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He stole this quirk so he could see Yoichi again.
That was all that mattered. The only person, alive or dead, who mattered.
It should be so easy. Take the quirk. Use it while falling asleep. In dreams, traverse a world where he once lived. Go to all the places they used to dwell in, everywhere with the imprint of his memory, his skin cells in the floorboards.
But, as he’s realizing, it doesn’t work that way.
He can’t choose who and what he sees.
Not everyone stays. Even among the dead, Yoichi eludes him.
It’s someone else he sees instead. By pure coincidence, he and his brother had once spent a few weeks in an abandoned apartment building overlooking a certain alley. He sees her through the broken window, is compelled to walk down and into the narrow passage.
He’s seen plenty of it by now. The total collapse of society only increased every petty crime and social plague, all of which went unacknowledged because the violence was far more important to control. Prostitution always existed in Tokyo, but by the time he hit his 30s, it was so rampant that one could be guaranteed a 1000-yen blowjob when walking through certain neighborhoods.
She’s propped up against the wall with a half-empty bottle of cheap sake in her hand. Rotgut, really. Her dress is skimpy and torn, her shoes worn out, her hair thick and unkempt. She’s bigger than he imagined, soft and solid. What did you expect? You remember your birth, what followed. You remember what she looked like, her size. But he was a baby then. Everyone seemed large. She’s of average height but stocky, not the sort he’s used to seeing on the streets, emaciated from years of drugs and self-destruction. Thinking about it, he doesn’t even know what drugs were common back then. He doesn’t even know what year he was born, what year he’s seeing her from right now. 1963? 62? Is she pregnant with the two of them?
“Did you know about us?” he finds himself asking, and as he does he squeezes the taxidermized hand in his coat pocket, all that’s left of his brother, a grotesque reminder of everything he lost a year ago.
No response. The dead can’t respond. She doesn’t even know he’s there, but once he speaks, he finds he doesn’t want to stop.
He’s never spoken to her, never heard her voice or felt her arms. This being who gave him life in more ways than one, alive to birth him, dead to feed him. And he realizes with a surge of discomfort that he wants to hear her, wants her to acknowledge him, wants her to see him.
He crouches down to get a better angle of her face, uncaring of his coat now dragging in the trash behind him. The clothes he now wears, the custom trousers and shirt and coat and leather shoes, would easily cover a year’s worth of rent in one of these buildings nearby. If only she knew how far her son would climb.
“Why didn’t you take care of yourself? You kept drinking and whoring while we were growing. Did it not matter?” Maybe she didn’t know, but he finds that difficult to believe. Who doesn’t notice they’re pregnant with twins after years of unprotected sex, especially when one child is twice the size of an average baby?
She stirs, sighs and pushes the hair from her face as she tries to sit up.
And he leans back on his heels, nearly falling over. Her eyes are green. Identical to Yoichi’s. And now that he can see her full face, he sees him there. Her cheeks are rounder, her chin nearly doubled, but he can see his brother in the lines of her skull. He sees nothing of himself.
Only Yoichi.
Are you really my mother? Why do we look like strangers? Was I only a parasite then, to you, to him?
But before he can properly grapple with this, she stumbles to her feet, dropping the bottle as she does. She pulls from beneath her dress a thin shoulder bag, uncaring of the glimpse of panties anyone walking by might see. A quick scan of her bag and a nod of satisfaction tells him that she still has what few belongings she must have. She’s probably used to being robbed. Then she stoops to properly squeeze her swollen feet into her flats again before stepping out onto the street.
She ignores everyone else just as she ignores her son from out of time. Head down, eyes concentrating on the ground before her, she walks slowly, hunched over, as if she, too, knows she doesn’t belong there.
She bumps into someone who snaps at her, but she doesn’t react.
And he knows why. She has no expectations in life, no hope or belief or delusion that someone might reach out to help her, ask if she’s okay. A fact he’d learned from birth, when his own mother, this woman, failed to help him. When did you learn to see the world this way?
But she’s weak, not like him. She doesn’t seize what others try to deny her. She only accepted her fate, therefore condemning him and his brother to a life of starvation and squalor and suspicion.
He follows her down the street, unseen and unheard just as she herself was, but the difference is that he doesn’t belong there, in this world of the dead. The lack of seeing is different. She stops at a convenience store, A Daily Yamazaki of course. The cheapest of all conbini, but the kind of store you only found in the run-down parts of the city. Even back in AFO’s time, in the ‘90s, when the country had descended to utter chaos, people joked about Daily Yamazaki. You know you’re on the wrong side of town when you pass one.
She grabs things listlessly from the shelves, her trail through the store practiced and tired. He sees the curve of her belly beneath the shapeless dress, and he jerks a hand out, poised to grab her arm until he stops himself and instead forms a fist, digging nails into his palm and feeling the edges of the abyss he carries within him.
She’s pregnant with them, listlessly buying nothing but alcohol and cigarettes and a single, day-old discounted onigiri. It’s not even ten in the morning.
He’s never cared much about money, always being able to get exactly what he wants and needs through fear and torment. Something about it always vaguely disgusted him, and to this day he scarcely uses it. The legends say he grew to be a billionaire, but the reality is he only ever used money for getting coffee from vending machines immune to his intimidation. But he knows that even keeping inflation in mind, the money she just wasted could have bought her a few solid meals, or maybe one and a shower and few hours proper rest at a manga cafe. Take care of yourself. Take care of us. You’re why Yoichi is so sickly, so small.
He laughs then, despite himself, as he follows her from the store. “You stupid bitch. You really convinced yourself you didn’t notice us growing inside of you? Or are you so much of a moron you had no idea that you had to care for us even before we were born?” He laughs as he speaks, but he doesn’t disguise the venom. Nobody can hear him, after all. He’s a shadow in this realm, just as she is in his. “You killed yourself, the way you lived. You didn’t care enough to live for us. You deserved to be devoured.”
He remembers the taste of her flesh, her blood, the messy, slippery parts of her body, the taste of iron and rot. He shouldn’t have such memories, but every second of his life, from the moment of his birth when he’d clawed his way out of her stomach, trapped in the birth canal and realizing he and the thing beside him would die if he didn’t tear a way out, is deeply engrained in his mind. He was born so very alive and enraged. And disappointed and abandoned and alone. The one who should have cared for him died instead, and he knows now that she chose to die. The bitch chose to abandon them. The life she led, the uncaring approach to her own life, the total negligence of him and his brother. We weren’t worth your trying.
“How can you live like this?” he says to her back.
He’s aware of his clothing, of the cut of his suit, the way it makes people grovel before him even if they don’t recognize who he is. Why does it matter? It’s the only way to make people look at you, see you.
“I lived on the streets, too. But I found shelter. I cared for the little one who depended on me. I made sure he had food, a roof over his head as much as possible. I made sure nobody touched him, looked at him. I even gave him a name.” He says it aloud like it matters, like anything he did for Yoichi made any difference in the end. He left you. He hated you. He died. He never loved you. Never named you.
She follows a set route, as if she knows exactly where to go, and he knows then that she’s going to work even at this hour. The alley she slept in, while in a sleazy area, is hardly in a crime-ridden neighborhood. That must be where she believes she can safely sleep. So close to where we slept, only a dozen meters away. It was abandoned even then. Why didn’t you crawl inside?
She goes to --------.
Growing up, he knew it was a scummy area, not enough to deter him from wandering through it now and then as a child, but enough to deter him from ever bringing Yoichi. He’d keep him hidden away somewhere, told to lay low and not move until he returned. It wasn’t the kind of place for children, but he was never properly a child. This woman he trails made sure of that when she died pushing him into this hideous world. Was it I who killed you? Parasitically siphoning away your life just as I took your quirk? It had crossed his mind before.
But he doesn’t care now.
Because as he continues to follow her, mocking the back of her head, thinking of reaching out and snapping her fat neck beneath that shaggy hair, she slips into another alley behind a pachinko parlor and walks down, knocks on the door. The Yakuza reigned supreme in this area in the ‘60s. They still do now, in 1995, but only because he allows them to. When the door opens, she slips inside, and he follows her.
And there he sees her
Her dress hiked up, the man taking her from behind. A quick fuck against the wall that only lasts for maybe two minutes. And he stares, transfixed, at his mother. He doesn’t know anything about pregnancy. It’s never been something he’s had to even think about, and so he never bothered to learn. Do the babies know their mother’s having sex? Can they feel it? Is it uncomfortable? He thinks about this stranger’s dick so close to Yoichi and he is filled with a visceral disgust.
He hears them speaking when it’s over. There’s no money exchanged, only a favor. She can go upstairs where a few girls live, the whorehouse above the pachinko parlor that doesn’t want her existence, only her services. She can go tidy up and catch a nap.
Which is what she does. The other girls there don’t even acknowledge her existence. Not a word passes between them.
He watches her step into the bathroom and strip. She’s heavy, clearly far along in the pregnancy, and yet she doesn’t seem to notice. He finds his eyes fixating on a few grey warts poking out from the cellulite on her legs, a few more on her left forearm. Her quirk. No, his, because his was the first. Hers was only a nascent quirk, a beginning of a new world made flesh in her uterus as a pair of twins. She washes herself quickly, as if she was only given a few minutes, and when she gets out she wraps herself in a towel and combs her hair with a listlessness that makes him wonder at how she’s able to maintain a grip on the comb before dropping her clothes into the rickety washing machine and wandering off to a rack of cheap-looking dresses in the living space. At first he suspects it’s a place for girls to leave what they don’t want for those street whores given permission to use their shower now and then. Only when he realizes how furtively his mother is looking around does he see that they belong to someone, that she’s simply stealing. Does she only have one dress? He’s stolen plenty of clothing himself over the years, first for Yoichi until his brother pressured him into wearing things himself, then for the two of them, then, eventually, just for himself. He still does it.
A shower and a chance to change her clothing. You could have gotten that yourself instead of buying booze and smokes, he wants to tell her, shake her until her spine snaps. But no, her own vices were more important than protecting what was growing inside of her.
On her way out of the building, she opens the fridge and glances at the trash, pulling a half-finished conbini bento from the latter. She eats with her fingers as she walks down the stairs and passes through the back door, unseen and unheard. He continues to follow her, his fascination mingling with disgust, as she next wanders over to a small part. She stops in front of a vending machine and seems to ask a man getting a drink for something. Probably money, but he can’t quite hear. The man in a business suit ignores her; he doesn’t say no or apologize or even look at her. It’s as if she doesn’t exist.
His fingers twitch in irritation. Being ignored infuriates him. He watches as the scene repeats itself with a woman this time. After a time, his mother gives up and sits on the bench nearby, staring glumly at the ground. If this had happened in 1993 where he’s coming from, he’d have strolled up to her, provided her with the drink she so wanted, then strike up a conversation with her. He’d suggest that society is cruel, that these privileged sorts don’t know what it’s like to go hungry, that they like to blame everything on the poor and those with meta abilities, oh and by the way, does she have one? And if it was a good one, he’d take it. A bad one, he’d ask her if she wanted to be rid of it anyway. But it’s different, knowing this is his mother, even a mother who abandoned him.
She suddenly stands up only to crouch down and look beneath the machine, probably looking for any wayward coins. Yoichi used to do that all the time when they were kids, irrationally excited whenever he found something. The little one was proud to use money properly. It always irritated him. Now his mother looks just like him, pathetically scrounging for whatever scraps the world accidentally leaves behind for her instead of taking what’s needed.
“Why are you so damn weak? Everything out there is yours for the taking. The world won’t acknowledge you. Your invisibility works to your advantage.”
She of course ignores him, now reaching under the machine. A few people walk by, not even looking at her.
When she gives up, she wanders off back to the alley, her way roundabout and meaningless. Her behavior again reminds him of his brother; every so often, he himself would refuse to help him, just to see how he’d react. He rarely figured things out himself, took what belonged to him. He’d only slump his shoulders and sigh and give up. It used to infuriate him.
The woman slumps to the ground again, finally pulling the alcohol out of her bag and listlessly drinking it. Poisoning the two of them inside. She’s useless. She never had a purpose in life except to protect the twins growing within her, and she failed horribly there, as if she never even knew what was going on.
“But I’m not like you. I have a purpose, to protect and find Yoichi. I carry your burden because you failed us both.” Though even as he says it, he wonders how different they really are. Polar opposites, bound by his brother, her son. He squeezes the hand in his pocket again. He shouldn’t carry it around. He might lose it one day, but he can’t bring himself to let it go even in dreams. And he might have ended up like you if I were not around. It’s a good thing I killed him. If he’d stayed with those vagrants, he’d end up like this. He carried your weakness in his veins.
Then he softens, because it only then occurs to him. She gave him Yoichi. She gave him his brother if nothing else. No. The world gave Yoichi to me. I gave him to myself. I tore myself asunder in the womb and gave myself what no one else would give me. But no. He can almost imagine the woman smiling at him, mocking him. Because he never loved you. You never had anything. He clenches his teeth and pushes it down, finally crouching down in front of her. He sits, pulling his knees to his chest and wrapping his arms around them like a child. He’s always been more comfortable on the ground, crouched and curled and ready to spring.
She never looks at him. She never looked at him, even when they lived together in one body. She never considered his existence, cared for him. And he knows that he was never loved. Not by his mother, not by his brother. Look at me, he wants to scream. Let me know I’m real.
“You were only ever food to me. It was the least you could do, keep us alive with your blood and flesh just as you did those nine months you carried us.” He sees the holes in his own hands and feels the emptiness of their yawning depths. “Food is the most basic desire of all life, and you begrudged me that, giving it up unwillingly in your death. Since then, I have only ever felt hunger.”
“You couldn’t save yourself. You didn’t try to save us. But I cared for him. I loved him to the end even if you didn’t.” Because that’s all that matters, isn’t it? His brother.
“Look at me, mother.”
He leans forward, tilts his head and hunches over to look up at her. It’s the closest he can get to eye contact, but she can’t see him. She never could.
And finally, finally, he unexpectedly sees himself. Not in her appearance, not exactly, but in that blank expression. Though she has irises unlike him, her eyes portray nothing. Within that nothingness there is a devastating aloneness, a void that absorbs the light just as his own do. And for a moment, he wonders if perhaps they are the same, if everything he’s said and felt in this dream is only what he’s telling himself. He can’t deny his origin no matter how he dresses and behaves, can’t pretend he hasn’t been as ignored and neglected as she is. The difference is that she asked for help; he realized from the beginning that it would never come, and he had to fend for himself. The growing sense of disgust he now feels is less for her, more for himself. We’re the same, after all. He leans in further, tilts his head more, to absorb what he sees, hold it in his memory.
He touches her face. Nothing. She’s only a mirage, even within a dream he can’t feel the warmth of another human. Still, he hugs her, letting his arms go through her before catching himself, holding still with his arms around nothing. “This is how you should have done it,” he murmurs.
He tries to move her hair, but of course it’s not possible. What did I expect? He presses his lips to the air above her unseeing eyes, just as he used to kiss his brother every night even as he squirmed and complained. And he places two coins on the ground before her. It’s all he has, unused to carrying cash as he is. It won’t get her to the afterlife, but it will have to be enough. Her whole life has been that, after all. He then stands, hands in his pockets again, already composed and distant.
“I took all of you that mattered. Your quirk, your flesh. You served a purpose, in the end, even if I will never devour enough.”
And he leaves the alley, never looking back. His steps are lighter. This place is the past. She is the past. He doesn’t need to think of her anymore. It’s all behind him, belonging to an older version of himself.
It’s a relief to leave her, and that’s all he will confess.