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The Takami family runs.
She can't say she's any better, even if she left that name behind – she knows more than anyone else fate always stores some twisted joke in your life –, but Tomie thinks she could try to be; after all, she had almost two decades to think where she did wrong and where to start over.
The circumstances forced her to leave her new home, but she thinks she made the right decision; it’s obvious she couldn’t stay in the house, especially not when those dangerous, scary men found her once and she barely survived. Who says the next time, things might turn for the worse? Who says she wouldn’t have died if she chose to stay in that big, big, too big, empty and void, house she received so many years ago?
She knows better than anyone, instincts should be trusted, especially by someone who clings onto them desperately in order to see another day.
Yet, she couldn’t escape without leaving a trace like she usually does, not when she had given away everything about the Takami family, not when she had to give his son’s name to those men, who she has no idea what they would need it for.
Keigo doesn’t deserve that.
It had been years, too many years, since she had ever talked about Keigo – it was forbidden. A part of the contract she signed, when she received her new residence and when she muttered her last goodbyes to her child, prohibited any form of disclosure about the Takamis and any mention of her boy.
Because she doesn’t have a son, nor does she have a husband. Her name is Ukai Tomie and the only Takami alive is her not husband, arrested almost two decades ago by the police after the tempestive intervention of Flame Hero: Endeavor, according to the official records.
The name Takami Keigo doesn’t exist; ironically, it was her most well kept secret.
It was a bit difficult to find a piece of paper and a pen – she never felt the need to write anything on paper except the grocery list, whenever the Commission sent her the monthly check – but it was harder to let the words out.
What do you say to your child, who you felt you needed to leave behind, for his own good? How can you tell him you don’t have the courage to confront him after so many years?
Tomie is proud of him, and she made sure to include those words in her letter.
She believed Keigo was doing well.
She hoped her child was doing well, even without her. Never once did she stop looking at the TV, and never once did she miss news about the heroes, especially after her son turned eighteen and debuted as a hero himself; Hawks, they call him on the screen, during interviews and in evening shows. In her mind, however, he will always be Keigo, even if on the television they wouldn’t know.
She kept following the movements and voices from the screen, until he was gone from the scene, or the interview ended, or the host changed topic. She would look at his face, trying to see something, anything, but it was so difficult – what have they done to you? – to decipher his expressions.
She never stops seeing.
She saw whenever her husband would throw litter around, like she saw her son try to clean after his father; she would cast a glance at her – murderous, unstable – partner kicking her – "Ungrateful brat! How many times have I told you to not turn your back on me?!" – son on his small back, right between his little wings, before turning her eyes away.
She never turned her head from the screen in front of her, not once. There was no use when her true eyes, the gray ones in her eye sockets, are unseeing.
And, even if she would try to find a reasonable explanation, there was always that fear in the back of her mind, those instincts she had to follow diligently to live, that her beloved husband would look at her with anger in his cold, golden, eyes. That he would have tormented her instead of her son. That he would have chosen to leave her behind.
"Don't leave, okay?"
Instincts were what usually made the choices for her, but they weren't infallible: when her husband was arrested – she followed with anticipation the live on TV, waiting, hoping, praying her beloved would escape like always, like those countless times she saw how he would avoid the police and come back to their house, to her – fear paralyzed Tomie in place.
And, even if not perfect, her ingrained desire to live, passed down generation in generation to maintain the human race, not entirely conscious, was, is, and will be stronger than everything else.
That time, she chose to move.
"We have to run, Keigo... They'll find us if we stay here."
Looking back, Tomie believes with absolute clarity, there wasn't much she could have done.
Her child took Tomie's outstretched hand – and what else could he have done, if not trust her; aren't mothers supposed to do anything in their power to protect their children's smiles? – and silently followed her on the streets.
She never wanted to see her little boy cry – and she never saw him, never she had seen tears run down his hollow, too hollow for a child’s, cheeks.
Not when he was toddler, not when her husband would slap Keigo for leaving the house, not when Tomie would ignore his hunger and leave him to almost burn his own tiny hands – clumsy, in the way only children could be – attempting to cook food for both him and his mother, using whatever he could scrape out from the cabinets and the fridge.
But she could tell.
She could tell how emotions would run across people's faces, how their eyes would turn away from her quirk, grossed out by the innocent eyeballs of the same grayish blue of her own, vitreous irids. She could tell whenever they looked at her and her child, with pity and hesitation lingering in their glances, moving away until it felt out of place and inappropriate – they are no heroes – coming back to offer some help.
She could tell whenever her husband would curse the day she ended up pregnant, ultimately chaining him to her, and she would get a glimpse of the frustration and resignation on his gaze. He didn't like when she could just use her quirk to know where he was when in town, he didn't want to see his wife's constant presence on him, he didn't accept how dependent on Tomie's powers he was.
But she couldn't wish for anything more and she would constantly ask him to please. Don't leave.
She could tell, even years and years later, when those men came into her residence at night, cornered her and demanded informations on Keigo and her husband. She saw clearly blue, blue eyes burning with trepidation and a touch of manic determination, to the point her urge to survive kicked in and she couldn't resist selling her son's name – her child, her little boy – away.
So back then, when another crack of countless in her sanity formed, when everything was too much, when her child looked at her expectantly, when she couldn't see anything else besides her husband's eyes, his quirk, his red, red, red feathers, like the red of Keigo's shivering wings, when she refused to listen to her child's kind, quiet voice, when she couldn't stop herself in time and- "get us some money! You're his son, aren't you? Why were you even born? What are those wings for-?!"
Tomie could tell.
She remembers Keigo's arms circling as tight as he could his stuffed toy and she remembers Keigo looking away from her, at his feet, at the dirty concrete and the stained wall of the train station, where they stopped to rest after the hasty escape from to the place they called once, to never be again, home.
He didn’t want his mom to see the sorrow in his face. Keigo was hiding from her, from his mother, like he used to mask his pain from the bruises his father gave him, from the cramps caused by hunger, from the twitch of his wings, from her husband’s harsh, cutting, merciless names, from her negligence, from the call of the world he was prohibited to live.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry please, Keigo, I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry."
She recalls her son slightly letting go of the toy, before he would slowly, tentatively, look at her face, even if he knew those eyes wouldn’t – couldn’t – see.
“Come here. Don’t leave me. Please."
But when those black suited men looked for her, for her boy, for her boy’s wings, could she claim she saw through their lies and their pretty words, their generous offer, their ability to cut the ties that linked her to her son, her son to his father, both her and her child from her husband’s criminal life? Was her decision driven by the instinct of survival, or was it a conscious one, to let them take her little boy away in exchange for a better life?
“What do you say, Keigo? Will you come with us?”
He tugged at his mother’s vest, as if he wanted her to say something, anything, before answering with a simple nod. It seemed like he was focusing his attention on the perfectly polished shoes of the man in front of him, and never once he dared mutter a word.
For how hard she searched – did she try enough? Did she care to? – Tomie could find nothing.
“It’s settled then. Please this way, ma’am: let us introduce you to your new home”
She doesn’t know if she couldn’t tell, or didn’t want to.