7 chapitres En cours d'écriture Contenu pour adultesNot everyone is created equal. That's a truth Tsumi learned far too early. In a world that insists everyone must fit into one of three roles-hero, villain, or powerless bystander-Tsumi finds himself belonging to none of them. He doesn't want to hurt people, and he refuses to disappear quietly, but the system was never built for someone like him. From the moment he's born, survival is a fight, not a choice. Running away becomes the only freedom he knows, and for two years he scrapes by on his own, learning how to endure rather than live.
When a man appears and offers safety, purpose, and everything Tsumi has ever been denied, it feels like a miracle. He believes the promise because he needs to. What he doesn't see-what he isn't allowed to see-are the conditions attached, the control hidden behind kindness, and the cost of obedience. By the time Tsumi realizes what's been taken from him, the damage is already done, carved into his body and his sense of self. Disobedience is the breaking point, and it's what finally tears him out of that life-straight into the hands of the authorities.
Tsumi's "rescue" looks nothing like salvation. He ends up under the care of a chronically exhausted underground hero and his impossibly loud husband, shoved into a hero school under the guise of rehabilitation. Tsumi doesn't believe in it-not the program, not the smiles, not the idea that he can be fixed. But surrounded by stubborn kindness, found family, classmates who don't know what to make of him, and a strange spirit boy he initially assumes is a hallucination, Tsumi is forced to confront his past instead of running from it. Slowly, painfully, he begins to realize that survival doesn't have to be his only purpose. Maybe he can choose something else. Maybe he can finally decide who he is.
Trigger Warnings:
• blood/gore
• swearing
• weapons
• referenced child abuse/neglect
• implied statutory relationships
• grooming
• cannibalism
☆ inspired by research to
