little birdie.

NOT QUITE TANGIBLE

Rescue training with sixteen-year-olds was going to be a pain in the ass, he could feel the upcoming migraine. Let's not forget Thirteens' weird way of talking, even back in high school, their speech patterns differed from the rest.

Whatever he got himself into class and announced for everyone to get up because they were leaving. Excited chitters and murmurs (Problem Child the first) passed as everyone boarded the bus. The class president, he really couldn't be bothered with remembering their names, did his awkward hand motions, and ordered everyone on the bus. He would be surprised if he didn't care this much. Only the paranoia can tell his fingers are touching and that he's ready to sleep twenty-four hours daily, for the rest of his life. 

He still had the crawling sensation; eyes on him. Maybe if he'd been a little more superstitious―like Hizashi, he would believe that a ghost was watching him. Oboro smiling down with his stupid smile and bent nose, or maybe she was there, blank eyes, rolled back, gurgling blood. Scrapes and scratches on her mangled arms and legs as her hair peaks from under the rubble.

Blink.

_

The lights flicker. Shi knows something is so very wrong.

Fear is a rare thing, because she's dead and gone―a ghost story to tell under the moonlight of a girl who saved someone in exchange for death; watching as her family cries by her funeral and as her cousins best friend tries to make up for that despair. So when she feels a chill, something cold and broken running along (what used to be) her spine, and it hurts―she shrieks.

Loud. She's loud when they break through a portal―a portal that feels familiar even though Shi has no recollection of her life. Purple mist floats and hundreds of bodies pool out. A boy stands in front, he's not yet a man. Too young, too young. He's scragly, thin fingers and hollow bones, an empty thing (the way he scratches is familiar, too). Blue-white hair, chapped lips under a disembodied hand, his skin trembles and he tears away at his neck.

He only wear dark colors, except for his shoes; they match his bloodied eyes. Red. Like liquid copper and stained teeth (and arms under hands on a bathroom floor, tremors wrack up the building). Shi shakes her head, making the bad thoughts scramble away. She pulls at the far around her; clambering to make sense of it all. She cannot―making sense out of something illogical is like trying to unscramble an egg. You know that in order to revert things, you do them backwards, so you turn the direction of the fork in your bowl and spin it the other way. The egg, in turn, becomes more scrambled, and you give up on having sunny-side-up. That is unless you have a time quirk, in which case you'll illegally activate it in your haste and get overexcited, and you'll end up with two whole eggs.

He bares his teeth in an almost-smile that's crooked around the edges, he's pale enough to be a corpse, or someone whose spent his entire life hiding from the sun at the risk it would burn him. Hand-boy is playing a dangerous game of can and mouse; that is to say she does not know yet who the cat is, nor the mouse. Perhaps they are playing something more complex, like cards―or a strategy game, like chess. Or maybe hand-boy is trying to do the impossible; like unscrabling an egg, or necromancing someone who is very much alive and well.

Red eyes, she looks at them through the translucent glow of her pale hands, she wishes to weep. Scratching his neck he mumbles out: "All Might couldn't even make it?"

Hand-boy says it like it's something he expected. All Might isn't here (he was the number one for two years before she died), he's trying to find how to think about it. Like a child not sure how to react to a car accident, because they've never been in one; they take the closest experience and react to the accident like they would the memory, unfortunately, to the fear and horror of the parents, the closest memory they had was a roller coster. Hand-boy throws a tantrum, and the purple fog is now human, with gold slits for eyes and a calm voice only a father could posses.

Tired and caressed with a sense of grim dread. Hope lingers in the air―like bated breath and the smell of blood after midnight.

There is a thing beside hand-boy. It's twisted, not human, inhumane, crippled and overpowered. Too many teeth and a too-long tongue. It'd brain stings against the air. The thing might've been human, once, but someone took it apart too many times, put in too many teeth and too many muscles to make up for it's lack of competence. Shi has (had?) grown up with people that were terrified of her quirk―she would have made a better villain than a hero. No! She became on, she did it with her friends and someone she might've maybe wanted as moe―

There―fuzzy. Black, black, white. Red now, floating black and soft hands that are covered in scars. Whispers of comforts and hope that stay alive isn't just a pipe dream. (They know it is, her arms are cut open by rubble; at least they match now.) Shi is trying to remember but it keeps getting cut off. She might have amnesia; maybe that's it (can you have amnesia if the brain in your skull is just as real as he skull it's in, which is just as real as your nonexistent hands and legs, and the rest of you?).

It's gone now, a dream, a notion, an afterthought of something that could have started wars and created peace; maybe she would know if her casket was a close funeral or if they'd found the body. She knows she's been gone too long, that her parents are long gone and that All Might has been a hero for more than ten years and that someone (a little brother, maybe) is as old as she is gone, give or take for years. This might be a spell, she might never wake up, and oddly enough, it makes sense to her.

Shi will know this, maybe, one day years earlier the sentiment will arise as a building will fall, and she will fly, like the blujays she watched from her window, and she will take a second, but when her body hits the ground, the silver line between life and death will make her understand it all. Why the sun rises and falls, why she must die, why it hurts so much that she still has so many things to do, and why it is impossible to unscramble an egg without a time quirk.