Yoichi? Never heard of em.

i.

Comic books aren't real life, Shutsu's never going to be some kickass vigilante that stops crime and saves orphans. 

He's stuck here, where it's suffocatingly warm.

The heat sticks to his bones, cuts his skin off and wraps around his throat. The walls are concrete in his sad, little, white room. His stomach burns with bile. Shutsu feels lead in his mouth instead of a tongue―tear tracks sting over his cheeks. His hands are shaking and his lungs ache with something uncomfortable. Everything is turning to madness and mayhem the more he looks at it.

The walls swirl around him. His world tips to ink and blurred photographs. Shutsu won't eat though. He knows the food is drugged, he just knows. It's not the first time his brother has done something that bad. Fear swelters under his skin, Shutsu hates when his mind is cloudy. He hates a lot of this.

He hates the color white, too.

Shutsu hates white, and the drugs in his food; he hates his brother and how he thinks that he's protecting when he's only driving Shutsu to insanity.

What Shutsu hates most is how scared he is.

When the door opens Shutsu does not have the energy to flinch back. His brothers shoes are the only thing he can see. They're black and slick with something corrosive. Something stings his nose, it smells like pennies.

Oh kami.

"Oh you poor thing," Shutsu's ears are distorted. Or maybe it's just his brothers voice, maybe his eyes are broken along with his ears (maybe he's hallucinating―he's only ever gotten that sick before once. It's stuffy here though, hot and stuffy). "you've gotten so thin."

He wants to snark: and whose fault is that?

"I've got something for you, though. Maybe this will make you reconsider."

Shutsu feels his shoulders stiffen under the fear.

White burns his eyes in. Black follows, shortly after.

(He really hates how scared he is.)

_

"Shu-chan, you're awake!"

"N'n-no―g'way."

His entire body feels like bricks and coal―like his been dressed in concrete lines and wrapped in telephone wires. His throat is burning with regret.

The shoes come closer and the stinging gets worse. He's going up, his body is so weak now. There's a warm hand carding through his hair. He's never liked it long, but it helps hide his face, helps differ him from the monster that's holding him.

(Shutsu hates that, the ugly was his brother uses his hands.)

It's a bitter desire, to enjoy something that makes his stomach roll in disgust. But they longer he holds his brother, the better his head feels―its less downturned.

It smells like poison and bleach. It tastes like spiked candy.

"M'sorry nii-san. 'M sorry, I wanna go h-home."

"Oh foolish, lovable Shu-ototo," His voice sends fear down Shutsu's spine. Into his wheatgrass heart and lemon scented ribs, over his rose colored eyes dipped in radioactive chemical vaults. "this is home. I'll keep you safe here."

"If this―" Shutsu grasps for something, air or hope or―something."―if this is safety I don'wan to."

His brother pulls him back, so they're eye to eye. "Ototo-chan don't be like that. I'm just trying to keep you safe."

Shutsu doesn't he―he doesn't. "I don't want to be safe―if if this is safety or freedom or, or, or―I don't want to be safe. His―"

"Shutsu!" His brother calls. "You. Are. Safe. I swore I'd keep you safe, I'm making good on that promise."

His gut broils heavily. Chatter fills his air; his brothers senseless muttering. The uncomfortable heat seeps into his skin. Shutsu watches as the hairs on his arm raise around where his brother is touching him.

Punch, something deep inside of him shrieks. It almost blinds him for a second; that's never been there before. Never, he's never acted on the violence that swarms his mind (it only breeds, it does not stop). It's heart stopping, thump one over. Shutsu has lost count of the amount of time he's wanted to sock his brother in the face. Bile rises in his mouth but he holds it back.

"Like you made good on that you were going to help people? 'Cuz you clearly―" A cough sputters out, his mouth stings with copper without red; it's green really. Envy soaks his soul sadly, sullied his hands with bits of his throat. "―y-you clearly made good on that."

"I do help people," His brother says, tired. He's repeated this lie so many times. "they go to me, I do not go to them, ototo-chan."

(Shutsu is so, so scared.)

_

It's spring when he wakes up―his bones are stuffed full of cotton and rosemary shrubs. Thorns painted in ivy grow lazily around his tongue, his mouth, his lungs. His fingers are raw and purple-tipped. Rubbed onto the white of the floor.

Weeks passed―he should be around nineteen now.

It was a blur when it happened. The only thing Shutsu could remember was that his heart was cold in his chest. Not entirely a lifeless, limp kind of cold. Not really the sick, wintry kind of cold he's used to―it's the cold of knowing that if death would appear before him, Shutsu would laugh and take those pale-red fingers and willingly oblige. If he has to meet the devil or the highest ranked heavenly being. Nothing matters at all anymore.

That kind of cold.

Despair stains his very soul. It dries his bones of blood.

Shutsu bites his tongue and closes his eyes and he takes a deep breath. It stings the back of his nose, the air. He feels the odd warmth inside his body that wasn't there when he was born. Reaches for the puzzle piece that was added to his picture from another box.

His head burns and it screams at him. Shutsu closes his eyes and listens.

Punch, it screams. So he does. He reals his fist back (thumb out, thumb out, like his brother always did) and pushes it foreword as hard as he can. There's a crash; when he opens his eyes there is no more wall. There's a second of waiting for too long―waiting to wake up (because surely, surely this is a dream).

There's a second of waiting, and then there is running. Running so hard and fast he can feel the freedom on his tongue. On his hands, the cold is gone and his head isn't stuffed full of sand. Smoke falls into his lungs and he hangs onto the taste of tainted air and the despair under the cot he's left behind. Rubble seems like a much more comfortable approach than that prison.

Shutsu laughs like a madman on his way to paradise.

(The fear is eating away at his bones and lungs, it spits copper into his mouth even when he isn't bleeding.)

_

There is rubble in his sock when he leaves. It's scraping against the soft flesh of his foot, but Shutsu doesn't stop running until the sky is a lighter hue and the stars are gone. He grapples around his neck and doesn't stop for all his stumbling. He's made it this far―made it to this refuge. He's never stopped. Not for nothing.

Nothing except―

There's a woman.

She's shouting; her fists shake and her voice echoes into the very pits of Shutsu's skull. Because in front of the woman, there's a girl, she can't be older than seventeen.

She can't be much younger than he was when his brother twisted into something else. The girl has slited goat-eyes and sleek skin along her arms and cheeks. She turns to Shutsu and croaks―her neck blows up way too wide. The way a frog would.

"Hey―uh."

"Who are you―" She croaks at the end, it devolves into a ribbit. That's what he'll call it. "―what do you want from me?"

"I'm―Shutsu."

"Call me Kero." She says.

Shutsu nods and an awkward silence stills. "I'm―I'm sorry. Uh, could―would―do you wanna come with me?"

She tilts her head and her eyes thin. "Why? Where where would you even go?"

Shutsu looks at his dust-stained shoes. "I don't know,"

He looks up at her, peaking at the horizon with his toxic eyes. They're as green as her skin, even brighter. Like some kind of cartoon sludge from a sewer pot. Like an infection (he is an infection, dipped raw at the surface and full of bacteria. "but I want everything to be better."

She stares at him with blank-slit eyes. Her tongue dips out, pink and fleshy and indecipherable from his own. "I think―I think that I want that too."

Shutsu doesn't know what he's doing. Especially with his brother chasing his tail and the footsteps he's left in the figurative mud behind him (he knows that so many people will die because he's selfish).

He holds his hand out to the webbed one―

Shutsu can taste redemption, he can feel the freedom edging under his fingernails, deep under his teeth, into his ears he can hear it singing. Things can only look up, he's already hit rock bottom, after all. Where could things go, if not up?

A small smile worms it's way up his lips. They walk―hold hands and Shutsu leads her to the warehouse he found by the beach. It wasn't all that far from where they were, not even a hundred meters away. His feet are sweltering in his hole-ridden shoes.

The night is cool on his skin, warping it lavender-pink; some middle point. Gold lined sunsets, because the sun isn't enough for his greedy, wanting soul. "Good," He says. "good."

"It is though. Good. I mean."

Teeth blow over his lips in a barely contained cackle. "Yeah. Good."

(He swallows the tingling in his ribs. Swallows the spiral of poisonous thoughts is head hisses out.)

_

Down. Very far down. There's a pit of vipers and a car crash and arsenic in his tea. His clothes are flopping off his skin like limp noodles, he's stumbling over there hems of his cuffed pants.

Kero is pregnant. He did not know this. She's pregnant and he's panicking because she's a child how could anyone do that to her?

Shutsu tries hard to get her what age needs, but they're low on food. They always are―Kero is good at tricking people, though. She wears gloves and slouches (or as he's learned, that's her proper posture for her). She hunches in a shawl and snatches wallets from business men in the nicer districts. They don't really understand that the world is falling around them; other than the money that comes out of it, of course. Propaganda is an easy tool to use in times of fear, and Shutsu knows just how paranoid people can be.

He's chocked full of dread every waking moment he's been alive, after all.

Panic draws at his lungs like a shark. He wakes up too early. He's not used to sleeping, he won't eat much either (because he's used to.. unsavory things in his food).

Meta-abilities run rampant in the slums. He protects Kero with everything he has, he's not sickly anymore, no. He isn't weak anymore―when his instinct tells him punch he doesn't think twice. Shutsu saves the random people on the streets; the boys getting beat up for the ability to grow out their arms, or eyelashes.

He helps everyone he can.

It's all he has.

(As useless as a cotton thimble with silk thread, as useless as water on a ducks back. It still eats him whole, makes his spine shudder and twist.)

_

"I can fix it." He says. "Kero, do you want the baby?"

It's a warm day. The sand slips past the holes in their shoes. Sunlight dyes the waters green and the sand muddy. Clouds flit through the sky with the effort of a lazy teacher putting on a video. His hands are clammy, his lips are cold.

Kero stares down at her rounded stomach, her fingertips are tinted with the ink stained purple. "No―ribbit―I. No. I don't want it."

"There's a man," He says. "he says he can do it."

Shutsu holds his breathe. "He can fix this."

"Do you really―really think so?" She asks.

"I like to think I look at the best in people, but really, I see the worst parts first. Because only really bad people smile when they offer a favor, and he was scared. I think that he wants to help," Shutsu admits. "but he doesn't know how."

(Shutsu thinks his brother is like that too; that he's helping without knowing the real damage he's inflicted of people. The lives he's ruined, the power he has.)

Kero smiles with her uneven teeth. "I think everything is backward nowadays. Sometime―in the future, maybe―it'll be backward too."

"The water looks off from here, like a murky ocean. We've destroyed everything, haven't we?" Shutsu giggles.

"I think, well that―everything is just how you look at it," She says. "what―what you make of it, and what you want of―what you want of it."

"Do you think humans created sorrow, or was that kami?"

Kero holds her hand out to him, it's pale and sickly as his was, once. She will not live long enoughto have the child she did not choose to bear. Shutsu will pretend things are fine, because how else will he fix it?

"I think the world is full of misfortune. I think that we can think of other people's―of their misery and laugh, or we can help. Or we―we can ignore it. People are good at that, aren't―aren't they?"

Yoichi smiles ever so sadly. "I think that we're all miserable little things, but we choose to persevere through it in hopes that there's happiness somewhere. Maybe there isn't."

"It's cold," She says. "let's go back home. Let's talk about this tomorrow."

He takes her outstretched fingers and they walk far away from the smoke-stained horizon. Her hands are some pale imitation of bruises; and there's dust crumbled around the sides.

She's going to die.

"I love you." He says, because it might be the last time he gets to. "You're like the sister I never had."

"I love you, too." She says. "You saved me. Nobody―nobody's done that."

(The nagging that something will go wrong leaves a bitter twist on such a sweet day.)

_

The baby comes early, Kero leaves early too. Shutsu makes the decision to give Ayū to the Orphanage For Meta-Children. He also cries a lot.

Yoichi sleeps with his eyes open and dries himself of any emotion, or he tries. He has always been brimming with something. Pain or love or melancholy. That is what he is made from.

He has given away his sorrow to his sister all-but-in-blood's daughter. Ayū means melancholy, Yoichi loves her, adores her for now much she looks like her mother. She has different eyes though, they are blue like tears and the depths of the ocean floor. So he calls her sadness, so it is in her name instead of her heart.

She is small, so small, with seaweed hair and ocean eyes and the name of melancholy. He writes her last name as Asui, with kaeru as the pronunciation.

Her name is Asui Ayū, and she smiles a toothless smile that looks like a ghosts grin. She wails for a mother that is gone.

"I'm sorry," He'd told her at the doorstep. "I'm so sorry, Ayū, but can you become something great?"

Yoichi knocks three times. A woman with slit eyes and a forked tongue comes out. She has scales scattered around her face and canines too sharp for a human. She looks surprised when she meets his teary eyed face. "I'm―I'm sorry. I―my sister didn't make it through, a-and she doesn't have a husband, and I―I don't know h-how to―"

"There there, ssssssir. You're doing jussssssst fine. It'ssssss cold out there, would you like to come in for a drink?" Her voice is light. "I'm Mongoosssssse Hissssssaki, ssssssir."

"Thank you. This, uh, she's my niece, Asui Ayū."

"You jussssssst need to fill out a sheet ssssso your niecccce can sssssstay in our cusssssstody."

"Yes. Thank you."

He thinks it might've been a little more difficult, but this is a time of war.

(Yoichi feels sick, like he might puke.)

_

There is someone following him, of that he he sure, should nothing else be.

(Yoichi cannot bear the cold tingling the back of his head.)

_

The devil is behind him, the devil has wrapped his arms around Yoichi and ruffled a hand through dirty hair. The devil hums something kindly with too-sharp teeth and a tongue made of poison.

Shutsu cannot breathe. His heart is running in his chest, fight or flight is gone and the only option is freeze because he's not making it out alive.

"Shu-ototo, I've been looking for you. You'd given me quite a scare. I thought you'd died."

Shutsu's voice is caught somewhere in his mouth.

"Shutsu, ototo-chan, say something." There's a threat behind his brothers words.

"Please," He starts. "let me go, Hisashi."

The devil wearing that of his own blood, flesh of someone so close to him doesn't move. Doesn't do anything but hold his breath while Shutsu suffocates. "I-I want to go away from here, away from you."

"It's fine if you don't see it." His brothers voice is―it's horrifying. "I'll protect you."

"I―"

"I'll help you, brother."

Shutsu can't breathe. "Like you helped your followers, like you helped everyone that disagreed with you―you'll, you'll set yourself to die a martyr, brother―"

"Like you?"

"That's different, I want to save people." He says. "You want to hurt them for your own gain and―brother you're everything you said you wouldn't become."

"Than what are you, Shutsu?" He turns around to look at his brother in the eye. Red stained pupils round the abyss; for such a warm color it's so cold. "If I'm the villain of this story, what are you?"

"I, I don't know."

Shutsu wants to cry, his heart is swollen in his chest. "Hisashi I didn't want there to be heroes or villains or―I wanted us to be happy! For you to get married so I could spoil my nephew or niece a-and I―"

His ribs are piercing his lungs. He's not sure if that's a metaphor. "I wanted you to read comics to me. I wanted to be poor, to drea-eam of something, for everything to be enough."

(Shutsu knows that happy endings only happen in story books, that he isn't some comic book character who's going to survive this. He's sickly and weak and cold. He's everything wrong with the world, the disease hidden under mildew grown skin.)

Urban decay sets his skin on fire. Shutsu forces his eyes to roll back, foams his mouth and shakes his arms.

Hisashi let's go. "Shu―"

Punch.

His brother never gets to finish his sentence. Shutsu doesn't think about it, he just runs as far, as fast, as seamlessly as he can. He jumps over trash and climbs a fire escape and jumps from roof to roof.

(He's shaking his head in hopes it'll rid him of trepidation.)

_

He wants to make sure he's never found again. Wants to make sure that there's no way to track him. He's listened to his instincs so far, and they say to give up part of himself. So he finds someone that looks for the taste of blood, and he spills himself into the throat of a stranger.

He gives pours his very being into someone whose face he cannot remember, gives an apology. He calls it one for all, because his brother takes all for one.

His chest is empty and his bones see hollowed. He wonders if this is what everyone feels when his brother rips parts if them away. Like they're straw-loose puppets limp on the concrete.

_

Shutsu saw the exact moment his world went wayside. In this case, falling wayside means that, to a degree, the road he's running is coming to an end, and not in the way that brings death. To fully understand what this means you'll have to take a step back and let me eludicate.

It began like this:

Shigaraki Shutsu is born to a quaint family in the upper slums, though that isn't saying much. He's born in autumn; it's a cool afternoon―his older brother, Shigaraki Hisashi is clutching his arms and smiling widely. Their mother, who will not be named, given there are no records of her (though some say that's only because her eldest son erased it completely) is looking at the baby in distain. Her hair has gone white from strain, she has green eyes, and if asked, she'd say her lover had brown. Though the man left two weeks ago, without promise of return this time. He comes back though, and he comes back angry.

He calls her that evening to explain that he will visit home again, that he got a job over seas.

Shigaraki Hisashi has black hair and red eyes, he has freckles like his mother and straight teeth, like his father. His jaw could cut steal (or could when he was older, grown out of the roundness that youth gifts, grows out of the ink drawn on his skull so that bones might grow out in gossamer line).

Shigaraki Shutsu, though a babe, has green eyes, bright as radiation; just as his mother before him. He has skin so pale it mirrors his mother's hair. The doctors say he will not live long. Shigaraki Hisashi says that he will not let his brother die, no matter the cost. That he will protect his ototo-chan until he's dead. The only problem with that is (as I'm sure you're aware, and if you aren't ask the nearest person you know with overprotective parents), Shigaraki Shutsu isn't very fond of being controlled.

Time passes, he learns to read, his mother picks up the habit of leaving late at night for a job and Shigaraki Hisashi takes care of his brother and so on. During this time―though it's uncertain―Shigaraki Shutsu grows an obsession with comic books, and, in particular, the heroes.

He plays with his brother while their world is at war.

Now, the youngest might've been oblivious, but the eldest knew it all. He also was coming to learn that nobody he knew felt the pull. The greed he felt whenever he saw a meta-ability. This urge to fill this hole between his ribs.

When Shigaraki Shutsu looks at his brother and sees him longing for something he does not have, for horns or the ability to switch the color of his eyes, well, he knows something is very, very wrong.

This wrongness follows him throughout his entire life. Trepidation that eats at his brain like an afterthought. But it is always there. It is why he ran from the overglorified jail cell, it is why he saved one Chi Kero, and it is why he stops after he pushed someone after running away from his brother.

It's a shame really, that after saving so many people the thing that gets him is someone without control over their meta-ability.