the day it stopped raining | midoriya izuku

09 | light's caress

TOKYO
23°C
MODERATE RAIN

"What do you do?"

The desire to be struck by disaster—to survive a plane crash, to lose everything in a fire, to plunge over a waterfall—which would put a kink in the smooth arc of your life, and forge it into something hardened and flexible and sharp, not just a stiff prefabricated beam that barely covers the gap between one end of your life and the other.

It's such a simple, genuine question from one's innocence, someone she just met—a fellow non-stranger who stands at the doorstep of someone's life; yet such sentence could put a perpetual halt on Masuyo's mind of stone. She wonders if she could answer that question with a wire plugged into a recorder from her head of tangerines, playing a biography of her tragic life of a failure and quelling—because then, if she were to tell her story to him with her lips; they'd quiver and frown, followed by tears dripping off her chin.

Masuyo's gaze lingers on the table stained by ready-to-eat meals, sitting under the pattering roof of Neoma at 9PM with Midoriya who got off patrol an hour and a half ago. They'd coincidentally met on the doors of the store as the girl was about to enter it for the first time in weeks, whereas the greenie had a bag with the same contents, solely meant for her. Masuyo was a little embarrassed at the timing.

"Masu-chan?"

His voice reels her attention back to him, knowing that she took a little too long to answer. It's just a simple, straightforward question, really. But why does it feel so...heavy?

"I..." Everything she says sounds fruitless. "I'm a freelance artist. I do commissions at least four times a month."

Midoriya's eyes light up at that, while she gets perplexed with that reaction. "Wow! Really? That explains why you live in such an exquisite place. Freelancers tend to earn a lot, huh?"

"Not necessarily a lot. I do what I can to make use of what I can do. It's nothing major, really. I work to live." She leans back in her seat, eyes spacing out again. Midoriya was sat opposite her, who had his gloves off to eat a warm, steamed bun. He was in the middle of chewing a huge chunk of it. However, that didn't stop him from talking.

"Eh? Work to live? That sounds stressful," he tilts his head. "Don't you do anything else besides freelancing?"

Masuyo couldn't hold back the forlorn sigh from her lips. "As depressing as it sounds, I don't. I rarely left the apartment unless it's for food or running an errand."

"That explains why I always see you here."

Masuyo didn't have anything else to comment on that.

What he said was true, after all. No matter how proficient she is in her own world, how much effort she put in all her earnings—Masuyo finds resolve in being her own robot of her own world. Listen to the pouring skies like a classic music, reading the blank walls of her home, relishing her numb tongue in spicy and caffeine foods.

An addiction to her doldrum and tedious routine, as if she had accepted with what she could live with and without after deciding she would leave countless hearts to heal her own. Regret sometimes gnaws away at the roots of her rose-coloured heart, yet relief has always overcome it.

Masuyo was a cigarette, a junkie, the embodiment of freedom, the bad habits, the guilty pleasures; yet she was someone locked in a cell with a key stuck in it, the probability of escaping with a fifty-fifty chance. She was a bird too big to live in their mother's nest, never having the chance to fly because the mother could never let her go. She was the age at which she became older than her parents were when she was born, which signals that her leg of the relay race has already begun, having coasted in their slipstream as they tackled the mountain stages of life, leaving her strong, energetic and deeply mortified by their loud yellow jerseys.