running | k.bakugou

Chapter 1

Her feet thumped on the asphalt rhythmically, the beat of the song playing through her ears in sync with each of her footfalls. Her heart pumped frantically in her chest and her lungs worked hard to get oxygen in and out of her body. The sweat beading on her forehead and back was slightly itchy but easy enough to ignore because of the wind rapidly cooling it as she ran.

Rey had always loved running. She didn't know why. Her parents, two very un-athletic office workers, never understood it. "It's just so gross and sweaty and way too hard," her mother would say. Her father would just shake his head and say, "at least your determination would be good in a workplace."

To say they were workaholics would be an understatement. They both worked at a really boring company that was in charge of all of the paperwork of everyone in Japan's quirks. They were always going on about the board of directors and the stock market and how "Judy in management made a huge mistake today."

Mistakes. One of the only unacceptable things in their household. Despite how schools tried to encourage that mistakes were good, Rey's parents drilled it into her head that she must not ever make any mistakes. 99/100 on a school test? how disappointing, you made one mistake. You slept in because you forgot to set your alarm? Another mistake, you have disappointed everyone.

Rey guesses that her strict parent's insistence on her not making mistakes is what drove her to work so hard for her goals, as much as she hates to admit it. Rey's goals were less than sightly in her parents eyes, but thankfully they just let her have them, as they believed they weren't achievable.

Ever since she knew what the word meant, Rey had wanted to be a hero. Seeing the admirable people on the tv save people out of the goodness of their hearts with a smile on their faces would always brighten up Rey's day. Of course now, she knew there was a lot more to it, that a lot of hero's did the things they did for selfish reasons (most of the time being money, but sometimes otherwise), yet she still had hope in the few hero's left that saved people because they wanted to, and wished to be added to the small list of people that weren't selfish.

They say that you either get a combination of your parents quirks, or you just get one of theirs, so when Rey got her quirk it was a bit confusing. Her mother had a combination of two quirks, that was really just having two quirks in the first place, because they didn't really merge together to create one quirk. Rey's mother had her father's ability to tell what a person's true intentions were, deep down, but also got her mother's quirk of "stapler hands", where, when she pinched her forefinger and thumb together, a staple came out and stuck into whatever was between her two fingers. Her two quirks are probably what has made her such a successful businesswoman, with one helping her to see who she can trust to have her best interests at heart, and the other just a handy tool for in the office.

Rey's father on the other hand had an arguably slightly more powerful quirk, a weak-ish form of telekinesis. He was able to move objects of up to 10kg with his mind, but not for very long (because he didn't use his quirk that much with his job, he never felt the need to train his limits to any extent).

In a weird combination of her parents quirks, Rey was able to do two things. One of them, the more mental of the quirks, was her ability to dig deep and see people's goals, or what they strived for. It often worked where the short term ones that were quickly to be completed were more obvious, sometimes absolutely screaming at her. These ones were most of the time things like, "remember to get eggs on the way home," and other to-do list sort of things. But sometimes she came across particularly ambitious people, who would have things like "BECOME THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD" written right above them in bold. When she dug deeper, that is when she found the more, "important things" as she dubbed them. They often told what sort of person they truely were, if they had good morals or whatever. Although she had never once come across one of the people who had their ambitious thoughts in bold that she got along with.

The other quirk she had gotten, which like her mother had not merged with her mental one quirk, was a combination of her father's telekinesis and her mother's stapler hands. She was able to telekinetically manipulate metals to her liking. She was still experimenting and practicing, but so far she had been able to move up to 120kg of metal at one time, and had also figured out that if it was classified as a metal on the periodic table, even able to control some metaloids (it was a very happy surprise when she found out she could control plants to some extent because of the presence of boron in them; she was a bit anxious to try out controlling living creatures yet, because it felt wrong to do so).

Rey didn't really understand why her parents thought her dreams of becoming a hero were unattainable, because her quirks (or at least one of them) were highly useful for hero work, and that combined with her running, her strict training routine, and fairly strict diet, would be a sure fire way to get into any school with a hero course. She just had to prove that to them first.