SSD IV: Shinsou

99. Lessons Learned

Been a hectic and very long day with way too much driving and I'm going to have to repeat half of it with the addition of dealing with small children for seven hours. Yay!

"I hate science," Hitoshi muttered, staring down at the faces that could be his birth parents.

"If Mayor Suzuki is to be believed, so did your mother at your age," she told him. "But her quirk meant she spent a lot of waking hours with nothing to do." It had to be so lonely, sitting in the dark every night with nobody around, only the silence. Nobody could blame her for using the time to learn. "Eventually, she decided there was a lot she could do with science, so she went for it."

"If you knew about all of this, then why didn't you tell me?" Lucy had sent the first photo to Silver over a week ago and she was meant to be working together with him for this. They were his parents not hers, parents he was never allowed to know. She had no right to keep this a secret from him. He didn't ask for her help so she could lie to him.

"Hitoshi, there are three reasons someone disappears and every trace of them is erased: one, they're in danger so they're on the run; two, they're in danger, and the one threatening them has deleted any information about them; three, they're recluses-" She left out the comment about most people like that being at least mildly bonkers- "and are currently living their lives far away from everything."

"So they could be perfectly fine."

"I-" She snapped her mouth shut, biting into her cheeks. "Maybe," she admitted. But if that was right, then they'd left their son behind and Silver found that hard to believe. "I felt the risk that looking into it could put you in danger was too much, so I kept you out of it. I won't apologise for that."

"You lied to me."

"And I'd do it again in a heartbeat."

He wanted to be able to hate her. He was angry, rightfully so, there was a burning in his head, hot and thick and heavy but then he looked into her eyes and he saw the silent resignation there, the expectation that he would not forgive her for this and nothing she could do would change that. She would let him walk away from her, but she wouldn't walk away from him. She would keep doing whatever she could to protect him from the sidelines. He wanted to be able to hate her, but the more he looked at her, the harder it was to even feel angry.

Wordlessly, she pulled out what remained in the box. There were more certificates, some blueprints scribbled over with handwriting he'd never seen before, photographs of a smiling couple with hands over a bloated stomach, more newspaper clippings. The last thing she found was a diary, written by Shinseki Aiko, she handed it straight to Hitoshi, it belonged to him now and she had no right to it.

"Lucy's still searching the deep web, if she finds anything, you'll be the first to know. I promised I'd help you find out as much as possible, I'm going to stand by that."

Hitoshi held the thick diary in his hand, smoothing down a kink in the top corner. If it weren't for Silver, he'd never have found any of this, he'd have gone the rest of his life never knowing. "Thank you." He tried to imagine his own thoughts if he'd been in her place, and struggled to see himself wanting to put her at risk if he could avoid it. He seriously doubted he would've been able to do what she did though, walking right into a room with a shark and managing to get information out of him. Someone had to be at risk for her little plan to work, and she'd chosen to take that for herself; he couldn't say he was surprised.

He set down the diary, filled to the brim with words from his mother. This was written by his mother. "I wish you'd think about yourself for once," he grumbled, knocking her shoulder with his fist.