Lightning Serenade

Chapter 14: Field Trip I

Kaminari Denki felt like Neito more and more every day since leaving the mental hospital. He missed his friends. They weren't allowed to share family names, so he had no idea how to find them. Their quirks would be helpful to find them, but Denki was only 12 and did not have access to highly classified quirk registries and databases, so that was a dead end.

He also did not have access to any hackers that could illegally access those registries and databases, so no luck there, either. Plus, it probably wouldn't have been a good idea after Touya had gone through the trouble of making a training regimen so that he could get his body in tip-top shape to become a hero. He should probably avoid doing anything illegal... not that he actually had the means to even attempt any illegal hacking in the first place, but a boy could dream.

With all of his wishful thinking and resulting sulking with every dead-end outcome, he wasn't even excited for the field trip to the zoo.

It didn't help that his friends kept flip-flopping between teasing him and avoiding him, not really sure how to react to having a friend who hears voices and spent over a week in a mental hospital. Sometimes, when his friends acted like they were afraid he would snap if they said the wrong thing, he thought that that must be how Hitoshi feels when people are nervous about his quirk. He felt that way as he boarded the bus, thinking about Hitoshi and not knowing who he was going to sit with because his friends were back in the silent treatment phase and acting scared around him.

Denki stopped dead in the middle of the aisle of the bus, causing one of his friends to crash into the back of him and immediately start yelling and shoving against him. If Denki had time to think, he would realize that that is not how someone acts when they are actually afraid of you, but Denki was a little distracted.

"Kaminari!" his friend had whined loudly, hitting him in the back in frustration. "You're so annoying! Why did you stop like that?"

But Denki wasn't paying attention because Denki's heart fell out of his chest and onto the dirty bus floor when he saw a mess of purple hair, purple eyes reflected in the bus window. He was already freaking his friends out enough, but now that he was hallucinating Hitoshi sitting there at the front of the bus, he knew that his mind was playing mean tricks on him, and he was nervous that he would accidentally talk to a hallucination and make his friends hate him even more.

Denki forced himself to keep moving toward the back of the bus where his friend group sat. Denki's worst nightmare happened again when his friends paired up without him, pretending that they did not want to sit at the very back so three people could sit next to each other to include Denki in the group, even though that seat was empty. His other classmates started maneuvering around him as he tried to convince a pair of friends to move to the very back to sit with him, and he almost cursed under his breath when he turned and realized that the back was taken.

Yes, Neito definitely had influenced him, maybe more than he had initially realized if he had to stop himself from cursing in front of his teachers. He would have to really work hard to police his thoughts so that he didn't blurt out anything inappropriate and get himself into trouble.

Denki was going to flop down in an empty seat near the middle of the bus, dreading the two-hour bus ride to the zoo, when his teacher called for him near the front of the bus, requesting that he come sit up at the front with the new student.

Denki was quickly learning that he had a lot of "worst nightmares," and this was another one. He worked hard to make the friends that he had, and he was hesitant to try to start a new friendship now. What if it made his friends mad and they thought he was trying to replace them? What if the new kid gets a bad reputation after being associated with the stupid, hallucinating freak that was Kaminari Denki?