Chapter Text
First, she isn’t. Then, she is.
The little red-haired girl blinks blearily. Disorientation, borne of not existing until this very moment, blares through her mind like alarm bells. Even ‘her’ and ‘girl’ feel tenuous, the weakest of handholds onto reality for a being that floats adrift in absolute nothingness. She looks up, and she looks down, and she looks around. New sights, sounds, and colours flood her sight, and for a while she just sits, soaking it in, half in amazement and half in absolute sensory overload. Time passes, and she has no idea it does. She learns a million new things as things move past the gap in the shadowy place between walls she sits in, and barely generates a single new memory.
The things that move look like her. They have legs and arms and heads and eyes, and their hands move when they talk. Some have more arms or more legs, or are different colours in their hair and their eyes. They’re all equally unique and captivating. Occasionally, one walks past with a thing on a leash that the little girl feels a sort of attachment to, the good kind that she can’t yet put to words. She feels an attachment to the ones holding the leashes as well, but it’s a different and more hopeful kind. She wonders what the others are thinking. She wonders if everything’s new to them too. She wonders if they can see her. What would they do if they did?
She decides to keep sitting. The world grows darker and the sounds become more quiet. The steady stream of people walking past slows to a trickle. The world stops changing in front of her, settling into a cool blue hue, and the occasional car that drives past is too fast to really observe. She feels two things. The first is irritation that the cars won’t slow down so that she can take them in better. The second is boredom. Neither are feelings she can name, because she does not yet think in words but in pictures and sounds.
She decides to leave the alleyway and search for more things to look at. The world is far, far larger than the little crack of it she watched. It stretches in each direction almost to infinity, and standing on her short little legs it dwarfs her by an order of magnitude. Each building is covered in windows, some even seeming to be made of them and reflecting the moon so clearly that before she figures out that trick she believes there is more than one moon in the sky. The air blows, harsh and chilly, and she watches the clouds speed by.
The little girl finds herself bumping into a tall person wearing a coat. He mutters, unintelligible, and keeps walking down the road. She looks left, then right, and she finds nothing, so she decides to follow him.
She follows him, taking three steps for each long stride the far larger man takes, and stares at his back as he walks past building after building. Is he following someone as well? Why is his hair short and brown, and why is there some of it on his face? Why won’t he slow down? He’s walking too fast, and she wants him to slow down. Why won’t he? It’s annoying, but enough new things pass by as she follows him that she doesn’t feel the need to act on the impulse.
After about thirty colourful signs all dulled by the dark go by - and each one is so unique and wonderful, and the odd scrawlings and mascots on them pique her curiosity - the man in front of her looks back. He stops and he stares, and the corners of his mouth turn downwards. She doesn’t feel anything at this development, and stares right back in his eyes. He doesn’t seem to know what to make of it. That’s perfect, because neither does she.
He makes more noises. She keeps staring. He turns to leave. She follows.
He walks for a while longer, then stops suddenly. There are more cars in front of him, and he stares up at something she can’t quite see. It’s a box on a pole with a little red person glowing on it, and when time passes it flickers and the person turns green, starting to walk as other odd symbols flash atop it. He begins to move again, staying on the striped strip. Aha, she thinks, and the little girl understands the rules now. She likes them, and she likes watching the tall person follow them. Something about it tickles the back of her brain.
Finally, the man comes to a stop, but there is no stripey ground or red light. She’s confused. He kneels down and says something to her. She doesn’t understand. Should she make noises back? She decides to give it a try, and repeats the noises he made right back to him.
The coat person’s mouth drops open and his eyelids rise. The expression makes the red-haired girl unhappy, and the idea that she’s fundamentally missing some element or rule of this interaction makes her even more unhappy. He stands up and takes something out of his pocket, and makes noises into it. She doesn’t think she should try to copy him again. With that disappointment, she decides to leave and walk down some other road. The person must have seen her begin to leave, and he speaks faster into his pocket-thing before he makes a loud noise. She turns back to see what gained his attention.
The man lowers his pocket-thing in front of her face so tha she can see the glowing screen on it, and then presses it. It starts moving and making sounds. Like the mascots on the signs she walked past, a yellow-haired man in red, blue, and white makes noises and moves. Comapred to the dull and boring coat-man holding the device, the sight is enchanting, and she stares at it.
Some time passes as she soaks in the sights and sounds the coat-man has given her. A few cars drive by, and she ignores them. No more people walk by. Coat-man mumbles something, and she ignores that too.
On the screen, yellow-haired man makes some sounds that signal happiness to a primal part of her brain. A dark and scary thing tries to attack him and he beats it up. It’s enthralling. The entire length of whatever it is she is watching is seared into her mind, and it stimulates it like nothing else. She wants her own pocket-thing.
Finally, one car comes to a stop nearby, past another stripey path and stopping-box. Coat man presses a finger into the side of the pocket thing she’s been watching and the screen loses its life, turning black and reflecting her yellow eyes, which glow dimly back at it with concentric rings. In the reflection, the corners of her lips turn down.
It was coat-man’s fault. She really wanted to keep watching that. Why did he make it stop? It’s not fair, and now she’s bored. Acting purely out of instinct, she points a finger at him, and surprises even herself when a glowing yellow chain shoots out of the tip of it and pierces his head. She wants him to put the show back on, and he does.
She hears more loud noises, loud enough to disturb the yellow-haired man’s show. Glancing to the side, she watches as two more people step out of a car, this one bearing red and blue lights and a black-and-white colour. Most cars she’s seen have only one colour, so this is worth noting.
One of the car-man seems to be checking the coat-man, holding a palm on his chest and staring curiously back at her. This is an emotion she can discern, because she knows how it feels. She’s felt it almost the whole day today. He makes more noises into a box on his stomach, and then both car-men guide her slowly into the black and white car with red and blue lights. They guide coat-man and his pocket-thing along with her, a chain linking his head to her finger all the while, so she lets them, and sits down in the back of the car. The door slams closed, but more importantly, yellow-haired man is about to fight a villain even stronger than the one he did before.
At 2:32 AM, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department takes a seemingly nonverbal little girl into custody, along with a man she appears to have linked to her quirk.
The red-haired girl finally runs out of energy, and the chain dissipates. The coat-man slumps back into the chair in the car, his pocket-thing dropping out of his hand. He looks drained. She reaches to pick it up but her attention is grabbed by the car’s window. Staring out the window is fascinating, as lights pass her by and light up the inside of the car before they leave. They come in all colours, and almost as interesting are the poles and wires and other things in the sky she stares up at, even as the clouds and the moon stay in the same spot. She begins to feel drained as well, and lies back, copying the boring coat-man. Everything goes back.
When she wakes up, it’s in a chair in a bright white place that hurts her eyes. People talk at her for a while and her head hurts. She remembers something from her dream, even though she can barely remember it - something totally cool and really awesome, red and sharp and metal-y and when you rip the cord it tears up everything it touches, and it eats stuff too. She doesn’t know what to make of it, and the harsh white lights hurt her eyes enough to make her forget it.
They put her in another car. The world through the window looks almost totally different from when it was dark, so she watches intently and counts the clouds and the wire-poles and the windows that go by before she loses count and gives up. The things she can see slow down and stop, and she’s guided out of the car and into a building. More people lead her to a room where she sits, bored, then another, then another. It seems all she’s going to do today is sit in a chair as people talk on the other side of doors, so she tries to leave. The door is closed. She’s tall enough to try for the handle but it doesn’t budge. She feels irritated.
The new person, the one who was there when she was led into the building, finally enters the room. She gestures at herself in a friendly way and makes a sound. She does this again, with the same amount of patience as the last time. The red-haired girl stares at the subtle bags under her eyes instead. Why does she have them? Why is she wearing glasses over them?
Her attention returns to the taller lady. The taller lady stares back, equally amused and tired. Something clicks in the little red-haired girl’s mind, and she finally understands the rules of the game. She just needs a sound of her own.
Like it was from a dream, the right sound to make comes to her, and she gestures at her chest in a perfect imitation of when the taller lady did it.
“Makima.”