Motives
Leaning over the trash can in his dorm room, Mochi empties the contents of his stomach. A terrible knot is coiled up in his guts, a wriggling mass of maggots left behind by the tickling flies. It had taken hours, but in the wake of the day’s grim work, reality is setting in with the sun. Gathering spit in his mouth, Mochi spits into the can to get the taste out of his mouth before he breathes in. He could normally just banish it, but his Quirk isn’t responding. Too much haze in his head.
Lifting his head, Mochi looks out the dorm window. Seniors get the privilege of an upper floor, solo room. Right now that means nobody to ask questions about why Stink Rat is puking. It also means he’s very alone.
Then again, nothing new there.
Keeping his eyes closed, Mochi sucks in long, deep breaths, trying to bring himself back to a more focused mental state. With that focus, his Quirk starts to come back, cleansing the smell and taste of the sick from his room. In its place, Mochi takes comfort in the smell of his grandmother’s sponge cake.
Wrong answer. That only makes it worse, and he doubles over again to heave into the plastic. It’s been a long time since Mochi thought of his parents, in Tokyo. A while since they thought of him too, if the lack of calls is any indication.
This is one of the last things Floor felt before he died.
Mochi sucks in a ragged breath and gags again, the taste and smell starting to creep back in.
Night has fallen, and Mochi stares up at the ceiling from his bed, unable to sleep. The tick of his bedside clock is the only sound, besides his breathing. Then a buzzing sound starts to reverberate through his laundry bin, once and then it stops. A text message- he’d left his phone in his pants pocket. Closing his eyes, Mochi groans. Getting into and out of bed is such a pain, but there’s only one person who would text him at this hour. Or at all.
If Mochi could just wear his cyber-legs all the time… but no, it’s the hard way. Can’t have questions. Sliding and pulling himself into his wheelchair is a minute long process, just to roll it two fucking feet to the other side of the room and dig out his phone.
A text from ‘mom’.
It’s a bad time to be alone. Try to make some friends.
Maybe some of the freshmen in your school could use your guidance?
“The freshmen, huh?” tucking the phone into the breast pocket of his night clothes, Mochi thinks over Imamu’s coded message. There must be someone he has in mind. It’s not talking about Kawano, he’s already in the pocket. One of those blessed with the shape of their spirit? Of them, one is colorful enough that even Mochi has taken notice while keeping his head down in the cafeteria. “What was his name?”
Lixdite. Not hard to find out by asking a couple of nobodies, the Italian mutant stands out in their minds. Attempts to whisper and gossip behind the new kid’s back soon follow, and Mochi just rolls on when they start. Idiots like them aren’t able to understand that those with blessed forms are the future. What can you expect, when human trash like Majestic are allowed to teach children.
After slogging through the drudgery of his classes until lunch, Mochi rolls into the cafeteria with purpose. Getting himself a bowl of miso soup and a pork bun, he locates Lixdite’s table. Sitting alone off to the side. Usually where Mochi sits, too. When he approaches, he feels a sudden nervousness. The moment the younger, but larger boy’s eyes lock onto him it sends a fight or flight response through him. Stopping his wheels in place, Mochi nearly spills his bowl on the floor, staring back across the gap of ten or so feet left between them.
Lixdite looks back down at his plate and struggles to pick out a pepper from his stir fry with a pair of chopsticks. Disarmed by the display of ineptitude, Mochi sighs out the nerves and wheels his chair up alongside the winged serpent’s table. “Hey. Mind if I sit with you?”
“Yes. Ok,” the other boy says clumsily, holding up a hand with the thumb and index finger held together. Mochi sets his tray down and stirs at his soup. The chopstick struggle continues to the point where he can’t stand to watch anymore. It’s like nobody taught this kid how to eat.
“Here, let me show you,” Mochi grabs a pair of packaged chopsticks from a little cup on the table and breaks them apart, adjusting them in his fingers to get a good grip. “If you can’t figure it out, just ask the kitchen for a fork or something. They have some for the foreigners.” It’s said in a harsher voice than Mochi intended, and he bites his lip. Make friends, Imamu told him.
“Thank you,” Lixdite gets up and nods his head, going to the kitchen counter. He has a brief exchange with the lunchman and receives a fork. Coming back over, he more happily impales a stack of vegetables and pepper and twirls noodles expertly onto them. “Thank you,” he says again.
“Sorry,” Mochi says, sighing into his soup.
Tipping his head to the side, Lixdite looks askance at him, raising an open palm to his ear. “I said thank you. Word for sorry has different meanings?”
“No, I mean for my tone of voice,” in spite of himself, even Mochi’s explanation for the apology is short and snippy. He decides to just eat some soup and shut up. The two of them eat in silence. When Lixdite is nearly finished, Mochi worries the other boy is going to wander off before enough courage can be mustered. Finally speaking again, he asks, “Do you want to… hang out after school?” The words feel as foreign in his mouth as they must sound to the godling.
Cautious eyes trained on Mochi cause another small spike in the nerves that had been lingering on simmer during the entire meal. It’s not… a bad feeling, once he starts to get used to it. Like the sadistic flies in his gut when he…
But without the foul aftertaste.
“Who do you want this?” with suspicion in his voice, the godling interrogates Mochi’s motives.
Scratching at his neck, Mochi grasps for a good reason. He doesn’t have to grasp far. “I need to take my mind off things, and I don’t… hate looking at you.” It’s an awkward way of looking at it, but Lixdite isn’t at all to blame for what Mochi went through or for being ‘picked’ before him, even in his most deluded rage fantasies. Lixdite wasn’t even in the country at the time. That’s without getting into the more awkward part where Lixdite is like a sacred being in Mochi’s adopted religion.
All the complexities in the answer seem lost on his conversation partner, but something must have satisfied the question. “Where we will going to?” Lixdite asks.
There aren’t many places Mochi hung out with other students, even when he was still a naïve child. Going to a shopping arcade has no interest to him right now, materialistic goods have lost their allure. But flashing lights and 8-bit soundtracks still activate something in his animal brain. “The video arcade?”
The feathers on his tail perking up, Lixdite nods his head. “I like arcade. What is your…” he searches for the word he wants with his hands, as if he could pick it out of a phantom dictionary. “Best like?”
“Favorite?”
“Ss, yess. Favorite,” the other boy hisses.
Crossing his arms in front of himself, Mochi thinks back on it. “My favorites were usually Super Mario and Super Monkey Ball. Those are more single player though. Sometimes I’d play Street Fighter or just, whatever. Why don’t we take turns picking?”
“Okay. We can do that.”
Stuffing the last of his pork bun in his mouth, Mochi takes his tray to the stack. The looming shadow of Lixdite comes up behind him, as the other boy does the same. “See you after school.”
“Yes.” Another of those thumb-and-finger hand gestures. Mochi tries making the sign back, and they part ways.