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He hasn’t stepped outside in three weeks. The world is big and wide and bright - at least, that’s how he remembers it. Maybe it's changed in the time he’s been holed up in the white-walled room. He wants to know if everything's the same, but he doesn’t know how to make the blinds over the window go up, and the people who visit him never talk to him. They never talk to him, but they talk about him. He can hear them, see them, pointed fingers and flashing teeth, Is that him? The kid who -
They always stop when they notice him watching.
Nobody ever answers his questions, not even the silly ones, not even the really important ones, like the ones about his parents. He hasn’t seen them in a while. Are they okay? The last thing he remembers before waking up in this place is being strapped into his seat in the back of the car, being driven to preschool because his mother thought he was too young to walk there himself. And he remembers asking something stupid, insignificant - he can’t even recall what it was - and then there had been a jerk and a jolt and a sound like ripping metal, and he’d shut his eyes, and he’d woken up here.
Without anything to do besides listening to the steady beep-beep-beep of the machine with the green zigzag line going across its screen, the hours drag. And he knows that they’re hours, because, the day before what he now refers to in his head as The Mystery, his teacher showed him and his classmates how to read a clock. He wonders if she’ll be upset that he’s missing so much school. He doesn’t know how he’ll explain to her that it isn’t his fault.
Days pass.
Nobody comes.
His name is Shinsou Hitoshi and he’s alone.
His social worker is a pretty lady with a tired smile, and she tells him to call her Kanagi, Ka-na-gi, beautiful, lovely, calm. She also tells him that he just needs to find his place, like he’s a puzzle piece lost in the world, waiting to find a bigger picture to click! into. She sounds so sincere every time that she says it that he doesn’t have the heart to tell her that she’s wrong, that he doesn’t want to find his place, because he already knows where he belongs and all he wants to do is go back to it.
All he wants to do is go home.
After Kanagi takes him to the doctor and the doctor tells him what his Quirk is, the kids in the group home start being mean.
For example, when he tells Hinowa - his best friend, or so he thought - the news, she tries to push him off of the highest part of the climbing frame at the playground, and then when she gets out of time-out she tries to do it again, and again, and again, and so Tokiatsu - the lady who runs the home - tells him to stop playing with her.
Hitoshi listens, but then he sees Hinowa whispering to Yuusou, a boy three years older than him, and, later that night, when Hitoshi asks to have a turn on the game, Yuusou shoves him to the ground hard enough to make him hit his head.
He calls Hitoshi a freak.
He calls Hitoshi a witch.
He calls Hitoshi a monster and a mutant and a demon and tells him that he’s never going to get adopted, ever, because no one would ever want a future villain as a son.
Tokiatsu lets him stay in her room that night, and, when she thinks that he’s asleep, she calls Kanagi. She talks to her for a long time, in hushed tones, and says, They’re trying to hurt him, Kanagi. She says, I don’t know what to do. She says, and she sounds like she’s about to cry, Get him out of here.
And so Hitoshi ends up with Marai, who has a mean smile, a bad temper, and a fridge full of yellow-blue cans that Hitoshi isn’t allowed to touch.
And so Hitoshi starts elementary school with bruises on his arms and bruises on his chest and bruises on his throat, and he doesn’t know how Kanagi finds out but she’s at the front door a few days later, dropping down to her knees and pulling him into her arms. “It's not your fault,” she tells him when he apologizes and apologizes, face buried in the crook of her neck and hands balled tight in her shirt. “It's not your fault, I promise,” and, once again, Hitoshi doesn’t tell her that she’s wrong.
Hitoshi is sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office for his yearly check-up when the question hits. He pauses in the middle of coloring in the lines of a printed-out picture of All Might and looks up at Kanagi. She’s not looking at him, is leaning back in the rigid plastic chair with her eyes closed, and so he clears his throat to get her attention. She gives it to him without a complaint.
He says, wording it carefully so she has no reason to get mad like Yuusou, like Midai, “I think that you’re very nice to me.” He turns back to his crayons, gripping the purple in one tight fist, avoiding her face. “I think that I wouldn’t mind if you were my new mom.”
“Oh,” Kanagi says, and then falls silent. She doesn’t speak for a long, long time, but when she does, all she says is, quietly, “I’m pretty sure that All Might’s suit is blue, Hitoshi.”
“... Right,” Hitoshi says, and switches out the colors.
He doesn’t bring up the topic again.
Kanagi doesn’t love him, he realizes later. She only cares about him because it's her job. He’s only ever a job to people, a burden.
He feels stupid for not figuring it out sooner.
“Shinsou Hitoshi.”
In the man’s mouth, Hitoshi’s name sounds like a death sentence. The man slams Hitoshi’s personal file down on the desk and watches him, waiting for a flinch. It doesn’t come.
“He’s a good boy,” Kanagi says. She’s sitting in the chair beside Hitoshi, her hands in her lap. “He’s very clever, very polite. I’m sure that he’ll cause you no trouble at all.”
“Are you sure? I can’t take in a child who will end up being an embarrassment.”
I don’t want him, Kanagi is saying. Take him.
I don’t want him any more than you do, the man is saying. Keep him.
Hitoshi stares down at his hands, clenches his fists in his lap. He says, “I’ll be really quiet.” He looks up at the man, who is staring at him with newfound interest. “You won’t even know that I’m there. I promise.”
“What, boy? Afraid of being last?”
It's a test, it's a test because everything is always a test, and so Hitoshi bites his tongue and doesn’t answer.
The man looks at him, watches him, and then nods once, sharp, and glances at Kanagi.
“I’ll take him.”
He watches the door to his room creak open later that night, and the only thing he’s able to think is, Ah. So that’s why he wanted someone who knew how to keep their mouth shut.
Hitoshi learns to pack a bag fast and run away faster - when things go wrong, he climbs out the window and is gone before Kanagi shows up to tell him that he has to leave anyways. They always drag him back, eventually, because he’s seven years old and seven-year-olds aren’t all too good at playing hide-and-seek, but one time he manages to disappear for five days before someone finds him. Back then, he counted it as a win in his book, that he managed to elude capture for so long.
Now, though, he wonders if they were even looking.
His foster mother of the month takes him to the science museum when he’s nine and a quarter, and he’s been there exactly twenty-eight times since - kids under twelve get in free, and so do kids with a lockpick. That first time, he holds his foster mother’s hand all the way until they make it to the space exhibit, and then he breaks away, darts this way and that for three full hours and ignores the overhead announcements calling his name.
Kanagi shows up on the doorstep on the evening of that very same day, but the disappointment on her face is worth it, he thinks, to be able to look at the stars.
“There’s a word,” Hitoshi says to his teacher one day, lingering after class in an attempt to get the bitter taste off of his tongue, “for something that’s just slightly out of place.”
She tilts her head, thinking. She’s young, new, fresh from college, not yet used to the bustle and clamor of Hitoshi’s current middle school, and it shows in the way that she’s taking time out of her own lunch period to answer the strangely-structured question of a back-row student. Finally, she offers, “Askew?”
Hitoshi rolls the word around in his mouth, tastes it. He shakes his head. “No, that’s not it.”
“Askance,” she tries. “Awry. Amiss.” Then, when Hitoshi shakes his head again, she’s silent for longer than before, quiet. And then she says, “Dislocated.”
Hitoshi stares past her, out the window. Seeing things that aren’t there. “Yeah,” he says, after a long, long moment. “That sounds about right.”
You’re one of the lucky ones, Kanagi tells him one day, in the space between a group home and another family as fake and manufactured as plastic.
He’s riding in the front seat, too tall at the age of thirteen to have an excuse to do anything else. Being in the back would make it look like he was avoiding her, and while he wants to, sometimes, he doesn’t want to alienate the one person that he can count on to treat him like he’s worth anything.
Alienate.
That’s another word he’s learned, scouring through the dictionary that someone in the home gave him as a Christmas present, probably as a joke gift, but he appreciates it anyways. It's a way to pass the time while he’s waiting to be placed with another new mother or father,
Anyways, Hitoshi looks at Kagani, wary. I don’t get it.
You’ve got a chance to change the world.
He’s a monster, an example of how Quirks could define lives, could plan them out without the user’s input. He is thin and sly and quick on his feet, a villain in the making, sharp teeth in a shark’s grin. But he’s pretty, Kanagi tells him, when he smiles. People like that, having a kid they can show off in public, that can sit still and sit quiet and sit like a prop in a show, a pawn, a china doll on a high shelf.
And so, she tells him, he should smile more.
She tells him about how he should always be presentable, always be polite, always be nothing more than a boy painted as a statue painted as a boy, anything to increase his chances of being picked. Like he’s a dog in the kennel of a pet shop. Like he’s a slab of meat.
She tells him all of this and more.
She tells him a lot of things.
She tells him, there in the front seat of the car, You can prove that people with mentalist Quirks aren’t always bad. You can raise the standard for kids like you. You can change the world, Hitoshi, don’t you want that?
No. He doesn’t. He doesn’t want to change the world. He just wants to be enough. But nobody listens when he says no, and nobody cares, and so he just shrugs and watches the world blur past outside.
Yeah, he says. Sure.
He’s out of the foster home by the end of the week, and it's not his fault, but it is, because it always is.
It's his fault that his foster mother’s real son, six years older than Hitoshi, had grabbed his hair and dragged him off the couch, cooing, Look at you, you’re so adorable.
And it's his fault that he thought about how one of his old classmates leered at him a while back and said that he was probably going to get a job as a street walker, so he might as well start practicing now, and how he had shut up when Hitoshi broke his teeth in with a blow that split his knuckles open wide.
It's his fault, it's his fault, that’s what he was told when his new foster brother was flat on his back and there was broken glass on the floor and people were screaming at him, your fault, your fault, why can’t you ever fucking do anything right? Why can’t you listen? What is wrong with you, Hitoshi, we’re trying to do you a favor and you’re just spitting it back in our face, get out, we don’t want you here.
Kanagi had shown up in the flash of ambulance lights, had shaken her head when the police officer unlocked his handcuffs and shoved him towards her. What did you do this time? she asked. Never, What happened this time?
What happened and what he’s done are two completely different things.
I defended myself, Hitoshi spat back. He was dragging me by my fucking hair.
You could’ve asked him to stop.
Right, because everyone always reacts so well when I ask them a question.
She hadn’t answered, and Hitoshi had gotten into the car, silent, seething.
You can change the world, Hitoshi.
Yeah, right.
He can say whatever he wants in here, it won’t be repeated. Unless he says that he’s going to hurt himself, because then it will be repeated and repeated and repeated until the right person is found to make him cut that out.
There is nothing between his chair and hers. It's an open space. He doesn’t open his mouth. She talks him through the protocol, the legal obligations she has, the terms of the contract.
She says that Kanagi says that he has problems with anger and problems with control and problems with socializing properly and he has more problems than he should have but, oh boy, can he throw a punch.
Do you like to fight, Hitoshi? Do you like martial arts?
Her voice is kind and neutral and way too fucking nice.
A mental evaluation is not what he agreed to, but it's what Kanagi agreed to, and she makes the rules. She should be the one answering all these questions, he thinks, but he knows that this is a requirement if he’s ever going to be accepted into Yuuei.
Do you like to fight, Hitoshi?
“Yeah,” he says. “I do.”
“Fists up, stance lowered, feet apart.”
Hitoshi stumbles, caught off-guard, and barely manages to dodge a blow that whistles past his ear a bare inch away from his face.
“Watch out for your blind spot. Watch out for your opponent’s blind spot.”
He doesn’t move fast enough to completely avoid the second strike, and it glances off his shoulder hard enough to make him wince.
“Don’t stand still, keep moving, make yourself a harder target to hit.”
He throws a punch of his own, but all that Aizawa does is catch him by the wrist and force his arm down. “Don’t telegraph your movements,” he says, and Hitoshi huffs and slaps at his hand until he lets him go. He has no idea how Aizawa manages to talk and fight at the same time, but it's irritating, how little effort it takes for him to render him immobile.
As if sensing his frustration, Aizawa sighs. He drops back into a crouch, raises his fists in front of him. “Feet apart,” he repeats. “You need a steady base.”
Hitoshi mimics him, frowning. “I don’t know how I’ll remember this in the middle of a fight,” he says, honest.
Aizawa’s lips twitch like he’s trying not to smile, but it somehow doesn’t feel malicious. More like he’s amused by Hitoshi’s complaints rather than Hitoshi himself. “You’ll remember if you get knocked on your ass enough times,” he says, and, yeah, that makes sense, but it sounds like a pretty painful way to learn a lesson. Hitoshi says so, and Aizawa snorts a laugh. “Tell me about it.”
“Feet apart,” Hitoshi mutters to himself, trying to commit it to memory. “I need a steady base.”
“There we go,” Aizawa says, encouraging, and then lunges forward. Hitoshi’s expecting it this time and he pivots to the side, blocks a blow, and lands one of his own on Aizawa’s arm. He barely even flinches, but he knows he has to feel it because the spot that he hit is steadily turning red. Aizawa moves like he’s about to try to aim a hit at Hitoshi’s ribs and he shifts accordingly, then sees what’s about to happen a second too late.
Aizawa sweeps his legs out from under him and sends him crashing to the ground.
The impact knocks the air from his lungs and he lays there on his back for a good minute, gasping for breath. When Aizawa crouches down beside her, probably checking to see if he’s being dramatic or if he’s genuinely winded, Hitoshi glares half-heartedly at him and hisses, “This is child abuse.”
Aizawa raises an eyebrow. “You’ve got to watch for the feints, Shinsou,” he says, and straightens up, holds out a hand to help him off the plasticky blue mats of the training room.
Hitoshi takes it, letting Aizawa pull him to her feet, says, “Yeah, I noticed.” He rolls his shoulders, feeling an ache resonate bone-deep through them, and takes a deep, steadying breath.
Aizawa tracks the motion, frowns. “Are you tired?”
“Oh, please. This is easy.”
Aizawa laughs, long and loud, and Hitoshi smiles.