─── Chapter Six. ❛ THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT (PAST LIFE ADJACENT ) ❜
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THERE WAS A COMMON THEORY OVER THE EXISTENCE OF A SINGULAR, non-linear effect that would impact the afterimages of a universal being and setting, like dominoes being toppled down one by one. Something so simple, so rudimentary and ordinary, such as the beating of the thin interwoven fibers of a butterfly's wingspan, could lead the world to alternate between what was and what could've been.
For Minami Chizue, she believed that the interconnectedness of a fraction of her being differentiating from who she was would never affect the longing, the greed she carried within herself to become a hero. The idea had been not only sown into the lashes of her eyelids, pronounced from the soft interior of her belly button, once housing an umbilical cord that connected her to a just woman. Chizue would never be anything other than a hero in the making.
A father's cruel love would not change that. A mother's indifference would not change that. The world itself had stolen Chizue from the womb, remade her lungs with fragments of honor and bubbles made from all things strong, simply so she could proclaim to the world that she was not made into a creature preaching heroism beneath hideous skin, but a young girl begging to be seen. For what she truly was — a vessel born to be a hero, born to hold the jagged crown (pomegranate juice sifting and sliding red against her fingertips, blood holding the ligaments of that fragile placeholder) and bite the hand that fed her, born to rebuke the ache against raw palms and push past all things that wore down her bones.
When Minami Chizue took that first step towards her own goals, she was not sixteen, walking on air amongst crowds of onlookers. She was that same nine-year-old girl carrying a sea of burdens in her eyes, wearing waterlogged clothes that clung to her skin, dragging her down into the depths of her swimming pool.
She was nine, spluttering through her wails, lifting her arms towards Minami Akihiro, waiting for him to fish her out of the freezing waters. A girl waiting to be done with a world that had yet to begin.
Many contestants were already halfway through the perilous cliffs when Chizue began to sprint her way past them. Left behind were her heavy burdens, too much to carry for the lightness of her quirk to keep her afloat.
Think light thoughts. Chizue warned herself when the world began to sink again, and fear gripped her heart. The pool's floor was in sight, and the water clogged her nose. She didn't want to drown. (Her fingers tightened against themselves, contraptions of scarred fury and bony sacrilegious defiance. Akihiro was her twisted god, and to him she shouted profanities and struck down the heavens. Icarus may have flown too close to the sun, but Minami Chizue would haul the sun to burn the earth into a raging inferno and declare herself an Athiest in his memory).
