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A gentle sea breeze blows through Momo’s hair. The wind is damp against her skin, smelling of brine and wet sand, and it makes the grass tickle her ankles. She sits in her white sunflower-print dress and gazes up at a baby blue sky as a pair of silent red and pink fireworks shoot up to fill it. They explode up and out from beside her, winding through the air in colorful patterns. As she watches them, Momo feels a sense of unease. It’s the middle of the day and they’re far too close.
The little dots of red and pink fall down to the earth, splashing over her and the grass to stain everything in their colors. It reminds her of last month, when a girl in her class tripped while carrying a cup of blue paint and sent it cascading across the classroom.
Momo had gotten it all over herself then, too.
But this is different.
The red is hot and sticky. She doesn’t taste chalk, but copper and salt, so heavy in the air that she can feel the taste thick in her lungs. She looks down at her dress and sees other colors, too—little pebbles of white and globules of yellow and grey. Strands of pink twitch like worms in the puddle of red at her feet. And she doesn’t understand. She can’t understand.
She tries to ask her parents, but they’re gone, replaced with paint, worms, and multi-colored lumps, and someone she’s never seen before stands behind the lawn chairs they’d been sitting in. Red covers him from head to toe, drips thick and dark from his three-piece suit and mattes down his hair. His hands are raised out in front of him, and he lowers them back to his sides, shaking the red and pink from them.
It’s hard to tell what he is at first. He is a beak, pointed and crow-like. He is a moving red smear. He is a pair of golden eyes freezing over in a sea of her parents’ blood.
And then those eyes turn to her and she recognizes the cold glint in them, and that’s how she knows that he’s like her: human.
Yakuza .
She pushes herself from the ground as he takes a step toward her, finally feeling the panic, fluttering and nauseating in her stomach. It smothers her as she looks to either side for help, but her parents are gone. There are only two people in the backyard of the seaside villa: her and him.
No one will save her.
So she doesn’t run. Her parents have always taught her not to run if someone comes for her when they’re not there, so she doesn’t run as he walks closer, dripping, wet grass squelching under his feet, a hand reaching out for her. Momo watches him approach with wide eyes and she does not run.
Once he’s close enough, he presses a finger to her shoulder and asks, “What’s your quirk?” The question is as harsh and cold as his eyes, like falling onto a sheet of ice.
“Creation.” Her knees tremble but her voice doesn’t. She’s rehearsed what to say so many times by now that the words don’t feel like hers as they come out of her mouth, distant and echoing, void of meaning. “The same as my mother.”
Momo sees his smile in the line of his cheeks. He moves to grip her shoulder in his hand, hard enough that she wants to whine.
“Be a good girl and I’ll let you live,” he says.
It’s only then that Momo realizes her parents are dead.
Her father often said there was no clean end for men like him, and she’s been prepared all her life for the eventuality that her parents won’t be there for her anymore. Even so, their death is not at all like how she’d imagined it.
Momo had always thought she would cry.
Instead, she feels nothing. She feels everything and nothing, like her nerves are straining against her skin, trying to escape from a body that isn’t hers. She feels floaty and numb, like she’s watching everything happen from atop a cloud.
She doesn’t run, and she doesn’t cry.
At eleven years old, Momo looks up at her parents’ killer and tells him, “I’ll be good.”
From an early age, Momo’s mother taught her that she would be underestimated. People would underestimate her for her sex and for her age, and most of all for her beauty. A powerful woman, she said, was not one who fought to be perceived as powerful despite these things, but one who understood peoples’ expectations of her and knew how to take advantage of them.
She explained yakuza society as a tokonoma . It was an alcove hidden in the wall, designed to be unnoticeable until someone stepped too close. The men were the kakemono , bold, eye-catching displays of ink hung broad across the façade of the wall, while the women were the perfectly-manicured ikebana that accompanied them, slim and beautiful and terrifyingly delicate. That was how she was to conduct herself: always daintily, always fragilly, as if she could hardly stand on her own two feet unless there was a man there to hold her up.
So, Momo lets the members of Shie Hassaikai think that she’s a flower on a shelf, raised without a purpose but to garnish whatever room she’s been placed in. They tell her to make precious metals and complex alloys and teach her about chemical compounds in the hopes that she will be able to produce those for them, too, and she does as she’s told. She reads the books that they give her slowly, repeatedly, asks them to explain the same concepts over and over again in a sweet voice, and she knows that they underestimate her because they always oblige her.
Her mother had only been able to produce minerals and chemicals with her quirk. Momo lets them think that hers is the same.
In exchange for her obedience, she is rewarded. The room that they lock her in at night grows in size, gains a fluffy bed and a carpet as well as rows of bookshelves lining the walls. As long as Momo meets her quotas, she can have whatever she wants, and to fit the caricature she’s cast herself as she demands dresses, sweets, and teen-oriented magazines. The man she comes to know as Overhaul takes to calling her his golden goose, while the people he orders to keep watch over her sneer from behind their masks and tell her how lucky she is.
For nearly two years, she was the princess of the Shie Hassaikai.
And then, one day, Chisaki finally agrees to let her go on a drive outside.
It’s only for five minutes, only in the alleys, only with the windows rolled up, and only with one of his expendables driving her, but it's the first time she's been let aboveground since the day her parents died and the fresh air feels like a song as it blows through her hair.
The temptation to escape is hot under her skin the entire time. It runs through her nerves and makes it hard to sit properly with her back against the seat, but Momo isn’t hasty. She watches buildings pass from behind the blacked-out mirror and keeps her hands folded demurely on her lap, because she knows a test when she sees one, and that is the only reason she can imagine Overhaul letting her out of her cell.
When the car pulls back into the compound, Overhaul is waiting for her, and she can tell by the way he stares at her evenly, unblinking, that he had not been expecting her to pass.
She gives him a reserved smile and thanks her driver, and then allows herself to be taken back down to her room.
A few weeks later, she’s granted a second, similarly uneventful trip out.
After her fifth outing, Overhaul stops waiting for her.
Still, she doesn’t try anything until half a year later, on her seventeenth outing, when the expendable who’d been assigned to drive her starts coughing on air and has to pull over for a drink of water. He lifts his mask up over his eyes, and that’s when she reaches under her shirt to pull a knife from her stomach. It’s long, with a hard rubber handle and a serrated blade, and when she plunges it into his neck it cuts through his flesh like tofu.
The man shouts. He drops the bottle of water and reaches blindly for his throat, his quirk turning his fingertips a poisonous purple. Before the blood can coat her hands or the man can touch her, Momo turns her fist so that the serrated edge is facing outward and pulls it back out and to the side with all her strength.
The blade flays his skin open. His blood looks like liquid tar as the wound hemorrhages, thick and black. He clamps his hands over his neck as if to keep the blood in his body, but it just flows through the gaps between his fingers as he gurgles and foams pink at the lips.
If she’s done it right, he’ll be dead in five minutes.
It only takes two for him to lose consciousness and she doesn’t wait longer than that.
The passenger doors are child-locked, so she exits from the driver’s door, crawling over the man as he bleeds out. The blood showers her as she passes, covers his lap and soaks her knees, dying her all over in its color. As she exits the car and drops to a kneel on the pavement, it feels sickeningly familiar against her skin.
For a moment, she stares at the knife in her hand—red and dripping, hot and wet and viscid, cooling against her skin and so red— and her head spins as it tries to wrap around what she’s done.
There will be time to think about it later when she’s somewhere safe, she has to remind herself.
She retches on the sidewalk before standing on unsteady legs and leaning back into the car to fish her driver’s phone from his pocket. Her hands are wet with blood and they slip over the buttons as she dials her uncle’s number, praying that he hasn’t either died or changed his number since her parents had made her memorize it.
A voice answers on the second ring, gruff and half-slurred, and Momo recognizes it.
She chokes on the feeling, her heart squeezing in her chest, and she’s so relieved that she can’t even make out what the man is saying.
“Uncle, it’s Momo,” she says, voice shattering as it leaves her. “I need help.”
Momo and her uncle are not genetically related. Back before Momo had been born, before her father had married her mother or made a name for himself, back when the two of them had been stupid kids not much older than she is, he and her father had exchanged sakazuke . Her uncle had promised to always act as her father’s younger brother, and her father had promised that he would carry her uncle with him all the way to the top. He’d been there on the day Momo was born, had been right there every step along the way as she grew up.
So, although she isn’t related by blood, she feels the same familial connection as he wraps her blood-soaked body in his designer suit jacket and cries wetly into her hair. He welcomes her into his car, into his house, and into his life like breathing. Like he doesn’t have to think about it.
Later, he tells her that he’d always known that one of them was alive—her or her mother. There has been too much rhodium and gold on the market to be explained otherwise. “I’d always assumed it would be your mother,” he confesses, his lips twisting around the thick scar cut through them. And then he looks at her through furrowed brows and eyes that beg whether he’s said too much.
She realizes that he’d probably wished that it was her mother who had survived instead.
“It’s a shame mother died,” Momo says, and her uncle doesn’t dispute it, giving a stiff nod. She expects the confirmation to hurt, but it doesn’t.
Shortly after arriving at her uncle’s house, she is assigned a tutor. She’ll be attending school starting in the spring, her uncle says, which only gives her a few months to get caught up on all of the things she’s missed in the last two years. He says it like it’s a challenge, but the material is easy compared to what she’s had to read and memorize with the Shie Hassaikai. She appreciates that it keeps her mind busy all the same.
Every day over breakfast, they talk about the weather. If it’s nice out, her uncle encourages her to go out, but Momo feels the most secure locked in her room with the key snug in her pocket, so that is most often where she stays.
She regrets not listening to him when she has to start school.
Momo enrolls as a transfer student under the name Sakuraba Chie, a sickly girl with an imagined heart problem. Her father had always wanted her to grow up as a functioning member of normal society, so she knows what it’s like to go to public schools. She’s experienced the large groups of students and the clique mentality, and she thinks that she’s prepared for it. Even before she walks into the classroom, she realizes that she isn’t.
The commute is the worst. For added safety, she’s sent to a school in Nagano, which means that every day she must spend no less than forty minutes sitting in the back seat of a car, staring out at the countryside through blacked-out windows. She never used to get carsick, but now she feels it almost as soon as the smell of leather enters her nose. Whenever a car passes, she finds herself tensing, hands flat against her bare skin, just in case she needs to pull something from herself.
Comparatively, school itself isn’t so bad. The number of people who crowd her make her feel uncomfortable, but by that point acting fair is so easy for her that she falls back on it like a crutch. She’s immediately different from the other students, smarter and more refined, more mature than them. Within the very first day, she finds herself placed on a pedestal by her classmates and teachers alike. Wherever she goes, their gazes cling to her skin, watching everything she does like she’s a toy put up too high for them to reach.
They ask her what her quirk is. She tells them that she’s quirkless and it makes her all the more exotic in their eyes.
Momo spends a lot of time in the nurse’s office using her supposed heart condition as an excuse. She goes there when the feeling of being watched gets to be like smoke in her lungs, or on days when she finds herself too afraid to turn corners for the thought of who might be waiting on the other side of them. She tells herself that the fear will fade with time, but it never does.
When her uncle asks her about how her classes are, she always says that she’s fine. Her grades are excellent, so he has no reason to question it. He often scratches the spot atop his head where his hair is thinning, but he doesn’t know how to connect with her any more than she would know how to open up to him. Ultimately, they both decide to leave the issue be.
He looks more vexed than surprised when she tells him that she doesn’t plan to attend high school the following year. “What will you do, then?” he asks, running a hand across his forehead like she’s given him a headache.
It makes her feel guilty, but she doesn’t think she can handle another year of school surrounded by strangers in a world she doesn’t truly belong. She knows she cannot handle another year of constantly looking over her shoulder, always on the lookout for monsters she can never be sure are of her own imagining. For her, the only way forward is to carve herself a new path out of the backs of her nightmares, so she folds her hands in her lap and refuses to let them shake as her uncle stares her down.
“Kill Overhaul,” she says.
Part of her is proud of how confidently the words leave her mouth. The other part regrets them as soon as they have.
Her uncle sighs, long and deep, as if he’s been expecting this. “You’ve got all your father’s fire hidden behind your mother’s manners.” he tells her, shaking his head.
“I want a tattoo.” She knows he won’t like it, but he’s never been able to say no to her.
“If Hiroaki were alive, he would have my tongue for this.”
“My father’s dead,” Momo reminds him.
His voice softens, growing quiet, and Momo thinks he sounds sad as he agrees, “Aye, he is.”
They begin inking lines on her back on Momo’s fifteenth birthday. Sixty hours is to be spread over two months before it’s completed. She decides on a phoenix, spread fiery across her shoulder blades in crimson and gold, diving down to spear the eyes of a black-and-yellow dragon with its talons. The dragon clutches a dead lotus in its claws and writhes in spirals on a bed of mud as wind-scattered cherry blossoms blow across the scene. Upon seeing the sketch on paper, Momo’s uncle tells her that the symbolism is so transparent that it’s embarrassing to look at, but Momo doesn’t mind—the tattoo is only for her, and she thinks the stronger the message, the better.
She’s told it will hurt.
It does.
The needle burns as it pierces through her skin, the pain sharp and throbbing, dull and acute all at once. But after spending so long feeling numb and afraid, it feels as if the pain is baptizing her, like it’s washing away the person she once was to make room for what she must become. Even after the swelling goes down, the skin on her back feels tighter with the ink in it, like it’s scarred over and leathery. The first time Momo touches it, she’s shocked to find that it’s slightly elevated compared to the skin around it but no less smooth than it was before.
She spends minutes at a time mesmerized by the sight of it in the mirror, of her fingers as they run over it. If it weren’t for the memory of the pain, she might have thought it was an illusion.
Momo had expected the feeling of permanence that came with the tattoo. She’d already set her resolve by the time she spoke to her uncle, but she knew that getting the tattoo and seeing it on her, a physical representation of her rejection of a normal life, would be different.
She had expected to feel more conflicted.
When Overhaul approaches the League of Villains, the news hits the underground like a bolt of lightning, loud and so eye-catching that everyone is forced to pay attention, from the lowest pickpocket all the way up to the corrupt officials who line their pockets with ill-gotten gains. When the rumors hit Momo’s ears, she smells opportunity on them, fresh and dangerous like ozone after a storm. Because anyone who knows a thing about Overhaul knows that, to him, an alliance is just another name for a subjugation, and any allies who fail to bend knee will inevitably end up on the wrong side of him.
It seems unlikely to her that the group of villains endorsed by The Hero Killer Stain and powerful enough to end All Might’s career will be willing to bend knee to Overhaul’s ambitions.
At her request, her uncle introduces her to a drunk man who calls himself Giran. Momo greets him with a handshake full of diamonds and says she would like to speak to the leader of the LOV, and he gives her a slimy smile as he counts them, telling her he’ll see what he can do.
Within a week, she finds herself at the edge of town in an abandoned factory that’s less a building than it is a concrete box, wrapped in yellow tape and protected with a sheet of paper marking it for destruction. Deep cracks line the walls and the floor is covered in dust and shattered pieces of cement from the holes in the ceiling, but it appears hardly as worn as their leader does. She knows it’s him, because her uncle has told her about the hand he wears over his face, but he looks younger than she expects, and shockingly arid. It looks like he’s been left for years to bleach in the sun. It's in the ashen dead skin against his black clothes, in the sound that his broken, untrimmed nails rake against his neck—like dry grass—and it's even in the redness of his eyes, inspecting her carefully as she walks in.
She does not waver, heading straight to where he’s perched upon a couch that smells of mildew, his feet resting on the scratched-up coffee table.
A lizardman dressed in scraps steps between the two of them before she can get far, his hand on the hilt of a blade. He asks if she's taken a wrong turn somewhere, and she gives him a patient smile because she supposes they all must have to have ended up where they are.
Without responding otherwise, she folds her hands in front of herself and turns to their leader, feeling the smile on her face cool. “I believe we share a common interest."
“Being?” His movements are loose and jerky as cocks his head to the side, as if to get a better look at her.
“The removal of Shie Hassaikai.”
Between the fingers on his mask, Momo sees his eyes narrow. “It’s just one thing after another with you yakuza types.” He leans forward, the couch creaking under him. As he continues, his voice hisses through his teeth, sounding like velcro to her ears. “You better have a fucking good pitch, because my patience is running thin .”
The hair on the back of her neck stands up and her stomach does somersaults at the tension in the air. She ignores the sound of a blade unsheathing to the left of her as she takes a step forward, holding a hand over the coffee table.
“Watch it,” says the green man as something sharp presses against her neck—and for a second her eyes widen as she recalls a neck flapping open and blood like tar flowing from it. The blade pricks her skin and she hesitates, her lips parting for a gasp that she forces silent.
Momo closes her mouth with purpose. She’s so accustomed to using her quirk that she barely has to think about it anymore. Her hand flashes with color, and suddenly their leader is leaping off the couch at her as the tip of the knife pricks into her skin.
A hand shoots out at her, stopping just short as a solid block of gold drops from her palm onto the table, filling the room with a crack , like splitting wood.
Dust settles in clouds between them and the leader slowly lowers his hand. He looks down at the table for a moment, and then back up at her.
“Is that all you have?” he asks.
“I can make as much as you need. Gold, jewelry, drugs, weapons, counterfeits. I can make anything you need in as much quantity as you need it. I think it’s a good deal for you.”
He reaches forward to heft up the block of gold, turning it over in his hands and holding it up to his eyes.
“It’s pure,” Momo assures him, although she doesn’t expect he’ll trust her until it’s been tested. His tone has less of an edge to it when he speaks, though, as if amused by something.
“And your condition?”
“I want you to give me Overhaul. Alive.”
A man with a patchwork face huffs a laugh, leaning against the far wall near the door she'd walked through. Momo doesn’t know if he’s just come in or if she hadn’t even noticed he was there.
“You his fan or something?” the man asks.
She tries to smile and a grimace spreads across her face instead, brows knitting together. “Something like that.”
“Kids your age are scary,” he says, breezily like it’s a joke, and then looks to the man on the couch. “What do you think? We could use some extra income.”
Their leader sets the gold back down on the table and considers in silence for a moment, scratching his neck idly. His eyes don’t leave her the whole time, and she knows that he’s analyzing her, because he must trust her as little as she trusts him.
He tells her to come back in two days with as many valuables as she can make in that time, and they can talk then.
She arrives two days later in a moving van full of precious metals and stones, and the leader introduces himself as Shigaraki Tomura. He says that she’s to bring one such van a week, and Momo says it’s a pleasure to do business with him. She never tells him of the second van she’s prepared, hidden back with her uncle, just in case.
Overhaul’s life is surprisingly cheap, she thinks.
She estimates it will take a year.
It only takes a month.
The heroes did most of the work, Shigaraki explains to her over the phone. The LOV just came in at the end to reap the rewards after the heavy lifting was done.
She thanks them and takes a driver to the veritable dump site at which they’ve specified to meet, feeling a numb sense of anticlimax as she looks out the window and notes that the leaves haven’t even changed color yet.
As Momo sees him lying there, strapped down onto the blocky bed doubling as his holding cell, she feels something buzzing in her ears and all through her body, but she doesn’t recognize the emotion. He looks like a corpse, she thinks. His skin is pale and almost grey under the fluorescent lights, both of his arms are gone, dried blood clinging brown to his clothes and skin, flaking off his face. His eyes are sunken and look tarnished when he gazes emptily up at her, like he doesn’t recognize the person in front of him, either. For a moment, she thinks that he won’t, and the world spins sickeningly around her. Perhaps he’d forgotten about her—perhaps she’s been safe and free this entire time—perhaps she’s thrown away her life for nothing—
But then a spark catches in his eye and he comes back to life, breath hissing between his teeth.
You , his eyes say, blue lips struggling to form the word, but Momo holds her serenity like a knife, silencing him with a smile that tells him to wait his turn before turning to Shigaraki.
“What happened to his arms?” she asks.
Shigaraki doesn’t even smirk. He shrugs innocuously, like he’d misplaced the remote, and says, “You just said alive.”
Maybe he thinks she’ll be bothered. She probably should be, considering they’d had a deal and he hadn’t even consulted her, but she’s honestly surprised that he’s fulfilled his end of the bargain at all. It would’ve been smarter for him to hold Overhaul over her head so they could squeeze her for all that she had.
Momo asks for some privacy. They seem to give it to her out of apathy more than respect.
Only when the two of them are alone does she hazard another look back down to Overhaul.
The air comes out of his lungs in soft wheezes, like he’s struggling through every breath, and he swallows to try and clear his throat but he still can’t quite find his voice. Without thinking, she pulls a glass from her arm and pours water into it straight from her fingertips. His head is limp in her hand as she lifts it, damp with sweat and shockingly heavy. He pulls a disgusted expression when she puts the glass to his lips but drinks anyway. The back of his throat tenses against her every time he swallows, the feeling so human that it makes her hair stand on end. She drops his head back down onto the bed before he can finish, and it hits with a loud thunk that makes his face screw up, the rest of the water splashing down on his face.
She always imagined she’d feel something like pride or anger as she stood over the man who killed her parents. She never thought she’d feel so disappointed.
But as she looks down at Overhaul, all she sees is a dying man.
When he opens his eyes, they’re rimmed with red and swimming. He clears his throat and looks up at her, and she wishes that he won’t speak but he does, hoarse and breathy. “My golden goose...”
It doesn’t feel right to call him Overhaul, so she answers, “Chisaki.”
“So this is where you went.” His voice goes thick at the end as he tries and fails to stave off a fit of coughing.
She waits for him to quiet before speaking.
“You know,” she says, her voice sounding distant in her ears, rehearsed. “My father mentioned you to me once. It was after he met with the former head. He could see in your eyes that you were going to go far. He said it was a waste that someone with eyes like yours was trapped in a dying world like the yakuza.” She pauses, her eyes finding his missing arms. “It seems Shigaraki has already taken care of your yubitsume .”
He looks up at her, tired. “I won’t beg for my life.”
“It wouldn’t change anything if you did.”
Letting him live would be crueler than torturing him. He’s powerless, helpless, hopeless—doomed to live trapped in his own body with the knowledge that he has nothing and no one. Momo could leave him here for the police to find and he’d have to spend the rest of his life alone, learning how to live with himself. The thought is tempting, if only because she finds that she doesn’t particularly want to kill him in the first place.
But this isn’t just about her.
So she pulls a short knife from her palm, the blade sharp and curved, and she says, “Back when my father was alive, there was something he was famous for. Do you remember?” He must, because his eyes widen and dart to the knife, but he doesn’t answer so she continues. “It was for his interrogations. They say he was particularly good at flaying people, and had taste for peeling the tattoos off of his enemies and hanging them on the walls of his torture rooms. Usually, just the sight of them alone was enough to get people to talk.”
“You have nothing to gain from torturing me,” he tells her.
She nods, an empty, bitter smile creeping on her lips. “But you killed my parents, so I’m afraid I must.”
When she makes the first cut, she’s expecting it to be like the man she killed when she was thirteen. She thinks it will make her sick to her stomach and that she’ll barely be able to get through a few centimeters of skin before she gives up and has to end it, but it’s not anything like she’s imagined. On the contrary, as she watches the red gather along the cuts she makes, watches it bead and drip, pooling on the table and then splashing down on the floor, it’s cathartic.
This is for you , she tells her father as she takes the skin off of Chisaki’s chest. And this is for you, she tells her mother as she works her way to his shoulders.
Then she gets up to his neck, and she knows that she doesn’t have the skill to do the same there. Her hands are slippery and shaking, too clumsy with a knife to take off the skin clean, so she stands behind him and touches the blade to his throat.
And this is for me.
Momo’s never been able to properly mourn her parents. She’s prayed to the pictures of them that decorate her uncle’s butsudan , but she was unable to attend their funeral, and she’s never visited their graves for fear of a trap. Even now, her emotions are as callused as they were before, buried deep under something hard and impenetrably thick, so she can’t cry for them. Instead, she closes her eyes and listens to the gentle trickling of Chisaki’s life draining on the floor, and it’s okay. She listens, eyes closed, and it’s like she’s crying.
It feels as if she’s finally stealing back all of the tears he’d taken from her over the years.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knows it should concern her how little remorse she feels at having killed a man, but it doesn’t. When she opens her eyes and sees him lying there, cold and still on his deathbed, it feels right, and it occurs to her that this must have been what her father was talking about.
There was no clean end for men like him.
Her own end, she supposed, would find her much the same.