She stands in the doorway, behind the chain of the deadbolt, haloed by the glow of computer monitors. The young man in front of her grips a scrap of paper, head nestled between his shoulders like he wants to blend into the hallway's wallpaper.
"Hello, mother," he says.
She turns, chokes back a sob, and eases open the door.
He came in to a home carpeted with filth and the tokens of a hoarder. The windows shut and covered, the lights off. The kitchen swarmed with flies. He sits down on a cardboard box and it sags beneath him.
"Tell me about my father."
She's slumped in an office chair, her face lit sickly blue by the reflection of humorless code on the screen. The keyboard breaks the silence before she does. She never answers, but he's used to going unanswered.
When she asks the name they gave him, he takes a day to respond.
She leaves the house once in the next week, tangled hair tied in a bun and glasses taped together at the bridge, and comes home with ten thousand yen worth of cup noodles, fresh fish and microwave dinners. The fish, wrapped in brown paper, is tossed in the fridge next to soggy rice on a plastic-wrapped plate and half a package of moldy bread.
It stays in the fridge as he forgets what day it is, until he takes it out and cooks it. It's dry and tastes like sickness. He remembers reading about aquaculture and fish swimming in their own filth before the slaughter.
They barely talk but she lets him stay.
"How do you live like this?" He snips at her damp hair with scissors, and she lays back in the chair, still.
"You're living here, too," she snaps, and he sees an old fire she must have once had flicker at the surface, then fade to cinders.
The shick, shick of the scissor blades is a welcome change in sound. They don't have silence anymore, only the hum of electronics and the muffled noise of the city below.
"I don't have anywhere to go." He pauses. "I don't want to be a prince and I don't want to live in the magic country." He sets down the scissors and hands her the mirror.
"Like mother, like son," she says, and she gives him her most sincere smile.
One day she opens the window in the kitchen (the cold air kills flies, she says,) and he watches her stare out at the street in vigil, like a gargoyle on a castle roof.
"Shouta is a stupid name," she says. "It's ironic, though."
The back of her head is familiar. It's what he knows best. He rubs the sponge in lazy circles on the plate but never looks away. She doesn't say anything else, and unasked questions linger on his tongue. He takes a chance.
"What would you have named me?," he asks.
Her answer is immediate. "I didn't want kids."
He replies in kind. "I know you didn't."
Over a dinner of chicken and noodles cooked in the cold kitchen, he asks again.
"Tell me about my father."
She fiddles with her food. "He was an idiot. Too nice for his own good."
He shoves a serving into his mouth and talks around it. "They told me he saved the magic world."
"He did." She scoffs. "I helped."
She look down at her plate, then over at the fridge. Her eyes trace a path around the apartment that avoids him.
"You both must've been brave," he says. The plate is empty and he angles it to change the shape of his reflection.
The still air cracks as she laughs. "I was a fuckin' coward."
Her wry laughter fills the house and he feels like he's seeing something he shouldn't.
This time, she talks. She grabs his shoulder and sits him down on the armrest of the next chair over. He feels her quivering even after she lets go.
A deep breath. "Your father and I never married. He doesn't even know he has a son."
"I figured." He tries to look away but the intensity of her eyes and the tired lines in her face force him back. "How did you know that he died?"
She palms at the pocket of her sweatpants like she's going to pull out her wallet. Her fingers stop short of taking it out. "I did freelance work for him. His secretary told me the day after it happened."
"I see." He remembers the android secretary who gave him his mother's address. We used to be good friends, she told him. From the way her eyes cast down with a weariness he never knew was possible from a robot, he figured it was best not to ask. "Don't you regret it?"
"What? Fucking your dad?" She gives a blink-and-you'll-miss-it sneer but her posture is still shaky and uncertain. "Giving you up?"
"I meant leaving him," he said.
"We were never together. I avoided him after that night, and about a year later he got married."
She breaks eye contact, finally, and he takes a deep breath. He collects and organizes his thoughts, dusts off old curiosities and opens drawers full of unanswered questions.
"Yeah, I regret it." She looks away still. He closes the drawers because for a moment the corners of her mouth and eyes look far older than they should.
He gets a job - data entry - and an old friend offers to rent out his basement so the commute is shorter. His things are neatly packed over two weeks into little boxes, and then a rolling suitcase. He brought very little and bought even less. He tugs the suitcase out the door on its three intact wheels, and when he comes back inside for his clothes, she's standing in the living room expectantly.
"You should take this."
She approaches him purposefully, fishes around in her pocket, and places an old, faded card in his open palm. It's an image of a smiling girl with long hair in a frilly costume, holding a toy scepter and a familiar pair of glasses. Hasegawa Chisame. She looks nothing like his mother.
He wants to ask, what happened?, but he stops himself. "Really? It looks important."
"It's got no purpose anymore," she says. The way her gaze settles into a cobwebbed corner of the room, he feels she hasn't finished that thought. "You look like him."
He gingerly drops the card into his jacket pocket. "Dad had red hair, right?"
"Yeah, but you both have these damn doe eyes that make you impossible to hate," she says, and a smile plays on the corners of her mouth.
He reaches to the floor for the bag of clean clothes and tosses them under his arm, opening the door with his free hand. "I thought you said he was an idiot."
"He was." She puts a hand to her face that hides her expression perfectly, and her voice muffles and drains of strength. "I loved him anyways."
They lose contact after he moves.
One day he finds and watches a recording of the Ostian coronation ceremony. His father's widow crowns the princess with teary eyes and a smile. The crowd - enough to fill ten stadiums - cheers and applauds. He shuts his laptop and curls up under his burdens. Maybe it's better this way. Despite her smile, his mother on the card seems to disagree. She watches what he becomes leaned against a monitor on a table covered in office supplies and dirty plates.
Chisame's pactio card is shredded and thrown out with the empty noodle cups.