after you l hawks x oc

i.

Hikari Kaneko can't exactly remember the last time she had a peaceful sleep. Outside her apartment, the city lay silent under a cloak of darkness, its once bustling streets now shrouded in the deep embrace of night. While everyone else is tucked in tranquility in their beds, she sits in her dark room and she swears she can feel time passing — fleeting out of her control, taking her soul away with it; she is paralyzed in her feet and can't do anything but watch everything slip by. The darkness envelops her, each shadow taunting her, whispering broken dreams and unfulfilled desires.

She should be used to it by now. It's been years since that day happened — when everything crumbled down and she was left with a purposeless existence, like a bird with clipped wings, unable to soar towards the sky.

And yet, whenever the night becomes deep and quiet enough for her to hear the ticking of the clock, she can't help but take out her laptop. She would search his name on the internet and read every latest article about him online, her eyes tirelessly scanning page after page about his achievements. It often ends with her scratching her scar: a long vertical slit just a few inches above her right collarbone. It doesn't sting. It didn't even hurt when she received that wound. But there's something about his name and that damn golden-brown eyes of his that makes her scar throb. Like an allergy, it provokes an irresistible itch she cannot ignore. She would scratch and scratch and scratch until the lampshade beside her shone too bright and exploded into pieces from her quirk. Geten would bring her new ones every now and then but she never truly uses them.

｡･:*:･ﾟ★｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

She was a gifted child — or that was what she was led to believe, to be precise. Her parents died in an accident when she was just three years old. Her grandmother raised her until the old woman also passed away when Hikari was six years old, leaving her alone with no close relatives left. It didn't matter because she could take care of herself. Since she was a kid, she had always been praised as the smartest and most mature in her class. She was ahead of her classmates in everything: be it in academics or in their quirks. No, she wasn't a genius or a prodigy but in their small elementary school, she was the closest to one they had; it was enough for them to regard her with respect and awe. In their town, she was loved by the adults and had no trouble living on her own because of their assistance.

When she turned seven years old, Hikari single-handedly defeated a villain during a class trip. It was a big man with a mutant quirk of a spider who, after being cornered by the patrolling heroes, tried to take her and her classmates as his hostage. Despite her young age, Hikari was quick to spring into action and captured the man using her quirk effortlessly.

When representatives from the Hero Public Safety Commission visited her right after the incident, she could feel her heart almost bursting with pride and delight. She was just a young orphan but she received a rare golden opportunity that no one else in her class nor even in her whole town can ever be offered with. She hadn't thought about being a hero yet by then but the invitation was more than enough to convince her to pursue that path. They told her she had a huge amount of potential, that she could be an amazing hero and accomplish great things, and she believed it with all her heart. She has an amazing quirk and it was only fit for her to excel with it.

Accepting the Hero Public Safety Commission's invitation came with the price of leaving her old life behind. She left their town, changed her name, and trained with all her might to meet everyone's expectations.

And look where it brought her.

Hikari looked at her reflection in the mirror after taking a shower the following morning. She didn't know it was even possible for the black circles under her tired eyes to get any darker. Her own purple orbs stared back at her without any glint of life in them. Like a ghost, her skin grows even more pale from the messy black hair framing her head. She's indeed unrecognizable now. All that she can see in front of her is a hollow shell of whom she used to aspire to be. She doesn't even go by Hikari anymore. In her work, everyone calls her Solar and that's all they know about her. She preferred it that way.