Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The clattering of broken metal and screams was not unfamiliar to her. She knew the sounds of screams well. Her mother loved to bring men home. She would love to see which lie her mother used. It was her own personal guessing game. 

Sora Mizushima was alone in her home so often it was starting to drive her insane. Her mother would spend the child support on whatever she wanted. Sora didn’t care. She didn’t even know who her father was. 

At six years old, Sora realized her father was never going to come around. She sent him birthday cards, but nothing ever came up. She had no dad. Her father didn’t want a daughter, and sometimes, Sora wished she didn’t want a father. 

She waited for her mother to come home one night, anxiously watching the door. She had no phone, no friends, no way out. She was sure the life she was living was lonely, but who was she to comment. 

She accepted that she was going to live a boring, uneventful life. She was going to go to school, come home, take care of her mother, and live and die a boring girl. A girl with no father and a mother so focused on being someone’s girlfriend that she’d forgotten how to be someone’s mother. It was her birth right.

“Mommy, I’m hungry,” she whispered that night. Her dad had left, leaving her with nothing. Her mother liked to say he found solace in another woman’s arms, but Sora didn’t believe that. Sora knew that her father got away from her mother. Hopefully, her father found a nice woman with a normal daughter.

Her mother didn’t respond to her. Of course she didn’t. Her mother hadn’t come home. Sora climbed into the master bedroom, with a teddy bear her father had left in her crib. Sora’s mother would have to pry this toy from her cold, dead six year old hands. 

Sora crawled into bed, covering herself in her mother’s perfumed covers. Her mother loved to do laundry. She would hum to herself before she went on her seventh date in a week. It didn’t matter what she did, or who she flirted with, the money never helped meet Sora’s needs. Sora wasn’t a real person according to her mother, just a product of a botched abortion.

Maybe that’s where it all started. 

When her mother died.

Sora couldn’t tell you how her mother died. All the doctors and police people told her that her mother had been in an accident. She didn’t question their words. Sora let them take her to the station. Sora let them tell her the horrible things that had happened to her mother. 

They told her that she had the choice to live with her father. 

She declined.

You can’t live with someone who left you all alone. Sora chose to live with someone else. Her uncle. Masaki Mizushima was her uncle’s name. He was a really famous guy apparently. Sora didn’t know that. She was just six. 

Her uncle came to greet her. He had big brown eyes, and dark skin. He looked nothing like her. She stared at her blonde hair, and the tan skin she was given. Sora was sure there had been some mistake. Her uncle had dark locks and a gentle expression.

Sora only knew violence. So, she expected it. She danced around her uncle’s feet for months, hoping to keep him happy. Sora didn’t take apart any clocks, or anything that ticked. She stayed silent, observant. She didn’t let anyone talk to her. She didn’t speak to anyone either. 

Sora had to go to school with new kids. She didn’t talk much as a kid. What was there to talk about anyway? Sora could hear their voices, and their whispers. She could hear their little whispers, and they were never too nice to her. She could hear everything, and that was the worst part of it all.

The bullying started when she turned nine. She was getting notes in her locker. Sora had devices in her ears now, her uncle had bought them off of some big tech company. It would help tone down the severity of her quirk. Uncle Masaki said it would help relieve the anxiety she had. Sora never told her uncle about it. Until it got worse.

Sora had a friend. His name was Kiyoshi. He liked koi fish, and the color orange. He played hopscotch with her. She liked being around him. Kiyoshi stopped them from hitting her with hard objects. He broke his glasses every other week, but every Monday, he would come in with brand new frames and a dream.

As they got older, Sora watched him change. He was meaner, but he liked the same things as before. He got a laptop, with words and fancy typing noises. Sora wanted to be around him more, especially with his new laptop. He stopped talking to her. He stopped looking at her. He stopped breathing the same air as her. 

Kiyoshi Chikara became one of her bullies. 

He tripped her. He tossed spitballs at her. He pushed her into the lake across the street from their school. Then he got some of their classmates to rip her support items from her ears. The feedback hurt. She watched her classmates scream. It got worse. It got worse. It got worse. There was blood coming from her ears, and tears came down her face.

Sora was homeschooled after that.

Then there was the anxiety disorder diagnosis. They said it was a mixture of things, but her uncle knew it was partially because of the bullying. It was because they wanted her to die. There were messages in her notebooks, words so vulgar she cried herself to sleep. They wanted her to die and never come back.

She hadn’t done anything to her classmates, she swore on it. Sora lost everything when she left that school. Her only friend became her worst enemy in the span of three years. She was at dinner with her uncle, adjusting her support items when the news broke out. Her classmate and former bully, Kiyoshi Chikara, had been pronounced missing for the last twelve hours. 

She tried not to think about it too much. What goes around comes around, right? But Sora didn’t wish ill on Kiyoshi. She couldn’t wish ill on anyone without feeling bad. She felt guilty. Was it her fault that her friend was taken?

Her uncle was a hero, and every day for the last six years, she’s begged him to find her friend. But her uncle told her he couldn’t do much now. Six years had passed after all.  There was a statute of limitations, or something along those lines. Sora wasn’t too big on all that legal nonsense. All she understood from that was that no one could find her friend.

She started building things when she was twelve. Again. Her uncle had noticed her fidgeting with things. It was toy cars, and then pocket watches, and then it was the microwave that made a weird noise when you hit defrost. She could build things from scratch. She always could. Sora wasn’t new to the DIY scene. She just wanted to feel special. 

The Support Course of Yuuei High School. Her uncle worked there. He liked to say it was the safest place in all of Japan. It wasn’t, Sora would tell him during their elaborate hotpot dinners. She would throw a piece of raw meat everytime he mentioned recommending her for the course. There was no way they’d even let her in. She had nothing to offer except the occasional anxiety attack and a cuckoo clock that played Hot to Go! In three different languages. It wasn’t Support Course material—

Yeah, so about that. She got in. 

Chapter Text

First days of school weren’t for her. Sora hadn’t gone to an actual first day of school since elementary. Her uncle worked at Yuuei. He taught second year English. Sora wouldn’t have her family until she survived this year. 

“Are you excited?” Her uncle asked, ruffling her hair. Sora had become fixated on getting new piercing before the year started. She had an eyebrow piercing and a septum. Sora tried to look different than the last time anyone saw her, which she had since it was elementary, after all. “You’re going to do amazing, and I’m so proud of you.”

“You’re a cornball,” Sora pointed out, anxiously rocking on the balls of her feet. She wanted to go home. Could she just come next week? Next month? Never? School wasn’t a good place for her, if you couldn’t already tell. “Can I go home?”

Uncle Masaki frowned at her. He shook his head. He wanted to shake her, she could just tell. Sora wanted to go back home. Really badly. She was exhausted beyond belief and her chest really hurt. She had an excuse to leave class early, but she didn’t want to be the weird kid in her class. She already was weird with her hearing issues. A girl that wore reverse hearing aids? That had to be a first. Her quirk was too powerful, that’s what all the quirk specialists said to her over the years.

Then they asked if she knew her father’s quirk. They offered DNA tests. Sora would decline. Her uncle would sigh and sign away the horrors. She didn’t want to know if her father’s quirk was just like hers. Her mother didn’t have a quirk, and that was enough for her. 

“You’re not going home, Sora,” Uncle Masaki chided. “You have to go out and socialize. If the first month doesn’t work out, I’ll transfer you back to homeschooling. Deal?” He offered her his hand, but she wanted to slap it away. She instead sighed, shrugging her shoulders. Sora stared at the building with disdain. 

“I still want to go home. I can’t believe they have heroes teaching basic subjects. Why is Ectoplasm teaching math? He barely knows how to multiply,” Sora mumbled, playing with her tie. Support course students were only required to wear a tie and white shirt. They would usually be dressed in the gym uniform. Thankfully, Sora actually enjoyed dressing up, or today would’ve been an even worse event. “Seriously, why didn’t they just hire regular teachers?”

“Because incase of an emergency, we could protect our students. A regular teacher can’t do that.” Oh right, she kept forgetting that Yuuei was known as the hero school. Sora had grown up around here. She had grown up with all these heroes around her. She’d met a couple of campus heroes too, like Stingray and Endeavor. She didn’t really like either of them, but their kids were nice-ish. Sora had played hopscotch with Stingray’s kid. He had blond hair like hers. You don’t see a lot of blonds in Japan, so it was nice. Endeavor’s son didn’t speak much. She liked him. 

“I don’t want to die, thanks.” She stared at her classroom door, glancing back at her uncle. Sora had grown used to leaning on her uncle for support. Sometimes, she could barely remember her mother. Her mother’s gentle lullabies, and the times they danced to music in the kitchen. 

She wondered if Kiyoshi would’ve gone to Yuuei, if they found him. Was it bad to miss the person who tormented your final years in a public school? She didn’t feel like a normal person. There were people around her, but she still felt alone.

“I love you, Sora,” her uncle whispered, pressing a quick kiss to her head. Sora looked back at him, gripping his jacket sleeve. He sighed. “You can eat lunch in my office, if you need to. You can leave class if you feel overwhelmed, just, do good, okay?”

Sora knew she was an exhausting person to be around. It was a wonder how her uncle managed to be by her side all these years.

She swallowed, gripping her chest. The pain was back as she slid the door open. It was worktables lining the walls. Powerloader wasn’t in yet. She was in school. Alone. With no one. Alone again. 

When she was twelve, she stared at a bridge. Sora had gone for a walk, feeding the koi fish near her old elementary school. She used to feed them with Kiyoshi, but now he was gone. She would bring day old bread, and watch the fish swim around the stale pieces. 

She wanted to die. 

There had been a fleeting feeling that never seemed to escape her. She couldn’t tell her uncle. Sora had watched him lose sleep trying to help her. A socially anxious kid with a hearing quirk turned disability isn't for everyone. She couldn’t leave the house without panicking. But she could do this. Of course, she could do this. 

Sora wasn’t a stranger to death. Her father was dead to her, and her mother had died. Everything about her was muddied by the concept of no longer breathing. Sora had accepted it. It was morbid, but wasn’t life all about what comes at the end?

She stood on the bridge. The water smelled like home. Her mother used to love taking trips to the lake. Her boyfriends would drive them up north, and they’d go swimming. Sora would build little toys shaped like fish. They would make her mom laugh.

She wanted to take a step off the bridge. 

There was another person there. Orange hair. Kiyoshi. She stared at the missing boy for a split second, watching him being tugged into another car. But she couldn’t hear. If she turned off her support items, she would hear everything. Sora felt guilty.

She wanted her bully to go away. 

She never told her uncle about seeing Kiyoshi on the bridge that day. That was three years ago. In those three years, Kiyoshi could have died, and Sora would have to live with that knowledge. But death wasn’t foreign to Sora Mizushima.

Chapter Text

She had jumped onto Kiyoshi’s back. Sora wasn’t sure how she had that much strength, but she was tired. Tired of being treated like garbage. She hadn’t done anything. She came to school every day. Sora wanted to make friends. That was all she ever wanted.

“Don’t pretend to be a good girl!” Kiyoshi shouted at her, shoving her away from his desk. She had been cleaning the bad things their classmates were saying. She didn’t want him to feel as bad as she did. There was a hope that her old friend didn’t hate her. But he probably did. 

Sora only smiled, swallowing tears. She just wanted to have friends. Why couldn’t she just have friends?

Kiyoshi scoffed, pushing his glasses up his nose. “If you want to tell me something, speak up!” His voice was so loud, she could hear his vocal chords moving in his throat. Sora turned up her hearing aids, trying to calm the anxiety in her chest. “There’s that look again. Don’t try to act so freaking innocent!”

The answer was honestly yes. Sora was upset. She was upset because she didn’t know why this was all happening. Why was everyone being so mean? She pushed him away, trying to leave the classroom. 

“Say something–” She screamed. She tackled him, pounding on his chest. Sora just hit and hit and hit. Why couldn’t he see that she was just like him? Sora just wanted to be human again. She opened her mouth, babbling again. She couldn’t speak well as a kid. 

“Doing my bezd…” she cried, hitting her best friend in the chest. Sora was crying. Her tears were salty, making her gag a little. “I’m doing my bezd!”

Kiyoshi shoved her face away from his. “I don’t understand what you’re saying!”

Sora didn’t come back to school anymore. Her uncle didn’t press charges, and Kiyoshi’s parents paid back every cent. Each support item cost a lot, and every cent was handed back to Uncle Masaki. She was there. She had fed the koi fish as Kiyoshi threw rocks at her.

She missed her only friend. Her best and only friend. 

This was a long time ago, you see. Sora moved on from that. It was obvious in the way she carried herself. She fiddled with her tooth gap, anxiously looking around the room. She was scared. This was the worst experience of her life. 

Well, that was an exaggeration. 

She had worse days before, but she didn’t want to be here anymore. She was rocking on the balls of her feet. Everyone had been used to school; she hadn’t. Sora was different from everyone. Uncle Masaki told her she could eat lunch in his office if everything were going terribly. She just wanted to go home. 

“Hi, we’re corner buddies,” a pink-haired girl with dreadlocks and dark skin sang. She was already covered in dirt and grime. She made everything look easy. “I’m Mei Hatsume. You must be Mizushima! You’re Snipe’s kid.”

“He’s my uncle,” Sora mumbled, picking at the tools in front of her. She fiddled with the wrench in her hand, feeling the cold metal against her calloused palm. “It’s nice to meet you.” The girl squealed, and it made the aids in her ear ring. She tapped the flatter part of the aid, lowering the volume. 

Hatsume jumped up and down, clapping her hands together. “Your aids are so cool. I’ve been meaning to meet someone with a hearing quirk. Is yours like Echolocation, or is it different? Do you get headaches, or is it just when things are too loud?” Sora backed up, looking around for a way out. She swallowed. 

“I hear too much,” she mumbled, turning away. Hatsume was overstimulating to the point it was starting to stress her out. “The aids keep it from becoming too much. It’s complicated.”

Hatsume couldn’t stop twitching. 

She was so odd. 

Sora liked her. It was almost like making a new friend, in a way. Could she even count Hatsume as a new friend? For now, Sora just sucked it up, chewing on her bottom lip as Hatsume spent ten minutes talking about her inventions. It was endearing.

Hatsume was odd. The kind of girl her uncle probably would prefer she was friends with, because Sora didn’t have friends. Maybe, until possibly, right now.