MLA May AUs (Parts 3+4/31?)

Intro Post

5/3: you’re lost in the labyrinth

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5/4: no sweat, no tears, no guilt

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Content Warning: Accidental death, harassment.

you’re lost in the labyrinth

It starts with blood on your hands, a sticky wetness you can smell but can’t see.

No.  Maybe it ends there.  Backtrack, turn the corner.

It starts with a power outage, a lit bedroom plunged into black, as if you’d blinked and gone blind.

Still not quite right.  Try again.

Maybe it starts with the fact that Dark Shadow was never like other quirks.  Usually, quirks start small.  Nearly harmless, no matter what their potential may be.  A quirk is like a muscle, after all, and children’s muscles are so weak.

But then there are quirks that don’t play by the rules.  Unique quirks, mysteries assembled from odds and ends of the genetic cloth.  Quirks that draw on resources beyond just a six-year-old’s tiny body.  Quirks unchained from the normal linear path of improvement or regression.

Quirks like Dark Shadow.

It starts with Dark Shadow, perhaps, and all the ways people misjudge him.

Your parents are out that night, enjoying dinner and an avant-garde play for their wedding anniversary.  If they were home, things might have ended differently.  They would know where to find the flashlights, would know to grab the flood lantern.

They told the sitter where to find these things before they left.  But the sitter is fifteen, her mind on other things, expecting no trouble, because really, how much trouble could one little shadow, teary-eyed and hiding beneath your elbow from the foyer’s overhead light, possibly cause?

Ah, and here’s this ending again, blood in the dark.

But it’s not the ending it seems—a great deal comes afterward.  Screaming and flashing lights, a violent whirl of people in costumes trying and failing to subdue Dark Shadow, until finally comes a hero wreathed in flames bright enough to burn the night away.

Everything is exposed.

Everything except your path, which twists awry, leading you into a labyrinth of court rooms, social workers, your mother grimly sending you back inside when you ask her what she’s scrubbing off the walls of your house.

Your father, from whom you inherited the shape of your face if not the color of your plumage, goes missing.  The police suggest in a back-handed way that he left (and who could blame him); your mother will believe otherwise (monster, said the writing on your walls, and carrion crow) until her dying breath.

You can’t talk to Dark Shadow anymore: the connection is still there, but to the best efforts of court orders and back-up generators, the darkness is exiled, and all Dark Shadow’s strength with it.  You aren’t allowed outside past sunset; you sleep with the lights on, a blindfold the only concession granted by your now-eternal day.

You change schools.  It doesn’t matter.

You change neighborhoods.  It doesn’t help.

No matter what, it always seems to go back to that night—to the blood in the dark.  And what you don’t dare tell anyone is, I wish I could go back.  I miss him.  I miss him so much.

But this, too, is not the ending, just time lost squinting against the unforgiving scrutiny of the light.

The exit, when you first stumble across it, goes unnoticed.  A reporter, one whose face sticks with you because you like the black sclera of her eyes and the cool blue of her skin.  There were so many reporters at first, and maybe she was even among them, but the news cycle turns ever onward.  What makes her stand out even more than her eyes is her timing: three full years after that night, she contacts your mother with a request for an interview.

“You poor thing,” she says directly to Dark Shadow when you meet, and shock shivers down the bond.  “It’s not your fault you were afraid.  And how short-sighted, to keep your wings clipped like this.”

You don’t know it at the time, when you’re staring at the woman with wide eyes and a stuttering heartbeat (another beginning, albeit a much more embarrassing one), but this statement both instantly endears Kizuki Chitose to your mother, while also striking her to paranoia at the unaccustomed kindness.

Life goes on.  At the time, you fail to recognize her for the exit she is. Everything changes when her article goes to print.

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no sweat, no tears, no guilt

Content Warning: Gore, Creature Rejection Clan, hate crime violence (past and attempted), referenced child abandonment. This fill guest-stars this delightful fellow, who I’ve been saying for ages that I’ll eventually write something about:

Looking around in the aftermath, Sugar counted bodies: three people in black robes and skull masks, three people whose builds matched the guys who’d spotted him at the convenience store and tailed him to the pit stop.  Two of them lay frozen, dead mid-convulsion.  Their mouths hung open, filled with white spittle and Sugar’s own clumpy secretions, which had eaten right through the hoods.   A low, wet sizzling noise said the dental records were not going to be any help to anyone who happened across the bodies.

The third man was still hanging in there—literally, speared in three places to the trunk of an ancient camphor laurel by the kid’s branches and choking out whimpered breaths as he twitched and writhed.

Idiots.  As if any heteromorph would just not notice he was being followed this far out in the sticks.  Or, having noticed, would bolt for the woods instead of his big, mobile, defensible truck.

Sugar plodded over to the third man and looked over the kid’s work.  One hit through the shoulder, another just barely through the waist—a few centimeters more and it’d’ve been a clean miss—and the third through the meat of the upper thigh.  That’d be the one that’d kill the guy, and quick, too.

The air reeked of menthol from the oozing tree sap, which made a good cover for all the rest.

“Thought you’d have safety in numbers, huh?” Sugar asked him in a low croak.  “Thought the dumb toad would be too slow and stupid to stand a chance against you fancy emitter metas.  How many of us have you run down in the woods out here?  Tell me where you buried ‘em and maybe in a few months I’ll see to it the cops back in town get a tip-off about where I bury you.”

A hand, covered in blood and still smelling faintly of the ozone of lightning discharge, lifted in a shaking gesture.  One of the kid’s branches lifted in warning, ready to strike at the first sign of a stray spark. Sugar didn’t follow the pointing, didn’t look away.  Not until the man groaned and went still, slackening against the laurel.

Sugar’s tongue darted out, snaring the skull mask and the plain hood beneath it, then spitting them out to the side as he stepped close enough to check the man’s eyes—staring and blank, not gone long enough yet to be clouding over, but that was just a matter of time.

He stepped back again and looked the rest of the way up through the leaves.

Shinji laid low against the center boughs, just one arm raised, bulging and branching out into the knotty limbs that curved back, serpentine, into the spears holding one dead bigot in place.  His had a tricky face to try and read—not real human, not real animal, either—but his gaze held steady, even if his eyes looked wider than his usual.

“Not bad,” Sugar said, and watched the tension leak out of the kid’s shoulders.  “You gonna need to throw up or anything?  Lotta people do, their first time.”  Especially when they’re partnered up with me.  (Sugar had it on good authority that watching him plug up someone’s mouth with his inner elbow and choke them with bufotoxin was disgusting even by the standards of people who disposed of bodies.)

“…I’ll be good.  ”  The kid hadn’t grown up learning a spoken language, and that still showed in the time and care he put into stringing his words together.  He rolled his shoulder back, and with a snapping rush, retracted his branches back into a simple, misleadingly arm-shaped limb.  The corpse sagged to a heap on the ground.  “It isn’t—my first time.”

“Right.  Almost forgot.”  It’d been Diopside who found the kid, not Sugar, but that scene probably hadn’t looked much different from this one.  Skull-face activity in Kyushu had been bad for years, and the infant abandonment rate in Kagoshima was still one of the highest in the country.  Plus, Mother Nature herself often wasn’t as pretty as she looked in postcards.

“Will you really—tell police about them?”  The kid pushed himself out of the tree in a fluid motion; the sound he made hitting the ground barefoot was closer to a bulb planter sinking into garden sod than anything you’d peg as someone landing after a jump. He wiped his bloodied hand against the laurel trunk unselfconsciously.

“Hell no,” Sugar answered.  “Their families knew what they were doing in the evening, and if they didn’t, they shoulda been paying more attention.  They can spend the rest of their lives wondering about it, just like the families of their victims.

“Come on.  We got some holes to fill, and I wanna be back on the road soon.”

Shinji nodded, lifting the body with the barest of creaking sounds and no complaints.

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Notes for Tokoyami:

• Tokoyami is an edgelord, so he gets second-person POV, the edgiest of all POVs.
• It occurred to me, in writing this, that maybe the reason more people don’t think Tokoyami is creepy is that ravens in Japanese mythology are less symbols of death than they are of wisdom and guidance. All the same, I think it would take very little to push the life of someone with his specific array of factors into a complete tailspin of harassment and heteromorph/villain quirk discrimination, and so it is here.
• Tokoyami’s edgy second-person narrator, please, it’s called a “sleep mask,” not a “blindfold.”
• Curious at this point would be 29, off the reporter beat and into in-depth magazine exposées.

Notes for Kamui Woods + Sugar:

• The most interesting thing about Kamui Woods to me is the over-the-top moral binarism of calling a purse-snatcher “pure evil.” If he were more “face,” I could pass that off as just being his hero persona’s “thing,” but he’s always presented as so earnest. He also apparently has a documentary-worthy backstory, which to me has “Inspiring True Story” written all over it. Thus, MLA!Shinji is picked up out of his travail-filled childhood by a group that has no interest whatsoever in tempering his moral education with nuances about how to treat their enemies. Probably always going to be a bit more comfortable around heteromorphic types than he is “normal-looking” humans.
• “Sugar” as a codename is a roundabout reference to cane toads, which were my primary referent for the character’s power set. They’re an invasive species in many of the places they’re found in the world, one of those cases of a species being introduced to cull the population of one that’s causing problems, but then growing into a problem of their own–in this case, cane toads introduced to eat cane beetles that were damaging sugar cane.
• Bufotoxin is a caustic secretion that causes red gums, drooling, loss of coordination, convulsions, hallucinations, death of cardiac arrest, and so on. It’s a considerably more serious threat to dogs, who will just go around putting anything in their mouths, but it can be a problem for humans who lick or consume toads as well. Seeing as Sugar is human-sized himself, his version is considerably more potent.
• This may have been an exercise in vigilante justice against bigots, but Sugar’s probably done this to MLA runaways, too. The uglier side of being an illegal underground cult is that, whatever your righteous ideals, you can’t risk that anyone will leave and spill your secrets.