Chapter Text
There’s a businessman trudging through the forest.
It’s a cool spring afternoon; a gentle breeze brushes through the leaves, and in the distance a lidth’s jay sings the song of an approaching April.
Flowers blossom along moss covered train tracks, petals face up to the sky, and the man treks across them without so much as a glance, venturing deeper into the brush.
His white dress shirt is rumpled, dark burrs stuck to the sleeves as a result of pushing through bushes and low hanging branches, and his briefcase drags miserably at his side. Despite the weather, his face rests in a deep scowl.
The grass crunches softly beneath his shoes, the sunshine cutting through the trees shining off of the fine leather like diamonds, and he busies himself with unclasping his watch, shoving it deep into his pockets.
His wedding ring follows suit.
He spares his phone screen a glance, ignoring the text messages flooding his inbox with practiced ease. He won’t be able to answer soon enough— service never lasts for very long so deep into the forest. It’s best to save the replies for later, lest he accidentally leave his wife on read.
He’ll blame leaving her on delivered on airplane turbulence.
The soft trickle of running water prompts him to shove his phone back in his pockets alongside the rest of his belongings, and he pushes through the last thick wall of branches and now crushed flowers until he’s finally face to face with the stream.
It’s a small thing, the last bit of runoff from the waterfall perched at the top of the mountains—he can clear it in one step.
Like clockwork, the man drops to his knees, dress pants no doubt staining from the dirt already, and he digs through piles of leaves and sticks until there’s a sizable hole left behind. The gentle breeze rustles his hair and kisses his bare skin as he strips down, flipping open his briefcase and swapping his work clothes for a plainer, much cheaper outfit. His watch and phone follow his folded dress wear into the case and into the hole, and he straps on his black medical mask with a bone tired sigh.
A bird hops on a tree nearby, staring down at him with round and beady eyes.
“Shoo,” He says with very little bite, “You never saw me here.”
But the winged creature stays still, attentive and judgmental, watching even as the businessman stains his soft lavender hair charcoal black with chalk that clings to his fingers and dyes the edges of his nails the same obsidian.
A glint of metal catches in the sunlight, and the bird takes off, fleeing towards the sky and disappearing above the treetops. It screams a frantic warning to others of its kind, “Don’t come any closer!”
The katana sheaths behind the man’s back.
—
Shinsou Hitoshi comes into the world in the midst of the worst hurricane to hit the city of Musutafu in over a decade.
The winds are nothing short of dreadful, hail and rain beating against windows in a torrential downpour, and the nurses eye the woman in active labor with something like wariness as the lights flicker above their heads. The hospital might need to switch to the backup generator if the storm gets any worse.
Her husband stands at her bedside, large hands encompassing her own as he supports her through the worst of her contractions. His watch, rimmed with gold and almost certainly handcrafted, glistens like the pearls his wife had shed onto the bedside table, where they lay in an expensive lump.
They’ve got the best room in the whole hospital, no doubt. The midwives bring the woman light snacks between groans, hot water to sip on in brilliantly lavish ceramic mugs, and the air conditioner across the room turns on and off according to the temperature outside. It was a stifling day before the storm hit—early July pressing on against the city with no mercy.
One intern fans herself with her clipboard when the woman isn’t looking, staring over the doctor’s shoulder every so often and jotting down notes when she can.
It’s been a long six hours.
“We’re not sure of the name just yet,” The husband explains, eye darting across the room fleetingly like any first time father. “We both wanted the gender to be a surprise. My sister—she gets these visions , you see—refused to tell us, anyway.”
“I do hope it’s a girl,” The wife comments, like they’re conversing over afternoon tea and she’s not on the verge of crowning. The intern wonders if being so well put together is her Quirk or if that’s simply how people act when they’re made of money.
The baby finally pops out an hour later with a crackle of lightning outside the window, decidedly not a girl, but the twin smiles on the newfound parents' faces are enough to diminish any worries of disappointment at all.
The woman cradles her baby against her bare breast, soft brown hair loose around her face from where it had fallen from her bun, and she coos down at the small creature in her arms despite the post-birth gunk stuck to its discolored skin.
“A boy,” The father breathes a laugh, sweat dripping down his forehead like he was just the one who gave birth for seven hours in the midst of a horrible storm. “I can’t believe it.”
He stares down at the child from his wife’s side, a creation that he’d had a part in, eyes wide and glistening. His son wails something fierce, drowned out only by the thunder, squirming every so often like he wants to be free.
“He’s just like his father;” The woman muses, brushing back the thin strands of purple that dot his head. A suggestion of a no doubt untamable head of lavender, if his father’s gravity defying curls are any sort of indicator. “wants to run around already. I can only pray he doesn’t get your stubbornness,” She jests.
The intern scoops the baby out of his mother’s arms a few moments later, snipping the umbilical cord with only slight queasiness. He squints up at her when she and other the nurses wipe him clean, stirring restlessly as she plugs his belly button and decorates his small head with a blue cap. His face scrunches gingerly when they dip his foot in a pad of ink, stamping his footprint onto manila paper.
She breathes a soft sigh of relief when the baby is finally passed off to his father—every time he so much as twitched she’d choke on an inhale, horrified that she might somehow mess up and send him toppling to the tile floor.
“Hitoshi.” His mother whispers, “His name is Hitoshi.”
Her son— Hitoshi —stares up at her, eyes fluttering open and closed as he fights off sleep. He seems to hold no qualms against his new title, too busy gripping at his mother’s hair.
"Shinsou Hitoshi.”
The intern steps out of the room quietly, half listening to the doctor beside her who’s already quizzing her on her first birth experience. She can’t get the image of the new family out of her head, of the beautiful and graceful mother and the strong yet anxious father. Their first son. The beauty of it all.
The door begins to close behind her, and she can’t help but glance back at the three of them before it can slam shut completely. The rain beating hard against the windows isn’t enough to dim the all encompassing warmth in that room. The moment is too special to be suffocated by something as trivial as a storm.
Shinsou Hitoshi , The intern thinks to herself. She extends her Quirk, the soft pink of her aura reaching out to brush the small ears of the newborn. She hopes that her smile shows even in her thoughts as she passes them on to him.
I just know you’ve got a wonderful life ahead of you.
—
"Won't you show off your Quirk for Grandpa?"
—
Just off the edge of the city, through the brush and over the train tracks, there lies a place that doesn’t exist. Untouched by riches and wealth, undisturbed by skyscrapers or car lined streets. A world unseen by pro heroes and left to rot by the police.
A place that can only be named in whispers, echoed against the dingy brick walls of alleyways past midnight, hissed in a meeting between informants, or passed down the line in the underground. A place whose shadows hardly brush against the edges of Musutafu, unknown—unpredictable.
To those who walk its thin line of existence, they know it as The Rails.
It's a safe haven for some—hell on Earth for most (when a life confined to hell flame and sin is far more welcoming to them than a life lived in the light). A collection of dozens of communities, scattered along the tracks all over Japan like litter left to mold into asphalt.
A handful of shipping containers surround a poorly dispersed gravel path, red and yellow dotting the opening in the wilderness; splotches of color against the eerie backdrop of pale winter. A bird stretches its wings, soaring over the road, and its haunting caws echo as it passes above a hunched, minute splotch of black in the snow.
A small boy, bones protruding through his thin sweater like the wings of a scraggly baby bird, kneels in the brown sposh outside of a rusty red container, tossing twigs into a steadily rising bonfire. He’s alone in the residential area, the only living thing besides rats and strays moving about in the chill, and his teeth chatter like a hoard of sick buzzing flies.
He rubs his hands together in front of him as the flames jump up, breath puffing up into a soft fog even as his body begins to gradually warm from the heat. He wipes at his runny nose with gloved hands, huddling as close to the fire as he can without falling right into it. He can't be any older than six.
The smell of firewood and smoke wafts with the wind as he stokes the fire with a long stick, the old bonfires from other shipping containers reduced to nothing but ash and coals. If the boy listens carefully he thinks he can hear movement from inside the nearby containers; the steady hush of quiet breaths, or the whimpers of a sickly, freezing child. That was him just the year prior—he can still remember the way his bones burned with the stroke of frostbite. How his chest had constricted with each and every wheezy breath like he’d been punched.
The metal door behind him slides open with a shrill scrape, before the crunch of boots on snow follows suit and he turns to face the woman approaching him with a soft smile.
She’s dressed for the cold as much as she can be, too. Her mismatched and frayed wool gloves are so large on her frail hands that they’re nearly falling off, and her long black hair is hidden snugly beneath the hood of her sweatshirt. She grabs the blanket she has draped over her arm and throws it over the boy’s shoulders, tucking the fabric around him until he’s almost completely drowned in it.
“You’ll get cold too, Auntie,” He protests, but he finds himself pulling the blanket tighter around himself anyway, chasing any semblance of warmth he can get.
“Well we can’t have you getting sick now, can we?” The woman tuts, crouching down so they’re knee to knee before the fire. The glow of the flames bounces against her cheeks like sunlight on water; she almost looks healthy in the face of the heat.
She silently takes the stick from her nephew's hand, prodding at the wood herself so he can tuck his hands beneath the blanket along with the rest of his body.
It’s mid February and the blizzards that hit the mountains are only just beginning to warm and transition into rainfall, leaving behind a sheen of ice and sludge in its wake that works its way up and around the foundation of metal shipping containers like frozen mold. Their own is no exception to this—covered in a thin layer of frost that makes the inside more like an icebox than a proper home.
The boy huddles closer to his aunt, frowns when he realizes she’s shivering worse than he is already. It’s better to be outside, glued to a fire pit, than inside waiting to catch hypothermia.
It’s not that bad.
The boy knows that they’ll be able to cook fish over the fire tonight, a far cry from the cans of vegetable-goo and soup that they stashed away just for the winter months, and the thought of eating something that doesn’t make his teeth feel coated with slime is enough to make his blood buzz pleasantly with excitement. His stomach groans at the reminder noisily, fighting for volume against a whistle of wind as it rushes over his covered head and caresses deadly fingers against his face, and a benign grumble of laughter cuts over the brief gust from just behind the crouched pair.
He whirls around without so much as a moment of hesitation, narrowly missing his footing and no doubt an intimate run in with the fire pit if it weren’t for his aunt’s steadying hand on the small of his back, and he launches himself like a missile at the man approaching, a splitting smile brighter than the summer sun on his face.
“It seems I came at a good time,” the man comments fondly, catching the small boy in his arms like he was anticipating the impact as he easily switches the paper bag from one hand to the other. “Someone sounds hungry.”
The boy’s father is a cataclysm of a man.
He’s tall and rough at the hands, rough everywhere, really, with more scars littering his cheeks and arms than he has freckles from days spent beneath the merciless sun. They litter his entire body like stars splattered against a clear, dark night sky—though the recent frigid chill has proved capable of dimming them down to nothing but mere suggestions on his tan skin.
His long, raven curls are windswept, eyelashes stained with white flakes of snow that must still be falling down in the city, and he smiles down at him with a gaze filled to the brim with nothing but pure, unadulterated adoration. Once a month, his father will make the journey into the city with that month’s savings and splurge on something delicious for them to eat for a week. It’s almost always some sort of fish, but there was that one time when he brought back stone pots and they’d cooked rice that left them all knocked out for an entire night with full, warm bellies.
The boy wriggles, following his nose towards the bag like a cat sniffing out a treat, and his eyes light up.
“Mackerel?” He guesses, and his father ruffles his head of dark hair with yet another chuckle. He’s no doubt cold, face turned a pale shade of pink from the wind biting at his sharp nose, but he approaches the fire slowly—like he’s savoring the moment of having his son in his arms as if he’ll never have it again.
“You manage to surprise me with your guesses every time, kid. Where’d you get such a keen nose from, huh?”
He greets his sister with a light press of his palm to her head once the boy’s finally dropped down from his arms, and she leans into the touch for a brief moment before pulling away to help unwrap the raw fish and skewers. Her eyes shine with hunger unrestrained, but her hands remain careful and purposeful as she and her brother begin stabbing the whole mackerel with the sharpened sticks.
The boy busies himself by adding more twigs to the fire, trying to make himself useful, but he’s clearly nauseous from the lack of full meals the past few days and the fleeting glances he’s sparing the fish are enough to hazard holding them far enough away that he can’t bite into them raw.
But the moment of ravenous impatience passes as it always does, and the three sit around the bonfire with two sticks of their own, chatting animatedly as if they aren’t all growing damp from condensation and a steady drizzle isn't beginning to fall above their heads. The boy listens with rapt attention as his father shows him how to get the edges of the skin to the crisp texture that he likes, and his aunt chastises him gently when he tries to devour his meal in one whole bite without pacing himself.
It’s domestic, because it’s home. It’s the norm; the numbing winters, the weeks passed without full meals, keeping their heads down whenever another group of people in just as ragged condition stumble drunkenly by.
It's not comfortable, and the small boy sneezes as a chill passes through him, but he’s smiling.
His father watches him attentively, gives him one of his fish when his son’s already finished with his own two. His eyes are glassy and his face far too void of healthy fat like the other kids he’s seen during his runs to the city, but he doesn’t ask for more. He doesn’t need more.
Hitoshi knows nothing of the life that he could have had.
Shinsou Hayato intends to keep it that way.