one.
She wakes up alone in a hospital bed, with the phantom pain of lost limbs and and constant agony in every part of her body with every breath she draws.
You're lucky to be alive, they tell her.
An unsolved villain attack, they had decided.
She is eight years old and all alone in the world.
two.
Scars like her flesh has been peeled away in layers, temporary muteness and amnesia from a deeply traumatic event.
They fit her with prosthetics, skin grafts and crutches. Healing staff quirks and government funding for special cases like hers can only go so far, after all.
She learns to walk again and how to use her new limbs.
She goes to therapy.
She gets turned into the system after a couple of months.
three.
The sympathy and the pity, after a while, wanes.
There are hundreds of cases like hers, and there are none. There are other children who have survived villain attacks, who bore scars from the trauma - but none so obvious or horrific as hers.
She doesn't even have a quirk.
The third time she is returned, their eyes turn cold.
Where is the family that you want to remember so badly, they seem to demand, and when will they come to get you?
three.
She remembers a mother with a kind face and warm arms. She remembers a brother with a sweet smile and trusting eyes, a brother she had loved but had pushed away to protect herself. The little brother she should have been protecting instead and had failed to -
(Never mind that she was eight years old and a child too.
The impact of the blows upon her cheek had hurt before, and she hated remembering that. She usually tried not to think about it at all, but the pain had instantly flashed in her mind the moment dark questioning eyes had settled upon her like a cruel omen and her own teared up, her mouth gaped open, it trembled and suddenly blurted out, she lied -)
She remembers frail grandparents, an affectionate pet dog, a father with a cold expression and harder hands - the last memory she keeps locked in a box and never touches again.
She remembers, she talks and she asks and she cries - and she is laughed at and jeered at.
How stupid, they taunt her.
How ridiculous, they goad. You're never going to find your brother - because he's dead, dead, dead. Just like the rest of your family.
She screams, and punches them right in the face.
five.
The years go by and it's all the same here.
The more children that leave, even more are herded into the system. Some of them stay of course, having no choice about it.
The children watch hungrily as the luckier ones are adopted away: the younger and the prettier ones, the ones with the flashy and useful quirks, the ones with the convincingly pleasant temperaments and the least baggage, the ones with the energetic and healthy bodies that don't ache as soon as they get out of bed in the morning.
She hates it when they catch sight of her, feeling sorry for her, thinking they can fix her - or worse, when they happily show her off as if to display what wonderful and generous people they are to take someone like her in, such good parents.
She stays, for now safely tucked in her hidden little corner.
six.
Her name is Hana, she remembers.
My name is Hana, she says, insists, shrieks, defies their numerous attempts to tell her something else.
Ayame. Minako. Nagi. Yui. Kyouko.
The names pile up and the more they try to force her to answer to these false identities, the louder she screams her real name. She's been moved and shuffled around so much, her original papers end up quite lost and they can't tell who she is anymore.
Her name is Hana; and she had a mother, a father, grandparents, a little brother and a dog. Her little brother is alive and he is somewhere out there, maybe even waiting for her to come and find him.
She does not know that but she needs it to be true.
She refuses to believe otherwise.
She holds onto it like it's a talisman, like it's the only thing she knows and has left of her old life, like it's the last thing she has of her past.
She clings to it, to Hana, like it's the only thing keeping her from falling apart completely.
seven.
She survives.
She knows the cold and the dark, the hunger and the loneliness, the four walls that pressed in on all sides of you, and the world that weighed down your shoulders, and dragged you into the dirt. The honey-toned words and soft-palmed hands that turned rough and cruel in an instant, clawing at you, sneering in the dark, whispering that you are unloved and unwanted, that you deserve this, that you are lucky to even have such attention, to even be alive -
She survives, and she is kind and compassionate, the very best that humanity has to offer - because if she's going to find her brother again and finally beg for his forgiveness, how could she be anything but less?
eight.
She grows and she changes.
She abandons her pigtails, the ingrained routine of splitting her hair into two tidy tails high above her ears, the first hairstyle that her mother had taught her and that her grandmother had lovingly styled for her every morning before school. They are too childish, too easy for someone else to wrap their hands around and pull on. Her arms ache and tire, and it drags at her scars when she holds them up for too long.
Her hair grows long and ragged, hanging into her eyes and framing the scars around her jaw and cheeks, and she ties it back into a simple, convenient ponytail at the back of her head, low at the base of her neck. She wears long sleeves, long pants, and a mask to cover her lower face. She learns to use makeup, spending hours with the cheapest and most effective types she can find, practising and blending until there is only the bumpiness as evidence of their existence, to cover up the scars and bruises - for when she is unable to conceal otherwise, for when she is being trotted out before new prospective fosterers or when she is secretly looking for work.
When she hits eighteen, she cuts her hair short and leaves.
She doesn't look back.
Notes: I wrote this immediately after reading Tomura's origin chapter discourse back when it first released (some of y'all really blamed a scared little kid for lying to her abusive dad? Like yeah it was a crap thing to do but.) I got the strong impression that Shimura Kotarou was an absolutely awful, abusive person to his whole family - and that's why it was so hard for any of them to stand up to him; we don't victim-blame here, god.
So basically, Hana survives by luck but not unscathed. Then she gets thrown into and lost in the system; where she is bullied, abused, and discriminated against before she finally comes of age and can leave. Her sense of identity hinges on a name and guilt/her brother's forgiveness/finding him again - which is A LOT on one small child. But that's her trauma response and unhealthy coping mechanisms.
She also has visible scars on most of her body and chronic pain.
Idk if I'll ever muster the energy to write it so let's imagine the next chapter: Hana manages to rent to the tiniest shoebox apartment and maybe charms some of the shadier customers in the hole-in-the-wall diner she works at with her kind but firm nature. Then the diner collapses one day when the League of Villains rampage through the city and she runs outside to see it's being lead by her brother and...