Takuma had a lot of things to stress about in his daily life: where would he sleep, where his next job would come from, when his next meal would be. It was stressful, but he had time to get used to it, and he knew more or less how it would go. He had gotten used to a lot of things: not asking questions, keeping his head down.
So when he woke up in the morning, he was more scared of the conversation he was about to have with Mei than he remembered being scared of the multi-armed mutant on trigger he had danced with two weeks ago because he knew what would happen to him if he lost a fight. The unknown was scarier than whatever the street could throw at him.
He had more time to go through his morning routine than usual since Mei had worked late in the hour. He was endlessly annoyed at how his hands kept shaking since his eyes had opened, and he was again contemplating making a run for the city to grab a bottle of whisky. Anything strong would do if life kept throwing curveballs in his direction.
His stretching routine helped calm him down a little bit. Takuma still made sure his bag with his essential items was close to the door if Mei decided to use her air cannon on him. As unlikely as it was, the possibility of something going wrong was low but never zero.
He made a light breakfast; hot chocolate in the morning always put Mei in a good mood, and he certainly hoped it would be the same today. Then he took some time to clean around the place, a good way to spend his time when the only other option was twiddling his thumbs.
Finally, after some time, he felt Mei slowly come to consciousness, and he proceeded to reheat the cup he made her. He grabbed her meds and laid them next to the cup. He was getting her used to her morning cup with a pill next to it in the hope she would start associating the two; that way, she would have an easier time remembering her treatment when he was gone. When he had the hangar to grab her plate, he hadn't seen a pill anywhere, so it meant he was at least having some success.
The wait was killing him; his host wasn't a morning person in general, and since it was the weekend, she took longer than usual to get dressed and leave her room.
"Good morning."
"Good morning," she greeted back as she slumped into her chair at the kitchen table.
"I hope the food wasn't too cold when you got to it," he said. Small talk was a good way to open the conversation before he started getting into the thick of it.
He watched her take her pill, and after a long sip from her cup, she nodded. "I noticed it before it got cold. Thanks for the meal!"
That was nice of her. "You're welcome," he answered with the shadow of a smile. It was nice to feel appreciated. "If you don't mind, there's something I want to ask you."
"Shoot."
"What do you want from me?" he asked her slowly, trying not to rush through the words as his hands started shaking again, and he had to hide them under the table for her not to notice with her enhanced sight.
Mei tilted her head to the side, and he could sense burgeoning confusion in her mind. "To make babies?"
And how Takuma was glad he knew what she meant by that, but that didn't change his problem in the slightest.
"Mei, you know I was homeless until you took me in, right?" he said, the rhetorical question hanging in the air until his host nodded. "When you're homeless, few people do things just out of the goodness of their heart. And I have been living in your home at your expense for the good part of two weeks now while you are making me gear that would probably beggar a few big players in the most well-established gang I'm used to running away from. What I'm trying to say is that you're doing so much for me I'm never going to be able to pay you back. So what do you want from me?"
His last sentence was laced with a hint of exhaustion and fear because he sure as hell was scared.
Mei picked up on it, as he expected. Her thoughts and feelings were a melting pot of confusion, anger, and fear he couldn't pick apart without getting into her head, so he simply waited for her to digest what he had just told her and come to a decision.
"I don't want anything," she proceeded to tell him slowly. "I didn't expect you to stay so long. People don't usually stay after." Then she started waving her hand at everything around them.
Takuma could say with certainty he didn't expect the conversation to take this turn. But it made some amount of sense given what she had let slip last Friday as she was leaving school. He didn't have anything to add, so he simply waited for her to continue, noting the lingering sadness around her when she spoke.
"I'm a bit much to deal with for most people. I'm weird and loud, and I can't remember people's names to save my life," she started to say at a much faster rate as she failed to find the right word. "I...didn't bring you to my house for any particular reason. I just wanted to help. And if I couldn't bring you to the hospital, there weren't many options. I didn't really think about it at the time, but, well, now you're here, and I didn't expect you to stay when I'm...me."
There was a lot to unpack from what he'd just heard, but it would have to wait because now Mei was looking at her lap, her pink dreadlock had fallen over her face to hide her eyes, but it didn't stop him from feeling the melancholy that had taken her during her speech. She would feel like shit for a while if he didn't put a stop to it, so he needed to turn the discussion on its head.
"Thank you for taking me in," he spoke while trying to meet her eye. And he did when she raised her head to look at him. "I wouldn't have lasted long if you hadn't, and to be honest, I would probably already be dead by now if it wasn't for you."
He watched Mei's eyes widen and her mouth open slightly. "What?" she asked with some horror in her voice.
"Mei, can you tell me when was the last time you saw a homeless person?" Takuma said, cutting her sudden bout of anxiety with a question.
He waited for her to say the word he expected. "N-No, I can't."
"And that's normal. I've been homeless since I was six years old, Mei. There are rules for people like you, and there are rules for people like me. We aren't even a person in most people's minds, so easily ignored and forgotten as if we weren't even there."
Takuma took a breath; he was the one flailing for words this time.
"When I fought the heteromorph, I did it for my own reasons, but by doing so, I broke a taboo for people like me. I brought attention to me, some random guy in a busy city. And when you've been on the street as long as I have, you get a reputation and enemies, even when you do your best not to make any. Do you know what I did when you were in school last Friday?"
Mei was trying her best to parse the information he was giving her; she was having a hard time accepting what he was telling her. "I don't remember much, just that I went to school and came back."
And she actually looked sheepish when she spoke, so at least he knew she realized something was very wrong with getting some sleep deprivation-induced amnesia.
"I was going to the city to get paid for a job. A broker who deals with heroes and villains alike paid me real money to commit what is essentially a crime in the eyes of the law. The only reason it's not a bad thing is that it's a hero who paid me to do it," he revealed. He watched her blink hard in disbelief.
"What...did you have to do?"
"I am an empath; emotions are something that are used by many Quirks to act on their victims. I learned through practice how to tell if someone is under the effect of a brainwashing Quirk, and in time, I also learned how to break this brainwashing. I more or less sell a cleaning service when I break brainwashing, hypnosis, and any other type of mental manipulation on someone's psyche," he informed her, trying to break down his job in a manner that was intelligible.
"That's..." she started to say then cut herself. "That's not a bad thing."
"It's not. I try to do good when I can," he agreed. He would be in a far better situation if he was willing to mind-rape his way into proper living arrangements, but such was the price of having a moral compass. "When I went to get paid for the job I did, I learned I had a bounty on my head."
He could see on her face she had a hard time accepting what he was telling her as fact. "How...how much?"
"I don't know," he told her honestly. He hadn't bothered to check; like his newfound notoriety on the net, he didn't want to know. "Enough for three large gangs to put money on bringing me back alive. Enough to force me to run for my life the second after I left the den because someone very much tried to get me."
The girl hadn't been much of a threat, but it did happen. And his host was now looking at him like he had grown a second head.
"Mei, I need you to understand that I'm not in a position where I can tell you no for pretty much anything really. And that's a terrifying position to be in," he stated in a way that would leave no doubt as to what he was implying.
Now that he had spelled it out for her, there was no doubt he would finally have an answer. He was tired of waiting for the proverbial sword of Damocles to fall on him; if she made up her mind, he would at least have the knowledge of what he was in for. Whatever she had in mind for him was better than the wait.
Of course, the alternative was going back to the street and hoping the two weeks of recovery he had in him would be enough not to be captured and sold or murdered when a real threat showed up. It wasn't the most inviting of ideas.
Taking a forever nap was tempting, but he hadn't struggled so much in his life to take the easy way out.
Now that he was less in his thoughts and looking over Mei, he realized she was in the midst of a full-blown existential crisis. Even behind his wall, he could feel her mind going a mile a minute, going through so many emotions one after another he was getting worried she was going to have an aneurysm. She was still for perhaps the first time he met her, as she stared into nothingness, so deep in her thought he doubted calling her name would do anything.
"You won't...can't say no," she repeated dumbly, as if the idea was not something she ever thought about.
Her eyes met his, and he was again mesmerized by the movement of her iris; it was breathtaking. A smile slowly grew on her face as a spark of something he couldn't quite name bloomed behind her eyes. "I know what I want."
He held a sigh of relief for the few seconds he had it in him. The wait was finally over.
"Let's be friends!" she declared, jumping from her seat and grabbing his good shoulder from the other side of the table with a manic look he recognized from when she was working on her gadget.
"What?" was the only intelligible thought he could muster. Mei was lying entirely on the table since it was pretty wide; her feets didn't even reach the floor.
"I want to be friends!" she repeated, and again her words made no sense to him.
"I can see your mouth move, but the word coming out of it doesn't make any sense," he commented numbly.
'Is this real life?' he thought. 'Maybe the mutant did pop my heal like a grape, and I'm just delirious.'
This would make more sense than what was happening right now.
"Just think about it; we can watch stupid movies while eating popcorn and doing each other's hair!" she vibrated in excitement.
"Is that what friends do?" he wondered out loud since his experience of friendship was closer to running away or fighting off psychopaths rather than the whole blanket and make-up thing.
"I don't know, I've never had any," Mei admitted with a hint of melancholy.
He shrugged. "Mine are either dead or criminal, so I don't think I have a good idea how friendship is supposed to work either."
"Then we can find out together!" she declared again before freezing. "If you're okay with it."
Of all the things she could have asked, no, demanded from him, she wanted to be friends? He was waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Mei to stop acting and tell him what she really wanted. But when he looked at her, he failed to see anything but earnest hope. When he felt the small amount of emotion going through his wall, hope and fear of rejection.
'Maybe there isn't any shoe left to drop.'
And if that wasn't the single most fucking scary thought he had in fucking years, then he didn't know what it was. The idea of having someone in his life that wouldn't fuck him over at the first opportunity was alien to him. But it felt nice, like something he never knew he needed until it was right in front of him.
"Yes, I think I would very much like to be friends," he answered feeling more shy than he ever remembered himself being.
For some reason, saying this sentence out loud made him hope for a hole to open right under him.
"YES!" she screamed in joy as she forgot his injury and hugged him with the strength of ten mama bears.
"Owowowo," he complained; the pain was not enough to stop him from smiling like an idiot. "You're going to break something if you keep hugging me so hard."
"It's what friends do!" she denied while still lowering her grip on his mid-section. "Oh, I have so many baby ideas you can help me with!"
Mei was ecstatic, and he didn't even try to fight back, more than happy to follow along with a smile of his own. "We really need to work on your phrasing," he sighed in good humor.
"Never!"
Friendship acquired. Is this karma? My boy needs a break. In the original plot that I thought of before it imploded and turned into what you are reading now, he was supposed to join the League of Villains, and the other main character should have been Himiko Toga. It didn't happen for many reasons. The quirk, first and foremost way too strong for a villain, the shape the story took with the prologue, and then the sudden appearance of Mei Hatsume with a steel chair. I wrote like 10k words on Takuma being rescued by Mirko, but I had too much fun writing the chaos gremlin, so I scrapped the idea. I think I might write a story from the L.O.V side when I'm done with this one. I'm 170k words in and I haven't reached U.A. What a joke. I won't be done with this one for a while, though. Writing is hard.