Freeze Frame

Chapter 136

Third person pov

Lillian has decided that she doesn't like being shot at. At all.

It's the USJ all over again. A snapshot frozen in time, the world still even though she was not. As though she were leaving time itself behind, existing on her own plane. The world within her line of sight had not been the only thing to freeze this time. There were no sounds from her left or from her right. Not from behind her or above her. It was like she'd stepped into the middle of a photograph instead of just taking one. As far as she could hear, everything had simply... stopped. Not limited to what her eyes could see, defying the strict rules her quirk usually followed.

For a moment she just stands there, breathing hard and staring at the gun pointed at her with a visceral fear she can't seem to shake. Maybe she should've taken up Hound Dog's offer of therapy. If only Chad were around. He'd have let her hold a pistol until it stopped scaring her so much, but he had to go join the Kidnapped Club with All Might, putting a real dent in the possibility of positive character development. Yeah, her social anxiety was generally nonexistent amongst 1-A these days, but at what cost?

The frozen world around her was quiet in an eerie sort of way, and that made her own breaths sound all the louder. The girl could hardly form a thought through her emotional spike. She was vaguely aware of her hair drifting upwards, her eyes burning harder than they had in a while now. Wasn't pleasant. Wouldn't personally recommend, in all honesty. She'd gotten fresh avocado where she'd wanted fre sha vaca do. Perhaps it was all just a sacrifice to the cause. The cause being the deterioration of her mental health and her advance towards semi-successful heroism... or something.

Seriously, just what was up with her lately? They were checking off all the boxes. Kidnapped as a toddler and as a teenager? She had a third time to look forward to in adulthood if this kept up, and a fourth as an elder. People were getting shot at, students were getting murdered, classmates were betraying their boyfriends. Lillian didn't even want to think about Hitoshi's hand or Neito's sudden and not-super-permanent-but-still-concerning death. There as also the moderate separation anxiety she now had with Katsuki, which she'd been successfully distracting herself from up until this moment.

"O-Oh." Lillian squeaked out. Her voice seemed to echo in the stillness. How cash money. Very pleasant. Alright, she could do this. She's a fully... okay, almost fully functioning, maybe-capable hero student. If she froze up like this they might boot her from the internship, and she'd be letting a lot of people down in that case. Her freezing Chisaki Kai was going to be their best bet at this whole thing.

The gears in her brain... lubricated, or whatever you want to call it. She (kinda?) came to her senses is what she's saying. The pain in her gut was what brought her back to the reality of things. The fact that she had actually managed to accomplish the anomaly that was freezing everything in her surrounding area settled like an uncomfortable stone in her chest. It hurt like a bitch, and seemed to have been triggered by extreme, very sudden fear. Her birth mother's quirk had been activated by extreme rage, right? Maybe this was the same thing in its own way. Speaking of which, fuck her for leaving her in a hospital. Not the biggest issue right now, but it needed to be said.

Maybe she could carry a photo of a pistol around with her to glimpse at anytime she wanted to freeze everything. Okay, was that too dark? That was too dark. She should move before this entire thing stopped and she got stuck with a bullet to the head.

Lillian reminded herself very surely that this was, in fact, not Kamino Ward. That wasn't Izuku Midoriya pointing a gun at her and Tamaki had not been shot in the chest. In fact, he looked like he'd perhaps caught himself with his arms, or had at least been beginning to push himself up right before she flipped her absolute shit. Deep breaths. We're relaxed people, right? Absolutely not, but that's okay. Chad used guns all the time! She'd seen them-- even cleaned a few. It was no big deal. Totally no big deal. This was fine!