Welcome! This is only a small snippet to introduce Nomi but I'm very excited to start working on her story!
As always, feedback and constructive criticism are welcomed!
"You carry the heavens
in your eyes
like one of those old
Greek tragedies.
And I'd call you Atlas,
but he wasn't given
a choice to hold the stars.
You were."
(P.D. Vulpe)
Prologue
Nomi Katsuragi knew her normal life was over by the time she was four years old.
Before then, she was a curious and carefree child. Her time was usually spent outdoors, exploring the woods behind her house and creating "potions" from various plants and insects that she would find, her clothes constantly smeared with dirt and mud, with twigs in her hair, scraped knees, and wet socks from jumping in too many puddles. Her parents would laugh when she stumbled into the house at dusk, affectionately referring to her as a beast before they cleaned her up and showered her with hugs and kisses.
If she had known then that she would never experience that kind of love again, she might have cherished it just a little more.
The day her Quirk manifested had begun an average one. A thunderstorm had kept her inside the house, leaving her to play with the blocks and dolls that were usually tidily put away in a toy chest. Her father had left for work that morning with a kiss on the cheek for both his wife and daughter, and her mother had gone about her daily household duties of laundry and cleaning. Nomi was left alone for most of the morning in the playroom, acting out her favorite game of "Heroes vs Villains" with her dolls.
Her designated "villain" doll rampaged through the block "city," complete with sound effects as it demolished buildings, when her mother walked into the room, carrying Nomi's lunch in her hands.
"Nochan, I brought you your—" Her mother had abruptly stopped in her tracks when Nomi looked up.
Nomi smiled, getting up to accept the food before she froze when her mother started screaming. At the same time, an awful, searing pain shot through Nomi's right eye, and, frightened, she began screaming, too.
Only the shattering of the clay dishes on the floor snapped them out of it. Milk and noodles leeched across the wooden boards toward Nomi's feet as she stood, shaking, her hand clapped over the now-dull, fading pain in her right eye. Nomi's mother had gone sheet-white, and she sank to her knees, uncaring of the mess on the floor.
It wasn't until later that Nomi realized her Quirk—the superhuman ability most of her generation possessed—had ruined her happy life after that.
The night of her Quirk's manifestation, she had sat at the dining table, a cloth pressed over her right eye, listening to her parents argue in the next room.
"It's not natural!" her mother screeched. "She's a demon—she's been possessed! She's cursed, and we need to exorcise that evil spirit now before it's too late—"
"It's her Quirk!" her father had yelled back, exasperated. "We both have one, we knew her own would manifest around this time—"
"That Quirk is nothing like ours!" her mother wailed. "It's evil! It's monstrous! She—it—made me see things—"
Her father had marched back into the kitchen then. Her mother trailed him, irate and pale, as he sat down across from Nomi at the table.
"Nochan," he said gently, "let me see your eye, please."
Nomi sniffled. "What's happening to me, Papa? Why is Mama upset?"
"It's just your Quirk, darling," he'd said. "Remember? We told you this would happen one day. It's nothing to be afraid of. Now, come on; let's see that other beautiful eye of yours."
Slowly, Nomi had lowered the cloth from her right eye. After keeping it in darkness for so long, the sudden light made her squint. There was no pain at that moment, but she thought her right eye was different from before; she could see more, see farther. The pores on her father's lined face became clearer, closer. The dust motes in the air swirled like snowflakes around her poor mother, sticking to the individual strands of her black hair.
Nomi met her father's eyes.
And then he screamed.
Her right eye flared with pain again, and suddenly, their small house was filled with the sound of Nomi and both of her parents screaming.
The doctor who specialized in what her father called "Emitter-type Quirks" had arrived the very next day.
He'd poked and prodded at Nomi for hours; he'd even unwrapped the bandages around her right eye and studied it from her peripheral. He was smart, the doctor; he'd suspected that direct eye contact with her right eye was dangerous, and he was right. After he was done examining her in her bedroom, he'd covered her eye again and called her parents inside.
He stripped off his special-grade gloves, revealing nails that resembled talons as he spoke to her parents.
"You say the both of you…saw things when you looked into her right eye?" he asked.
Her father nodded. It looked like he hadn't slept the night before. "Yes."
The doctor hummed. "What sort of things?"
Her father said nothing. Her mother, from behind her hands, whispered, "Awful things."
"You'll need to be more specific than that. Hallucinations? Things that happened in the past? Things that will happen in the future?" He'd flexed his talons, as white as his hair. "There have been no records of any time-travel-related Quirks, though Warping is possible in rare cases, and Brainwashing—"
"Nightmares," her father had uttered. "Fears." His shoulders had trembled. Her mother clutched his arm. "She showed me…the things I feared."
The doctor had nodded slowly. "Fear-related illusions. Illusions are quite common for Emitter-type Quirks, though I do admit to not having seen one related to the emotion of fear—"
"Please." Her mother's lips wobbled. "Take it out of her head. Get rid of it. That eye—it's c-cursed."
"That eye is her Quirk." The doctor's voice had been injected with steel. It had even captured Nomi's attention. "Hone it. Teach her how to use it—or not use it—properly. Entrust her to the care of the teachers and counselors around this country who will guide her and help her. There are safeguards in place in this new society of ours meant exactly for people like her. Use them."
Her parents had left to escort the doctor out of their home then, leaving Nomi alone in her bedroom.
When all the adults had gone, she picked up a small compact mirror left on her bedside table and raised it up to her face. She uncovered her right eye and looked into the mirror.
Her left eye was still the same as it always had been. Big and a pale lilac color, like her mother's eyes. Unchanged. Normal.
Her right eye no longer resembled anything human.
The pale purple iris had become a bloody red, the pupil nothing more than a slit. The white of her eye had disappeared, too. In its place remained black. An eye of a demon.
Nomi Katsuragi was only four years old, but she already knew that her life would never be the same again.
Normal, she had come to realize later, was destroyed the moment that demon eye had stared back at her from the mirror.
Her parents had argued a lot about sending her to school.
"What if she hurts someone? Scars some poor child for life?"
Even though her bedroom was upstairs, voices carried in their house, and Nomi's mother always reached a certain pitch when she spoke of Nomi and her Quirk.
"We'll have people out for our blood!" Nomi's mother continued from downstairs. Nomi sat on her knees behind her cracked bedroom door, listening to every word. "There'll be mobs with pitchforks!"
"We can't keep her locked up and shut away like some prisoner," her father's tired voice said. He had always been weary from working so much, but after Nomi's Quirk had manifested, he was exhausted to the bone. "You remember what the doctor said. She needs guidance. Someone to help her control it."
"There's no helping that cursed child," her mother spat. "Not with that demon eye."
Demon eye. She'd never been given an official name for her Quirk yet, but her mother said it so often that Nomi assumed that was what it was truly called. It was also what her mother had put on her Quirk registration papers. It had been hard for her to understand back then what her newly changed right eye could do, but the fear and vehemence in her mother's voice whenever she spoke of it were clear. Demon eye.
In the end, her mother caved, and Nomi was allowed to attend kindergarten, and then elementary school.
For the most part, school was simple and fun. The other kids asked her why she always wore an eyepatch, of course, but they never pressed when she told them she wasn't allowed to take it off; they simply shrugged and went back to showing off their own Quirks to the class.
Middle school was different.
Her classmates often loudly speculated that she was Quirkless since she could never take off her eyepatch, but the endless teasing and bullying had stopped after one day in particular when a boy in her class had thought it would be funny to rip off her eyepatch using the sticky substance he could shoot from his fingertips.
Nomi had clapped both hands over her eye in horror. "No! Give it back! Please!"
"Or what?" the boy taunted, dangling her eyepatch from his finger. The rest of the class had watched, excited and tense, as he leered at her. Their teacher, of course, wasn't in the classroom yet, and Nomi's heart had skittered in her chest like a frightened animal. "What are you going to do, Quirkless? C'mon—show us your eye!"
"I can't do that. Please, just give it back—"
He'd then wrenched her hands away and froze to the spot.
It had been years since she'd used her Quirk on another human being who wasn't one of her numerous specialists or counselors. She'd been tested to see if it worked on animals or anything else, but her Quirk was only for humans, and after her parents, she'd always used it in controlled conditions.
But when that boy had forced her to uncover her demon eye, when he'd made eye contact with her before she could look away or shut her eyes, that same blinding pain shot through her head, her eye, and the boy had started screaming.
She never knew what their illusions were, what people saw when they looked into her demon eye. Her Quirk didn't allow her to access their minds fully to a point where she could read or control them. All she knew was that whatever they saw terrified them.
"Temporary exposure creates abject fear and horror," one of her specialists had theorized, "but I wonder if prolonged exposure could lead to partial or full madness?"
Nomi had never tried, and she never wanted to.
The boy had kept screaming long after she had covered her eye again.
No one tried to see under her eyepatch again after that.
"You should apply for U.A. High School."
Nomi looked up from her lap into the violet eyes of her middle school counselor. The woman was compassionate and warm despite Nomi's terrible Quirk, and she respected the woman greatly. Thus, she was shocked by the conviction in her counselor's voice.
"U.A.?" she repeated, skeptical. "The best Hero Academy in the country? You think they'd be interested in something like this?"
She pointed to the simple black eyepatch covering her demon eye. Her counselor sighed.
"We've been over this, Nomi," she said. "Your Quirk is never something you should fear. It has great power—yes, great. And terrible," she added to Nomi's incredulous look, "but that means it also comes with great responsibility. U.A. is the best place to teach you how to handle that power."
Nomi frowned at a chip in her counselor's desk. The woman sighed again.
"You admire heroes," she said. "You always have. You've even expressed interest in being one to me before."
Nomi hunched in her seat. "It's not realistic. It's not like my Quirk could ever save anyone. All it does is hurt people."
"Maybe it doesn't have to be that way."
When Nomi said nothing, her counselor pushed a stack of papers toward her. "Here. These are applications to all the Hero Academies in Japan—U.A. included. You don't even have to try for the heroics courses if you don't want to. General studies is fine, too. I just want you to think positively about your future, Nomi. Even if it's only for a moment while filling out these forms."
"Even if it's only for a moment."
The words echoed back to her that night while she sat at her desk in her bedroom, listening to music and doing homework. Her pencil paused in its scratching for the umpteenth time as she looked at the stack of papers jutting out from the depths of her backpack. The top paper gleamed out at her, emblazoned with gold: U.A. HIGH SCHOOL APPLICATION FORM.
"Even if it's only for a moment."
She grabbed the form and a pen and began to write.
That had been two years ago.
When the villains pressed close, surrounding her on all sides, dozens of them, she began to regret ever chasing that moment, that fleeting dream of becoming a pro hero.
But there was no time for regrets now.
She removed her mask and let them come.