clumsier handling than his father. Chisana stares up at it as he puts it on, fur bristling.
He tucks the handgun into the waistband of his shorts, heart hammering against his ribcage as the metal, ice-hold, seems to burn against his skin. He’s different, he tells himself, from the first time he followed his father to the cages— a part of him doesn’t remember what that version of him used to be like. But as he steps out into the road, pulling the door shut behind him with a grating scrape, the feeling in his stomach does. He can feel it before he even takes his first step, that sense of overbearing fear that had him fleeing from his own father and the blood on the same blade he’d been learning to wield for the last two months.
Hitoshi can taste metal and bile in his throat at the memory.
Don’t be a coward, he thinks. He just wants to watch, he reasons, to see for himself what it was that dragged his father in so deep that it’d drowned him in the end. Just one fight. Just from the sidelines. Just to know what that unnamed feeling he gets in his chest when he looks at his father’s katana actually is.
Hitoshi follows the pool of dread in his gut like a compass into the forest.
( Even he doesn’t really believe that. )
