Chapter Text
I remember my name.
My stuffed bison? There’s a little box he guards, that’s why I don’t pull him out with the others. I keep it in there. Sometimes I take it out, try it on, remember how it feels. I have to put it away again, of course, then Scruffle keeps it safe for me.
I know I’m not supposed to, but have you met anyone from our generation who doesn’t? I know you remember the old days. Pro Heroes, Quirks, living without fear, All Might… We were five, well, four in your case, but you were almost five. Old enough to know things were changing, too young to realize how much we lost. Nah, we learned that later…
Did they tell you what happened in school? They gave us a whole year about it in history class, but they probably treat you a lot better.
Yeah, I can tell you what they taught us. The way my teacher told it, All for One’s para ability let him steal powers from people he killed, and when he took them they would act like weeds and sink roots into him. They’d mutate together like how kids get a combo of their parents’ abilities. Nakamura-san used a way more disgusted tone though, like, she seemed like she was about to go feral when she had to talk about it. She really didn’t like having to teach us.
Anyway, the way they taught it, All Might was like, way close to Singularity too. Some people say they were brothers, the first two people to develop para abilities, and they’d just been fighting for so long their powers evolved. Officially All Might was just the child of a bad match, and got two Quirks that were too powerful together, and he was right on the edge of Singularity.
You remember that day? When it felt like the worst earthquake ever, and the whole sky turned into thunderclouds in a single second? Nakamura-san said that was because they finally finished each other off. Either All for One killed All Might and stole his para ability, or All Might pushed hard enough to hit Singularity and that wiped them both out. Or maybe both things happened. Either way, someone went too far, and we lost the Oki islands.
And that’s when it all changed. The world knew that we weren’t evolving to the next step, we were on the cusp of utter, worldwide destruction. Next time, it might not stop with four islands out in the ocean. So now I’m a Resident, and I have to respond to “17-Lambda.”
I hear other countries have it worse. If we were in China, I’d be sterilized at birth. Or maybe that’s just talk. I dunno, I’m not legally allowed to travel outside the country, and those internet filters aren’t exactly crude.
Nah, I’m not bitter. There’s nowhere I really wanted to go except, like, maybe Paris? I stopped worrying about that kinda stuff when I learned they were abolishing Pro Heroes. Yeah, I know the Omega Subjects still do the same jobs, but you have to be born with a near-Singularity para ability. I’m only high risk. Still have to get a license for more than one kid, but don’t get to have a cool codename and gadgets.
Why am I telling you all this? …because I’m going to name our child, and I want you to know why. I need you to understand. Not just this, but…me.
Maybe I should start from the beginning. I know it was probably similar for you, but I’ve never talked about this with anyone. I need to, I think.
After the big week of mourning for All Might, my family got a letter in the mail. An actual, honest to goodness letter. I barely knew how to read kids manga back then, but I don’t think what it said was much of a surprise. Wait, no, you don’t have a para ability, huh? They probably sent you a different one.
The gist of it was:
Your family has been assigned to report to Assessment Clinic Five on the seventh of July, at 7 am.
Your paranormal abilities (commonly referred to as Quirks) will be evaluated and you will receive a numeric designation in lieu of your given names. Depending on the outcome, the following rights may be rescinded.
Travel outside of Japan,
Number of children,
Choice of your own spouse,
Attendance to higher education,
Use of paranormal abilities in private,
Ownership of land,
Service in the military,
Refusal of service in the military,
Service in the occupation formerly called “Pro Heroes,”
Refusal to serve in the occupation formerly called “Pro Heroes,”
Consumption of alcohol,
Use of non-prescribed pharmaceuticals,
Private residence.
This list is not comprehensive, and additional rights may be rescinded or restored following evaluation.
Failure to arrive at your appointment will result in imprisonment.
There was more on there about rescheduling and stuff, but I don’t remember all that. We went to the one they set, and I remember being…excited. I know, it sounds so dumb now, but I thought it was like an assessment for if I could be a Hero. I thought I was gonna blow them away with my Quirk. But then I got there.
It was like a hospital, but the most depressing hospital you’ve ever seen. Bare, concrete walls, dim lights, long hallways that echoed with footsteps you couldn’t find. They let me stay with my mom when she went to her exam room. It was like a grey box. No chairs. No wallpaper. Not even proper tiling.
They mostly tested how invisible we really are. Ran a few different kinds of lights over our arms, watched to see how they acted. Flashlights, lasers, radios, bluetooth, x-ray, all that. They took some blood, hair, and skin samples, checked for allergic reactions, that sort of thing.
And then we had to wait.
It felt like forever, but everything does when you’re that young. It was probably just an hour, maybe two at most. Then we got the news.
My parents were Thetas. They weren’t Citizens anymore. Just Residents. 288 and 289-Theta. Couldn’t leave the country, couldn’t have kids without a license, couldn’t serve in certain jobs, and couldn’t go back to school for a degree unless their job was willing to vouch for them. All things considered, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
Then they got my results back.
Lambda. “High Risk of producing a Singularity-capable offspring,” they told us. Apparently my para ability was more potent than my parents’, so I got a worse deal. I can’t go to university at all, need to have a kid before twenty, can’t have any more without permission from the Allocator, can’t have a blood-alcohol level above a certain percentage, need a doctor’s note to get a headache tablet from the store, and a whole bunch of other stuff. And, of course, I’m not allowed to apply for a divorce from my matching, and infidelity is punishable by death.
So, yeah, the Hagakure household wasn’t exactly celebrating that day.
I got moved to a new school. My dad was able to keep his job, thankfully, but I didn’t understand that. I just knew I didn’t get to see all my friends anymore. Looking back, I bet some of them were worse off than me. For some, not much changed. But no one was entirely spared.
I suppose on the outside there wasn’t much to complain about. I got okay grades, I made new friends, I was allowed to go out and be social so long as I was home by the Resident curfew, and I even had a decent home. But around twelve I started to realize I was just…going through the motions.
I didn’t have any plans, any path, any…choice. I couldn’t be a Pro Hero anymore, they didn’t exist. I wasn’t going to be a business owner, I didn’t have the brains for it. And any sort of job where I had to show my face? Forget about it. Of course, it wasn’t like that mattered. When I talked to a career counselor about it, you know what he said?
“You’ll probably be matched to a successful Alpha Citizen, so you won’t need to worry about a career.”
Because that’s what a confused girl needs to hear when she’s worried about what her future looks like. The problem is, he was right.
We had a school dance that year. Something to help everyone feel better since the newest Omega Subjects were debuting and…yeah, you remember how that went. Problem being, there wasn’t any “ask someone out” stuff. No, they got a mandate from the government that we had to be paired off with “appropriate dance partners” for “safety.” There weren’t enough people with Alpha status to match with all the Lambdas, so they paired a lot of people off with the same sex when they ran out.
I think that was probably the worst bit of all. All those people who got to have a profound realization that night? Guess what, kiddos, you’ll marry who you’re assigned to.
To be totally fair, I got paired up with an actually really nice girl. She had like, mushroom powers or something? We were the same height, and she was a really good dancer, so the night was fun anyway, but I kinda missed out on that whole experience of picking your partner. Plus, I’d never met her until after I got there, so we were in the wrong dress colors and didn’t know what to talk about like, at all.
But yeah, that was the real wake-up call that my life had been planned out by people I’d never meet, and all I could do was follow along or find myself out in the cold. Didn’t leave me a lot of options.
So, for the next three years I decided to do the only thing I could. I picked up hobbies.
I wasn’t going to be going into the workforce, not when I had a match waiting for me out there somewhere, so I figured I might as well get ready to live the quiet life. While whoever he was went off to work, between whatever I had to do with him to avoid jail time, I’d need something to keep myself sane.
I tried it all. Skydiving, golf, martial arts, painting, writing, sewing, blogging, baking, musical instruments, acting, voice acting, speedrunning, swimming, pilot lessons, driving, biking, and I think briefly I looked into fashion—you don’t want to hear about that one—but I gotta tell ya: some of those are really hard when no one can see you. I tried being a streamer for a little bit? Yeah, that didn’t turn out great.
I mean, you’ve seen some of the stuff I do when we have a day off. I kept a couple things, but none of them really…fit, you know? I never felt like “yeah, I can do this for the rest of my life and be fulfilled.” I wanted to help people. To use my abilities.
You know, that last year before the matching, I tried to evolve my ability? No joke, I tried to get knocked down to Omega. I figured it would suck, but it might be better than slowly dying inside. Didn’t work, obviously, but for a while I was trying. I was desperate, especially with the big day coming up.
I…don’t think I slept at all that night. I was too anxious. Tomorrow I’d be meeting the person I’d spend the rest of my life with. Sure, he might hate me while we went to High School and request a re-match, but what if he didn’t? Or what if he liked me and I hated him? I just couldn’t relax enough to fall asleep, and ended up listening to music on my phone to try and calm me down. I might have dozed off towards the last couple hours, but that didn’t help a whole lot.
And then it was time to get up. The whole rest of my life would be decided before dinner. The only thing to do was get on my dress and not make a fool of myself.