The explosions draw her in like a moth to a flame and she cannot avert her eyes. On screen flashes one report after another, interrupting an inane afternoon drama she could not really care much for. Ten people dead and more injured, as the so-called Mutant Resistance terrorizes a small condominium. From amidst the smoke and rubble, a lone, nondescript red flag waits, the cloth waving to and fro with the unstable wind. The reporter talks about panic and public outcry, all the while showing various shots of the casualty. Momo thinks about plans, schemes and schedules. She had been planning to do it without this development but it would not hurt to have some help.
She thinks of them, misguided and aimless, and the inaction that could be mistaken for her pacifism reared its head back and she lets her ambition take the reins. She has her goals after all. Bags packed and her mind resolute, she stands.
She left the inn then, not bothering to check out from the room she already paid for a week. When the innkeeper decides to check on her whenever he realizes she has long since overstayed her welcome, there would be no trace of the odd young woman who traded guns for a weeklong stay, those pistols he thought he had gotten from an incredibly great bargain now reduced into thin air.
In another life, she thinks she would have pursued a business degree. That was in another life, if she did not have a quirk and if those with quirks were not hunted for their lives. In this life though, the black market is her game. It was a profitable venture, albeit dangerous.
But she ate danger for breakfast.
In a world like theirs, peddling guns is one way to prosper, except when your goods dissolve into nothing in a just fortnight. To her, it had been a means to survive the harsh streets, after having abandoned everything that had defined her, including her own name. While conning people into buying something she made out of her quirk will never be her favorite career, Momo cannot exactly afford to be picky these days.
She chooses the exact same method to extract information. The Resistance is as elusive as it should be, especially in a society that despises their members for merely existing. It was quite impressive really, especially for people who had been marked off as nothing but a fluke of evolution. But Momo is smart and she spreads the right rumors, whispers to the right ears and as she had intended, they come like dogs in a hot scent, finding her.
They find her in another run-down shack the old man behind the counter insisted is a hotel. The town of Raika is a small, quiet one close enough to where the bombings happened but fortified by enough tall hills to be unassuming. It was the perfect hideout for freedom fighters and she thinks she has caught enough attention around town to warrant theirs. She hears the footsteps outside. She waits.
She is sitting upright on her unmade bed, all senses alert when someone knocks roughly on the wooden door, the loud raps obviously stating that it definitely is not some courtesy visit. She does not open it immediately, summoning a double barreled shotgun from her palm. Yonder, she hears an argument, some sparks igniting and the door comes off its hinges, revealing two men in masks so ridiculous, she immediately came up with a design to replace it.
It was an interesting start to recruiting people and she says so, all the while pointing her gun at the two men.
One of them puts his fist together and with a loud bang, expands his muscles into something she thinks is as hard as a rock. The other, while less showy, hangs back, but every limb in his body is so tense, Momo begins to think that he is more of the threat than the other one. She remembers the explosions in the news and thinks that perhaps this guy is one of the few that had been cursed with a powerful quirk.
Like Shouto had been.
She decides to cut quickly to the chase and shows her arm, one hand holding the gun still trained towards the two rebels. "I'm not an enemy." She says, drawing back her sleeve with her mouth to show what she has kept hidden for most of her existence outside the Institution. The sight brings back the desired change. She can tell she surprised them because by all accounts, everyone with a tattoo like hers should have been dead.
Like Shouto.
She banishes off the fleeting thought from her head when the second man abandons caution and immediately assumes a fighting stance. Momo backs away but not far enough to be mistaken as fear. She levels her gun, wary of the small explosions on the man's palms. She can tell he is powerful. The Institution would have had a field day curing him.
"Bakugo… wait! She was from the Institution. She must be like us. What if…"
"Anyone dirtied by the government is not to be trusted." The one named Bakugo barks, literally. The voice reminds her of a mad dog. "And for all we know, she's just a brainwashed spy. And tattoos can easily be faked. Look at that fucking gun. What self-respecting motherfucker would rather use those obsolete tubes rather than their quirk if they were like us…"
"But..."
"This is my quirk." Momo interrupts. She proves her point by creating a dagger from her face, letting it drop to the faded linoleum floor. The sound of it falling hides the audible gasp from the muscly one. Bakugo's eyes only follow the dagger on the floor in just a moment before immediately focusing back on her.
"What do you want with us?" he demands and took a step forward. "Aren't you guys all supposed to have been hunted down?"
"I am one of those few who were left." Further risking her neck, Momo lowers her gun, drops it too and raises both hands. She looks Bakugo in the eyes and notices that the red in his orbs stands out from the rest of his horrible, black ski outfit. "I want to join you."
She muses as she lets the seemingly more sensible, muscly guy argue her case, that it has been a while since she initiated to join something, anything.
ONE
She did not have that luxury of a choice when at thirteen, the Institution whisked her away from the peaceful, rural life her parents tried so hard to keep her in. It was one day in April, ten years ago. She was just showing her mother a doll she made through her quirk when big, buff men stormed in her home and took her away.
She would learn later that they were executed shortly, charged with the crime of birthing her, a mutant, to the world and worse, keeping her alive and well-fed She did not know this when they threw her in the cell, with nothing more than the men in white speaking to her in hushed, clinical tones. She did not know this when they began "testing" her, alternating between being civil to her in an attempt to let her open up or being outright torturous. She had been one of the first to be captured. She had been one of the last to leave
In retrospect, she thinks that something crueler than putting pre-teens in an isolated prison cell was how they drove them into denying their own existence, wishing they never were born, just as much as those who were deemed normal wanted them to be. Had that baby in China never started glowing, Momo wanted to think that highschool could never be as bad as this. At the very least the food, whenever she was allowed to eat, would have been so much better that the jook she could barely even taste.
The men in white who insisted they be called doctors did not tell her much. Not where she is. Not how her parents had been dead for almost as long as she had been admitted. But Momo never tired of asking, even when all they promised her was that she would be let go whenever they found a "cure".
"But I am not sick.' She insisted. And they guffawed, grunted and told her that being able to excrete something else other than poo from one's body is anything but healthy.
They add a child each day. Three, if the days were "busy". Counting heads had been a great way to pass the time. They never gave her books and marking her cell with the number of times they let her eat got a little too old. It had been regretfully a long time when she realized that even though, they never got a shortage of "new blood", as the older kids call it, their number never seem to change that much.
She asked one of the doctors this, a bespectacled youngster who was new and thus, more susceptible to talking than the others. It still was not much but his sarcastic and gruff responses are still more than welcome than the grunts and huffs the other doctors breathe. She saw him hesitate, look at his clipboard as something that she should have realized is a snort came out of his lips.
"They were cured." He offered. And she knew she should not have believed in those words but she hung on the one thread of hope that she saw and she did.
(TBC)