Chapter 39
Loaded Knick-Knacks (II)
The light outside had warmed from black to lavender blues and from that to a weakly glow of yellow, though still with darkness enough for Aizawa to have lock-picked his way into Rin's apartment (or was it her former apartment?) without attracting the prying eyes of her neighbours (former neighbours).
Now he stood amongst neatly stacked piles of books and paper, a stark contrast to the disaster he'd walked in upon weeks ago. It occurred to Aizawa vaguely and without any particular urgency that Rin must have been coming to her apartment in the dead of night to reorganize her belongings – to return some sense of formless order to whatever pattern she'd established for herself in this chaotic, sacred space. Perhaps also to salvage whatever evidence she may have had against Doctor Voodoo and his cronies.
Houseplants had been rescued from the previous destruction, amassed upon the small dining room table in wine glasses and mugs and cereal bowls. Their broken pots had been thrown into a dustbin bag against the wall, along with shards of glass from shattered picture frames and any number of crumpled, shredded or folded papers. The walls remained bare. No dishes waited in the kitchen sink. And in the bedroom, over which Aizawa cast his eyes from the invisible boundary of the doorway, the two large bags Rin had left with were thrown across the bed. Unopened, forcing a limp disappointment upon Aizawa as he realised that she'd been there and he'd missed her by mere hours. Not to say he'd expected to find her; however, some hopeless hope drove the realization that she'd likely still come back.
She'd changed the bedsheets so that no hint of the bloodied handprints remained. Had they been Paper Cut's? A fresh ire swelled between Aizawa's temples; only, exhaustion prevented him from being anything but dour and detached as he drifted deeper into Rin's bedroom. He eyed the scattering of things he hadn't noticed before: dying orchid on the bedside table, an antique dressing table wedged around the corner. Perfumes and the odd pair of sneakers or heels, a well-frequented stack of books, still more papers.
Things which, had Rin stayed, she and Aizawa would have made occasion to bring to his apartment.
He allowed himself the indulgence of imagining it, half-sick upon the poisonous sweetness of such domestic imagery – her houseplants, in their fleshy freshness, filling the vacancies along his shelves; her papers lying across his tables and chairs; even something as stupid and quaint as her shoes next to his. She'd make meals from her multitude of cook books; he'd put away her clothing as it spilled from cupboard to furniture to floor. They'd come home together after late nights of hero work, chugging down coffee and watching the news and then falling into the same bed, the same ruffled sheets smelling warmly of both her and of him. Villains to catch. Bills to pay. Papers to mark. Aizawa doing exactly the same thing he'd always done but now with her to do it alongside.
Only in hindsight did it all seem so tremendously stupid, and only in hindsight did Aizawa realise that he and Rin both shared a terrible fault: they'd both pretended, had both allowed themselves to slip into a lulling routine of romantic comforts even in the face of impending disaster. Aizawa had been privy to the situation's unnaturalness from the start. Yet, he'd remained blissfully and quite decidedly lackadaisical and had relished Rin's charms, drinking upon her cat-like nature to pad about and ignore the rest of the world while also being comfortable enough to curl up to him in little, quiet moments of affection. He'd played house, as Paper Cut (fuck him) had said.
And now his mind – the stewing origin of his rationality and resentment – screamed against him. Demanding and pleading that he not fall under the same spell once more. However, every other part of him – body, heart and soul: those which, before Rin, had been mostly silent but had now assumed a pivotal role in all Aizawa's decisions concerning her – pulled in an entirely opposite direction. Given the choice, Aizawa was certain he'd do it all again. He'd be hers, if she asked. Even if he didn't want to feel anything, she gave him a pulse and there'd be no forgetting that.
But he wasn't trespassing simply for the sake of maudlin pining.
Resisting the gross sense that he was violating a delicately established trust – what supposed trust, he couldn't say, for it was clear Rin had done just about everything but trust him – Aizawa began an aimless search of her room. He didn't know exactly what for: only that he needed answers in their simplest, most unambiguous form. Memories.
He started with the photo frames dotted in mismatched zig-zags across her dressing table, picking up and deliberating and putting down. Photos with an incandescent, foggy quality. Several different Rins, at several different ages, each one a fresh pain. In one she was graduating from UA, unnecessarily beautiful as she smiled thinly between pink smudges of early blooming sakura. In another, she cradled a black kitten against her chest. And in another, she and a second child clutched each other in a clumsy, excitable hug as though they'd just been wrestling. Aizawa tried to place the second child, recognizing in the slanted features and unhealthy smallness something sick and familiar. He stared hard and for a good deal of time at the wide eyes, the curling mass of pale hair, before realising with a certain dismay that the second child was Yukio.
There were many more photos of Rin with a man – who stared grumpily at the camera with a face like a crinkled landscape of pallor and elfin features; features which, despite the wrinkled and ashen quality of decay, gave the man an eternally mischievous air and bore a gorgeous, near-fantastical resemblance to Rin – and a woman – silvery hair cropped short around her soft, tired face; glowing eyes, luminescent in their feline yellowness and a charmed, unfocused smile; a woman who must have been pretty in her day, and was still pretty enough through a nostalgic sort of daze, but was unfairly marred by unease and age. Aizawa took these photos from their frames, often times finding the backs of the pictures dated in a stylish, overly-neat handwriting. Rin with Granny and Grandpa. With love. At these, Aizawa gazed intently, bringing the images close to his face as he attempted to pick out the subtle nuances of genetics.
Then there was one – singular and lonely, hidden in a distinct angling away from all the others – of Rin as a toddler. Plump, pale, tremendously cute as she reached for whomever stood behind the camera with crocodile tears streaming from the corners of her eyes. And alongside her was a woman, laughing delightedly with her hand balanced behind baby Rin's back. It shocked Aizawa. Shocked and stirred him, and inspired the urge to throw the photo across the room in a mix of disgust and awe. Rin's mother! Not the emaciated, drug-dashed witch he'd imagined but an exquisite future-form of Rin herself. Despite having a baby, she couldn't have been much older than twenty two or three, and was haloed by light like an angel from a daydream. A healthy glow. An inviting tenderness. She was lounged across a picnic blanket with a large red flower pressed deftly behind her ear, and she looked to be so painfully in love with Rin it was hard for Aizawa to stomach it.
He turned the photograph back to its initial position. Facing away, excluded like a disease from the rest of the frames.
Nothing jumped out at him from inside the dressing table drawers. Besides a few pretty dresses and a very bland, black, oversized Eraser Head t-shirt (where Rin could have gotten that, Aizawa dared not think of it), nothing important was to be found in the cupboards either. The bedside tables were empty. The bags on the bed, which Aizawa had pried open with more expert lock-picking, presented him with nothing new – only an echoing scent upon the jerseys, traces of Rin's fingers in the pages of her books. The bathroom – nothing. Underneath the furniture in the living area – nothing.
And after hours of scouring the stacks of disembodied papers, he'd only managed to find a handful of Rin's old school reports and some news articles. On missing children. On the quirk-enhancing drug. The like. Aizawa folded these into his pockets, sighing, and trudged through to the kitchen where the fridge was empty and the cupboards contained only rice cakes and iron supplements and coffee. He poured himself water from the tap; boiled the kettle. From the cabinet containing Rin's unholy multitude of mugs – ones with cats painted on, their tails the handle; ones with flowers or stars; ones in pastel pinks – Aizawa took the largest one he could find. Which, lo and behold, revealed the corner of a box wedged into the back corner of the cabinet.
A hidden stash of snacks, perhaps. Or small kitchen gadgets Rin cared nothing for. As Aizawa hesitantly pushed the other mugs out the way, the clink clink clink of their ceramic bodies somehow driving a harsh grimace through his core, he worked against getting his hopes up. The box was curiously light as he took it. Something of a trinket box, wooden and little bigger than the size of his outstretched hand – certainly too small for food or gadgets, and with no need for lock-picking either. Leaned against the counter, loosely aware of his body's impending stiffness, Aizawa twisted the box before his eyes for some moments as though in search of hidden messages or booby traps. All seemed perfectly innocent. Aizawa flicked open the lid and found – much to his disappointment, making him groan to no one with the looming threat of anticlimax – a newspaper clipping.
Folded with the utmost care to be nestled comfortably between the box's wooden walls.
Looking thin and worn and well-read in its crinkled quality.
Over this Aizawa was in two minds, first of all attempting to remain convinced that he'd searched the apartment fairly exhaustively (indeed, he'd looked in the tank of the toilet and had unsuccessfully attempted to pull out the cornices from the walls) and that there was in fact not an all-elusive little gem of information to be found.
Especially not in a place so dreadfully ill-concealed.
However, his fingers seemed to burn as he plucked the clipping from its place; he could do nothing to restrain his hands' faint quiver as he set the box aside on the kitchen counter behind him.
The paper was significant. His heart and soul were sure of it. And when he unfolded the page to its full size, chest squeezing in upon itself with ever greater tightness, his head spun with much too much anticipation for him to immediately absorb the implications of the cropped article's heading. Aizawa shut his eyes, overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of his exhaustion and frustration, and drew a ragged breath. The sensation was almost excruciating – until then, his breaths had been shallow, agitated and ineffective – and he cringed at the inkling threat of the headache. But nothing came. He opened his eyes.
He opened his eyes and was confronted, initially with disbelief and then with piercing realization, by a picture of himself.
Black and white, blurred by movement and nighttime darkness but still distinctive enough for Aizawa to recognise the moody displeasure of his youth. Different from his current moody displeasure only on account of the recognisably less tired look. He glared at the camera, seemed to be raising his hand from the corner of the page as though to shoo the photographer away. Blaring lights, torches or police cars, shimmered in the background behind blobs of bodies. Pictured – Debuting Erasure Hero: Eraser Head (not available for comment). Beneath which was the article's heading, written in imposing bold and italics–
Fourteen Children Rescued
Throughout the rest of the week, Aizawa spent his free time scouring the article; in time that wasn't his free time, he occupied his mind with thoughts of the article; and late at night, the dormitories quiet and devastatingly hollow without Rin, he writhed against the predatory torture of the headache as it reared itself and reared itself and reared itself. Images came to him during the day, obtrusively and obsessively – hazy faces; a clear vision of being flanked by shadowed, cold walls which faded into obscurity and back into focus and then out again; a smear of white, with high definition focus upon details like the corner of a mouth or a dirty toe, a bell-toned word or a tantalizing pressure in the palm of Aizawa's hand. Nothing that made any real sense, but which dazed Aizawa and made him fall noticeably silent at odd times.
The article was strangely short for such an important thing as fourteen children being rescued from a trafficking ring. The details were there but happened also to be brief and easy to glaze over – Tokyo warehouse; some minor injuries on the part of the children, one of the traffickers dead from unknown causes; none of the heroes involved in the rescue being available for comment. Not one, with only the Debuting Erasure Hero: Eraser Head being mentioned alongside a transitory allusion to a well-known underground agency.
Aizawa searched the internet and came across no more information on the incident, though a vast variety of news sites covered the story with the same detached conciseness.
He also expanded his search to the Voodoo Agency and found nothing he didn't know. There were listings of missions Doctor Voodoo and his sidekicks had headed or been involved in, but looking up the names and dates and places turned out close to nothing, as though not a single person in the world had cared to follow up on the events. A photograph was rare. Commentary from anyone at the Voodoo Agency – let alone Doctor Voodoo himself – was even rarer, and Aizawa quickly abandoned any attempts to discover whatever it was he'd hoped to find. All of them, those murky figures, were little more than ghosts. Myths. Illusions, known only by name and by well made-up faces.
Quietly, Aizawa damned his younger self for having not been available for comment that night long ago, because perhaps if he'd said something – any goddamn thing at all – there'd be more for him to remember from.
And through it all, despite the aching tragedy of his disturbance and literal pain, despite the incorrigible desire to see her, Aizawa didn't once risk the heartache of going to Rin herself. Unsurprisingly, she didn't return to the dormitories, and though it distressed Class 2A greatly – "But she promised to cook us something Italian this week!" and "Is she going to stay with one of the other classes? Did 2B steal her from us!?" – Aizawa made no effort to explain her absence and managed with a certain amount of subtlety to make it clear to his students that he didn't want to explain.
On the Monday, in a moment of beguiled weakness, he did venture past her office. Closed door. The faint murmur of her voice behind it. In the empty hallway, aware of but choosing to ignore the possibility of being caught by an innocent passerby, Aizawa had slumped himself against the wall and listened for an agonizing number of minutes to her speaking. Sometimes managing to make out words, other times not, enraged whenever she was interrupted by the second person in the room (a boy, it seemed, one with a familiar voice which Aizawa had no energy to place). No matter the audibility though, he was indubitably shaken by the typical bubbliness in her speech, its vibrancy wholly without the dragging melancholy Aizawa himself felt. He rotted inside at the sound. He ran his hand over his face and sighed into his palm.
He didn't once try to put himself through that same torment again, though she - Rin! - was the first thing he thought about every morning and the last thing to cross his mind through his painkiller-fueled daze at night. Was she back at her apartment, oblivious to the way he'd scavenged through it only days before? How long had it been since she'd left him – forty nine hours? Seventy eight? Did it hurt her to think of it all quite as much as it hurt him? These things and more, like pins piercing swiftly through Aizawa's mind with a numb, impersonal vengeance.
For the most part throughout the rest of the week, he managed to avoid her with a fair amount of dignity. He sidestepped certain corridors, was sure to check for her presence in the teachers' lounge or offices before entering. He didn't once have to outrightly face the catastrophe of his feelings. All along, Aizawa flattered himself by thinking that it was by his care and logic that he didn't see her again, that he had grasped a certain control over their situation and it was only a matter of time before – before what? Before he forgot about her again? Like hell. But at least he had managed to swallow down the general sadness that swirled inside of him.
However, it was made clear soon enough that it was by no doing of his own that he'd been able to maintain such a distant façade. It was no show of skill that kept him apart from Rin, no deliberate attempts that kept him safe from her charms. Because really, he should at least have seen her by now and should at least have had some sort of close run-in that would have left him reeling and breathless from the exposure. But there'd been none of that – there'd been no danger to Aizawa whatsoever because by the end of the week she was gone. Rin, in all her elusive loveliness, was no longer there to be avoided.
A/N: Until now, we've been going in circles - however, you needn't wait any longer, because in the next few chapters we will be reaching the pinnacle (and the end?) of this story. For now though, keeping reviewing to let me know what you think! ^-^ Thankie.