Fuel to the Flame Chapter 1: Impact, a my hero academia/僕のヒーローアカデミア fanfic

HEY PLEASE READ THIS BECAUSE FOR SOME REASON EVERYONE SEEMS TO BE IGNORING THIS!

For newer readers or re-readers, you may be wondering what "upcoming rewrite" means. Well, it's exactly what it says on the tin! I'm planning a re-write for this story with a fully fleshed out plot line (as of 5-4-21) and better pacing in general.

What does that mean for the current version up? Well, it will be deleted and over-written with what I'm currently writing. Of course, I'm archiving the current work so that you will be able to download it elsewhere. This is the way I've always gone about doing re-writes. If I had meant to abandon this story, it would have been removed from the site altogether.

I wrote this story when I was 14 and I believe it was my second fic on the site. Of course, it reads like a 14 year old wrote it. Google translate Japanese, bad plot progression, awful pacing, and sub-par characterization are unfortunate staples of this fic. I think the only thing that really makes up for this is the fluff present, which definitely would not have helped in later chapters.

My perspective on writing has changed significantly since I started this piece and so has my prose. There were a lot of decisions made in this work that don't vibe with me now and thus I'll take the hit to say this story was mediocre at best. The set-up for the rewrite will be similar, and I will maintain the concept that this is an OC-insert rather than an SI-OC. Fingers crossed that the next one is better.

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Text Key:

Italics = Emphasized thoughts/text/dialogue

I did not expect death to be so short.

At least, not as short as it played out to be. It was a rather simple death, one that plagued me to no end.

I was a law-abiding Samaritan, minding my own business whilst walking across the street in a timely manner and then bam! I was then laying on the road like a puppet with the strings cut loose, except that particular puppet had the ability to bleed and die. Painfully. A goddamn car hit me with absolutely no falter in speed beforehand. It was like the driver was trying to hit me.

I was shuddering violently as I felt the warm, sappy blood ooze out of my body. The cold air collided violently with the raw skin, only furthering my feelings of absolute frigidness. It was in those last few moments that I remembered a small moment with my mother years upon years earlier...

I think I was seven... probably. I remembered that our family car broke down about a mile away from our house that was tucked away from the closest city. My mother and I had to walk all of the way home with groceries in tow while my father got our car towed off to the mechanic.

It was a rather long walk as far as I could remember, no dialogue was exchanged nor was there anything to look at. A few cars passed by on the empty crossroads but the little town stayed as quiet as it was usually.

At the time, I had absolutely no idea how to cross the road (which is rather shameful for an American child, mind you) and I thought that once that little sign on the other side of the road flashed the walk signal, you had to book it across the road like a murderer was about to catch you and drag you to your bloody death. Of course, I was wrong. The thing was, nobody ever told me that I was wrong. God was I an idiot.

So when that sign said to walk, guess what I, the ever-so-smart seven-year-old, did? I dashed across that road like there was no tomorrow, even shamelessly adding the classic 'anime run' that you see in almost every shonen jump anime in existence.

Of course, a car just so happened to be speeding by at the moment and my mother barely caught me from smacking straight into the headlights of the vehicle and chunked me back over to the sidewalk. The talk I got after that was more than the healthy amount of words someone should say in a single day and left my head spinning for a good three hours afterward.

It was after the whole chiding session that my mother just sighed and ended with a tired "At least you know now" which was absolutely untrue to every degree. Cause, of course, your child almost getting hit by a car immediately taught them how to cross the road. No, that made so much sense. Note the sarcasm there. Just pointing it out.

And thus, I actually, seriously, not joking about this, never learned how to cross the street. Now you may possibly be wondering, how could I not learn how to cross the street?

Well, the answer is simple: you become a hardcore introvert that never leaves the house for anything other than school, food, and water. I was rather cozy living this odd lifestyle and I seriously preferred it over having to crawl out of my house and face the real world. To think it all started because I never learned how to cross the street...

And of course, that choice of lifestyle just had to come back to chomp me in the ass. Why was I crossing the street when I was hit? Well, I was unfortunately forced into a situation where I couldn't hitch a ride with either my friends or parents and I needed to get to school. I was unlucky to have missed the bus and my school was a good thirty-minute walk away, a good amount of stop lights and railroad tracks to trek over. I did not have my driver's license yet, only a permit. Everyone knows that you can't drive alone with only a permit; you needed to have an adult who was fully capable of taking the wheel if you were to fail horribly with you while driving at all times. Not to mention, driving gave me serious anxiety when it came to the tests and whatnot.

So I did the next best thing and walked wherever I went, doing whatever I needed to do with my own two legs. It made me feel independent, to some extent, but I knew that what I was doing was about normal for any other teenager so I didn't make much of it. If I had known that it would be last time I would feel that independent in years, I would have cherished those steps much more than I did.

A mere minute before my untimely demise, the stoplight, which I had still dreaded with my soul, had turned red, signaling the walk sign to buzz to life and signal pedestrians to go along the highlighted path. It was a simple routine, one that everyone should know. But things don't always turn out the way you expect them to.

There is always a little room for disaster with every action you take.

This one happened to be a driver who was texting and did not seem to notice the five-foot human-directed right in front of them. I question this person's sanity. Not only because they were texting while driving, which almost every person knew not to do because it was endlessly drilled into our heads when we learned how to drive, but also the fact that it had to be extremely difficult to miss a fully grown human being right in front of you.

The world moved in slow motion, the car's operator finally realizing that I was a living being and not just a road sign and beginning to slam their feet on the pedal. Before they could stop, it was too late. I slammed into the front of the vehicle with the force of a freight train, my entire body revolting at the sudden impact.

In seconds, I was lying on the ground, wheezing like an asthmatic on the verge of combusting their lungs, and darting my eyes from both the huge gash in my side which was hurting like hell and the driver who had oh-so graciously stopped and got out of their car to see the damage they had caused to me. I'm sure they did not even care, they were probably just worried about whether or not their goddamn insurance would cover this.

My world was spinning and the faint blaring siren of an ambulance and police cars could possibly be heard, the noise slowly getting louder and louder as the vehicles presumably got closer. I had hope. Heaps and heaps of pure, unadulterated hope. I would be saved from this nightmare, this pain, and this reckless driver who was hopelessly stuttering, fussing over me, and apologizing at a rate I did not think humanly possible. Looks like they cared about me after all.

Hmph, not like it mattered now. I was dying, about to kick the bucket. Every euphemism for dying you can name, I was doing it. I honestly thought that I could come out of this alive, I really did. It was only then that I realized that I could not move my body a single inch and that I had been impacted in the spine. Even if I survived, I would be condemned to a life of disability for the rest of my days.

I closed my eyes, not willing to look at the world that was about to toss my life away as if it were garbage. Was human life all that valuable when things like this happened every day? That driver that hit me would live on, my parents would grieve but eventually move on, my friends would slowly forget me as the sands of time drifted by. It was the one question that made me wonder why my life ever mattered in the first place. My life was about to be purged in such unequivocal silence whilst those who surrounded me were drowned out by the simple unfairness of my situation. Nothing could possibly be done, nothing could possibly be said.

That was the last way I wanted to go out, especially in regard to my hubris and legacy. I did not want to be pegged as that girl whose death 'was a shame'. I did not want to be seen as wasted talent or someone whose mortality could not have been helped. All of these inhibitions were topped off by my worst fear, however: I didn't want to be forgotten. If I was, then it would truly be as if I had never even existed in the first place.

Strained tears leaked out of my shut sockets, insensitively staining my face for what would be the last time. Would I even be remembered at all?

I suppose I'll never have that question answered as I went numb at that moment. There was silence. Darkness. The world's noises and feel were completely gone from my consciousness. I couldn't see nor hear. I couldn't move nor feel. I felt hopelessly stuck in those few moments of immaculate silence. And then...

There was light.

If there was a word to describe the odd sensation I was feeling, it would definitely be less tame than the word uncomfortable.

I felt weak and utterly drained. Somehow, I also felt surprisingly squeezed at the moment, almost as if someone were hugging my entire body in one fell swoop. I was confused and being assaulted by a cacophony of noises. The mechanical beeping of machines could be heard as well as the high-pitched wails of an adult woman. I wanted so badly to know what was happening.

"Pusshu, Inko, pusshu!" an unrecognizable voice yelled over the deafening noise. I could not tell what they were saying and there was just so much screaming.

At that moment, another piercing sound added to the absolute mess of noise that plagued the room. This time, I knew what that noise was. It was crying, one of an infant.

What the hell.

I needed to know what was happening, why I was still feeling and breathing. Why wasn't I actually dead? Shouldn't I have been ascending to heaven or something? I wanted to know why I wasn't following the natural order of death, why I was still pumping precious blood throughout my body. I wanted to use my voice.

I opened my stiff lips to voice my thoughts, completely baffled when a mind-numbing screech came pouring out of my own mouth. I felt my eyebrows knit together, myself being utterly surprised by such an undignified noise exiting my body. I tried again.

Another wail entered the open air, filling the room with the wonderful sounds of high pitched squealing. I clamped my lips shut once more and set to work thinking of a reason why my own body was refusing to work properly. Before I could try again at speaking, the squeezing that surrounded my body tightened accompanied by the small murmurs of words in the same incomprehensible language as before.

Something was shoved gently into my mouth, the rubbery texture of the item squeaking against my tongue. Instinctively, my hands went to grasp the object being held up to my mouth and held it at an odd angle. My body was doing this. I didn't want to do this.

I could have sworn I was about to have an aneurysm from all this confusion when I started to suckle on the rubbery object. Once again, my body had full control and was unwilling to compromise on imbibing this object that had intruded its way into my mouth. An oddly delicious and light liquid slid down my throat as I continued to practically inhale the rubber. Was this... milk?

The realization crept into my mind slowly. It made more and more sense as I continued to absently drink from the rubbery apparatus.

I was not going to consider it, I did not want to consider it. The answer was so blatantly obvious why this was happening to me, why I was still breathing and why I wasn't in some sort of afterlife. I did not want to accept it, I couldn't.

This harsh reality still existed, no matter how much I didn't want to consider something like this real.

I had just been reincarnated as a child, an infant.

What the hell.