bones and all, katsuki bakugo.

01. over and over and over.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

When Arisa Henshin turned five years old her parents decided they no longer wished to keep pretending, they'd tolerated one another for long enough and a messy divorce soon began. At five years old, it was quite confusing for a child to understand why her parents spent their days screaming at each other and putting her in the middle of it.

It was also at five years old when Arisa's quirk activated itself for the first time.

She had powers.

However, amongst everything she'd been going through, Arisa initially thought she was going to die. She was somehow... okay with it. If it got her out of the mayhem that had become her home life, she didn't mind going sooner than anticipated. She almost thought it might even bring her parents together once more.

She was five years old and she was naive.

Of course those feelings didn't linger.

The brief moment happened during another typical yelling match them, she had cried out and they finally stopped looking at each other to look at her.

She swore they lasted all of a nanosecond before her mother was back to blaming her father for what was happening. It was enough to tell her how the rest of her life would go. They would never come to an agreement over anything again, much less when it came down to her.

When they made it to the hospital, a quirk specialist was quick to analyze her and come to one conclusion: she was, in fact, not dying. (Bummer).

Every single bone in her body, down to her tiniest pinky, was breaking over and over and over. They were breaking and subsequently healing back up. Her quirk?

Arisa Henshin was a shapeshifter.

Not a unique power, by any means, but a tad more complex than what the world had previously encountered thus far.

There were heroes, of course, like Mirko, with rabbit like characteristics, and Ryukyu, who transformed into an actual dragon when using her quirk. But Arisa... Arisa was different.

When she used her quirk, she could actually become anything she chose to be. If she wanted, she too could fly and change her form into a dragon. If she wished, she could focus her power onto a single body part instead, she could turn her nose into a snout and gain an enhanced sense of smell. And if she trained at it, she could perhaps one day learn enough control to the point where several parts of her became separate parts of others.

The day she learned of her quirk, she also learned that the world had a pretty sick sense of humor. Sick in the way that she — a young girl with parents fighting over her for the mere satisfaction of getting one over on the other, who constantly tried to manipulate... to morph her for the judges in order to win the battle — would be born with the ability to change her body's shape at the snap of a finger. She went from being a different version of herself with each parent, to literally being a different version of herself when using her powers.

Fucked up was her world.

Now that she was a little older, she'd stopped hoping for things that would never happen.

"Don't forget we have the dinner with the neighbors later after school!" Arisa heard her mother call out just as she was getting ready to leave for school.

She stopped in the midst of putting a shoe on, turning around to stare dead at her mother,"Is Dad going?"

"Of course." Her mother pressed her lips tightly together,"Why wouldn't he? It's a family dinner, our family will all be there."

"Then do I have to go?" She asked.

"Our family will all be there." The woman repeated, a stern looking taking over her features as she stared at her daughter, almost daring her to challenge her.

Another thing Arisa had learned: her mother lived to fight.

"I don't know why we even go over there anymore." She groaned,"You guys have been divorced forever now, Dad lives in an apartment downtown, and the neighbors know all this shit—"

"Language, young lady."

Arisa ignored that as she continued,"They scream and yell just as much as we do, what's the point in faking nice and going over there? Just because they cook good and we get leftovers so you don't have to cook for the next few days?"

"Niceties, Arisa, it's important to establish good relationships with one's neighbors and friends, they've been ours for as long as we've lived here, why would we break tradition after your father and I split up? I'd say that's quite rude, would you not?" She asked, eyebrow raised.

"Rude is pretending like they're your real friends so you can get a few extra meals out of them in order to avoid cooking for your daughter." Arisa shrugged,"But that's just me— later!"

And with that, she turned and shut the door, other shoe in hand still as she locked behind her and made sure her mother wasn't going to open the door back up again to yell at her. She wasn't wrong, her parents were far from friends with the neighbors. The only thing they had in common was that they both liked to yell and had one single child.

And speaking of said child...

Arisa made eye contact with Katsuki Bakugo, presumably about to leave for school too if his uniform was anything to go off of.

They didn't go to the same school, there was some city line and apparently their houses were right at the divide. He made the cut to go to one and she the other. Both were in the same district, but hardly interacted.

Even if they did, she knew for a fact that neither she nor Bakugo participated in any sports or after school activities that involved fraternizing. And so, they only ever acknowledged one another at family dinner.

She put on her other shoe before turning the other way, then as an afterthought, she called out,"See ya at seven!"

She pulled out a pair of headphones and settled them onto her head for her walk to school.

He said nothing back, or at least she assumed he didn't because he never spoke to her under his own pretenses, always encouraged by his mother to be polite to her. Same as her.

Which was why Katsuki Bakugo wouldn't even cross her mind until later that day when they would once more engage in awkward conversation (e.g., school talk, new manga recommendations, music...) all for the sake of their parents and "niceties".