News traveled quickly through the Zen'in compound.
The servants always learned things first. They heard conversations through half-closed doors, noticed when medical reports were left unattended on desks, and watched the expressions of family members closely enough to understand what had happened before anyone explained it. The estate's official security network may have been impressive, but it had nothing on the quiet exchange of information between maids, attendants, cooks, and drivers.
By the time I left my father's study, several of them already knew.
I could see it in the way their eyes flickered toward my face before dropping politely to the floor. None of them asked about the swelling along my cheek or the dried blood near my mouth. They had worked for the family long enough to understand which injuries were accidents and which ones were not supposed to be noticed.
By evening, the news had reached the branch households.
By breakfast the next morning, everyone knew.
The second son of Jinya Zen'in was quirkless.
The word followed me through the estate, sometimes spoken in whispers and sometimes carried only in the sudden silence that fell whenever I entered a room. Adults who had once greeted me with automatic politeness now avoided meeting my eyes. Others looked at me with carefully arranged sympathy, their expressions softening in a way that made me feel smaller than open disgust ever could.
I learned what shame looked like by studying other people's faces.
It looked like an aunt ending a conversation when I approached, as though my presence had reminded her of something unpleasant. It looked like an uncle placing a hand on my father's shoulder and speaking in a low, consoling voice while I stood only a few feet away. It looked like relatives who had barely known my mother mourning the tragedy of my birth as if I were not there to hear them.
"Poor Jinya," one woman whispered in the corridor outside the dining hall. "First his wife, and now this."
"At least it was the second son," another replied. "Jin'ichi is healthy. The main line will continue."
"You have to wonder where it came from. Her family never had the Zen'in blood."
They were not trying very hard to remain unheard. Perhaps they assumed a five-year-old would not understand. Perhaps they simply did not care.
I understood enough.
The family did not see my condition as an illness or an accident. It was a humiliation, and humiliation always demanded someone to blame. My mother was dead, which made her convenient. I was alive, which made me easier.
Before the examination, I had belonged to the head family. Afterward, I became a defect that happened to share its name.
The change was immediate, but no one explained the new rules to me. I discovered them by crossing invisible boundaries and watching people correct my mistakes.
The first person to teach me was my brother.
Jin'ichi was two years older than I was and, until then, had been the center of my small world. He possessed the confidence of a child who had never been given a reason to question his place. Adults praised the strength of his quirk, instructors praised his discipline, and relatives spoke of his future as though it had already been written.
Before the doctor's appointment, none of that had mattered to me. He was simply my brother.
He had taught me how to climb the ancient cherry tree in the eastern garden, showing me which branches could hold our weight and which ones would snap if we trusted them. He smuggled sweets from the kitchen and split them unevenly, always keeping the larger half while insisting he had been generous. When he trained with wooden swords, he sometimes handed me one and corrected my grip with exaggerated seriousness.
"Keep your feet apart," he would say, circling me like one of the instructors. "You'll fall over if someone pushes you."
Then he would push me.
When I fell, he laughed, pulled me back up, and called me little brother.
The morning after the examination, I saw him walking through the main corridor on his way to breakfast. His hair was still damp from washing, and the sleeves of his training clothes had been rolled above his elbows. For a moment, the previous day seemed far away. Jin'ichi was familiar, and familiarity felt safe.
I hurried toward him.
"Jin'ichi."
He kept walking.
At first, I assumed he had not heard me. The corridor was wide, and voices drifted from the nearby dining room. I followed him and called his name again, louder this time.
He did not turn.
There was something deliberate in the way he looked straight ahead. His shoulders had gone rigid, and his pace quickened slightly, though not enough to make it seem as if he were running from me.
I stopped in the middle of the corridor and watched him disappear around the corner.
Confusion came before hurt. Jin'ichi had never ignored me before. He had teased me, pushed me, and occasionally blamed me when we were caught doing something forbidden, but he had always acknowledged that I existed. I spent the rest of the morning convincing myself that he had been distracted.
The next time I saw him was outside the eastern training yard.
He stood near the entrance, tightening the cloth wraps around his wrists while several other children gathered inside. Wooden swords struck against one another beyond the open gate, accompanied by the sharp commands of an instructor. The sound drew me toward it out of habit.
I had followed Jin'ichi to training dozens of times. Sometimes I watched from the edge of the yard. Sometimes he let me imitate the exercises after the instructors had left. Nothing about approaching him had ever required courage before.
"Jin'ichi," I said.
This time, he looked at me.
His eyes moved briefly over the bruise beginning to darken along my cheek. He must have known where it came from. Every child in the family understood more about discipline than the adults realized.
He said nothing.
"Can I watch?" I asked.
The other children had noticed me by then. Their conversation quieted, and several of them turned toward the gate. One boy leaned closer to another and whispered something that made them both smile.
Jin'ichi glanced back at them.
That was the moment I understood that his answer would not be only for me.
"Quirkless aren't allowed in the hero training yards," he said.
The words sounded rehearsed, as though someone older had given them to him.
I looked past him at the open space beyond the gate. "I always watch."
"You can't anymore."
"Why?"
His mouth tightened. For a moment, I thought he might lower his voice or step outside so the others could not hear. Instead, he straightened his shoulders and looked at me with an imitation of our father's coldness.
"Because you don't belong here."
The children behind him remained quiet.
I gripped the edge of my sleeve. "You said you would teach me."
"That was before."
"Before what?"
He stared at me as though the answer should have been obvious.
"Before we knew what you were."
There are sentences that a person remembers because they are beautiful, and others because they mark the exact moment something inside them changes. I remembered those words for years, though I doubt Jin'ichi remembered saying them by the end of the day.
He had not struck me. He had not raised his voice. He had only repeated what the adults around him believed, and perhaps that was why it hurt more than anything else he could have done.
I was not his little brother anymore.
I was what the doctor had found in the x-ray.
Jin'ichi turned back toward the training yard. "Go somewhere else."
I waited for him to look at me again.
He never did.
The instructor called the children into formation, and Jin'ichi joined them without hesitation. A few of the others continued watching me until the lesson began, but their attention soon returned to the wooden swords in their hands.
I left before anyone ordered me to.
After that, my brother became skilled at looking through me. We passed each other in hallways and sat at the same formal dinners without exchanging a word. When relatives asked him about me, he answered as though discussing a distant cousin. The speed with which he adapted should have surprised me, but Jin'ichi had been raised for the same world I had. He understood that his position depended on separating himself from weakness.
At seven years old, he had already learned that cruelty could be a form of self-preservation.
I stopped following him to the training yards. I stopped waiting near the cherry tree and stopped saving half of whatever sweets the kitchen servants occasionally gave me. For a while, I still looked toward the door whenever I heard his footsteps outside my room. Eventually, I stopped doing that too.
The rest of the family followed his example.
Relatives who had once asked about my lessons no longer bothered. Servants were instructed to move my belongings from the rooms closest to the main household and into a smaller section of the residence used for children under supervision. Invitations to family meals became less frequent. When visitors arrived, I was kept out of sight unless my presence served some purpose.
None of these changes were announced. The clan preferred quiet cruelty because quiet cruelty could be mistaken for order.
There was a simplicity to it, once I understood.
Every person inside those walls had shown me what they valued. They valued strength, reputation, and proximity to power. Affection lasted only as long as it did not threaten any of those things. The moment loving me became inconvenient, most of them stopped.
At five years old, that truth felt like the end of the world.
Looking back, I can almost consider it a gift.
Had they offered me occasional praise or small pieces of affection, I might have spent years trying to earn more. I might have trained myself bloody for the chance to hear my father call me worthy or waited for Jin'ichi to remember that I had once been his brother. I might have mistaken their approval for love and built my entire life around obtaining it.
Instead, they rejected me completely enough that even a child eventually understood there was nothing left to chase.
I did not see that as freedom then. I saw only the doors closing one by one, each lock turning before I could reach it.
It took years for me to realize that a locked door works both ways.
If they had decided I did not belong to them, then perhaps one day I would no longer have to belong to them at all.
...
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