Chapter Text
Chisaki Kai's hands are clean. It’s the first thing Hitoshi notices. They’re distinct, completely unlike the others in his little group. There are no callouses. The nails are clear and curved into perfect, pale crescents. No hangnails, no anything. Just perfect, lovely hands.
So much blood beneath those nails. A quirk like a scalpel and a beautiful face. Hitoshi had seen pictures, of course. Pictures pinned to files full of bodies, dissected and discarded. Broken and bruised and half-buried. Pictures of such a pretty man, with such a friendly smile and dead, dead eyes.
Hitoshi smiles. He’s dressed simply, to Chisaki’s preference. He keeps his hands tucked behind his back. All the information they’d found on Chisaki as a person mentioned his mysophobia, how meticulous he is with what he touches. His signature white gloves sit across his lap, the silk catching the light of the gas lamp and casts them in pale orange. His hands tap against his lips.
Bright amber eyes scan Hitoshi’s face and then drop over his outfit. Clean, close cropped, simple. A white shirt, a pair of black slacks, and an overcoat buttoned all the way up. Hitoshi looks just like everyone else here. It feels like a uniform. Plain, colorless.
He doesn’t look around the room. He won’t look away from Chisaki until the man makes his choice and he’s given permission.
The other bodies in the room gather like shadows in his peripheral vision. Dark silhouettes, hovering like ghosts. The entire house feels like a haunting. Chill seeps in through gaps in the wooden walls and the damp makes the electrical lights wired throughout the house all but useless. They flicker, and when Chisaki gets tired of the flickering, they return to the gas lamps. In the dim lights of the room, Hitoshi can almost ignore the lump on the ground ahead of him.
He was like that when you got here, he tells himself. You couldn’t have stopped it.
Even if the vaguely human-shaped thing ahead of him had been alive when he arrived, Hitoshi isn’t allowed to intervene. Aizawa told him they must keep their hand close to their chest until they discover the girl. The girl, and any others Chisaki may have taken. The list is long. Long, and soaked through with red. Chisaki quirks a dark brow at him and tilts his head.
“Well, newcomer. Introduce yourself.” Chisaki’s voice grates—a quality to it that tumbles into Hitoshi’s ears like glass and sticks there.
“Shinso Hitoshi,” Hitoshi bows his head again, slightly. “Head of medical staff, psychiatric division. You requested someone with my level of training and, well. There’s only five of us in the region, sir.”
All of this is true. It’s why Aizawa said they should go with his true name. He very rarely goes as himself to these things, but for once he is exactly who they need. Hitoshi allows his nerves to slip through and rubs the back of his neck with his hand.
Chisaki is watching every movement, every choice. Hitoshi’s breathing picks up under the scrutiny, and he forces it back down. Control the rib cage, the diaphragm. Even, steady. Calm. He can’t look nervous. He has no reason to be nervous. He’s qualified. He’s overqualified, even. Hitoshi waits and keeps his face pleasantly flat. Or at least, he keeps it flat. He’s been told the pleasant part of his expressions doesn’t always come through.
It’s difficult, navigating the emotions that are expected of him, the faces he’s supposed to wear. Aizawa put him through classes, fed him scripts and social lessons until he could recite them forwards and backwards. He could survive almost any encounter based on etiquette alone. However, when he least expects it, there are times when his face simply does not cooperate. When he must tuck his hands away and stare at the spot right below someone’s eye and wait for the moment of contact to be over.
Somehow, it doesn’t seem to affect his work very much. People see what they want to see, he’s learned. It takes the edge off. He can be slightly awkward, and people sigh and wave it off as an occupational hazard. He can smile too wide, can stare a little too hard, and people only scoff at the doctor’s eccentricities.
How lucky, to be odd in the right way.
How awful to be invisible inside his own strangeness.
“I want you to prove your abilities, Hitoshi.” Chisaki says his name like he’s been saying it for years. The sound of the syllables dripping off his tongue like shards, cutting and clattering, makes Hitoshi’s skin crawl. “If you really can do what you say, then you’re hired.”
“Do you have a willing participant?”
“Katsuki.” Chisaki pulls his gloves over his hands. “Come, make yourself useful.”
Finally, Hitoshi allows himself to look at the other people in the room. There are several. Some of them expected. There are files on many members of the Shie Hassaikai. Hitoshi recognizes the man with the orange eyes and almost manic gleam to an otherwise bland expression. Shin Nemoto. A truth compulsion quirk—Hitoshi’s read every scrap of every article he can find on the man, interviewed every person who ever came across him. This man, aside from Chisaki, is the most dangerous in the room.
Shin barely pays any attention to him.
There are others. Hitoshi recognizes the drunk leaned against the corner, as well as the man with clockwork hair who carries himself with an air of fanaticism that practically fills the room. Those who follow Chisaki are loyal. Fear and awe can inspire such deep devotion. Hitoshi searches for this Katsuki, the one he’s supposed to be brainwashing.
“Here.” A voice, flat and deep and hollow all the way through, catches Hitoshi’s attention. The man approaches from a corner where he’d been all but invisible.
He’s not from any file that Hitoshi recalls. His memory is perfect, a blessing and a curse, and he knows this man isn’t pictured on any paper that has crossed Hitoshi’s desk. He looks familiar, though. His buzzed blond hair and narrowed, dull red eyes tap against Hitoshi’s skull. You know me, the almost-memory insists. Remember remember remember.
Katsuki isn’t an exceptionally uncommon name. Blond hair is the second most common hair color. Red is unusual, but not unheard of. And he can’t remember. He’s never experienced this before, and he has to stuff his hands into his pockets to keep from reaching across the room and yanking Katsuki closer so he can see him better.
“Are you ready?” he asks, and Katsuki’s lips twitch down in the barest hint of a frown.
“What do yo—”
And then Hitoshi has him. Katsuki’s mind, cradled like a fragile thing with feathers in the palm of his hand, fluttering. Hitoshi closes his eyes and concentrates, breathing steady and easy, listening. He can feel the man on the other side of the connection, breath slowing until they’re synced, the same. And Hitoshi murmurs into his hold, just loud enough for the others to hear.
“Come here, Katsuki,” he whispers across the feet between them.
When he opens his eyes, Katsuki is close enough to touch. Close enough to see the wine-dark of his eyes, the smudge of exhaustion lining the slight redness of his waterline. His mouth is parted, and when Hitoshi strains his ears, he can hear a slight whine at the end of Katsuki’s shallow breathing.
He drops his hold.
Katsuki collapses against the ground, curling into himself. His shoulders are tight, his hands clenched into fists.
“What did you do to him?” Chisaki asks, curious rather than worried. He may be asking about the details of a mildly entertaining magic trick. “He doesn’t usually react this way to… well, anything.”
Hitoshi clears his throat. His eyes sting. So much flared to life in those few seconds, so little he understands. The man, Katsuki, is here. The only ones here are people Chisaki trusts, implicitly, with his life. And yet, holding the man’s consciousness, he can only recall flashes of fear, of thrashing panic, and then all the motion on the other side had fallen out. Died.
That gasp Hitoshi heard—he doesn’t think anyone else caught it. He wants to reach out, to help the man to his feet. An apology rams itself between his teeth, stuck inside his gums. They should be bleeding. He swallows it down. Step back. Do not reach. Do not say anything. Hitoshi pulls his face into a pleasant smile. Or, at least, a smile. He looks to Chisaki, not sure what he’ll see.
Chisaki might be too impressed with his quirk. Aizawa had warned him of the dangers. Power is only useful in the hands of the men who are allowed to wield it. In the hands of anyone else, it directly translates to danger. In Chisaki’s world, he is the only one allowed to keep power. If he feels like Hitoshi threatens that…
Well, he’d been warned of the risks. Hitoshi rolls a loose thread between his fingertips. Chisaki’s expression is unchanged, but there is something almost pleased about the way he looks at Katsuki curled on the ground.
“Just brainwashing, sir. I’ve never had anyone react to it that way before. Maybe he was not expecting me?”
“You’ll do.” Chisaki says, finally. He stands and tugs on his gloves once more, as if making sure they’re in the exact right place to protect his perfect hands. “You’ll begin tomorrow. I’ll show you to your rooms.”
And that, it turns out, is that. Chisaki doesn’t ask Hitoshi if he needs to grab his things. The assumption is, of course, that he came here knowing he was either hired or dead. His suitcase with all his meager belongings is stacked in the hallway. Chisaki doesn’t pause long enough for Hitoshi to grab it.
That’s fine, Hitoshi can just come back for it later. It’ll give him a good reason to wander around, poking at things. The fun thing is that he doesn’t even have to pretend to be bad at directions. He spent a not-insignificant portion of his life staring at buildings and wondering which identical brown brick square slab he was supposed to be turning at. He’s better now, but not so good he doesn’t remember how to look lost as all fuck.
“You’re expected to eat breakfast with the rest of us at 8am. Don’t be late. Our cook,” Chisaki chuckles at the word. Hitoshi isn’t in on the joke. “Well, he’ll be upset if someone shows up late. He has a very strict schedule he keeps.”
Chisaki pauses in front of a heavy, cherrywood door. Hitoshi has the very appropriate thought that the door would muffle a lot of sound and all the many things someone might use that for, and then Chisaki is pushing it open and waving him inside.
No tour of the house. No directions to the bathroom. Chisaki watches him enter the bedroom. Watches him sit on the edge of the mattress—covered in a downy grey quilt, like a cloud before a storm—and then closes the door. No farewell, either. Not that Hitoshi had expected the last one.
However, in a place as concerned with society as the Chisaki household, he’d have at least expected the first two. He knows the family of the estate pushed to have the most modern electricity and the most modern plumbing money can buy, even though it is largely wasted on their home. Chisaki supposedly closes off many, many of their rooms to keep the mold and mycelium at bay. Out of sight must mean the same as out of mind. Hitoshi could talk at length about the way that mold spores are most often airborne or how mycelium will pack itself into every exposed and unexposed centimeter of its environment. Making Chisaki more grossed out doesn’t feel like the right move. He might burn down the house entirely. Would he bother letting anyone else out? No, explaining the fascinating inner workings of mycelium feels distinctly unwise.
Especially not when Chisaki could brush one finger over his skin and reduce him to puddles. According to their sources, Chisaki’s knowledge of the human body is such that not only would Hitoshi be in puddles, but he could be micro-biologically organized. They’ve received agents in jars, accurately labelled. There is no way to undo the effects of Chisaki’s quirk. Hitoshi even tried to see if there was evidence of Chisaki undoing the effects of his quirk. No.
Hitoshi blinks. He is exhausted. Sleep knocks heavily behind his eyes, but when he closes them he sees a wine-red staring back at him.
He wants to cradle that mindspace close. Katsuki. Anticipation, familiar and unwelcome, trembles against the palms of his hand. Katsuki, who stood in the light of the gas lamps, pale and gaunt and bruised by deprivation.
Who tickles the back of Hitoshi’s memory like a puzzle. An anomaly. Hitoshi has never forgotten anyone before. Not since his consciousness started forming memories and storing them in the endless depths of his mind. He flickers through it, but there are no clammy skinned, pale haired boys. Knock knock knock. Remember.
Is Katsuki another of Chisaki’s thugs? Does he steal children off the street and stuff them into rooms inside this giant house? He’d been so quiet, so flat. Tired. Sleeplessness hung beneath his eyes, sinking into his high cheeks. Hitoshi opens his eyes and stares up at the ceiling and tries to trace out the shape of Katsuki’s skull beneath all that skin and muscle. Dull, like a snuffed candle. Like a candle flame smothered in a rainstorm.
That whine, so quiet, echoes. He sits up and stares at the floor. At the afterimage of a man, curled on the ground, trying to hold himself together with his fists alone.
##
Hitoshi knows better than to go for his suitcase immediately. People will be watching how he acts, what he does. Plus, if he waits, he allows time for the suitcase to be moved. If the suitcase gets moved, then it only makes sense he’d have to search for it. There aren’t many things in there that he needs. His clothing. His reading glasses. A couple of books on quirk theory, on the mind. On the intersection of both.
He wakes in the morning to a quiet knock on his door. A woman waits for him with a slip of paper. He’s been given orders already—for a shift in the middle of the night. Their trouble patients, apparently, wander the halls. Or attempt to do so—Hitoshi understands any amount of unsanctioned exploring by patients are severely punished.
He doesn’t know what he expects, really. To be thrown in a room with people and told to make them do awful things? Aizawa has patiently—and a few times not so patiently—explained to him that it will almost never work like that. There is real work to be done in most underground networks. A psychiatric hospital, even if it’s a barely functioning coverup for shoving dissenters somewhere quiet and out of the way, still has patients to care for and beds to keep clean and food to serve.
Chisaki is a surgeon, of sorts, but his father was a pioneer in the post-quirk psyche world. Chisaki’s above ground empire is blended between physiological medicine and psychological treatments. The criminal side threads through both. Somehow, Chisaki manages.
So many bodies. So many names. On and on and on. Hitoshi’s memory is perfect.
He closes his eyes. Toga Himiko. Hikiishi Kenji. Shigaraki Tomura.
A group of friends. One survivor. Well, two, but he doesn’t think Todoroki will be talking any time soon. There are many things a man can do to a body. There are many places Chisaki can reach in and rearrange, can intensify pain, without killing a body. Juzo had said, in quiet, shocked tones, that Todoroki is lucky his father is so famous. Todoroki money does keep the lights on. Well, keeps the lights flickering, at least.
Hitoshi doesn’t agree, though.
He runs a thumb over the scars on his knuckles and tries to imagine what those would feel like, all over. Then, abruptly, decides against it.
Their source claims that Todoroki’s nerve endings flicker, leaving him with sporadic, unpredictable pain. When the days are particularly bad, he is said to curse and scream and spit, so that the hospital wing sounds like it’s being descended upon by a hellish, blue flamed demon.
Hitoshi doesn’t know what to make of their internal source. Neither does Aizawa. Every letter is passed to him with strict warnings—take it with a grain of salt. Confirm the source as soon as possible. Maintain a healthy level of skepticism. And then, always, Aizawa looks at him and sighs. Hitoshi can’t help but smile, hearing Aizawa’s dry voice in his head, telling him, “More skepticism than that.”
It’s not his fault. He knows people lie, he knows situations don’t always look like they are. He doesn’t look like he is, after all. But he can’t do anything except take things as they are and adjust when they change. He can’t. Reality doesn’t care what is true, it cares what is happening. Hitoshi just has to deal with what is happening. Then, when reality is ready to present itself, he can deal with that, too.
It’s only six in the morning when Hitoshi pulls on his slacks and shirt. He drapes his jacket over his shoulders but he’s already too warm. He buttons it at the bottom and then pulls his boots on and tucks them into his pants. He counts to ten, letting the clothes settle into the lines of his arms and legs, against the bends and joints. He counts to ten again and allows himself to settle the same way—fingertip to fingertip, allows himself to sink until he’s anchored to his heels and his hips and his shoulders. A body is just a body, but he is inside this one.
Aizawa taught him this, too. Quirks like his and Aizawa’s can make those lines blurry. Hitoshi is not inside Katsuki’s head. He’s not even holding that mindspace anymore. He breathes in deeply and blinks open his eyes. Purple hair falls in front of his face, but he pushes it back and then leaves the room.
He’s lucky—his suitcase has not managed to make its way back to his room. Probably, Chisaki hadn’t bothered to tell any others where he’s sleeping. The maid had seemed nervous. The others are probably afraid of him. He should poke around. Get to know some people.
He expects he’ll get along with some of the patients. He usually does. It’s why he’s so good at his job. Why he’s so good at both of his jobs, actually.
He wanders the hallway, checking into rooms as quietly and subtly as he can. There’s the dining hall—still empty, though he can see a shadow moving in the room beyond it. Probably the kitchen.
Our cook has a very strict schedule he keeps.
Chisaki had seemed amused by that. Hitoshi should get to know the man. As a rule, one should always befriend the person responsible for their meals. Before now, that had always been Hitoshi himself. Or, very rarely, Aizawa. No amount of friendliness would make Aizawa’s meals any more edible, sadly. The shadow moves away from the doorway and Hitoshi frowns.
“You’re staring.” A chipper voice cuts through his thoughts. Hitoshi jumps.
“Sorry, was lost in thought.” He turns to look and is surprised to find a small woman with a bandage over her eyes, her smile wide and toothy. She’s got a gap between her two front teeth and when she laughs, the air whistles. Freckles dot every single visible surface of her face and hands and the bits of her wrists that peek out from the sleeves of her dress. She reminds him of one of the dolls he’d seen on advertisements flapping on worn out buildings in the city. Raggedy Ann he thinks they’re called. “I’m—”
“The brainwasher,” the woman hums. “We’ve been told.”
“We?”
“A general we,” she hurries, shrugging. “Anyway, I wouldn’t stare in there. Mr. Chisaki will get mad.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.” She glances towards the dining room and away again. Her bottom lip worries between her teeth. Eventually there’s a noise up ahead and she flits towards it. “He doesn’t like when people touch his things.”
The files said as much. Hitoshi wonders what’s in the kitchen that he’s not even allowed to look at. Many times, he doesn’t know what he’s doing in this line of work. Undercover, underground hero work doesn’t make a lot of sense for a guy like him. His quirk, of course, slots in like he was made for it. Everything else, though.
Right now, he’s all too aware of why he’s so good at this particular part.
He has been told not to do something. And now, with that very kindly given warning in place, he finds he absolutely must do it.
He waits until she is much further ahead and has turned a corner before he doubles back. His suitcase can be found later. One glance down the hallways in both directions and a deep, calming breath in through the nose, out through the mouth.
There’s no sign of Chisaki here. He doubts the man would be in the kitchen itself. And if he is, well. Hitoshi hasn’t been told any of the house rules. Not explicitly. He can’t be expected to know.
If this is how he dies, then he wouldn’t have lasted anyway.
He crosses the dining room on his tiptoes. Stupid, really. It’s not like it actually makes him any quieter. In his boots, he might even be a little louder like this. The tiles click softly. But his body eases into the steps, and after a few muted clicks, he is practically silent.
The lights are warm, when they work, and the kitchen is awash in a golden glow that stays steady. What little heat blooms in the house is coming from here it seems.
Everything smells alive. He hadn’t realized how much the rest of the house smelled like dirt and cold and wet. The stove is littered with skillets and a pot of boiling soup. The scent of butter cooks, sizzling softly beneath a thin layer of eggs. An expert pair of chopsticks rolls the flat omelet, stuffed with spinach leaves and garlic and flat, thinly sliced layers of sharp cheese. Wafting beneath the other scents is the brown scent of fresh bread and the salt of breakfast ham. A western-ish breakfast. Hitoshi usually just eats an apple and calls it a morning.
What are the merits of stealing a ham steak straight from the heat? He inhales deeply, as if he can breathe in enough to fill his stomach up on the fumes.
“You should leave.” The same deep and hollow voice from yesterday. Hitoshi’s heart thumps in his ears, climbing up his throat.
His mouth drops open, and before he can swallow it back down the apology falls out and splats onto the tile. “Sorry, for last night. I—I assumed he’d explained.”
“You have a lot to learn about Kai, then.”
It takes a second for Hitoshi to make the connection that Kai is what this man—Katsuki, rememberrememberrememberstopthat—calls Chisaki. “I do. Probably not too much, though. I have a feeling he’d prefer to keep his mysteries close.”
“And his enemies closer.” Katsuki’s grip on the chopsticks is firm and decisive as he rolls the eggs and slides them onto a plate. There are already several—at least a dozen.
He pours more ochre liquid into the skillet and layers each ingredient.
“I mean it.” Katsuki’s voice takes on an edge. The sharpness zips up Hitoshi’s brain, sending off signal flares that something is happening, but he couldn’t recognize it if he wanted to. Not danger. But something danger adjacent. Something that makes his breath noticeable in his lungs, makes his skin feel too small and too big, at the same time. He wants to hide inside it. He wants to make Katsuki say more things, so he can hear that hollowness recede like the tides.
“Mean what?” Hitoshi tucks his hand behinds his back and blinks slow, staring at the smallest beauty mark right beneath Katsuki’s left eye. He doesn’t want to look at them too closely—doesn’t want to see that dullness from yesterday.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” Katsuki snaps. “First lesson of your new job—Chisaki is possessive over his things.”
Hitoshi frowns, looking around the kitchen. “What things are his? I’ll be sure to leave them alone.”
Katsuki scoffs and looks away. When he speaks again, his words are empty, his voice quiet. “Everything.”