Kagome Dominguez

Misuse of Righteousness

Misdeeds of a Name

To hear her tell it, Izuku Dominguez and Nylessa Shimano belonged together the way an old, dying dog belongs in a kill shelter.

“Where are you going?” Nylessa asked the question without looking up from her piano. She hadn’t needed to see the keys since she was seven-years-old.

Izuku looked over his shoulder. He looked at the gold trim threading throughout the room. He looked at the sleek marble flooring he wasn’t allowed to be barefoot on. He looked at the butterfly mural on the ceiling: one for every member of the Shimano family, or every mech SSC had ever produced, or something equally important. “Out,” Izuku replied.

“Will you be back?” Nylessa hit every note exactly as the one before it demanded her to—some keys had to be caressed, others struck. She had played this song so many times that its name was no longer relevant.

“…” Izuku stood in the doorway for several seconds, maybe waiting for the song to end, maybe waiting for her to tell him about the pregnancy test in the trash can. “… I just need time.” The song followed him out the door.

The last time they’d looked at each other was three weeks ago. Sometimes, it’s better to forget the way a mistake can make hard gold seem like sunflower yellow.

Kagome Shimano stands in front of her mother’s piano, just feet away from the massive hole a certain mech left in the wall. Feet away from the cracks in the marble floor, beneath the energy damage to the SSC butterfly mural (“every Smith-Shimano man and woman in every mech”), and inches from the shattered frame of a single Mother’s Day card. She is barefoot, having embedded her heels somewhere in her bedroom wall last night.

The front door opens. Kagome closes her eyes. The Eagle-Class artificial implant that replaced her right eye two weeks ago aches. Footsteps frantically enter the room, then go still. Kagome lived this moment in every blast from the Bolt Nexus. She felt it in the crackle of the Storm Shield. She tasted it in the dust of the 15th Smith Shimano Art Emporium. From dust we built our empire and to dust it shall return—so decrees one of many, many emperors.

She approaches the piano, hand gliding down the keys in a perfect descending scale. “I’m leaving.” Kagome’s throat tries to swallow the words like alcoholic bile. “It’s not just you. It’s everything that’s been built around you, too. But it is you.” She didn’t expect leaving luxury to be something her body resisted. “I’m sorry. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re as bad of a mother as you could have been.” Kagome pulls the cover over the piano keys.

Fragile silence turns the air into glass, and Kagome thinks that this might be it—the final flawed brush stroke before her mother tears down the painting. Her mother has kept a gun in her purse since the day her father left, after all. It might only take one gunshot and a few calls to pretend it was all nothing but a few bad nights. There’s nothing.

“… Kagome…?” That voice doesn’t belong to Nylessa Shimano. Kagome turns and sees her father, Izuku Dominguez, for the first time in years. “… Let’s go somewhere else.”

As they leave, Izuku asks what wrecked the house. Kagome tells him it was a Misuse of Righteousness. He laughs. She didn’t realize she had his laugh.