Chapter Text
There was a stack of money on the table; he noticed that first. Beside it was a key attached to a giraffe keychain. Genos sat seiza opposite him, backlit by the setting sun. “Saitama-sensei,” he said. “Thank you very much for your hospitality these past few months. I have learned a lot from you but the time has come for me to leave.”
Saitama straightened, this was an important time for Genos. His voice was steady when he said, “I understand. You’ve grown a lot since you arrived. I hope at I was able to impart at least some of my knowledge to you.”
“I would not be the person I am now, were it not for you, Saitama-sensei. I will not forget you or your lessons.” When his ex left him, it had gone like this, both of them reciting their lines over dinner in a fancy restaurant where the bill had burned a hole in his pocket. She wore that blue chiffon blouse that contrasted nicely with her skin tone. She had this unreadable expression on her face, blurred by memory, and all he could remember was the blouse. Genos’ face was shadowed by the light of the setting sun, but he was sure it held the same expression she had.
“You’re going to pursue the Mad Cyborg?”
Again, he was going to let them go again. He couldn’t keep anyone. They all had ambition and goals, and they needed to progress. People couldn’t just stay where they were. Even if he desperately wanted them to, he couldn’t make them. They had a destination and they had to keep going, with or without him.
“Yes, Dr Kuseno has pinpointed his location and predicted that he will arrive in Village 23 tomorrow.”
“I get it. You’ll finally gain the revenge you were searching for.” It’s fine, he thought. I’m used to this. People leave all the time. Why should Genos be any different?
“Yes. I apologise for all the trouble I have caused you.”
He had anticipated this from the very beginning. Still, he should’ve, maybe he could’ve-
“You weren’t any trouble, Genos. You-” He stumbled on his words and berated himself. Keep it together. Remember, it’s not about you. “You’ve been great. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”
“Thank you for your kind offer, but I must take care of this on my own.”
“Are you leaving now?”
“Yes, I must leave now in order to intercept him before he reaches Village 23.”
“I’ll see you to the door,” he said but didn’t move.
“Do not worry, sensei. It’s not far.”
“Alright.” Saitama waited until Genos picked up his pack and walked past him to the genkan. He heard Genos put on his shoes and open the door. I should go after him, he thought, spontaneously. Or say something. ANYTHING-
“Itte-”
“Sensei, is something wrong?”
“It’s noth, nothing.” He cleared his throat. “Nothing. Good luck.” Say it, say it, SAY IT-
“Thank you, Saitama-sensei,” Genos said, and closed the door behind him.
Saitama’s shoulders slumped, as if the invisible strings that had been holding him up had been cut. Back to square one. He felt the crushing weight of living crash back onto him like an ocean. It was like he was collapsing inwardly, rent from the inside. The apartment blurred out of vision, dissolving into a dimming void where he and everything in it was slowly turning grey-
Saitama sat up and scrubbed the grit from his eyes. The room was painted a greyish-yellow by the morning sun streaming in through the curtains. The apartment was too quiet.
He’d spent yesterday in a daze.
After he had put down the phone, it felt like their conversation hadn’t happened. It was too strange, too jarring to have been real. He kept expecting Genos to come through the door, arms laden with groceries with a long-winded story about how he missed a sale and had to travel to another grocery store two neighbourhoods over in order to get the discounted meat. He spent the whole day pretending not to watch the door, and then fell asleep without having left his futon at all except to relieve himself. He didn’t eat anything, convinced Genos would be back in time for breakfast, which became lunch, then dinner.
Now, his stomach ached with hunger pangs and he dragged himself over to the fridge. There was some leftover pasta from two days ago which he heated up in the microwave. As he stood in the kitchen eating reheated pasta and watching the news, he thought about the giraffe keychain and the stack of money. There was no trace of them in the apartment, but his phone had logged a call from yesterday morning.
When he was done with the pasta, he left the bowl in the sink to soak.
Yesterday’s phone call had happened even if last night’s dream hadn’t. Genos was gone. He’d left to kill the Mad Cyborg.
He wasn’t coming back.
The world slid sideways and then turned upside-down completely. He involuntarily gripped the kitchen sink, and tried to right it through sheer force of will. The edge which he gripped cracked a little but the world remained suspended. He watched water drip from the tap into the filled bowl, jostling the liquid already inside it and causing it to slip over the sides.
He stared at the overflowing bowl enviously. His own body was an empty shell.
His house was an empty shell.
Filled with things that didn’t belong to him.
If Genos wasn’t coming back, he would have to pack up his things that he forgot to bring with him. He’d have them sent to Dr Kuseno so that when he got back from defeating the Mad Cyborg he wouldn’t have to make the extra journey to collect them. That was a good plan. Saitama still had the cardboard boxes from when he moved in, at the back of the cupboard. He would get those out and pack in all the clothes and notebooks Genos left behind.
That decided, he went to the cupboard and started pulling out piles of clothes. Genos had taken most of them with him, but he hadn’t taken his favourite collared shirt or his grey jeans or the red socks he sometimes wore as a joke when he did the dishes with the red washing up gloves-
Saitama put the clothes down. He wanted to climb into the cupboard or back into the futon. Why didn’t Genos take all this stuff with him? He grumbled half-heartedly. Why did he have to leave all the heavy-lifting to Saitama?
He tidied all the clothes, placing them into a pile. The grey vest they had bought for the HA Year End party was the last to go in. It had cost quite a bit but then again, Saitama hadn’t really gotten Genos a proper Christmas gift other than the cake he baked him. A poor balance for the oven range Genos had bought him. The vest made sure that they had given gifts of equal value to the other.
He packed the clothes into the box, sealed it and stood, brushing the dust off his clothes. A shadow brushed over the curtains, blotting out the sunlight. He drew back the curtain and realized the laundry had been hanging out to dry since yesterday.
Well they were dry now. He should probably take them down.
He pulled the jeans and trousers off first and slung them over his arm. He thought of Genos, a pink ribbon X across his back, bent over the tub, soap suds dripping down his forearms while Saitama slept in the other room. (The only time he could do chores in the past few months, covertly, while Saitama slept. Or Saitama would do them first.) Then later, stepping over his futon, careful not to drip water on the floor and sliding the balcony door open as quietly as possible.
When he had taken down all the clothes, he placed them in a pile in a corner of the room to be folded later. He took down the rotary. The door still couldn’t be closed completely when it was up. He supposed he wouldn’t ever need the rotary again. Maybe he should sell it. It took up quite a lot of space and was inconvenient to keep.
The CD player and the CDs were easy. The notebooks were easier, although there were a lot of them.
He set them aside. Then he went out to the genkan and opened the getabako. There were pairs upon pairs of shoes. Genos had only taken two with him. The sneakers and calf-high boots.
He shoved the rest into a box. They were a tight fit but he managed to get it closed.
When he was done, he stacked the boxes by the genkan and took a final look around the apartment to see if he’d missed anything.
The dishes, he thought. I bought some from the 100 Yen store. I won’t be needing all of them and they were for him anyway. He should have them. He opened the kitchen cupboard and started picking out dishes and bowls and plates. He set them out on the counter and thought aloud, “Wait, but, some of these are mine.”
But they were also his.
They had both used them.
He would have to split them up equally. He separated them out into sets, and then split the sets. The red ones, the blue ones, the sakura patterned ones, the white ones.
Once that was done he moved on to the mugs. Genos liked to use the green one because it held more liquid. Saitama moved to set it aside and stopped. He used that mug too, sometimes. When Saitama was feeling surly, Genos would make a particularly large cup of tea for him and use the green mug, always turning the handle so that Saitama could pick it up with his left hand while he read manga. He liked that mug. But so did Genos. He set it down in the middle of the two piles he had created. One for him, one for Genos.
He pulled down the other mugs. The Hero Association mugs, he didn’t really want them, they were ugly and purple and had their weird yellow crest on them. But mugs were mugs.
He’d bought mugs for Genos too. Plain white ceramic ones with thicker and larger handles so he could grip them easier. Stoneware mugs with grooves he could slide his fingers around. Bucket mugs with cheap inner glazing that threatened to chip but never did. He looked at the collection of mugs that crowded the countertop and tried to separate them into one of the two piles but they sat, stubbornly in the middle.
He decided to pack the dishes in first, but as he checked them over again, he thought, no, but he used this pretty often, and this, and this, and I used that. Soon all the dishware sat in the middle. He had ruined the two piles and now all the dishes he, they, owned were just there as one big mess of memories of meals they had shared.
He felt like taking a break, maybe he should lie down on the futon. He hadn’t kept it yet. He wouldn’t need to anymore, probably, except for when he needed to clean the floor or air the futon, now that he didn’t need to set out a second one every night. He could have both the futon and the table out at all times.
What should he do with the second futon?
He rarely, if ever, had guests over. He probably wouldn’t ever have guests anymore. Maybe he could sell it. The extra cash would go towards paying the rent.
He lay down on the futon and stared up at the ceiling. Now that he had packed most of the things that didn’t belong to him away the apartment was less filled. The walls looked like paper, without any substance, ready to crumple at a moment’s notice. The television was still murmuring in the background.
A cool spring breeze blew into the room, causing the curtains to billow out. He caught a glimpse of pink on the balcony, one that might have been tied around a metal body, and shot up in surprise. “G-”
But it was only a dishtowel he had hung up to dry, flapping in the wind.
He lay back down and turned to face the wall.
It was fine. The apartment was just a pit stop. Just a base. And the protagonist had already progressed onto the next plot point in the story.
And Saitama.
Saitama would carry on.
He left the boxes in the genkan. He still hadn’t packed away the dishes and he didn’t want to send them back one at a time. Instead, he put it off. They were ready to go anyway. Once he got round to packing the dishes…
In the meantime, he tried to fall back into his normal routine but there were now twice as many chores to do yet half as much that needed to be done. He interspersed it with fighting monsters, but those took barely five minutes. Ten, if he bothered to listen to their speech.
He let them talk more. He asked them questions. It was something to do. Someone to talk to. Before, he’d never felt the need. But he was so used to having a running dialogue that he’d even bothered to listen to the more boring speeches that started off with their tragic past and ended with their quest for revenge.
Some of them were happy to ramble on about their life, but some got bored and turned to leave, like that Crab guy had all those years ago. Like those classmates that forgot his name. Like his parents who called him and wrote him letters.
He killed those monsters; their blood coated his gloves, feeling, for the first time, like an apology was in order.
He’d started doing his laundry at the laundromat. He hated doing coin laundry but when he went to wash his clothes for the first time in a few days, he thought he heard the sound of water splashing coming from the toilet and looked in, expecting to see a blonde head bobbing up and down, a pink ribbon X across a broad back, soap suds dripping down forearms. But there was no one in there.
So he forked out 100 yen and 38 minutes to do his laundry at the laundromat. He still washed his gloves in the sink, and sometimes his underwear if he really needed a new pair.
As for his meals, when he finished all the leftovers, he consumed the pre-cooked food he had stockpiled over the past few months. He had been spoiled rotten on home-cooked meals, so eating food soaked in preservatives swept him up in a wave of nausea he fought to keep down. Not just because of the taste, but because of how he had to fix his eyes on the television to stop from glancing to an empty place.
He let the dishes build up. He had a lot of them anyway.
Eventually, he had to do them before they grew unsightly and disgusting. He ran them under the tap and squirted a dab of soap onto the sponge, cleaning them with the sponge side and scraping the stains off the plates with the scouring pad.
Before he knew it, he was done. He stared at the stack of clean, wet plates in confusion. There should be more in proportion to how long he hadn’t done them for. He absent-mindedly called out, “Are there any more dirty dishes out-”
And stopped himself. Right, he thought, rubbing his face tiredly, of course. He dried the dishes and put them away. He would sort them out later, when he felt like packing again.
Meanwhile, he tied up the trash bags to put taken away. It was non-burnable trash day and the bag felt lighter than it should. He checked that he had sorted it properly. There weren’t any non-burnables in the burnable trash, nor the recycling. He checked for metal-
Oh, right.
He set the bag outside and knew it would be gone the next time he went outside.
When he ran out of packets of instant ramen, cup ramen and canned food to dump on top of rice, he dropped by the grocery store on the way back from fighting a monster that looked like a screaming lamp post. He should really start paying attention to what sales were on again. Luckily, eggs were on sale.
He would make omurice, he decided. He’d fry up the perfect omelet and Genos would be so impressed-
He stopped walking. It was 4pm. It wasn’t too late to buy some cup ramen from the convenience store. He forced himself to keep walking, firmly, one step at a time, down the abandoned streets that led back to his darkened apartment.
When he opened the door, he called out “I’m back” out of habit. But, as he was slowly learning, or relearning, there would be no reply. He changed out of his suit and went to make dinner.
He washed the rice and set it to cook. He cracked the eggs into a bowl and whisked them using a pair of chopsticks. He reached into the cupboard for soy sauce and his hands met an empty space where it should have been. What the heck? He could have sworn he had half a bottle of soy sauce left.
He looked into the cupboard; any sauce or seasoning that contained any kind of sodium content had been removed.
What?!
He stared in bewilderment at the array of condiments and seasonings left. He began to rifle through the cupboard, looking for the soy sauce. Maybe he had misplaced it? Or shoved it to the back on accident? Or maybe it had fallen over? His hand brushed against a jar with a screw top lid. That wasn’t a sauce.
He pulled it out. The jar was filled with small green fruit that had turned brown. The juice the fruits had exuded was saturated with sugar and alcohol. He shook it and watched them dance and swirl around before settling again at the bottom. He put the umeshu down and wondered if he should package and send that too.
He closed the cupboard. The oil in the frying pan was getting very hot. He took it off the heat. Then, after a beat, switched off the fire and took some furikake out of the cupboard.
Tamagohan, it was.
He scooped out some rice. He didn’t feel very hungry anymore and yet, he had made way too much rice.
He poured the eggs over the rice and swirled them around. Then he topped it with furikake.
He ate and tasted nothing.
He would have to start buying bentos from the convenience store again.
After a few days, it was like before. Before the intrusion into his life and his apartment. Before the brief interruption of colour into his grey life.
After a few days, he woke up and his heart wasn’t pounding loudly in his ears, his chest didn’t ache and his eyes didn’t burn.
After a few days, he felt ready to pack the boxes and send them off.
Of course, just as he packed away the last box, his phone rang. “Hello, Saitama residence.”
His mother was on the other line. He knew how to play this part too. He recited his lines, dutifully and when they had run through the whole script. She paused.
“You sound terrible, are you alright?”
“I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
“I,” he hadn’t spoken to another person properly in days. He was tired, he was hollow, he was cold and his mother was asking him questions he didn’t know how to answer. “My student just left,” he said unbidden.
“Oh, are you a tutor? You didn’t mention,” his mother sounded pleased.
“I’m a teacher,” he said.
“Did your student give you that cold? You should scold him for not covering his mouth when he coughs. Children can be unruly if you don’t scold them properly.”
“He’s an adult,” Saitama said. “He didn’t give me a cold.”
“You should take better care of yourself then, I thought you said you were doing fine? Do you need more money?”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose, “No, no I don’t.”
“Well, who is this mysterious student of yours who sticks around you so much you catch his cold?”
“His name’s Genos, mother,” Saitama snapped. “He can take care of himself and so can I.”
“If you’re getting sick, you’re not doing a very good job for either of you. What do you teach him?”
He didn’t know how to respond to that so he kept silent until his mother sighed, “Fine. Take care of yourself. Eat properly.”
“Yes, you too,” he said. “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
He put down the phone and sat down on the rolling armchair. There were still ume blossoms sitting in a white ceramic vase he never bought. He noticed they weren’t just pink. There were also white and red blossoms among the pink ones. They nodded approvingly when he accidentally jostled the table, shedding some petals onto the table.
“Where did he even get these,” Saitama wondered aloud. “There are only white ones in this area.”
Art by banana-babies. Do not repost anywhere
He supposed he should change the water in the vase. He went to do just that and as he stood at the sink, one hand grasping the branches of ume blossoms, the other holding the vase under the tap. He turned to leave and his foot scuffed against a dent in the ground.
What the-
He looked down, running his toe over the groove. Then he looked up automatically, and saw a matching dent in the ceiling. He could almost hear the laughter echoing through the dimly lit apartment.
It could have been anyone laughing on the other side of the wall. It could have been anyone standing in this kitchen, washing dishes. Anyone could have been humming. Anyone could have been doing the laundry. Anyone could have been writing notes in the night. Anyone could have called home.
But it was Genos.
It had always been Genos.
He was here. He couldn’t have been anywhere else. His things were still here. He had been here. He had lived here for almost a year. He had rooted himself into Saitama’s apartment, into Saitama’s life, into Saitama’s experiences.
He had occupied Saitama’s line of sight for the past year and even if Saitama wanted to pretend that burst of colour hadn’t exploded into his vision, it had happened. It had left a dent, a mark, a stain. He couldn’t pack it into a box. Not Genos.
It was the start of Spring. He could hear the buzzing of the mail drone coming from outside.
He put on his suit and went out.