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It starts without anyone noticing and spirals from there.
You’re five and should have gotten your Quirk ages ago. “A Minor Mutation, probably,” the doctor had said. You have oil-slick eyes, a constant stream of vibrant rainbow shimmering off deep black.
Mom and Dad say they look beautiful. They say, “You could be a model, Arata. You are so handsome.”
It doesn’t occur to you that they could be lying. Adults aren’t supposed to lie yet. Or you don’t remember them lying this early. They have always said you are above average, smarter than your peers, prettier than them. It makes sense to you at the time. Your classmates don’t understand the lessons even though they are retaught again and again.
You come home crying because it is so easy and you are so bored. Mom and Dad send you to class with a book the next day. You like it the first time you read it, but they keep giving it to you. It repeats and repeats and repeats.
Finally, you are sick of it. You yell and scream and tell them to stop offering the book to you. Tell them that you hate it now. You read it all those times because they looked so happy putting it in your tiny hands. They called you a little genius. They said you were smart to try to learn more.
You can still imagine it. The plot was dull, something about floating frogs, and there were more pictures than words. But it was a thick book and kept you occupied. Long fingers with rings on them would pass it to you ever other week before school.
“I don't want to read it again! I hate it!” You shrieked with child lungs.
Your parents just looked at you. The distance was expanding and they were pushed farther and farther away in their confusion. “We don’t understand, Arata. You’ve never read this before.”
The oil-slick of your eyes rippled and you fell backwards, time flowing around you. The rush of emotions pushed you under. Why didn’t they understand? Why couldn’t they see?
It took a very long time to realize what your Quirk was. Those were some of the loneliest years of your life. No one could remember the conversations you had. Your friends didn’t know they were your friends. You learned the days of the week without comprehending them and when someone mentioned that their birthday party last week was the best ever, you didn’t understand why they would say that.
You never boasted about going to the zoo or eating ice cream with Dad or seeing a hero fight close up. If you liked something, you went back as many times as it took to get tired of it. You lived moments with child-like fanaticism. Then you peeled them apart into a million layers that you bounced through, watching how each of your actions made the whole thing tangle up.
Your first years were some of the loneliest in your life. They were also some of your longest. You never know how old you actually are. So many days spent trapped in loops tore the concept of time away from you.
Eventually you figured it out what the past was. You went back to the day Mom took you to the zoo. The week afterwards would be rough, you knew. That’s when Daisuke was mean to you. That’s when stole your chocolate bar out of your backpack and you never could find out who did it.
You stare at the piranhas and they stare back. A thousand fish suspended in a tank like they were strung up. Or you used to think it was a thousand. You can count better now.
The only time you have seen them move is when one of the keepers drops a chunk of meat into the water. Then they swarm in a chaotic mess of color. Light reflects from their scales in dizzying patterns. You watch them with eyes that catch the light and bounce it back in even brighter colors. An echo chamber. An ouroboros.
In three weeks you start a book on mythology. Your parents are taken aback at your reading comprehension. Most children your age are stuck tracing lines and tripping over words. You demolish books with ease. You understand before the teacher has even started the lesson.
Mom comes up behind you just as the first piece of flesh falls into the tank. An explosion of glitter, gnashing teeth and blood in the water.
“Arata, isn't this scary? Are you sure you want to watch?”
You used to be scared. The first time you went to the zoo, your trip ended before you got to the aquarium. A villain attack. You got to see Vlad King in action that time. Then you went back again and tripped the villain at the entrance to the zoo. He fell onto his face and cracked his jaw open.
Rewind, watch. Bone meets cement with a crunch. You want to flinch but it is fascinating knowing you have so much control on if someone bleeds or not. Rewind, watch. Power is not fit for children.
It isn’t your fault, Mom assures you. You are only five after all. You haven’t even gotten your Quirk yet, if it is anything besides the polished sheen of your eyes. There is no way you could be accountable for the blood on the pavement.
Rewind, watch. This time the man lands on his wrist with a snap. He howls. You don’t like that one as much. It’s too loud.
It isn’t your fault, Mom assures you. You are only five after all. You haven’t even gotten your Quirk yet, if it is anything besides the polished sheen of your eyes. There is no way you could be accountable for the way the man curls into himself with a sob.
The crowd stills, like it doesn’t know what to do with the figure on the ground. Someone steps forward. A hero probably. Or just a person who wants to do good.
You tried to do good for a while. It feels like grasping on too many strings. If you pull a string in one direction, if you try to lift one person up, the rest fall. You cannot save everyone, so you rarely bother anymore.
The villain whimpers. Someone calls for a medic. Then Someone looks at you with concern in his wide eyes. “Are you okay?” Someone asks. The light seeps through his blonde hair and into your eyes. Yellow refracts into a million pieces.
You break everything you touch.
The villain whimpers again. Sometimes you break things for fun, just to see what it’s like. You look at Someone with reds, blues, greens swirling in your eyes.
Rewind, watch. Bone meets cement with a crunch. You don’t know the word possibilities yet, but a hundred moments of pain stretch in front of you. In your tiny hands, you hold this man’s life. Will he pay thousands to have his jaw reconstructed and wallow in debt? Will he get a bone infection when his wrist cracks apart? Will he murder someone in the future? Does he deserve this? Is he innocent if he hasn’t committed a crime yet?
Thousands of lives rest on top of your tiny shoulders. Your hands are not big enough to crush throats yet, but some day they will be. You know this. Your joints ached as you grew.
It isn’t your fault, Mom assures you. Someone does not step forward this time. Does the way the man’s jaw hangs loosely scare him? Can Someone even be scared?
You manage to see the aquarium that day, for the first time, but hide behind Mom when it is feeding time. Something about the frenzy terrifies you. It is too uncontrolled, too wild. You cannot spot a pattern and it chokes you. The fish move in a million lines, trailing broken timelines behind them. Light bounces from their scales and sinks into your oil-slick eyes. Teeth snap without sound. Blood in the water.
Rewind, watch. Rewind, watch. Can you see how they move now? Does it make sense?
“You are only five,” Mom says from behind you. “Isn’t this scary, Arata?”
The fish dart past each other in jagged movements. They decimate the meat, rip it to shreds. You trace their trajectories before they even move, watching for changes you might have caused. For ripple effects in the brakish water of the tank.
“Yes,” you tell Mom. You don’t like to speak much. Your voice tugs you in different directions from what you want. Sometimes you talk and talk and don’t stop. You look up and Mom’s eyes are large, horrified. She doesn’t understand. She is scared of what you can do.
Rewind, watch. The piranha feast.
“You are only five,” Mom says from behind you. “Isn’t this scary, Arata?”
You nod this time. Why repeat yourself unnecessarily? This is important, a significant moment that you like to return to. A reminder of what you cannot predict. Of what will constantly slip away from your oil-slick eyes. There is too much chaos in the tank for you measure out into neat parcels. Hundreds of sharp movements spanning across the seconds you view again and again.
A lesson in control. A lesson about drowning in chance. You cannot save everyone. You cannot explain yourself. You can only wait for the blood to dissipate.
You are seven now and not seven at the same time. Speaking of, you finally understand it. It is linear and dull. You despise it. You shred it apart again and again and again and sit in silence as everyone follows the rails they have been placed on.
A day ends when the moon lies flat and bloated in the middle of the sky. A week is seven days and a month ranges from twenty-eight to thirty-one. You prefer to count in hours though. If you start thinking about how all these rewinds add up you start realizing how distant you are from your peers. They are stuck on child things and you are transient, too old in a too young body. You are ancient compared to them and it rankles you.
You don’t like to count in years. Thinking of all the hours crammed into that measurement frightens you. It is too long to repeat.
It doesn’t stop you. Your dog dies when you are six. Mom and Dad adopted Rou when Uncle Hiroshi died. He was old and you loved him.
Not Uncle. You never really cared about Uncle. Sometimes he gave you caramels but you only spoke once a year. And that is an awfully long time. You know this intimately.
But Rou, you saw Rou every day for three years. He was greying around the eyes and could only run in short sprints. Whenever Dad took him to the vet, he would joke about free dogs. A pet is never free.
Rou loved you unconditionally. You would like to say you loved him too, in the same awed manner. But seeing someone for so long dulls you to them. People are only interesting the first time you meet them. Rou lasted longer because all the times you truly cherished him were spaced out. He was a warm presence in winter when he curled up in the crook of your elbow. He chased you through the park with his tongue lolling out. He liked it when you hugged him, would shove his head between your arms and demand to be held.
When you are six, Rou dies. Unavoidable, you realize. And that terrifies you more than piranhas ever have. You rewound weeks and months and watched him waste away again and again. It destroyed you every time.
Inevitability tightens around your neck like a noose. You could keep Rou alive indefinitely at first. But repeating days became boring. You can only sit in a classroom of too loud children so many times for someone you only loved in short bursts.
So to avoid the reminder that everything must end, you went back three years. The day Uncle was due to die via drunk driver, you called him on the phone to talk. People over the age of fifty love to talk. They have realized the hard limit on life like you have. They are alone like you are. Uncle never asked you why you wanted to talk for almost an hour on a Saturday night. You didn’t tell him.
Your house felt empty without a dog in it. But the gaze of chaos leveled on the back of your neck faded.
The gaze of your parents didn’t. If you were smart before, you were uncanny now. Where they used to push you up a grade and stop worrying about it, they instead talking quietly in their room. You laid on the wooden floor and watched the yellow light pooling under their door flicker as they moved. Their words were tense. Their arguments sharp. They finally realized the sheer potential you carried in your small hands, the sheer intelligence that bled out of every bored expression and too thick book.
The light puddling under their door fractured in your eyes. It disappeared under the sickly rainbow. You are not supposed to have your Quirk yet, but you are an early bloomer. Or a late bloomer. Depends on whom you ask.
(No one. There is no one to ask.)
And you are seven now, but much older than that. You understand entropy and probability and death. You complete your homework too fast and do not make friends.
Your parents are worried. Mom takes you to the zoo every weekend to watch your eyes glow under the fluorescent light of the aquarium. She asks if you want to be a biologist. She understands your level of cognition now. She has been talking to you like one adult to another for years now.
You watch the piranha erupt into a boiling mass. One of their brethren slips from the delicate turbulence and more blood sinks into the water. It tries to escape the flash of sharp teeth but the tank is too compact. There is nowhere to run to. Its bones rest at the algae-covered bottom moments later.
Rewind, watch. The pattern does not waver this time. No one dies. The meat disappears under the trash of scaled bodies.
“No,” you tell Mom. This is just something you like to do. It is a reminder, an exercise in caution. How much have you changed in this world? How many people have you saved? How many have you killed?
Dad helps you apply for middle schools. “You spend a lot of time on the computer,” he says. “Do you want to go into programming?”
You think about it and the silence drags on him. Dad does not like to wait. Most people don’t. You are an anomaly in more ways than one. Your life is built on patience.
Mistakes are easy to fix with your Quirk. But the cycles you waste solving your problems add up. How old are you? When is the last time you’ve had a friend?
The Internet is a glorious thing boasting all sorts of treasures if you dig for them. And you have more than enough time to search. For you, it is possible to have a hundred interests and enough energy to fulfill all of them. Procrastination is incomprehensible. So are all-nighters.
You can also pretend to be someone you aren’t behind the haze of a screen. People do not doubt you when you lie. They cannot verify your age. You meet strangers through lines of Ethernet cable. There are enough that you don’t feel lonely when they forget. Your world does not feel so empty when you retreat into the safety of the past.
Dad shifts uneasily. Colors swim in the sheen of your eyes. “Arata?” He asks.
You debate rewinding and discard the idea. You don’t want to for some reason, though you have gone back for less. This must be laziness. Why inconvenience yourself and add seconds to your life? Dad’s comfort is not worth that much.
“No,” you tell him. “I’m still thinking.” People like reasons for your actions. They cannot fit investigation into their schedules. They have short attention spans, prefer ‘here and now’ with as little work as possible.
You don’t mind either way. You have time, you have eons in front of you. Your life stretches forwards with no conceivable end. There is no rush in your movements, no mistakes in the work you turn in. The only thing you have to fear is boredom. And far off inescapable outcomes. But those will come later and you can hide from them easily.
Seven is an important age because you finally get your Quirk designation. Mom and Dad take you to the specialist. They talk about your intelligence and quick answers and the way you never startle. ‘Foresight’ reads the text in your file. You contribute some nonsense and extrapolate on untruth. Lies spill over your tongue. They coat your mouth in vitriol and float in the oil of your eyes. You are built of falsehood.
You remember Mom’s horrified expression, lost to another timeline years ago. The fluorescent light of the aquarium twists in your eyes. It perishes in your vision. It is sucked into the void of your pupils. What bounces back is inhuman and awful.
Your mouth opens and your voice fills the air without your input. Mom grows more fearful the more you tell her. She cannot comprehend you. She cannot know understand you have seen.
Rewind. Stay silent. Do not make a sound. Your apathy is terrifying but your emotions worse. You wonder if you will break one day.
‘Foresight’ reads the text in your file. ‘Ability to see thirty seconds into the future. Paired with Minor Mutation of irises (tapetom lucidom over ocular coloboma). Eternally active Quirk.’
You look up the larger words later. Doctors love telling people things in words they cannot understand. They love telling things to people period and not sticking around to see how it changes their life.
“Very strange,” the physician had said. “Given your Quirks, I would expect something more oriented in memory. Arata-kun is part of a minority whose Quirks have mutated away from the family genetics.”
Mom can perfectly recall a handful of sights from the past. She told you years ago that you make up most of the ten pictures locked in her skull. You wonder if this is still true, or if she has rotated them out by now.
Dad always knows what time it is. He said that he feels clocks ticking in time to his pulse. When you were young, you used to put your head on his chest and imagine lines of timers counting down. You think that he is probably the reason you understand how hours pass. Or what a day is. Or why people rush towards an imagined finish line their whole lives.
It doesn’t make sense to you, but you can comprehend it.
‘Arata’ means new. You understand the word sardonic very well at this point.
The search bar flickers as you type. Ocular coloboma are missing pieces of matter in the structures of the eye. Yours occur in the iris, segmenting it into patchy strips of black on black. Tapetom lucidom is a layer of tissue behind your retina that reflects light. It allows superior night vision.
You never realized that humans cannot see in the dark. Some can, with the assistance of Quirks, but you believed it was universal. It just never came up. Another divide between you and the eternally scrambling people of this world. Another reminder that you are not like them, that you will never be like them.
Mom and Dad take you to another appointment the same year. It is a warmer office with tables made for small bodies. The doctors do not wear white coats. They crouch next you in comfortable business wear and hand you crayons.
“Fill out this form for us, Arata-kun. If you don’t know the words, we can help you.”
You sit in one of the child chairs and watch Mom and Dad leave the room. They are going to talk, they tell you. The therapist is interviewing them about you. The doctors are here to help.
You are unsure about that last part, but turn to the packet without speaking. Something about performing an action for the first time makes you savor it. Anxiety clutches at your heart and the future spins out in front of you. What would happen if you lost your abilities? What would happen if you tried to fall and couldn’t?
Seconds flips forwards and backwards. It is comforting, letting time spill out into confusing shapes. You read through the pages too slowly and the therapist comes back. She tries to read the questions aloud. You let her, up until she expects you to answer verbally.
Minutes flip back and Mom and Dad leave the room. You page through the packet to memorize it. You dissect intention behind each word. You entertain the idea of a hundred iterations. How many large words will the doctors tell you? Can you make them believe you are normal?
Finally, you fill out the small bubbles with a yellow crayon. This is the color that shows up the least. You wonder what the doctors would think if you let slip that all your actions carry purpose. You wonder what they would say if the truth poured from between your teeth in all its terrible glory.
“Are you very good at lying?” Asks the form.
“Do you do things without thinking?”
“How much do you love your parents?”
“Do you like to plan ahead?”
“What do you think about heroes?”
“How many friends do you have?”
“Have you ever hurt someone for fun?”
“Are people mean to you at school?”
“What do you feel when other people cry?”
“Do you understand why your parents make rules?”
“How do you compare yourself to others?”
Some of the questions are formulated for people much older than you. They ask about things you have yet to experience. The packet repeats itself too, circling back and rewording what it has already covered. Assurance, you realize. They cannot see the compounding probabilities spreading out to the horizon. This is the only way they know how to check.
You think that many of the questions are pointless. You think this entire appointment is unreasonable. Your homework is perfect and you do not make mistakes. No friends invite you over on weekends and you spend more time on the computer screen than you do outside. Sometimes you avoid chores until the last possible minutes in order to not trap yourself repeating the same tedious actions again and again.
The doctor calls you into a follow-up appointment weeks later. You sit between Mom and Dad and try not to fidget in your too-large chair. The psychologist takes her glasses off and looks Mom and Dad in the face. An appeal to empathy. An indication of sincerity.
She does not glance at your oil-slick eyes. You wonder if she is scared of losing herself in their eternal depths and shattering into a million pieces of light. You wonder if this is the reason most people do not meet your unwavering stare.
“Antisocial personality disorder,” she says. Her mouth falls open and damnation drips off her tongue. Doctors love to do things like this. They love to wrap words for ‘aberrant’ up in the foil of verbosity. They love to drop tinsel covered shackles on people and not stick around to watch them flounder.
Mom and Dad stiffen next to you. No one gazes into the warped kaleidoscope of your eyes. They start to ask for treatment. The color imprisoned in your broken irises beats against your corneas. You sigh next to them and they freeze, like what they are petrified, like they cannot fathom what you may do. Finally they look into their whirling reflections locked inside the glinting abyss of your vision. They see their faces twisting away in an amalgamation of hue.
When you are seven, Mom and Dad take you to your second doctor’s appointment of the year. You sit in a child-size chair with a yellow crayon in your small hand. The psychologist passes you a packet of stapled pages with large text and comic images.
“Fill out this form for us, Arata-kun. If you need help understanding the word, we can help you.”
You never expect to do anything right the first time. Your yellow crayon bubbles in small circles. It is okay, you think. You have no limitations. You are boundless and you never fail, are unable to fail. You do not know what you will accomplish yet, but you know that it will be incomparable to the linear lives eddying around you.
The doctor calls you into a follow-up appointment weeks later. You sit between Mom and Dad and do not fidget in your too-large chair. The doctor steeples her fingers over her lips. She has stacks of paper on her desk now, recommendations overflowing on the wooden surface. Her eyes pinch at the sides as she looks at you, as she studies the shifting neons accumulating against the edges of your gaze.
“Asperger’s Disorder,” she says with a calm smile. You are not something to fear, not a beast encaged in child flesh. You are misunderstood and misunderstanding. You are not aloof, just confused. You cannot piece together the actions of other, cannot devise their motivation, so you interpret the best you can. You copy what you see and sometimes your replicas come out malformed.
Mom’s and Dad’s shoulders droop. The psychologist assures them that you can live a normal and healthy life. You are just not the same as children, better and worse at different things.
You never expect to do anything right the first time. By the second, third, fourth attempt, you glide too steadily over the indecision of others. But you would rather succeed in the unearthly way you do than commit to imperfection.
It is better this way, you tell yourself. Mom and Dad set up biweekly therapy sessions. The psychologist praises them on taking this so well, promises to update your file. She offers her help to ensure disability accommodations. Mom and Dad smile as she talks about your bright future. They are so proud of you.
They fall into the fabrication with ease, with relief. They are so proud, so overjoyed for the protective shell of misdirection you layer yourself in. What would they think of the truth?
You already know that answer. Their pale faces drift through your mind, followed by a wake of discarded alternatives. Mom puts a hand on your shoulder and shutter-clicks, the image of you searing itself into her mind. Dad thanks the psychologist profusely. In the middle of it all, light segments in your oil-slick eyes.
Fifteen is a strange age. You are taller now, but not by much. You inherited Mom’s height. Dad laughs loudly and pats your back. At least you got his voice, he says.
And you do. It is too deep for your slight frame, echoes too low from your thin throat. Mom never stops telling you that you are handsome. You thought she would stop as you finally grew into yourself, moved past the point of childlike fragility. But she doesn’t.
You suppose that parents lie to their children much longer than you initially believed. Certainly nothing awe-inspiring greets you in the mirror. Round cheekbones, heavy-lidded eyes, thin wrists. Shoulder-length hair that you spent a good number of iterations changing, trying to see what you liked best. When you decided to just pull it into a messy ponytail, Dad grins.
“Our little Arata. You should have gone to a modeling school instead.”
Your high school specializes in preparing students for engineering programs. It is one of the best in the country and Mom places the insignia on the rear window of her car with pride. When she has lunch with her friends, they stare jealously as she mentions your perfect GPA.
You are smarter than ever, older than ever. Somewhere along the way you stopped using as many loops. It became easier to complete your work perfectly on the first try. You no longer went back to fix test scores. You discovered if you interacted less with your peers, you did not have to discard so many attempts wasted on having a normal conversation.
The work is good, difficult and fulfilling. You take the most advanced mathematics courses because the numbers comfort you. It is not the same sensation the piranhas bring, not the same reassurance the decay is ineluctable. More that these answers never change with your actions. There are no ripple effects in calculus. The chaos theory is part of mathematics. It is regulated by it, defined in sharp boxes and models, in grids on graph and the bounce of double-rod pendulums. You breathe factorials and exist of probability. You feel alive.
Your classmates do not know what to think of you. Some are intimidated, some reverential. You are an enigma with your slight bones and distorted irises. You are known for your intelligence, regarded as perfect. Your Quirk is incredible for your field, they say, so powerful when paired with your natural genius. When you retreat further into yourself, bury yourself in the safety of percentages and sink into the mess of time, you are regarded even higher.
Somehow your status spreads. Your parents are proud, insanely overjoyed that their son carries the regard of so many. You become a legend, an impossibility, a god in a crowd of children.
You don’t care for it. You like the slow burn of satisfaction when you solve a complicated equation. You like the way the strings holding certain, seemingly unchanging plot points untangle and fall. You like picking people apart, picking scenarios apart, and examining the underpinnings. You like understanding why things happen, what makes them happen, and what can you do to make it all change.
You don’t care for it, but sometimes you do. The way people trip over their words to you is vexing. When they make room for you at tables, you are somehow satisfied and annoying. You despise being invited places and expected to attend. You border on offense when someone attempts to be your friend, and all that entails.
But you like the way people look at you when you use the knowledge garnered from a thousand repetitions. You like scrolling through online news channels and seeing how your actions spread, how everything turns so easily. You like how your class ranking is the highest, unsurpassable and intimidating.
You want to be admired but not touched. You want to be praised and left alone. You want to hold people’s attention in a fist, you want your presence to demand their focus, you want to be known, but if anyone asks you for compassion, for a relationship, for something that requires your effort without personal gain, you sneer.
Not literally of course. It is an inwards scowl. On the outside, your face is flat and dispassionate. You tilt your head to the side and stare at them with color that you lured into your endless eyes, with hues that you trapped between layers of tissue. You blink oil-slick eyes and scare them away.
Fifteen is a strange age. You cycle back to the months before your voice starts cracking out of embarrassment, out of contempt for change. Eventually, you tire of the repetition and release time from the cage of your clawed fingers. You grit your teeth and wait for your voice to drop octaves and ignore the pain of growing bones. You eat more and sleep more and start using your Quirk to peel back hours of the night. You stay up till three studying then rewind back to ten to go to bed. Where your classmates stress about finals and tests and essays adding up, where they guzzle coffee and sell Ritalin and come to school with bags under their eyes, you arrive well rested.
You are untouchable. You are perfect. When you look in the mirror, you still see nothing special. Your talents lie in your intellect, not in the soft texture of your hair or the point of your chin or the span of your shoulders. You have become a Narcissus of everything but your body. You would prefer to hide behind your computer screen, to shield yourself from the appreciation of the physical world and trade it for the mental kind.
Notes start appearing on your desk. They are covered in hearts. They ask you to meet after school. You rewind weeks and allow someone to be your friend. Give her your number and do not pay attention as she preens and gossips. You tell her that you don’t want a girlfriend. That you never have.
Notes start appearing on your desk. They are covered in hearts. They ask you to meet after school. When you ask your friend, she tells you they are from boys. She says that you are cute, are pretty and mysterious and everyone dreams of cracking your icy exterior. And of course, gay. Because if you don’t want a girlfriend, you must want something else. No one wants to be alone.
You rewind weeks and allow someone to be your friend. A different person. Give him your number and do not pay attention as he preens and gossips. You tell him that you don’t want anyone. That you never have.
The rumors spread that you are concentrating on your studies. A teacher pulls you aside after class and commends you on your dedication. The notes do not entirely stop, but slow considerably. More people try to get closer to you. Your friend says they want to show you that you will not have to put aside your work to be with them. They want to study with you, want to go on dates where they quiz you on vocabulary in bright cafes.
You tell him that you are fine right now. He laughs and pats your back and asks to hang out for the fifth time this month. You grit your teeth and let your lips twitch into the almost smile you permit people to see. You want to be loved like a mythical figure. You want to be treated as important, as the most influential person in the country, but closed off from everyone by Plexiglas and bodyguards.
At least your hands have grown larger. Your long fingers fit around necks perfectly, threading behind someone’s head as your thumbs press into their throat. You have tried this, just to see what it was like. Adrenaline raced through your body and anxiety chewed your lungs apart when you imagined that this was the last iteration, that there was no going back from this.
It wasn’t that interesting in the end. You repeated the encounter again and again, watched closely every time as their face turned red. But after the first exhilarating time, it lost its appeal. You felt nothing as you finally choked someone’s life out of them.
Did they have a family? Would they save someone later? Would their death bring about the end of the world?
The personal act differed from the widespread loss you reap in only the minutia. More sweat down your back, more scratches covering your arms, more trembling in your fingers as you dropped the body to the ground.
It started to become interesting when the news sources picked the murder up. Clips of police officers discussing your case broke the monopoly the League of Villains had on headlines. The thrill of knowing someone was actively hunting you, the nickname that flashed across television screens, the increased paranoia digging needles into everybody? That is where you started to thrive.
Your parents did not understand why you started smiling more. They were thankful of each emote, unaware of their cause. Fear tore at the back of your neck and you felt alive.
This is how you met Someone again. He caught you in a grimy alleyway in the middle of the night. You were humiliated.
Not because he caught you. You felt guilty at the cliché. An alley filled with rotting garbage that not even dogs go to die? It was uncreative. It was not where you wanted to have a final stand. It was not what you wanted your actions to lead to.
For a second, you thought of rewinding. Before you had bruises on your wrists from a man’s grip. Before Someone looked over your shoulder and saw a body slumped next to the overflowing dumpster.
No, you decide. You want to see where this leads. The pale yellow of a streetlight shines through Someone’s blonde hair and falls into your eyes. It dies there, is ground down by the weight of unmeasured age and hundreds of overwritten mistakes. A travesty of the original tone refracts back amidst the swirls of grease in your broken, empty irises.
Someone anticipates your attack, braces himself. You swing one flimsy punch. Your combat skills are nonexistent, are unnecessary. Each victim left to rot in shallow doorways and under laundry lines was captured by prediction and preparation. Not by physical prowess.
Your fist slips right through Someone. It passes through his hero costume and his skin and back into the air. It feels like you are sinking your hand into dense air. There is nothing in him, no substance behind his frown and bright hair and broad shoulders.
But his eyes, his wide, black eyes flood with resolve. They shine with passion. It is blinding and terrifying and worse than anything you have ever witnessed. His stare meets yours and it carries the power of everything you cannot be.
He grabs your wrists and flips your feet out from under you and you blink back seconds purely on instinct.
Someone stands in front of you in a grimy alleyway in the middle of the night. The pale yellow of a streetlight shines through Someone’s blonde hair and falls into your eyes. It dies there, it shatters into fragments and drowns in the ocean of grease. But when you stare at him, when you meet his furious expression, the oil of your eyes catches the fire burning in his.
You do not throw a punch. Instead you smile, a very real grin that spreads across your face. Your eyes are empty for this first time in your life. The slick of lies has gone up in flames and all that is left is the emptiness it used to hide. You are revealed to the world in your entirety. It finds you wanting.
The metal handcuffs are attached to a metal table in the cement room. You sit in a metal chair and raise one hand up after another. The chain of the cuffs pools like water on the table as you lower your palm to the cool surface. Your hollow eyes never leave the one-way glass across from you.
The smile has not faded. It is too large on your delicate face, a mockery of what a human should look like. You wonder what would happen if you never rewound time when the villain cracked his wrist all those years ago. Would Someone be stronger now? Would he have died throwing himself in front of an attack meant for another? Would he have met you again?
A sound of locks turning. The door opens and you watch a lanky man walk towards you with a thick file in his arms. He places it on the table with a soft pat and bends into his chair. His limbs splay like an insect. When he looks into the broken void of your warped pupils, his glasses glint in the light above you.
Your smile leaves your face. You want to talk to Someone. You do not understand why, but it snaps at you. It consumes you.
The man asks a question and you think it over. Roll it across your tongue. Splinter it into fragments and click them back together in your mind.
“What is your name?”
And what really is your name? Arata, certainly. That is what everyone calls you. ‘New’ it means, and irony rests heavy in your spine. But is it really your name if you have grown too old for it? Is Arata what the first iteration of you was called, before you split yourself into a million pieces and tore through space-time like a rabid animal?
Is a name even yours if it feels foreign to you?
The man takes off his glasses. His fingers are long as he bends the temples in, as he folds them into a perfect cross. You watch his perfectly manicured nails tap against the metal table. The glasses go into his breast pocket and his fingers come together, interlace under his chin as he leans forward. Intimidation, his posture says. Danger lies here.
“We will do this the difficult way, then,” he says.
You almost laugh. The line is ripped straight from shitty movies. This whole night must be a fest of cliché.
But words die in your mouth as his eyes flash. His pupils dilate to pin pricks. He stares at you, stares at you, stares at you. You watch his breathing stutter and pick up until his chest is racing, until you watch his mouth fall open and he starts to pant. Air seems to escape him as he suffocates on perfectly good oxygen. His face burns red then purple then edges on blue as he tips forward, barely catching himself.
His eyes never leave yours. It takes a minute for the people behind the one-way glass to catch on that something is wrong. The door slams open and they pour into the room. You do not recognize any of them. Bloodshot eyes bleed into a suit covered in fur into a girl in a crop top into black dreads. But then, in the very back of the crowd, you see Someone.
“Nighteye!” He screams.
And the man in front of you finally blinks. Then, he seizes and falls to the floor. He twitches like a dying bug and they swarm him.
Bloodshot eyes turn to you and black hair starts to lift but you are already gone, slipping away and slicing linear strands behind you. Someone meets your eyes one last time and they burn, burn, burn until the vision carves itself into your brain.
You are fifteen. There is no blood on your hands. No bodies rest in shallow doorways and under laundry lines. There are no rolling lines of text speaking of your latest deed.
You lie in bed and think. A part of you wants to try again. To do it better this time. But you resist. All you want in life is to be revered. And the people who revere murderers are in the drastic minority. They are also not who you want to associate with.
You go back to school without any indication of the events you sheared off the spiderwebbing tree of fate. You pull out rotting roots digging into your heart and refocus. This time, you are more aware of the world around you.
It is incredulous to think you would never notice the way attention at school slowly turns away from you. You concentrated on the rush of anxiety crime brought and blocked everything out. You made these blinders and charged ahead, uncaring for the sights on your side.
And what sights they are. It rankles, how quickly things change. People grow used to you. This is what people do best: they adapt. Your presence intrigued them for months before they dropped you for the next best thing. Your reaction to being poked with a stick was unsatisfying. They grew bored far before you tired of the worship.
Now, you sit in the stadium of the U.A. Sports Festival next to your friend who is not your friend. He is entertaining in small doses. Very small ones. Miniscule and fleeting.
You keep him around because he is useful. His Quirk is an invisible one that relies on intense conditions. If he stands in the tide at midnight on a full moon, he can feel the life force of whatever creatures are in a hundred foot radius. You asked him if he could snuff out those life forces. You retraced seconds when he sputtered.
Sometimes he tells you things. Stuff that you cannot care about. Human interaction is a give and take, a push and pull, a constant squabble for equality. You tell people secrets and ask them to reciprocate. You bond over the sharp knives you hold against each other’s backs.
Well, you don’t. People do. Not that you are not a person. You are. But you are one so distant from the concept of ‘humanity’ that you wonder if one day you will stop feeling emotion all together.
To err is human. The context is different, but this phrase applies to your whole convoluted life. People make mistakes, that is what they do. That is what separates them from machine. If a computer produces the wrong answer, you take it apart. You either fix it or you throw it away. When a person makes a mistake, you forgive them. You call it opportunity for growth. You support them in their inherent humanity.
Well, you don’t. For both. You tear your inaccuracies off and shed them like snake skin. You rewind and redo actions until they are perfect. It has gotten to a point that you abhor human faults. You cannot comprehend how people can blindly shout ideas that are so wrong. How they can regurgitate information that has never been fact checked. You cannot understand.
Sometimes, your friend who is not a friend tells you things. Secrets he hides in the cradle of his rib cage. Maybe you should fulfilled when he peels his bones away and gives you the truth he hides. Maybe you should feel blessed that someone would offer you pieces of his soul.
You aren’t. You don’t care. You accept each confession like a wealthy king would a jewel. You track how it glitters in the sunlight then toss it back into the piles of identical gems at your feet. Another shred of respect. Another attempt at deification. You take your prizes and hoard them and never give back.
“I wanted to be a hero,” he whispers to you. “I actually hated my ex-girlfriend. I just thought she was pretty,” he says. “I am scared of the dark.”
You wonder how he manages to meet the greased mirrors of your eyes as he says these things. Social interaction, you have learned, is built on symbiosis. These one-sided reveals are not friendship. This is therapy. Or platonic prostitution. You only bear it because the wealth it brings, the tinder it is to the inferno of ego tied to your veins.
He points to the race on the screen in front of you. You stare with oil-slick eyes as a child your age flies through the air, mop of green hair waving behind him.
“Hey Motobe, you think he knows how to land?” Your friend who is not your friend asks.
You shrug as you watch the kid fall. The minefield explodes in clouds of pink smoke at his impact. Your friend who is not your friend laughs.
His name is Takumi, you remember. It is a fleeting thought, a random fact that bursts into your head and leaves just as quickly. It fits him though. ‘Open ocean.’ The word contours around the easy movements that bury his insecurities. It bathes each action in a stranger light. You look at his profile and think that he is cruel.
Takumi cheers loudly as the kid comes in first place. He taps your arm as the scores are read out. He demands your attention. You do not like his casual touch. Seconds blur past and he leans over.
“Hey Motobe, you think he knows how to land?”
You get up. “I’m getting food,” you say. He makes a noise of protest, whines that you are going to miss the results. But as soon as you start walking down the row of seats, he turns back to the festival.
The concession stands spread around the outside of the arena. You wander. A child runs into your and you rewind. A child runs towards you, head twisted over her shoulder as she screams at her friend. You step out of the way with ease. Your winding path carries you around table and yelling vendors and heroes with identification badges strung around their necks.
A kid spins around suddenly and slams into you. The acidic tang of a soft drink splashes into your eyes. Cold liquid soaks into your shirt and where you feel it drip off your skin, it leaves viscid trails.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry! Are you okay?” His eyes are wide. “Let me grab some napkins.”
You stare as he shoves a bunch of paper at you. The pink-haired girl behind him finally looks over. “Haimawari, what did you do?”
He has begun to pat your face off with his fistful of napkins. “I am so, so, so sorry,” he says. The shimmer of your eyes twists and coagulates in a sick rainbow. You disappear into the streams of time.
“Hey Motobe, you think he knows how to land?”
You ignore him. Takumi takes it in stride. He is not your friend, merely an acquaintance you permit to be in your presence. He is useful and he understands this. You are not a nice person. Every one of your actions is founded in purpose. Friendship to you is merely a thin veneer for information, for gossip, for fuel to your egotistical flames.
You wonder if Takumi has been lying to you. Does he even like you? Is he treating you like the god you are? Is he going to slip out of your grasp, taking his awe with him?
When you tore a sick dream from your heart and let it wither on the ground of misplaced ambition, you were able to see how regard was shifting. Your classmates became used to you. This is what people do best: they adapt. And this transformation is not one you can bear.
The cavalry battle is interesting. Milliseconds spin back and forth in the endless black of your eyes. Possibilities flicker among radiating hues and distorted reflection. Rewind, watch. A raging teenager meets the ground and is disqualified. Rewind, watch. The tape catches him just barely this time. Rewind, watch. The obstacle course winner does not make it to the tournament. Rewind, watch. Snapping teeth of a student get to close to another and the stadium gasps. Rewind, watch. Intangible streams of fate run before you. The percentages swirl in the oil of your eyes. Improbable results occur then vanish in the next iteration. You pick and chose and smile as you hold the futures of so many in your taloned hands.
You pull minutes back and get up. “I’m getting food,” you say. Takumi makes a noise of protest, whines that you are going to miss the results. But as soon as you start walking down the row of seats, he turns back to the festival. He is different from you. Alien in every behavior. You are aware of the status you bring him, how he uses having such a terrifying and impressive friend to do whatever he wants. He throws his weight around and leers behind your back and leaves red marks on smaller children’s skin.
He is cruel, you think. Your feet carry you around stalls and clouds of steam and masses of people. Two young adults refill their drinks at a stand, bickering loudly. Pink hair puffs up in a gust of wind and she scrambles to tame it. He laughs and leans back. Your eyes meet. His gaze holds power, holds passion and ambition and a will that ignites the oil of yours into a crackling wildfire.
Look away. You fade into the pulsating crowd around you. Takumi does not say anything when you return with only enough takoyaki for one person. He stares with admiration as an iceberg rises from the middle of the stadium until it towers over the two of you. Rewind, watch. Rewind, watch. Takumi startles and turns to you with marvel etched into his face.
You look at the creaking ice and say nothing. The pale light of the glacier seeps into your eyes and splinters into a million fragments. You eat your takoyaki in silence.
Takumi returns his fascinated gape back to the ring. Around you, people talk loudly. They marvel at the power of the child in front of you. They sigh and shout as each match passes. You watch a girl fall again and again, arms blistering under the rage of her opponent.
Behind you, a thousand strong chant her name. Takumi joins in. You stare as she falters, as she fails, and all around you the noise does not let up. You do not understand their fevered excitement. You cannot comprehend why they stand, why they scream for the figures facing off below you.
Your eardrums ache with the force of their exhilaration. Your chest burns in jealously.
Takumi is cruel, you think. He bullies and sneers and drops useless information like it is supposed to mean something. He bellows with the spectators, with the masses. He turns his attention away from you.
Takumi is cruel, you think. But you, you are something unholy.
Fifteen is a strange age. You watch shaky footage of a hero raid against a yakuza base. The aftermath has spread across the street, littering rubble everywhere. A classroom of students gasps. They are scared, they flinch with each falling building and cracking street.
The retirement of All Might has shaken them. Evil seems constantly around the corner. News sources speculate constantly. The image of the shrunken hero cycles through media. It becomes a reminder to the population. Nothing lasts forever.
You are intimately familiar with this concept. While the country mourned, you snuck into the aquarium and watched the tanks. You have done this enough to know where they keep headless bodies of mackerel.
Your phone played commentary on spikes of villain activity. You removed the river-styled backboard of the tank that prevents the public from seeing where the keepers work. The swivel chair squeaked as you pulled it over and protested your weight.
You dropped the corpses of mackerel into the water. Masses of potential energy, of chaos trapped under scales and underbites, were still. They faced you and a hundred black eyes stared into your soul. They hovered on invisible strings, in invisible chains. They were suspended in the brackish water like ancient naval mines.
Then, movement. The surface boiled as they thrashed. Teeth snapped. Fins beat against their brothers. Scales collected light and threw it at you, their tangled mass a maelstrom of hue to die in your eyes. Blood in the water.
Inevitability is invisible to most. People see death as a paradox, as an impossibility that will occur in the far off never. Reminders of mortality only see the sun in segments of unspeakable horror. For a topic discussed so much, with statistics and backstories in fiction and endless slog of articles written in poor taste, humanity prefers to shove the idea the farthest regions of their subconscious. They procrastinate the transience of their bodies.
You never procrastinate. You never die.
Oh, entropy will take you eventually, but that is far into the future, buried deep in the past, mangled in the present. You are timeless. You are out of time.
Police sirens in the distance. It takes fifteen minutes from your break in for them to arrive. Spend an eon in milliseconds wondering if you have somehow run out of iterations, if this is your last loop. If this is where everything ends.
The doors burst open and you have already left. This offshoot timeline corrodes behind you, torn asunder with sickly light and sharp teeth. Blood in the water.
The footage is grainy and the sound distorted. Someone is praying. The newscasters talk over it without pause. Your classmates hold their breath and you wonder what their names are. Did you ever learn? Will you remember their faces if you pick months off your age tomorrow?
(The answer is no. You will not.)
An explosion. Ryuku, the Dragon Hero, crashes into the ground and the camera angle switches in a blink of editing. From another apartment, you see the street crack and start to sink. A girl on your left hiccups. The fight returns above ground almost as soon as it disappeared.
You watch blood spread across the pavement. Then it vanishes. The news castor continues his commentary. There are no gaps in the audio. The body has simply reformed, has been bound to a masked man. Destruction and reconstruction. It is different from your Quirk, but similar enough to make you pause.
The footage cuts out as cement arcs across the road. Just before it dissolves into static, you can just barely make out the form of something huge. Rewind, watch. Rewind, watch. What beast is this?
Miyagi pauses and looks to his side. You watch the shape of his lopsided horns through the glare of the screen. “We will keep you updated,” he says to the camera.
The class is silent.
By the time reports start filtering in, you are bored. Uninterested. Envious of how pro-heroes have captured the attention of your classmates. You remember how your nickname would roll across the bottom of the television. You remember how newspapers ran stories of your deeds for weeks. You remember wrapping your long fingers around a man’s throat, how it didn’t affect you. You were chasing an adrenaline high, the rush of fear and potential in your bloodstream. You wanted everyone to know your name. You did not care what it took to achieve renown.
But that was a different time. A past and a future and a deserted present packaged up in the slender noose of fate. It was tied in a bow you ripped from a weaver’s fingers, saved from the snap of shears just to cut at it with abandon.
You are a different person. You think, at least. Black eyes burning with hope met sinkholes of toxic waste and you died that night in an alley not even dogs would go to die. Someone took your fragile spider legs and broke your grip on the world. You want him.
It’s not desire or affection or frivolous ideas of intimacy. You want him. You want to watch his face turn purple as he chokes on perfectly good oxygen. You want him to look at the eyes that take and take and take and only give back pale perversions of what is dropped into their depths. You want him to hit you. You want him to tell you that you are awful, a despicable human, something too evil to come from a loving god. You want to be his mortal enemy. His antithesis. A person even a hero would give up on.
You want him. You want him to smile at you. You want him to look at the eyes that only break what they are given and you want him to find something worth saving in their noxious pools. You want him to pat you on the shoulder. You want him to tell you that you are redeemable, that he admires you, that you have the capacity for good among the pathological ruins of your soul. You want to be his friend. A genuine companion. His teammate. A person he will stand next to as an equal.
Two extremes surge together like tectonic plates. Which one will slip under the other? Will they push up to form a mountain you can stand on? Will they sink into a trench you can drown in? How many will perish to the earthquake shaking with the beat of your heart?
You do not like emotions outside the slow burn of satisfaction. They warp your thoughts, worm their way like ivy into the delicate linear streams you dip your fingers in. When you finally pull out the roots, there are too many holes in the foundation to continue. No matter how much you try to fight, they will overcome you in some way. You will crack and crack and crack.
Obey instinct and be overtaken with it. Force it out and watch plot you spent so much time on come crashing down around you. You are lucky that you can start again or you would have died long ago.
Two extremes meet like galaxies colliding. You watch them spin apart into a mess of dust and gas and starlight. It burns too fast and falls apart faster. All you can do is play with seconds and watch the explosion.
You want too much, you have always known this. Opposition crashes. Ocean meets ocean with a roar. A compromise forms.
You want him. Love and hate are too strong for this timeline to last long. Someone found the strings that hold you together long ago. The dominos have been falling for a while now. You are just feeling their effects.
You want him too loudly and too wildly for you to accept. This is terribly human behavior and you are nothing like the fragile, fault-ridden people blundering around you. You are too smart, too streamlined, too perfect to desire Someone. To want a person.
But you can strive. Not for certain people, as the pull of individuals will shred your gossamer mind, but for things. For mobs and headlines and worship. You want to be heralded as a mythical creature, with the power and following to back up your domain on the top. You are a thing to be glorified from a distance, deified and left to feast on praise. You are more monster than man. Filled with sin and better for it.
The stars right themselves in your head. Galaxies merge effortlessly. Lava bubbling under your skin cools into stone. You want what you cannot have, so you will become it instead.
“The Dragon Hero Ryuku is on the scene with the BMI Hero Fatgum and Sir Nighteye. Other notable heroes include Lock Rock, Kesagiriman, and sidekick Bubble Girl.”
The television buzzes in the dark room. You are tiring of it. Physics is too important to be interrupted like this.
They seem to finally have found a way to get cameras into the area. Footage plays behind Miyagi. On the ruined street a multi-limbed creature swats at a green blur.
“It appears that interns and first year U.A. students Deku, Uravity, and Froppy have also joined the fight. We will switch to our on site reporter, Sasaki-san.”
“Thank you, Miyagi-san,” the report shouts over the thump of helicopter blades. Her hair whips around her and the mic crackles with white noise. “We believe third year U.A. student Nejire-chan is also involved in the fight.”
A picture flashes on screen. Nejire-chan’s provisional hero license depicts her smiling at the camera, blue hair falling over her shoulders. “We have not confirmed the presence of the other members of the so called Big Three, Lemillion and Suneater, though the pros they are currently interning under here.”
Two more images appear on screen. You freeze. It is him. Someone. His hair is brighter than it was under the grimy street lamps. His eyes are flat on screen. Somehow devoid of the flames you have balked under. You grit your teeth.
“Deku is currently engaged with the villain. He is—Oh!”
The class tenses. The video shakes as it captures the green blur slam the villain into the ground. The lighting that has been peeling off the intern the whole fight grows. Electricity sparks and discharges across the street. You watch transmitters explode on the nearby power lines.
Then as soon as it starts, it disappears. The camera manages to capture Deku stand with a small figure in his arms. Shrill sirens echo off the street as a flurry of ambulances arrive.
“We are receiving reports right now that hero Sir Nighteye has been admitted to the hospital in critical condition. His intern, Lemillion, as well as one of the first year students, Lock Rock, and Fat Gum are joining him in the ICU. We are unaware of their status at this moment.”
No.
The bell rings. No one moves. You glance outside to see the door across the hall open. The Computer Science class is similarly entranced.
Fifteen minutes of tense silence. Miyagi is handed a piece of paper. He stares at it before clearing his throat. “Sir Nighteye, pro-hero and founder of the Genius Agency, has passed away. We extend our sincere condolences to his family.”
A picture of the hero replaces the aftermath video rolling behind Miyagi’s head. You recognize him. He was the man who tried to interrogate you a broken timeline ago. Someone had screamed then. When Nighteye fell to the floor.
Miyagi’s eyes flick from side to side as he reads, then re-reads the text on the paper. He looks back at the camera. With a solemn face, he speaks. “Fat Gum, Red Riot, and Lock Rock have been moved out of ICU and expected to fully recover. Lemillion has—”
The class leans forward in anticipation. You join them. Finally a part of the mob. Finally human in your concern.
Is it concern? It gnaws on your throat and sinks stones into your intestines. The emotion surrounds you, breathes through you. It is all-consuming and horrid.
“Lemillion suffered undisclosed injuries and has lost the use of his Quirk Permeation. No one has offered a set date he is to be released from the hospital by.”
The silence break but you are already slipping away. Hours twist out of order as you flip the timeline on its back. You scrape away at straight threads trailing into the horizon and mangle them.
Fifteen is a strange age. You wake up in your bed and stare at the ceiling. Then you get up and make your way to the bathroom.
Stare at the mirror. You see nothing special staring back at you. All that is important rests heavy and ancient inside your thin shell.
Shove your fingers down your throat. Listen to the sound of steps are Mom comes running. She pulls your hair out of your face and rubs your back. “Oh no baby, it’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
You lean into her cold palm and shake. Tears drip down your face, automatic instinct as you retch. She whispers to you under the white light of the bathroom. And you let her. No one understands you, and you have come to terms with this fact. But your parents escape the sharp lines you draw in the sand. They fall outside your boundaries of ‘useless’, ‘tolerable’, and ‘able to put up with’.
It is because they are proud, you think. You have taken to spending more time in the library after school, winding minutes away from when you have to return home. It is not because you have a problem with them. They are proud of you and you want it to stay that way. Their pale faces spin behind your eyelids, fragments of time long since discarded. Fractures you screamed into because you knew you had to redo them.
That are proud of you and you want it to stay that way. It is easier to retain love for, compassion for, someone you rarely see. Your image to them will never change if you are not there to distort it.
“I’ll call the school,” Mom says. You kneel on cold tile. A bead of water falls from your empty face. Above it, your eyes shift under the bouncing glare.
You stay home and stream the news. You have no idea when Someone is hurt so you rewind hours. The shadow of Miyagi’s lopsided horns has printed itself perfectly inside your brain. Light from your screen dries your broken eyes again and again.
Rewind, watch.
“Lemillion suffered undisclosed injuries and has lost the use of his Quirk Permeation. No one has offered a set date he is to be released from the hospital by.”
Rewind, watch.
“Lemillion was dosed by an unknown drug by the Yakuza during the Genius office raid. He has lost the use of his Quirk Permeation. No date has been set for his release from the hospital.”
Rewind, watch.
“Sir Nighteye, pro-hero and founder of the Genius Agency, has passed away. His intern and student at U.A., Lemillion, followed him an hour later. We extend our sincere condolences to their families.”
Rewind, watch.
“Underground hero Eraserhead and interns Deku and Lemillion suffered undisclosed injuries and have lost the use of their Quirks. Their release date has not been scheduled.”
Rewind, watch.
“Lemillion, intern at the Genius Agency and third year student at U.A., has passed away. We extend our sincere condolences to his family.”
Rewind, watch. Rewind, watch. Rewind, watch.
Your Quirk is an unusual one. If you unraveled the carapace of lies that cloaks you, your Quirk would change the current theories on parallel universes. You believe, at least. The basics are easy to hammer out, but the details evade you.
‘Indefinite’ you call it. You never professed an aptitude for creativity. It is to the point. Takumi calls his Quirk ‘Under the Watchful Moon’. His unbridled desire to show off amuses you. You rewound seconds again and again until you stopped laughing. It’s a terrible habit, to ruin jokes for yourself.
Your Quirk allows you to return to any point of time in your life. You cannot travel forwards, no matter how short or long the point of time you looped is. It creates something like an alpha timeline, a patchwork quilt of repeats that string together until you peel them apart again. But the most interesting thing that happens, is how probability works.
Say you roll back an hour. That hour ceases to be. From your current position, uncountable possibilities spread from under your feet. Your actions can directly affect what happens next, but so can chance.
See, if you say the wrong answer in class and you pull seconds apart to have a redo, the plot of your life will change. But the spiraling probabilities that wrap around, you assume, the world have the opportunity to occur differently. So you retrace seconds and on the other side of the world, lottery numbers land on 09118 instead of 09119. A miniscule difference that ripples out. The millionaire that chanced upon a ticket won instead of the man who blew his whole paycheck in a fit of stupidity.
You rewind more than you let on. The number used to be higher, when you had to account for your own imperfections you were so desperate to fix, but even now you slide under the slip stream countless times a day with an eye on the world news. It is not an attempt to save people, you moved past that long ago. No, it is an effort to create a more habitable world for you to succeed in.
There are some hard points that you spent days tugging on, trying to get the numbers to fall differently. These are the hard saves you do not like to write over. Theoretically, you could travel back to when you were five and demand to become a professional ice skater. But you would prefer not to. When you are nine, there is a kidnapping attempt. To untangle the mess of likelihood that will lead to black smoke pouring into your bedroom, that will bring you to a dimly lit warehouse deep inside Kamino, that kept happening despite how many times you rewound the day, you had to return to age six.
That took you an indeterminate amount of time to solve. You do not know how old you truly are. The months and weeks and years you tripped over certainly added to your age. Your rough estimation would be in your mid-twenties.
You watch the fight repeat. Electricity tears across the street. The sinkhole pulls an apartment building into it. Acceptable losses. You only think of one person.
“Lemillion suffered undisclosed injuries and has lost the use of his Quirk Permeation. No one has offered a set date he is to be released from the hospital by.”
Rewind, watch. Someone dies again. Rewind, watch. All the students die this time. You watch Eraserhead sink to his knees. Rewind, watch. The villain flees with a child in his arms. Rewind, watch. Someone loses his Quirk. Rewind, watch. He suffers a spine injury and can no longer walk. Rewind, watch. He dies. Rewind, watch. Everyone but him dies. He stumbles through the base’s door holding a child’s hand. Then he dies.
How many days have you spent trying to save him? How many realities have perished under the deadly sheen of your oil-slick eyes? How much more can you see before you realize this is futile?
This is an excellent excuse, one side of you says. You are decaying at your engineering school. The attention came too quickly and left you hollow inside. How can you become Someone with just a bachelor’s degree to your name? How many will praise you for your work as an analyst?
Everyone remembers the names of Prime Ministers. No one learns who implements his ideas. Twenty years after your death, your grave will sit untended. Who remembers those working behind the scenes?
You hold so much power in your clawed fingers. People live and die by your actions. How many have you killed? How many have you saved? You need the world to know. You need them to revere you.
“Lemillion suffered undisclosed injuries and has lost the use of his Quirk Permeation. No one has offered a set date he is to be released from the hospital by.”
You tear through time with slick ease.
Fourteen is a prosperous age, you think as you stare at the arcing crest of U.A.