Chapter Text
In a broken world, stripped of its sunlight and comic-book flare, Ochaco Uraraka awoke to a nightmare.
She was a twisted mess of blankets as she sat up, gasping for the breath her forgotten dream had stolen. Forgotten colors and shapes swarmed her vision; they raced about her barren room at speeds she couldn’t begin to comprehend.
Wait…
Instinctively Ochaco reached for them, trying to make sense of the blurring shades and turn them back into something she’d know. Something recognizable. And green ?
It was too loud. Her jumbled dream escaped with the passing of a jet overhead; her room shook as they slipped away.
Ochaco fell back onto her cot, “Not again… ”
For months she’d been bombarded by the same nightly vision—haunted by the buzzing chill it always left behind—but she couldn’t for the life of her remember it. She only ever recalled colors, sounds… a hand?
Something was different.
Something was wrong … and the paintings she’d muddied in her mind had been her only shot of understanding what that something was.
Why can’t I remember…?
Just barely suppressing a shiver, Ochaco wiped the sleep from her eyes and rewrapped her dreary sheets around herself. The tips of her uncovered toes were freezing. She glanced at her cracked window, taking in the silver sheen of frost that covered its plane. Still winter, then…
Wait.
With a start Ochaco shot out of bed.
“No.”
The sheets fell from her shoulders. Her hair tumbled over her eyes.
“No, no, no…” she whispered.
It can’t be—not today.
The floor was ice beneath her feet as she stumbled to her terrifying wardrobe. The thing was a mass of peeling, black wood that gave her splinters whenever she wasn’t careful, but that didn't matter. She’d figured out what was wrong, and Stars she wished she wasn’t right.
Tearing the closet’s door open, a sharp prick bit the inside of her left hand and shot through her wrist, but she couldn’t bring herself to worry about that now. A paper calendar fell out with the swing of the door, landing sprawled at her feet, and she scrambled to pick it up.
The year was wrong, but that was nothing new. Her calendar was pictureless, crumbled, and all its corners were frayed, but it wasn’t like she could be picky. She’d scavenged it from an alleyway dumpster nearly a decade ago—before the Burning. No one sold calendars anymore.
September. October. November. With every month Ochaco flipped past, X’s continued to mark up all the days in scratchy black ink.
Please. Please…
Her hands were shaking when she flipped to the last page. December. She scanned the trail of markings she’d left, scaling down the weeks she’d crossed off. Her palm’s fuzzy mitten followed the path they made—tracing all the days she’d lost and forgotten—until they just… stopped.
A fat, red circle—the only circle—enclosed the only unblemished date: December 27th.
It was her Birthday. Her 18th Birthday.
Her countdown had finally reached zero.
Ochaco bit back a cry and threw the calendar across the room. This couldn’t be happening. It had to be a dream.
She moved, backing farther and farther away from the cursed paper as if space alone could erase the nightmare it suggested, but then something caught her ankle and she tripped. Her palms slapped against her bed’s wooden post before her head could smash its way through the floorboards.
This can’t be happening...!
Ochaco sank to the floor and pressed herself against her bed. She kicked away the straps of the bag wrapped around her feet and tugged at her shirt. Stop. Stop. No!
She was gasping for air again. Her world had flipped itself over on its head and was spinning like a top along her nose. Her eyes burned—the air felt so heavy!
Ah—!
Something was biting her wrist.
Ochaco hissed and pulled her eyes off the ground. Her pink mittens were glueing themselves to her palms, entirely too hot. Frantically, she tore the fraying balls of fluff off her fingers and tossed them aside.
Flipping her hand over, she stupidly expected to find a splinter, or some bloody cut, but instead her eyes fell on the imprint of a green and black butterfly, tied to her left wrist. It was frozen, wings caught mid-flutter; it was a motionless, glittering stain on her skin. Her soul mark.
Of course…
Ochaco choked on a sob. Of course the butterfly was hurting her; the insect was already a death sentence. Why wouldn’t it’s design act up on her birthday?
Stars, no…
It was already the brand of a stranger and the strangle-hold they had on her and her life… It doomed her. Cursed her. Hurt her.
And it had the audacity to be beautiful.
Another day, Ochaco supposed she would remember to feel lucky the mark was small—at the bottom of her left palm—not that its size would stop it from being the first thing to catch a person’s eye if she ever shook their hand.
Her butterfly was a swirling design of two black lines that twisted their way into two prominent wings—into patterns Ochaco had never seen before. Soft, electric-green currents encircled every black line, shocking the mark to life with its verdant lightning. Stars, she wished the bug really was alive—that it could stand up and flutter away.
By merely existing, her mark served as a contract to the hell she would be forced to go through. An indelible fingerprint. Because only those with quirks received the marks. Only those with marks like hers would be found and taken away.
Yet, Ochaco had been so close to not receiving one at all.
For years she’d attacked hundreds of newsfeeds and comms, scouring through all the articles and stories she could find with any knowledge of soulmates and quirks. Every last one of them said a mark surfaced when a quirk-user turned five.
Ochaco had been fourteen.
She still remembered waking up to the mark engraving itself into her wrist; it was as if the invisible hand of a tattoo artist had pinned her arm down to stain it with its ethereal ink. She nearly woke her entire sector screaming, before locking herself away in her family’s only bathroom to try scrubbing the cursed butterfly off her skin.
Of course it was a butterfly. What a cruel joke.
Ochaco had always envied butterflies.
. . . . .
Polaris. Pleiades. Antares…
Ochaco shuddered before the running faucet. She needed to drown her butterfly out. Wash away the colors, sounds, everything.
“Aries. Perseus. Leo... Breathe… ” She gasped and willed her body to choke her terror down. She was being too loud. Her parents didn't need to hear this. There was no way she'd let them see her panic. Not today.
Breathe! Her mind screamed, and she doused her face with water again. Virgo. Orion. Andromeda…
Ochaco listed every star, every constellation she had ever memorized and tried to remember the sky as she picked her head back up. Wild, chocolate irises captured her own, and a face much sharper than it used to be frowned at the auburn bush devouring her head.
It twisted something in her chest, knowing the shell behind the mirror was supposed to be her.
“What are you doing?” The husk seemed to ask her. Tears had drowned its cheeks.
With a cry stuck in her throat, Ochaco spattered water across the mirror’s face, watching as the droplets snaked their way down its surface to blur her muddy features.
Stars, what is wrong with me…?
Her butterfly nipped at her wrist and she saw a shadow. A hand.
Stop it! Breathe…!
Ochaco clapped her palms to her soaked cheeks and shakily reached for the brush laying against the sink. She ignored the heat of her mark and tore the brush’s hairs through her tangled nest.
She should be used to this; she’d put up with her mark’s antics for years, learning to suffer through the burns and bites it loved to dish out. She thought she’d figured the insect out, but then, it had never attacked her this frequently before. It was never this insistent.
Ochaco winced as her brush snagged on a knot. She bit her lip and pulled, yanking at the roots of her hair, and her skull shrieked in protest. Without warning, a flame seared her palm and the hairbrush slipped through her fingers, shattering the quiet as it skidded across the floor.
Stop…!
Ochaco clapped her hand over her wrist and willed it to cool. Her body shuddered and she looked back into the mirror’s haggard face and sunken eyes and wanted to scream.
The butterfly did this . If it weren’t for her mark, she wouldn’t be here—she wouldn’t look like this. She wouldn’t be eighteen, hopelessly emaciated and weak!
Why is this happening to me...?
Ochaco ran her hands down her face and up through her hair. She tangled her auburn locks in a fist and pressed her knuckles to her stinging scalp.
I can’t... It’s not fair!
Squeezing her eyes shut, she suppressed the slimy tremor creeping up her hips.
Cancer. Capricorn… remember…!
She couldn’t admit she was afraid. She couldn’t break now.
But who was she kidding?
I can’t. I can’t do this… I’m not strong enough…
She wasn’t ready.
Suddenly, the floor gave out beneath her. The darkness beneath the boards swallowed her whole and she blindly tumbled in it’s abyss.
Stars… Breathe!
Ochaco wanted to reach up, to grab something; a snag, a ledge, anything to stop her free-fall, but she couldn’t. Her body rolled inside a void and her stomach lurched.
No. No no no—
“Ochaco!”
Papa?
Ochaco rocked forward, snapping her eyes open just as her head rammed into the ceiling. With a cry she reeled back, but her legs kicked out from under her, flailing without purchase in the air. She hardly made sense of it all before she capsized and her back slammed into a wall; her toes clipped the high ceiling’s dry paint.
What...?
Blinking the stars away, Ochaco looked at the faucet running beneath her head… and realized she was upside down… She was floating.
With a wince, Ochaco twisted around and pressed the pads of her fingers together. She released.
Gravity welcomed her like an old friend, enveloping her with a familiar tug at her tether, and her feet hit the floor with a quiet thud.
Breathe… Remember?
She twisted the knob of the faucet off and leaned over the barren sink as it dripped. Her limbs shook beneath her, unraveling, but her mark was still. The girl in the mirror sucked in a breath.
“You can’t keep losing control. It isn’t safe.”
Ochaco sighed and dipped her head; her reflection bowed to meet it.
I’m breathing. Can’t that be enough?
She pushed away all thoughts of her birthday and calendar… She thought of the hundreds of mornings she’d woken up with her face pressed against the ceiling, a nauseous knot of blankets thanks to her quirk.
Zero Gravity.
Most days it was easy to hide—to control—but she’d never had much freedom to master it. When she slept, clapped, or closed a fist; any time the five pads of her fingers closed around anything, something would find itself weightless.
Her mittens helped. If she remembered to wear them, her thoughtlessness rarely sent tables, forks, and chairs soaring above her parents’ heads at the dinner table.
“Ochaco?”
The lull of her father’s baritone swept through the doorway again, and Ochaco remembered how his voice had pulled her back. Immediately, she straightened and turned away from the shell behind the mirror. She was breathing and she was fine. That would have to be enough for her; she had to be strong enough for them.
“Coming, Papa!”
Ochaco moved, willing the door to fall shut behind her and the mirror to be still.
. . . . .
“Papa—”
She hadn’t made it two steps into the kitchen before her father’s massive arms engulfed her, wrapping themselves around her shoulders to crush her cheek against his heart. Her own seemed to melt in his warmth as he sighed.
“There’s my Stardust.”
Her father smelled of coffee—and construction equipment—and Ochaco turned her head to grin into his dusty flannel shirt. Of course she was fine. She was home.
With a gentle squeeze, her papa rustled the matted waves atop her head, moving to tuck its wild strands behind her ears.
“When did you get so tall?” he laughed, “You used to stand no higher than my knee.”
Ochaco looked up at him.
Her father’s short, messy hair was mussed on the left side of his face and the gray scruff on his chin was in dire need of a shave. She remembered the beard he used to have, how he used to love tickling her cheeks with his whiskers.
Her smile softened.
“I’ve gotten old, Papa. I’m not a little girl anymore.”
Her father frowned and pulled back. He really was a giant of a man—all bulging muscle and morning coffee—and she was dwarfed by his massive frame. Swallowed by his massive arms, Ochaco still felt like the five-year-old girl she used to be, the same small girl that had latched onto his pant legs every night he’d gotten back from work, undeterred by the buckets of sweat and sawdust that clung to him.
“Now that’s not true,” her father shook his head, “You’ll always be my little girl, squirt. ‘til the day pigs fly or you grow bigger than me.”
Ochaco almost giggled as he spun her around.
“You’re my Stardust. My sunshine. The light of my world!”
“Don’t let Mama hear you say that. She’ll think I’m stealing you away from her.”
Her papa laughed and his dimples grinned.
“My planet has two stars. ‘Don’t need any jealous ladies fighting over me.” His warm eyes crinkled, melting into a pool of caramel and mirth. They had that in common: a matching chocolate gaze.
Ochaco had never tasted the exotic sweet their eyes mimicked, what with its expense in light of the city’s rationings, but she knew it’s look and had memorized its addictive smell. While chocolate was a pipe dream, at least mochi was affordable.
“You’re such a mess,” Ochaco teased and stepped out of her father’s arms. “It’s gotten better, by the way.”
She pointed to the bridge of his nose, still just slightly crooked and scarred. There had been an accident at one of his sites a few months back; an explosion had toppled his equipment and some of the debris had clipped his face. Mother had fretted over him for weeks.
“Aw, but I thought you liked it all busted up. ‘Said it made me look dangerous,” her father smirked, wiggling his broken nose at her.
Ochaco rolled her eyes and swatted at his arm.
“Stop that. It's healing.”
“Stardust, if your mother says my nose is fine, I’m fairly certain surgery couldn’t make it any better. Lord knows how many first-aid kits that woman has wasted on me—”
“—Well, I wouldn’t have to keep wasting kits if you weren’t such a klutz, now would I?”
At the sound of another familiar, soft voice, Ochaco spun around.
“Mama… ”
Swallowed by an enormous fuzzy sweater, her mother smiled at the two of them from her perch in the doorway, “Good morning, Stardust.” The roses on her cheeks bloomed as she inclined her head, “Husband.”
“Hello, my love,” her papa swooned, swooping past his daughter to scoop his wife into his arms and pepper her with lofty kisses.
Ochaco bit back a smile and looked away, moving to busy herself with pouring a cup of her father’s coffee. She sighed, dumping in about five bags of sugar before she could deem the brew consumable. (Even on days like this, her parents’ affection was simply too perfect to spoil.)
We’re all breathing and we’re fine…
Mindful of her pinkies, Ochaco sipped at the steaming concoction in her hands and glanced at the empty mug sitting atop the counter. A translucent tablet and pen were left discarded just beside it, beneath the projection of her father’s construction report emitted by a thin, silver disk. She watched the comm close in a holographic snap. The clock in its corner had read: 11:45.
Strange.
Behind her, her mother laughed and Ochaco turned.
“What are you two doing here so late?”
It was nearly noon and her father’s shifts rarely ended before sunset. Mother usually haggled in the markets until three.
As soon as the question left her lips, her father shifted, fighting a grin as he wrestled with his flannel’s pockets. The auburn strands falling out of her mother’s bun bounced as she quickly turned, clapping her quirkless hands together in remembrance.
“Happy birthday,” her mother smiled, and her father pulled out a small, white box.
The cup in Ochaco’s hands almost slipped through her fingers. She imagined it shattering in a flash of a thousand ceramic shards.
. . . . .
Ochaco seemed to blink one second and by the next she was sitting in the center of her family’s only worn couch. Her mother was instantly by her side, pressing a bleached container into her hands as her father sat on her other, lightly nudging her to accept it.
Breathe… You’re fine.
Sure, maybe most people were used to receiving actual gifts on their birthdays, but Ochaco wasn’t. In truth, she had thought the morning with them had been her present, it was more than enough and she hadn’t minded that at all, but this…
Ochaco shook her head in disbelief. She thought of the expense, “How—”
“We’ve been setting aside a bit of rent,” her mother supplied, her voice was a feather, as light as a gust of wind, “Today’s supposed to be special. Good. There’s no reason we shouldn’t try to celebrate it.”
Ochaco could think of a number of reasons; a collection of constellations fell on the tip of her tongue, “But I don’t—“
“—But nothing, squirt,” Her father said, laying a hand on her head. “Your mother and I have wanted to give you something for a long time. And well, we knew you loved the mittens she made you all those years ago, so we thought it was about time we fixed you with an improvement—”
“ —Something ,” her mother added gleefully, “a bit more stylish.”
Ochaco’s breath caught in her throat.
They didn’t…
She lifted the snowy gift’s lid.
Two beautiful black gloves were nestled inside the little box. They were dark—as stark as ink on a blank page—and smooth. Whatever thick fabric they were crafted from gleamed in the lamp light.
These were tailored…
Ochaco struggled for words, “This… this is amazing. They’re incredible. I—I don’t know what to say,” And she didn’t. She didn’t know how to feel, nor what she was supposed to.
The penny-pincher in her was a whirlpool of worries; she had no doubt the next week would be a struggle for her parents, financially, but the smiles on their faces and the warmth of their gift just made her so… so… happy.
Stars , she was going to miss them.
“Well, let’s try them out...”
Gently, her mother took the box’s cover and began to slip the shiny gloves over her shaking fingers. Unsurprisingly, they fit the mold of her hands seamlessly.
The thick black fibers hugged Ochaco’s palm like a leather guard; the slim cuts woven into the underside of the gloves’ forefingers hardly felt open or out of place. They were designed to expose the pad of a single fingertip on each palm, designed to control her quirk.
Ochaco choked out her thanks, fighting to keep the sudden onslaught of tears at bay. She knew that if she opened her gates now, her pending waterfall of fears would flood her entirely. There wasn’t enough strength left in her to stop that.
All-knowing as she was, her mother laid a hand on her arm, “Stardust... What’s wrong?”
Ochaco took a breath, willing every fear and constellation away before she burst, “Mama… I don’t think I can—”
But a beaconing ‘News Alert’ stole her voice, and all their attention fell onto the stupid holographic TV screen bursting to life at their feet. A pampered news anchor was sitting behind a sleek table, the picture of intellectual poise and plastic with her slicked black hair and glamour. Her eyes were glassy behind her ruby-red smile:
“...City of Musutafu. Citizens should be pleased to know that another supposed “Hero” was apprehended this morning at the scene of a bank robbery in the Tatooine district. The subject was caught reprimanding another rogue quirk-user who reportedly instigated the break-in, according to a dozen eye-witness accounts at the scene. Suspects wielded Gigantification and Landshark Transformation quirks, respectively.
“The vigilante has been identified as Yu Takeyama, having conducted her illegal quirk use under the ‘Hero’ alias of Mount Lady. Mount Lady’s connection to the Band of ‘Heroes’ has yet to be determined, but both criminal quirk-users have been detained and are undergoing interrogation…”
Ochaco felt her despair capsize, morphing to fill her with something ugly and vicious. She bit her lip.
This shouldn’t be a surprise; quirk arrests were a constant tool in the media’s propaganda and she was no stranger to the tarnishing of the city’s forgotten superheroes. It was just another show of power. A reminder to those like her that there was no escape—no way for her to break free of her marked fate…
Vigilante? Criminal?
…But none of this was right. None of this could be further from the truth.
Ochaco still remembered All Might. She remembered the billboards and stories dedicated to quirk-users like Gang Orca and Edge Shot and Ryukyu… Ten years ago—before the Burning—the Heroes had been real… they’d been revered, idolized and new, but now...
Images—rustic and distorted—flashed across the telescreen in snapshots of what was left of the scuffle leading to Mount Lady’s arrest. A street and a bridge had completely collapsed; an old convenience store was in ruins. Then photos of the broken hero were presented, rimmed by some golden hue. Ochaco felt her body jolt.
“Oh no,” her mother murmured, before violently clapping a hand over her mouth. Such sympathy was scorned, treasonous.
“The vigilante’s capture marks the 14th quirk arrest this month, yet another sign of our city’s progression towards complete quirk pacification. Furthermore, the adoption of the Nomu Cooperation Order established eight years ago, coupled with All Might’s disappearance, suggest the effectiveness of Endeavor’s Quirk Assimilation Plan and the steady increase in arrests can attest to the progress of his youth indoctrinations in quirk academias—”
“Ochaco!”
Whirling around, the reporter’s voice fell away in a shriek of sound that reverberated throughout Ochaco’s skull.
What—
Her father pinned her with a stare so devoid of emotion she fell back into herself in a thundering boom. Something was staining her mother’s pale irises—something that shook her weary frame as her eyes flitted between her family and the mess surrounding them.
Only then did Ochaco realize she was floating again; with one of her gloves splayed out on the floor. The couch she’d been sitting on, a table, and everything atop both of them twirled in the air above her head.
Scrambling, Ochaco pulled off her other glove and released.
I lost control…?
She hadn’t felt a thing.
Everything fell back to earth in a cacophony of rattles and scrapes, but Ochaco hurriedly pulled her new gloves back over her hands and turned away from her silent parents’ eyes. Everything was too much. They were too much. The constellations were back.
I can’t be here…
Wordlessly, Ochaco moved for the front door, and the coat rack hammered into the wall beside it. She needed to vent, but she couldn’t do that here.
“I’m going out,” she whispered.
She pulled two light pink bands out from inside her only jacket’s pocket and began clipping them over the small of her wrists. The bracelets were like blood pressure gauges, capable of stimulating the pressure points around her hands. She’d spent half of her savings on the bracelets, believing they would come in handy when training her control of Zero Gravity. (They were supposed to suppress the nausea her quirk invoked… At least they sort of covered her mark.)
Ochaco suppressed a shudder and her wrist throbbed. The aches her mark induced had become so much more violent in the last few months, but who was she to question the mysteries of her cursed butterfly?
“You’re going… out,” Her mother vaguely repeated, reprocessing her words as if she were waking from a dream. “Today?”
Ochaco wouldn’t, couldn’t, look at her. Out of the three of them, her mother had always been the most fragile: a glassy, porcelain, beautiful gift she refused to shatter, “I think I need to.”
She winced when her mother’s breath caught.
“Ochaco... You’ve been attending that man’s classes for years. Is there honestly anything he can teach you—that you don’t already know?” Her father’s kind eyes and voice were back, laced with worry, but Ochaco refused to accept them as she slid her dark green jacket over her arms.
“Believe me, Papa. I have so much more to learn. With all the new students, there’s bound to be something new to work on.”
“Ochaco…”
The sound of her name on her mother’s lips was so broken it wrenched her eyes off the floor.
Her mother reached out before Ochaco could think to step away, taking and turning her left hand over in her palm. And Ochaco let her.
She let her mother push up the end of her glove, brush her pink band away, and run her porcelain fingers over the strange green butterfly. She watched as she traced the insect’s wings, antenna, sternum, and then everything in between. Her hands—the gentle hands she’d used to teach Ochaco to read, write, sew… moved so slowly.
She was tracing the bizarre currents of lightning when she finally spoke, “My Stardust... I know you’re unhappy. You won’t show it, but you must be so scared… I wish everything was different. I wish you could live the life you want… I wish the stars had been more kind—that you didn’t have this,” she tapped at her mark. “You just… you don't smile anymore. Not really, and I wish you would. I wish you could.”
Slack-jawed, Ochaco could only stare as her mother caressed her wrist, unwilling to let their eyes meet.
“Your smile is sunshine.”
A shiver ran down Ochaco’s spine.
It remained when her father settled a hand over her mother’s palm and squeezed. They shared a look, something passing between them that Ochaco just couldn’t understand. And it terrified her.
Soundlessly, her mother released the grip on her wrist, and backed up into her husband’s arms.
They’re so worried…
Ochaco slid her pink band back over the mark, suddenly cold. She rubbed at the phantom of her mother’s touch, a bundle of fear pooling in her stomach’s pit. They never gave her leave this much hesitation, never this much thought.
“Just hurry home after your lesson, okay?”
Don’t they know I’ll be back...?
“I’ll come straight home. No mochi stops this time,” she tried to laugh, to wave away the worry shaping their faces, but her voice betrayed her.
“I’m not leaving yet,” she began again. All her possessions still laid unpacked, scattered across her room, her hairbrush still sat on the bathroom floor. “I promise.”
Why am I making promises...?
Ochaco turned. She slid two black boots that were way too big over her small feet and suppressed a shudder.
“We love you so much, Stardust,” her father told her. His arms were wrapped around her mother’s shoulders, as if he thought he could hide the fact that she was shaking. “Be safe. For both of us.”
Like a dam breaking loose, Ochaco’s pent up facade burst and every last one of her fears flooded her entirely. She tried to give her parents the best smile she could muster, biting back the sting in her eyes. It must have looked sad, small, and absolutely terrified, but at least this was real.
“I love you too.”
What am I doing? I still have time, don’t I?
The fearful turmoil she’d fought crept back down her spine. She found herself mapping out stars and constellations again and breathed.
I’m fine, aren’t I?
Her mind screamed, but as the words left her lips, she couldn’t find the will to break off her goodbye.
“I’ll be okay. They won’t find me.”
Not one of them spared a thought for her martial arts class.
. . . . .