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The Abyss (chapter 10)
🕑 Added 2024-10-14 01:27:35 +0000 UTCOne moment he had been helpless as the League of Villains stood over him under the midday sun, and the next he found himself sprawled on a cool floor in a dark room.
It was all disorienting, and annoying.
Overhaul had expected Shigaraki to kill him, and he had to assume that he’d been turned into a marble by that prancing jester to prolong it. That was the difference between them. Shigaraki killed because he could, while he had tried to avoid killing unless it served a point.
Easier to just put them back together after he had gotten what he wanted…
A deep well of self-hatred surfaced again. It didn’t matter now. He lost his work. He lost Eri.
In the gloom, he made out a table with two chairs at each end.
When he tried to stand, he stumbled instead. He quickly found himself staring at two misshapen stumps where his hands used to be, his heart thumping in his chest painfully.
“It had to be done, Chisaki.” His mind had to be playing tricks on him if he was hearing Pops, but it sounded like he was right there in the room with him. “You have shown you can’t be trusted with power like that.”
Forcing himself to look away from his stumps, he somehow saw the old man, seated on one side of the table with his clean shaven face and gray hair. The disappointment he saw had him shrinking in on himself, reaching blindly for some kind of explanation.
“How?” he tried.
“My granddaughter. The same granddaughter you have been tormenting ever since you put me in a coma.”
Hatred mingled with the shame he felt. If she had only obeyed then none of this would have happened. He had tried to bring about some good from her accursed existence, and this was his thanks?
“You know what she had done to her own father. Eri would have done the same to you,” he tried to explain, to make him see reason.
“You had learned to control your Quirk. Why couldn’t she do the same?” The old man motioned to the seat opposite him wearily. “Join me.”
Overhaul stumbled to hit feet as much as he could with stumps for hands, dropping his bruised and battered body into the seat with a hiss of pain.
“I’m no longer Kai Chisaki,” he whispered slowly. He had remade himself enough times that it was true. “I am Overhaul. The cure to a sick and broken world, playing by its rules to bring about its demise.”
His words sounded hollow even to his own ears. It was all for nothing, in the end.
“I did it for you, Pops,” he continued. “Against this world that you had no place in anymore.”
“I pity myself if all you have done is for my sake. The Shie Hassaikai was no more as soon as you abandoned everything it stood for. I shouldn’t have ever taken you in.” The words left a gaping wound in him. “You call Eri a curse, but what have you brought to my doorstep but ruin? I cannot even bear to look my granddaughter in the eyes now because of you.”
“You don’t mean that,” he pleaded. “You have to understand. Things would only have gotten worse if they continued like they had.”
“I would have had a son that I could be proud of in you, and a granddaughter that still knew what it meant to smile.” The wretch that he was, he couldn’t even bear to look at the old man anymore. “You always had a ruthless streak, Chisaki. I blame myself for not correcting it sooner.”
Hearing Pops blame himself for his mistakes, Kai Chisaki made a miserable sound. “The fault is mine. Take my life in exchange and be done with it.” He hung his head, staring at his stumps again. Without his hands, he wasn’t Overhaul.
He only hoped his death would give the old man some closure.
“Is your life enough to pay for all the grief you have wrought?” he heard.
Kai’s cheeks were wet with tears. “It is all I have left to give,” he whispered brokenly.
“Don’t sell yourself short.”
He frowned, hearing a younger, smoother voice. Raising his head to look at Pops again, he was left squinting as the lights turned on, illuminating a younger man with black hair and dark blue eyes that seemed to stare past him. The black and white suit he wore was also unfamiliar.
“I confess I played a little trick on you, Chisaki,” the stranger said. “And thank you. It was starting to get tiring seeing everyone recognize me. I blame my sister.”
There was something about the mocking words that should have made him angry, but something wasn’t sparking. It was like something had hollowed him out.
“You still have your hands,” the younger man continued pleasantly. “You’ll be needing those. I just had to break your ego down for my Quirk to slip inside.”
Kai looked down to see his hands whole again. He should have felt something like hope or relief, but he couldn’t, and his hands felt like lead when he tried to stir his Quirk to action. He couldn’t even feel frustrated.
What had he done to him? He’d said that his Quirk had slipped inside, the very thought of it making him feel filthy. Kai could still feel that much, the urge to tear at his skin with his nails intense for all his fingers refused to obey.
“Well, I won’t claim to be perfect,” the stranger admitted to him. “Some things are harder to get rid of. And forgive my poor manners. Nobuto Kayama, at your service.”
He didn’t connect the name immediately; he never cared for heroes. But the resemblance was there, though his Quirk was even more disgusting. He couldn’t get it off of him. He felt wrong. He—
A wave of calm washed over him, soothing him. It made it hard to care, and he felt sleepy.
“Hmm. Maybe I overdid it,” Kayama commented.
Kai looked at him like in a dream, each thought feeling heavy. The white walls around them seemed to blend together unpleasantly.
“Let’s start with something small. You and Shigaraki clearly had history.” The hero seemed to find that funny. “It probably hadn’t taken much for that manchild to get pissy, but consider me still curious.”
“We met,” he began, unable to stop himself. “Two of their members attacked me for the offer I made them, and I defended myself. One of mine had died in the struggle.”
Kayama already seemed bored. “And after?”
“Shigaraki set up another meet, said he changed his mind. Offered us Bubaigawara and Toga as a show of support.”
The experience reminded Kai of another Quirk, but worse in every way. It wasn’t that he was compelled to tell the truth; it was more that he had forgotten how to lie, how to feel.
“Seems they played you.” Kayama’s dark eyes hadn’t left him. “Next question. Let’s say I had an encrypted hard drive. Your Quirk, as far as I understand it, allows you to take something apart and then put it back together in whatever way you want. Could you get rid of the encryption?”
“I can’t say. I’ve never tried.” The old man had been the old-fashioned type, and Kai hadn’t worked with computers often.
“Then let me explain it to you.”
Kayama spent the next few minutes carefully explaining to him how encryption worked in a manner that might have felt surreal. If he could feel annoyed, he would be showing it.
He still answered, a thrall to the hero’s Quirk. “I could take it apart and put it back together, but without knowing in what order to put it back together correctly, I couldn’t guarantee the end would be any more readable than it is now. Just picturing it being so might get you something in Japanese, but in the wrong order,” he finished.
Kayama shrugged his shoulders. “Worth a shot. Worst comes to worst, this is just a copy.”
He retrieved what was presumably the hard drive from the left side of his suit, sliding it over to Kai.
Able to feel his fingers again but feeling even emptier for it, Kai touched the cool metal of the hard drive as dark eyes watched him. The deed had taken him a few seconds, nothing but the sound of shifting metal and plastic passing between them.
“Thank you,” Kayama told him, placing the reconstructed hard drive back inside his suit.
He breathed more easily as the pressure eased.
“You’re curious,” the hero continued. “I didn’t get rid of that, so it’s understandable. I’d taken it from All For One.”
If those with Quirks were a disease, then All For One was a walking plague with all the Quirks he had collected. While Kai had maybe been thankful to him for taking All Might out of the picture, he could rot in Tartarus for all he cared.
“Is it Tartarus for me as well?” He was surprised that he could still ask a question.
Kayama’s expression changed slightly for it. “I don’t disagree that Quirks have made a mess of the world,” he said instead. “You’ve probably heard at least once that if Quirks had never appeared, that we would have been traveling the stars by now.”
Kai was also still able to feel confused.
“It doesn’t change that you’re a hypocrite, Chisaki. You might pretend otherwise, but you would have never surrendered the power that you’d grown used to exercising had you succeeded.”
He shied away from Kayama’s eyes. They seemed darker each time he looked.
“But tell me more about your Quirk,” the hero continued. “It’s one of the most interesting I have encountered. And start from the beginning; I don’t want to miss a thing.”
He couldn’t even guess how long he talked in that dreamlike state, only that it hurt him to speak by the end of it, his throat dry.
“That’s quite the learning curve,” Kayama finally commented.
An awkward silence followed as the younger man stared off into space. His own thoughts wandered back to the old man. He wanted to speak to him still, to offer his life in penance if he asked for it. There was nothing else left for him.
“I only realize just now how uninspired my plan had been.” Those eyes were back on him, and this time, he couldn’t look away. “I don’t even know if this is any good,” he said, patting the front of his suit. “If only you could have inspired yourself as you inspired me.”
The pressure increased and the hollowness inside him grew, leaving Kai struggling to string thoughts together.
“Just think of what you could have been capable of had you put your mind to it,” the hero almost ranted at him. “You could have produced wonders in seconds that a thousand men could work on for years. You could have saved a million lives. And what did you use it for instead? Even your dream of a world without Quirks was a small man’s vision built on the suffering of one little girl.”
Kayama loomed over him now, having shoved aside the table between them.
“I’m going to show you what ambition looks like, Chisaki. You’ll have a front-row seat, even if you won’t have eyes to see it.” Those eyes that seemed to stare past him, he saw something in them. “There’s no escaping it. Even for me.”
Empty all over, he just stared.
“Ṟ̶̨̢̼̣͚̝̞̼̈̉̅͘e̷̛̯͓͈̹̳̻̾̃͒͆̂̾͜m̷̧̹͕͇̤̝̈̀é̸͚͚̠͎̈́̍͗̋̽̓́́͋m̵͔̞̜̞̰̅b̶̞̾̋ę̶̩͇̰̼̦̦͇͎͂̑̽̍̇̌͝r̷̹͖̦̗̦̙̻̲̹̓̚͜ what you had told Eri each time you tore her apart and put her back together. Let it be your last thought before I become your prison.”
His mind fixated, his hands moved, and his Quirk activated.
After the pain, there was only darkness.
…
Nobuto took a slow but deep breath through new lungs, exhaling just as slowly. When he opened his eyes, his Quirk came alive to remind him that he was still himself, even as he tried to forget how he had come apart at the seams. It had been deeply unpleasant.
Flexing his fingers, he found his hands feeling alien and awkward despite looking unchanged.
There was only one way to find out if it had truly worked. Touching a hand to the table, he watched eagerly as Overhaul activated under his will alone, deconstructing and reconstructing it into the world’s ugliest nightstand.
He breathed out a sigh of pure catharsis as he smiled. Whatever his odds of survival had been, whatever he’d risked, it hardly mattered now.
That low droning in his head that has persisted for close to a month now had also ceased. Maybe because he’d technically died and been reborn as something new or maybe because he was simply harder to kill now. Once he got the hang of this Quirk, he could always just put himself back together good as new.
He also tried not to think about how Chisaki was still in there somewhere lest he ruined his good mood.
Raising a hand closer to his eyes, he closed and opened it a few times. His success here changed everything. Even his wildest dreams seemed within reach now, despite the long stretch of road ahead of him still.
Nobuto would avoid the pitfalls that Chisaki had learned through trial and error, but unfortunately he couldn’t say how long it would take him to reach the same level of proficiency. And then there was how practical it would be to even keep something like this a secret. It wasn’t like he could say Quirk Awakening and hope nobody noticed.
Still, he already had something of an answer there…
Leaving the room with its white walls, he put his sunglasses back on, his Quirk quieting as the world dimmed. He retrieved his phone from his pocket then and called his sister.
He had promised that if he came out the other end of this still himself, that he would tell them.
“I did not see you in class today, baby brother. Should I be worried?” she asked.
“I’m fine. Are you at U.A.?”
“I might be. Why?” It wasn’t often he called her, so he could understand her surprise.
“I’ll be there soon to explain. Find Nejire and Enkh-Altan if you can as well. They should be back on campus by now.”
Mirio and Amajiki were both still at the hospital. Recovery Girl had ensured their injuries hadn’t been bad enough to require an extended stay, but they hadn’t been discharged either.
“You’re going to keep me in suspense?” she complained.
“Yep.” He could almost see her pouting on the other end before he hung up the call. That he still enjoyed messing with her so much was more confirmation that it was him and him alone at the wheel.
He kept trying to find the right words on the route there, but it wasn’t easy. He was like something out of another old timey sci-fi movie now, The Thing. It tempted him to let his Quirk make it so it didn’t bother him, but he decided against it. It kept him human.
A nervous energy filled him as he walked U.A.’s campus, more than a few students around since it was such a nice day out. Maybe it was a small part of why he took his time on the way to Nemuri’s office.
Inside, he found his sister and his friends. Nejire still seemed tired and downcast as she sat on the couch, but she brightened when she saw him, her smile lifting his own heart. Enkh-Altan just gave him a nod from where he was seated against the wall.
Nemuri meanwhile was looking at him with unbridled curiosity as she waited for him to say why they were here.
He mustered a smirk. “Don’t give me that look.”
“No, I think I will. At least until you spill the beans as the Americans say.”
Nejire pulled him down to sit with her, hugging one his arms as she leaned into him.
His sister gave her a funny look that she missed. “Ah, but first…” She stood, revealing she had donned something similar to her villain persona. “It’s Mistress Night’s new look. What do you think?”
His and Enkh-Altan’s eyes followed as she did a spin. He certainly had a comment or three.
“You look like a depraved shrine maiden,” he commented.
“Isn’t it a little too villainous still?” Nejire asked, tapping a finger to her chin.
Nemuri flipped her wild mane of hair flippantly. He assumed she'd been too lazy to try and tame it again. “Not every hero is sunshine and rainbows like yourself, Nejire Chan.”
He would have said something if his Hero Costume had more color than a funeral.
“Since you had the good sense to change your look up, Nobuto, I’m thinking of making a change as well,” she continued. “Out with the old, in with the new.”
He did like it, but then his sister would look beautiful in almost anything. He told her as much.
“Then that’s all I needed to hear,” she said, beaming. “The beans now.”
He rolled his eyes at the turn of phrase, trying not to notice how they all stared at him expectantly, even Nejire. Retrieving the hard drive from inside his suit, he placed it on the coffee table in front of him.
“Your insane plan work out then?” Enkh-Altan asked. “Wasn’t sure with the League of Villains attacking the transport and Overhaul disappearing.”
His sister and Nejire looked between the two of them confused.
He started from the beginning, or close enough to it. “I didn’t come back empty-handed from that little foray into the Nomu factory.” He tapped the metal exterior of the hard drive. “I found this. Of course, it was nothing but an elaborate paperweight since it had been encrypted, but I’m stubborn.”
Nejire’s bushy eyebrows furrowed cutely while his sister tapped her nails on her desk.
“I think we all know that much, baby brother.”
“Overhaul’s Quirk,” Nejire mumbled quietly, staring up into his eyes.
“I guess the dinosaur spoiled the surprise,” he complained, a rumbling chuckle his response. “It was something of a long shot, admittedly, but I thought with a Quirk like that, maybe it could work.”
“I was wondering why I woke up in Enkh-Altan’s arms after overusing my Quirk,” Nejire commented. “Though he wouldn’t say a peep about you.”
He exchanged a glance with the dinosaur, finding him shrugging his shoulders. “Not my story to tell.”
“Men,” Nemuri muttered with a roll of her eyes.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Nobuto teased her. It was good to have friends, even if he was a poor one sometimes. “Anyway, I had slipped inside the transport earlier to try and find some alone time with Chisaki. As you can imagine, that all flew out the window when Shigaraki finally decided to show his ugly face.”
Nejire hugged his arm even more tightly. He ignored how panicked he had been in the moment himself. He won, and that’s all that mattered.
“You do have a tendency to find yourself in those situations,” his sister accused. He could tell she wasn’t happy.
And that was all the easy part. He never found the right words for what came next, so he did what came naturally to him. He lied. “It wasn’t a fight I could win, so I tried to get Chisaki to safety. It didn’t go as well as I hoped. Shigaraki’s Quirk was slowly killing him by the time we managed to escape, and I made a choice.”
He didn’t like it, but he didn’t want them to look at him like a monster either.
“I thought it would be a shame if it just ended like that, so with a little trickery, maybe, I convinced Chisaki to pass his Quirk Factor on to me. I had gotten the idea from what he’d done to one of his men,” he admitted, and that was true enough.
“You did what?” Enkh-Altan asked, making an almost bemused face that did not sit well on him.
“Admittedly, I wasn’t thinking clearly,” Nobuto continued. “All the adrenaline, maybe. As for the end result, well…”
Plucking a rose from a nearby vase, he pictured the cherry blossoms he had seen blooming all across U.A. in the spring. The rose fell apart in his hands, and from its remains a dozen misshapen cherry blossoms fell to the floor.
Nobuto forced down any embarrassment for the shoddy work. It was something that had taken Chisaki a lifetime to master, so his perfectionism could take a hike.
He felt Nejire’s nails digging into his arm painfully. “He could have taken your life just as easily once you let him touch you, Nobuto.”
“I took precautions,” he defended himself.
His eyes found his sister, who was looking the most pensive he had ever seen her. There was something else as well, but she had clamped down on it before he could figure it out.
“Not counting how much I want to strangle you for doing something so reckless, do you understand the trouble this will cause me?” Her eyes were cool as she paused. “You were one strike from suspension.”
“I know, Nemuri. But ever since All Might’s retirement, the Safety Commission’s been in dire straits. They can’t afford to dismiss me with this Quirk. And even if this,” he said, tapping the hard drive again, “is a dud, I also managed to recover Chisaki’s work. The Quirk-destroying bullets he had made. Shigaraki would have gotten his hands on all of it if I hadn’t intervened.”
There was another rumbling chuckle from Enkh-Altan. “You have them in quite the bind.” He ran a clawed hand through the feathers crowning his head. “And here I thought I had a few screws loose. I wouldn’t want to make an enemy of you.”
He took that as a compliment, even if Nejire was still frowning at him.
“I’m sorry I kept you in the dark,” he leaned down to whisper in her ear. Unfortunately, kissing her cheek didn’t seem to budge her mood. “Think of how many people I could save with this Quirk. I could have saved Sir Nighteye’s life, saving Mirio the grief of losing his Quirk and his mentor all at once.”
Nejire was the practical sort, she would understand even if she was angry with him right now.
It was his sister he was worried about, as he was struggling to parse what he was feeling from her. “I’m going to make a call,” she said, standing. “If you won’t even give me the courtesy of telling me, then you can face the music, Nobuto.”
She stopped at the door, avoiding his eyes.
“Unfortunately, you’re probably right,” she whispered. “The Safety Commission will bend over backwards for you, even as they try and find ways to control you. It is how our world has made them.”
She left after, leaving just the three of them in the quiet room.
AN: The choice not to code the first half as an interlude was very deliberate, considering what ended up happening.
