I don't own MHA.
Tsuki's father exited the crookedly hinged door leading to their home's basement "playroom".
His hair was askew, more so than usual, and his dark eyes were lit with excitement.
He dragged a large, tightly knotted black trash bag behind him, and there was semi-dried gore smeared around his lips and down his chin. His teeth, normal for the time being, were bloodied, and he wore all black as usual. The sleeves of his black button down were rolled up, revealing the multitude of old, crisscrossing, silvery scars littering his pale flesh.
Tsuki had similar scarring on her own arms, but less, because she hadn't been trained as harshly as her father had been during his own childhood. Though, these features were not visible at the moment, because as usual the young girl was dressed in a black and white striped shirt beneath baggy black overalls. She stood before him, having been waiting for him to leave.
Tsuki had in her right hand, a bucket of a special substance. It was a home remedy smelling heavily of lemon juice, and in her left was a sterile yet ratty gray hand towel. She needed to run to the hardware store and pick up some new ones.
"Daddy, are you done down there?" Tsuki asked, looking up at him when he paused before her.
Her father's eyes wrinkled as he smiled at her with his blood covered lips.
"Yes I am." He said. "Be a good girl and make it pretty again down there, hm? I'll be back later with a new friend, and I don't want to give them a bad impression."
"Yes daddy." Tsuki nodded obediently.
"You're such a good girl Tsuki." Her father crooned, dropping the trash bag for a moment so he could shuffle closer and pull her into his arms.
Tsuki stood still as he snuggled his face into her fluffy peach hair, audibly inhaling her scent.
"Such a good girl." He murmured, stroking her hair. "Daddy is so happy baby. What would I do without you?"
Well, Tsuki would assume he'd get along just as he did before she was born. Which was pretty much doing the exact same thing he did currently; the only difference being that Tsuki hadn't cleaned up after his fun because again, she hadn't been born.
The nine year old blinked, scenting the thick metallic odor of blood on her father, as well as an underlining musk. He only sometimes smelled like that and blood after ending a friend because sometimes doing so got him really excited. Tsuki didn't like the scent, it made her incredibly uncomfortable, because she knew what it came from.
She was homeschooled, and her father sugarcoated nothing. She knew how children were made, and unfortunately she knew that sometimes certain things got people excited enough to make making a child possible.
Her father found killing arousing at times, especially when the one being killed struggled. Tsuki had heard the thumps and muffled yelps in the basement. She heard her father's responding giggles, and she knew he was having a lot of fun.
Tsuki's father stopped petting her like she was a particularly favored puppy, pulling back so that their identical eyes could meet. The nine year old rose her damp, clean towel, wiping the drying blood from around her father's mouth. The sun wasn't up yet, but you could never be too careful. Those older eyes crinkled again as her father smiled.
"Such a good girl." He whispered.
"Be safe daddy." Tsuki said in lieu of a response.
Why? Because despite her dad's words, Tsuki didn't always feel like a good girl. Was being "daddy's good little girl" the same as being a good girl? Or a good person one should say? Tsuki didn't feel comfortable asking her father his opinion on the matter, and she wasn't quite certain why.
When Tsuki talked to people in passing while running errands so that their house wouldn't fall apart, she noticed something.
She noticed that her dad was… different.
Of course Tsuki knew this because he made sure she knew she wasn't to mention to anyone what went on in their house, but still. What Tsuki was beginning to notice… was that her father was different in a bad way. She still did as her father told her to, because that was all she'd ever known, but she'd been talking to the friends he brought in more. Each one said generally the same thing.
Her father was a psychopath. A bloodthirsty, murdering sadist who should not be doing what she was helping him do. He was also something Tsuki had recently learned the name for after a sneaked visit to the public library in their neighborhood.
A cannibal.
Of course in the back of her mind Tsuki had known that her father had bitten whole pieces away from living human beings, but it had never quite clicked that he ate human flesh.
It was a recent epiphany that slammed into her with such clarity she was left reeling. Tsuki knew for certain that what went on in her house wasn't normal. It wasn't okay in any sense of the word, and that's why they had to keep it a secret.
Because it was wrong.
It was one of the worst kinds of wrongs. And Tsuki was helping.
The child blinked when she heard the front door shut and the lock click. She hadn't noticed that her father had made to leave. The peach haired child had been so lost in her thoughts that time had completely gotten away from her.
Shaking her head, Tsuki held onto her bucket and now soiled rag a little tighter, making her way into the basement.
She descended the creaky stairs, her eyes sweeping over the same basement workshop she'd been tasked to clean for as long as she could remember. It was still lit by candlelight, and for the time being, the lab table with restraints was empty, the tool table set up next to it was spattered in vivid liquid crimson, and so was the tiled floor.
There was a huge puddle of the spilled life's fluid around the drain centering the basement floor, and Tsuki knew as usual, that was the area her father had chosen to dismember the now dead friend. She knew their remains had been tossed into a trash bag, and that very same bag was being dragged off somewhere by her father to be disposed of.
She wasn't sure where he did it, or how, but he'd never been caught, so Tsuki would assume it was a secure area to do so.
The child set her bucket down, tossing her rag into it and turning around to leave again. She was going to need more towels, and more solution, as the mess her father left behind was sloppy and large.
When she returned, the child set about cleaning the leftover carnage, her eyes absent as she set about the familiar task.
When she was done, she dumped a bucket of water over the floor, washing the blood diluted cleaning solution down the drain. She then tossed her handful of blood soiled towels into her bucket and left the basement to put them in the wash.
Once that was done, she washed her hands.
It took her fifteen minutes to get the blood beneath her fingernails out, and her palms were still stained a muted pink when she finished.
Tsuki paused, staring down at her faintly stained hands.
Her fair brows furrowed as she did so.
'This is someone's blood.' She thought.
It wasn't as if her hands hadn't been stained like so countless times before, but ever since she'd began inwardly musing on her life and her father's decisions, she found she couldn't quite look at things as they were with the same old uncaring eyes.
Tsuki hadn't cared that much because for her, her life had been normal, but as she realized her normal wasn't normal at all… she began noticing things more and more.
And she didn't like what she saw.
She wondered if there were people out there in the world, looking for the ones her father had snatched off the streets and tortured before chopping them up and draining their blood into the floor.
She wondered truly, what it was to be afraid for your life.
How afraid were the people that her father had taken? How deep was their pain? Why did her father do the things that he did? Why did he raise her to help him get away with it? Tsuki tore her eyes away from her hands, noticing that they were trembling slightly.
'I'm different.' The child realized. 'I… I'm not the same as daddy.'
She wasn't.
She didn't understand why he enjoyed doing the things he did, she didn't understand why he did them in the first place beside enjoying them. And then, there was something else that was glaringly apparent.
Tsuki didn't eat people.
She ate normal food, and her father did as well, but he also feasted on human flesh. Why was that? Why was she different from him? Why was she relieved that she was different from him? Tsuki wished she had someone to ask all of these questions, she wished she could understand why she had an uneasy feeling telling her that she shouldn't and couldn't ask her father these things.
The child would ask her mother, but she was, in the words of her father, "completely out of her mind". Tsuki's mother actually lived in the next house over, and from time to time the child went over to tidy up the cluttered hole her mother called home.
Kohana, Tsuki's birth mother, had paranoid schizophrenia, and suffered from delusions that the government was responsible for the appearance of quirks, and that it was their way of monitoring the flow of human evolution.
In Kohana's mind, it was their own convoluted way of ensuring the continuation of the human race. Kohana also insisted that heroes were just garishly dressed government officials sent to watch all non government employed quirk users and keep them under tight watch.
Supposedly, without the "phony fascist pigs" that were heroes, people would rebel against the government, who would then be exposed as the ones responsible for the mutations present in the human gene code.
More presently, Tsuki wasn't quite certain asking her mother for advice was very wise. The child also knew that her mother wasn't aware of what her father did, and she didn't want to be the one to tell her so.
Despite her mother's mental issues, she did care for Tsuki's father, and Tsuki thought some part of her father cared for her mother as well, considering he hadn't killed her, and whenever she was brought up he swooned over her "pretty flesh".
According to Tsuki's father, the reason they didn't all live together was because her mother was simply too paranoid (and also there was that little detail about what went on in the basement).
It didn't bother Tsuki though. She didn't really know her mother so much as she knew of her. She still wasn't quite sure how she felt about that, but the child thought maybe it would be nice to have someone tuck her in at night and kiss her forehead like in the storybooks at the public library. But for the time being, she'd live as she always had, until she could figure out what to do with herself and her recent moral musings.
Tsuki paused, hearing the front door.
"Ah." The child murmured. "Daddy's home."
Trivia:
-The name Kohana contains the kanji for "child" and "flower".