The morning he wakes up is white. Keito watches the clouds, the murmur of conversation, the tightness in his throat, he keeps it all in his head, focus. He thinks to himself over and over and over, that same line; focus.

It's cold.

It has to be, they put him in a jacket, tied at the ends and he's sitting uncomfortably, between two other kids that are fast asleep, his wings are gone. They look soft, the kids, he thinks, he wants them to be warm, because they must be cold. If he had his wings right now he'd probably wrap them around the kids. Focus, says that little thing in his head. Focus. He can't afford to be distracted, he doesn't know the consequence of doing so, yet. He's sure he'll learn, eventually. He wonders if he got a freebie. His wings are gone—

Right now he can't space out. Focus.

Keito's throat feels like sandpaper. His back aches. He's tired and aching and fear strangles him, wasps find a home in his stomach, scratching at him everywhere, he feels saliva pool in his mouth, a pressure build under his tongue and he swallows the nausea as best he can so it doesn't spill on the car, on the two kids asleep on both his sides. He wonders what the punishment would be (they already took his wings, took his brother—).

They're so small, the kids, smaller than Toshi was when Keito first found him. Tired and aching and hungry. He wonders if these kids are aching too, if they're bloated from hunger.

He knows what that feels like, that stretch in your stomach that can't be properly filled no matter how much he eats. Keito is hungry. Always.

The kid on his left is small with dark purple hair and sickly white skin, she looks like a disease made human, the snot pooling out of her nose is black, and Keito wonders if that's blood instead, but there are black tears pooling from her eyes too. She's fast asleep, murmuring in something that doesn't sound like the strange cutting language they were talking in, or Japanese. It sounds lyrical almost, like a song.

The boy on his right has light orange hair, so light it's verging on white, his skin is darker, brown with darker freckles splotted around. He's bigger than the girl on Keito's left, but only barely, his face is rounder than hers and his tongue lounges out of his lips, too big for his mouth. It's black, pitch, and he can't make out the shape's entirety, it's just there, no dips or ridges like the kind that normal tongues have. It kind of lays there, ominously.

Then— then the car comes to a shortstop, and the girl snaps her eyes open, a glowing silver color in one eye and a bright sun-color in the other. She says something that sounds like a lullabye, a lilting tune.

The boy wakes up too, his dark green eyes looking everywhere— he cries out something, it's sad that it's the same thing and that Keito knows it won't help. "Mama," he says. "tolong, mama!" The boy leans to the people driving, they don't look back. "Saya ingin pulang ke rumah . Talong– "

The people in the front murmur something that Keito can't make out. "We're going to be okay." he says to the boy. The boy looks at him and shirks back. Tries to make himself as small as possible.

"Mama." he cries.

"Āmarā kōthāẏa?" The girl.. asks, Keito assumes. He doesn't understand the question. "Āmarā māmā kōthāẏa?"

"I can't understand you." he says. She looks at him, it's probably how deep his voice is, the way it pushes out from his chest is different from the way she says her words. "I'm sorry," he says. "I don't— I don't understand. Where are we?"

They don't respond. Keito doesn't think they ever will.

_

The minute it hits Tomura, really hits him; full in the face and he starts to break around the edges, is when it becomes an anniversary.

It's been six-months since Keito-kun's been gone. Tomura is waiting, still, for something to happen, for someone to say this is all some sort of prank, or a lesson that he needed to learn, or just— a big bad joke that Keito-kun thought would be funny, but it isn't. Keito-kun's boss, Giran, says that Keito-kun's been full on missing, that he left his little brother so they know it wasn't a move to run away or anything.

He's gone. Like, somebody took him, gone.

It makes Tomura angry, makes him sad, he starts to scratch but he can hear that smoke-strained voice in his head saying you really shouldn't it'll only get worse.

So he stops, holds his breath, finds a little corner to climb into and holds himself. Holds everything in, his head between his knees, as small as he possibly can. Like he's a child again, small and helpless, hiding behind dumpsters. Like the world is cruel again. He doesn't care that his shirt turns to ash, he just cries. Until there's nothing left, until his throat is raw from screaming, until his head aches and he throbs from the pain in his chest. An echo of some stranger he trusted laughing in his head.

Tomura is just sitting in the cold dark corner of his room, shaking.

Tomura doesn't understand grief. Grief is for video games, for the character's and the heroes who need a push, for the villains to become their worst. Grief is for parents who have given up everything for their children, grief is for good people. Tomura has only glimpsed at grief once, when he was small, and betrayal stung him until it didn't and all that was left was the heavy grey fog of longing for change, but it ended rather quickly. Grief is not for the likes of him, he's going to be a catalyst, and catalysts don't feel grief, they rage and rage, like Tomura does. Tomura knows rage well, knows it like the back of his hand, the back of his fathers hand. He has memorized the way it curves and creases in his brain, the way it makes his heart speed up violently and chokes his insides until he needs to destroy— until he needs to break and come anew again. Tomura doesn't know longing, doesn't know that ache anymore that used to sit in his chest like a bad feeling. Tomura is happy, free , he gets everything he wants these days, he has a friend, he had a friend—

Tomura does not know grief.

Sensei always said he was a quick study.

_

Keito learns very quickly how to speak in knives and razors and sharp teeth. He learns the words they want him to first, yes, no, stop, please, mercy— and then he learns more. The names of fruit and foods.

He learns that khoroshaya rabota means he did well, means good job, because they tell it to the older ones, seventeen, eighteen, twenty, who can speak and understand enough that they don't go to the basement anymore. Keito learns they call him mal'chik, they call the other boys that too, they call the girls devushka and Keito thinks that they don't even know their real names. He's learnt the kids' names, the girl is Aparajita and the boy's name is Wira. He slurs them, but they slur his too. Kei to, Kei to. They can't seem to get it right, he isn't one to blame them. The accents are off. All of them. They try to talk in the bits and pieces they've all learnt from the language of cutting knives and—

It's not fun here, they clean mostly. The boys, at least. Aparajita cooks and, well, he doesn't know what she does but she gets sent to the basement more than they do. He can hear it, sometimes. What goes down there, but he can;t put a finger to it, and he never remembers what happens to himself.

Sometimes, though, someone will get bid off, he learnt that in the cutting language, kupil, they say it enough, they say kto-to kupil devushka, or kto-to kupil mal'chik. They look at him, sometimes, at his hands, his nails that they have to keep in gloves. They tried to cut them, but he bit and scratched and clawed until somebody missed and the scissors blades dug two rough scars into the side of his face. They took weeks to heal and he only got scarier in the after, tensing anytime anyone came close.

He doesn't celebrate his seventeenth birthday, he doesn't even realize a year has passed.

Not until they say it. They say vy dolzhny znat' luchshe, proshel god, slaboumnyy, and he understands them, is the worst part. It's getting harder to remember Japanese as the time passes and he's hit every time he speaks something other than the language they do.

Aparajita says she can't remember her Mama's voice and she cries, Wira says he can't remember his Mother's face or what his home looked like and Keito comes to the terrifying realization that he can't remember anything his brother has ever said in the right voice. He tries, after that, to mimic it, to call out and sound like his brother, like Boss, like the boy he knows he would play with but he can't remember the name of—

He tries to keep the memories from slipping, but whenever he falls into the habit of repeating things they take him downstairs and he can never remember what happens there, everything gets more fuzzy. It gets harder to remember at all what they look like, but he keeps his brother's name tight in his throat. The wasps in his stomach have a tendency of crawling out on those days.

Keito tries, at least, to keep his brother's name, he repeats it, carves the letters into the floor he sleeps on, in the only alphabet he can read, he writes it and writes it, he doesn't want it to slip, he says oyasumi Toshi-otouto he says goodnight Toshi every night every night, he makes sure to, even when the older kids start disappearing and there are younger and younger kids coming in.

Keito tries not to spit out sandpaper, tries not to let the wasps in his stomach out.

Then he's almost eighteen, on the verge of it. Things go sideways a little.

He's the oldest now, at seventeen-almost-eighteen, he's asleep. They put a bag over his head and shove him in a car again. They say that he knows how to ignore the basement so well, they say he's ready, he doesn't know for what but he's leaving Wira and Aparajita behind and it makes his stomach pull awkwardly.

—

Hitoshi doesn't think he'll ever get used to missing Keito-nii. Keito-nii's boss, Okuta-san, call me Okuta-oji— he's brought Hitoshi into his apartment. It's not this big, grand thing, but it looks comfortable, it's warm, like his house never was.

Okuta-oji brings him to a room, it's empty and completely devoid of little knick-knacks and the shiny rocks and bottle caps and all the things that Keito-nii hoards. It's empty, it feels sour to have the world like this, blank and bitter and withering away. It feels like a hollow gift, like an empty stomach.

Hitoshi has to wonder how long this will all last, until something happens and he's thrown into a gutter, until Keito-nii comes back, until—

He's made of the rotting edge of lavender and rosemary, something pungent in his very bones is blooming through his skin. Dry-rot and blood slitting from his mouth, pooling out like ink from a snapped pen. It sticks to his fingers, dazily, he reaches for the bathroom to let the rest out. He lurches over the toilet and lets himself hollow. He lets his stomach spill out, bile pulling at the lid, he cries, he cries and the puke leaks through his nose and it keeps coming and coming and he can't stop it, he throws up water and whatever it is he ate yesterday and he doesn't stop until everything else goes dark, vision spotting on the ends and something bitter— more bitter than bile, echoes through his head.

Histoshi wants to go home. Except his home is his brother, and his brother is gone now.

He doesn't know if he'll ever be well fed and happy.

Keito-nii said that they never let you be rich and happy, except Keito-nii is gone now, they can't hang ugly crayon art on the barely working fridge, they can't laugh about all the bad bitter things in the world anymore because there's nobody to laugh with except his own reflection. For a minute he gets it. Why Keito-nii broke that mirror, cracked it with a closed fist and let blood drip past his knuckles in a fit of hysteria.

Hitoshi gets it now. He does, he wishes he didn't, though.

Keito-nii said he's too young, but he was only a little older when he really started taking care of Hitoshi. It makes something in Hitoshi's chest ache terribly, like a cough drop stuck in his throat.

He wonders if he's ever going to be fixed, he holds himself into nothing and thinks, no, probably not.

Things still change, he's almost at the end of middle school, and he's going to be a hero. To save Keito-nii from whatever life he lived in before. It's a bitter, bleeding thing, a drink gone bad in his mouth, sour milk. He's going to be a hero, he'll have all the recognition, and he'll save Keito-nii, wherever he is.

He will.

He comes back from winter break as a new person. He's quiet, even to Akocchan. She still sticks by his side like glue, but he can see the way she misses the old him. Hitoshi's teacher's find him pitiful now. His grades are on the decline but nobody dares come near him, he aches, really. He needs to become a hero though, so he keeps it steady, he already knows this, knows what he's learning. His chest squeezes painfully at the realization that he's never going to be perfect.

Hitoshi tries, really he does.

He studies and studies and when Okuta-oji points out that he doesn't have the right quirk for the entrance exam, he starts training. He looks up videos and videos and reads articles over articles on how to train a body and Hitoshi tries to follow them as best he can. He runs track in the gym and gets weights on the way to Okuta-oji's house with a saved weekly allowance. He does it every day, he trains and trains and trains but it isn't enough. So when summer rolls around and the last day before break comes around, he asks Akocchan if he can help at her parents construction company over the summer.

She tells Hitoshi that it's brutal work, but she'll ask if he can.

Summer comes in like a hit to the head. He's approved for work, but it's gotta be volunteer work, they can't afford to pay him and really he's fine with that. He learns some things about construction and Akocchan laughs about his obliviousness, and he says she should shut her whore mouth because her cheapskating is sad at best. She blows a raspberry at him and says this'll be a great summer.

It is, really. Time passes, and he's eleven, then twelve, then thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and summer's come and go. Growing pains were bound to hurt, Hitoshi just never thought he'd be crying this much into his teenage years. His pillow is probably tear stained so hard no detergent could take it out. Time doesn't stop for him, though. They go to the same better-than-nothing Nabu Junior High and they stick to each other like glue. Hitoshi doesn't have the best time, but it's surely not the worst either. They're both here on scholarship and they avoid anyone else like the goddamned plague.

Akocchan is apparently a genius because she decides to become the valedictorian. Badass. They all clap, and clap and clap, or at least Hitoshi does, until his hands go numb. He smiles, wide and bright, he never had a damned chance at being anything special enough for a speech, they don't let him talk in class, let alone in front of the whole school.

He thinks he might be proud.

This is the last summer before they both try for Yuuei, and even if he doesn't make it in, he thinks he's glad he found a friend.

__

He's seventeen, almost eighteen, a legal tenure age, when he's shipped off to a bidder. He opens his eyes and he sees the person who bought him and thinks, oh, I'm back in Japan again, because the way the man speaks reminds him of his boss. Given, Keito can't actually remember any words except iizo. He doesn't know the voice it comes in, but it's in that baritone stipe.

It's not that muffled, but Keito blames it on the mask the guy is wearing.

" Anata no namae wa nandesuka? " He looks at Keito, and the disdain in his eyes is visible and cutting.

" Boy. " says the woman who brought you here. "Tell the man your name."

Keito thinks about it, really thinks about it, he lets himself smile, for a moment. Razor thin and bleeding. " Fallen. " he says in that roundabout voice in his head, in his first tongue, "Namae wa Fallen. Gomen, watashi no nihonjin wa amari yoku arimasen. " Keito wonders, softly, that if the man weren't wearing his golden beak, he might be smiling, he might be smiling wide and feral and ugly, but Keito won't say anything. He feels like a child again, lacking the proper words, chirping and clacking his teeth.

"Fallen Angel, huh?" the man says.

"No. Just the fallen, da without the ten-shi. " Keito says, words like knives, his tongue cuts the inside of his mouth, too sharp. " I have to relearn Japanese. " He says.

"Yeah, I think he can tell, boy." Keito grins sharply at her, this isn't her fault, she just got put on transportation in the business.

"What's your name, bossman?"

The man grins, Keito can tell, under his mask, it's sharp and cruel.

"Overhaul." He says.

Keito's new fancy job is glorified babysitting. There's this little girls room that he stands guard at, and he's supposed to catch her if she tries to run off, but like, he has one fuck up chance. He completely understood Bossman Overhaul, but that's the run of the mill shit. He's heard stories from the older people here.

His quirk remakes people.

Keito isn't touching that mess without a ten-meter-pole and a glock. Thank you very much. He's fine with the job, really, he just has to stand by a door, the worst part is watching the kid get dragged out, it reminds him of watching the newbies go into the basement. They never come out the same, like their brains have been hollowed.

Keito isn't like a good person, or anything. His partner guard, Atsuko, lies occasionally, to see him flop with his pronunciation. Which is funny considering her name has the word honest in it. Keito does the same thing in this weird ass language exchange thing they have going on.

When he gets most of the gist of Japanese, he turns his attention to eavesdropping. He doesn't know what was up with that house, maybe it was the stress, but his feathers never grew back in the years he was there. Now that he's here, he can feel pin-feathers growing painfully under his skin. They bleed when they start growing, but the blood only shows on the underlayer of his suit—

Right. His suit. It's legit mandatory to wear one, there's a dress code for the lower ranks like him. A dress shirt, a black tie, and a vest. No blazer because that's apparently too much. In any case, the eavesdropping. They're experimenting on the toddler he's guarding. Look, Keito isn't a good person, he knows that, he's done really fucked up shit in his life, he's almost sure he sold some highly illegal drugs in his downtime when he was younger.

Whatever.

Anyway. The kid. Right. Scared shitless, so he tries to actually talk to her. She doesn't say anything, of course, but he'd be suspicious if one of the old handler's at his facility started getting buddy buddy with him too. He isn't going to try some skeezy shit though. He opens the door and Atsuko doesn't stop him. She's just chilling there.

"Hello? How are you? I am good." he says in very, very broken Japanese. He feels like he's a moron. There's no response. "Your name is Eri, correct?"

She nods, slow, so he bends down. He sits adjacent to her.

"My name is, ah, Fallen, like angels. Do not call me angel though, it is not my name."

"My name— I don't know what it means." she says softly.

"Do you know how to uh, write it?"

She shakes her head, no.

"There is— I know language other than Japanese, it is why my Japanese is not, ah, very well. Would you like to learn?"

She nods. Yes.

" No, no." he says. " Yes, yes."

"Niyet." she says. "Da." she says. "Like your name, da. "

"Accent is different. Yoshi can mean different thing, no?"

" Yoshi. " she corrects. "You say it funny."

" Yoshi ." he says it like she does, in her voice, high pitched and childish. She looks at him in surprise. " You say it funny. "

She looks at you with that kind of concealed awe that only children can have. "You sound like me."

" Is part of my quirk ."

"It's part of your quirk." she corrects.

"It's part of my quirk." Keito amend. She's still shiny-eyed. "Do you have a quirk?"

He sees the minute the light in her eyes go out. Like blowing out a candle. "I.. I have a curse. It can end curses." she says.

It's funny, he thinks, for a second she sounds like Toshi did when his quirk first came in, calling himself a villain. Keito wonders why people do that. Put ideas into other people's heads, wouldn't it be so much easier if she was indoctrinated with love? That kind of loyalty is forever. It's how all the greats do it. They control people with kindness, it's how BOSSMAN'S boss did it, big bossman, he said people could have what they wanted, for one favor in the future, and they were loyal—

"I have a, how do you say? Small child, not mine form womb—"

"A friend? A brother?"

"Yes, little brother, his quirk is, ah, bad. He is not. So his quirk is not bad, because he is not." he tries to smile. "Are you bad person, Eri?"

She stays still for a moment. She doesn't answer, and the silence hangs heavy.

"You know, the most, most spelled way Eri is with the character for blessing, and justice , " he doesn't remember the word. "make thing right. How do you say it? Name can lie, but I don't think that it is lying to you. Your name is blessing, maybe you are too."

She doesn't say anything. He just sits there, in the corner, staring at her until the door opens and someone comes in to take her to this knock off basement.

It's a bleak reality, Keito knows. Things don't change, not for people like him.