Chapter Text
It was early in the spring of my twenty-second year that my self-appointed-best-and-only-friend decided I was depressed, presumably because I worked only afternoon shifts, spent the entirety of my mornings in bed, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of free time to thinking about death.
Whenever you read a depression booklet or website or whatever, they always list exercise and companionship among the available treatments. But, as far as I was certain, depression is not a side effect of standing still, nor is it the resulting calamity of not speaking to every stranger you bump into on the street. Depression is more of a side effect obtained from a lifetime spent staggering beneath the collected ton of baggage on your shoulders. But my friend believed I required treatment, so she took it upon herself to ensure that I was getting my daily dose of exercise and interaction with humans by accompanying me on my nightly run.
This nightly run featured a brisk jog up and down the city streets surrounding my apartment complex for about ten or so minutes, followed by a lazy walk back to the building’s parking lot to the spot where her car would always be parked.
The nightly run, of course, was less of a run than it was a glorified walk. We met every evening at the same time in the lobby of my small apartment. I would wait for her standing near the front doors, where the dingy-green carpet merged into the tile of the center walkway, where one or two of my neighbours would be passed out drunk or asleep on the pair of decade-old couches, having not quite made it to their respective compartments within the building.
I noticed this because I had spent so much of my life surrounded by these type people that their habits had become familiar, even if their names and faces weren’t. I still recognized the few I had actually bothered to get to know, of course. But for the most part, these people were as invisible to me as I was to them.
So here’s how it went before the nightly run began: I walked in from the door that led to the stairs, gazed at the decrepit scene of unfortunates passed out on each of the stained couches, leaned against the wall next to the front doors, and breathed in the residue smoke of users as I waited for my self-appointed-friend to show. Once in a while, some dude might pass by, smelling grossly of alcohol and general squalor. If I was lucky, I got to pet one of the many cats that roamed the building, all of which technically belonged to Mrs. Fuji, a midget of an old lady and the only person whose presence I found oddly comforting whenever we interacted, but had all gotten out at some point or another and now freely navigated the entirety of the complex, once in a while, a few even venturing outside to hunt the various rodents on our block—the decomposing innards of which can still be found scattered all around the outside of our apartment.
Once I received the text message I was waiting for, I would excuse myself from any feline companion I had snuggled in my arms that night to head outside to the lit sidewalk. And then began our glorified walk in and around the blocks surrounding the apartment area: me coaxing this concerned friend of mine named Emiko Chiba, a round-faced, pudgy girl with wavy green hair and straight bangs, into preforming at least a few stretches before we set off into the night. To be fair to Emiko, she wasn’t exactly the athletic type, though she always made an effort to at least keep up during the first ten minutes or so. After that, it was a puttering walk as she munched on one of the many candy bars she had stashed away on her at all times.
And her Quirk was at least somewhat responsible. She had the fantastic ability to transmit stamina into whatever food she cooked, allowing a person to gain energy after eating it. The only downfall being that the usage of her quirk drained her of her own stamina, resulting in her needing to eat in order to regain it back. As far as I was aware Emiko had always been slightly overweight, though whether it stemmed from laziness or as an actual side effect of her quirk, I had never been able to tell.
And we got along well enough in spite of our differences. She came from a well off family, but never looked down on people for having less than she did, and instead treated everyone with the same respect and kindness. Though I’d initially been less than eager to have anything more than a working relationship with her, her tenacity towards a goal wasn’t something easily overcome once she put her mind to it. The fact that she wore the kind of thick glasses that made her eyes preternaturally huge, like her whole head was basically a character straight out of an anime, didn’t exactly make turning her down easy on the conscience, either.
So nightly runs became our thing, and after a few weeks, I grew to even mildly enjoy the whole affair. In fact, I even found myself buying candy bars to carry with me as well in case Emiko ended up needing them. (Most of which I admittedly ended up eating as soon as I returned home for the night, but still).
Emiko pulled her car door shut in my apartment’s underground parking lot at 10:26. I bent down and retied my right shoelace, which had loosened at some point during our walk back.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” asked Emiko again, and I looked up to find her gazing down at me with worried eyes. “We’d only be gone for three days.”
“No, it’s fine,” I said, and pushed a smile onto my face. “Go, enjoy the time with your family.”
“Are you sure?” she said as I stood up. “Because you wouldn’t be intruding—”
I rolled my eyes. “Emiko, I’ll be fine. I promise.”
“If you’re sure,” she said, the corners of her lips finally turning upward. I tried not to think about how owlish she appeared with her magnified lilac eyes and small, pinkish lips. “Just don’t forget to crawl out of your bat-cave at least twice a day while I’m gone.”
“Oh god, anything but that,” I said, pretending to be put out by her request.
“I’ll see you in three days,” she said, beaming.
“Yup. Three days. Have fun in Tokyo!”
“I’ll bring you back something tasty to eat!” she said through the rolled-down window as she drove away.
I watched her drive away. The stale air tasted like gasoline, the desolate space eerily silent now that Emiko had left. The underground parking lot was only a single level since the apartment was so tiny; the apartment building, a cement stack of four floors and marked by row after row of windows shuttered by shabby curtains. I felt nothing as I exited the underground lot and stood staring up at the ugly building in the dark, no stir of bitterness, or even shame. Despite this being the place I had lived for past ten years of my life in Japan I couldn’t rightly consider it mine. I still thought of it as “hers”, even though she had been dead for over four years.
I thought about entering the apartment and retiring early for the night. It was such an easy thing to do. The previous years had been a blurry-film of me practically living in bed when I had nothing else to do. They seemed so ridiculous to me now, all those years spent standing still, and yet I still ached for the simple sensation of my body submerged under warm covers, obliterating everything else. I faced away from the front of the building to shake off the tiredness, to stop my mind from drowning out what was around me.
Just behind that longing was the urge to break into a sudden run. I always had been an active person, even without Emiko’s nose poking into my daily schedule. As much as I’d pulled away from the daytime world in the years after Her death, I’d also leaned hard into world of night. I worked into the evenings, did all my shopping late at night, including my cardio workouts.
I’d started to jog down the street without realizing it, coming to- just as a gust of cool air whipped my hair into my eyes. I was dressed in the clothes I usually wore during my nightly runs, every last thing at least a couple years old. Ankle high socks beneath a pair of black running shoes with streamline reflectors. Black leggings with a discreet ink-coloured fanny pack around my waist. Gloves made of a special quick-dry fabric and a plain black hoodie over a sports bra.
I jogged at a brisk pace down the dimly lit streets, watching the odd person or two come and go, trying to stay on top of my surroundings. I watched old boozed-up men in stained shirts and people with professional appearances drive by in cars and teenagers who sped by with music blasting out their open windows. Nobody had the look of a murderer or rapist, but nobody didn’t look like one either. I jogged with the casual air of certainty in my direction, despite not really knowing where I was going until the shimmering dark water of Dagobah Beach sprung into view.
I stopped and stood staring at the barren beach for a few minutes. Away from all the city lights, I had only the moonlight and twinkling stars to guide me now. I felt no fear despite this though, and after taking a moment to scour the beach for people, I ultimately decided to venture towards a part of the beach I usually avoided.
I jogged near to the shoreline for a while; the tide receding and rising back up again. But after about fifteen minutes of jogging with the beach all to myself, I could see myself fast approaching what appeared to be massive heaps of dark. It was clear that I had reached the junkyard.
It had been quite a few months since I’d last been down this part of the beach, and, though I wasn’t by any means surprised, it saddened me to see that it was in an even worse state than before. Trash washing up from the sea had been accumulating here for years, but clearly people had taken to using the spot as a dumping ground, if the piling up of the various refrigerators, bins, wardrobes, and broken freezers were anything to go by.
There was nowhere else for me to run because of the massive piles of junk in my way, so I planned to turn around once I reached the blockage. I wiped the back of my hand against my forehead in order to brush away some of the thin tails of sweat and regarded the garbage-mountain just as I started to turn away.
A boy was sitting on top of the heap.
I was quite sure I’d never seen him before. Long and leanly muscular, I really couldn’t make out much more than that in the moonlight. Blonde hair, sticking every which way and short. He looked about my age, maybe a couple of years older, and he sat with one knee bent and the other hanging down, his posture careless, one elbow resting on his bent knee.
I looked away, not wanting to intrude when he was here for the same reason I was probably: to be alone. It wasn’t as though I could pass by the mountains of trash anyway. And I wasn’t one to waltz up to some dude I didn’t know from a hole in the wall. I ought to just turn around and jog back the way I had come. And yet—
I cut a glance up to him, and saw that he still hadn’t seemed to notice me. His body rigidly overlooking the sea, while his mind drifted seemingly elsewhere. I had no possible idea as to what he was thinking in that moment, but the stillness of his form I recognized.
I was shivering and sweating from my combined workout and the chill in the air as I approached the bottom of the junk heap and began to climb, sand caking my shoes and legging cuffs. His eyes snapped to me as I soon as I started, and though I couldn’t decipher his expression from so far away and in the dark, I could tell he was aware of me now.
He cleared his throat, and I paused in my climbing to look up at him. His voice was unexpectedly low when he looked down at me and said, “Good evening. Not that it’s any of my business, but what are you doing here? It’s dangerous to climb without a light at night . . .”
“I know,” I said, and I focused my attention back unto the task of climbing up, up, up. I knew his eyes were still on me, though he said nothing more as I carefully used a broken television as a ledge to propel myself upwards to some higher bags of garbage. In less than two minutes I was feet away from the freezer he was sitting on, though it felt like an eternity had passed since I’d begun my ascent. The cry of What the hell am I doing? was a continual echo in my head. But, all I could think about was Emiko and the kindness she had shown from right off the start. If showing kindness to another person in turn repaid her in some stupid way—
My hands clasped the edge of the freezer and I hefted myself up and over, so I was then on my knees beside the boy.
“Don’t worry, I’m not here to bother you or anything,” I said. I panted and felt thin beads of sweat trickling down my forehead. I brushed it away, along with a strip of my hair that was tickling my nose, and reached into my fanny pack to retrieve two of the candy bars I had stashed inside. “I was jogging along the beach when I noticed you up here alone,” I said, sliding one of the bars over to him. “You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to—I just thought I could keep you company for the time being. I’ll need to be heading back soon, but for now—”
I shuffled over to the edge and stretched out my legs over the junk beneath it, two feet away from the guy. I glanced at him. He sat like a statue, confused, his eyes on the candy bar I had left in front of him, and his colour varying. It was still difficult to make out the majority of his features in the darkness, but the pair of blonde bangs framing both sides of his face was impossible to miss.
Not wanting to be caught staring, I returned to facing the sea and ripped open the wrapper on my candy bar. I munched on the chocolate silently, my eyes drinking in the sight of the shimmering waves from where I was currently perched upon my throne of stinking garbage. A thin layer of sweat stood on my forehead and I wiped it away with a gloved hand, shivering a little when a breeze blew through the fabric of my sweater.
“Here,” the man said to me, and I jumped when a jacket was draped over my shoulders. I turned to see him kneeling on the right side of me in a plain white shirt. “Sorry, if I was being rude earlier,” he said. “I’m just not used to anyone coming over to this side of the beach . . . much less for said anyone to then climb a pile of junk just to hand a guy a chocolate bar because he seemed lonely.”
“I’m— not very good with people,” I said, blushing a little at the realization of how weird I must have come across to him. I subconsciously pulled the jacket a little tighter around me. “Besides, most guys don’t recline on a trash heap in the middle of the night just because they want to be alone.”
He paused, and I watched as a smile spread across his face. “You got me there, I guess,” he said, and I looked away as he settled onto his rump on the ledge next to me, our bodies close but not close enough to be touching.
Neither of us said anything for a few minutes. I heard the sound of a wrapper ripping close by, and remembered then about my own chocolate bar that I had yet to finish the remains of. I took another bite of it, chewing quietly as the water lapped at the partly submerged garbage below us.
When I was done, I pulled out my phone and clicked it so it would display the time: 11:46. I crushed the wrapper in my hand, and then considered leaving it to rot with the rest of this garbage heap: A single candy bar wrapper won’t have much of an impact. Something stopped me from letting it go though. I’d never been one to leave my trash behind for others to pick up.
Finally, I decided to just shove it into my fanny pack and depose of it properly when I got home. The junk heaps were accumulating enough as it was here without my contributing to it, after all. I pulled the jacket off my shoulders, and then I turned to discover that the guy was watching me.
“Thanks for lending me your jacket,” I said, laying it down on the freezer near next to him. He nodded, though the darkness hid his features. “Well,” I said, nodding vaguely in a sort of awkward goodbye. I lowered my feet onto the pile of smelly bags a little below the freezer and started to carefully retrace my earlier route. “So, I’ll see you around, maybe,” I said.
“Do you need any help getting down?” he asked.
“Nah, thanks,” I said. “I got this.”
“Probably. But let me help you anyways,” he said, dropping down onto where I was leaned-over slowly lowering my leg, with a grace that put my actions to shame and extending his hand to me. “It’s the least I can do to repay you for the chocolate bar.”
I stopped climbing. “We’re still technically strangers. For all I know, you could be an axe-murderer.”
He half smiled. “Just as you could have poisoned that bar you gave me.” I kind of opened my mouth to scoff, but then realized he was right. God, the creep vibes he must have gotten from me.
I sighed through my nose and then reached out to take his bare hand with my gloved one. The strength of his hand surprised me when I used it to steady myself as he led me down onto a busted microwave, and I tried not to think about the lack of physical contact I’d had with any human being for the majority of my life.
I followed him downwards, stepping carefully as I made my way down, heaps-of-sometimes-jagged-sometimes-squishy-trash not exactly being a field of expertise for my body.
And then we were off of the junkyard pile and on the beach, the spring air just on the cool side, the late-night sky heavenly with its expanse of stars.
“Thanks,” I said quietly, turning away from him. I walked in the direction I had come from, leaving the mystery man behind me, and ignored the urge to squeeze the gloved hand where the warmth of his touch lingered.
I felt this weird mix of disappointment and anger welling up inside me. I didn’t even know where this sudden onslaught of emotion was coming from, really, except that there was a lot of it, and I wanted to disappear under the covers on my bed and also replace my quirk with a quirk that didn’t suck at being a quirk. I was walking in my reflective running shoes through the sand, my bangs laying across my brows, and right as I shoved my hands into my sweater pockets, I felt a warm weight engulf my shoulders.
Suddenly walking next to me, the blonde-haired guy half-smiled and said, “I’m headed the same way.”
“Sure, but what’s with this?” I pinched part of the jacket that was hanging off my shoulder closest to him.
“Oh that. You looked like you could still use it,” he said, and rubbed his mane in an embarrassed manner. I wondered what he looked like in broad daylight, when his features weren’t shrouded in darkness. The chances of me ever seeing him again after this were pitifully low though, all things considered.
I went back to staring at the toes of my shoes as I walked, reaching up to wrap the jacket closer around myself. I glanced over at the guy again, who looked back at me. I found myself admiring the bangs on either sides of his face, since I could barely make out anything else. I didn’t look away and neither did he as we walked and soon it was a staring contest. After a while the boy smiled, and then turned away his head to face forwards. When I finally went back to staring at my feet, I caught a glimpse of the cement staircase and realized that we had reached the beach entrance.
I looked over at the boy, who looked back at me. I hadn’t even realized it, but at some point we’d both stopped walking. It felt to me like we were both waiting for something as we continued to stand there, the breeze off the sea blowing strands of my hair over my nostrils and tickling them. Finally, he shifted from one foot onto the other and asked, “What’s your name?”
I considered lying. I was unlikely to see him ever again, after all. But in the end I told the truth. “Chusi Lancaster.” He nodded. The interaction seemed over. I walked past him to the stairs and started climbing. He stepped beside me. “What about you? Do you have a name?” I asked.
Without looking over at me, he said, after a pause, “Toshinori Yagi.”
“Well, Yagi-san,” I said, just as my left foot touched the top step. I stopped and looked over at him. “I’ll be seeing you around, I guess.”
He looked like he was about to say something else, but then nodded. “Take care of yourself.” He walked past me, his shoulders not quite filling out his white shirt, his back slightly hunched, his golden hair moving to the breeze as he faded from my life as quietly he had entered.
When I could no longer see his form silhouetted against the dark, I turned and walked in the opposite direction feeling null.
I went back to my apartment and walked quietly past the couches where men unknown to me lay sleeping and into my apartment on the second-level, where one of Mrs. Fuji’s escaped cats I called Momo slept too, and I took off my clothes and got into the creaking bed that was older than I was. I lay awake for an hour, running my hands over the feline curled up on my pillow, imagining what it would feel like to have a human body sleeping in the bed next to me. I tried to summon up feelings of what I thought it might feel like, as I often did whenever I found myself longing for a companion. I conjured up the presence of a body laying behind me, their chest rising and falling with each breath, their side of the bed sinking with their weight.
I closed my eyes, focusing on that presence, until the last bits of tension melted off my body, and my soul-deep exhaustion rose in its stead.
It wasn’t long after that I drifted asleep.