He spends most of his time with his eyes open these days. He doesn't have a choice, now that he needs to plan.
Sometimes he doesn't want to.
It's no use, whispers a voice, gentle and mocking. You can try to run, you can try to hide, but in the end, you're going to spend the rest of your life in this cold, white room, and you're going to remember watching a little girl waste away all because you weren't good enough.
At those times his eyes sting and his hands shake and he wants everything to just stop, but then-
I'm proud of you, Hakamata's voice echoes in his mind as the little girl reaches forward to grab his hand. She gives him a tentative smile and every other memory becomes a footnote to Hakamata's voice whispering soft encouragements and telling him he's proud.
So Yuuto takes what little he knows, what little he has, and he plans. There isn't much he can work with. The room he shares with the girl is mostly empty except for whenever one of the villains brings them food and water, and since he always has quirk restraints on, it hardly means anything anyway. In contrast, the girl doesn't have restraints so she could use her quirk however and whenever she wanted, but she's still only four or five, six at most. It hasn't been long since she gained Drain so she barely knows what it is, let alone how to control it.
He can control his quirk but he can't use it. She can use her quirk but she can't control it.
It's a mess, he knows, but he still has to try.
"I'm sorry," the little girl whispers one day as she fiddles with the hem of her gown.
Yuuto blinks at her slowly as he nibbles on a piece of bread. "Why?" he asks after a moment of trying to remember whether she's done anything recently that might merit an apology.
Not that he really needs a moment to 'remember' - it's just that sometimes there were little things in his memories that he might have looked over without a second thought but were, apparently, 'crucial to understanding social interactions,' as Hakamata once put it.
You'll get better with practice, he said when Yuuto had asked how to notice those.
He can't say he's gotten better yet, but he's definitely getting practice.
Tears spring to the girl's eyes and he nearly drops the bread.
"Because I can't," she says and he hears a sob build in her voice.
"Can't what?" he asks completely baffled.
It's the wrong thing to say, though, and the girl shrinks back until she's practically curled up in a ball in the corner of the room, her face hidden behind her arms.
Yuuto stares at her wide-eyed as she shakes, her little hiccups and sniffles muffled against her arms.
"It's alright?" he tries because half of the time, saying a variation of 'it's fine' or 'we're going to be alright' usually got her to quiet down, but this time it isn't enough.
"No it isn't!" the little girl hiccups as she shakes her head violently, still avoiding his eyes.
Yuuto frowns and lowers the piece of bread.
"I'm sorry?" he tries again because sometimes that works too.
"Why are you sorry," the girl says instead of calming and Yuuto's fingers twitch.
He doesn't know what to do.
He stays there sitting at one side of the room while the little girl cries at the other. It's surprisingly uncomfortable, Yuuto realizes. True, he already knew trying to ignore her didn't work well, but he didn't think watching while doing nothing would be just as hard. He shuffles forward, intending to pat her on the head like Sakamata or Blue Jay did whenever he did something right, but the little girl scoots away whenever he gets close enough to touch. He shuffles forward and she scoots back. This goes on for a couple more minutes until he realizes they've gone in a complete circle.
He blinks, staring down at the little girl who's stopped crying some time in the middle of their impromptu chase, and she lets out a watery giggle.
"You've stopped crying," Yuuto says and her smile vanishes almost as soon as it came.
"I'm sorry," she repeats, and for a second Yuuto panics because he has no idea what he's supposed to do if she starts crying again - but the little girl is still staring up at him. Her eyes are wet and red, and her lower lip is trembling even though she's obviously trying to keep it still, but she isn't crying. At least not yet.
He really wants to know why she keeps apologizing (he's the one who's doing nothing right and everything wrong) but the last time he tried didn't work out so he settles for carefully sitting beside her. When she doesn't move away, he tentatively pats her hand. He isn't prepared for when she grabs his in a surprisingly tight grip.
Yuuto blinks and the girl's lip quivers.
"I can't do it," she says and Yuuto blinks again.
"Do what?" he asks, careful and slow.
"I can't use my quirk!" she bursts out.
Yuuto tilts his head and tries to remember what it was like when he first came to the lab. He remembers the cold grey room with a tiny window and the dead bugs, but none of the fear, the grief, the lethargy that should be there comes to mind, and he tilts his head even further.
"It's still working, though?"
The girl pulls her hand away, only to smack him on the arm.
Yuuto stares.
"Not that," she says, her brows furrowed and her lower lip sticking out. She's probably trying to come off as frustrated, but all Yuuto can see is a pouting child.
"Then what?" he asks as he takes her hand again, and though the girl pouts even harder, she doesn't try to pull away.
"I can't," a sniffle, "I can't use my quirk the way I want to."
Oh. Well. That's… accurate.
She looks up at him with wide grey eyes, but Yuuto can't think of anything to say so he just stares back.
After a moment, she huffs.
"You're supposed to tell me it's going to be alright, silly," she says and Yuuto blinks.
"But it didn't work the first time?"
"Because I was crying. You're supposed to be nice to me, then."
"Oh. I'm sorry."
"I forgive you," the child says solemnly as she pats his knee.
Yuuto blinks.
He hasn't said anything that could help, hasn't even done anything but listen (and he wasn't particularly good at it), but it looks like the little girl has managed to get things under control on her own. She sniffs once in an attempt to unclog her nose, before wiping away a bit of snot with her sleeve. She ends up smearing it all over her face instead, though, so Yuuto takes the glass of water, pours a bit over the hem of his hospital gown, and uses it to wipe her face clean.
"Thank you," the little girl says primly before going back to eating enthusiastically.
He doesn't understand children.
You're doing wonderfully, Hakamata voice echoes in his mind and his hands still completely for the first time in hours.
Things are a mess and he still has no idea how to sort them out, but at least this time he isn't alone.
Selfish aren't you? whispers a voice as he settles down to watch the little girl eat. Though I don't blame you - misery loves company after all.
He ignores the voice and pushes the piece of bread he was eating towards the girl.
"What about you?" she asks curiously, though she doesn't say no.
"I'm not hungry," he says.
The voice laughs in his head and he doesn't blink.
After all, he needs to plan and he can't do that if he's seeing things that aren't there, can he?
The rate at which he's forgetting things frightens him.
Is this what normal people who don't have a memory quirk feel like every day?
Not quite, says a voice and a memory of forgotten meetings and lost keys rise to the forefront of his mind. It's usually more embarrassment and exasperation and confusion - and much, much less terror.
Yuuto tilts his head just a fraction to the left as he watches the doctor jot down a few notes he passes on to one of his helpers. He thinks he can understand the 'more' but he doesn't understand the 'less.'
The 'fear' you're feeling is because you're dealing with something new, whispers Hakamta and Yuuto's fingers twitch.
Like when he first met Gang Orca?
Exactly like that.
"Things are proceeding quite satisfactorily," the doctor says once the other villain leaves the lab.
For a moment, Yuuto thinks he's talking to him, but then he goes on before Yuuto can answer and he realizes the doctor is just muttering to himself as he looks through the many many files on his desk.
(Sometimes in his sillier moments, Yuuto used to wonder whether the doctor's quirk was 'order' or something along those lines. Something to help him keep track of all his notes and ideas and experiments - though then again, if he did have a quirk like that, he wouldn't need to keep everything quite so meticulously labelled.)
"147 has lost most of its emotions regarding over half of its life, yes, yes that's quite nice - but, the speed though. It's slowing down. Why? Is it its diet? Do I need to add more protein to 209's food? Or is it that 209 has been suppressing its quirk? The woman said it wasn't suppressable but what would she know, the stupid bitch -"
He devolves into unintelligible mumbles and no matter how much Yuuto strains his ears, he can't make sense off anything.
He falls back to his usual sense of apathy (not usual, a part of him whispers, a little too soft and slow to be called frantic but close enough that Yuuto feels his heartbeat quicken by half a beat) and watches as the doctor starts stabbing a scalpel into his desk.
They're like him, he thinks all of a sudden as he stares at the gouges the little knife makes into the wood. He's the table and the knife is everything around him and the little cuts, some deep and some shallow, are the memories they've left behind. They never go away, never get covered, not even when the doctor stabs the same spot over and over again, because nothing's ever exactly the 'same.' Sometimes he'll be just a millimeter to the left, sometimes he'll make a cut just a tiny bit too shallow, and sometimes he'll be both - so each cut is never erased. They have their own unique place among the litany of mars on the table and they're never going away.
Not until someone takes a wood carving knife to the desk and starts whittling.
Slivers of wood fall, little by little, until the marks start to disappear one at a time. First it's the older and shallower ones that go - the fascination the first time he saw an ant, the delight when his mother let him eat an entire tub of ice cream on his own - and the confusion when she came back and took it away (because it turned out he'd mistaken what she'd said - it's all yours, Yuu-chan! - to mean he was allowed to have the entire thing in a single sitting when she meant he could have it in little bits over a long period of time.) Then it's the newer, slightly deeper ones. The bemusement when he met Tenya, the frustration as he spent hours agonizing over math and English, and the satisfaction whenever his minion managed to find Eraserhead when he's out on patrol. The little girl's quirk whittles at his memories so slowly, so gradually that he doesn't notice he's lost entire layers until he goes back to see and realizes there's nothing left but the knife and the table. He can still remember where the marks were, but they're barely a shadow of what he remembers them to be.
He'll never admit this to anyone, but when it comes to the doctor and the little girl, the latter scares him far more. The absolute worst the doctor can do to him is kill him (and he knows from experience that that never lasts,) but the girl.
He's terrified that one day he'll wake up to find that he no longer remembers what it feels like to hope, and that he'll spend the rest of his life waiting for an end he doesn't believe will come.
"- useless," the doctor snaps as he throws the knife across the room. The blade misses Yuuto's ear by barely an inch.
He's jolted out of his thoughts and he stares at the man, who's still muttering to himself as he clicks his pen.
"I need better helpers, better equipment, more room at the very least - thank god he's managed to take care of that. Speaking of which, have I mentioned everything I needed? Quirk restraints? Test tubes? A separate room for 147? Everything would be so much more easier if it could be packed into a box - though I suppose technically I could - but what if a prolonged state of death causes it to malfunction? No, no, it needs to stay alive, at least for a couple of days before and after the relocation -"
Yuuto's hands spasm against his side, hard enough that the cuffs on his wrists clang against the table, but the doctor is too lost in his thoughts to do more than frown his way.
His heart begins to pound and he clasps his hands together in an effort to keep them still.
He isn't quite sure- he might be misreading things but-
Maybe, just maybe.
Holding his hands isn't enough to keep them from shaking. He's sitting on the edge of the table, perfectly still except for how he can feel his hands tremble against his thighs. Whether it's out of excitement, fear, or hope, he can't tell.
It might be a mix of the three, because finally, after days of waiting and watching, he finds the opening he's been looking for.
Good luck, he hears Hakamata's voice, warm and kind, echo through his head, before it gives way to the plans that start to grow.
Relocation.
Yuuto may have memories of memories of being fifty and twenty and thirty-six and everything in between, but that doesn't mean he still isn't a ten-year-old child.
He makes a plan, but he knows it isn't a very good. For one, it relies far too much on the assumption that when the doctor said 'relocation,' he meant something on a scale at least as large as moving everything to a separate building. For another, it relies on the hope that he and the little girl would be among the last to be moved. And finally, it relies far too much on the girl being able to use her quirk.
"But I can't," she says wide-eyed when Yuuto first whispered the bare outline of his plan into her ear.
"Have you ever tried?" Yuuto asks.
The girl shakes her head jerkily but she still looks far too frightened. "I can't control my quirk."
"I don't want you to control it. I want you to use it."
"Is it different?"
Yuuto reaches forward and pats her head as gently and as comfortingly as he can. "I don't know,' he says and the little girl glares. He isn't finished, though. "But I think- control is knowing when to stop. Using is… just letting go."
Her lips pull down in a frown and her nose scrunches up. "Like when I have to pee-pee but aren't supposed to I have to wait, but when I'm at the bathroom I can go?"
Yuuto blinks. "... I think so?"
To be honest, he has no idea whether that's a right analogy, but the girl's frown morphs into something almost thoughtful, so he decides to let it go. It's her quirk after all. She should know how to use it better than he does.
"But - what about you?"
Soft pudgy fingers brush against his arm and he tilts his head to the side as he looks at her.
"What about me?"
"What if you forget?"
That… is a problem, isn't it? He's been trying not to think about what might happen to him if she used her quirk to its maximum capacity while he's still in the vicinity.
Logically speaking, it shouldn't change things. What he feels hardly matters when he can still remember all the facts, so even if he does end up forgetting every single emotion he's had since he was born, things should still go according to plan.
But.
He doesn't want to forget. He likes remembering the feeling in his chest whenever he saw the little notes attached to the books Eraserhead sends every couple of days; the fond exasperation that comes from arguing with Sakamata about how vanilla is better than chocolate mint; the delight and warmth that spread from his chest to the tips of his toes whenever Hakamata smiled down at him and told him he did well.
He needs to remember the hope and longing whenever he looked outside the window and saw a world where he could be free and safe.
What he wants or needs has never been the most important thing in his life. There's no reason why that should change now.
The girl's biting on her nails, so Yuuto reaches forward to take her hand in his.
"I won't," he tells her and it's only half a lie. "I'll remember everything important."
She stares at him with wide grey eyes and Yuuto doesn't look away. He doesn't think she believes him, but after a moment, she slowly nods and Yuuto squeezes her hand once before letting go.
The little girl pulls on the hem of her hospital gown and chews on her lower lip. Then, all of a sudden, she stands and whirls around so she's facing Yuuto.
"When I grow up I'm going to be a hero," she announces and Yuuto blinks.
"I'm going to be the best hero ever and next time," her voice wobbles and her eyes water, but she plows on before Yuuto can reach out. "when someone needs help, I'm going to be the one who comes up with a plan so no one needs to forget."
Yuuto's fingers twitch once before they still. "Okay," he tells her.
"It's your fault for making a stupid plan," the girl sniffs before she sits back down.
"Sorry," says Yuuto, but for once, the words hold less guilt and more amusement and he leans forward so he can pull her into an awkward hug.
She doesn't seem to care that Yuuto clearly doesn't know what he's doing, and she wraps her thin arms around him tightly.
"I'll be the best hero ever," she says and Yuuto believes her.
Two days later, when a villain enters their room with a syringe in one hand and keys to the cuffs on Yuuto's wrists in the other, they're ready for him.
A/N: this... took longer than I expected. Sorry for the late update, and thank you to everyone for waiting patiently! As always, I hope you enjoy the chapter and any comments of any kind are always welcome :)