Recollections: Chapter 1

I had just turned four years old when one of my classmates, Daichi, manifested his Quirk. It turned the tips of his fingers into drills, and everyone oohed and ahhed over it while he figured out how it worked. The teachers smiled at him and told him how great of a Quirk he had, while I grew curious. "Sensei," I asked, "why do people get the Quirks they get?"

One of the teachers turned to me, still smiling and said, "Well, Yui-chan, it's pretty simple. People either get one of their parents Quirks or they get one that's a combination of the two. Does that make sense?"

I felt an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach after she told me that. I looked around grasping for something to say to fill the silence, when I said, "Th-then… What are Daichi-kun's parents' Quirks?"

She seemed surprised by the question, and honestly, I didn't know why I asked it either. But her expression turned contemplative, and she looked up, concentrating.

"Hmm… If I remember correctly, then his mother's Quirk lets her spin all her fingers around in place, and his father, I believe, can move earth around quite easily with his hands."

She nodded as if satisfied with her answer, before looking back at me. "Does that answer your question?" she asked.

I bobbed my head up and down.

Later that day, after Dad got home from work, we ate dinner. I told them about what my teacher had told me and asked, "Does that mean that I won't get a Quirk?"

My parents looked at each other, their faces unreadable, then turned back to me. Dad started talking, with a slow, quiet voice, "Well, sweetie, you know that both your mom and I are Quirkless."

"Not that there's anything wrong with that," Mom injected sternly.

Dad nodded at that before continuing, "No, nothing wrong with it at all. But that means that it's very unlikely for you to have a Quirk of your own."

I looked between the two of them, not understanding. "But… everyone else will have a Quirk."

Dad looked a little lost for words, but Mom just pursed her lips and said, "Yui, twenty percent of humanity is Quirkless. We're a minority, but there's still almost two billion people who don't have Quirks."

My face felt wet. "B-but those are all old people!" I shouted.

Mom looked pained. "I'm sorry Yui, but there are some things in life you can't change."

I never noticed when Dad climbed out of his chair and started hugging me nor when Mom stood up and started petting my head. But even though I felt safe and the smell of Dad's shirt comforted me, it didn't get rid of the lingering anxiety in my chest.

I was almost five when I manifested my own Quirk. Class had just started and the teachers started showing everyone how to play a word game. At first, I just felt a small sensation in my chest, like a little light that I could see without my eyes.

And then I saw everything. The little not-light in my chest got drowned out by the mass of sensation flooding my mind. The kids and teachers around me, the man walking his dog just outside the preschool, the people buying food at the grocery store down the street, the ants crawling up a wall three blocks away. Past that things got blurry, but even within that range, nothing made sense. The not-lights twisted and shook in ways that couldn't happen, inside and around people in unique patterns, flattening and calming as it moved away, but still everywhere I saw/felt/sensed it. In the ground, in the water, and even in the air itself. It filled my lungs, choking me.

I heard words around me but for some reason they sounded muffled. Distracting. I moved in deeper, focusing on the not-lights in the center of the ball that I knew. Solid not-lights fluttered to and fro, shuffling weak and still forming not-lights away from the center. One of the solid not-lights came and the center moved shifting my point of view, stopping in a place not that far away, but felt soft. I felt a not-light come from beyond and move quickly towards the center. Like a few others, it felt flat, no twists or shakes, yet still bright. It lingered for a while before taking the center and moving it somewhere far away, yet somehow familiar. Calming. Adrift in the calm ocean of unseen light, I fell inward. Further and further away from the rest of the world, until all that remained was inky darkness.

Time didn't seem to have any meaning. Seconds felt like minutes felt like hours. Muffled voices drifted down from on high. They came and went but they could never quite reach me. The two I heard the most often tickled something in the back of my mind. Like I should know them somehow. At first, they sounded stressed, yet hopeful, but after days felt like months felt like years they sounded somehow… sad. Desperate. Scared. For the first time since falling I reached back, trying to catch those muted sounds and I heard. Hospital, Quirk, month, coma. Words without context and I struggled to understand, to comprehend until…

I opened my eyes.

I saw, actually saw this time, a grid of large white tiles filling my vision. I heard a sharp gasp beside me and, slowly, I turned to see Mom. Her light brown hair looked like it hadn't been brushed for days, and she had large dark circles underneath her tired brown eyes.

"Oh, sweetie…"

The book she had in her now limp hands dropped to the floor as she carefully wrapped her arms around me. Through the tight hug I could feel her shaking and the wet tears that fell on my shoulder. And yet still beneath it all I could feel that flat, white not-light inside her calm in relief.

What felt like hours passed with her arms around me, one comforting hand stroking my hair.

Eventually a doctor came in, a young man with small, white horns on his forehead, and explained to me that I was in the hospital. Apparently I had fallen in class and wasn't responsive, so they called my parents, thinking that it might be do to sensory overload of my Quirk manifesting. Mom had taken me home to rest, but shortly after I fell into a coma.

After he finished explaining they did a bunch of tests to make sure I was all right and then the doctor showed me an x-ray of my foot. He pointed out the lack of a second pinky toe joint, saying it meant I had a Quirk.

"Although your case is a bit extreme, children who manifest Quirks that give them enhanced or additional senses often experience sensory overload and pass out until their brains have time to adjust. We believe that this is what happened to you. Can you describe any differences you feel?" he asked.

I tried to put it into words, I really did. I talked about how the not-light had something like color, but wasn't actually color, his being something I'd liken to yellow. About the twists and shakes that couldn't happen that formed balls in people's chests. About how my mom's was white and flat, but not actually. The doctor appeared confused at a lot of points and by the end I was pretty frustrated. He still seemed impressed by it though. "Amazing! To be able to sense and differentiate people from so far away is simply an amazing Quirk! I'm sure that you could easily become a great hero!"

Mom's expression remained still after that. The next day they let me go home, which I enjoyed. The same house I grew up in now seemed new and exciting. I could sense the pipes and wiring behind the walls and where pretty much everything around the house was at all times. Living things were the easiest to sense, but the not-light was everywhere, so I could sense objects through the outline they made. The range that I had before seemed to be a one time thing. If I concentrated I could bring it out to about a one block radius, but most of the time it just barely touched the other houses around us.

A few days after that though, I had to go back to school. I'd like to say that when I got back all my friends came up to greet me, but the truth was that I wasn't really close to anyone. I talked to people, and they all oohed and ahhed when I closed my eyes and pointed out unerringly where everyone stood. But after the all excitement died down, and the teachers got back to class, they all went back to hanging out with their own friends.

It was at about that time that I figured out what the not-light really was. We were playing around outside when Daichi, the kid with the drill fingers, and a couple of other boys started digging around in the dirt. My sight and my Quirk overlapped a little bit. Looking at something helped me focus on the finer details of what I sensed. Which is why I was staring at Daichi, or rather, at the ball of light brown not-light in his chest. I saw how little tendrils of the stuff went down his arm and into his fingers, which had their own small, not-light structures. How those structures soaked the ground in front of them with shaking, spinning pools of not-light. And how those pools let him move far more dirt than those tiny drills of his really should be able to move.

Oh, I realized, they're Quirks.

I stared at people after that. A lot. Sometimes I did it just to admire how pretty their Quirks were, but mostly it was to figure out how they worked. Which I did. Just… very slowly. Often times, when my family walked around outside I'd stop to ask people if I could see them use their Quirks. Most people said no, apologised, and walked away, but sometimes their expressions would soften, they'd look around, then show me. Very rarely, my parents stopped to let me see hero fights. From a safe distance of course, which annoyed me a bit. I always had to concentrate to extend my range, so I could never quite focus solely on how the heroes' and villains' Quirks worked. Still, I always walked away having learned something new.

Unfortunately though, this habit really didn't endear me to my classmates. The opposite, in fact. I already didn't really have any friends, and now I spent my over half my time just staring at them. Whenever the teachers turned their backs, the others kids called me things like 'creepy' or 'freak', and in one memorable case a girl said I looked like 'a cow about to get hit by a car'. It hurt. Thinking back, I could kind of see where they were coming from, but that didn't make it hurt any less.

It made me miserable, their taunts. The fact that they never let me play with them. The teachers tried to help, to make them include me. But I'd just look at the expressions on the other kids' faces, feel something twist unpleasantly in my stomach, and say that I prefered to just watch.

I didn't stop, though.

I couldn't help it. I had become far too curious for something like that to dissuade me. Plus, I always had my parents there to support me. They usually looked confused when I explained how I found the same not-light structures in different Quirks, or how two Quirks that looked practically the same through mundane senses, actually worked completely differently beneath the surface. Mostly because my vocabulary was childish, and I often made up terms completely on the spot. But still, smiles would tug at the corners of their lips, and they'd nod every now and again as if they could understand the nonsense coming out of my mouth.

Eventually, after being in preschool for what seemed like far too long, we moved up into kindergarten. The first day of class, I tried as hard as I could to not stare at anyone for too long, and I succeeded.

For the most part.

But when playtime came around, and I started nervously looking around for people to talk to, I found that everyone had already formed into little groups. No one even looked at me… except for one girl. She had a round face and large brown eyes. Her short hair curled in a bit at the bottom and was a rich brown color, just a shade darker than my own flat hair. She must have noticed the look on my face because she smiled at me and beckoned me over.

A warm feeling lifted up in my chest, but… I looked warily over at the other girls in her group. Two of them used to be in my old class. I uselessly hoped they wouldn't recognize me, but when they followed the gaze of the brown-haired girl, they sneered at me. One of them turned to the girl and said something, glancing over at me every now and again.

The girl turned to them, and as time went on her hands clenched and the face that smiled at me became something disapproving. I looked down, eyes threatening to spill over, the once warm feeling in my chest turning cold and biting. I could sense the girl walking over to me. Probably to call me a freak, I thought.

She stopped a couple feet away and I heard her say, "Hi! My name's Ochako! What's your name?"

I froze at the happy tone of her voice. I looked up slowly, expecting that same sneer on her face, but what I received instead was a brilliant smile. The tightness around my heart lessened, and I had to fight to keep the tears in. I managed to squeak out, "Yui. Tanaka Yui."

"Ah, Yui-chan then!" She stuck her hand out, pinky held away from the others. "Do you want to be friends?"

Hic. "Yes!" I cried.

Literally.

"You're crying?! Wait, no! Don't cry!"

Fat tears dripped down my face as Ochako became worried, her hands hovering awkwardly around me. "Are you okay? What's wrong?!" she asked.

"I-I'm sorry… It's just…" Hic. "I'm really happy…"

Through my blurry vision, I couldn't make out what kind expression of Ochako made, but the way she wrapped her arms around me said enough.