Chapter Text
In this world there are two types of people: the ones who can afford life and the ones who will live to pay for it.
He learns the hard way we wasn't within the first category.
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The day Fudou Akio was born was bright, sunlight creeping through the cracked windows of the Fudou residence.
The blinding light makes it past the cheap curtains and reflects in blueish green eyes and he smiles and laughs until his lungs give up. Only his mother sees this, though, because his father is too busy working extra hours to attend his birth, which, of all places, happens inside the decrepit cage they call their home.
She treasures this sight as one of the few instances he sees joy in Akio's eyes.
Akiko takes her son to the playground when she's done arguing with her husband. She doesn't really talk to other parents there either because she carries the Fudou surname-. A name no one wants to be involved with.
What she doesn't know is that Akio hates the playground. He hates the stupidly colorful slide, the scrappy monkey bars, the way pebbles get inside his worn out shoes.
Or maybe she does, because she always looks detached. Still, as lost in the smoke of shitty cigarettes as she is, it's hard to ignore Fudou playing all alone by the swings, holding an old toy car she found in her parents attic.
She watches her son push too hard and fall hard on his knees and face, but before she can even react, he's already up and well, not a single trace of a tear. He looks in her direction with a proud stance, eyes fierce as always.
She gives him a smile, then avoids the disapproving gazes behind her.
Akio jumps on the swings one more time with bloody knees and she knows the other parents are judging her. She's aware of their words, of how her husband is six years older than her, of how her face is the only one lacking in smile lines, still young at age twenty five, of how their family lives off shady businesses, and deals with the fact that his son might never have friends because he too carries their name.
The cigarette lights out when she looks up at the sound of cries coming from where Akio is. A woman is dramatically holding her child as she screeches about how Akio had bitten her hand when she tried to play with his toy car.
On the other side stands Fudou, holding a little wheel that wasn't supposed to come off. For once, he holds back tears as he points at her with his band-aided finger, blaming her for breaking it.
Before things get uglier, she grabs Akio by the hand and apologizes to the woman, lowering her head more than she should, even when she's sure it wasn't her son who started the fight.
"She broke it."
Fudou swallows the knot forming in his throat and steadies his voice, holding his now unusable toy like a dead puppy.
"I know." Akiko kneels down in front of him to wipe out non existent tears, "I will get you a new one when we get this month's pay, okay?"
Akio shakes his head.
"I don't want a new one."
He really does.
It doesn't take too long until he realizes money doesn't grow out of trees, but instead off his parents' blood and sweat.
At only age five, he grows accustomed to terms such as red numbers, rent and debts.
So far, he has celebrated a total of two birthdays, one being his literal birth day, which he now knows is bullshit because seeing how they quietly blame him as the cause of all their misfortunes, it's hard to imagine them smiling at the idea of his existence. After that, the money used to celebrate a party no one would attend became more expensive than the gifts received, so Akio is ok with it.
They try not to tell him but he had always been smart. So he notices the way his mom sneaks a lollipop into her pocket and doesn't pay for it. He notices how they silence their steps and voices to check who's at the door before opening. He notices how she pitches up her voice when talking to the ugly men that show up in his house from time to time asking for his dad, telling excuses she had prepared beforehand while the man of the house hides in his room. Sometimes they try to ask him too, putting on a fake innocent voice and ignoring his mother telling them to not involve him in this.
"Hey there, will you be so kind to tell us where daddy is? Your mom doesn't want to tell us."
The mix of a overly-high pitched voice and his mom's eyes pleading him not to tell twists Fudou's face in disgust.
"Fuck off."
The tallest of the two men loses his temper for a second and rises his hand to slap him, but the kid won't flinch and shows even less intentions of apologizing.
Alarmed, Akiko rushes to apologize for his behaviour once again, lowering her head to her knees as Akio digs holes between the men's eyes. They drop the act and go to a more discrete area to talk about how his dad will one day pay for the promises he can't keep.
When they leave, his father finishes the slap that didn't reach him earlier, calling him stupid and prideful. Akiko agrees with her husband until he leaves to lock himself in his room again and she reaches for her son.
"Well done, Akio."
He attends a good school thanks to his outstanding grades. He doesn't like any of the kids there though.
They're loud and annoying and they respect no one's possessions like they didn't cost any money. He won't lend other people his crayons or erasers because he knows they will manage to break them one way or another, so it was only a matter of time until they noticed he always wore the same ragged shoes and didn't have as many toys as them to start poking fun at him.
"Stingy kid" they call him, "the poor kid". But he doesn't care until they call him dirty for no reason or pull him by the hair.
He won't cry.
Instead, he waits for recess for one of those idiots to try and bother him to give it back to him, making his stupid little nose bleed. He talks as mean as he can, spitting insults he learned from his dad. The teacher arrives at the scene fast, of course, and even if he's only seven, he knows there's no point in trying to excuse himself because there will always be a favorite between the loud kid with good parents and the lonely boy with a sketchy family.
None of the school staff like his parents either. His dad always comes off as aggressive because he is, for as long as whoever he's talking to is in a lower position of power. Honestly he wishes they got to see how pathetic he really was, bending down to every order his boss gives him, working himself to exhaustion out of fear of an organization he joined by his own doing.
His mom is only there when his dad can't (which is very often, to be honest). So she's the one his teacher calls to "have a talk" about his behavior at school.
They try to force him to apologize to the other kid, but Akio's neck holds the weight of being born in a disfunctional family and a pride of iron won't bend as easy. So he refuses.
He gets expelled for two days.
His dad is pissed to say the least. He goes on a long rant about how they work their asses off to get him a good school, only for him to be so ungrateful.
"If I'm in that school it's because of my grades."
The man slams the half broken down dinner table and Fudou is sure if he pushes a bit more, he will make it crumble.
"Do you think good schools are free?! Why do you think your mother is working double time? Because she likes it?! If it was me, I would have already sent you to live with your grandparents if it wasn't because they don't want to hear shit about us!"
Akio feels himself shrink at the statement. Embarrassment fills him. If he's right then his schooling is taking up most of their expenses and he just got expelled for being stubborn. He hates this feeling and he refuses to hear anymore, but won't apologize to his dad of all people.
He tries standing up to go to his room, but his father forcefully grabs him by the arm.
"No, you don't get to leave now! Just so you know, you little shit, you're where all our money goes to die!! You've been nothing but a black hole since they day you were born!" Akio forces his mouth shut to not let out a pained yelp and hits his father's arm with weak punches.
"Let me go!"
He won't cry.
The grip lightens for a second he uses to break free and run towards the bathroom and lock the door.
He doesn't hear steps in his direction. Instead, there's an angered grunt and the sound of a door being slammed shut. Now he just has to wait until his mom is back. He ends up falling asleep next to the door.
When he goes back to school, the bruise on his arm covered by the uniform's sleeve (he thinks of it as a battle scar even if his father could never come close to an army), he sees his desk filled with childish insults scribbled all over it. Not with his crayons, that's for sure.
"It's spelled 'dumb' with a 'b'."
One month before his nineth birthday, every insult, back handed comment and passive aggressive remark come back at train speed to hit them in the face.
They finally give his father an ultimatum, and must pay what sounds like an exorbitant amount of money in the spam of six months or else. It's not established what that grim else entails, but it sure is enough to bring up the topic of divorce real soon.
Akio knows what divorce is because it's not the first time he hears his mother mention it. Once a month, she dusts off the old landline phone and calls his forever absent grandparents to beg for support (the cables peeking out are peeled out all the way to the base, and the only miracle in their lives to ever happen was that that thing still works) , then smash the phone and pull out the abused back of cigarettes she carries everywhere.
He really hopes it happens soon.
It's no secret he hates his father. He knows his mom does too, but she buries in her pockets years of a blossoming, developing and decaying love she won't let go of.
He can't stand the way he yells at him when he's not hiding behind his wife, or how he can't seem to take responsability for anything that happens in the house. How he claims to be the one in charge yet he can't put his own life together, or worse, drags them down with him.
Akio doesn't fully understand what being a man really means. He hears a man is supposed to take care of his family, be successful, strong and be the one giving orders. It doesn't take him long to realize he may be more of a man than his father will ever be.
So before the ship sinks, they flee.
The kids in the first year of middle school only get worse as times goes by, and he can't fight back now that his dad is gone for good (they don't hear again from him ever since, and he doesn't pay for Akio's maintenance because he's sure he can't even pay for his own life). One source of income is barely enough for them to eat, so failure isn't on the table.
Hair pulling becomes so insufferable he takes matters into his own hands and lets the hairdresser do as he pleases with it in exchange of a free haircut. When he comes back home his mother doesn't comment on it and serves two plates of overcooked rice with discounted cabbage.
Second year comes by and thanks to his abnormally good grades he's transferred to Teikoku, a school so big he considers moving there. Just the bathroom in the first floor is bigger than his house and he wouldn't mind having a working sink.
Akiko, on the other hand, doesn't really like this change. Akio had already had problems with bullying related to their status and Teikoku is one of the top schools in Tokyo, if not the top one. But Akio insisted on attending it, so she couldn't say no to the decision in his eyes.
(Lately she likes to play dumb on herself, acting as if she really wasn't using her own son as a long term piggy bank, swimming in ideas of what kind of life they would live if Akio strikes luck with a brain she has no idea where it came from.)
The uniform Akio wears every day now is the most expensive thing in the house, so he makes sure blood doesn't get to stain the fabric.
By age fourteen, Akio does the house chores regularly.
He tries to make up for the impact his puberty has on their bank account; extra food on the shopping cart, stronger deodorants, and a new set of underwear and shoes. They won't have to worry about his pants until the day they rip apart because they're already 2 sizes longer and it's not like he's that tall anyways (even though Akiko thinks the opposite, having seen her son grow from barely reaching her chest to being her same height in just a few years).
Still, his body is going through a lot of changes and it shows. He eats twice the amount he used to last year and this stresses him out because all he can hear is extra, extra, extra. Lots of things that of course, don't come for free. He could swear despite the amounts of food he digests, he loses weight out of pure guilt.
His mother is twice as worried about their income as well. She tries applying to jobs left and right to no avail and the distress starts to take a toll on her. The smoke fills the living room and the smell lingers for hours even with the windows open. Akio studies on the kitchen table (his room barely fits a bed and a nightstand, let alone a desk), which is practically next to the living room just because of how little space there is, and the ashy scent of his mother's frustration digs deep in his lungs.
Grades are good, as always, but Teikoku may not be doing him the good it should. There's something about those shining restrooms, those spacious hallways and pristine classrooms that make it the more annoying when the dishes don't fit in the cabinet, or when no matter how much he sweeps the floor, dust never leaves, always lingering in the air. His house had never felt like a welcoming place, but as years go by it tightens more and more, suffocating him. Shit piled on top of more shit, sprawled all over the old wooden flooring that make him trip every time he tries to walk from one room to another, cursing in every step.
(Sometimes, when maths become too boring, he lets his mind wander off, imagining a place where his barely-functioning MP3 doesn't look ridiculous compared to his classmates' iPhones, daydreaming of spacious hallways and pristine rooms.)
Some store owner in his neighborhood accepts taking him as an employee even though he's just fifteen, so now Akio has to balance school, an illegal and poorly paid job and his mother's recent mood swings due to her new boyfriend. Not like he can complain, anyways. He insisted the store owner for a few weeks after seeing the last store clerk seemingly disappeared (probably because they pay horribly but something is better than nothing and energy at home gets more expensive with the years), until he finally gave in. There's no contract of course, so he starts right away, some burden being lifted off his shoulders at the idea of finally bringing some money home.
Akiko doesn't refuse the gesture but can't help but feel like she failed him once again.