Chapter Text
I wasn’t there when the world fell apart and stitched itself together again-- but when it happened to me, the world wasn’t there either, so I guess we’re even. To be fair, falling apart is an exaggeration, but great grandad was an exaggerator and he’s the only one I knew who saw it first-hand. He was born just a couple years before quirks started showing up. Quirkless, in a world made for people like him, he saw the world transform. And it scared him.
I remember sitting in his kitchen, morning light creeping through the windows on the days when my mom was at work early. He would rub his hands together before he did anything, like he wanted to make sure they were still capable of feeling. I sat, swinging my legs off the bar stool, as he made pancakes and cursed the neighbors. Grandpa was a quirk-phobic, but usually when I say that, people think the opposite of what I mean. When he was a kid, it was normal to hate quirks, but these days, it’s more normal to hate those without it. I guess that’s just what happens in a world where 80% of the population has superhuman abilities.
It makes you wonder what being human really is.
My therapist likes it when I talk about my childhood. She says that putting the stories in the air smells bad, but keeps them from stinking up the brain. I think that’s just a fun way of saying she doesn’t know what went wrong with me and she thinks if I talk enough I’ll accidently let it spill. She’s wrong, but I don’t hold that against her. It means we have some common ground. I’m not hiding anything from her. I’ve talked to enough shrinks with psychic quirks to know that I don’t have any suppressed memories that point to a cause, just lots and lots of effects.
My best guess is what I heard some doctor say 23 years ago-- my brain didn’t develop because I wasn’t held as a child.
No one took him seriously, of course. My mom was a bit eccentric, but she was still a normal mother: affectionate, smart, and capable. I love her and my step-mom with all the heart I have, which isn’t much, but it’s something. It’s not their fault-- of course it’s not their fault.
“It’s my fault--” I said to Dr. Okiwa. She looked at me, her gaze as soft as the blanket on my lap.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It is,” I insisted. “But that’s not a bad thing. It was my quirk, before I learned to control it.”
She nods, but she doesn’t believe me. I’ve read all her notes on me-- stupid human curiousity, I guess-- she doesn’t think child attachment disorder explains all my symptoms. Maybe not, but I don’t think she understands.
“Because I must’ve woken up-- in the other state-- as a baby, I mean-- maybe I woke up and started crying and no one came and I just kept crying and I could’ve-- I could’ve done it for days--” I cut myself off. The story wasn’t hanging in the air, I knew it. I said it wrong and it had fallen on the floor. It spilled everywhere and all I wanted was to mop it up, to start over.
I closed my eyes, trying to ignore the word puddle at my therapist’s feet. Weaving my fingers through the sensory blanket was the only way I knew how to ground myself. I needed something real, something solid, something with me.
“I understand that thinking about that hurts,” she said. “But whether it happened or not, it’s in the past. We can’t change it. I’m glad you feel comfortable to share your theories with me, and I will always be welcome to hear them. But remember: they’re still just theories. They don’t have power over you. The present is still and always will be yours. Why don’t you tell me about something you really remember?”
It was a nice sentiment, but I had been hearing it for years. I had been in and out of mental hospitals for the better part of my adult life, but even when I was out, I had a therapist. Dr. Okiwa had known me for a couple months and she had been slowly chipping away at the thousands of stories I remember, searching each one as though it might be gold, like it might have an answer.
In this place, my room was number 87.
It was a corner, at the end of the hallway. The room’s a little bigger, but the window’s a little smaller. Maybe it’s a fair trade for some people, but I’d rather be in room 86-- the woman next door spends all day looking out the window and I think she looks okay. Not happy, but not like me.
Sometimes I hear her crying.
But she sings, too.
I cry-- sometimes at the same time as her. I think everybody here cries, late at night. When the rain taps on the window, begging to be let in, it puddles on the courtyard walkway, like stories. Stories always pile up in the courtyard-- I think they’re the only thing keeping the flowers alive.
The woman next door once whispered the story of her son to me.
It clung to the leaves of a holly bush. I was sitting on one side, she on the other, sun above us, bush between us. I think that’s why she told me-- I couldn’t look her in the eyes. She told me that she poured burning water on him and she hated herself for it. She told me about her husband, about her family, about her kids, about her quirk. About her father, her brothers, the policeman who looked her in the eyes and told her there was nothing he could do-- every man she’d ever met and why she wished she never did. She said she couldn’t stop living and re-living a life that wasn’t real, that never happened. She talked and talked like there was no time, but there was. For once, there was.
She was silent when she finished. I didn’t have anything to give her except my own.
“He was in my class--” I said and she looked up in understanding. “A hero course, a couple miles from here. I was-- anxious. Quiet. Clingy. I thought he wanted-- to be my friend.”
I stopped to look down at the scars that raced up my palms and formed a lace on my palms. Some friend.
“He said that the world was filled with false heroes. He wanted to get rid of them-- us-- them. He said I lacked--” I stopped, making sure to spit the word-- “conviction. He said I didn’t want to help people, that I just wanted to use my power. I thought I could change that-- that I could train-- that I needed his approval-- fuck. I can still hear him sometimes-- see him--”
My story clung to the bush, just like hers. They overlapped, words melting into each other. It’s the same story, and the same story, and the same story-- every woman who ever leaned up against the window and sang or cried, I think their words would blend right into mine.
I spent most of my time in the courtyard. Dr. Okiwa said the movement of the air and the sun would help. Maybe it does-- it’s better than spending all day in my room, in living rooms full of sick, tired people, in cramped entertainment rooms with fuzzy televisions. The courtyard had flowers and benches and stories about the most awful and most wonderful things.
The sun was sitting above us, but I could feel it slipping away. I could feel time moving past, I could almost see it.
“They say it’s the most powerful quirk in the world-- kinda wasted on me,” I said.
“There’s more to life than power,” she said and we both knew she was lying. There’s nothing in this world but power-- power over others, power over the self, and everybody’s lack of power over the randomness of the universe. It’s all just power and maybe that’s what we had in common: we didn’t have any. It was just the two of us in that courtyard, in this world, in that moment-- a mother too young and a child too old-- like maybe we could have survived if we stayed there forever, on either side of that bush.
But neither of us could meet the other’s eyes when we finally got up.
Every few months, the hospital tries to send me out into the world. A “trial period” they would call it-- or “independent living,” depending on how well they thought I was doing. Sometimes it would last a year or so, sometimes only a few weeks. It would start out with the classes, then the nice little job to set aside money, and then they would send me out to a cheap, but clean apartment. I make friends with my neighbors or coworkers-- I see my therapist less often-- I start becoming a member of society--
And then I mess it all up.
Eight months ago, they put me on one of their standard partner farms-- far out in the country, where I could see every star at night. There were a couple others; some were anxious out of their minds, some yelled into the wind and let their words attack the distant insects in the fields, and some were just stuck with quirks that were dangerous in crowds. It was hard work-- on the farm, I mean-- but it was nice to use my arms, my legs, my back. I could feel so many things, so many textures, so many smells. I learned to taste a thunderstorm the day before it arrived and to hear the soybeans growing, singing in the sunlight.
It was nice, while it lasted.
Quirk counseling was on the schedule for me, but everyone knows it’s not the same thing as training. Maybe it was the little kid in me, that part in everyone that wants to be a hero. Maybe it was guilt for flunking out of UA, for robbing the world of the greatest quirk in the world. Either way, I was trying to understand my quirk-- pushing myself to my limits. I ended up passing out in a field.
They didn’t find me for two days.
Dr. Okiwa suggested I stick to the city-- more people, less space. I wasn’t like most of the panic cases because not even I was sure if I wanted to be close to other people or as far away as possible from them. They say there’s two types of child attachment disorder: one where they adapt by not reaching out to adults and one where they reach out too much to any adult they can see. I had the worst of both worlds-- the antithesis to Hannah Montana.
This time, it was the city. A little coffee shop on a busy corner in my hometown, it wasn’t much, but I wanted to make it everything. I wanted to get better, to be better. I still wanted to be part of the world, wanted to make it better. If that meant saving up money, seeing my therapist twice a month, meeting people, I could do it. I wanted to do it.
“Hi! Welcome to The Mug. Can I take your order?” I smiled, placing my hands on the counter, in the perfect welcoming posture. Dr. Okiwa couldn’t help smiling back at my well-practiced face, but she seemed more disturbed than a couple weeks ago, when I was awkward and nervous in the shop.
“Black, in house, please. I want to--” she looked around at the sleepy coffeehouse, then to the other barista, who was cleaning mugs-- “talk.”
“Sure! Any mug caught your eye today?”
Dr. Okiwa looked around at the walls of the shop, which was coated in mugs of every sort. They filled up every shelf, they hung from racks, they held flowers as centerpieces on every table, they held the tips. No two in the shop were the same-- a fact which I doubted, but made for fun branding. She gestured towards a little hand-made one with a crooked handle for the only reason of it being just within my reach.
When I handed her the cup, I could feel her quirk on her fingertips. It made all the hair that was standing on end fall back down-- not unlike the smile off my face or the sugar from the packet into her coffee. She had a calming presence, a nice little trick for a therapist, but it wasn’t very strong.
“Tokei,” she sighed. “I just came to check on you.”
“Hm?” I knew there must’ve been more. “I was just going to see you on Thursday, right?”
“How are you settling into your apartment? Made any friends?” her words were floating in the same air, but they refused to mingle. Like water in oil or maybe the other way around-- it felt wrong in the little coffee shop where everything was supposed to melt into each other.
“Dr. Okiwa, are you okay? Did you want to tell me something?”
She laughed, but I watched the sound float downward, sinking into the table and soaking into her napkin. Usually, a laugh will spend some time in the air, but this one fell too fast; it got stuck, like a secret, like she was sad.
“So we’re skipping all the fluff, huh?” she asked and took a sip. “That’s okay. You’re perceptive, always have been.”
She chuckled again and this one was worse-- it barely left her mouth before setting itself on the table. I watched it and she watched me watching it, like she always did.
“I’m afraid we won’t be meeting on Thursday. That’s what I came here to talk to you about--”
“You’ve cancelled meetings before over text-- I don’t mind as long as I can reschedule for next month. Is your next month full?”
“Tokei,” she sighed. “There is no next month. We’re under new management and I’m being relocated to Aichi-- you’re being fully discharged.”
“Oh.”
I sat down. I could feel the plasticky couch, even through my company-issue khakis. Her words were floating, but they were soaking into places too, into my clothes, into the coffee. It was like glitter, but they were dividing-- or multiplying. Discharged. Relocating. Discharged-- they split until there were so many words I couldn’t see, I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move--
“Tokei?” she asked.
“I’ll be fine-- great, actually, “ I smiled, but I wasn’t looking in her eyes. She was leaving-- I wasn’t needed anymore. We didn’t-- it didn’t mean anything anymore-- gone, just like that. Every muscle in me clenched and I wanted to be anywhere but standing in front of her.
“Thanks for everything, Dr. Okiwa. I was only a couple weeks from putting in my request for full discharge anyway,” I lied. “I hope you like Aichi, I hear it rains almost everyday there.”
“I’ll make sure to bring my umbrella,” she nodded, setting down her coffee. She reached into her bag, “If you need something, you can email me, of course. But I also have some recommendations, some numbers you can call for someone in town. A new therapist, I mean.”
“Sure--” I took the list without looking. Even if I had, I doubt I could’ve seen it through the clouds of words. It was so loud, so bright-- I tried to ground myself to my work vest, but it was too smooth, too simple. It was like falling while I was still standing up. How could I have been so stupid? It was a professional relationship. She was helping me because she got paid. The money moved, so did she. The latest therapist in a long, long list and the latest patient in an even longer list-- it’s not like she was going to miss me. It’s not like I was supposed to miss her. I wasn’t supposed to miss her.
“I’ll be fine.”