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18. Sweet Dreams

Warning: Nightmares (the nightmare is pretty gory too). Vomiting.

Please, as ever, I beg you to take care of yourselves. If the above makes you unsure as to whether you can read this chapter without causing yourself harm, there's a full chapter summary below or there are in-chapter warnings around the specific sections.

Full chapter Summary:

Otsuka has a nightmare about the day her quirk manifested, many of the details twisted by her subconscious. In the moments before she wakes, she's called a monster by TT.
She wakes and is sick into the toilet. Aizawa finds her like this when he returns from patrol and helps. She promises she's fine, blaming her quirk episode for it, and goes back to bed, but not before taking a prescribed high dose of tablets intended to induce a dreamless sleep.

Chapter 18: Sweet Dreams

Rule 10: Fear makes you strong, don't fear fear.

⚠️WARNING BEGINS ⚠️

A small ginger. Young, weak, terrified, running through half-remembered corridors. Behind her, zombies dragged their feet, always too close no matter how slow they seemed to be running and she couldn't move any faster no matter how hard she fought for it.

They were grotesque, horrifying, skin marred by deep burns that mangled their flesh and tore away their skin until bones— white and shimmering— shone bright in the open air. And all around was that haze of blood no-one could escape.

She ran and she ran and she ran, panting, struggling to breathe, her legs weighed down by an invisible force she couldn't shake off, terror fuelling every tiny movement.

She turned the next corner and found a room of rotting corpses, the zombies were still behind her, she needed to get to the door on the other side or they'd catch her.

"You." Their voice echoed through her body. "You killed us!" A thousand screams shot their accusations through her mind and she could do nothing but keep going as the slimy voices wove in deeper. "Murderer!"

Swallowing down her fear as best she could, the ginger pushed herself to ignore the putrid carcasses around her and crossed the hall to get to the freedom beyond the door on the other side. But no matter how much she jumped and tiptoed around the bodies, trying to avoid disturbing them, the door behind her only got closer, and the one ahead farther away. She only got all the more desperate with the zombies following close after her.

"Murderer!"

She could practically feel their hot breath on her neck as the mist of her quirk around her grew thicker and harder to see through. She had to get to that door. Light poked out from a small window in it, casting a glorious swathe of yellow across the room, bringing hope. All she had to do was get to the door, then she'd be safe, she'd be safe.

They couldn't get her beyond that door. Someone would save her if she just made it to that door.

And she did. And she flung it open.

And a world of regret flooded out.

Matsui, Mufiko, Aizawa, Yamada, the entirety of 1-A were waiting on the other side, eyes pale and lifeless, skin burned and slowly disintegrating. Even her birth parents.