The problem with being four, Kaito was quickly learning, was that four-year-olds were not supposed to go anywhere alone.
He could not leave the house without his mom knowing. Could not cross the street by himself. Could not wander the neighborhood looking for dead things to climb inside of, which was a sentence he never expected to be a problem in any life he lived. He sat at the kitchen table after breakfast, watching his mom wash dishes, and ran through his options.
They were limited.
"So what do I actually do?" he asked Gloom quietly, low enough that it would just look like a kid mumbling to himself.
"Kill one."
Kaito went very still.
"What?"
"You can and you will. If you want to develop your quirk properly, you will need a body with a quirk eventually. Unless you think digging up a stranger is easier than this."
He processed that for a moment. His mom set a clean bowl on the drying rack. The faucet ran. Outside a car passed.
"I cannot kill something. I cannot do that."
"You can. I am not saying you have to enjoy it. I am saying it is an option and you are going to need to make peace with that sooner or later."
He did not say anything. He wanted to push back on it but he could not find the argument. He had already accepted that his quirk involved possessing dead bodies. He had already accepted that the bodies would look alive while he was inside them. He had already sat with the part about walking up to someone's family in their dead kid's face and them maybe not knowing. Killing a stray cat was, by the math he had already done, not actually the worst thing on the list.
He still did not like it.
"What happens to it? The animal."
"It is reborn. Into another litter, another life. Animals at that level of sentience do not carry enough consciousness for death to be what it is for something like you. The soul resets cleanly. There is no suffering that lingers."
"You are sure about that."
"I am sure."
His mom turned off the faucet and dried her hands. She asked if he wanted to watch something. He told her yes without really hearing himself say it. She turned on the TV in the living room and he sat in front of it and stared through it.
* * *
"Do I get any kind of secondary ability from this? Like some kind of death control? Reaping? Anything like that?"
"No."
"Nothing?"
"Nothing. You possess the dead. You do not command death itself. Those are very different things."
He had not really expected otherwise but it was still a little disappointing. Some kind of death sense would have been useful. A built-in radar for recently deceased things in the area. Instead he had a quirk that required him to do his own legwork.
"So I just go around taking over corpses and there are no consequences? No bad karma? No cosmic bill?"
"That depends on what you kill."
That was not the answer he was expecting.
"What does that mean?"
"There is no karmic cost for killing animals. There is no karmic cost for killing what I will call purple."
Kaito turned that word over.
"Purple."
"People who are so far gone that the universe has already written them off. Killers. People whose continued existence causes a net harm to everything around them. The soul math works out differently for them."
He was quiet for a second. On the TV a cartoon character ran off a cliff and kept going until it looked down. He watched it fall.
"Soul math."
"It is not a perfect system. Nothing is. But the universe does keep a kind of ledger. Taking a life that was being used to destroy other lives does not register the same way as taking an innocent one. The weight is different."
The word ledger sat in his head in a way he did not totally like. He had spent his whole first life afraid of dying. Now he was being told there was a system that tracked what kind of dying you were responsible for, and that some of it was fine, and some of it was not, and the line between the two was something he would have to learn to read.
"And if I kill someone innocent?"
"Then the weight is different. I will not sugarcoat it. That is a debt that follows the soul. It changes the shape of what you are."
He believed that. He did not know why exactly, but it landed with the weight of something true. Not a rule someone made up. Something older than that.
"How do I know the difference? How do I know who counts as purple?"
"You will feel it. Not perfectly, not immediately, but your soul is strong enough to read the weight of another soul if you are paying attention. It is not a guarantee. You will make mistakes. But it is there."
He filed that away too. It was not a clean answer. He would have preferred a clean answer. But he was starting to understand that Gloom was not in the business of clean answers, just honest ones.
"You are very casual about all of this."
"I have existed for a very long time. Casual is what happens after enough context."
"That is not reassuring."
"It was not meant to be reassuring. It was meant to be accurate."
* * *
The cartoon on TV ended. His mom came back in and sat next to him on the couch. She pulled him into her side the way she apparently always did, and he let her, because his body remembered it even if he didn't.
He had a lot to think about.
At some point in the near future he was going to have to go outside and kill something. He was going to climb inside whatever he killed and figure out what that actually felt like, whether the control Gloom described was as instant as promised, whether his four-year-old brain could handle running a body that was not his.
And then he was going to have to come back home and sit at the dinner table and eat rice and act like a normal kid.
He looked at his small hands resting in his lap.
This life was going to be strange.