From Ashes to Flames [BNHA]

Paper Crane

"Hope rests upon the wings/ of a thousand paper cranes." (paper crane by Lillia G.)

Akai walked away from the exit, walking towards the roof of her middle school to take some much needed alone time while Izuku would be able to leave without an awkward silence between them while he wanted to be alone. She stood practically against the fence, her fingers lightly gripping the chainlink as she looked out on the town surrounding her. She felt the wind pick up, its fingers sliding through her long hair and throwing it about in a playful manner. 

Her lips parted as the smile fell, a memory ringing in the afternoon air, 

"I love your hair, dear. I wish I could take care of it more often..." Akai's brush suddenly slipped from her mother's hands as another dizzy spell took over the woman. After a few minutes and a glass of water retrieved by the apathetic looking elementary schooler, the woman was able to speak again. "You should keep your hair long, Akai. It looks the best on you."

The wind tugged her lightly away from the ledge as if it sensed her overwhelming urge to walk with bare feet on the other side of that wretched fence.  Akai's lips curved up into the smile again while she turned and began her walk to visit her mother, which she took everyday.

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She sat in the hospital room, alone with the woman who she hadn't been able to speak a word to in almost a decade. Next to Akai was her backpack, filled with freshly finished homework that was sure to get full marks. Her aggressively high intelligence was apart of her curse, she reasoned, since because of it she's never once had a dream, only being able to grasp practical goals. She admired the naivete of one such as Izuku, who was both smart yet dumb to the world and its ways. So she put the last scraps of faith left in her body towards his success, as though a final cry from her emotions before they disappeared in the darkness that continued to devour her. 

The room was full of paper cranes, as it was a permanent room paid for by her mother's well off family whom she was the only daughter of. Over the years, to occupy those ghost like hands, Akai made thousands of paper cranes. There must be at least a thousand in this room alone, though she constantly goes through once a week to cull the herd a bit. More origami paper was in her lap, as she presently fiddled with a deep red paper without even having to look at her fingers. She let the finished crane fall back into her lap with a dissatisfied gaze out the window where the sky began to turn purple.

She took up her next hobby, writing letters to her mother. On the off chance that the woman ever awoke, she wrote a letter everyday to give to her, so that she wouldn't miss a single detail of her daughter's life. Over the years it had become the one place where Akai was honest, where she expressed the dark thoughts that ran through her veins and how many cuts it took to satiate them for the day. This letter became different, however, because Akai had already made up her mind that afternoon when she finally expressed something to Izuku that she had only said before in her letters to a woman who might as well not exist. 

This was the last letter Akai would ever write to her mother, that red crane was the last one she'd ever make in that hospital room, and the second letter she would write would be the first and last one she would ever write to Izuku Midoriya. All of such was decided hours beforehand, the girl simply waiting until she thought the sky would be the prettiest. She left the  letter for her mother on the table in the room while she walked away, knowing the police would take it as her suicide note after she had been missing for a couple of days.

As she left the hospital, she crossed the street with no real care as though daring a bus to come and crush her at the time when orange, purple, and blue mix in the sky. She slipped the letter to Izuku into the post box, hearing it land in the bottom with echoes of finality. Yet, she wasn't nervous or afraid of that final toll, instead she let out a sigh with her curved smile and began her walk to the beach in the dark.

She stood on the edge of a cliff, her school bag and shoes abandoned further back from the edge. She had even taken her socks off, to embrace the damp grass with her bare feet for the first time since she was a child. She looked off into the distance with those tired bloodied eyes, watching the last of orange and purple being chased past where she could watch them on the horizon. It was her cue, she decided while looking at the stars that seemed to dip into the ocean in places. 

She took a few large strides back before turning back to the glory of the night sky, sprinting faster than she knew her weak limbs had ever moved in her life. She jumped as far as she could from the edge, realizing that she would have cleared the sandpit in gym if she'd had put only a fraction of this effort in. In a whole of a few seconds she watched the pitiful life she had led flash like shooting stars on that barren horizon where the sky met the sea. All she could say for herself was that she,  Akai, would finally return to the sea as her mother had intended by naming her with 'kai' with the meaning of the ocean or sea. And she, like the thousands of paper cranes that filled her childhood home, would finally be able to fly.

Then everything faded away, with the pain so quickly killing Akai Homura she didn't even get the chance to register it. Just like that, 

Akai Homura was dead.