The infant's cry echoed through the small apartment, piercing and insistent, but Nemuri Kayama couldn't bring herself to pick him up. She stood in the doorway of the bedroom she'd rented under a false name, staring at the bassinet with an expression caught somewhere between grief and relief. Her hero costume was folded neatly in her suitcase—she'd be back in Japan by tomorrow, back to her life, back to being Midnight.
Back to pretending this never happened.
"Ms. Kayama?" The older woman's voice came from behind her, gruff and impatient. "You said you were leaving him with me. Are we doing this or not?"
Nemuri turned to face the woman the mother of man who'd fathered her child had been a brief mistake during an overseas mission, someone she'd met in a Gotham hero meeting, someone whose Quirk had interacted with hers in ways that led to poor decisions and poorer consequences. He'd gone missing a fate far to common for heroes in this cursed city nowadays, before she'd even realized she was pregnant, and she'd tracked down his mother through private investigators, desperate for a solution that didn't involve her rising hero career being destroyed by scandal...
The woman standing before her was in her 50s, with iron-grey hair pulled back severely and eyes that held no warmth. She lived in one of Gotham's many crumbling neighborhoods, in an apartment that smelled of mildew and old cigarettes, in a building where the elevator didn't work and going outside could be dangerous even in daylight.
"The money," the woman said, extending her hand. "You promised money."
Nemuri reached into her purse and pulled out an envelope thick with cash—American dollars, more than she could really afford, but worth it to fix this problem. The woman snatched it, counted it with practiced efficiency, then nodded once.
"Fine. Leave him. I'll keep him alive. That's what you're paying for, right? Keeping him alive?"
Something in Nemuri's chest tightened painfully, but she pushed it down. She was twenty-three years old, her hero career was just beginning to take off, and she'd worked too hard to let one mistake derail everything. She'd told herself a thousand times over the past nine months: she couldn't raise a child alone, couldn't be a single mother and a hero, couldn't let her family find out, couldn't let the media discover her shame.
The baby who she'd named Suguro in the hospital, a name she'd chosen quickly without real thought, kept crying louder. His little face was red and scrunched, his tiny fists waving. He had her dark hair, but his face was all his father's: sharp features that would probably be handsome someday, if he survived childhood in this place.
"Does he have a Quirk?" the grandmother asked, already tucking the envelope away.
"He's an infant. It's too early to tell."
"Hmm. Well, if he does, I'll deal with it. If he doesn't, thats a shame in a city like this." The woman walked past Nemuri into the bedroom and looked down at the crying baby with no visible emotion. "Noisy little thing, isn't he?"
Nemuri wanted to say something wanted to demand that this woman treat her grandson with kindness, wanted to insist on regular updates, wanted to establish some kind of connection that would let her check on him. But she knew that wasn't how this worked. This was an abandonment, pure and simple. She was paying this woman to take a problem off her hands and never speak of it again, something a hero should never do...
"I should go," Nemuri heard herself say. "My flight leaves in four hours."
The older woman didn't even turn around. "Then go. We don't need you here."
Nemuri stood frozen for another moment, looking at her son, her infant son who she'd carried for nine months, who she'd given birth to alone in a Gotham hospital under a false name, who she was now leaving with a woman who clearly had no love to give. She memorized his face: the way his little nose wrinkled when he cried, the dark fuzz of hair on his head, the impossibly tiny fingers.
Then she turned and walked out.
She made it to the street before the tears came, and she let herself cry during the taxi ride to the airport, but by the time she boarded her flight back to Japan, she'd composed herself. By the time she landed in Tokyo, she'd forcibly locked the memory away in a dark corner of her mind. By the time she returned to her hero work, she'd convinced herself she'd made the right choice.
Midnight was a hero. Heroes made hard choices. Heroes sacrificed for the greater good.
She told herself this so many times that she almost believed it.
Behind her, in that decrepit Gotham apartment, the baby who would one day become the world nightmare cried alone in his bassinet while his grandmother counted money and calculated how little she could spend on his care while still keeping him technically alive.
The city of Gotham stretched out beyond the grimy windows, a monument to human cruelty and institutional failure, where hero society had long since given up. It was the perfect place for someone to fall through the cracks, to grow up twisted and broken, to learn that the world was a nightmare wearing the mask of civilization.
It was the perfect place to create a monster.
**Four Years Later**
Suguro Crane learned very early that crying accomplished nothing.
He was four years old, small for his age, sitting in the corner of the apartment's main room with his knees pulled up to his chest. His grandmother was in the kitchen, slamming cabinets and muttering to herself about bills, about money, about the burden of having a child she'd never wanted. He'd learned to make himself small during these episodes, to disappear into the corner like a ghost, to barely breathe.
"Useless," she was saying, her voice carrying that edge that meant she was working herself up to something worse than words. "Absolutely useless. Four years old and what good are you? Can't do anything, can't help with anything, just another mouth to feed."
Suguro didn't respond. He'd learned that too, don't talk back, don't defend yourself, don't give her anything to grab onto. His dark eyes tracked her movements as she emerged from the kitchen holding a bottle that he knew from experience meant bad things. She drank from it directly, her face twisting.
"And still no Quirk," she continued, moving closer. "Four years old. Most kids show something by now."
She stopped in front of him, swaying slightly. Suguro pressed himself further into the corner, trying to become invisible.
"Look at me when I'm talking to you."
He looked up slowly, meeting her eyes. They were bloodshot, angry, looking for a target for disappointment and rage that had nothing to do with him but that he'd bear anyway because he was there and small and powerless.
"I should have told that woman no," his grandmother said. "Should have told her to keep her bastard or throw him in gotham harbour. Would have saved me four years of misery."
Suguro's mind, even at four years old, was already learning to detach from moments like these. He'd discovered he could separate himself from the experience. His grandmother raised her hand, and Suguro flinched, another lesson learned early. But before she could strike him, something happened.
The air around Suguro seemed to shimmer slightly. His grandmother stumbled backward, her eyes going wide with sudden terror. She screamed, a raw sound of primal fear, and scrambled away from him, pressing herself against the wall.
"No! No, get away! Stay back!" She was looking at something behind him, around him, at something Suguro couldn't see.
He turned to look but saw nothing, just another grimy corner of the apartment, the water-stained walls, and old furniture. But his grandmother was still screaming, still seeing something that wasn't there, her face twisted with absolute horror.
Then, as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. His grandmother blinked, looking confused, then looked down at herself. She'd wet herself in her terror, and the shame and rage that crossed her face made Suguro's heart freeze.
"What did you do?" she whispered, her voice dangerous. "What did you do to me?"
"I didn't..." Suguro started, but she was already moving toward him.
"Freak! You're a freak!" She grabbed him by his thin arm, her grip bruising, and dragged him to his small room, an empty room with little but a mattress on the floor. She shoved him inside and slammed the door, and he heard something heavy being pushed against it from the outside.
"Stay in there! Stay away from me!"
Suguro sat in the darkness, his arm throbbing where she'd grabbed him, his heart pounding. But underneath the fear, underneath the pain, was something else: curiosity. Something had happened. He'd done something, even though he didn't know what or how.
He had a Quirk.
Over the following weeks, Suguro began to understand his power through careful, secret experimentation. At night, when his grandmother was passed out drunk, he'd focus on that same feeling he'd had during that first manifestation, the detachment, the observation, the cool distance from his own fear.
And then the gas would come off his skin.
It was odorless, with a black haze, but he could feel it leaving his skin like perspiration. He tested it on the cockroaches that infested the apartment, watching as they suddenly skittered in frantic, purposeless patterns, as if fleeing from threats only they could perceive. He tested it on rats in the alley behind their building, watching them attack each other or cower from empty air.
He was almost methodical about it, even at four years old. He kept mental notes of how long the effects lasted, how intense the reactions were, what seemed to cause the gas to produce. He realized quickly that his emotional state mattered, the more detached he felt, the more control he had. Strong emotions like fear or anger produced it involuntarily, which explained that first incident with his grandmother.
He didn't tell her about his discoveries. Instinct told him that if she knew more about what his power really was it would not end well.
His grandmother never mentioned that incident directly, but she looked at him differently now, with fear mixed into the contempt. She started locking him in his room more often, leaving him there for hours with minimal food, as if keeping him contained would somehow protect her from whatever he was.
Suguro didn't mind the isolation. In the darkness of his room, he could think. He could plan. He could experiment with his Quirk without being observed. He'd stolen a small notebook from a convenience store as his grandmother now no longer cared if he left the house even at his extremely young age and in a city like Gotham, and in it, he kept detailed observations about his power.
**Entry 1:** *Gas makes things scared. Don't know how. Don't know why. But they see things that aren't there.*
**Entry 2:** *Works on bugs, rats, probably people. Grandmother saw something that scared her bad. Need to be careful.*
**Entry 3:** *Can control when it happens if I stay calm. Harder when upset. Practice staying calm.*
The last entry was perhaps the most important. Suguro had realized that his survival depended on control, control over his Quirk, control over his emotions, control over his reactions to his grandmother's abuse. So he practiced. When she hit him, when she screamed at him, and when she locked him away, he subconsciously began to train himself in emotional detachment.
By the time he was seven years old, Suguro Crane had already learned the most important lesson of his life: feelings were weakness, and weakness was death.
He was building the foundations of the monster he would become, one carefully controlled breath at a time.