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Family life is new and unfamiliar, a pair of sneakers that Shou hasn’t quite worn in and might never fully adjust to without a limp, but it's something he's stuck with. It’s been four months and it’s still weird. He’s not sure if he dislikes it, but he doesn’t understand it.
His mom is a familiar piece of the puzzle, someone he knows and can work around and exist in the same space in without too much of an issue. Amma can be understood. She’s not easy per say, but she’s able to be survived. They’re not close, but Shou doesn’t even know what it would look like if they were. Her attempts to fix that can usually be subverted or evaded or suffered through with little to no effort on his part, and so he doesn’t mind. He just thinks of it like having a mildly clingy and bossy roommate who pays all of the rent.
The ones he’s struggling with are the new steps, the new halves, the new partial-family. Stepfather, stepbrother, half sister unfortunately conceived a few months before Shou tore down Claw—they’re new, and Shou isn’t adjusting to them as well as he’d like to.
His half sister is the easiest of the bunch, mainly because she hasn’t been born yet. She just chills in his mom’s stomach and Shou sometimes has to talk to her because apparently she can hear them and Amma really, really wants him to. He’s decent at making shit up, does it all in Japanese so that hopefully she can speak it better than her father and other half brother, and then goes about his day. All Shou has to tell her to do is not cause too much trouble and have a fun time on earth and that he loves her. He guesses that he loves his sister, but he’s fallen into the habit of calling her No Name and can't quite think of her as a person yet, so he's not sure if that really qualifies as love. He’s not sure how he’d know if it did or not.
Matthew is where the real struggle starts. For one thing, he’s constantly trying to speak to Shou in Japanese when he sucks at it, and Shou doesn’t appreciate being used as practice for his language improvement. Amma got upset the few times he told Matthew to cut it out and she did it in that mild, constrained way that meant she was actually upset about it, and so Shou decided to suck it up, but that didn’t mean he liked it. It was a symbolic thing probably, and Matthew was improving fast enough that he’d be fine before it was too much of a big deal, but still.
And then there’s the homework. Surely he’d get his fill of teaching when he spends all day trying to cajole high schoolers into speaking English, but no. As soon as he gets home, he wants to help Shou with the work he’s supposed to be doing to prepare to enter middle school sometime his second year. He’d rather do it by himself if he has to do it, but Matthew always wants to help. Even when Shou has to translate half of the damn assignment for him, he wants to help. It’s infuriating, and he wishes his mother married an electrician or an engineer or anyone but a teacher, but apparently that’s not how love works. It’s all horribly inconvenient.
There’s also the fact that he’s the worst driver Shou’s ever seen, the obnoxious 80’s synth pop he plays at ungodly hours in the morning, the amount of times that he loses his glasses while wearing them, how constantly in Shou’s space he is and how he’s always trying to “relate to him,” and the fact that he consistently buys lemon-scented everything. They make the whole stepfather thing a nuisance.
Still, he has his good points. He doesn’t insist on Shou calling him Dad or anything like that, he’s a good cook, and he isn’t hellbent on taking over the world. The good doesn’t outweigh the bad, but the good make Matthew able to be dealt with.
Aidan is the real issue. Shou’s halfway through the next level on Doom when he remembers that he’s supposed to be picking him up from school, and he all but hurls his controller at the TV. Surely seven is old enough to walk the fifteen or so blocks from elementary school back home by himself, but apparently it’s not. Shou’s not a fan of being a babysitter, and the thing is that Aidan can and will tell on him when Shou doesn’t do what he’s supposed to do. Attempts to bribe him with cash, TV access, and even the expensive-ass American candies that he was complaining about missing all failed, and the one time he attempted to threaten him into submission, Aidan cried for an hour and Shou earned himself a hell curfew and a two-hour-long scolding session that only ended when Shou admitted he’d rather that his mom just smack him across the face and be done with it like Pops would have. Then she had cried, and that had been a whole mess.
It’s not that Shou hates kids. It’s just that he puts on his coat, walks out the door, and thinks that this kid is annoying as hell, mainly because he cries about everything. His obsession with trivia shows is weird, the train tracks he builds frequently go through Shou’s room, and he was responsible for losing Shou’s hamster more than once. He was also responsible for the half a dozen or so times Shou snuck out to visit Ritsu and came home to find Amma sitting up waiting for him, armed with a lecture and more grounding, because Aidan thought that apparently Shou was the best person to go to for nightmares. He's not sure what gave him that impression, but Shou would like to change it.
It’s cold as hell out, cold enough to probably warrant a scarf, but Shou doesn’t particularly mind. The cold is a nice sort of sting, something that keeps him present and awake. He goes invisible, disappearing into the sides of buildings and then disappearing into the tops of him, making up lost time by flying part of the way there. He stays close enough to the ground that he can tell where to turn, and that lets him be low enough that Shou can kick Sakurai in the back of the head when he spots him. Sure, he’s ~reformed~ now, but Shou doesn’t trust that. He doesn’t trust any of it, doesn’t trust any ex-Claw members except Fukuda, Higashio, and Ootsuki and that trust only came after years. The rest of them will always be under his eye, always be treated with extra layers of suspicion. He’ll die before he lets them live in peace.
Salt Elementary is a cute place, brightly colored, and most of the kids are already gone. Not enough of them that Shou qualifies as late, but enough that it’s noticeable that Aidan is still there. The best place to land without being seen is the alley between the bookstore and the ramen shop, but when Shou goes to land there, a group of kids start walking towards it, kids that are in the unfortunate age group where they can walk themselves home but they still believe in magic powers, and he is not in the mood to explain powers to them. So he has to wait, hover, and only once they’re gone can he appear.
“Nii-chan!”
Aidan waves with his whole arm when he spots Shou and then comes barreling towards him, a pastel blur only separated from other pastel blurs by the fact that his backpack is the same shade of green as Shou’s jacket. Aidan swore it wasn’t intentional when he bought it. Behind him, a teacher that he recognizes as being Aidan’s sighs in relief and then turns back into the building, and Shou barely has his hand out of his pocket to wave back before he’s overtaken by a hug.
“Miss me that much?” He asks, awkwardly placing his hands between Aidan’s shoulder blades.
“Mhmm!” Aidan then lets go, steps back, and takes off his backpack. “I’m gonna show you something!”
“Alright.”
Aidan rummages around in his bag and then pulls out a piece of paper that he thrusts in front of Shou. It’s a math test with a 100 written in the top right corner along with two smiley face stickers and a star. Aidan beams up at him, practically bouncing with his need for approval.
“Very nice.” Shou says, and that seems to be enough because it makes his smile grow wider, almost inhuman with how many crooked baby teeth he’s showing at once. Aidan puts the paper back and Shou waits just long enough for Aidan to zipper it up to start walking. He doesn’t wait for him to put it on.
“School was good today. My team won dodgeball in gym and I only got hit three times!” He tells Shou, skipping a few steps to catch up with him. The sidewalks gets narrower on the way home and Aidan, like always, forgets. And like always, he stumbles, one foot landing on the street. Unlike always, his ankle twists outward and his whole body pitches forward in what’s going to turn into a rather nasty fall and Shou’s aura acts before his hands do, keeping him hovering a few inches from the ground. Aidan just floats there, making no move to get himself up until Shou pulls on his collar and forces him up.
“That was your powers.” He whispers, one foot still on the street. His eyes are saucer-wide and Shou gives a noncommittal “Mhmm” before tugging him forward and then dropping his hand from Aidan’s collar all together once he’s moving again.
“I’ve never seen powers before.”
“Yes, you have.” Shou tells him. “Remember the kitchen counter? And the time we were running late and couldn’t get your shoes tied? And every time I’ve had to get a spider out of the house?”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t like that. That was so cool!” Aidan tugs on Shou’s sleeve twice to emphasize his point. “How can I do that?”
“We can’t talk about that around people, bud.” He brushes it off, keeps moving. A tug on his sleeve again, the one barely hiding burn scars he got answering Aidan’s question. This isn’t a question he wants to think about for long. He’s thought about it for long enough that he should get a free pass to never talk about it again. In fact, Shou shouldn’t have to ever talk about anything related to Claw ever again, but people are always asking about it, even when they aren’t. He knows that’s what his mom’s asking when she asks if he’s okay, what Matthew is asking when he asks how Shou knows what it looks like when someone gets blown up because he made an off-hand comment during an action movie, what they were both asking when they asked why he skipped their planned trip to the beach. They’re always asking, and now it’s moved onto Aidan, too. His life has turned into an interrogation with interrogators too cowardly to ask their questions like they should and if he went to run away from it, he’d be returned within the minute. There seems to be no way out of it.
“But when we get home? Can we when we get home?”
Shou pretends to think about it, and then shakes his head. “Nope.”
“Why?”
Part of Shou just wants to say “Because,” but he knows better than that. Instead, he says “I can’t tell you that around people, either,” and that shuts him up for another second. He takes that second to relax his shoulders, shove his hands in his pockets, and assume a more casual slouch. Shou had barely noticed that he transitioned out of the slouch in the first place.
“But you can tell me why you can’t tell me when we get home?” Aidan begs, tears beginning to well up in his eyes, and Shou thinks through his options. A yes means that the whole thing will be brought up again, but a no is going to lead to a further fight. No answer is his best answer, and so he tries a distraction.
“You said you won your dodgeball game, right?”
Aidan nods, wipes his face, and transitions into being more focused than upset. “Yeah, but that’s not an answer. You’re, uh, you’re…”
Shou knows that he’s generally supposed to hop in with the right word here. Instead, he stays silent and keeps them moving forward, one block turning into another with little fanfare. His back straightens up again, shoulders squaring, casual facade falling away the longer that the silence draws on because normally Aidan would give up on trying to find it by now. But he’s not giving up, and that persistence is what got Shou what he got. That persistence is a danger.
“Distracting?” He guesses, and with Shou’s certain lack of response, he grows more confident. “Yeah, you’re distracting! Changing the subject! Not answering!”
Shou grits his teeth when a bicycle passes them, pulling Aidan close to keep him from getting sideswiped and then pushing him away. It’s a harsh shove, harsh enough that Shou hopes that it makes him cry so that he’ll stop asking so many fucking questions, but it doesn’t work. “I sure am.”
“Why’re you doing that?” He looks up and tilts his head to the side like a particularly dumb golden retriever. Shou doesn’t look at his face for long.
His next trick is a meaner one, but it’s necessary to avoid the conversation Aidan wants and Shou very much does not. “Why do you still wet the bed?”
As expected, it makes him appropriately indignant. “I do not!”
“Really? Because I heard from Ito Akari that…”
“She was lying!” Aidan insists, a pout crossing his face before he begins the rant that Shou has heard a thousand times about a nasty playground rumor that he had only understood because one of his kinder classmates bothered to translate the whole thing. Sure, recounting that story makes Aidan upset now, but it’s necessary.
By the time they get home, Aidan is talking about kanji and Shou can breathe, but he can’t quite relax.
***
Math homework is always bad. Math homework with Matthew is worse. Math homework with Matthew when Aidan has just aced a math test is a new level of hell that Shou figures was designed just to torture him. He stays hunched over his algebra, shielding his work from Matthew’s corrections and moving his pencil as fast as it will go so he can get this done and over with.
Aidan’s train track has moved from the living room into the kitchen, and Shou can smell Amma’s cooking without feeling the need to look up and see what she’s making. She’s in one of those cooking moods, and her cooking moods usually result in something pretty good. And when it doesn’t...Well, Shou survived Higashio’s cooking. He can survive anything.
He’s close to getting to the answer. Shou has finally figured out what x equals, and so now he just needs to put it into the other equation to find out y, but first he needs to find where the hell he put that other equation. He squints at the paper, searching through his mess of numbers when Aidan speaks up.
“Do you need help with your math?”
“I’m getting help with my math.” Shou points to Matthew with his pencil before going back to his numbers.
“Yeah, but I’m really good at math. I bet I can help!”
Shou wants to snark at him, but he makes himself hold back. “You can help me later, okay?”
“Okay.” Aidan sits down next to him and moves his train back and forth on the table.
“It’s usually good practice to put a box around your equations.” Matthew tells him.
“It’s usually good practice for you to shut up when I’m trying to find my equations.” Shou shoots back in the same gentle tone Matthew used on him, the one that reminds Shou of zookeepers approaching rabid tigers.
“Shou.” His mother warns from the stove. “Don’t say that kind of thing in front of Aidan. And don’t stay it to Matthew, either. It’s rude.”
“Just let me know when you want me to look over it.” Matthew mutters, a quick retreat. Coward. Shou’s been trying to get him to put up a fight over something for months, but he just won’t do it. It’s infuriating.
“Yeah, you’re not allowed to tell people to shut up.” Aidan moves his train closer to Shou’s papers, and when Shou finds his equation, he puts a box around it and then shoves the train away with his powers so that he can keep his pencil moving, focus on the math.
Aidan stares in awe at his toy, and Shou only realizes his error when that look goes from the train to him. Fuck. He puts the pencil down and stares up at the ceiling, silently asking for god to smite him as Aidan says “You never answered my question earlier.”
“I’m not going to.” Shou tells the ceiling tiles.
“But why?”
Shou turns his gaze from the ceiling to his stepbrother, and Aidan’s eyebrows knit closer together. He backs away.
“Aidan, why don’t you finish up your train tracks and let Shou-kun finish up his math?”
Matthew’s suggestion cuts through the tension and Aidan mumbles “Yes, Dad,” before leaving his chair and going back to the train track. But the question is on his mind again and all of Shou’s earlier rush to get this problem done disappears. Now he stalls, and Matthew’s eyes don’t look like the eyes of the tester, but his glasses have the same reflection and Shou remembers being bloodied and bruised and making cups move without touching them to prove that yes, the experiments worked, enough torture could bring out latent powers and enough torture could make them stronger and Touichirou was right, just like always, he had to make sure everyone knew he was right and it was all Shou’s responsibility to prove that so that they could go on and test on other people and the pressure was on and was going to stay on until he did what he had to do.
His hands are long since patched up, but they’re shaking and numb like the tendons tore yesterday. His writing goes from bad to illegible and he stops, puts the pencil down, shakes out his hands. He’s fine. Everything is fine. Aidan’s train is still on its tracks but he’s staring at it very intensely. Shou breathes in and it smells like lemons. He needs to substitute in x to solve for y. His mother is cooking pork that sometimes burns like flesh burns. Shou suddenly doesn’t feel too hungry, but he does feel very dizzy.
Matthew pushes his glasses up. Shou grabs his pencil and makes himself double down. Almost done, almost done, then Fukuda can patch him up and he can go home and he can sleep and he doesn’t have to come back tomorrow, he just has to move this cup, boulder, building, cloud, tree, universe. He just has to do this, has to do this, has to do this—
“Done.” Shou shoves the paper towards Matthew, gets it out of his sight. He’s fine. The ceilings here are a different shade of white than in HQ. The stove was never any place that Shou could see it. Hatori’s models were of planes, not trains. Everything is fine.
“Good! You dropped a negative, but the actual math was correct.” Matthew smiles at him, circles the negative sign that Shou forgot to write in, and then grabs another piece of paper. “It can sometimes take longer, but to avoid that sort of thing happening, it’s best to set your problem up like this.”
He starts doing some sort of math wizardy that involves evenly-spaced handwriting. Shou sits on his hands and watches him work, half-absorbed in that and half-absorbed in seeming absorbed.
“Cool.” He says when Matthew finishes it up, even though it’s not really particularly cool. “That was the last problem, though.”
“Well, you can try it like that next time. See if it works out for you.”
Shou nods, pretends to think about it, and then starts heading to his room, papers in hand. He hasn’t bought a bookbag yet—-no need to when he’s not going to school—but he knows he’ll have to get one soon.
Aidan follows behind him.
“How do I get powers?” He asks again.
A new change in tactic. Perhaps giving him the basic answer will make him give up on it. “You have to be born with it.”
“So I don’t have them?”
“Probably not.” Shou confirms.
Aidan continues tracking him up the stairs. “When will I know if I have them?”
“Whenever. One of my friends didn’t know he had powers until he was thirteen.”
Aidan stops suddenly and Shou turns around to see him open-mouthed and wide-eyed. “You have friends?”
“...Of course I have friends.” Shou blinks and quickly decides not to process the fact that he’s been roasted by a kid who sometimes forgets how to tie his shoes if he doesn’t take a minute to think about it. If he ignores it, it totally didn’t happen. Totally.
“Oh.” Aidan closes his mouth for a second and Shou starts back up the stairs again. “I thought you didn’t have friends. You don’t go to school!”
“School isn’t the only place you can make friends.” Shou says, and Aidan chews over this piece of big-brotherly wisdom when they reach the top of the stairs.
“But where else can you make them? Is it a powers thing?”
“Not really.” Shou’s room is at the end of the hall, and he suddenly wishes he picked something a little closer to the stairs so he had a quick out. The back of the hall gave him good window access, though, and that was more important than anything else.
“Hm.” Aidan is slightly behind him, but Shou can imagine him pouting. “I still want powers, though.”
“And I want a motorcycle. We can’t all get what we want, dude.”
Just a few more feet. A few more feet, the door handle beneath his hands, a few seconds of space right in front of him—
“But can you help me get powers?”
Shou opens the door, steps inside, and then slams it behind him. The boom echoes and Aidan knocks and calls for him and asks again, but the closed door is his answer. The closed door is the nicest answer Shou can give.
***
Shou sleeps through everyone else’s morning routine. He doesn’t have to get up for any of his schoolwork, and he doesn’t like to be up before nine in the morning if he can help it. Today, he’s up at eight and everyone is gone, exactly how Shou likes them. The house is empty and he can breeze through his work and then go out and wander around and not come back for a while. He decides picking up Aidan is a bad idea and maybe being left at school will teach him to be less nosy. Sure, it’s maybe not the kindest thing to do, but Shou isn’t particularly kind. And it’s not like he’s actively hurting him, which seems to be what the damn kid wants him to do.
He crawls out of bed and turns on the TV for some background noise as he starts looking for what to wear. The news drones on in the background, telling him about a hurricane building somewhere in the Pacific and a traffic accident on the main stretch of highway between Seasoning City and Tokyo and—
“And new charges are being brought up for members of the ex-terrorist group Claw related to unethical human experimentation. Okajima-san has more on this story from the Culture Tower.”
Shou pulls on a long-sleeved shirt and watches the camera cut to a young woman in a pink suit, hair blown about by a mild wind. “Yes, I’m here in front of the Culture Tower that was almost destroyed by Claw this November, and the search continues for information on the whereabouts of what internal Claw documents call the Awakened Child. Apparently, this child—”
There’s the screeching of metal and plastic bending beneath his powers as the TV is crumpled into nothingness. The dresser it sits on starts to collapse as well, and Shou breathes in and makes himself stop, focuses on just the useless hunk of metal and the useless fucking cops who can’t even trace down the original document with his actual fucking name on it and the useless fucking experiments that only worked because he would’ve had powers anyways and they knew that, they knew that, everyone already knew that and everyone already knows who the Awakened fucking Child is and clearly it’s some sort of ploy to get him to come forward and confess to some crime so that he can be thrown in prison like his father and his mom and Matthew and Aidan and No Name can have a happy fucking life without him like they deserve and everything can be perfect. The TV is the size of a baseball now and he throws it out the window, delights in hearing the glass break. There’s peace in destruction like that. The piece of paper Shou’s thinking of is in the old house, and suddenly, he knows what he has to do today.
He leaves the house without looking at his schoolwork and without taking his phone. He doesn’t even bother with a coat. It’s all just as well.
***
He burns the house to the ground the old fashion way. Robs a liquor store invisible, douses the place in vodka, punches out all the windows, turns on the stove and the oven and the heater, and then tosses a lighter on the kitchen floor. His mother’s plan was to rent it out or sell it, but Shou knows what’s best here.
There’s something satisfying about standing in the middle of that burning kitchen, hands bloodied and lungs slowly becoming corrupted with smoke. He feels better and freer than he has in months, and Shou wonders what it would feel like to die here. If it would feel good. If it would be right. If anyone would feel bad. Maybe they’d feel bad about not feeling worse. That’s what he thinks, anyhow.
Shou stands there until he hears sirens. Then he escapes through a back window and is grateful for the fact that invisibility was what he learned first. And walks, still invisible, out of the neighborhood where he briefly grew up. And he keeps walking, and keeps walking, and he notices where the sun is in the sky, and so much of a day has passed in burning this place down. It’s time to pick Aidan up from school and Shou decides Aidan’s punishment can be waiting for a few extra minutes, not being left entirely, because Shou needs an alibi just in case the police want to come after him about this, too. He malingers in the same alley where he appeared the day before and wishes that he had thought to bring a change of clothes, but it’s too late for that now. It wasn’t his most well-planned crime, but it was easily one of the most satisfying in the moment. Now there’s just the coverup to get through, and that’s the real hard part.
He waits until all of Aidan’s classmates are gone and it’s just him and a two other kids. Then he appears and Shou has never been more tired in his life than when Aidan runs towards him and hugs him. He could fall asleep right there.
“You smell funny.” Aidan says when he finally has the sense to let go of Shou.
“So do you.” He says. “Now come on, let’s go home.”
Aidan nods and Shou starts walking. When he trips today, Shou can tell that he falls on purpose and he sighs in exasperation when Shou catches him with his hands.
“You were supposed to use your powers!” He complains.
“I wasn’t supposed to do anything. I could’ve just let you eat some concrete, but I’m a nice person and decided to save you. You’re welcome.” Shou forces himself to smile at him. It’s mostly teeth.
“...Thank you.” Aidan concedes.
“There we go.”
They keep walking. Aidan keeps his head ducked down, unnaturally focused on missing sidewalk cracks. Shou keeps an eye out for anyone who seems to be following them, and decides that if anyone stays behind them for more than two blocks, they change course.
“Amma said her back was hurting this morning.” Aidan announces after three whole blocks of silence. “She’s not my mom-mom, but apparently if you step on sidewalk cracks, it makes your mom’s back hurt worse, so you’re not supposed to step on them.”
“Huh.” Shou makes a point of missing one sidewalk crack just to sate him, checks over his shoulder and determines that no one’s trailing them, and then keeps going. “It’s probably No Name causing it.”
“Probably.” Aidan frowns, deep in thought, and Shou leaves him there. His own mind is messy, something that he’s been on-and-off lost in all day. He spots some kids his age in a cafe and all of the sudden, he wants to see Ritsu. Not even talk to him, but just hang around him and exist nearby. It’s not too far of a walk, really. He could just drop Aidan off and then go to the Kageyama’s house, but he has no real excuse for going. No adventure to wisk Ritsu away on, no idea as to what they could do for fun, not even a cool video game to show off. He just has the pit in his chest that he can’t put a name to, and the worst thing is that Ritsu would let him in anyhow, even though Shou wouldn’t deserve it. So he’s not going to bother Ritsu with this, not unless it gets truly unbearable.
“Can your powers show you what No Name’s name is gonna be?” Aidan emerges from his thoughts and shakes Shou out of his own head. Another fucking powers question.
Shou breathes in through his nose. He’s not going to give off any clues to Aidan. He is fine. He is normal. “No.” He says, very level and even. Very obviously trying to stay level and even.
They’re a third of the way home.
“Can you try?”
Shou’s gut instinct is to say no, but he gets a better idea. “I can try, but it means that you can’t say anything the whole way home. I have to use all my concentration for it.”
“Okay!” Aidan’s face lights up at the idea of possibly getting to see Shou’s powers in work. They keep on going, and when Shou changes direction after noticing a businessman six steps behind them for two blocks, he doesn’t say anything about it. He doesn’t say anything when it happens again with a jogger and her dog. He just shuts up and trusts Shou so absolutely that it makes him sick.
They make it home half an hour later than usual and Shou sees his mother pacing, phone pressed to her ear. She stops when they enter and she damn near drops it.
“There you two are!” She exclaims, and then she goes back to the phone. “Now, what were you saying about the damage?”
Right. Somebody would’ve contacted her about the damage. Shou decides to make himself sparse and go upstairs, but Aidan tugs on his sleeve. “What’s her name?”
“I don’t know.” He whispers back, tugging his arm from Aidan’s grasp. Then he goes up to his room and hops in the shower, changes into a different set of clothes, shoves the old ones to the bottom of his hamper. Then Shou flops face-down on his bed, the world compressing into two pillows, and tries to convince himself that if he lays he long enough, he’ll eventually feel better.
***
Shou sits in the living room, a place he doesn’t normally like to spend time, but the fire thing clearly has his mother upset, and so he decides it’s wise to stay nearby and mitigate any explosions that might happen. The TV plays a trivia show he doesn’t care about, but Aidan and Matthew are absorbed, and his mother is calmer than she was at dinner. He sends off a text to Ritsu, just for something to do with his hands, and melts further into the couch he’s claimed as his. He is not thinking about arson.
[Shou] do u know a state in the us that starts with u?
[Ritsu] Utah.
[Ritsu] Why?
[Shou] step-fam is doing trivia shit again. they’re STRUGGLING with geo tonight.
[Ritsu] ...I thought they were American. Wouldn’t they know the states?
[Shou] you’d think so, but apparently not.
[Ritsu] RIP to them, then.
Trivia switches to news and Shou finds himself sitting up straighter. Traffic, a story about a murder of an executive, the hurricane again. Shou can’t think of a good reply. A commercial break, Matthew talking about something that happened at school, Shou thinks about the flames and suddenly feels sick, but no one can find him. No one can find him, but his family is looking right at him and he’s never wanted to be more invisible in his life, in this normal moment in time. It’s almost overwhelmingly average. His mother is feeling better and laughing. Matthew is finishing his story and smiling, too. Aidan is absorbed with his trains. Shou committed arson not even six hours ago, but he’s here, pretending like he’s part of this normal family. Like he’s part of anything.
He gets up from the couch and makes it three steps before his mother calls out for him. “Shou, honey, where are you going?”
“I just remembered some work I forgot to do.” He lies, keeps heading towards the stairs, heading to his room so he can vanish in peace and never emerge.
“I thought you finished your school work.” She says, and there’s a small hint of suspicion there. He stops and looks at her, and her face has stopped making sense to him. He can’t get a clear read either way, can’t think straight, can’t think above the urge to hide, but Shou doesn’t even know what he’s hiding from. He just needs to disappear.
“I forgot about the history.” Shou manages, and then he starts going again. This time, he doesn’t stop. It’s not until he reaches the foot of the stairs that he realizes that Aidan’s behind him.
“It’s about powers, isn’t it?” He whispers conspiratorially. “I won’t tell Dad or Amma if you give me powers, too.”
“Aidan.” Shou crouches down to his level and puts a hand on his shoulder. The smile he gives is polite and perfect except for the fact that it doesn’t reach his eyes, will never reach his eyes. “If you ask for me to give you powers one more time, I’m going to break your head open on Mom’s nice kitchen floor, and then I’m going to fucking leave you there to rot. Do you get that? I’m going to fucking leave you there to rot if you ask me about powers one more time. Nod once if you understand that.”
Aidan doesn’t nod. A high whine builds up in his throat, one that makes Matthew’s head turn, and the tears start falling the second Aidan calls out “Dad!”
So of course Matthew comes over. And Amma comes over. And everyone’s coming over and looking at him and Amma says “Shou,” all stern and cold while Matthew hugs his son and Shou stands up and lets the smle drop, replaces it with something more serious.
“What? What do you want me to do, huh? He keeps asking me to give him powers. Powers!” Shou laughs, but it sounds humorless and empty to him. “So what do you want me to do? You want me to upset him, or do you want me to push his face against the stove? He’ll cry either way.”
Amma is silent. She’s made a connection she’s been avoiding and gasps in gentle horror. Shou feels something inside of him snap, sharp and hard, and words start pouring from his mouth, words that he had been stockpiling with the intent to keep them hidden forever.
“Or do you want me to drown him? Pops prefered they use drowning when it was available. Waterboarding, too. Leaves less of a permanent scar, you know? It’s only in your face for a few days and in your lungs for a lifetime, but the burns leave all kinds of marks. Very inconvenient. I think those would raise questions for Aidan at school, don’t you? Unless you want to pull him out, like you and Pops did with me. I like to think you were just stupid enough not to know, but who knows, maybe you wanted me to be the Awakened Child. Well, you got your wish! It would’ve happened anyways but now I have that fucking title and the cops are after me for an interview, it was on the morning news, but we all know what that really means, don’t we? So if he wants powers, we better get this torture done fast. Better hang him by his ankles and slice him open quick, huh? If that’s what you want, say the words! I’m a good kid now, haven’t you heard, I’ll get right to it, I’ll—”
“Shou, enough of this.” Amma crosses her arms, digs in, holds her ground, but there’s something shocked in her expression that lets Shou know that he got her.
“I’ll say when it’s enough!” There’s a pregnant pause after that, and he lets it linger before he goes on. “That’s what you want, right, Aidan? You want powers?” Shou stops and looks at him, almost entirely hidden by Matthew’s back. There’s no answer. “Well, if he wants powers, he’s gonna have to go through it. If he really wants powers, he’s gonna have to—”
“I just wanted to be like you.” Aidan sniffles from his father’s shoulder. “That’s all I wanted. I just wanted to be like you.”
He speaks just loudly enough that Shou hears it and Shou makes himself stop before he does something he can’t take back. Before he does something that makes him into someone he spent his whole life trying not to be. He breathes in, shoves his hands in his pockets, and shakes his head.
“No, you really don’t.”
Shou makes his way towards the door.
No one stops him.
***
He walks out of the house, fighting with the frantic feeling in his chest that signals the urge to cry. He will not cry, he does not cry, he turns invisible and keeps going, flies around Seasoning City in loop after loop until he's so tired he thinks he might fall from the air and break his neck on the way down. That would be an annoying way to go.
He lands on Ritsu’s balcony and presses his back against the cool glass of his french windows. Shou’s content to just sit here, eyes closed and knowing that Ritsu is nearby, but he’s not going to bother him with this. He can handle this on his own. He can handle everything on his own. He’s perfectly capable of it. He just needs to sit with all that’s happened.
The doors open. Shou doesn’t need to turn to look at Ritsu when he can feel him. “I know you’re out here.” He says to the empty air, and then Shou bothers to show himself. Doesn’t move, just lets himself be seen.
Ritsu crouches in front of him and Shou refuses to open his eyes. If he were to see the look he thinks Ritsu’s giving him, the intense, all-consuming thing he sometimes gives to homework assignments and piles of rubble he’s intent on moving, Shou thinks he would die on the spot.
“Something happened.”
A nod.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
A shake of the head.
“Alright.”
Ritsu then wraps him up in a hug, something they’ve never really done before but that feels right nonetheless. His hands settle between Shou’s shoulder blades and Shou finds his head in the crook between Ritsu’s shoulder and neck and his hands are making these soothing little circles that make Shou exhausted. He has no clue what to do with his arms except throw them loosely around Ritsu’s waist and hope.
Ritsu holds him tight, without complaint or expectation, and Shou lets his weight fall against him. The desire to cry comes back because he feels safe enough that it’s a feasible option and Ritsu pulls him up with a strength Shou forgot he had, gets them standing, gets them in a position that’s slightly more comfortable. It is dark and Ritsu’s holding him and Shou has done nothing to deserve any sort of affection or comfort. If anything, he should be getting the opposite.
“It’s going to be okay.” Ritsu says, apropos of nothing, and if he notices Shou rub his face on his shoulder to get rid of the built-up tears, he says nothing about it. He just lets Shou exist as he needs to.