Crocs were really the best kind of shoes.

Serizawa wasn't used to actual shoes. The last time he'd ever had to wear real shoes he'd been twelve and…and it had been after that day. His last day of school. He had…the other kids had pushed him too far that day. The other kids used to love to tease him and…and he'd warned them…but they hadn't stopped and then the next thing he knew there had been so much screaming…and then after that just the feel of the sidewalk under his shoes as he ran. He ran all the way home, one foot and then the other, the air stinging his lungs and hitting him right in the face along with his tears. The next thing he remembered after that was kicking his shoes off in the genkan, not even bothering to put them together let alone face them the right way…but Mom had fixed them. She had taken them and put them the right day and…and she hadn't moved them since.

They were probably still there.

He wanted to tell Mom that she could throw them out. They didn't fit anymore, he a lot bigger than he had been when he was twelve, and he had never liked those shoes anyway. His school shoes had never fit right, they'd always been too tight, too stiff…too uncomfortable. That was one of the few things that he had liked about being in his room, no more shoes. Well now he was out of there and he had to wear shoes and, well, he liked these shoes a lot.

Miss Suzuki had gotten them for him.

She had picked them out because they fit like slippers. They didn't look good, she had said, but that was ok because he was a boy and nobody made fun of boys for their clothes. He hadn't corrected her. Boys could be very mean about clothes. When your uniform was used, when the colors were faded, when your mom sewed patches on top of patches….boys could be very mean. But girls were meaner, from what he had seen, and anyway it didn't matter. None of his friends ever made fun of him. He mostly wore sleep clothes and they had never said a single word about it. His friends were nice like that…well that made sense because that was how friendship worked. When you were friends with someone then they had to be nice to you…well not had to but…but wanted to.

Wanted to. That was better.

His friends wanted to be his friends. They wanted him around, they weren't scared of him, and they never made fun of him….well Shimazaki could be a little mean sometimes but that was just how Shimazaki was. It didn't mean anything. Sometimes he wondered, though, how someone as nice as Miss Suzuki could have been friends or anything else with him. She was always so nice and patient and never, ever afraid of him. She was always doings things for him, taking care of him, and the least that he could do was do something for her.

The least he could do was feed a cat.

"Ok. I can do this." said Serizawa. He had to say it to himself, Miss Suzuki wasn't around to say it to him. She was off having fun on her birthday. She deserved it. She had said that she hadn't wanted a party but there was no reason that she couldn't have fun and go out and do all the things that she deserved to do. Thirteen was an important birthday, too, or at least Mom had said so…and she had said so…so many times…she had spent the whole day knocking on his door asking him to come out. She had made him a cake, from scratch. A chocolate cake with vanilla icing. The best kind. She had gotten him Dreamcast, too, like he had been asking for since it came out. He still hadn't come out. He hadn't even been able to open his door, not while she was in the house. He couldn't have risked hurting her again….the last time he had seen her in person he'd accidentally sent her flying across the room….

It wasn't his birthday, it was Miss Suzuki's, and he should have been thinking about her right now.

"You can do this, Serizawa." said Serizawa. It sounded better when she said it. Everything sounded better when she said it. It was like…like if she said something then it had to happen. Like how the President had said that of course he was going to take over the world, if he had the audacity to say it then of course it was going to happen. Well if Miss Suzuki had the audacity to tell him that he could leave the house then it was going to happen.

Even if she hadn't actually said it this time…it still had to happen.

Serizawa slipped his shoes all the way on and took a deep breath. In for four and out for four, like Tsuchiya had taught him. He…he was fine. He was the only person around. There was no chance of running into anyone, the top floor was pretty much empty since everyone had left, and…and there was no chance of anything else bad happening either. Like the building falling down or him locking himself out or the cat running out when he opened the door and then he would have had to spend the whole day looking for it but it would have been gone and Miss Suzuki would have been so sad, and Fukuda too since it was more his cat than anyone's, and then President Suzuki would have been sad too and…and then it all would have been his fault and-and-and-

-in for four, out for four.

He did it twice, so that meant eight. Eight deep breaths until he could leave his house. Eight deep breaths until he could open the door. Eight deep breaths until he could walk down the hall. One foot, then the other, and then the other. One after the other after the other. Slowly. Carefully. Down the hall, past Miss Suzuki's door, and down one more to Fukuda's. The hallway was long but he didn't have to walk to the end of it, just down it for a little bit. Not very long at all.

He had done this.

The next step hadn't gone as well. Once he got to Fukuda's door he was lost. Nobody was home but the cat…but he didn't feel right just letting himself in. Even if Miss Suzuki had told him that it was ok…it just felt weird. He remembered back when he had been a kid and Mom had let herself into his room while he was asleep. She always crept in so quietly that he never heard her….but that didn't make it any easier. Waking up and seeing his things moved around, his clean clothes folded on his dresser, all the piles of trash taken away…there was just something that left him feeling so…so he didn't even know. Something bad, it had been a bad feeling…and he didn't know if he wanted to make another person feel like that.

Maybe if he didn't touch anything.

That was a good idea, he decided. Just as long as he didn't touch anything that he didn't need to touch then it would be ok. He didn't know Fukuda that well…but he was kind of curious. You could tell a lot about a person by their room, not that he had been in a lot of other people's bedrooms, but he had done a lot of exploring in games. The important characters always had more decorations in their room, items hidden around, and eve secret doors and portals. He knew that were weren't any secret doors or portals since this was the real world and the real world was a lot more boring than games, but there must have been something interesting. Something to tell him more about the person Fukuda was. Nobody liked him, nobody but Sho and President Suzuki, and that was so sad….but at least he had two good friends, which was a lot…and maybe three…

But Serizawa had never been good at making friends….with people, anyway.

"Oh. Hello there." said Serizawa. The moment he opened the door, the very second, the cat came. It stuck it's head out and looked up at him. It didn't try to run or anything, not even when Serizawa opened the door wider so he could get in. All the cat did was walk up to him and rub it's fur against his legs. He wasn't sure what he was supposed to do. He knew that it wanted to be petted but…but what if he hurt it on accident? Hurting a cat even worse than hurting a person because cats didn't know what was happening and if he accidentally hurt this cat then Miss Suzuki would have been so mad at him…

She would have wanted him to pet the cat.

She would have taken his hand and told him that he could do it. That was what she always did. She always built him up…she was a good friend like that. He had to be a good friend too. He couldn't depend on her to build him up, he had to learn to build himself up. He had to figure it out. All of his friends had figured it out. All the people he knew were just…so confidant. They all knew exactly who they were and what they could do and what they wanted to be….and he couldn't even figure out how to pet a cat…

He had to try.

He pulled the sleeve of his robe down over his hand. Conceal, don't feel. He got the feeling that this wasn't what Miss Suzuki had meant, and it hadn't worked out so well for Elsa, but he didn't know what else to do. He reached down and held his hand down. The cat used him like a backscratcher. He let it. This made things a lot easier…this was good. This hadn't been so bad. Miss Suzuki would have been so proud of him if she had been there.

But she wasn't.

She was off having fun on her birthday. She asked him to feed the cat so that she wouldn't have to cut he fun short and…and he could do this for her. He had never fed anything that wasn't himself. Mukai stealing his snacks didn't count. He didn't know…he knew what to do. She had left him instructions and he could follow them. It was easier to have instructions. There was no way to mess something up when he had been told, step by step, when there wasn't even anything to think about.

Ok, he could do this.

He took a step forward. He decided to treat this like a mission in a game. He knew his objective, he knew how to complete it, and…well this was more like a tutorial mission if anything since he had more directions than normal….well of course he knew that it was real life but he decided to think of it as a game. He knew about games. He took one step forward, and then another, and then another until he made it to the kitchen. The cat ran between his legs the whole time, sometimes trying to fight the legs of his pants. He didn't know why, he had no idea what he could have done to it, and he had no idea how to make it better. He didn't know if it was mad or just playing. Everything he knew about cats he knew from games…and games weren't real life. They were better, in a lot of ways, because even if you died you always got a second chance….but real life was real and that made it…it was complicated, very complicated, more complicated than feeding a cat.

He decided to do one thing at a time.

He hadn't touched anything as he'd gone through the apartment. Not that there had been anything to touch. Fukuda didn't decorate at all. That was…interesting. Even the President decorated his office with pictures Sho drew...maybe Fukuda just didn't like decorating…anyway it wasn't Serizawa's place to judge. He had a mission to complete and a hungry cat trying to fight with the bottom of his robe. He pulled out his phone. Miss Suzuki had sent him the directions.

There were a lot of directions

Taking care of a cat in real life was a lot different from taking care of a cat in a game. Ina game all you had to do was feed it and water it and then it was fine. You didn't have to filter the water or feed it specific meals…meals which he was glad that Sho and Fukuda had cooked before they left. Serizawa had always thought that cats ate food from their cans…but he wasn't a pet expert. Sho was. Serizawa had to do what he, and Miss Suzuki, had said. All of these directions had been written by Sho and forwarded from Miss Suzuki's phone. He read them in her voice, in his head, since Sho tended to yell and curse…

He was always so mad.

Serizawa felt bad for him…the least he could do was give him one less thing to be angry about. Sho took his pets very seriously, That made sense since he was President's Suzuki son. Like father like son. President Suzuki always took his work very seriously, and he had to, since he was planning on taking care of the entire world. He knew that he could make the world a better place, that he was the only one who could do it, and of course he had to take that seriously. He was going to make a world where people like them wouldn't ever have to be afraid of themselves ever again. He was going to make it so that no kid ever had to go through what he went through, so that no kid ever had to worry about losing control of his powers and hurting someone, so that nobody ever had to feel like they were alone.

Good things.

President Suzuki really cared a lot about people, that was where Sho and Miss Suzuki had gotten it from. Miss Suzuki cared more about her friends than anyone he had ever met in his life and Sho cared about people too, he was just mad all the time. He was good at taking care of his sisters and his hamsters and his cat. Serizawa wished that he could have been more like the Suzuki's, any of them. They were the nicest, kindest, most caring people he had ever met in his life…not that he'd met a lot of people but still.

Still.

He had been still for too long. The cat had gone from using him as a backscratcher to a scratching post. He could feel it's claws stuck in his robe and the leg of his pants. Right, right, right, he had to feed it. The water was actually the easiest part. All he had to do was let it sit out on the table. The food…there was so much food in the fridge. It was labeled but…well he knew that it mean to even think something like this but Sho wasn't the best at writing. He had a lot of trouble with neatness and stroke order…Serizawa had no room to complain. His handwriting was even worse than Sho's and he still mostly wrote in hiragana too. Sho went to homeschool, Serizawa hadn't bene to any kind of school since he had been twelve. Sho won….not that it was a winners or losers things but Sho won and Serizawa was happy that he had. He was always so sad, the kind of sad that turned really fast into being mad, the kind of sad that he wished he knew something that would help. Just…Sho had so much going for him but he was always so sad and mad. He had made all of these cat meals all on his own and he had figured out all of these cat directions on his own….Serizawa had no idea why he felt the way he felt.

It was none of his business, anyway.

Sho could feel however he wanted to feel. Everyone could feel however they wanted to feel. Serizawa didn't have to understand other people's feelings to know that he didn't get a say in them. It was mean, too, to think about how if he had been Sho then he would have been so happy that he was, well, Sho. He was talented, he had a lot of friends, and Miss Suzuki loved him so much…and he was so mean to her…but Serizawa didn't get to have an opinion on this.

He was here to do something so he was going to do it.

Once he figured out what the labels said it was easy. He fed the cat and even when Miss Suzuki a picture to prove it. She sent back…a lot of emojis and a picture of the sidewalk. He didn't get it but he didn't want to ask either. He was going to assume that he'd done a good job….he had, hadn't he? He could do things on his own. it may have been hard but if Miss Suzuki believed in him then he could believe in himself, too….mostly….kind of…only if she did first, but that was ok. Things were better now, better than they had ever been in his life…he was doing better….he had done better. He had done well and now he could go back home and wait for Miss Suzuki and then they could spend time together…it was so nice to have friends.

Especially a friend like Miss Suzuki. Especially someone who believed in him and built him up and taught him about comfy shoes.