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Tucked into Jules, Seren’s tear-wracked chest shuddered for breath. It hurt. His lungs and his ribs and his scars and his heart and his throat and the space behind his nose and his eyes and his forehead. It all hurt, sharp and deep and tight and twisted up like a knife in a cape. Air. Not enough air. Too much fluid, all in the front of his face and none of it in his mouth or throat where he needed it, skin-cracking dry and raw like the air was sandpaper.

He wanted it to go away. He didn’t want it to stop. He wanted to run and hide from the guilt and the blame and the shame and the pain.

He didn’t deserve to escape the pain. Haiiro was dead and it was his fault.

His fault.

His fault...



Eventually, the worst of the tears slowed, simply from exhaustion rather than resolution. Seren hung across the chair arm in Jules’ embrace, wrung out and worn out and worse than trash, because trash had least been useful once. He was just left behind, left in the wake of the person who most deserved to live in all the world. The person he most needed to live. The person he had doomed to death, and been unable to save. As much his fault as if he had given the order. His fault.

He didn’t deserve this life. To go around like nothing had happened, like the world would go on, to sit and drink tea and take comfort in the arms of another. Seren pulled into himself as the salt began to dry on his cheeks, and with the strength of lately-unused core muscles he dragged himself back to the chair. He didn’t really make it upright, but rather fast hunched forward. He stiffly rubbed at his crusty face with a rain-damp shoulder, and then shivered. Now he was wet and cold and tired and aching. His sigh sent a sharper jab of pain into his chest. He deserved that. It was his fault.

When none of it went away, and the cold drifted deeper into his bones, Seren sighed again, even though it hurt. Jules deserved an explanation. They hadn’t asked for any of this mess. Seren had brought it in with him, unasked-for and unwanted. ”We were at-“ his voice creaked, but he swallowed against the dry swelling in his throat. ”We were at a bank. I was off duty. They - the bank was attacked. Some device that immobilized everyone.” A ragged breath, and then another. He deserved this pain. ”They found my work phone. Figured I’m - was - a hero. Took him so I wouldn’t try anything. I... I couldn’t do anything anyway. Nothing.”. His aura limply spread, a vague pink haze passing through table and chair and Jules without the slightest effect at all. Here and there, the occasional fleck of dust, dirt, and dried tear-salt glimmered. ”Nothing.”

If Seren weren’t a rescue hero, or if he were at least in his right mind, he probably would have acted differently. As it stood, though, strategic engagement was not a loud enough priority to override the blinding need to attack these four white masks. Somehow. He had never wanted to specialize in combat. He didn’t have a great Quirk for that, and he had always known that.

That didn’t stop him now. He ran, the laces on one of his hastily-tied boots loosening and streaming behind him, his shaggier-than-usual hair trying to do the same, his jacket too stiff and heavy still to do more than hang down. He ran, and swept dust from the pavement to fill in the gaps between the sand already darkening his aura.

The four villains turned toward each other, and the one with the backpack shrugged. Before Seren could get even close to near enough to brush them with debris, the four turned and sprinted down the road.

Seren swore beneath his breath, not that he had a lot to spare at the moment. He didn’t remember exercise of any sort being this exhausting. It was just his first wind, though. It’d pass. He was not going to let them get away. One of them. That was all he needed. Stop them and leave them for the police to find. That would be enough. If he didn’t beat them to a pulp first.

His jacket gradually lightened as more of the weight transferred to his aura, and it got easier to run. He wasn’t catching up to the villains, but they weren’t remotely close to losing him either. Around a corner, but he knew these streets too well for them to lose him by dodging into the winding alley tucked behind a hedge. The moment he turned the corner and saw the mostly-empty street, just some scattered confused civilians, he darted toward the half-hidden entrance. The villains hadn’t stopped but had kept running, so Seren kept running.

It felt like decades since he had last dreamed, asleep or awake or somewhere in between. When he eventually fell asleep, a momentary lifetime of hours after Detective Koizumi hung up, it felt like he had dreamed the conversation, and woken up instead.

Tango Koizumi, the police officer handling Haiiro’s case - easier to think of it that way, if he was already tangled in the knowledge - called Seren at least once a week, even if there had been no progress. Most of the time, that was all there was to be said, and the call was brief. This time, the call had been longer, both in how it felt and the time stamp on Seren’s phone.

A lead, the detective had said. After all this time, something had surfaced. Not new evidence, not a new witness coming forward. Not after months. But another crime, another robbery. Less fuss, less flair, less risk. No vigilante involvement. Just a group in white masks raiding ATMs shortly after they were restocked with cash. They had followed an armoured car to four ATMs before drawing enough attention to vanish without a trace. No fingerprints, no DNA evidence, but enough video footage to start narrowing down their builds beneath the obscuring robes.

---

The conversation hung in Seren’s mind for most of his waking hours, and left his sleeping ones restless. He thought it was the next day, though it might have been the one after that, when the murmuring TV in the background flashed. And kept flashing. It was local news, and eventually it sank in that there was breaking news. Robberies. Villains. ATMs.

Villains robbing ATMs. In featureless white masks and heavy robes.

This time, he grabbed the leather jacket hanging by the door, and shoved his feet into an old pair of boots. The jacket made him stagger for a moment; he hadn’t packed sand in months and clearly had forgotten how heavy it got. He shoved a pair of gloves and his wallet into some pockets that weren’t brimming with sand and hurried out the door.

He... he didn’t want this. Any of this. He didn’t want to feel like this, or for any of it to have happened, for any of it to be real. He certainly didn’t want it to all be real, not like this. He could handle the scars, even the way they cut into his chest and haunted every reflection. Scars were part of the job, and he had chosen to keep them to remind himself of what he could neither accept nor forget. He hung in between, unable to do or be or feel any of it, unable to move in any direction, unable even to run away from it all. The farthest he’d gone was the couch, or here, And he hadn’t come here to flee the past, not exactly.

He didn’t want to feel like this, like the space between his heart and his lungs had shrunk, had pulled everything else deeper, spun it up like noodles on a fork and then thrown into the jaws of a vise spun shut by a god. A heartless, uncaring god who spread chaos and death and despair so that others could feel what they could not. He couldn’t breathe. The pressure in his chest had claws in his ribs, keeping them from moving and keeping the tightness from rising past his throat, even as the struggle to bring in air stung the back of his nose and raked coals across his eyes.

He didn’t want to feel this, but he could feel both it and a hand on his arm, light and soft and warm and not intruding but just... alongside. He could feel the heat in his face, both in the tracks of his tears and beneath the skin around them, and the little places where fallen tears had caught on his bare arms, on his hands. Maybe... maybe if he could feel more of those things, it wouldn’t hurt as much? To feel the hurt too. And Jules was familiar, but separate; they weren’t part of the hurt, and didn’t know H- ... Haiiro. Just him, Seren. A trickle of air made it a little bit deeper, cold against the inside of his throat. Cold like his scars felt now, tired ashes embedded in tense and fiery tissue. Cold at the same time as the heat and the damp and the ache and the burn and the terrible, terrible pressure buried beneath his breastbone.

Jules was there, and they were offering, and they were there for only Seren, not judging, not remembering anyone else, not also hurt by Seren’s failures. Their life hadn’t been torn apart. They were safe, and the people who survived needed to lean on the people who were safe. He had always been the safe one, the rescuer, the hero, calm and alert and accepting. He wasn’t that now. He couldn’t be.

He tipped sideways, somewhere between hesitantly and tentatively and so, so slow and yet almost as fast as he could bear to move. The chair’s low arm proved little barrier, and then there was resistance against his shoulder, sturdy support and heat that wrapped gently around him and the hand pressed against his chest like pressure from outside would lessen the pressure inside. Perhaps it was hard enough to bruise. Perhaps he had space to care?

No. There was a different kind of not caring. He didn’t care that he was tucked into someone’s chest, that a chair arm was tucked into his side, or that his feet were tangled up between the chair and the table. He didn’t care that he was sobbing, quietly, tears sheeting across his face and spreading faster across the front of Jules’ apron, chest seizing against his knuckles as his lungs fought to keep air moving in and out. He... didn’t care that everything hurt, because maybe it should hurt, and deserved to hurt. He deserved to feel like this, not numb. He deserved this pain, after all: ”He died,” he coughed out, barely more sound than his tears and his uneven breaths. ”Because of me.”. All because of him. Because he was the hero, a hero who could barely fight, a hero who had been caught unarmed and unprepared and unawares. Because they knew how he was vulnerable.

Because Haiiro died because of him.

Suddenly. French. Far too fast for his unpracticed ear, never mind his muddled brain. There were definitely... some sounds in that. Some vowels. At least one J. Maybe an M or two. It was all more than enough to make his head spin. Somewhere in the chaos, the French stopped and more fluent words began to seep into his brain again, but it was still hard to process them. Too fast. He needed more time to listen and to think, never mind to understand or respond. How could he respond if he didn’t even understand because he hadn’t really heard?

The barrage finally subsided, and the cafe person moved, no longer drying Seren’s hair but maybe intending to return to that? The towel itself was still kind of comforting. Maybe he should hood himself with blankets more often. He was starting to feel a little warmer too, and his hands no longer felt like they were melting. His body, at least, was almost starting to feel... normal. When his fingers curled around the mug’s handle rather than the mug itself, they didn’t creak or take a lifetime to move.

Somewhere through this subtle action, he realized that the cafe person was looking at his face from the side, and just radiating some sort of joy that he didn’t have the energy to describe. Maybe it was familiar? Maybe he just couldn’t tell the difference between the different kinds of happy right now. He certainly hadn’t felt any of them in a while, and couldn’t find the energy to think about it any further.

Was the cafe person staring at him? At his scars? Or at least the bit they could see. Seren turned the mug in his hands, just enough to lift it with his left rather than his right, and tried to pretend that he was unintentionally covering the mark on his cheek while solely focused on tasting the tea... and then actually realizing that the warm ceramic felt rather nice against his still-cool cheek. He leaned the mug against his head, briefly closing his eyes and not actually trying to cover the scar, although it was undoubtedly more successful this time.

After a long moment, almost seeming long even to Seren, he shifted slightly. ”You might have seen me on TV,” he admitted. He didn’t want to be recognized for his work, not yet, but he also didn’t want to be a bother to someone who had already recognized him. But he wouldn’t go so far as to give his hero/idol name. ”I’m Seren.”

Seren looked in the direction of the steaming mug as the café person talked, unblinking but insufficiently attentive to consider it staring. The sounds rippled past his ears. Something about.. opening? Batch? He closed his eyes, shutting out the inoffensive light and surroundings to better concentrate. He caught more, this time, but he couldn’t quite figure out what a wet floor sign had to do with opening or batches. And then, in no time at all, the other person had moved away, and Seren was alone again.

His fingertips bent against the cup with more force than he intended, if indeed he did intend anything. He thought about drinking the tea. The mug didn’t move. He thought about it a bit more, and his aura flowed around the steaming cup as if it could help. It couldn’t, of course, since its capabilities were so very specific. He let the faint bit of colour fall away, collapsing like withheld rain, and left it puddled around his feet as though it cared about gravity. The floor was too clean for the aura to pick up anything. Opening? New? Seren slowly looked around, mostly just with his eyes since moving his head felt like so much work. No dents in the walls. No burned-out lightbulbs, and bright enough to leave spots when he looked at them too long. Even blinking was in slow motion. And the table. No peeling edges or worn-through pictures or gouges with unknown stories. New. Everything was new.

Seren’s head turned toward rattling wheels, and he saw the café person wheeling a mop and bucket away. When had it come out? He hadn’t noticed. He was still thinking about the café being new.

As the apron-clad blond (when had he noticed the apron or the hair?) headed back in his direction, some of the background gears in Seren’s head apparently reconnected, if only for a moment. ”Sorry,” he said softly, gaze now stuck on the wet floor sign. He’d made work for this person, in this new café, and had been offered tea in exchange. Another, smaller, shiver trickled down his spine, but the radiating warmth from the tea kept it from reaching any farther. ”I didn’t mean to make a mess..” With more than two words in a row, Seren’s faint accent crept through, though it had never been especially pronounced, and he blinked up at the lean figure alongside. May they... what?

Seren’s gaze slowly followed the gesture. Sit? It wasn’t his café. It wasn’t his decision. But formalities. Yes. Social protocols. He dipped his head in agreement, though he stalled before the second half of the motion and stared at the cloths now sitting on the table. Those... Why were they there?

Water dripped down his face, creeping from his hair down whatever path it could find. Were the towels for him?

OH. Was that what person across from him had been talking about? He must really be making a mess, Seren looked down at the steaming mug. The first thing offered, after a seat. And food, although his stomach shied away whenever the croissant came into focus. He should do... something. Not just sit here, even if everything felt so heavy and stiff and numb. At least make some observable effort. Something that wouldn’t cause this person any trouble. He didn’t want to cause trouble...

He could be tired later. With an almost-normal-speed deep breath, Seren sat up a little straighter, tucked his aura behind him (much less clearly like wings than usual, but still more organized than the floor puddle it had been), and stiffly separated one hand from the hot cup. His palm immediately chilled, though the flesh underneath remained warmer than it had felt before, and he pivoted it on his elbow to pick up the top cloth. It was soft but not in the way of worn fabric, soft In that stiff way like it had never been used. There were still creases in it too. The new towels at home still had creases in them. They hadn’t been used. He had been cutting off the sales tags and then he and Haiiro couldn’t agree on whether or not new towels needed to be washed before they were used

The hand on the towel shook, the movement from deep inside rather than the superficial tremor of a shiver from the cold.

He could hear the rain outside. He didn’t know how long he had been listening to it.

Had it started during the night? Had he been awake all night?

Rain. Rain was inside weather. Always had been. He had never really been able to work in the rain. And when it rained, Ha his attention had always turned inward. Indoors.

How long had he been indoors? He didn’t remember. Sometimes all he did was remember, in fragments or loops. Sometimes it was all he could do to remember if it was day or night.

Right now, it was.... day? Early? It was grey behind the sheer curtains but not dark enough for night. Not orange enough for the streetlight. Morning? Morning. But he hadn’t woken up recently.

He sank farther down into the couch, but the blanket spilled from his shoulders. His bare arms, the exposed skin, shivered in the cool air. Cool like an open window. Fresh air from the rain. Clean. Not like the air in here. It was always the same air. In the living room, it smelled only faintly of him. More of him] now. He didn’t remember when he’d last showered. Probably had had to be told. It was just so hard to.... do anything. Being was exhausting enough. How was he supposed to do something when he was so tired and empty?

His phone vibrated on the coffee table. It shivered and danced sideways across the white melamine. It got closer to the edge. Closer. Fell off. Vibrated one more time and then fell silent.

Seren tipped forward to pick it up with nerveless fingers. One missed call. Mr. Chuuhi. Probably going to come over again. He didn’t have the energy to see him. The man who would be - would have been - his -

No, he didn’t have the energy for that. Not today. And he wasn’t weary enough to withstand it. To sleep through it. It would last hours. Hours of not looking at the face that H- that he would never look like. Not today. No. He couldn’t do it. His chest was already tightening, ratcheting smaller beneath his skin and his scars. No. He wouldn’t be able to even listen to his voice today. The soft Japanese, the accented English. That same way of shaping each sound. No. He couldn’t. He couldn’t be here. He had to... get out. Go out for a while. Far enough away that they wouldn’t accidentally cross his path. People he didn’t know, who didn’t know him. Somewhere new. He needed to go somewhere new.

When had he stood? It had been too fast, but he hadn’t hit the coffee table, just wobbled. His head caught up with the movement, and he rolled his shoulders to loosen them. So stiff. Everything felt stiff. His shoulders, his body. His head. His mind. Everything. Even his aura, and he couldn’t actually feel it. But it seemed to move in slow jerks, ill-formed twitches and ripples around him. Whatever. Let it hang around him like a cherry haze, a shroud. All the better if people thought he was dead.

His phone buzzed again in his hand, shivering against his leg. Just twice this time. A message. Had it already been ten minutes? It was Mr. Chuuhi again. He should... tell him not to come. He didn’t want to see him, hear him, but he didn’t want to be rude. Mr. Chuuhi didn’t deserve that. He should let him know. Tell him he would be out. Not to worry. Going out for a walk. Fresh air. There. That should do it.

He slid off his house slippers and stared at his outside shoes. Hero boots closest to hand, untouched since before. Dress shoes and runners and sandals. Too many options. Why did he want to go out again?

His phone buzzed. Mr. Chuuhi. No, he didn’t need anything dropped off. He wasn’t hungry. Didn’t want to waste anything. He didn’t say that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt hungry, even though he’d worked his way through a tub of ice cream recently enough that the lid was still on the coffee table. Either of his parents in law would have thrown it out. No. Too many reminders. He needed out. Needed to be somewhere different and new and not full of memories. Shoes. Whatever was easiest. He shoved on a pair of of slip-on sandals, even though they weren’t much more than soles and some straps. There was a name for them, but he didn’t remember and didn’t care. He needed to get out of here. Keys. Those were his keys beside the door. He grabbed the leaf-shaped leather tag and shoved the jangly collection into his pant pocket. Out the door. Down the steps. Past the rain-flattened gardens, don’t look too close, don’t think too much. The rain had stopped for now. The sun wasn’t out. The ground was covered in scattered puddles. His feet would get wet. Were wet. Not much point trying to keep them dry even if he had the energy to try.

The gate clanged as it bounced against the latch. He didn’t need to keep anything in or out. Just keep walking. Pick a direction. Don’t even need to look. Not past the Chuuhi residence. The other way. Away, away, away.

...where was he? Seren shivered, hands deep in his pant pockets, one hand awkwardly beneath his keys and half-numb despite the thin heat from his thigh. Everything was cold. Or he couldn’t feel it. Not that that was all that new, but he couldn’t tell why he couldn’t feel the things that weren’t cold, if they were too cold or if he was just numb. Like so much else was numb. Rain trickled down his neck, not cold enough to burn as it slid over his burn scars. His shoulders were soaked, the plain navy t-shirt looking closer to black other than the few sheltered areas still showing their dry colour. His arms. The hairs stood out with rain and a selfish attempt to retain heat. His pyjama pants were soaked from the waist down and from the hems up. His feet... ached, where they weren’t cold or numb or numb with cold. He couldn’t quite tell where the difference lay, but some of them ached. How far had he walked?

How long had he walked? His phone. It had the time. Rain slowly beaded on the screen, challenging his attempts to unlock it but no longer heavy enough to stop him altogether. Less than an hour. No, less than two hours. One missed text from Mr. Chuuhi, just checking in. Yes, he was alive, yes he was still out. No, he didn’t need anything. The responses felt wooden and automatic. They were enough to stop further questions for a while. That was what he wanted. He sighed, and then sneezed as the movement shifted rainwater from the outside of his nose to the inside. Now that was cold and wet too. He sighed again, and rubbed his face on his wet shoulder. It didn’t really help. Maybe he should go inside?

There was a cafe just over there. He didn’t recognize it, but the Open sign glowed, warm and bright against the rain-streaked glass. Maybe he should go inside.

The bell over the door tinkled, soft and not quite invasively cheerful, and the cafe itself didn’t try to brighten everything either. That was... not distressing. Seren stood in the doorway for a long moment, rain slowly dripping from his t-shirt and pyjamas, half-looking at the room.