The One That Got Away Series: Kokichi Muta (Mechamaru) | Megumi Fushiguro | Nutrition Kamo
Summary: When Mechamaru breaks down in a late-autumn storm, Kokichi expects stares, fear, or nothing at all. What he gets is a woman under a dark magenta umbrella, a dry lobby two blocks away, and help that asks for nothing back. WC: 1.2k.
Warnings: Canon-typical Disability/Chronic Illness Themes · Mechanical Body/Puppet Body · Panic/Helplessness · Injury/Malfunction · Loneliness · Emotional Isolation · Missed Connection · Implied Unrequited Love · Time Skip · Referenced Murder · Robbery Gone Wrong · Major Character Death/Original Character Death · Bittersweet Ending · Heavy Angst.
Header images are from Pinterest, red dividers/banners are made by me, & rose dividers are by @uzmacchiato.
Under the inadequate awning of a shuttered electronics store, Kokichi Muta wrestled with inevitability.
The rain wasn’t a gentle London drizzle; it was Tokyo in late autumn, a relentless downpour that turned pavements into mirrors and drains into rivers. Umbrellas clashed like weapons as commuters hunched against the storm.
His primary puppet (Mechamaru)—a lifeline, his voice, his shield—slumped against the wall, its left arm hanging loose at an unnatural angle. Rain seeped into the joints where synthetic skin met metal. Inside the control rig strapped to his frail body, error messages cascaded: Servo Motor L-3 Failure. Hydraulic Leak Detected. Signal Degradation 78%.
“Damn it,” he muttered, the sound thin and almost swallowed by the roar. He tried the neural command again.
The puppet’s head twitched, the right arm spasmed. The left remained a dead weight.
Panic, cold and sharp, pricked at him. Stranded. Exposed.
The helplessness pressed in on him like a physical weight. He scanned the rushing figures, anonymous behind their hoods.
Who would even notice?
A voice came through the storm, close and steady. “Need a hand? Or… an arm, maybe?”
Kokichi jerked the puppet’s head up.
A woman stood a few feet away, the hood of a dark magenta raincoat pulled forward but not enough to hide her face. She held a wide umbrella tilted against the wind. Her eyes—sharp, assessing—weren’t fixed on the puppet’s face but on the broken joint. No recoil. No pity. Just calculation.
“It’s fine,” the puppet rasped, the synthesized voice tight. “Just a minor malfunction. I have it under control.” He tried to straighten the puppet, but it lurched, scraping concrete.
She didn’t flinch, stepped closer, angling her umbrella to cover them both. “Doesn’t look ‘under control.’ Hydraulic blowout on the lateral actuator, if I had to guess. Nasty in this weather.” She nodded at the leaking joint where hydraulic oil bled into rainwater.
Kokichi froze inside his rig. How did she—?
The puppet’s lens-eyes fixed on her. “You know robotics?”
“Enough to recognize a catastrophic joint failure.” A wry twist touched her lips—not placation, more like commiseration. “Worked assembly line maintenance before freelancing. Seen plenty of actuators give up the ghost. You got tools?”
He hesitated. Trust was a luxury.
But the rain was already seeping through the puppet’s outer layer, his own body screaming from the strain.
“Inside the pack,” the puppet admitted, gesturing stiffly at the satchel. “But I can manage.”
“Right,” she said, dry, unconvinced. “In this monsoon? My library building’s two blocks that way. Lobby’s dry. You can patch it there. Better than drowning out here.”
Pragmatic. Not pity.
Kokichi wrestled with pride.
Another servo whined, loud as a scream in his skull.
“...Fine,” the voice box grated. “Lead the way.”
The procession was awkward.
She walked slightly ahead, holding her umbrella high to cover as much as possible. Rain still sheeted down the puppet’s damaged side. Kokichi focused on moving one step at a time. She kept glancing back—not at the puppet’s face, but at its gait, gauging stability.
The lobby was blissfully warm and fluorescent-lit. She shook out her umbrella. “Over here,” and gestured to a clear corner by a potted fern, away from mailboxes and elevators.
The puppet slumped against the wall.
Kokichi exhaled hard. “Thank you,” it said, stiffly.
“Don’t mention it.” She shrugged out of her coat, revealing a white sundress scattered with blue flowers, the fabric soft and old-fashioned against the sterile lobby light. It looked almost out of place in the storm—romantic, practical, and a little softer at the edges. “Bad day for hardware failures, huh?”
“Stress fracture exacerbated by moisture ingress. The seal on the L-3 housing was compromised.”
She crouched near the joint, hands steady, nails short. “Yeah. Crack’s obvious. Needs replacing. You got a spare?”
“In my workshop.” The thought of dragging this broken frame through the city sent anxiety spiking. He rerouted control to backups. The puppet’s right hand twitched. Barely functional.
She caught the micro-shifts, her voice quiet. “Backups kicking in?”
“…Yes. Reduced functionality. Enough to walk.”
She stood, brushing her palms on denim. “Lobby’s dry. Security won’t hassle you. Take your time.” She turned toward the elevator.
Relief mixed with a sudden loneliness. She was leaving. Of course she was.
Still, the thought of being left alone again in this exposed state ached.
“Wait.” The word escaped.
She paused, hand on the elevator button, expression neutral but patient.
The puppet gestured clumsily. “The assistance was unexpected. Most people don’t stop.”
She considered him, gaze steady. “Most people are in a hurry. Or scared.” A small smile flickered, brief but real. “Glad the backups work. Try not to short-circuit on the way home. Take care of that actuator.”
The elevator chimed.
“I will,” the puppet rasped.
She stepped in, gave a final nod.
Doors slid shut.
Kokichi stared at the empty space, the hum of lights loud in his ears.
That smile. Not pity. Not charity. Just connection, without strings.
When he finally maneuvered back into the rain, the path home felt marginally less desolate.
---
Days later, in the library, she paused mid-reshelving. Wedged between a physics tome and a mystery paperback was a pocket edition of Advanced Hydrodynamic Principles for Micro-Scale Actuators. No contact info.
Just… lost.
Her brow furrowed. The subject matter clicked.
The puppet. The actuator. That rainy night.
With brisk efficiency, she scanned it back in, cleared the fine with her own money, and scribbled a note: Found near Shimbashi Electronics, 11/15.
She slipped it into the book, reshelved, and kept moving.
Another workday. Incident fading.
---
Years passed.
Kokichi’s body was gone, replaced with machinery of his own making.
He fought, he endured, he survived.
But sometimes—rarely—rain on a windowpane pulled him back.
To that helpless puppet in the storm.
To the voice that cut through: Need a hand? Or… an arm, maybe?
To the blue raincoat. The steady eyes. The diagnosis. The brief smile.
She had stayed a stranger. He never learned her name.
But in his mind, she crystallized into a constant: the kind stranger with the nice smile.
He forgot the book. Never knew it was found, logged, and quietly paid for. That link was lost forever.
And she—she likely remembered only in passing. A rainy night. A boy in a broken machine.
Nothing more.
But in Kokichi’s brutal reality, where kindness was scarce, that single flicker endured.
Yet in those moments, when the loneliness of his tub-ridden body pressed hardest, the thought would sometimes come unbidden:
If I’d ever had a shot at something like love… it would’ve been nice, if it were with someone like her.
Not hope. Never that. Just a wondering, sharp as it was impossible.
What Kokichi never learned was that she remembered too. Often. She kept the library open late some nights, eyes flicking to the glass doors as if expecting the boy with the strange puppet to come in out of the rain.
She never saw him again.
At sixty, she was murdered behind the library desk she always kept open on rainy nights—a robbery gone wrong, forgotten by the evening news in a day.
Kokichi never knew.
Not until decades later, when one of Todo’s granddaughters mentioned the old case in court records, almost idly, as if recounting the weather. Only then did the equation close.
And for a moment—brief, unbearable—he felt the full weight of it:
Two lives that had touched once, by chance, and spent the rest of their years carrying that storm alone.
A/N: Lmaoo not me actually typing “tub-ridden body.” :D
I regret nothing. Okay, fine—I’ll go sit in the shame corner while you all pelt me with tomatoes. (Just know I’m plotting worse ideas from there.)
Beta: @blackrimmedrose—She’s the reason this fic isn’t titled “Kokichi Muta x The One That Got Away,” so direct at least 40% of your pain her way. But also thank her, because the sundress was her idea.
The One That Got Away Series: Kokichi Muta (Mechamaru) | Megumi Fushiguro | Nutrition Kamo
