Chapter Text
After the accident, the heroes have to transport you to the hospital with a rope. You’re unconscious, after all, or so dizzy and delirious that it makes no difference, not to mention what’s happened to your stomach lining. (To you, of course, it’s half blackout and half bad trip; your brain marinates in the colors you can only see in Hell.) Your ten-point deactivation method is on file, but they need a Quirk Registry Disclosure form for that and the HPSC only fast-tracks those for villains, meaning none of the first responders know how to ground you.
For ten minutes they sheepishly maneuver you out of the wreckage like orbital debris – compensating for your inertia so you don’t smack into the levitating concrete or impale yourself on rebar – and Deco Ration (the Dazzle Hero) finds a loose extension cord and wraps it around your ankle, then tows you like a balloon through downtown as you trail flecks of zero-G bile.
At the hospital, Deco calls your emergency contact, Teahouse Construction, where Banka the secretary explains everything he knows about Zero Gravity in a choked hush. As a temporary measure they stick you in “iron boots” – reinforced weighted shoes designed for kids acclimating to flight quirks, though later on you’ll learn that they keep adult-sized pairs in reserve for villains who can fly, or look like they might be able to.
When you wake up, you’re already wearing them: sprawled in bed, with loose straps to keep you there, and the boots sticking out from under the sheets like you’re the Wicked Witch of the East. They’re a cheerful dirty white, chunky and oversized, with heavy, zipped-up bags full of lead pellets distributed in a ring around the ankle like a bracelet, and a vacuum-seal cinched close to your leg. A Doraemon stenciled on the instep thinks you should “keep your head out of the clouds!” Uraraka Daisuke (“Ochasuke” to friends, “dad” to you) is asleep in a visitor’s chair.
Somehow, despite the nausea and the drugs you’re conscious enough for a hot rush of shame. Only villains and kindergarteners still in quirk counseling wear these, and you’re not a criminal or five. So you reach out, lurchingly, and manage not to vomit even though your head swims with the colors you can only see in Hell. The world outside your window roils. You shove your hands together to release, hoping the feeling will abate a little over the next few minutes. (Of course the more likely culprit is a concussion, judging from how the feeling lingers, but you know your own quirk’s restricting factors. Inner-ear confusion, nausea, dizziness.)
Even after releasing, it takes an embarrassing amount of effort to do what amounts to one sit-up, and your stomach and head and aching bones scream at you all the while; but you do, and wrestle with the right-hand boot’s release with your right hand, left massaging your temple. There’s a sealed cap and you aren’t so out of it that it should be this hard to turn, but –
– it only occurs to you to fold your pinky away once you’ve already made five-point – except the boot doesn’t float. You jiggle your foot and confirm it’s still heavy. There was no trademark pink light or ping sound. Your five-point contact is, in fact, four-point, because your ring finger terminates past the first knuckle, field-dressed in dirty gauze.
You haven’t actually released Zero Gravity. You can’t.
Oh, you think, and, inanely, I can’t get married any more.
Uraraka Kameyo and Uraraka Daisuke are ordinary in their passions and commitments. Left-of-center Hearts & Minds voters, but a little put-off by the radical leanings of its literature. Vaguely irreligious – Shinto for weddings, Buddha for funerals, and All Might for accidents, like the saying goes. They trust in heroes, not with any real conviction – the kind that curdles when it’s betrayed – but as a background assumption in their lives.
The day before you get out of the hospital, Dazzle Office sends a very reasonable-sounding sidekick to Teahouse Construction’s office. He explains, over a steaming paper cup of coffee, that Dazzle Office feels real guilt and responsibility as people – and as your future seniors, since after all, Ochako-kun’s a hero-in-training, isn’t she? – but there was little they could do to prevent your accident.
After all, when they pulled you out of the rubble, you were already weightless, which indicates that you were using your quirk to escape. Japanese law says that that qualifies as interference in hero work in progress, and absolves Deco of all but the most severe misconduct. He’s smart enough to frame it as just explaining what happened, so they don’t have to keep wondering. The distant implication that your unlicensed Quirk use might make you culpable is more than enough for his purposes.
Not – mind you – he says, with his coffee half-finished – that it’s your fault either. You panicked and tried to run, and ended up where heroes couldn’t reach you. It’s nothing but bad luck, pure and simple, and Dazzle Office will do its best to support the Uraraka family through this difficult time.
Uraraka Kameyo and Uraraka Daisuke, for all that they love you deeply, still trust in heroes. They do no legal research. It’s possible that the idea of a lawsuit never enters their heads. It certainly never enters yours, though you at least have an excuse.
All the weightless debris you touched with your off-hand – plus some puke, separated into constellations of axiomatically-perfect floating droplets – winds up in a hazardous materials disposal, where it’s pounded to moon dust and vacuum-sealed into forty-eight reinforced bags. You, sick in bed, notice absolutely no changes. The absolute mass and weight of the load you’re bearing remains the same.
The altered gees you’re channeling leave your sense of balance completely shot. One-size-fits-all iron boots become a permanent fixture of your wardrobe – with the exact same babyish Doraemon on them, since they were bought on consignment from the hospital – so you can walk unassisted after a week of bed rest, but even with their weight to keep you grounded, your stomach can’t be convinced that down is really down. If you shuffle, flat tile is relatively easy, but stairs require continuous focus: picture the location of the next step relative to this one. Adjust your weight, localized to your two centers of gravity, at the ends of your legs. Balance on one. Lift the other. Repeat. You fall down your complex’s stairs three times in the second week.
True enough to their word, Dazzle Office and Deco offer referrals for physical therapy, which you can afford maybe four weeks of. Credit to her, your therapist fast-tracks you through her regular course and homebrews a few techniques for you to use – always reminding you to keep your eyes on a fixed point, like how you recover from car sickness – but you still find yourself clumsier than you’ve ever been. Your muscles atrophy, too, and by the time the therapist has done enough research on astronaut reentry to devise a plan you’ve got just one session left. Water resistance training makes you feel like you’re drowning for forty-five minutes but you know it’s making you stronger when almost nothing else will, and start spending every minute you can at the public pool, wearing cheap swim trunks over your bathing suit, with the pockets stuffed full of rocks.
Nausea makes it difficult to eat. It’s no longer possible to measure your weight in kilos but you start to thin out anyway, not like women in heroics are supposed to – aiming for marketable softness without sacrificing your muscles, which your industry has down to a science; the “Uwabami ratio” is required reading in one of your Marketing courses – but like you’re sick, which you are. One of Teahouse’s recent hires makes a joke – nothing you ever hear – and is summarily fired two days later, even though half the staff is on near-double shifts. With the physical therapist’s off-books aid you put together a diet plan of smoothies, with varied textures and flavors so you don’t get tired of them, and relocate the blender to your room so the noise bothers your family less (under protest; your mom insists it’s fine, but her tension headaches have only gotten worse recently and you’re a dutiful daughter, even like this).
(Barfing has never been more than a little embarrassing to you, given your quirk – a gentle slap on the wrist as a reminder of your tolerances, and it happened so infrequently. At worst you ranked among the girls who couldn’t cope with roller coasters. But what you’d taken as reduced nausea was, it turns out, just acclimation – feeling sick for so long, and so continuously, that you’d forgotten a little that you weren’t well. After the third or fourth time you lose your lunch you look at your regurgitated bento – down to a single drifting tentacle from an octopus wiener, cut with slightly shaky hands – and feel something, not just guilt at wasting food but a disgust so intense and abrupt that it almost makes you vomit again. After that you cut out everything but the smoothies.)
It’s not impossible. It’s an exercise in budgeting, is all, in efficient living, just one that deals in more currencies than yen: your stamina; friends’ goodwill; time, and effort; doctors’ patience, or sometimes their hope. An intern cries over you during a scheduled check-in, in great heaving gasps, and you end up having to comfort him (once you’ve established it isn’t a seizure). See, and that’s what you’ve always wanted to do, right? Help people smile?
Everyone but your parents figures out that you can’t be a hero any more after, maybe, six weeks.
Even once you’re judged recovered – upright enough to take a day of classes, acclimated to the weight of tons of moon dust – you can’t go to your friends’ usual study sessions. You can’t stomach the usual family restaurant’s menu any more. They apologize about it when you ask and take you out for a light meal at a health food place – too bougie for a cheap student’s budget; the kind you used to make jokes about on your way to fries and grease – to make conversation so deeply stilted that you uninvite yourself from the next one.
After you you sway seasick through a self-defense lesson, your Capture teacher takes you aside to tell you that she can’t teach someone so far from “human baseline” (not a phrase she’s supposed to use, but the principal’s sour on heteromorphic rights activism since the walkouts over Heather Hyoujou and his hiring practices have changed to match).
Even the way you sound is wrong – your iron boots go clank with every footfall, and the attached adjustable-weight pellet baggies rustle and clatter. Who would ever trust a rescue hero whose approach sounds like debris is about to fall?
Healing quirks exist. Red Queen, the Cure-All Hero, lives in America, has a years-long waitlist, and charges enough that she’d bankrupt Teahouse Construction before she hit the second knuckle.
Forcible-deactivation quirks also exist. Eraserhead is an underground hero and actively hides his quirk from the public. No one at the hospital, or Teahouse, or your heroics-track middle school, knows enough to suggest approaching him.
In the absence of either, you live with it.
Of course your parents cry. You end up having to withdraw yourself from the heroics track with your mom sniffling in the seat next to you, holding her hand, with one pinky unnecessarily arched to avoid five-point, a habit your stupid brain holds onto even though it doesn’t make sense any more. You don’t really want to stay on in the same building now, so you look into transfers to a school closer to your house with a decent business/trade course.
It’s kind of an empty feeling, oddly enough. Sad but not devastating. People are supposed to feel wronged when this happens, in, like – comic books? You’ve read the old pre-Advent Batmans (Batmen?) for History, and disfiguring accidents are responsible for the Joker and Mr. Ice and Poison Harley (you kind of bounced off pre-Advent comics lore). But no one’s exactly to blame. Who would you even avenge yourself on?
In a dream you release your quirk, and watch the moon fall out of the sky. When it lands it splatters into tons and tons of glutinous mochi, but every single person in the world, coated in moon batter, goes about their day as if it never happened at all. Except for you. You choke on it and die. It’s delicious.
Ninooka Atsuji is the kind of broadly-friendly class clown boy who plays jokes on his female classmates – if you’re being nice, because he messes with everyone, no discrimination; if you’re not being nice, because he enjoys seeing teenage girls flinch and making a joke out of it. His parents have more significantly money than is average for your middle school, and Atsuji doesn’t flaunt it – he’s sheepish and embarrassed, mostly – but it hangs around him like a cloud.
Maybe he wants to cheer you up. He’s not terrible, exactly, and everyone knows you’ve been a wreck since the accident. Maybe that’s why he yells his nickname for you – ”OCCHACHI!” – from two steps behind you in the courtyard after classes let out, with a big, dumb grin on his face, the kind of smile you love even if it’s technically at your expense. But your world is seasick and small, your head is throbbing, and the lurch of shock edges the sunset with the colors you only see in Hell –
– you whirl and shove him, blanching as you do. With your off-hand – you’re ambidextrous, thanks to all the practice – the one that still has all five fingers. You’ve forgotten your safety gloves.
Ninooka Atsuji’s quirk is “Quick Reflexes,” and he is a heroics track student. Your impulsively-thrown hand only gets his schoolbag, held up like a mock shield; your stomach craters as your quirk activates, dread and nausea bending you double, but the sensation of faux-leather you feel under your pads is an incredible relief. It careens out of his arms, and spirals out over campus, shedding pencils and dog-eared manga volumes. (It’ll stay where inertia takes it for eternity, or until you die, or until a janitor collects it and hands it over to you and you take a bus ride, which costs 280 yen, to the disposal center, to be pounded to moon dust, which costs 500 yen. A steal at any price.)
This is fine. This is so much better than what you were afraid of. So you choke down the vision of a classmate added to your load forever, straighten up, and you open your mouth to apologize –
He’s looking at you, like…
Quirk-involved unlawful activity – villainy – is pretty loosely-defined, as legal terms go. “The era of Super-Crime” wasn’t a great time to be a measured and merciful lawmaker. Somewhere along the line, quirk singularitarians – leery of a future run by all-powerful mutant children – snuck in clauses that made it much easier to charge minors as villains than as standard criminals.
For binary emitters at any age (like you, i.e., people whose quirks affect things outside themselves, with an “on” and an “off” state) a villainous act is defined partly in terms of frequency or duration of activation: activated once or more in commission of the crime, or active for at least ten percent of the length of it, whether it’s used for unlawful ends or not. This works, mostly, because most police aren’t inclined to push too hard on day-to-day unlicensed quirk use, or to summon heroes about it, but if someone’s litigious enough it’s easy to build a damning case.
You are a binary emitter with no off switch. Any crime you commit is one hundred percent activated time, which means any crime you commit is villainy. Shoplifting is villainy. Jaywalking is villainy.
Destruction of property is absolutely villainy.
The Ninookas love their son very much. And he’s afraid of you.
It’s not a drawn-out trial. The Ninookas aren’t that vindictive, really, even if Atsuji’s dad’s lawyer asks you to demonstrate your quirk twice and the judge agrees that you should and it adds four more pounds to your weight (he tells you afterwards that he didn’t know you couldn’t release it; he says kids lie about their quirks in these trials all the time, and they haven’t updated your registration to note your deactivation method doesn’t work any more, because expediting that for civilians involves a fee). They’re just worried parents, who want to exorcize their son’s newfound anxiety about his life being ruined by demonstrating their power to protect him.
Teahouse can’t afford what they’re asking for the settlement, so they reduce it to something Teahouse still can’t afford, then again, then won’t go any lower. It’s about their dignity, says Ninooka Takaya, and the damages won’t bankrupt you. “Loans exist for a reason,” he says.
It doesn’t even take a week after it ends for your new prospective school to reject your transfer application. Technically, it takes two quirk-involved unlawful incidents to make you a villain. Technically.
Everyone’s heard about Ninooka, filtered through a perfectly ordinary teenage rumor mill, and when you get back in after the trial concludes there’s a bubble of vacuum around you that starves conversations of oxygen. You were used to pity but you’re not used to this.
Not to mention the teachers – you haven’t been coasting, or anything, but the vague, ambient goodwill you earned for being diligent and easy to deal with was more important to school staff than you realized. Three days in, your homeroom teacher, Kiritani-sensei, pulls you aside after the last bell and suggests you “strongly consider” buying specialized anti-contact restraint gloves – the lockable kind, with a key you can leave in the staff office during classes, which not even hospitals use. “For the class’s mood,” she says. “So everyone can feel safer.”
Your mom tells you not to worry about it. But Teahouse’s budget books are easy for you to find, and so are the line items dedicated to your health: Uraraka Kameyo refuses to use Excel, and her crisp handwriting wobbles more and more as the figures rise. Your vastly reduced non-athlete’s diet and lack of a personal life have made a dent in what they spend on you, but not enough of one.
In a fit of optimism you read all the articles you can find about civilian quirk use licensure. Sure, Zero Gravity can’t replace a crane – there’s no zoning board in the world that would certify Teahouse Construction to use concrete that weighs less than styrofoam – but it’d make cleanup after demolitions a snap, and if you’ve adjusted to the weight of one building’s worth of debris – which you have – you can adjust to two, or three, or four. If you quit school, when you quit school, you can dedicate all your time to handling the increased mass of it, and you wouldn’t ever ask your parents to pay you for it – the whole point is to give them easier lives, and you’re used to living with a tight belt and a limited budget. It’s maybe a little pathetic to work for room and board as an adult, but it’ll be something you can do for them.
According to the articles, commercial civilian quirk use requires a new permit and certification process for every work site, plus assessments by two separate regional boards – one zoning, one “non-heroics quirk use,” whose civil service website tab is a dead link. Two hours’ Googling doesn’t help you find an office address, or a contact. Reddit informs you that anyone under twenty-five is denied two steps into the process, after the initial application fees, thanks to “Raiju’s Law” – passed in the wake of some overtaxed electric-quirk kid who fried himself to keep a data center operating during a blackout. He’s a hero now, they say. He’s doing very well.
So. There’s a few convenience stores hiring in the Musutafu area, and – despite the sallow face and your technically-not-a record – you’ve got a nice smile, half a Marketing course, and naked desperation on your side. Eventually a manager takes pity on you and lets you pencil yourself in for night and weekend shifts, alongside dazed, absent-eyed Bubaigawara-san and Komomori-san with her extremely persistent cough. And that’s you, now, you guess: someone’s weirdo part-timer coworker, reducible to a funny little anecdote. Uraraka-san the dropout who wears shoes for five-year-olds. Not that you’re a dropout yet. But you can feel it in the air when you talk to your teacher. The relief it’s going to be for everyone, now your transfer’s fallen through. The patience they’re showing, waiting for you.
Anyway they’re nice people, your coworkers, and it’s rude to reduce them to symptoms of the worst thing that’s ever happened to you. Bubaigawara-san offers you a slice of pizza after work and grins at you when you accept, even if the grease weighs horribly on your gut. Komomori-san has three little brothers who think it’s very cool that you can levitate with your boots off and a kite-string to secure you. You offer to babysit them when her cough gets bad and she’s so grateful she cries and insists she has to pay you: so much you should refuse, but don’t, and buy your parents dinner in a fit of manic optimism that leaves you just a little bit in the red.
It’s fine, isn’t it?
You’re going to live with your parents for the rest of your life.
It’s inevitable. There’s barely any work you can do like this, with your technically-not-villainous record and constant race against malnutrition and your atrophied bones like an astronaut’s (you break a toe stubbing it against a freezer at the convenience store and don’t tell your parents because it’d only be another doctor’s visit). This bedroom, which Daisuke talked about remodeling someday, which catches sunlight like the rest of the apartment doesn’t, it’ll always be yours. The thin blanket you accidentally levitated that drifts off while you’re asleep, and the kiddy workdesk you’re supposed to love with bug-eyed grey alien stickers, and the stupid mismatched oven mitts – one weightless, one not – you wear to bed, the ones you’ve had since you were a kid covered in fraying embroidered flowers, the ones that used to smell like brownies instead of stale sweat and bedsore. It’s all yours forever. They’ll be carrying you until you die.
No, no, no, no, no, no, nO, NO, NO –
Shoplifting with an activated emitter quirk is villainy.
It’s not like you’re stealing makeup, or limited-edition sweets, most of the time. Just microwavable bentos, and you know where convenience stores put the ones close to expiring. But it’s villainy, still, and even if Komomori-san sighs heavily into her wrist and looks the other way for close-to-sell-by onigiri, the mochi ice cream is too frivolous. Too colorful, anyway. Tea-green packaging with pink accents. It’s cute and it’s soft and it’s barely even a decision to take it, even if it’s barely even odds you’ll be able to digest it. Which is how the girl in spandex must recognize it, as you step through the automatic doors of the convenience store, ready to go home.
When she shoves her pale-cyan glove up your jacket, your first thought is weird pervert???: but her palm just crumples the cardboard ice cream container against your hip and makes you shiver by reflex at the cold, and your adrenaline splashes into your gorge and spills into your peripheral vision as the colors you can only see in Hell – of course you’ve learned your lesson and you keep gloves on all the time now, so when you slap her hand away it isn’t another irreversible stupid accent. But she already has it in hand.
“Gotcha,” she tells you, cheerful.
Maybe she’s a first-year high schooler on an internship. She’s not an adult, at least, too short. And she has your unpaid-for mochi ice cream crumpled beyond salvaging in one cyan fist and heroes aren’t supposed to deal with quirk-uninvolved crime which this is in every way but the strictly literal, but the part of you that knows that feels very distant, as you stumble back shakily in your iron boots that clank against the pavement. Maybe she thinks you’re violating parole. Maybe she knows what your boots mean.
Her eyes glow with the telltale heat signature of some kind of laser quirk, a quick charge to release – and the beam draws a sparkling, dust-free line across the asphalt but misses you by a solid few feet as you stumble to one side, lurching again, unbalanced like you’re in too-high heels. Is it a soap ray? Is she trying to beat you up with a soap ray? But any laser someone fires at you (a hero, this is a hero) can’t be anything good and you try to quiet your impending migraine, to make for the corner –
Cyan light washes over you.
It’s like a fire hose pointed straight at your midsection. It’s more than enough to lift your iron boots, whose traction is notably terrible, and that’s all your weight, localized; instead of shoving you back or punching you in the gut, it tips you over and slams you facefirst into the pavement. Starbursts light inside your eyelids; warmth floods your nose, less a bloom or a blossom than an uncorked champagne bottle, if champagne could go to vinegar, bitter and bright and hot and loud – you lose track of –
You lose track of –
Everything’s blurry, and then dark.
Something rolls you over onto your back. It’s easy. You’re very light.
“Shit.” It’s not really okay for heroes to swear on the job, or at least not girl heroes. Definitely an intern. Maybe she’s even failing Marketing. “Shit, um, wait, you’re – are you alright? Miss?”
Miss. You’re too dizzy to laugh. Something dribbles out of the corner of one mouth. “Gross,” she says. “God, look, I didn’t get you that hard, it’s – that wouldn’t even have slowed most kids down! Do you not eat?”
All you have to do is explain again. Once you get out of your muzzy little fit, if she can just stop trying to drag you upright by your shoulders (“mmh,” you manage, did she give you a concussion?), you can just tell the hero intern why you have iron boots, apologize for the mochi, and promise to pay for it even though she’s the one who destroyed it. She’ll escort you all official back to Komomori-san, who’ll by now have panicked and told the manager; if you’re upset enough about it (and you will be, you can feel it coming on through the migraine and the jangling, flashing colors and the disorientation), maybe she won’t report it to anyone. Eventually her intern office will require the hero intern to report, and she’ll be chided for interference in a quirk-uninvolved crime, while you’ll go home with a messy, talentless field dressing for your cratered nose but possibly still employed, and your parents –
Again.
Just wait until you can talk and explain again.
Just be patient.
She’s trying to get you up. She’s fumbling with your gloves, why is she – two fingers scrabble where the fabric meets skin – under your –
You can’t let her –
It only occurs to you that you shouldn’t grab her wrist to stop her (from checking your pulse) until you already have. Ping. It’s not a bad sound, on its own. Zero Gravity’s tone is high-pitched but gentle, even a little melodic, like a chime. She whacks your hand away on reflex with a startled little yelp and rises to her full height with enough force that it lifts her off her feet. To the height of a telephone pole. Startled eyes, the same color as her beam, meet yours.
She isn’t that mad, you can tell – in fact she giggles a little when you roll onto your side and barf, and makes some dumb quip that splashes against your brain without resolving into words as you stagger off towards the station. (You don't tell anyone. What would you even say?) As far as she’s concerned, you’ll be taken into custody soon, and your quirk will wear off, and she’ll get back to her office with a fun little life lesson. Because you’re some middle-school shoplifter who panicked when she grabbed you, nothing worse.
But you know. You know, when you read the article on a local news site about the yet-unidentified culprit of an act of villainy. There’s a picture of her in civvies with red-rimmed eyes, fists balled, a hero in a ridiculous hat hover-handing her shoulder. She’s trying to sit for the photo, but her weight’s localized to her feet, nowhere else, and so she can’t sit in chairs any more, just squat over them, which is substantially more effort than standing. Doraemon winks at you from her iron boots. No one’s bothered to keep her name out of the media.
Daidouji Tenri is never going to be a hero.
Just like you.