White and yellow paint dotted and dashed across the rivers of black asphalt coursing through the city like stubborn sandbars breaking up the constant waterways where the traffic would come streaming through once the day was over and the people of the city rushed home. Now, though, on a Tuesday at midday, the streets sat empty beneath the glow of the saffron sun, save a few housewives taking out the trash and getting groceries, or the specters of salarymen arisen from the office on personal business.

Footsteps clicked across the pavement, and a shadow cast by nothing weaved in and out of the painted road lines. The puddle of shade swung around a pole, dribbled a pebble down the street, and scattered a flock of unsuspecting birds indiscriminately ripping apart a stale, golden french fry and the rancid butt of a discarded cigarette both. They screamed and collided into one another as they took to the sky, and the shadow laughed until it became the form of a child no more than thirteen.

Shou, the boy, held a hand up to shade his pale face and washed-out eyes from the light assaulting him from above as he looked upwards, like he was leering arrogantly back at some unseen god, and then pushed his fingers back through the argumentative tufts of bright orange hair pushing out of his scalp.

"It's hot," Shou said. "that sucks." He spun around on the toe of his sneaker and made a beeline for the scant cover of one of the trees lining the scalding sidewalk. The ends of his jacket swished around from where they were tied to his waist like the impatient tail of a cat with all the time in the world, but nothing to chase. When he was safely beneath the uneven shade of the branches, he tapped out a rhythm on the rough trunk and scanned the shops lining the street.

"Burgers, nah," Shou said. "Luxury goods, eh. Games, nothin' good's out. Bookstore," his tongue darted out of his mouth and stayed there for a moment. "Well, those are always air-conditioned." He plodded down the sidewalk and to the crosswalk, and then stopped, one foot stuck out treacherously over the striped walkway despite the hand commanding him to wait before crossing, and stared hard at the simple green and blue sign advertising Pets calling out to him from around the corner.

So, Shou changed direction, and this time the walking man blessed his serendipitous journey across the street.

A parrot painted in feathers of electric blue and lime sat in the store window. It blinked down at the newcomer with beady, curious eyes, and squawked out a greeting- possibly even in words- but Shou journeyed on, too absorbed in his mission to even acknowledge the pleasantry. The store clerk looked up from the manga she was reading from behind the desk, and then returned to it as Shou breezed by with an alabaster grin.

Against the wall sat an ocean of tanks full of fish of every color and type, and Shou mimicked their open-mouthed, gasping expressions on his way by, his hands working at his neck to sway away from his body, and then fit neatly against it like fins.

The tank and fish supply aisle came next, and Shou swam through it and the following pet food aisle until he came upon a stack of cages piled one on top of the other, with wood chips filling in the bottoms and an assortment of plump, rounded balls of fur scattered about inside each one- some sleeping, some hiding, some making a journey of a thousand miles on a metal wheel. A gerbil put tiny paws up against the clear plastic separating it from Shou, its tiny pink digits pressing against the sides like hungry starfish, and then turned away with a sniff and the flick of its brown tail.

"Hello," Shou said, waving and then scanning the enclosures. "Rats, mice, ohh, a ferret! Chinchillas, guinea pigs, and," he grinned, "you." He knelt down in front of the hamster cage. The animals inside looked back at him with glassy black eyes almost too big for their faces.

Shou grinned wider, his face appearing less and less like that of a mischievous sprite and more like an awed child. "Babies!" he said, covering his mouth with his hands. "Baby hamsters!" He crossed his legs and sat with a plop. "Look at you guys!"

Yet another one popped up from a bank of wood chips in the corner, fur mussed and spirals of golden, papery mess clinging to its head. Black ears swatted back and forth as the rodent shook, and it succeeded in scattering more of the light curls over itself. It fluffed up beneath the feather-light touch, each piece sitting like the weight of the world on tiny, soft shoulders.

"Aw," Shou said, holding out a hand towards the little Atlas.

One by one, the offending woodchips lifted up into the air, glistening within the grasp of Shou's influence, and landed back with their kin while the hamster waddled over towards its own.

Shou then held onto his kneecaps, observant, his pale eyes twinkling in the store light like the sun off of an iceberg. An audience of quivering noses and twitching whiskers gazed back.

The store clerk leaned in between the aisles to peer at Shou, too. The boy's bright smile- full of teeth only barely straight enough to escape braces- and amicable wave sent her on her way back to whatever she was reading at the counter.

Shou, meanwhile, looked back down to the hamsters sniffing in the enclosure and huddling together for warmth.

Eventually, he held up a hand and gestured behind himself. "I know you're here," he said. "I know you've been following me."

A man with light eyes magnified by glasses and marred by a scar cutting from his cheek down to his jaw stepped out from behind an endcap advertising different kinds of pet food. "With your power, you could just take one," he said. "So why don't you?"

Shou waved the question away the same way he had brushed off the store clerk. "Your name is," he tilted his head all the way back to get a closer look at the man, "Sakurai. Right?"

"Yes."

Shou's thin eyebrows shot up into his hairline, and his attention snapped back to the hamsters. "You think I oughta take one? Heh. Didn't you learn anything from the fight with my dad?"

"I'm not asking about what I think you should do, or about myself and my actions," Sakurai said. "I'm asking about yours."

"Well. You're rude."

Sakurai's answer was immediate. "So are you."

Shou scoffed. "You'd think you would have the brains to be a little more scared of me since my Pops and his weirdo organization isn't around to protect you anymore."

"He never protected me. Or you, not really. Only his reputation did. He was happy to let us all drown." Sakurai tucked something into the pocket of the tan apron hanging from his neck. "So. Tell me. You've got power, and you think people with power should use it. Why aren't you using it?"

"Geez," Shou muttered. "Because you can't just use your power for stuff like that. It's selfish, and it undermines the kind of thing I wanna use my powers for."

"And what do you want to use them for?"

Shou scooted closer to the hamster cage. "What about you? Why'd you get a job at a grocery store instead of just using your powers to take money?" he shot back.

"After Reigen spoke with us, I-"

Shou's pale eyes cut through Sakurai again, his pallor the color of an apparition, like he could pass right through Sakurai like he was nothing. "That was rhetorical. I wasn't asking for a sob story." He turned away. "I know why already, so don't waste my time with that now. It's over."

Within the cage, the hamster Shou had liberated from the wood chips waddled closer to Shou and sniffed.

Sakurai stuffed his hands into the pockets of his apron, thoroughly chided, and suffered through the soft, repetitive music floating down from the store speakers and into his ear, drowning out his arguments with the mellow cadence of a voice guided by the absolute, unquestionable dictation of a metronome. When it ended, another song began, just as constant and annoyingly placating as the first. Shou hummed along and scooted closer to the animals in the cage while Sakurai took in the contents of the aisles reflecting on the lenses of his glasses.

In the rat enclosure, one of the animals pushed another off of the metal wheel and took its place. Then it ran forward, and got nowhere while its companion ambled around the sides of their shared cage and pushed up against the immobile boundaries. Water fell in fat drops from the plastic bottle jutting out from the side of the cage, one at a time, lowering the level in the bottle little by little until it would inevitably become empty and hollow.

"Minegishi works for a florist, and yes, I got a job as a grocer," Sakurai said.

"Oh, so the apron isn't just a fashion statement?"

Sakurai pressed on over the derisive grin reflecting off the sheen of the plastic cage and leering at him. "What are you going to do now?" he asked. "Now that everything's over. Are you going to go to school?"

Shou sighed. "You nag worse than Higashio and the rest." He stood up, the tails of his jacket stirring behind him. "And you look suspicious, tailing a kid like this. And! Worse! You're scaring the hamsters. Look, they're shivering."

"Huh?"

Shou strode through the narrow space between Sakurai and the endcap of the fish care aisle, touching neither and breezing by like he were made of air and nothing else. Then, he skulked past the fish tanks and bags of colorful pebbles lining the shelves, and turned an abrupt about-face when he reached the end. The loud, fiery hue of his hair shimmered against the cool blue glow of the fish tanks nailed to the wall behind him. "Well?" Shou asked. "Are you coming? I don't feel like playing this game all day. Let's get this over with." Then, he disappeared around the corner and the automatic opening and closing of the store entrance was the only clue to his whereabouts.

Cautiously, Sakurai followed the boy out the door, one hand touching his apron pocket in search of his courage, and then falling back down to his side as he put one foot in front of the other.

The parrot at the front of the store wished them both a good day and bowed from its perch. Sakurai responded in kind to the sound of Shou's laughter, and then followed the red of the boy's hair through the sun-soaked streets like it were a torch.

The boy lead the way to an empty park. The fountain in the center gleamed as if it were pouring out silver and platinum rather than the same gallons of water over and over again for the sun to siphon away. The thirsty branches of the surrounding trees reached up, begging for the sky to rain what it took back down onto them before the deep green of their leaves browned and shrivelled away.

Shou dragged his hand along the surface of the water inside, as if to mock Sakurai with his overwhelming youth. Then, he followed the long, thin shadow of a branch to the umbrella of darkness beneath its trunk, his back to the sun as it began its slow descent towards the western horizon, and smirked as Sakurai struggled to look past its glare and meet Shou's pale eyes.

"So what's this about?" the boy asked. "You regret helping me?"

"That's not quite right," Sakurai said. "At least, I don't think I regret helping you. But," his fingernails dug crescent moons into the soft planes of his palm, like the night of a whole solar system had risen in defiance of the bright daytime. "Maybe."

A choked puff of air escaped Shou's lips, and then a rough, wheezy laugh. "Maybe? You mean you don't know? Ha! Did you decide to challenge my pops on a whim, too, and get that scar on your face?" He floated into the air and pressed himself into the side of the tree, ankles crossed, like a nymph caught between forms. "You risk life and limb just because you had a passing fancy?"

Sakurai's teeth clacked against one another as he built his retort. "And why did you challenge him? Because you felt like it?"

"Pops was abusing his power. He was a total embarrassment. An eyesore. I had to stop him."

"An embarrassment?" Sakurai asked. "He was indirectly and directly responsible for murdering and torturing an untold amount of people, wishing destruction upon the world only for the thrill of it, and you label that sort of activity as nothing more than an embarrassment?"

Shou snorted. "Semantics. I'm thirteen. And I always stood against him- which, in case you forgot, was not the case with you. What else do you want me to say?"

The glaze of light on Sakurai's lenses parted like fingers as he tilted his head to appraise Shou. "What are you going to do now that you're done fighting him, Suzuki?"

"Well, I'm not gonna be stuck working in a grocery store in my thirties 'cause I followed a wannabe ruler of the world, that's for sure."

A stray breeze disturbed the fountain and battered the laden limbs of the trees back and forth. Their leaves made a great clamour as they rubbed against one another.

"This is all just low stakes to you, isn't it?" Sakurai jammed a hand into his apron pocket. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck, and he held up a hand to shade his eyes when the sun finally broke him. "World domination was nothing more to you than something you could use to justify your anger against your father. You weren't concerned with doing the right thing. You only wanted something."

Shou's eyes glowed in the dark beneath the tree, and pulsed. "Don't talk to me like I'm anything like you and your Scar cadre."

"And what would you have been, had that boy Kageyama not stepped in and stopped your father? You'd have a scar on your face, just like the rest of us did, and-"

"A scar? A scar?! You think he'd let me off with just a scar?!' Shou's shoes hit the concrete and summoned a whirlwind of dust on impact. He drew closer to Sakurai, his face split in two by the light of the sun and the slashes of shade beneath the tree crawling over his face. "Pops would have killed me had things been left to play out- because my failing to surpass him was his ultimate embarrassment."

"And a man like that," Sakurai said, "you somehow still want in your life, beyond all reason."

Shou bristled, and his eyes narrowed to mimic his lips as they shaped an unspoken question, his head shaking from side to side and pushing forward on his shoulders in disbelief.

"Because 'It isn't over until mom scolds you', right?"

"That's not the same thing! She's got a right to talk to him!" Shou bellowed.

"Maybe, but does he have the right to talk to either of you?" Light eyes narrowed behind dark frames. Of course, since human experimentation and torture is merely an embarrassment, I suppose you can kiss and make up like it was nothing." Sakurai's eyes narrowed. "You're not thinking of breaking that madman out just because he's your father, are you?"

Shou came close, the sun lighting supernovas in his pale eyes and pulling his pale face into a grimace. "We're not enemies, you and me, but don't you dare-!"

"I wasn't finished," Sakurai said. "You're hot-tempered where he was icy, and aggressive when he was passive, but just as manipulative and driven as he ever was, with arrogance unmatched."

"Shut up! You're only saying crap like that to me 'cause you think the little toy in your pocket makes you invincible!" Shou sent a palm into the air and pulled a plastic water gun from Sakurai's pocket in the same motion, neither touching, and cast it into the fountain with a thrust of his hand away from his body. Sakurai tensed, but otherwise did nothing to stop it.

"It's true I use my toys as a security blanket, even now," Sakurai said, "but that one was too new to have any kind of power stored inside. I couldn't have done anything to you with it, anyhow."

Shou stared up at Sakurai, hard and unyielding.

Sakurai bowed his head. "I don't want to fight, but I wanted to see what kind of person you were. I don't regret helping you, but I feel I owe you enough to come say it to your face: I don't trust you. Not only are you still a child, but you're too much like your father."

"Bull," Shou said. "I'm nothing like him. I want to use my powers to make this world better. I want-"

"-to live in a world where everyone else is like an animal in a pet store. You have your favorites, and your least favorites, and you play with them and feed them, but at the end of the day they live in a cage that you made for them."

The water spraying from the top of the fountain splashed and roared as it hit the still pool at the base. Shou, however, was still, his face paler than before.

He stepped back into the shadows, his footfalls uneven.

"You haven't spoken to him since it all fell apart, have you?" Sakurai said. "To Serizawa, the man with the umbrella."

Shou hid from the bright sun, to the point that only his shadow was left behind to mix with that of the tree shielding him. Sakurai's glasses shrouded whether or not his gaze followed the boy.

"Kindness doesn't cancel out superiority, Suzuki," Sakurai said. "Or arrogance. And how you feel doesn't change the truth of a situation. Some people will choose to follow you, sure, but people don't bend and change just because you want them to, and they don't necessarily love you just because you love them." He paused. "I'm sorry."

Then, Sakurai bowed to an empty park. "Be careful, and be smart," he said, and walked away.