Chapter Text
Rekha had never liked hospitals.
All too sterile, uncomfortable places that smelled like an excess of antiseptic and bitterness. You were never there to get good news. Instead, the doctors and nurses would pat your hand kindly as they diagnosed you with some type of incurable illness you’d have to live with till your dying breath.
The hospital was where you went to die.
Stale air permeated the room, the constant hum of the air conditioner buzzing. The only entertainment to be found was the small television set propped up in the ceiling corners, displaying an endless cycle of news that was, at that point, entirely repetitive. A villain had appeared, causing havoc around some major city. But luckily, a hero was able to swoop in and save everyone. Repeat ad nauseam, and that was the news cycle of Japan.
She wasn’t exactly a… ‘hyper’ child, but she was getting the overwhelming urge to run around and irritate the hell out of everyone else waiting.
Her legs swung back and forth in the air, still too short to touch the ground. Rekha knew that at age four, that was the usual. Even so, she found herself stretching her legs, sliding down in the plush blue waiting room chairs so that she could reach the grey linoleum floor.
Off in a corner by a large potted plant, her mother stood with her head tilted, phone propped on her shoulder. She was muttering softly into the device, switching back and forth between Punjabi and Japanese. Rekha couldn’t quite make it out, but she knew that when her mother’s hands kept reaching up to her hair to tug it out, it was never a good sign.
From the hallway, her father returned from the bathroom, pulling at his shirt collar. He approached his wife nervously, waiting for her to get off the phone. She shot him a tired and apologetic look as she got off the phone, but she was scarcely allowed time to speak.
A nurse poked her head out of the door to Rekha’s right with a pearly, bright smile on her face. “Is Rekha Kakushin here?”
Her father turned abruptly, an anxious sheen on his face. “Yes, we’re her parents.”
“Great! Come on in, Dr. Hasegawa will be with you in just a minute.” The nurse turned and walked back into the depths of the hallway, her pink technicolour hair flouncing behind her. She stuck right out amongst her bleak white and grey surroundings.
With a heavy sigh, both her parents beckoned her over. “Come on, Rekha,” her mother said, wrapping her overcoat tightly around her. She stuck out a shaky hand, adorned with rings, and offered it to Rekha.
The young girl accepted, ready to take on whatever was on the other side of that door.
“I’m very sorry to have to be the one to tell you, but Rekha is quirkless.”
Rekha paused, her body going still. The finger pushing up the red wooden bead up the bendy wire retracted, leaving it to fall back down the blue cable.
She could hear the shifting of fabric as her mother leaned forward in her seat, no doubt clutching her purse. “A-are you sure? Haruto and I both have quirks— I mean, biology isn’t exactly my field… maybe the test came out faulty?”
Rekha’s chubby little hand gripped tightly to the kid sized table in front of her, pudgy fingers grasping at wood.
“I’m afraid not, Mrs Sanghera.” Papers rustled over the sound of the air conditioner. “You see, the way we determine quirklessness is seeing if the person in question has a double jointed pinky toe or not. Given that both of you have quirks, it’s safe to say you both would only have one joint in yours. That’s not the case for Rekha.”
“She could just be a late bloomer,” her father insisted. “The other kids in her kindergarten class have started showing signs, it’s only a matter of time for her.”
It was only then that Rekha could bring herself to turn around, legs trembling. Was it the cooled air batting at her exposed calves, or sheer anxiety?
She didn’t trust that doctor. He’d closed the door and lured her in with kind smiles and sweets only to force her family to wallow in the news that hung in the air like dark clouds in the sky.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kakushin. Even if she were a late bloomer, you’d still be able to see only one joint.” The doctor pointed to an x-ray of her feet they had taken ten minutes ago. “By her age, she should have already begun showing signs that a quirk is developing. Either one of yours, or a mixture.”
Her father grasped at the fabric of his grey trousers. “Is there any possibility she could be functionally quirkless? I have a friend who has a quirk but can’t use it because it’s difficult to activate, maybe Rekha’s is the same.”
The doctor shook his head, pulling his surgical mask further up his nose. “If Rekha were functionally quirkless, she would have one joint but be unable to use her quirk. But Rekha is truly quirkless. In her generation, only 0.01 percent are quirkless. It’s a shrinking population. We believe that at some point, there will be no more quirkless people left in the world.”
It wasn’t until many years later that Rekha fully understood why her mother burst into tears.
Two days after her diagnosis, the school had assigned an additional teacher to the classroom.
Ms. Kimura was an assistant. She didn’t do much teaching at all, really. She just stood off to the side and took notes. It didn’t take long for Rekha to notice Ms Kimura’s watchful eye, always trained on her. Waiting for a bomb to explode.
Rekha had always been good at the class worksheets, so she didn’t understand why Ms. Kimura was standing behind her seat and trying to help with the answers. She knew what she was doing, so who was this woman, and why was she only helping her?
This new Ms Kimura also insisted on playing with her during recess and free time. Rekha just wanted to go to the main area to play with the other children. Instead, she was on a matted floor, pushing toy trucks around with a woman who wouldn’t stop looking at her with those apologetic eyes.
What did she have to be sorry for?
A month after Ms Kimura’s introduction, Rekha got into a small scuffle over a picture book.
It wasn’t anything big. She had grabbed the book first, but then another kid tried snatching it from her hand. No matter how much she pulled and snapped at him, he still insisted that the book was his. The matter ended with hot tea shooting out of his fingertips and scalding her bare skin, leaving her to cry out and release her hold on the book.
From that day forward, Rekha wasn’t allowed to play with other students.
“Y’know that Kakushin girl? The one always… messing with those machines and stuff?”
“Is she in the special ed class? 2-G?”
“Yeah. I heard she’s on track for getting the academic award this year.”
“No way, she’s quirkless! She’s probably only smartest amongst the disabled kids.”
“Well you know how they have a different curriculum to us, yeah? Well, Sachiko told me that she like, makes the teachers give her the same tests and stuff as us.”
“That’s so self-important. If you’re dealt a bad hand in life, you deal with it. You don’t try to get on the same level as people who are obviously better than you.”
Rekha was just finishing screwing the last bolt into one of her new gauntlets when she overheard this conversation as she was passing by. Slamming the slide down to activate it, the gauntlet whirred to life, the repulsor on the palm glowing an electric blue. She glared up at the people who were gossiping about her. Some randoms from the accelerated class.
“For people who’re apparently so smart, you guys sure have no spatial awareness,” she said, brown eyes scrutinising them. “Weren’t you dealt the better hand? You should be able to tell when someone’s walking down the hallway.”
They stared at her, an awkward hush falling over them. With a roll of her eyes, Rekha blew a tuft of walnut coloured hair out of her face and continued her trek down the hall.
Her destination was her middle school’s industrial arts classroom. She was planning on showing the instructor her new invention, the stun glove. It was meant to be able to stun a person just by touching them. There was of course, the obvious repulsor on the palm that released electricity when activated, but she had implemented small taser probes on the finger tips so that simple pointed contact would be able to deliver a shock.
Most people looked at her inventions and assumed she wanted to make support gear for a living. They praised her up and down streets, talking for miles about how talented she was. What a brilliant mind, she’d be sure to go far!
But once she brought up heroics, all that talk ceased.
Whispers of ‘it’s too dangerous’, ‘she’ll get herself killed’, ‘how can she even become a hero?’ shot through her like bullets. No one took her seriously. They expected her to know her place. And the fact that she wanted to escape what had been designated for her… well, the world would teach her that harsh lesson very soon.
Ten years after her diagnosis, her relatives still told her all the time that if she just stuck to her place as a quirkless person, she’d get picked on less. The kids at school would stop bullying her, because at least she wasn’t trying to break the mould. But Rekha knew better. No matter what she did, they’d always view her as less than.
If she could not be like them, she would just have to be better. The universe may have dealt her a shitty hand, but Rekha knew how to play the game.