Chapter Text
Death is something you thought as inevitable, albeit a bit unconventional, maybe even inconvenient. It was a bit of a morbid thought, you'd admit, but you'd long since gotten used to the mundane cycle of life. Wishing for an escape that never came. You were, by all means, used to the idea that you would die in a rather minuscule way. The thought had been with you ever since you were younger, staring at a video in a classroom as it explained the scale of the universe.
Most of your classmates had oohed and ahhed at the video, or started crying about the sun exploding even though it was millions of years away. You, however, were the only one staring at it transfixed. Realising, in some way that fit your immature mind, that you were nothing. Your life, in the end, did not matter in the grand scheme of things. You would contribute next to nothing, or if you did, it would be lost to history. Even if your name was sung from mouths through generations, eventually, everything would end and it would all become dust floating through an empty void before being sucked into a black hole.
In hindsight, that was probably something you needed to get checked.
Truly, though, you weren't surprised when you heard the alarm go off over the P.A., not when you heard screaming and gunshots, not when you heard your teacher hurriedly locking the door as per protocol. It hadn't mattered in the end, though. The shooter, some kid either broken by others or feeling that he was the sun, had still gotten to the class. Broken window, uncaring of the metal bars, unscrewing it or bending it, you never really saw. You had been stupid, reminded of yourself in the wild eyes of someone pushed too far and doing something that would backfire hard. You'd seen the barrel pointed at someone you used to care about, someone who you'd grown up with, laughed with, smiled at and got one back. Someone who you'd screamed at, cried at, wept for, and still detached yourself from.
It had been a no-brainer, really. You were a stupid kid, and you would forever be one, leaping up to take the gun away. A singular shot through the kidney, gritting teeth stained with blood as you wrestled with him, holding him down for escape. So heroic, people would probably say on the news. So overwhelmingly self-sacrificial, you knew, blinking away tears as consciousness faded from you.
Death was an abyss, cold though it was, sinking its claws into you. Thoughts flitted through your mind, barely scraping conscience before fading. It felt like an eternity, honestly, and you weren't going to lie about it. You were never particularly religious, had always followed common sense and proven fact, rather than belief shared or gospel spoken. It didn't mean you were exactly atheist, but you wore religion like something casual, a jacket rather than a robe of any sort.
You had wondered what death felt like, vaguely. Would it be something crushing and silent, a pressure or the conscience while your body decomposed? Or would it be... more mythical? Would you open your eyes and see a palace with spirits to judge your choices? You never had a specific belief when it came to that. It felt like a vacuum of some sort. Crawling over you, your muscles twitching as your skin grew taut. Exhaustion slipped over your eyes like wool, a sharp pang through your gut that had you cradling it, curling into yourself.
Then it started. Like you were slowly sinking, but the water was evaporating just as gradually. It wasn't long until you felt a breeze rushing past your ears, a light slowly coming to shine over your vision weak with pain, faint but stark and the only thing your senses were registering. Purple flooded your sight, not covering but rather like a neon sign. Something raw, guttural with pain mirroring yours, surrounding you.
Something warm picks you up, cradling you close. Not the source of the screams, but close to it. Words, or at least sounds made by human voices, surround you just as quickly. A ringing in your ears starts, dull but throbbing, and you can't help the wail that escapes you. The warmth clutches your closer, the sound of pain surrounding you, harmonising if you could be poetic even, and you're pulled to sleep out of exhaustion.
So quickly, do things change.
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"Something's wrong," A low, gravelly voice. Your eyes open blearily, the urge to yawn rising, but you resist the best you can. "She's never been this affected by a Quirk, even if it's... volatile. She's been in the damn bed for a week now, maybe we should call them—"
The word shoots through you, the irony not lost on your brain. Quirk is a word, yes. But not like that. Not like a proper noun. It's an adjective, most of the time. Very rarely is it a noun by itself. And you hadn't been partial to the series itself for a couple years now, but you don't live under a rock that big. Rubbing your eyes as best you can with your limbs, you look up to the person holding you.
It's a man, for one. Black hair reaching his shoulders, or, well, a bit beyond that. Dark eyes, skin pale from staying inside as much as he can. There's only one person you can name that looks like this, even if only vaguely. You want to cry, really, but you're not given time to do so. The size of him calls something else to your attention, and you look down at yourself.
Hands, still chubby with life, not calloused or bruised anymore. You brush one of them to your head, feeling for the messy hair you used to have. Scarce, thin like paper, softer than silk. You squirm, and there it is. Something wrapped around you, tucked securely. The thought enters your head like a sledgehammer does to wood.
An infant. Or, well, a baby. You're a baby. If you're completely honest, the thought of reincarnation was amongst many when you would sit in your bed and wonder about inevitability past curfew.
You tune back into the conversation, hungry for knowledge on where and when you are.
"... I know it's complicated," The man holding you—you refuse to assume, but regardless, a pit begins to form in your stomach—sounds... defeated. "I know they have bad terms with each other. I don't give a damn, honestly. She got hit by a Quirk, it gave her a baby, and she's not responding to anything. She's been in the bed for a week, damn it, Hizashi. The nurses won't answer my questions, not until 'the results are definitive'. I'm not the only one who sees it. Something like this shouldn't have happened in the first place, and it's her it happened to. She's been through enough already—"
The steady thud by your head quickens, only by a fraction, but it's enough to have your body work against you. A small babble, innocent and so young, leaves you. The man falters, as does the voice on the phone. Eyes turn to you, physical and digital, as your hands reach up to slap against the skin of a cheek.
The growing restlessness fades from the man, and with it, the thud by your head. His heartbeat, you realise belatedly, cooing up at him.
"... Shouta," The phone voice is gentle, cautious, but not happy nor optimistic. A certain lilt to it. "I... I understand your frustration. I can't... bring myself to go to the room myself. But that doesn't mean that she'll be hurt forever. The nurses say her vitals are stable. The doctors say that she's not... wasting away. And... well... it's an unusual phenomenon. None of them, not even the specialists, have anything to work off of."
"... I know," The sight that leaves Shouta—your suspicions confirmed correct, despite yourself—is heavy enough to make you quiet alongside it. "I'm... I'm sorry for blowing up on you. It's just... it's scary. I've never seen a case like it, and... the last time she was in a situation like this..."
The silence after weighs heavy, enough to make you shift in your makeshift swaddle.
"Shouta," The voice again—Hizashi, you remember. "I... I know how you feel. But you have to remember what we've been told, too. The reports. The Quirk... it's... curious. It's from her soul, so... it's harder to recover from. She just needs time. And when she wakes, she'll be fragile. Bringing... them, bringing him moreover, would put her in a precarious position. And... we don't even know if the baby's made with more than one person in mind. It could be just hers."
Aizawa just mutters something under his breath. "Right. But... if I'm correct, then there's child support to be paid."
"Manae is just fine without him," Yamada (you think, that's his surname, right?) teases lightly. "Even if she wasn't financially stable, you'd still help."
"It's the principle," Aizawa mumbles, but doesn't deny it.
After another brief pause, words spoken in a hushed tone that you can't recognise, Aizawa hangs up. He turns his eyes to you, carefully standing, regarding you with mild skepticism and something softer you wonder about. Then, rather carefully, he starts walking down the sterile hallway. Something about it, even if quiet and stiff, allows you to relax in his arms.
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Slowly, things become clearer to you.
You won't delude yourself by saying you can't eavesdrop, because you do. But, honestly, it's the most logical thing you can accomplish. It helps that you've enough control over yourself to not cry at random times; not to say you're completely so, because you're a child. An infant, a newborn growing. You have urges, instincts, helpless things that fall in line with development. You cry at odd hours, you've zero potty-training (to your disdain), you're easily fooled by peekaboo... the list goes on, really.
But the fact that you're a docile baby, not silent but blessedly less high-maintenance than most, puts up the impression that you're nothing to worry about when it comes to conversations in the same vicinity. You're in the middle of getting the wisps of strands you call hair brushed when one such talk happens.
Shouta Aizawa, in your eyes, is similar to a father figure. It's obvious he doesn't want you calling him your father, or anything of the sort, but it's not to say that he doesn't care about you. If anything, he's been hovering over your shoulder when you're not clinging to him. The idea of him being something like that, a connection to Manae, your mother, seems to make him vaguely disgusted at the notion. You're quick to figure out, however, that it's not out of disdain. Rather, it's a built dynamic. He sees Manae as a close friend, perhaps even a younger sister, and his actions that can be seen as fatherly are simply his style of showing he cares.
Speaking of her.
You learn her name pretty early on. Manae Nabatame. The first time you see her, she's still in a hospital bed, in some comatose state. The first thought that you find echoing in your brain is the word pretty. And she is. Dark strands of hair streaked with blonde from sun damage, fair skin pulled softly over jaw, and when she first wakes, startling purple irises with slit pupils, framed by lashes and markings resembling eyeliner. She's roughly eight years younger than Aizawa, foreign by birth, and apparently, your mother.
She takes to it rather well, in your humble opinion. Considering the information you hear.
From what you can piece together, your 'birth' is abnormal. She was on duty—oh, yeah, your mother is a hero, go figure—when she got an alert about some criminal. She had gone ahead, requesting backup when cornered. The perpetrator had hit her with his Quirk, which she had caught last minute with her own, clashing them and creating something abnormal. You. You were a fragment of her soul, in some way, shape, or form, pulled out and given its own body.
Her Quirk, to you, is mesmerising. You're pretty sure the official name for it is 'Mirrored Shadows' or something of that vein. She has two, technically. Mother and father, combined. One is an Emitter of some sort, while the other is... a Mutant one.
The former is the one she uses the most. She controls shadows, able to solidify them, liquify them, mould them into a shape or transform into one. She can transport from place to place through them, and after some trial and error, create them similar to clones or their own characters. The drawback to this one, though, is... just as intense. She gets more instinctual, and on particularly bad days, snaps at even Aizawa while hogging you in the master bedroom until it dies down. She doesn't think clearly, if at all, and her emotional function decreases. You found that out rather quickly, watching her mood swing back and forth.
The latter, however, is less convoluted, yet also more. Technically, it's supposed to be a Tiger Quirk, from her mother. Still, it mutated on top of everything. Instead of one pair of ears, she has three, all flickering and getting a sense of things. Her tail is longer, the fur on it thicker, her canines sharper and her eyes more versatile. It's everything her mother had, cranked up to eleven. Blessedly, though, it comes with the instincts around not hurting cubs.
Life, in some way, had taken a routine with you.
The specialists' reports help frame the situation, at least, to you. You age between 7 and 8 months per actual month, or (as you'd squinted at the paper) roughly 8 days per actual day. With it, you'll be in your teens given a couple years. It's the abnormal circumstances surrounding your birth, you hear someone tell your mother over the phone. Because of it, though, you're confined in the house until you're a teenager.
Your first steps are a month and a half in. By then, you'd grown a bit to see features come in. Thankfully, not too much is erased of how you looked before. You hear adults chalk it up to the abnormal birth part, even if it doesn't logically make sense to you, but you supposed Quirks have a long influence on the average person. You mourn some features, though. Your eyes are the same colour as your mother's, and your hair is streaked with white by birth, but it's nothing too bad that you feel completely lost to time.
The first time you say 'mama' is the week after, clinging to your mother's pants as she carefully sorts paperwork. It leaves your lips easily, but still, she almost drops the stack of papers into the shredder. She's always been... a little weird around you. You can't blame her though. She doesn't let it get in the way of parenting you, even if you're pretty self-sufficient for a toddler, and you can tell she still loves you. But the concept of motherhood had never really settled into her fully up until then. She had looked at you for five full seconds before picking you up, abandoning her work to get you some treats from the kitchen. She hadn't spoken much, but you could tell she was close to (good) tears.
"Mama," Your voice is quieter than usual, which isn't... particularly new. But right now, you make sure to keep it smaller. "Why... why two pictures?"
"It's my parents, love," Comes her predictable but still warm response. You're both facing a pair of pictures stood up on a small table, like an altar. "Even if they weren't... the best to me, they still loved me and tried their hardest to make a good life."
You nod, even if you don't believe that's all she has to say on the topic, shifting your eyes back to the faces staring back at you.
The father—your grandfather, you suppose—is a stern-looking man. Jet black hair cut precisely, eyes narrowed at the camera, an impassive look on his face. The plaque on the frame reads Nabatame Shiryuu, and you can't be too surprised by how pretentious it sounds to you. He died not too long ago, but you don't particularly care about that. You study his image, trying to fit his genetics to your mother's. Same purple eyes, same hair colour, same sharp curl downwards when she's irritated. Same build, you realise, with the shoulders tense but angled downwards as if agitation and disappointment are synonyms.
Your grandmother is softer along the edges, but no less solemn. Nabatame Kotoba, died a little before your grandfather. Softer eyes, slanted downwards. She's smiling, faintly, but it comes off as patronising more than anything. She's the one with the tiger ears and the presumed tail to go with it. Her hair's a warmer brown, eyes like the warm cocoa your mother gives you when you're cold, but there's something about her that has you wish you could shrink. Not inherently malicious, but something that has a tick of something harsh spark in your chest.
Both dead before you were given to the world. Both staring back at you through film like you're smaller than your rapidly-growing body is.
"[Name]," You tilt your head up, amethyst meeting tanzanite. "Whatever happens. Remember, I always love you."
At the time, you had wondered why it was said like that. It didn't take much longer, though.