She was thirteen-years-old when she dreamed of being born.
There's a reason our memory isn't developed at that age. It's not a great thing to remember. Being squeezed out of everything you know through a too small, thumping, hot hole just to get freaked out by your own scream and your own headache. And your eyesight isn't all that great, but oh! Boobs.
The dreams went on. While her friends mentioned having dreams of flying, losing all their teeth, and going to school without their pants, she had dreams of having her butt wiped, never getting her body to move how she likes, being hypnotized by lights and shapes, and more boobs. Her only comfort was that, while she was dreaming, she didn't remember being thirteen and impressionable.
But it wasn't anything to alert her dad about since it technically wasn't getting in the way of of her grades or sleep, so life went on.
At fourteen her dad finally admitted he wasn't raising kids, just funding a house for them all to fester in, and gave up her and her two younger siblings to foster care. There wasn't any high hopes for adoption. They were all over the age of ten, after all.
In her dreams she'd learned to walk, babble, and discovered her favorite food was applesauce. She had an excellent chew toy that Mommy always kept nice and cool for her. Sore gums on iced squish was…sublime.
Fifteen through eighteen were the years she graduated early from High School and got a job so her and her siblings could be together for the last few years. She learned why her dad might have been burnt out, but also learned just how awful he was for giving up his family. She'd always been their as the Mom for her siblings since their mother died, and she couldn't imagine a life without them.
At night she learned to talk, tried more foods, got into all sorts of cubby holes and general mischief, and started Kindergarten. After her fourth birthday party her parents started watching her extra close for the expression of her quirk. Her mom asked her lots of questions about her dreams while her dad tried giving her math problems that made her head spin. She couldn't remember her dreams, and she was still learning to count, but she liked the attention and did her best to please.
After finishing her general education classes online, which took three years since her time was split between work, her brother and sister, and breathing, she finally got to take the first class towards her Math degree. The university she applied to demanded she be on campus for the classes, which meant time had to be taken from somewhere.
She chose sleep. She had never valued sleep too much, as she'd never had a problem with it. Her biological clock had been perfectly in tune since that first baby dream when she was thirteen, so every night she fell asleep and woke up exactly on time without an alarm clock.
But she hadn't been trying to go to school full-time and work full-time with two teenage siblings still needing her time.
Thus, for the first time since she was thirteen, she found herself nodding off.
And waking up on the other side in the middle of the night, five-years-old and covered in a cold sweat as memories of being a stressed out adult slowly faded from her mind.
She ran to her mother, heart racing, to tell her what she could remember of the details before they disappeared entirely. Her mother, a woman who's been dead on the otherside, smiled wide before shaking her father awake. The same father who'd left them to child services with blank eyes, dark shadows, and unkempt facial hair.
Feelings of an eighteen-year-old and five-year-old mixed in her head, fighting for dominance, till her little body rebelled and she threw up over her mom's carpet slippers. She'd cried from the pain until the last of the memories leaked away and she was left just herself. Just five, still reeling from what her mother insisted was a quirk induced dream, and still Juvi.
Juvi Baiyoso.
Her parents got up to comfort her with an early breakfast and her favorite honey warm tea. She couldn't stop looking at their little apartment with its lack of table, barstools at the counter, and the blanketed kotasu in the living room. It seemed smaller than she remembered, and she kept coming back to the blanketed kotasu in the living room and the short, floor level couch. They just looked so odd and she couldn't figure out why. She couldn't figure out why seeing her parents working in the kitchen together made her chest hurt and her eyes water. She didn't know why she kept looking behind her and kept expecting two more heads to pop out from the hallway.
Sometime mid-morning, Juvi's tired little body finally fell back asleep.
And woke up as Jubilee Brant, with the home row keys of her laptop imprinted on her face.
She cut down her college time to part-time again so she could get better sleep. Her brother was graduating early at seventeen, though not as early as her, so he can help hold up the house until their younger sister, at sixteen, could graduate. They had big dreams for the day they could claim their adult privileges and shake off the heavy shackles that came with being orphaned children.
At twenty-years-old, Jubilee had a falling out with her youngest sister. She'd gotten a boyfriend without telling either her or their brother, which wouldn't have been too much of a problem if he wasn't an absolute skeezeball who constantly smelled of skunk. After announcing her pregnancy with a shriek and river worth of tears, her baby sister had slammed the door of their little apartment and blocked their calls.
When she finally fell asleep, she was Juvi again, living in a country she now knew was Japan and wondering how she knew about multiplication and division without anyone having taught her. Her parents had given her quirk the tentative name of 'Dreams' and hearing about her magical proficiency in math had given her father the courage to finally fill in 'Mathmatical Dreams.' It would be the perfect combination of his and her mother's quirks: Calculator and Lucid Dreamer. They weren't flashy quirks that got you the hero role ont he playground. But they had their uses, which father and mother were more than happy to explain to her.
She knew she dreamed vividly, but she could only remember her dreams when she just woke up. Before she could write down what she could remember, the dreams would slowly drain out, leaving her frustrated and feeling quirkless.
There was a boy in the class next over who was quirkless. Seeing how he was treated on the playground, she found herself desperate to hold on to her vague, just-there quirk. Even so, she could see herself in him, and couldn't understand how he was less than anyone.
When she fell asleep, Jubilee would muse about having dreams of a world where super powers were common before splashing cold water on her face to try and calm the puffiness that came from crying yourself to sleep at night. Somewhere in the world she had a little niece or nephew that she'd never be able to protect.
At twenty-two, half way to her Bachelor's degree in Mathmatics and starting a minor in teaching, Jubilee's brother moved out to attend a university in the State next over. He let her cry on his shoulder for a long time before finally getting into his beat up old Honda and driving away. He'd done what she had, getting his general education credits out of the way before applying to a specialized college. He was going to be a pediatric psychologist in order to help kids like them who had been screwed up by their childhood. And also, and he only said this during that quiet bewitching hour when they weren't quite ready to go to bed, he wanted to be ready to help should they ever get to help their little niece or nephew. It made Jubilee wonder if she really wanted to be a Mathmatician.
One night, when she woke up as nine-year-old Juvi, something older and disillusioned woke up in her chest and she found herself running to the quirkless boy as fast as she could when she saw him raising his arms to block a blow to his head. He had the biggest green eyes she'd ever seen and a face full of freckles, which weren't all that common in Japan, even a Japan filled with all sorts of quirks. She screamed at the top of her lungs to draw over a teacher, making the spattering of bullies scatter, before turning to the boy and throwing her arms around his neck.
"You're not worthless or useless," she said, already crying as well. "I'm sorry it took me so long to help. I'm so sorry."
A few months after her twenty-fourth birthday, Jubilee got in a car accident. She was t-boned by a driver trying to text at the same time and sent into a week long comma.
On the other side, Juvi had a horrific week of insomnia, broken up by brief, dreamless respites brought on by her mother using every over the counter sleep aid she could find. The tingling along her neck became a maddening itch. Her father found her on her bed with her hand covered in blood, the muscles and tips of her vertebrae bare to the world. Only then did they rush her to the E.R. where the doctors gave her the most intense sedative they could give to a child.
Only then did she wake up on the other side as Jubilee in a hospital bed, her bleary-eyed brother at her side.
Stuck to bedrest for the next two weeks, Jubilee found herself left to peruse around in her little dabbled in hobby of anime watching. She mostly watched it for nostalgia sake; a quiet hommage for the peaceful hours spent under the blanket as a child with her siblings watching Dragonball Z , Astro Boy, or Inuyasha . Even before their mother had gotten sick their parents had been far too willing to tune out the children with a laptop and basic TV subscription.
A lot had changed in the anime world since she'd last seen it as a child. She didn't recognize any of the pictures she saw, and she felt kind of silly for watching animated TV shows as a grown adult. But being stuck in bed, and not having seen her little sister for four years now, Jubilee needed comfort. So she clicked on the anime listed on the top, advertised for having several seasons and being popular.
My Hero Academia.
It was a lot more emotionally in depth than she remembered animes being. Though she remembered bawling at an Inuyasha movie once.
One fall morning, eleven-year-old Juvi woke up remembering her dreams perfectly for the first time.
It hurt trying to organize her young mind around twenty-four years of memory and it made the scar on the back of her neck itch. But she was too stunned at the revelations it gave her. Mouth dry, she scrabbled for her phone on the nightstand and pulled up her best friends contact.
" Hey, Juchan," came the painfully familiar voice on the other side, high and childish. " What's up?"
"Zuku," she swallowed and licked her lips, trying to wet her mouth. "That explosion guy, his name is Bakugou Katsuki, right?"