Chapter Twenty-Seven: Fever vs Fervence


Unannounced and unwelcomed. She was forever unannounced and unwelcomed.

She appeared out of thin air. A middle aged brunette with a cigarette stuck between the top of her bottom teeth and the bottom of her top teeth sauntered across the threshold of the Bubaigawara residence. She'd clothed herself in a long obsidian coat, a high quality find by the looks of it, and knee high leather boots which must've been the product of a couple sacrificed cows along the line. Another cow had to have been slaughtered with a hungry smile and greedy hand to design the sandy clutch the woman squeezed with a clenched hand, as though it would fall apart if she loosened her grip, even just a bit.

For all her kids knew, she killed the cows herself, the tight grip and the deliberately heavy steps both complimenting the nefarious air that came in with her whenever she opened the rarely used door. Usually, the motel room the family had managed to permanently squat in smelled of cotton and mold - the room had been rotting itself away for some time now, the siblings trapped inside faring no better.

The root of the Bubaigawara offshoot had two takeout boxes loosely piled in her other hand, the lady more preoccupied with holding onto the purse. Straight to the poor excuse for a kitchenette she went, deliberately avoiding the two dark eyed stares of the children in the room. They weren't her kids - they never were. Just as the two sacks of skin and bones didn't exist to the world, they wouldn't exist to her either.

At least, that's what Jin and Ayumi perceived whenever their mother didn't meet their eyes, and she never once met them before she completely cut ties.

Once she placed the boxes on the counter for the two, the eldest brunette made her way back to the door from which she'd come and go so quickly. Her slow, agonizing steps were methodic, each beat tugging at the strings of what little heart she assumed her children had left. Wide eyes - both of them had wide eyes - just like the two men's she'd been tricked into loving. Was that the reason she never met their gazes? Because of trivial regret? Anger? Fury? From her view, the matriarch saw none of it as trivial. Her feelings, she saw, were permanent as long as the two were around. They were her skin, her bones! - her cries, and her eyes - the two were all of it, and the only way to cleanse herself of what those men had done would be to cleanse the world of her kids.

What better way to do it than to never let them live in the light?

Stray wonderings regarding their mother's motives and desires often took place once she left, the glances Jin and Ayumi shared the beginnings of their never ending curiosity. That particular night, however, the Bubaigawara woman had something to say before she slammed the door back into its watchful place. The woman turned her head back, a rusty gear not used to how its sole task felt, looked above her children's heads, licking a portion of her upperlip. Everything about her was ominous.

"Getting whatever you two want will never be easy, and that's how I want it. That's how I had it." The woman removed her gaze effortlessly, calling one last thing out as she walked off: "I killed a man to get these clothes."

Leaves often shook when bathed in daytime, twitching and quivering under the sun's attention. No matter how soft a hand or gentle a smile, they'd shake and shake until the poor leaves forgot why they had begun to in the first place. Darkness had the Bubaigawaras shaking, shaking, shaking as they wondered if they were capable of the same atrocities as their estranged mother who stood before them. Killing cows, killing men, hiding kids - when they thought the room was pitch black, it only got darker for them. And so, regardless of when she came and left, the matriarch always held her children down with a claw of darkness rather than a watchful eye, hoping it'd kill them in the process.

Purging things was what she did best, after all.

They shook, but for what? - the two had never stopped quivering since birth, early cries never silenced and only prolonged. Unaware of the shaking's source, Jin couldn't find it in his teenage mind to look away from the door; childish Ayumi couldn't look away from him.

Unannounced and unwelcomed. She left forever unannounced and unwelcomed.

Next time I'm forcing that damn teacher to give me an itinerary!

Although Ayumi's heart was pounding - the after effect of having been buried in a sea of melted biomass - the beat was no where near as devastating as the pounding coming from all directions. Trees that depended on each other for support shook, their already quivering leaves nearly convulsing over the breaking bark; though they lacked conscious thought, it was as if they could foretell their demise, foretell the decimation of the forest and the kids forced into it. Ayumi, despite the degree to which she disliked humanity as a whole, couldn't help but sympathize with the surrounding nature - nature, in her dark (and therefore cynical) eyes, being only more of the same molecules organized in different ways than were considered "human". Humanity's disregard for this served as another of countless disincentives that generally kept Ayumi away from participating in their disastrous social constructs.

Earthy smells polluted the pure mountain air, as did the groans of the green girl's fellow classmates, some smothered by muddied rock, others strewn across the ground like the ragdolls they were in comparison to Mother Nature. The entire scene was dirt caked - nature's bitter reminder to humanity of its inferiority - Ayumi no exception to this, the chronically exhausted teen unable to take many more of the shocks provided by the world of heroics.

"Is everyone okay? Make noise if you need help getting out of the rubble!" exclaimed Midoriya, or, as Ayumi had grown to know him, heroism personified. Often, the snake bitten girl would bite her tongue at his over zealous antics, believing it to be too cruel to do more than laugh at the kid's true personality. Cynical as she was, there was something about Midoriya that bred a bit of hope within her troubled mind - a possible impetus of change within what was broken by the system.

A few groans punctuated her surroundings - Ayumi was unable to discern whether they belonged to the students or the trees - each one seemingly exhausted by the institution's unpredictability. Pushing herself up, the brunette deliberately approached one of the large trunks before her, running her hand over the bumps that each spun their own story, like bone markings on a tibia. Wear and tear had done its number on the bark over the years, however, none had split off, an even, fortified layer firmly protruding from the depths of the plant. Ayumi couldn't help but wonder how every cell stayed put together with the terminal stress nature impressed upon the biomass daily, and if there was some secret to it that she was not privy to. Why did the knowledge of pro heroes not put her at ease? How could she not trust those who likely started out as her fellow classmates did?

If her cells could've, the sickly-built girl knew she would've been fragmented by then.

"I'm gonna split!" Peanut butter bread, Thrice, cat and mouse.

"Ayumi. Ayumi." Straightening her backbone, the intern whipped her head around, dark eyes clashing with forest-bred ones. Midoriya shrunk back under the generally apathetic girl's intensity, but continued, relentlessness only natural to the perpetually hard worker, "Would you mind helping some of the others out? They could use some healing."

Ah, too bad. Despite sympathetic whims she'd experience for her classmates every so often, Ayumi, defensive to a fault, couldn't help but assume the term "peers" was purely nominal. As such, she'd developed capricious tendencies in reference to the students of 1-A, understanding of those who were disgruntled by the temperamental way she regarded them. In this situation specifically, Ayumi's cutting tongue took the lead: "I don't heal. I'll only be able to numb them, and when I do that, they may just break their bodies further." With a slight glare, she pointedly spoke, "You would know, Midoriya."

"But-"

"Ayumi!" A riot made his way over from behind the tree-hugging duo, a limp disrupting his pace but not the genuine heart which kept him going. Kirishima's contagious smile infected Ayumi's ever-apathetic features with ease, her thoughts shamelessly diverted from the pleading boy to her right. The red head's attention was electric, something more than adrenaline firing up every neuron in her shaky frame, a redness only he could transmit setting up camp on her natural pallor.

The wide eyed girl had never been attracted to him for congenial reasons - the shark-toothed boy's shadow more luminous than where the sun would hit her own features - yet, she still found her mind caught up in the snare his cinnamon words laid out. He wasn't the meticulous type; his lack of words stuffed with ulterior motives and thoughts of ambiguity were evident of such an attribute - a rare facet of character at that. However, each time that boy borne of passion clamored over to her, sun-brightened teeth attracting the girl like a blinded moth to a flame, Ayumi couldn't deny the paradoxical nature of her analysis, as Kirishima's direct tendencies unfailingly left her questioning if he'd planned to startle her all along.

In retrospect, the brunette might have considered avoiding the boy who had such a drastic affect on her; absence where her family should have been likely was the source of her predisposition to the condition he easily put her in. He was a fever cloaked in the skin of a human - though it burned her to have him so close, Ayumi knew she wouldn't mind her inability to sweat it out.

And then dark eyes hit crimson ones, a mutual affinity filling the gaps each had, cracks and dents and all the like not erased, rather, repaired by the substance the other carried.

It was only a moment, but a moment was all the two ever needed.

"Hm? What is it?"

"A few of the others over there got scraped up in the fall," said Kirishima, eyes never straying from the bloodshot ones that held his captive time and time again. Putting a hand on his partner's shoulder, Kirishima delivered another devastating smile. "Mind helping out?"

It was the same request Midoriya made, the same request, the same request. It was the same request the class favorite made, however, all had been futile the second the red riot had approached. Kirishima held a different place in Ayumi's heart, and thus, a different place in her ear.

Consequentially, when Ayumi responded, no venom shot out: "Oh? I guess. Anything major?"

"Nah, just some scrapes and bruises. It's just - I know you usually have a few bandages on hand whenever we train."

"Yeah I have a few right now. Give me a minute and I'll be right over."

"Thanks, Ayumi! I'll go tell them!"

Lips innately impervious to happy-go-lucky impulses curved upwards for a moment, Ayumi turning away from Kirishima to ride off whatever blush bled through stoic senses. However, a moment - a single flash of the other's smile, a hint of elation at something that was said - was all they needed to continue on. Ayumi liked to think what they had came in bits, each passing glance or small conversation momentous in its own like. Each moment he beheld her in his radiant gaze was a new degree of fever the wide eyed girl was crushed under, and she wondered if the boy that made her burn felt the same way. In a sense, the passion she felt delude her hardened heart had proven to be the most irresistible vice the girl could have possibly acquired, the effect of Kirishima's mere glance a more potent psychoactive than all the substances that had accumulated in her blood.

Only once he was no less than twenty paces away did the girl's body temperature return to its usual levels, then plummeting - a sudden presentation of hypothermia - as Ayumi was reminded again of the gravity her lie held. It was scary, how the less she said seemed to bring them closer.

"Uh, thanks, Ayumi?"

Whipping her pounding head back to the boy with wider eyes than she, Ayumi stifled a gasp - of embarrassment, or pain, or desperation? - quickly covering it with a small cough. Though alarmed, she had no trouble dulling her bloodshot eyes as she had countless times before; she had one weakness, but that failed to stop her from uttering fallacies to all that weren't he. In a melancholy tone that was standard for her, Ayumi replied, "It's no trouble. Not like I'm gonna use my quirk on them or anything."

Regardless of how deeply her pain ran for the trees in the forest, the trees that were still being shaken by an unknown tremor in the ground, Ayumi refused to waver like them, departing from her spot at the class hero's side to aid the crimson boy that had faith in her.

Pride - what could motivate and paralyze as effectively?

"You're in the way again, filth."

"How about you just leave my area then! No one told you to follow me, incompetent swine!"

"Oh, those big words are rich coming from someone whose vocabulary put them at spot twenty-one in the class!"

"Just admit you wanted to fight at your bestie Kirishima's side!"

"GO TO HELL!"

"Guys, guys! No need to fight over me. There's enough to go around, I promise!"

As the trio pushed onward, the snake bitten intern smiled at a mud monster, reminded of the human within her. Permanence would be nice.