Chapter Text
₀.₁
We got them preachin' that we're hell-bound // But I don't think we are unless you do
Ochaco loved to eat fruit.
Fruits weren't expensive, for one.
Not only was fruit tasty, refreshing, healthy and always in the grocery stores (not like ice-cream, which her parents let her eat only during summer) but it was incredibly affordable.
Or, well, Ochaco should say that it had once been affordable, since she hadn't eaten fresh fruit in maybe three years. There had been exceptions, like her birthdays, where her mother had not only treated her with some delicious chocolate cupcakes, but also with small, ripen peaches, the smooth ones that she'd loved ever since she was a baby. But they'd been that- exceptions.
And this terrible thing had been caused by the overlapping of two terrible events: the 2100's financial crisis and her father's firing.
She knew of course that the two things were connected.
The company that usually contracted out her father’s small construction company had gone bankrupt, and his father hadn't been able to stay afloat with all the competition.
He'd kept on working, and her mother had reassured Ochaco that her father hadn't really been fired because he still had a job, but Ochaco knew that her father was now a freelancer, and that meant less money.
And if Ochaco hadn't eaten fresh fruit in the last two years it was because of this.
She still liked it, which was unavoidable.
She was just eleven, and yet she'd already understood that the less you have something, the more you want it.
For this same reason, Ochaco wanted lots of things.
When that afternoon she walked out of school, after the end of her lessons, she started trailing after a blonde-headed girl without even noticing.
She'd just spent two hours studying English. Since she was the worst at it, and she couldn't start middle school with grades as bad as hers, rather than going to the gym with her classmates, or doing art, music, even poetry after lunch, she had to study English.
As if it was even a bit enjoyable.
It was useful, she knew that, but she couldn't help but wondering why English, out of all the languages in the world. Wasn't Japanese more beautiful, wasn't it easier?
Was English the easiest language in the world?
It didn't look or sound like it.
Thinking about how complicated it could have been to study a different language, such as French (she'd heard someone speaking it once on TV- which she hadn’t watched in two months because her mother kept forgetting to pay the license), she almost missed the girl walking in front of her.
She chose to follow her (after barely wasting a thought behind that decision) when the girl started to leave a trail of red dots on the sidewalk.
At first she didn't even notice the color, because the girl was too far from Ochaco, but when she crossed the street and Ochaco got closer, her subconscious overtaken by the curiosity of seeing a new face in such a boring part of town, she saw the red stains on the white crosswalk.
That wasn't a super nice neighborhood, but only the month before the crosswalks, markings and signs of that street had been repainted, or replaced with more beautiful and modern models.
It made Ochaco feel uncomfortable, for some reason. The whole school made her feel this way, now that government funds had made sure it was renovated.
Just the summer before her last year there, but she wasn't sad about it.
The girl, Ochaco had never seen her before. When she glanced at her face, she let out a small sound of surprise, and awe.
She was older than Ochaco, and she was obviously a middle-schooler. Not only because of her uniform.
And it was obvious that she wasn’t from there, not only because Ochaco didn’t know her, but because Ochaco recognized the name of her school, written in kanji on her dark, fancy backpack.
Not that Ochaco was an expert when it came to Shizuoka, of course, but the one written on her bag was a legendary name among the girls in her class: it was a private school of first class, one that Ochaco could only dream of- of which she still didn't understand the usefulness (unless someone wanted their children to only spend time with equally rich kids).
Ochaco had actually observed the girl’s face too quickly to really notice what shape her nose was, what color her eyes were, but she could see the perfect cascade of blonde hair down her shoulders. It was beautiful, much more beautiful than Ochaco's hair, monotonous and boring and short- that his mother had 'fixed' just two weeks before, saying that it was easy enough and that she could do what any hairdresser did for their crazy high prices. In the end it had been short enough to not even resemble Kuyuki's fashionable bob.
Between her hands, Ochaco could finally see as she quickened her pace to reach the other side of the street, was a pomegranate.
Ochaco blinked, confused after seeing what she'd seen.
The girl raised her hands until the fruit touched her lips, and with her teeth she tore out a bunch of red grains, chewing slowly. Her lips were tinted red, and juice was dripping down her arms.
She'd just started eating that pomegranate, but she was already that dirty, so that probably was the second one- and not the last, judging by the paper bag on her elbow. Its handles were getting soaked.
Ochaco stared at her, amazed- who eats pomegranates while walking down some random, not-so-ugly-anymore street?
Pomegranate was perhaps one of the few fruits she'd never eaten before, because her mother was allergic and Ochaco had never been curious enough to ask for it- and now, even if she had been curious, she would never have told her parents, or they would've felt guilty and bought it even though it was one of the more expensive ones, for some reason.
The girl kept on walking. There were two clips on her hair, but Ochaco could only observe one of them. It was light pink, with little black drawing that from that distance looked like random stains. A car passed by, over the speed limit, and she was briefly stopped from looking at the girl. Just for a moment- but then another car stopped at the red light. Then another one, and another, all of them parents ready to pick their kids up from school, and Ochaco couldn't see pomegranate girl anymore.
If she panicked, it was because the street ended just a few feet from the last place where she'd seen the girl.
She knew it, so the girl could either walk forward or turn left, going inexorably away from Ochaco.
And Ochaco didn't want to lose the girl, because the paint of her clips shined under the sun, and the skirt of her uniform was black and large and it moved freely with every step she took.
Ochaco wanted to know if she would also wear such a beautiful skirt, once she started middle-school. She wanted to see the color of the other clip, the one she couldn't see, and she wanted to see what was the color of her eyes.
And she wanted to know why she was eating a pomegranate in the middle of the street.
So, taking a deep breath and asking for her dear parents' forgiveness, she started to walk towards the opposite sidewalk.
The people in their car who'd stopped because of the street-light were driving towards Ochaco, so when she turned left she easily saw their bored faces, stuck in those metal boxes. They were an unforgiving obstacle.
There was enough space between the windshield of the black car next to her and the trunk of the car behind it, so she slipped between them as quick as she could.
And she ran.
(Ochaco was small, but the woman behind the wheel saw her appear out of nowhere. And when the traffic light turned green again the cars in front of her began to move, but she thankfully stood still a second more. She stares at the little girl who was now running across the road and who had just barely missed being hit by a car.
She exchanged a look with the couple sitting in the Mazda, whose eyes were just as wide open. )
Ochaco reached the opposite side of the street, with her shoes dirty because of the short but tumultuous walk on the still wet road (it had rained that morning), just in time to see the girl disappear behind the corner.
She ran after her, but didn't make too much noise- thank God, or she would have buried her head in the sand like an ostrich.
She kept on following her, even from a distance.
She couldn't be much older than Ochaco. One, two years?
The girl stopped at the playground near the kindergarten.
It wasn't a private playground. All the children of that neighborhood played there. Ochaco used to play there with her friends, as a kid, but now none of her friends liked going at that park: they all said that it was childish, and even if Ochaco always wanted to remind them that they were still children she usually stayed quiet, to avoid making herself even uglier in their eyes.
There were four swings, two normal ones and two built for small children, with those uncomfortable seats in which Ochaco no longer fit; two wooden tables and benches, two slides and climbing walls.
The trees were few, the grass always well cut, the leaves swept away by the teachers of the kindergarten every week.
It was autumn, so the leaves were starting to become lots.
The girl sat down on one of the tables, and put her feet on the bench in front of her, and Ochaco froze in place.
What was she supposed to do?
She could leave. Turn around, go home, without worrying her mother too much, and hurry up with her science homework, assigned for the day after.
She could stay. She could send a message to her mother with the phone that her grandmother had given her (a useful gift: because of how many hours her parents worked everyday, it had become less rare for Ochaco to contact them using the phone) and she could approach the girl.
Who was now tearing apart the remaining half of the pomegranate, with her fingers, without worrying about the stains on her white socks.
She could already imagine what she would write in the text.
"Hey mom! I'm staying at the park with my classmates" because she couldn't tell her that she'd followed a stranger, even if she she knew the area and the girl was her age and not some random creepy man, "-but I'm not gonna be late. See you later!".
Her mother would have answered after half an hour, at five-thirty, when she started her break. Probably with something like "Be careful and have a good time!".
What she couldn't imagine were the words she would say to the girl, if Ochaco approached her.
She just couldn’t. Her teacher always told her that she was terrible with dialogues, no matter how good she was at writing stories and describing characters. Hina had told her that no matter how handsome her legendary knights were, when they opened their mouths they became stupid losers.
She could stay there and not talk to the girl.
Even if Ochaco talked with her, how could she explain and justify the fact that she'd literally followed her?
It was more than strange, now that she thought about it.
She felt her cheeks warm up.
What the hell was she doing, staring at the pomegranate girl like that?
The voice that rose in the air was a trill worthy of the fairy from one of the movies his uncle had (illegally) burned on DVDs for Ochaco.
"Hi!"
And the girl was staring at Ochaco, Ochaco with her badly cut, too-short, boring hair, wrinkled uniform and red face.
And Ochaco spat out a "Hey" that, for the surprise of no one, ended up being worthy of one of Ochaco's knights: handsome, but ridiculous once they opened their mouth.
And Ochaco wasn't even handsome.
The girl was looking at her, and Ochaco got closer without noticing, because she wanted to take a good look at her face.
Her lips were red. That was the first thing she noticed. As red as the pomegranate she was eating. It could have looked like lipstick, but not even girls that went to middle-school wore lipstick.
(Ochaco knew that because her mother had told her that she wouldn't have let Ochaco touch make-up before her fifteenth birthday, and Ochaco believed her when she said that.)
And her eyes were maybe the biggest eyes Ochaco had ever seen.
Hers weren't small, ever since she was a kid she'd been told that they looked like the brown ones of a baby deer, but the girl's eyes were too big to be real, and they were yellow.
They looked like the eyes of her neighbor's cat: they weren't yellow, but the pupils were just as vertical and thin, small lines in the middle of beautiful irises.
She tried to think of something to say, but found nothing in her empty, empty head.
Even if she got closer she didn't sit down on the bench, nor on the table.
"Sit down!"
Her voice was pleasant to hear. It was beautiful, if Ochaco had to be honest.
Her empty, empty brain needed a moment to understand what she'd been told.
And where did she have to sit?
She chose the bench. The girl was older, and maybe she would have been offended by the sheer audacity of Ochaco sitting next to her on the table. So she just- tilted her head to look at the girl.
She was even prettier like this, she realized a little dazed and terrified.
What had her mother said to her, to stop her from being afraid of becoming friendless, back when she'd started going to school?
"I’m Uraraka. Ochaco."
Introducing herself was fine. But maybe the girl didn’t even care about her name. Why hadn't she waited for the pretty girl to ask her? Why had she assumed that the pretty girl wanted to know her name?
The pretty girl smiled, slightly tilting her head to one side.
"Nice to meet you! I’m Toga Himiko."
Toga Himiko. Himiko. What a beautiful name.
"Nice to meet you too."
Her gaze fell upon Toga Himiko's hands.
She had perfect nails, very different from Ochaco's half-eaten and short ones. There were no small wounds, no dry blood around the cuticles, only not too long nails, well-groomed and shiny. Perhaps she'd used one of those glossy nail-polishes that Ochaco had seen on one of the shop's aisle when she'd gone there to buy shampoo.
Her whole hand was shining under the sun, which had not yet begun to set. Had Ochaco touched it, she would have felt the stickiness left by the now dripping juice.
"Why are you eating pomegranates in the park?" she asked without realizing that she'd asked out loud the same question she'd been asking herself the whole time.
If her brain shut down, refusing to have anything to do with her latest failure, Ochaco couldn't do anything to stop it.
"Mhh." Toga's smile stayed there. "I like it. And I can't eat it when I'm home."
Ochaco frowned. She wasn't like Ochaco, it was obvious from miles away. She could buy whatever she wanted. Even if her mother was allergic, like Ochaco's, then she could still have eaten it in her house.
"Why?"
Toga didn't say anything at first, as if she was pondering whether to answer her or not, and Ochaco was quick to add "Sorry for the- questions, you don’t have to answer me", to which Toga’s smile widened a little.
Rather than a polite smile, a happy one.
"My mother says it looks like blood. And since my quirk has to do with drinking blood and she hates my quirk, I can’t eat it at home."
Ochaco, again, didn’t know what to say.
Perhaps a few words of comfort. But she couldn’t think of anything.
Blood, like vampires?
Ochaco found vampires scary, even if they didn't exist. Yes, Hina always said that there was a possibility of them actually existing, since quirk already did, and they were hiding even if there was no need to, but Ochaco suspected that it wasn't true, since Hina didn't like Kurogami only because he looked more like a fish than a boy, with his blue skin and bulbous eyes.
Vampires were really scary.
But Toga wasn't a vampire, wasn't she? She was under the sun, for one.
"I've never tried it," she said instead, rather than translating her thought in stupid things like "Are you a vampire?", or "Why does you mother hate your quirk?". Maybe she thought that vampires were scary too- but if she was Toga's mother then she had to know if she was one or not, right?
At those words, Toga's smile became big enough to look scary.
The sun that was finally starting to set was hitting her face, and her yellow eyes seemed to shine, and the light reflected on her left clip for a second- the one she hadn't been able to look at before. It was identical to the other one, placed perfectly on her golden hair.
Toga looked like a doll, but that smile was real.
It was scary.
Her canines were very sharp, like the ones of a cat, and all her teeth were straight and white. Not like Ochaco, whose canines were normal and boring and a little crooked.
It was such a big smile that her eyes squinted, her eyelids still relaxed.
"D'you want to try?"
Ochaco shook her head.
"No, no. Fruit's expensive, it's yours."
Had she said this in front of Hina, she would have never heard the end of it.
But Toga didn't laugh at her.
Toga hadn't laughed at her hair, monotonous and too-short to be pretty. She hadn't laughed at her teeth, at the wrinkles of her clothes that her mother had forgotten to iron that morning, at her dirty, cheap shoes.
Ochaco bought too many clothes from Komi, or so her friend said.
(And to think that when the jokes had started, three years before, Ochaco hadn’t even noticed. Only when she'd accidentally told to her mother that they wouldn't stop telling her that, as she was explaining her confusion, her mother had explained it to her.)
Toga said nothing about her shoes, or her red cheeks.
"It doesn’t matter. I have one more." By moving her elbow she shook the plastic bag. "Take it, come on. You’ll love it, Ochaco-chan. I can call you Ochaco-chan, right?"
She could feel her cheeks burning, but she nodded. She couldn't have said no even if she'd wanted to.
(But why- how could she ever want to say no to that?)
When she got the pomegranate out of the bag Ochaco was surprised by its size. It was bigger than an orange, and it looked more solid- she took it in her hand, and it wasn't wrinkled like an orange, or as smooth as the peaches she loved so much. Or, well, it was smooth, but she could feel with her fingers the bumps caused by what had to be the seeds.
"I opened mine with my teeth," she apologized without saying sorry "Does it ick you, if I do the same with yours?"
Ochaco shook her head, honestly alright with the idea, and Toga took the fruit from her hands. Her smile was still big when she opened her mouth.
She bit the tip at its end and tore it apart. She then spat it on the grass, far from their feet, and Ochaco chastised herself for her own surprise. It wasn't that strange to spit out grapes' seeds, her father had taught her how to years before, and no matter how beautiful and old Toga was they weren't all that different from each other.
The realization hit her rather harshly.
Then, she put her lower canines where the peel had been detached from the layer below, lowered her upper teeth, and pulled again. She cut off a piece of skin as large as Ochaco's hand, and gave her the fruit.
She'd managed, somehow, to not get dirty.
Only then she resumed eating her pomegranate: she used her fingers to take off some of those red, large seeds, eating them immediately, without taking her eyes away from Ochaco.
Ochaco was nervous, why was she nervous? She was eating, just eating.
So she put her thumbs under the yellow part, and used all her strength to tore it in two.
Only then she could finally see the seeds, and with only another second of hesitation, she brought her mouth closer to the fruit, like she'd seen Toga do before she was noticed by the older girl.
It tasted sour, but also sweet.
It was weird, she settled on this. Its consistency was hard- at the center was the real seed, but she ate that too: Toga had done just that, so it all went down. But first she chewed a little bit on the soft, tasty pulp around the seeds.
It was good.
Ochaco smiled.
"It's really good!"
Toga was looking at her like the neighbor's cat looked at the red laser that the old lady never hesitated to use when the pet started to meow out of boredom.
She was flushed, and because of her parted lips the sun shone on her teeth, now slightly red.
"I'm glad! Hey, Ochaco-chan, call me Himiko!"
Ochaco blinked.
"What?"
"Call me Himiko!"
"Himiko…-chan?"
"Yes!" and her smile grew larger and larger, and her large eyes became smaller. Her eyelids lowered in a relaxed expression, and wasn't a doll anymore, not now. She was so real, and dangerously close.
She had ordered Ochaco to call her by her name, and she'd offered her some pomegranate.
Ochaco loved fruits.
They finished eating, and the sun was even lower.
Before leaving, Toga stared at her, barely blinking.
"You're so cute, Ochaco-chan, I'm happy you followed me here!"
And with her big smile, eyes almost covered by their lids, pupils larger than ever, cheeks still red, Toga walked away.
That night, after her parents passed out in their bed, Ochaco went looking for the DVD of that old film about vampires that her father had gifted his wife a few years after their marriage.
She stayed awake to watch it, and she watched it again the day after, until vampires stopped being scary.