Chapter Text
It was a miserable rain. Bruce soaked in the downpour, feeling the misery slowly seep under his clothes, into his skin. Or maybe the misery was already there, stuffed into his bones, coded in his DNA, the rain was just washing it out like ink from paper.
He glanced at the row ahead of him. Roughly a hundred. About the same behind him. Then down at the stacks of yen in his palm. About a hundred thousand. Maybe enough for a meal or two. The bills were damp and crumpled like the people around him. The portrait of Yukichi Fukuzawa stared back at him, stoic as always, unbothered by whatever fuckery must have led to his owner paying with him for half a kilo of rice.
A scream came from the street to his left. Heads picked up. Bodies tensed. Hands jerked towards pockets containing knives and in some cases, Bruce was sure, firearms. But no one moved. And everyone made sure not to stare too much when they dragged a woman through the mud and oil soiled, waterlogged streets.
Her shirt was torn off. Tattoo lines of inky hair stuck to her pale skin. The bones nearly broke through, she was so thin. They all were. That woman probably looked no worse or better than the people queuing for rice since three in the morning.
Except for the wings.
Not real wings, not the ones people previously dreamed of having. These were small, fly-like appendages, budding between her protruding shoulder blades. Iridescent foil wrapped around bone coloured wire. Around Bruce, people averted their eyes. It was unwise to stare too long lest someone thinks you’re one of them.
Us. Bruce resisted the urge to fix his bandana in place. No, not us. He was but a weary citizen, soaking in the rain, sharing his misery with his fellow citizens, yet alone in it. Everyone was alone in theirs. If he so much as steps a centimetre out the line, someone will take his place and he can do nothing about it. Not without causing an incident.
Yet, Bruce stared. One wing was broken. Not that it mattered. They were too small to fly. A mere cosmetic mutation, little more than an ornament. The woman probably spent a good chunk of her life hiding them without much difficulty. He wondered if she had ever shown them to anyone before. He wondered if this was the first time that person, that human being, was ever naked in front of another. In the streets, dragged by the elbows like a convict. Lynched, beaten and publicly humiliated for a crime imbued in her DNA. For daring to be born with a set of harmless wings on her back.
Bruce’s hand tightened around the yen. One of the Officers ran his eyes over the crowd and he quickly turned his profile. He stared at the people in front. Standing more than a metre apart, yet it's as if they were breathing right into his neck, their round teeth nibbling his nape, their eyes prying underneath his clothes, searching for wings.
Some of those teeth might just be a tad sharper than appropriate. Bruce ran his tongue over his own. They were a bit crooked but that’s normal. Whatever normal meant. He never got braces for them, is all.
He knew they all felt it. The fear. In your bones, taking the place of whatever the rain washed out of you. It has been raining for weeks. The streets were flooded with blackish-brown streams of sludge. Kudo said it was the humanity slowly leaking out of all of them. Bruce wasn’t much for dramatics but he too, felt a bit lighter. Further from the others. He feared it shows.
Mutation or not, they all watched. Even if you were declared ‘healthy’ by the government, got your fancy paper with the fancy green stamp, saying you weren’t one of them, you couldn’t shake the feeling of being surveyed. By no higher power but each other. There was no higher power anymore. You never know when a dormant meta ability decides to make itself known. The eyes were like spindly, prying fingers wanting to pick apart the very being of you. Uncoil your DNA like yarn to see if everything was proper. Maybe knit it back in order if they could. Bruce didn’t know if he’d let them. They’d certainly try.
There were two hundred of them in line. None of them looked but some of them felt the same thing Bruce did. Waiting, keeping their head down but not too down, trying to get something edible before the small grocery store runs out of supply by noon. Last year they said one percent of the population possesses the ‘mutation’. Now it was three. Despite their best efforts, it kept going up. There should be at least five other people in this line who had something else in their bodies. In their code. They didn’t know exactly what but it was there. Dormant, hidden or just suppressed; maybe by willpower, maybe by binders and tape, maybe by drugs and back-alley plastic surgery.
You had no way to know. To each other, everyone else was a them. No ‘us ‘ existed anymore. It wasn’t you and me. It was you or me.
The woman’s legs gave out from under her. One of the Officers (originally called ‘Meta Management Officers’ but now just called ‘Officers') helpfully kicked her in the side to make her move along even though she was already practically dragged by two others. Their modified gas masks -supposedly against catching some sort of meta strain- made them look even less human than the young woman they were dragging to one of the camps. Sorry, Meta Management Establishments. They all knew what they were, really. They all read Maus in high school.
They never thought they would be in it, though.
The woman didn’t get up, couldn’t. Bruce saw the quick flashes of eye whites from the crowd. The line didn’t move for an hour now and everyone was hungry, cold, miserable and glad.
Glad to not be one of Them.
But you could be. You could be a Them without ever having a jumbled nucleotide in your body. Maybe you sang just a tad too well. Maybe your eyes were just a tad too bright. Maybe you looked for just a tad too long. Maybe you were simply in the way. Either way, your existence was crime and your punishment was death.
One of the Officers grabbed the broken wing. His gloved fingers wrapped around it, crushing the brittle membrane. He pulled. She screamed a scream so ragged and raw, Bruce wanted to cover his ears. Somewhere, a kid started crying but it was muffled almost immediately. The appendage twisted and stretched, straw-like structures snapping and the thin iridescent film crumpling before it all tore out of her back with a sickening, wet crunching. Her scream cut off only as she lost consciousness.
Bruce stepped out of the line.
Someone immediately took his place but he didn’t pay it any mind. He shoved the worthless scraps of paper back into the pocket of his combat uniform and advanced towards the scene.
The Officers, of course, noticed. Everyone noticed. Everyone looked. No one did anything. He was Them now. Always has been. They all were.
One of the Officers scrambled for his weapon but Bruce was faster. He watched the trajectory of his arm, the twist of his body. He looked and imagined the swirl of the movement, the start and endpoint, the energies being bent and used when the Officer took a step back to steady himself. Bruce found the point and struck.
He kicked in a knee, twisted a hand, and watched a punch fly his way in almost slow motion. He raised an arm and let it brush against the forearm of the Officer. The rough fabric slid on the naked skin of his wrist; smooth, close, intimate. He felt the flow and grabbed and twisted the energy so the Officer’s punch flew way off-track and Bruce’s open palm connected with his solar plexus. They wore kevlar coating but it mattered very little. The energy transferred all the same.
Previous, he would try to tell his students that they could too, ‘see’ the energy if they practised enough. That it was just a matter of mastering the art of tai chi, of being in harmony with your body, all that bullshit. Now he knew they did not see the swirling patterns. They did not taste the nectar of movement on their tongue. They did not feel the other’s muscles shifting from a single point of contact.
It was him, only him in this entire world, only his malcoded body that did that.
He had the four men down in less than twenty seconds. The rain and their surprise helped. He knew there will be more if he doesn’t hurry. There will be Red Lights if he doesn’t hurry. They’ll have to leave town after this. Try to get to the next prefecture.
The queuers kept looking. None of them did anything when he looted the bodies, just like how none of them did anything when a person was being openly tortured in front of them. None of them liked the Officers, not even the green-stamped ones.
Bruce shook the woman awake, dragged her to her feet, not much kinder than her previous captors, and they ran. He flung her over his shoulder when she could no longer clamber behind him. She barely weighed anything.
It took him an hour longer to get back to their squatting place. He had to dodge the Red Lights twice and kept hearing the sirens even when there weren’t any. He heard those sirens in his dreams. Everyone did. Everyone saw the Red flashing behind their closed eyelids, meta or not. Kudo sometimes woke up breathless next to him, dreaming he was being choked again when the Red Lights first came on.
He slid the woman inside the small, busted basement window and went in after her. As soon as his feet touched ground, something cold pressed up against his temple.
“What did you do this time?”
He couldn't see Kudo but could feel him inside the shadows. He wondered if it was their ability or his own. And the barrel of the gun was very real indeed, even if Bruce knew he won’t fire it off.
“She needed help. I helped her,” he said simply. There wasn’t much else to add.
A huff came from the darkness and the barrel was gone. Kudo stepped out of the shadows. They seemed to cling to him, following him a bit longer into the light than what was appropriate. But it might have been sleep deprivation playing tricks on Bruce’s brain.
Kudo knelt beside the woman and inspected the wound. A thick, clear-ish liquid oozed from it, mixing with standard, red blood. He sighed and scooped her up to take her to their ‘bed’ and start addressing the wound best they could with a few rolls of damp gauze. Everything of theirs was so damn damp. It needed stitches but they didn’t have the right tools so a pressure wrap will have to do. Bruce went to get some water and started cleaning around the tear.
On her back, underneath the only remaining wing, there was a palm-sized, angry red, brandished ‘M’.
He looked at Kudo, sharing a glance and a thought. On his partner’s cheek, there was a jagged scar climbing up the bridge of his nose, slicing through his left eyebrow. It was two scars overlapping, actually. One, he got a few years back in the line of duty. The other, he made himself a few months ago. What was previously there, a single letter that should not mean as much as it did, wasn’t anything worth keeping.
Bruce didn’t think himself a meta for a long, long time. It never even occurred to him that his abilities could be the result of anything other than hard work and determination and a little bit of love for his profession. Not before they confronted him behind his dojo three years back. The situation was ‘controlled’ back then and the thought that he was unsafe, has never crossed his mind before. They grabbed him, ten grown men, well trained, yet barely able to subdue him. Some were his very own students. People who he taught how to read the flow of movements and now they were blocking his, kneeling on his throat, twisting his hands behind his back.
They etched a crooked, jagged ‘M’ into his forehead. Like an animal, branded, waiting to go to the slaughter. That was before the billows. Kudo’s was after.
Bruce was afraid at that moment. Angry too but when he saw the hunter’s knife coming towards his eyes, he felt a fear he never did before in his life. The same fear this woman did. The same pain Kudo did. The same terror everyone did. Even the ‘normals’.
They looked at each other, Bruce swallowed and they went back to quietly working. He wondered if they should just get rid of her other wing too while she’s out of it. Do her a favour. But even the thought made him feel— vile. He knew Kudo did too.
“We need to move after this. Again. ” Kudo grumbled when Bruce reluctantly told him how he disarmed four Officers in broad daylight. He did take their weapons and money, cigarettes and even a kevlar vest. Kudo inspected the weapons, checked how many rounds they had and tossed them into the pile.
Then he took a cigarette and lit it, following the smoke coiling towards the ceiling. Bruce grabbed the west and pulled it over the woman’s head. They didn’t have more spare clothes but he did find a mouldy blanket so he draped that on her too. Then he joined Kudo and lit a cig of his own. He didn’t smoke before meeting him. He didn’t attack (ex)police officers either.
His partner didn’t have any obvious ‘meta traits’ either. He was rather easy on the eyes if Bruce was to be honest. A soft, boyish face contrasting the scarred, muscled body below. But when the light hit him, it didn’t seem to reflect off his pupils. They were the deepest black. Most would say they were unsettling. Bruce would say he’d like to dive into them like a pool of shadowy night and drown happy.
Before, no one would think twice of it. He would wear sunglasses when it was bright outside and indoors, it wasn’t noticeable at all. Kudo wasn’t big on words. He rarely talked about his time in the special forces but Bruce knew he was good. He was in the squadron reserved for only the best of the best. Their specialisation was covert operations. Once he got close enough to touch your shadow, you were done for. Yet he could not sense when one of his crew-mates, his brothers, firmly held a pillow over his face. He woke up choking and in the dark. They probably thought it was mercy.
No wonder almost all of them turned out to be metas. Kudo was the only one still alive and free.
The woman stirred. They both tensed, watching with wary eyes as she blinked herself awake. Her face immediately contorted from the pain but she didn’t make a scene. She looked too tired for that. They all were. She noticed them and froze, waiting for them to make the first move. She didn’t seem to be expecting anything good.
“Hello,” Bruce said with an awkward-ish little wave. “I’m Takao. This is Kurosawa. We’re like you.”
Her tension didn’t ease up but she slowly, distrustingly, nodded and reached around to palpate her back. When she found the bandaged wound, her face filled with not just pain, but a sadness. Not a strong, obvious sadness, but a deep, resigned one. Bruce knew that sadness. The sorrow of losing something that previously was one of the things that made you who you are. He doubted it was just the wing.
“Suzuki,” she said after a while.
“We’re going,” Kudo declared and got up to pack their things. Bruce knew better than to try and stop him but he still turned back towards Suzuki.
“How are you feeling? Do you have anywhere to go? Anyone to contact?”
The woman didn’t respond but that was as clear as an answer as any. She kept lightly touching her back as if she would find her lost wing if she did so for long enough. Bruce’s forehead ached in sympathy.
“We could—“
“We’re not ,” Kudo cut in immediately. Then, softer, “We can’t afford to. It’s better for her if she doesn’t associate herself with us. We both have hits out on us.”
The woman’s eyes got a sliver of light in them. “You’re part of the resistance?” she asked, so sickeningly hopeful, Bruce winced.
“There is no resistance, Kudo barked, tossing Bruce his bag.
“There is,” the woman contested, almost offended, clearly still a bit out of it.
“This isn’t fucking Star Wars. There’s no resistance and we need to haul ass before the dogs catch a scent.”
“There is,” the woman repeated, quiet but firm. It’s the kind of certainty you choose to have. Because if you don’t, then you have nothing else. “In Tokyo. There’s this person— the- the Albino, they’re calling them, they’re— they’re freeing camps, giving refuge to people, metas. They freed one of my— anyway, they said to go to Tokyo and search for after the M.”
Bruce stopped in his tracks. Kudo glowered, resorting to forcefully dragging him out of the basement.
“What do you mean?” he asked, ignoring his partner’s grip on his forearm and the surge of spirals and movements and energies that came with it. The part of his brain forever immersed in his work noted at least three ways to break his hold and turn his force back on him.
The woman sensed the same desperate belief in him, that undignified clinging to something false, something impossible. Kudo always said Bruce was a dreamer. Well, somebody has to be in this god fucking forsaken country.
“You— you can f-fight right? Your— your abilities are powerful, you could— we could—“ there’s a fight in her voice, shaky but there. Broken but not irreparably so.
“They are nothing but a burden,” Kudo sneered, his porcelain face now nothing but snapping teeth. The face of a person chipped at the edges, roughly sanded down to its barest of forms, beaten and abused into a shape that does not fit those delicate features. “These fucking ‘abilities’ are only going to get us k—“
There’s a rumble of engines, a screech of tires and then Red. The Light spills into the basement through the boarded windows like sluggish waves of vaporised blood. There’s always blood where the Red Light is. Harder to see, but there. Like them. Kudo’s sneer deepens and then his face smooths out. Completely blank, completely focused. He unlocks the safety on his gun and stands in front of both of them while an Officer orders through the megaphone,
“COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP OR WE WILL OPEN FIRE!”
There’s merely a second’s pause, a silent moment spent in terrified stillness, before a smoke grenade flies through the open window. Kudo acts with cold precision. He leaps, catches it, tosses it back out and immediately turns on his heels to kick the barricaded door down. Bruce can already hear them doing the same on the other end of the hallway. Trapping them in, driving them into a corner.
Kudo looks back and that one look is enough for Bruce to grasp Suzuki’s wrist and drag her close. Then Kudo raises his gun and shoots out the lights.
Bruce shuts his eyes even though he knows he won’t see anything either way. Suzuki’s breath catches in her throat but she follows obediently as they stumble through the darkness. It rolls around them with a physical weight of something other than just a lack of photons. Something thicker, something alive. He hears the gunfire, he hears the heavy, iron soled steps ahead and he doesn’t hear the faster, much lighter ones of his partner. He does hear the screams. Some of them might be his or Suzuki’s, he can’t be sure.
It only takes less than a minute and he’s out. It feels blindingly bright even though the rainclouds make everything a dim, murky grey even at the peak of noon. No light but no sharp shadows either. None of the complete darkness of the basement. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.
Then there is the Red. The reflector of the armoured truck is aimed at their pair heaving in the rain, terrified and surrounded, rounded up and herded towards the barrel, like swine.
There are too many of them, there’s too much Red washing over them like waves of pain, it’s too much, all too much and all Bruce can do is push Suzuki behind his back and heed the speakers demanding he puts his hands up and surrenders. He does. What else is there to do? He knows it doesn’t matter but he does so anyway. Maybe they’ll take them to a camp. Maybe they’ll kill them swiftly. Maybe they’ll dispose of their bodies respectfully. None of those statements seems likely to come true.
Bruce feels his hands shake. Not enough to be noticeable but he knows they do and that in itself terrifies him more than the half a dozen barrels winking at him from behind the Red. His hands never shook. Not even when he broke the femur of his past-student in one, definite movement.
When people prepare to die, one would presume they think of their life. Their past, their loved ones, their achievements, and regrets.
Bruce thinks of that broadcast he saw when the internet was still up. Of a body being dragged behind a Porsche SUV, face down on the concrete with their three hands tied behind their back. How thick the bloody streak they left on the pavement was. But more than anything, he thought about the cheers. High, joyous, childlike.
He thinks about how Kudo said there was once someone with a meta ability to move tattoos on their skin. How he saw it peeled off, prepared and then auctioned. How he cut their throat too soon because he couldn’t watch.
He thinks how horridly funny it is that the first thing that ran out was black hair dye. Or brown or blonde depending on the country.
He thinks how a world that was entering an era of never before seen prosperity, can come to this because of a single picture of an infant. How he loathes that baby. How he wants to wring its neck with his bare hands. How he wants to pick them up and rock them to sleep and tell them it’s going to be all right. That it wasn’t their fault. That it would have come to this sooner or later anyway. That they weren’t the first. They were merely the first to be seen. Too bright to hide.
But the baby is dead and so are they.
From the corner of his eye, Bruce sees Kudo emerge from the gaping blackness of the basement entrance, alone. There’s no blood on him but that doesn’t mean much. The shadows cling to him, tendrils of smoke hooking into the wrinkles of his clothes, the folds in his skin like the long, wispy fingers of a desperate lover. The blond-grey strands of his hair seem almost black before the shadow loses against the Red and he’s out in the open, standing beside them, hands up like the rest. Bruce wishes he could see the light elude his eyes once more, making them so mythical and mesmerising.
But what he sees instead is the flash of a barrel. Kudo sees it too. He ducks almost the same time Bruce tackles him.
He had his hands up.
Their bodies slam into the cracked curb with a teeth-rattling thud.
He had his hands up.
Bruce’s hands do not shake anymore. He rolls off Kudo, not checking if he’s fine, he has to be. He plucks a smoke grenade from his belt and hurls it at the armoured vehicle.
He had his hands up. No weapon. No threat. No mercy.
Bruce doesn’t hear anything but his staccato heartbeat and his ragged breath, loud and violent in his ears as he pelts towards the Officer and snaps his neck in one swift movement. It’s almost laughable how easy it is. The spirals and waves and curls just lend themselves, beg to be used and twisted and pushed whichever way Bruce wants them to go.
He hears gunshots, Kudo’s or enemy, it doesn’t matter. The smoke coils in their wake, magenta and angry. Bruce knows where the next Officer is. He knows and as soon as he makes contact, it’s over for them. He snaps a wrist, an elbow, a shoulder, a spine. It all crackles in harmony with the gunshots. The heel of his palm shatters a jaw, it drives into a nose, redirects shards of bone through a brain. He grins a vicious showcase of blood-stained teeth and kicks a pelvis into smithereens.
He sees Kudo up and running towards another Officer that has their gun trained on Bruce. But before they could fire, Kudo reaches out, seemingly too far to grab them but his hands still find their target. The thin, black shadow the Officer casts onto the side of the van. He digs his fingers into the middle of it, the Officer screams, seizes up and falls.
His partner grabs the dropped AK and empties it into the reflector. The Red is gone and with it, something leaves Bruce too. But not the Red. It’s on his hands, his clothes, his face. Dripping, smudging, drying, seeping underneath his skin to stain something he cannot just take off and wash in a machine. He looks down at the Officer he shattered the face of, even through the mask. Then at his hands. He didn’t even break a nail.
He hears a voice, muted, female, barely familiar. He feels a hand grab him and jerks, reaching out to catch the momentum and use it against its owner. He realises just in time that it’s Kudo and Suzuki, the latter shouting from a car with the engine running, exhaust puffing soot, one leg already on the gas pedal, spinning the wheels in place.
Bruce ignores his DNA telling him to drive a knee into his side and break half a dozen of his ribs and lets himself be pulled. Then he’s somehow inside and they are somehow going, screeching down the streets, away from the scene, away from the armoured trucks, the Red and the bodies. Bodies he made. Made from humans, now mere heaps of minced meat and broken bone.
There’s a hand clutching his. Kudo sits in the front but his shoulder is off, probably shot. He still reaches back and anchors his fingers to Bruce’s as if it was the only thing keeping him from melting into a pool of shadow completely. Bruce grips back, feeling the very bones in their fingers grind together painfully. He digs his perfectly unharmed nails into the soft flesh of his lover's palm and takes an insignificant amount of comfort when he feels the same half-moons of pain on the back of his own.
Kudo doesn’t glance back, doesn’t acknowledge how their hold is coppery from the blood, doesn’t ease up even a smidgeon, just asks Suzuki, “Where did you get a car?”
“Hotwired it,” the woman shrugs, failing to be casual. In the rearview mirror, her eyes flash to Bruce periodically. Her grip on the wheel is desperate. Her nails are broken, chewed, and even ripped out altogether. Bruce’s are not. “I was a car mechanic. Back when I was still considered human enough to have a job.”
Bruce doesn’t feel human enough. He feels outside of any description that could capture what he is. What he became in the Red Light in less than a heartbeat. When it cascaded down on him like a dam breaking through, taking something with it and replacing it with Red.
How in it, he became what they already said he was.
His other hand comes up to claw under the bandana. It traces the ‘M’, picks at its long healed edges. He almost strips the skin when he tries to hook his perfectly round nails into it and rip it off. Then he stops. He stops and thinks about how none of Them had their hands up. How the only one who got shot was Kudo and he had his hands up.
“So what do you know about this Albino?” he asks, voice muted in his ears but sound.
In the rearview mirror, Suzuki grins. Her teeth are just a tad too sharp. There are wings under her clothes. Kudo’s fingers dig into his flesh and Bruce takes the bandana off.