Work Text:
and in my nails, there are fumes;
this smoke I don't think it'll ever leave
1.
She takes to looking at her hands. If she stares long enough, the lines blur; she sees weight, strength where there is none. She makes a fist and she convinces herself that this one will flatten the sun, make it rest neat on her palm; that she can rise on its light, more wind than girl.
Ochako sits in her dorm room with her back against the bed's legs and static at the corner of her eyes. She's been in this space before, breathed in listless air, found a melancholy that she wrapped around her shoulders and wanted to carry forward into the world. She never did, though; she made sure to strip it away at her doorway, before going into the kitchen, to her parents, to their creaking knees and to the bills waiting carelessly on the counter.
But her parents are still in that bent house and she's here and she held a dead man, and Ochako wonders when, exactly, this noise will all go away.
2.
In the days that come she attends class, she stands with Tsuyu's shoulder against hers, she goes to the funeral. She has her first conversation with Aizawa and she watches as he puts his hand on her, warm, listens as he tells her it's not her fault.
She gets that, though. He was already dying. She's not a healer, no one there was – and she thinks about that, later, when she can't sleep and all she sees is Mirio's face when the casket closed – and it's not her fault that he died and it won't always be her fault when others die; it's just that she chose this job to wave away a few pieces of paper that kept coming in the mail, to shut up a landline that kept ringing, and it feels like she can't say that to anyone. Not anymore, and she breathes, her chin on her knees, the dust mounting.
3.
"You're not okay," Tsuyu says conversationally, the way she says everything else – except, of course, when she cries, and Ochako remembers that day too.
"I'm…" She presses her fingertip to the edge of her lunch tray. She shrugs. "I don't know," she says. She doesn't smile, doesn't have a word for how one side of her mouth moves; she thinks it must look like the clothes she leaves in the corner of her room, crumpled and half-lost in the dark.
"I'm thinking," she says, and Tsuyu nods, reaches to take her milk.
4.
What does she – what do any of them know about grief? The sink of it, how it struggles along in her shoes, occasionally pokes at the back of her knees. Ochako's world before was simple: she loved, loves, her parents. She wants an easy life for them. She thought she could give it to them by walking this way, only now walking is mechanical, a learned motion, and the golden line at the end isn't even remotely there anymore.
She decides she doesn't like it. She counts the rotation of her ceiling fan and she's on fifty-seven when she goes to Momo to ask for a vacuum, a duster, some rags.
She leaves them all there by the door, the rags on the vacuum handle, the duster against it. It only takes her three days to forget about them entirely.
It's not even her weight to carry, and that's what gets at her, makes her start rubbing her eyes, wanting the blurriness again.
5.
"What's grief," she asks, and she thinks she sees a definition of it in Aizawa's face, in his thin cheeks, the shakes in his palms when he stirs his coffee.
This is therapy, they say. He's her teacher so he's best-suited for it, they say, and she has nothing to compare it against to argue otherwise.
Aizawa finds a sugar packet; as he's tearing it, pouring it in, he says, "It depends."
But he's looking around for more sugar, and Ochako passes over a packet from behind the salt shaker.
He nods. He says, "It makes you tired. Not the kind that you get after training, or when you didn't sleep enough… The kind of tired that sticks around."
He taps his elbow. His fingers shake, too.
"It's inside," he says. Like it's a code she's supposed to have the key to now.
Ochako considers her own elbow. It's a small thing, rounded, with a pocket of fat still bloated at the top.
She can't imagine finding anything inside it even if she pried it open; just a mess of now-familiar red, fat and beady.
6.
Instead, she finds Iida, in the library, typing restlessly at a computer. She takes the seat beside him, mindless, and waits the minute he needs to turn toward her.
"Hi."
"Hello."
"How are you?"
Iida says, "Well, I guess. How are you?"
She shrugs. "Fine." She looks at the tab Iida hasn't closed, and then she looks away.
"How's your brother?"
This, he considers. Then he nudges the monitor toward her.
"Better. He's in therapy now." He points, needlessly, at the selection of wheelchairs on the screen. "I've heard that a motorized one is more useful, but he says he wants to use his hands."
Ochako's nodding, because the only wheelchair she knows is her neighbor's back home: straight-backed, with bulky wheels that struggled on pavement cracks. She remembers being too scared, too shy to ask if the old man needed help; too embarrassed to touch.
It brings a burn to her tongue – she stands, knocks a foot into her chair, and Iida's already pushing the monitor back into place.
"Tell him—" She blinks; once, hard, like she's just woken up. "Um… good luck. Tell him good luck, with the… the therapy."
"Of course," he says.
Maybe it's just her. She leans against a lamppost, the sweat on her palms clammy against the metal, and maybe it's just her who hasn't had this particular knot of growing pains.
7.
Ochako cleans her room. Tsuyu watches from the bed, lifts the comforter when the vacuum comes closer.
"It's a step somewhere," Tsuyu says when the dusk sighs, sluggish, around them.
"Where's somewhere, though?"
"Somewhere," Tsuyu repeats. "It doesn't matter where."
Ochako lies on her back, her ankles dangling at the edge of the mattress. She wanted glow in the dark stars on the ceiling the first day; she wants them now to count, to get lost in.
"I saw Iida," she says. "I asked him about his brother, and I – I forgot about him, you know? I forgot what happened to him."
She reaches up to feel the shape of her cheeks, the smudgy points of her bones. "It's like… like I have this bucket of things I care about, that I want to care about, and the bottom's the same, but the rest of it – it keeps changing and I lose things that I didn't want to lose, and the stuff that's there instead is just…"
The melancholy inches in her. It itches in her, she realizes; in her marrow, small and needy, trying to grow thick like a caterpillar in spring.
"Just things," she says, "that a hero shouldn't have."
Tsuyu tugs at her hair. She threads together a thin braid.
8.
Ochako cries in the shower, abruptly and without cause.
She comes out of it with an emptiness in her stomach that brings her back to elementary school, a virus going around, her squirming in her parents' bed, the cold a brick in her gut. She can't sleep, so she goes back to Momo and asks for those stars. She finds a stepstool in the utility closet, balances it on her desk, and then she starts to arrange the dim green pieces.
She's not sure what to make of the strange shape that comes out of it, or the understanding that her hands are still steady.
9.
"I think I'm okay now."
She's not, but it's not like she knows what the working meaning of 'okay' is, what she was a week ago and who's rummaging in her head now, gluing useless things to her tongue, stuffing them in her throat and sewing them to her teeth. Aizawa dismisses her, and she wanders back to her dorm.
She puts her phone on her desk, out of reach, and she sleeps.
Ochako doesn't dream. She just remembers: how it sounds when someone has liquid in their mouth, sticky, squeezed tight to their lips; the words that start to come out in that moment, in the seconds, minutes it takes to die. She remembers the churning that accompanies her lies; her want.
10.
He's walking out of the convenience store three blocks and a corner away from the dorms. He has a bag on his arm, his hair's in place; he's chewing on a popsicle stick, frowning, cross-eyed, at the 'sorry, maybe next time!' on its end.
She drops her phone.
Mirio picks it up for her, smiling, and she looks at his wrist: the veins settled thin underneath skin, the beginning cut of his life line.
It's not fair, she knows, to tell him that she's sorry. It's not her fault, and he knows that too. There were no healers there, just a fistful of kids, grown in slim summer months.
But she still can't really help the water in her eyes, the sudden tilt to her world.
"I'm—" He's still holding out her phone. She bites down on the acid in her jaw, and she says instead, "Can you teach me?"
"Um…?" He stares at her the way she stares at her hands. His smile's gone away. "…Teach you what?"
Everything. "Anything."
She says, "I want to save people."
And she breathes.