Chapter Text
The morning of the U.A. entrance exams, Nyanko-chan puts up a fight.
It's incredibly annoying tucking him into the backpack mom helped her modify. (Made just for him! So he safely can stick his head out the back and look around if he wants to; nothing but the best for her Nyanko-chan!) Sayako gets yet another set of scratches up and down her arms--she should probably wear things with sleeves next time, but she likes her over-sized t-shirts too much to bother. She ends up disconnecting the nerves of two of his legs before she manages to settle him into the bag long enough for her to strap him in safely. Then she has to deform his voicebox a little, to keep him quiet.
Poor Nyanko-chan, he probably knows today's going to be a terrible day for him. Her kitty is so smart.
She'd been working on that lately, actually! Brains are always hard for her--they work all funny, and smartness doesn't make as much sense as, like, lung capacity or skeletal reinforcement. Plus brains are really easy to mess up, and then it's almost impossible to put it all back right.
Muscle and fat are easy, though! Sayako's spent all week focusing on that, and Nyanko-chan's definitely been putting on some weight! He's gotten more mass and thicker bones, which will be good for the exam--but is not so good for her back now. She grunts a little as she swings the bag on, and her kitty squirms a tiny bit but settles quickly enough.
"Mom! Sayakkun's leaving now!" she calls as she enters the hallway. Mom comes out of the bathroom to join her--her job at the pharmacy doesn't start for another hour. Sayako's up for an early start today.
Mom's crying a little. "My little Sayakkun, off to high school already."
"Mm-hmm! Sayakkun's gonna be a hero, mom!" Sayako cheers. She doesn't tell mom that she's only off to an entrance exam, and she might not even get in--U.A. only takes the best of the best, after all, and her Quirk (or rather, the way she uses it) can be kinda... icky. She might say something if they were at the pharmacy, but they're at home and being around mom is different at home. Like. Like, how Sayako only ever refers to herself as Sayakkun at home, because it kind of seems to help mom?
"Just like your father," mom sighs, which snaps her out of that line of thought. Sayako nods. Dad was a good hero; everyone says so, and Sayako wants to be like him but maybe not too much like him? He worked far too long in hospitals, she kinda remembers, but he was always very warm and very smiley even when on the job. Grammy sometimes tells her that mom went a little crazy when dad died, but it wasn't a bad kind of crazy, just sad, which means it's still okay for Sayako to stay with her and keep her from being all alone in the house with the plants for company. (The plants don't seem like nearly as good company as mom thinks, but maybe that's just to Sayako, since their Quirks are a little different.)
Sayako doesn't like thinking about those sorts of things, though, so it's good mom keeps talking. "Do you have your water bottle, Sayakkun?"
"Yep."
"Your bandages? Your tissues? Your shots? A spare change of clothes?"
"Yep, yep, yep, and Nyanko-chan's probably sitting on the clothes. Everything'll be fine, mom! But Sayakkun needs to leave soon."
Mom frowns, like she's just noticed Nyanko-chan sitting pretty in his baggie. Sayako supposes that makes sense; she's been growing her hair out more, since hair is useful, and where Nyanko-chan still has fur it's been growing out the same silver color as her hair since she tweaked her kitty's blood some. Pressed between her shoulders, he's probably kinda hard to spot.
That might be a good thing, actually! If Nyanko-chan's camouflaged, less people are likely to ask questions about why she's taking a cat into the exams.
"Well, if you're sure, sweetie," her mom murmurs. She leans down to kiss Sayako on the forehead. "Go to your grandmother's house when class is over, and I'll pick you up tonight, okay?"
"Okay." Sayako steps into her sneakers (red), leans down to tighten the laces again, and reaches up to peck mom on the cheek. "I'm off!"
"Is that your current Nyanko?"
Shinsou Hitoshi-kun sounds faintly horrified.
It's more life than she usually hears from him, these days, which is kinda nice. Sayako spins around to beam at her classmate, but pauses for a second to pout when she realizes this means the camouflage didn't work--or at least, not on Hitoshi-kun, who gets weird about her taking cats home. He used to help her find all the neighborhood strays too, when they were little, and he was so good at getting them to come close enough to touch. Now they two are only friendly sometimes because they're the only ones in their whole middle school who still want to be heroes, even with kinda nasty Quirks. Sometimes it feels like Hitoshi-kun doesn't even like her anymore. It makes her sad to think about, so she just doesn't.
"Hitoshi-kun! Hiiii," she says, and tries way too late to to tuck Nyanko-chan behind her. She's tiny and Hitoshi-kun's tall, so it doesn't really work anyways--especially when Nyanko-chan makes a pitiful rasping-wheeze noise at Hitoshi-kun over her shoulder. Her classmate frowns at her like he can't decide if he has enough heart left for her to break--a little disapproving, a little stumped, and a lot deadpan.
"Why did you bring your cat to the entrance exams?"
She sticks her tongue out at him, because he knows why, duh, and also because no way she's answering him. Last time he disapproved of her having pets he brainwashed her and made her let both of them go. One of them wasn't even a cat! It was a bird that was gonna die if she just left it on the road! (Incidentally, Hitoshi-kun is never invited over to her house anymore. Which is probably for the best, considering how her mom gets confused sometimes.)
She sees the exact moment he decides this is too much effort, because that's when he abruptly turns and heads inside the school.
Sayako's used to Hitoshi-kun, so she isn't offended. She's a little giddy, actually--because this means he's going to ignore anything to do with the issue he's already decided isn't worth it, which means he's not going to give her grief over Nyanko-chan, which means she's won. She bounces after him, ignoring his attempts to ignore her, and all is right with the world up until the hallway splits and Hitoshi-kun goes the wrong way.
"You're going the wrong way," Sayako helpfully points out. Hitoshi-kun lazily waves her off, and doesn't stop.
"The General Ed testers are supposed to go this way," he drawls, casually, as if being a hero isn't the one thing they've always agreed on, always, in all the years they've known each other. As if he doesn't know how his words have stopped her dead on the linoleum.
"...What...?"
Sayako isn't sure what her face is doing, and Hitoshi-kun never looks back to see, so he can't tell her about it later. (Later?)
She supposes she'll just never know. The thought is, strangely, almost comforting.
Sayako knows what she looks like. She doesn't need to hear what other people are saying to know that their first impression of her is going to be small (weak), someone looks too young to be doing something as dangerous as fighting school-mandated robots (which, by the way, !?!?! ...Sayako is so lucky she could bring Nyanko-chan), never mind actual villains. She doesn't look like a hero.
She also doesn't need the occasional baffled comment to know that their second impression, for those taking that second glance around while they wait for the practical to start, is invariably going to be CAT(?). Because she's clutching Nyanko-chan to her chest -there's no need for a bag that would only get in the way- and, as she already said, she's tiny. Nyanko-chan might actually be fatter than her torso, right now, especially with the bony spurs she's been cultivating jutting out of his spine and tail.
(The third impression, in the normal way of things, falls somewhere between you're kinda creepy and are you a girl or a boy? really?. Today, she's going to blow normalcy right out the water! ...Probably.)
Usually, she does this on just one of her arms, finger-to-shoulder. Less vulnerabilities when all the blood vessels and organs are relatively compact, less work for her personally, and whatever she's using tends to live longer when she doesn't spread them too thin. Maybe she could've done that today. But she's been feeding and working on Nyanko-chan for months, now--there's plenty of him to use. And she only needs him to last ten minutes or so before she'll put him back together.
(And right now, on the cusp of taking a test that will determine if she's fit to be a hero, standing effectively alone... maybe she's a little bitter. Maybe she finds that she doesn't care too much about a measly cat, anyways, or what other people think of her.)
The gates aren't open yet, I have time, Sayako thinks, and then focuses on the cat in her arms. Comprehension blooms in her mind--fur, skin, blood vessels, muscles, sinew, bones; nerve clusters and vital organs lighting up here and there; cells fading into hyperfocus. Familiar already with Nyanko-chan's ins and outs, it takes a bare moment to deaden his sensory nerves -she's not cruel- and then she gets to work pulling him into something usable.
The fur dissolves into skin to make it thicker. Muscles are manipulated and stretched, strengthened and hardened and layered over her arms and legs and sparsely connected by thick tendons across her torso--she twists organs and forces some of Nyanko-chan's fat stores through conversion processes, into more proteins to use. Blood vessels and locomotive nerves are condensed into thick tubes, slid neatly between muscle groups, and the whole thing she tops with twisted-together bone plates at her knuckles and toes, fingers edged with the chitin from the little store she'd been building between Nyanko-chan's shoulder blades and around his ribs.
She leaves the cat's skull mostly alone, settled on her collarbone. She's wrapped it a little more securely around his brain, though, because if she lets that get smushed she won't be able to fix it properly and then Nyanko-chan will die. (Whatever Hitoshi-kun might've thought, might've said--she's never wanted any of her pets to die.)
There's no room for a decent heart, or sufficient lungs, and Sayako grimaces--but. She forces the connection anyways, blood vessels burrowing into her wrists and connecting to pulse points, sealing off. She resigns herself to breathing extra deep and suffering the lightheaded putterings of a heart trying to support a few extra miles of blood vessels. Nyanko-chan's blood won't hurt her -she's done a massive amount of cellular work making it human-compatible- but still. Ugh. At least she's had practice with this--personally keeping something else alive enough to use her Quirk on. (Even now that he's not going suffocate, though, Nyanko-chan's fat stores are limited--she only has so much energy to use before she starts burning her own. It'll have to be enough.)
...And now she has an awful headache. That's okay, though, because the next part's just punching robots, and she doesn't need to split any sort of cells or hairs about that. Find muscle group, make it pull. Easy.
She opens her eyes to the gates wide open, and nobody moving. Everyone's staring; right next to her, a boy appears to have frozen mid-backskitter.
"What the hell did you just do to your cat?" He sounds completely horrified. "Tha-that can't be allowed. That can't be legal."
Sayako has an entirely unwanted flashback to the first time Hitoshi-kun saw her use her Quirk. She's not thinking about that.
"The U.A. office people okay-ed Nyanko-chan as my support!" She smiles her best demented smile, and promptly bounds past them all and right into the fake city to unsteadily smash her way through some robots.
(Aizawa Shouta, watching from the screens in the teacher's break room, feels uncharacteristically sick. Just a little. He briefly considers if it would be unprofessional to try and press charges of animal abuse with the test footage.)
About ten minutes later, towards the end of the exam, a boy with an amazing but ridiculously self-destructive punch takes down the zero-pointer and saves a fellow tester. Specifically, he saves a gravity-manipulating girl that Sayako herself was in the middle of rushing forwards to save, and he manages the deed before she even gets close enough to start digging the other girl out.
So Sayako switches targets and scoops the boy out of his freefall--no way he was going manage any kind of landing strategy with two unnaturally floppy legs like that. (Half her family are doctors; she knows what legs are supposed to look like).
He whimpers in pain when she sets him down next to gravity girl (who'd managed to dig herself out in an altruistic panic, awww), and as Present Mic calls time Sayako spares a moment to cut off his pain receptors. Knocking him out directly would probably be the polite and proper thing, but Sayako's not sure if that still counts as an unheroic action, since they're still on the testing grounds and no one has ever reacted positively to seeing her touch knock someone out.
Super Punch Guy's not in danger of bleeding out, though, so Nyanko-chan comes first. Her head is splitting right down between her brain lobes, she swears, but if she passes out now then Nyanko-chan is definitely going to be dead by the time she wakes up--if she wakes up before bleeding out herself. So she fights the shakiness in her hands and sticks herself with one of her pick-me-up shots -meant to help her concentrate enough to use her Quirk safely through blood loss and adrenaline crash, mostly- and starts the arduous process of peeling Nyanko-chan off and messily piecing him back together again.
It doesn't take long at all, really--but it fucking costs.
(After, Sayako will think back to that moment, to the two peers who sat and silently watched her reassemble a mess of pulsing flesh and bone into a perfectly normal -if bald, because fur was a bit beyond her right then- cat, and she'll wonder if she was seeing things. Or not seeing things, as it were, because she'll remember their gazes being curious but peculiarly free of disgust.
After, she'll remember the solemn way Midoriya, lying on the ground and broken thirteen ways to Friday, says you're bleeding while staring at her wrists. She'll remember the gentle way Uraraka chatters while she takes Sayako's bandages, and Sayako's hands, and wraps them without a single flinch or question after Sayako works out my Quirk doesn't work on myself.
After, mom will ask, did you make any friends at school today? And Sayako will reply, mmm, Sayakkun thinks so, mom.)
...She has to piece this reckless kid's bone fragments back together, Sayako realizes dazedly, at some point later. Probably not too long of a later. Maybe she says it out loud, too, but probably not. She can't even make her fingers -bonier and maybe a tiny bit shorter than before, how much of her own body had she accidentally broken down and poured into Nyanko-chan when her cat's reserves ran out? Her hair's all dried up too; she just can't remember when that happened- anyways she can't even make them curl around the skeletal frame of the kitty passed out on her lap.
Lucky cat, she thinks -almost snickers, really, for no reason at all- before she finally forces herself to move.
She gets a good look at the mess the boy's made of himself. It's... bad. It'll be at least a full day of rest before Sayako's anywhere near confident she'll do more good than harm, trying to fix just this boy's mess of a wrist--never mind approximating the rest of his arm and shoulder muscles or, god forbid, the absolute clusterfuck he's made of his ankles. This is way too far out of her league right now; they need an actual healer.
Fortunately, that's right about when Grammy finally arrives, bearing gummies and kisses.
(And Sayako's not jealous, damn it, even if Grammy fixes injuries that would've cost her granddaughter countless headaches so easily, with just a simple kiss and some sweets. Even if she didn't inherit the Recovery Quirk from dad.
So what? She's got Tactile Biokinesis, which means she's got the best of both her parents, and she's going to make sure everyone knows it's just as good--no, that it's even better, than just creatures or just plants could ever be by themselves. She's going to be the absolute best if it kills her.)