She was running.
Running as fast as she could, she used her quirk to float over the rubble and avoid the fire. She could feel nausea, but she kept going. She ran past the burning and screaming bodies. Ran across blood-spattered concrete. Ran past the fights raging in the streets and inside the buildings.
She eventually came to the building she was running towards.
She stopped and started looking, she saw strangers but no faces she knew. Saw survivors but not the people who mattered most. Saw pets with no owners. Saw broken bodies, burning bodies. The smell alone almost made her vomit. She could hear screaming in the distance intermingled with explosions. She started asking random people if they had seen them.
No one had.
She looked up and knew that they were still inside. So, she floated up to the 7th story and smashed through the balcony window. The fire was intense, but not as intense as her desperation. She had to make it in time, she had failed so many times. She avoided the fire and got into the hallway but the smoke had filled almost the entire hallway. She started running down the hallway.
Room 712.
She kicked the weakened door in and ran inside. She stopped dead in her tracks at the scene before her. She had seen this before and knew she had failed.
Too slow.
Far, far too slow.
She fell to her knees and crawled forward, she desperately tried to lift the mass of rubble off those trapped. Her quirk was not enough. When it really mattered, she had always come up short. She screamed and kept trying until she could scream no more and just cried.
"I'm so sorry..." She repeated the words over and over again as she bowed her head.
She looked up eventually and screamed. The faces were inhuman, grotesque, and tortured. The skin was burned and peeling, the muscle beneath showing and fire where blood should have been. She could see the pain in their perfect eyes though and the ever-burning question.
"Why?"
She could always see it. Every time she saw it, she couldn't help but hate herself for not having an answer. So, she screamed and cried and pounded on the floor always saying the same words.
"I'm so sorry... Mommy... Daddy... I'm so sorry..."
The fire around her started to twist and dissolve and then she was kneeling in a blood-spattered alleyway. An alleyway she knew all too well.
"gods no... please... don't be dead... please..." she begged as she crawled to the person in blue and white armor.
As she got closer her hands met with a growing pool of blood, until eventually her hands and legs were covered by it. She got up next to him and turned him over, already knowing what she would find.
She turned him over and the lifeless eyes of Iida started back at her, blood gushing out of a hole in his neck. She desperately tried to staunch the flow with her hands, but the more she tried the more it gushed until it was swirling around her. A whirlpool of blood whipped around her, it forced her mouth open rushed into her lungs. All the while a long gone voice whispered in her mind...
"Why... Why did you let me die... Why...?"
She couldn't respond and felt her life ebb away until darkness covered her, suffocating her.
Then she opened her eyes, to a scene from hell. Fires raged across the ruins of a once vibrant and lush small mountain town, blood ran through gashes rent in the earth by giant hands, bits of trash and rubble lazily drifted through the air and fell from the sky, and the field of corpses stretched before her.
The broken bodies of heroes, villains, and civilians alike littered the area. She wandered dazed and unfeeling through the area. She eventually found herself at the entrance to an old bomb shelter where some nearby civilians had taken shelter, or where an entrance had been. The whole thing was collapsed, and she knew everyone inside was dead. She fell to her knees and just stared at the scene of carnage in front of the now collapsed shelter. The villains had been focused on killing her and her classmates. They had figured that out too late and thinking they were protecting the civilians had brought the fight to them instead.
Gigantomachia had appeared here first, teleported in via Kurogiri he had destroyed everything. The bodies of her classmates littered the ground, all in varying states. Some buried, some flattened, some just an unrecognizable pile of flesh.
Then the voice started echoing around her. Demanding to know why she had failed them. Their deaths, Iida, her parents, her ultimate failing.
"Damn the villains, damn the world, damn me, I'll crush it all. They'll all die, I'll ensure it with my own two hands. I'll break them just like they broke me. I'll see Shigiraki's body at my feet, him and all his people, even if I die trying."
Her vision blurred red as she bled from her tear ducts. They may have won this battle, they might have killed Gigantomachia, but it was all meaningless.
What was even the point of winning if all she cared about just ended up dying, burning, exploding, or getting crushed in the end.
"What's the point of living?" she wondered to herself.
"To kill them all, to wipe Shigiraki and his league from the face of the earth. No matter the cost." A voice inside her answered.
Eventually, the blackness came, and she welcomed it. The relief of the pain she felt had come.
It didn't make a difference though. It was just exchanging one pain for another.
She awoke in a cold sweat. She sat up and just buried her face in her hands, curling up into a ball she cried for what she felt must have been hours. Eventually, she sat up and started breathing deep and slow.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
Eventually, the shaking and sweating stopped and she just leaned against the headboard. She glanced over at the calendar. June 25th.
"Already the 25th..." she whispered quietly.
She always had nightmares on this day, and no amount of therapy was going to prevent that. She only hoped that time would do that, but until then she would just have to learn to cope.
She got up from her bed and went over to the balcony window, she stepped out into the warm summer night and sat down on one of her mesh chairs. She looked up to the sky and drank in the light of the stars. It wasn't anything compared to what she had been able to see out in the rural parts of Japan but at the very least the destroyed infrastructure of Japan meant people could see the night sky more clearly. The sight made her sad, it had been a long time since she had been back to her hometown; since she had been able to stare up into the sky and see the beautiful starry night. The lack of stars reminded her of her parents and of her life before she went to UA. Remembering her parents though only made her feel worse, so she got up and went back inside.
She rummaged through her draws and picked out some appropriate clothes for today's meeting. She felt a wave of warmth pass over her and she shivered despite it. It was always at its worse around this time. She always dreamt of that event and of the pain that came with it. the phantom heat and occasional pain would pass through her like a wave.
She stretched and gave herself a light slap.
"That's enough," she told herself. "I can't keep going on like this, time to get moving."
She walked into the bathroom and stopped at the covered mirror above the sink.
She hadn't ever used the mirror; she knew that if the mirror was uncovered, she would have to give up her last meager defense against the pain. The mirror represented to her, the truth she couldn't face. This was the only mirror in the apartment she had managed without for over a year. Every time she needed a mirror, she'd use the one in her bedroom located above her dresser. When she got out of the shower, she'd dress then go and manage her hair in that mirror.
Her therapist, however, in their last meeting of possibly the year had told her that she had to face it eventually. There wouldn't be much point in the therapy if she could never ever learn to face an object of her trauma eventually. It wasn't like she hadn't seen similar or even worse things too, honestly in comparison to some of the things she had seen this seemed such a small and petty problem. So, while she knew her therapist was right, the prospect was still daunting. Today though in her mind seemed to be the perfect day to do it. The day where it all began, would also mark the day where she truly started to take strides forward in recovering once and for all. She cast her thoughts towards her parents and All Might, her greatest figures of inspiration and they seemed to lend her the strength she needed.
"Face it Ochako. You can't avoid it forever, go beyond!" She said psyching herself up.
Then in one quick movement, she tore the cover off the mirror, and before her nerve failed her, she stripped out of her clothes and simply stared at herself in the mirror. It took all of her will power to not look away immediately or shatter the mirror. She felt her heart rate quicken and she had to grip the sides of the sink to stay standing.
The ugly twisting burn scar covered her right breast and side, the twisting tendrils of scarring crept across her like the reaching claws of some shadowy monster. She was on the verge of panicking and then she thought she saw something orange and flickering out of the corner of her eye, she was starting to pant now and could feel cold sweat starting to break out. She flashed back to her parent's burning faces and she could swear she could feel the heat of the fire all around her. She had started to make things in the entire bathroom start to float and the mirror was rattling when a voice, small and distant but insistent seemed to drift into her mind from a long way away.
"I want you all to remember these words, my master told me these words, and they are what continues to push me forward even now... If you feel yourself hitting up against your limit remember for what cause you clench your fists... remember why you started down this path, and let that memory carry you beyond your limit."
The words were spoken to the class by All Might days before his death, and remembering those words drove her thoughts towards that of her parents and their deaths. She had sworn to protect people as All Might had, she had sworn to never let such a tragedy happen again while she still drew breath. She could feel the panic receding as she remembered those words and her promise.
The therapy she had been undergoing had also helped quite a bit. She had been told to help other burn victims as part of her therapy. Some might think of it as an excessive and cruel method of therapy, but her therapist, Dr. Kouta Minoru, specialized in PTSD in heroes and knew her very well after a few months of a regular, more standard style of therapy. So, when the time came to work on her fear of seeing her scarred body, he decided that having her help others with similar injuries would help her overcome her fear. He had been right too; it had terrified her at first. She nearly had a panic attack the first couple of times, but he kept reiterating that these people needed help. They needed a hero, they needed her. That had been what done it, approaching it from a heroics perspective drastically helped. It hadn't been easy, but by the end, she could look in mirrors. Mirrors while clothed anyway, she hadn't managed it without their thin veil of protection. mirrors in her own home were her last big hurdle to overcome, and she would overcome it today. There was no better day for it after all.
The second scar she saw, expanded outward from where the right nipple should have been. Just a mass of scar tissue now. She shivered, the unnatural and sickening sight was not easy to overcome. The entire course of events seemed to stretch on for ages, but only a couple of seconds had passed before she turned away from the harrowing sight and ran the water as cold as she could. The heat she felt despite the cool air of the apartment and slight tightening in her chest made her grip the side of the shower for support. Despite the cool temperature of the bathroom, she felt warm, hot even. She often felt a wave of heat overcome her in the aftermath of the nightmare, or in this case seeing her scarred body. So, she never used hot water.
Just before she got in though, she stopped herself. The images of her parents had drifted across her mind again and before she could think about it, she turned back and stared at herself once more in the mirror. She didn't look away this time however, she simply stared at herself in the mirror. Drinking in the harrowing sight. She couldn't keep running from the truth of the injury forever or what it represented to her. She didn't know how long she stared but eventually, she took a deep breath and smiled.
"I will overcome this. I won't go to pieces. I will live on, both for myself and for everyone else. I will survive." She said aloud, the determination of her statement bolstering her confidence.
Yes, she would survive.
She would carry on living.
She owed both of her parents, Iida, and All Might, that much.
Ochako walked down the hallway toward the conference room. She sighed, knowing exactly what she was likely to hear. Every month they discussed the same topics and just debated on how to solve the problems they faced. It never amounted to much in the end, but sometimes they actually managed to accomplish something and that made attending the meetings worth it. Even if she didn't really contribute anything, her presence was a comfort to the people involved so she stoically attended the monthly meetings. They were also an excellent source of reliable news, and she always knew exactly what was going in every city.
She walked up to the doors and strolled inside stifling a yawn as she did so. When she saw who was in the conference room today though, she stopped and blinked, unsure if she wasn't just hallucinating.
But there they were. Nezu the UA principal, her old teacher Aizawa, Hawks, Shoto Todoroki, Bakugo Katsuki, Momo Yaoyorozu, and even to her even greater surprise, detective Tsukauchi. Seeing all of these people in the same room was not only unnatural but also surreal to her. It also brought some dark memories to mind, seeing all these people in the same room wasn't going to be good.
Surprised though she was, she didn't miss a beat. Nezu, Aizawa, and Tsukauchi were discussing something at one end of the conference table looking at and occasionally gesturing to a laptop screen. Nezu, minus missing an ear, looked the exact same as he did when she was a student. Tsukauchi looked much the same as well, but he sported a new scar and his coat was even more ragged than the last time she saw it. She could only assume it held some sentimental value. Aizawa though still didn't look good, even after a year and a half of tentative retirement from active heroics and just focusing on teaching, he still had that sickly complexion; the bags under his eyes were especially pronounced. His hair was held back in a ponytail and he even had few thin lines of silver starting to appear. The stress had gotten to him, and he seemed to have aged quite a bit more than he should have.
has it really been a year and a half since it all ended? she wondered.
The other four, however, were a bit noisier. Bakugo seemed to have gotten involved in another argument with Todoroki. Yaoyorozu naturally took Todoroki's side, with Hawks acting as a sort of middle man she guessed, or else just enjoying the show. Bakugo had his customary spiky hair but now had a light goatee in addition. The prominent and honestly complimentary scar on his left cheek made him look all the more like one of the top heroes he was (not to mention scary). He sported a few light scars, but overall, not only had he become even more intimidating, but he had also become quite handsome. Ochako had heard he had gotten a girlfriend at some point, but she hadn't seen him in a while so she had never met her if she even existed, to begin with. He was very tight-lipped about his personal life but when you were friends with Ashido it was a good policy.
Todoroki had slightly longer hair but it was much the same as it was when he was a student. His features had become more rugged and he had also become two inches taller. Todoroki had come out of everything the cleanest, he was by far the most classically handsome guy of their class and his looks along with his blunt attitude had made him one of the most liked heroes of the times. He had one of the biggest fanbases out of all of Class-1A, matched only by Bakugo and the combined fanbase of Kirishima and Ashido. The fanbases of Kirishima and Ashido had kind of merged together after the two of them had gotten married last year.
Yaoyorozu's hair had been short during the war. but now it was even longer than it was in school and was still in the trademark ponytail of hers. She had become a de facto female hero of modern times and was the aspiration of many an aspiring hero. She had almost as many if not more scars as Ochako herself did and until she had upgraded her hero suit, were very visible at all times. Her defenses had always been a problem given her quirk for a long time, but Momo had come to terms with the scars long ago and had worn them like badges of honor when she was out working, at least until she had gotten her upgraded suit that covered her entire body.
Hawks was the same, if not a bit more rugged and rough around the edges and sporting a small scar above his left eye.
Despite the dread, she felt in the pit of her stomach, she couldn't help but smile at the two sights. It had been a while since she had seen these particular friends and teachers of hers and she was looking forward to catching up with them. It reminded her of the days when they were all students at U.A. As she smiled though, it faded with the pang she felt through her heart and the thought that went through her mind.
Iida should be here too...
Remembering Iida just made her sad. He had died so long ago now, with all of his hopes and dreams going unfulfilled. If he were alive today, she had no doubt he would have been in the meeting room with them. Still, she did feel happy at seeing them all and it reminded her of the upcoming get-together with Tsuyu and the rest of the class. It would be nice to see everyone again and catch-up. Things had been so chaotic for the last year and a half that everyone had precious little time to interact with one another. The last time she had seen everyone was during Kirishima and Ashido's wedding, and that had been short-lived due to everyone's highly demanding schedules. Seeing her friends was difficult, especially since most of the class wasn't stationed in the city. It had taken a lot of planning ahead of time, but everyone had managed to set aside three days for an informal class reunion. She suspected that Momo and Todoroki had done some persuading of people in the H.A. to allow for these tops of the line heroes, time to relax. Lord knew they needed it, and the last thing the H.A. wanted, was for their top heroes to burn out.
The argument between Todoroki and Bakugo showed no signs of abating, so she decided to ask Aizawa and Nezu what was going on. Normally, these meetings involved only some of the higher-ups of the Heroes Association with some rotation between people and also Hawks. It was unusual to see anyone else here, let alone none of the usual (minus Hawks).
"... we still don't know where they are or what they are planning but we have to move fast too..." Tsukauchi stopped talking when he noticed Ochako approaching.
"Ah, Uraraka it's good to see you again. I hope you've been well?" Tsukauchi said.
"I've been fine Mr. Tsukauchi, but I'm confused as to why everyone is here. I wasn't told you all would be coming today. What's happened that the H.A. would have all of us meeting?" She knew something was wrong, she just prayed that it would be something relatively minor.
"The association felt that everyone here would be the best to help manage the upcoming crisis. Hawks is here acting as the Associations representative. Now that you are here, we can officially start the meeting." replied Nezu. He looked at Aizawa and nodded.
Aizawa merely nodded back and turned towards the other group. He activated his quirk and merely stared at them.
Bakugo was in the middle of saying something when he felt a chill run up his spine. He knew the others had felt it too, and as one they turned and looked at Aizawa. "Meetings starting, sit down," said Aizawa and just like that, they all took their places.
Ochako went and sat next to Momo, and while their seniors started setting the projector up with assistance from Hawks (who did attend the normal H.A. meeting occasionally) the four friends got to talking.
"Uraraka, it's great to see you again! How've you been?" asked Momo with a bright smile.
"I've been better, sleeping is difficult at times but the past year and a half have done a lot of good. I've been able to relax and sort some stuff out. stopped seeing my psychiatrist and therapist last month, but those meetings will likely resume in about four months' time. He told me I could call whenever I needed, but he wanted to put some distance between us and see how things went for a bit." replied Ochako. She honestly had gotten better; the nightmares came much less frequently and after the morning she was not only confident but determined to face what might come head-on.
Then the lights dimmed a bit and the projector flickered on
