Work Text:
superpower.
(noun).
an exceptional or extraordinary power or ability
dependency.
(noun).
commonly referred to as the ‘activation key’ for powers. unless the dependency is fulfilled or complied with, individuals cannot access the full scope of their power, in some cases even weakening.
e.g. “when they don’t abide by their dependency of ‘being thirsty’, they can’t fly.”
( one )
‘It’s a shame, really.’
Meguru is playing by himself in the consultation room but he can hear his father and doctor speaking behind the curtain that separates him. Idly, he wonders whether they've forgotten that he can hear them, that he isn’t stupid.
They’re saying it’s a shame and they’re saying it comes from his mother.
Powers can be detected early on, those with Recognition’ can tell from the onset what’s going to manifest but it takes a few years longer for the dependencies to settle.
So Meguru sits on the bed of the consultation room, listening to his flesh and blood call him ‘horrid’.
It doesn’t hit him until a few years later that that’s what he is. ‘Horrid’. That everyone is going to look at him and want to play with him, until by some fleeting rumour or quiet side comment they’ll realise he’s monstrous. That he’s not quite right. That he’s something to be avoided, like an illness or a jagged crack in the pavement.
Meguru’s dependency is ‘thought’, but they call it ‘cruelty’. It’s a fickle one, difficult to define and pin down and one of the few that seem to exist in fluidity and grey areas. Most dependencies settle and stick but ‘thought’ is a more abstract one. He doesn’t really understand it himself. The doctor averts her eyes when she draws back the curtain, tells him something vague about ‘manifestations’ and ‘it could change though, don’t worry!’ before sending him on his way.
He doesn’t understand and he’s too scared to ask his dad, who refuses to speak until they get to the car.
It’s said under a breath, barely a mutter and more a subconscious thought than anything else. But Meguru hears it all the same.
“Figures he’s a fucking freak, just like his mother. What a waste of time.”
He doesn’t understand, not really, but he knows that ‘fucking freak’ and ‘waste of time’ aren’t good things. So he looks down at his lap, holds back the stinging in his eyes and fidgets the whole oppressive journey home. When they get back, he turns to his dad who had kissed him on the forehead earlier and indulged in his drawings the day before. He turns but all he sees is the shape of a back walking away from him, disappointment clear in the lines of his shoulders.
Cold. Meguru feels cold. Little fingers clutch at a little shirt, he scampers to his room and it feels like something is ending, something big.
A few months later, his parents divorce.
It’s a shame, really.
( two )
It’s just his mother and him now. He likes it like that.
His mother has ‘image manifestation’. She’s an artist and she creates looming masterpieces that are a little difficult to understand but beautiful all the same. They feel like universes on a canvas, like a thousand emotions told through the streaks of paint. Fame follows her through magazines and tabloids with the same repetitive tagline ‘stunning art, but at what cost?’
(‘Her soul!’ Is what usually follows).
Meguru loves the paintings his mum draws. Peeking his head round the door to the place where it all happens, the air thick with the smell of paint and every inch of the room covered with half spilt pots of paint, empty canvases and little knick knacks of all sorts. This is his mother, her centre, her self and her paintings.
They’re monsters. Her paintings are monsters.
It starts early, the bullying.
Strictly speaking, powers and dependencies are private information but little children tend to be terrible with secrets. His mother had pat his head, a look in her eyes he couldn’t read, and said “Megu, your power is really cool. So if you want, you can tell your friends all about it. But you don’t have to tell anyone your dependency, it’s your business not theirs!”
So he tells people his power. He’s got ‘quick feet’, if he thinks he wants to do something, move a certain way, new or tried, it’s easier for him to do so like breathing air or eating food. He still has to work for it but his body moves with the ease of a ballerina or an assassin and he’s barely a handful of years old. It starts well, at first. He picks up football and finds the one thing in the world he loves more than his mum’s paintings - it becomes his whole mind and his whole self. And he’s good at it, really good. It’s fun and it feels like living and soaring and flying all at the same time, it feels like triumph.
Then, it goes wrong.
He must’ve said something. He’s just a child after all and even the memory of his father turning away and that cold, horrible consultation room doesn’t mean he understands what’s wrong with him. Before he knows it, there’s a shift. Parents pull their kids away from him, people stop praising him for his skills and start muttering about how it’s the only thing he ever does.
It culminates in a bucket to the head.
He’s not sure exactly how it starts but one of the girls in his class, the one who can form little clouds if she stays warm enough, makes a football for him. A fluffy little thing in the middle of the classroom. It makes him smile, one of his sharp and too wide ones but she doesn’t seem to mind. She’s pretty and she’s nice and quick enough people get jealous. Next a kid yelling at him, and yelling at her, and he’s saying horrible things and Meguru feels very angry and very small.
“Don’t you know? He’s going to end up crazy! Screwed in the head, just like his mum!” Then the kid picks up the bucket which holds the classroom toys and swings it right into Meguru’s face.
Meguru gets a big plaster and a transfer.
It doesn’t stop there, in fact it only gets worse. He can’t seem to escape it and he doesn’t even want to think about what people say about him, about his dependency that not even he fully understands.
Football is a team sport, but he feels lonely all the time.
He plays and people play with him, with his ‘quick feet’ they can’t afford to get rid of him (although he’s seen the faces of parents, they never look happy to see him). Eye rolls and sneers, insults and harsh shoves, he has a team but children are capable of incredible cruelty.
It’s then, when his cheeks are still round and his eyes wide, he truly realises he has no one, that his monster starts talking to him.
( three )
Looming, the monster in the painting towers before him. His mother’s ‘thought’ compels her to draw a certain way and she tells him about how it’s a voice and it’s a ‘monster’, but when she says it, it feels a lot less like something to be ashamed of, it feels like something that’s his. People shy away from his mother’s paintings, but this strange revulsion is also what draws people to them. He looks at the huge figure nearly four times his height that lives in the space between his mother’s kind eyes and thinks it looks like a friend.
He’ll be ok. One day he’ll find someone who will have the same monstrosity in their veins, who will look at him and not run away, but maybe that will take a while. So he’ll be like his mum and listen to the monster that starts crawling under his skin.
He gets faster, he gets better, more of a threat and people want even less to do with him.
‘Fucking freak’.
But now he has his monster with its huge white eyes and gaping white maw full of teeth. He starts to dribble more and it suits him, suits his power. His monster grows from a little flickering flame to a hulking mass, just like his mothers. It makes him smile. (His smiles have changed too, menacing and full of teeth, just like his monster).
Loneliness continues to trail after him, like a ghost that’s anger prevents it from truly vanishing. However, he trusts his monster and he gets tougher and meaner and he looks at his mother’s paintings with their horrific masses and explosive colour palettes and feels at home.
( four )
He’s older now, and no less isolated.
Repulsed. His peers are truly repulsed by him now, but he’s happy regardless. Life is good! Life is fun! His monster pokes its fingers through his eyeballs and his feet shift like a wispy dandelion seed caught in a tsunami, with the destructive force of a guillotine.
His mother’s monster comes alive in the slices of her paintbrush, his comes alive through his domination on the field. As long as he listens, as long as he trusts, in his invisible companion he knows he’s not just going to be ok, he’s going to be great.
Shame. Shame is a weapon that can be wielded with surgeon’s precision and Meguru won’t let it get to him anymore. Body, smile, words, he cherishes what makes him repulsive. He finds pleasure in the small things and learns to be happiest when others are at their lowest. When a person is subjugated and crushed over and over again, it can ruin them and Meguru knows that in many ways he’s got scars in his brain. But his skin is tough and he understands autonomy and the power of perseverance like no other. He’s not his father’s freak or his classmates’ weirdo. He’s Meguru Bachira and even if sometimes, his solitude feels enough to kill him, he knows who he is and who he wants to be. The best. He’s going to be the best striker in the world and he’s going to find someone who lights him up like a fire, because no matter the opponent and no matter the threat, Meguru has a monster, just like his mother.
In his teeth, in his nails, a devil grins its grin and it’s enough to make the world quiver.
( five )
Isagi.
God, the monster in his head thrashes like agony but it feels like triumph. It’s screaming at him with its whole being because Isagi has the same scent, same feel, same darkness lurking in his veins.
Precognitive clairvoyance, with a dependency of ‘honing’. It’s a tricky one, much like Meguru’s. No straightforward instructions or easy steps, instead Isagi has to actively think and develop it in order to properly weaponize it, otherwise it only exists in the instinctive.
There are two things in the world Meguru will love forever. Football and his mother’s paintings. But meeting Isagi makes him want to love again.
No softness, not at first because Meguru’s a monstrous force of nature who’s unlearned how to be sweet. Unfair and off putting, he knows how he looks from the outside but Isagi doesn’t flinch, instead he faces him head on and blooms under the pressure Meguru exhibits.
He’s spent nearly two decades by himself and he’ll admit to no one that there’s a part within his heart that still aches terribly even if his dependency means he’s never truly alone. The wind has changed directions and the loneliness starts to ebb away.
( one )
[ some time, in the future ]
Hot water makes the long scratches on his back sting. Isagi’s already back in bed, likely lazing around like an exceptionally spoilt cat now that he’s been well fucked and appropriately pampered. Meguru’s a thousand acidic fires in human form but even he can’t say no in the face of Isagi’s demands, especially when matched with a sly, seductive smile.
He’s grinning himself, can feel the chesire cat in him purr as he bathes in the afterglow of a good day. Running his fingers over the bites in his shoulders, he stretches and feels terribly alive. His dependency, his ‘thought’ has shifted, now he no longer listens to a monster in his head - no longer the same lonely boy he was all those moons ago. Instead, something different swims in his grey matter. Hot and sweet and jagged and gentle, it feels a bit like destiny, it feels a bit like love.