Work Text:
Shirai kuroko had noticed the changes, the worries, the late nights, the never sleeping, most of all the look of utter desperation in Misaka’s eyes. She had decided, no, sworn, to not intervene, to let her attend to her own business, it was her way of respecting her, but it just couldn’t be ignored anymore. This was not some boy she was upset about, she was in trouble, real dangerous trouble, she was always bruised and aching these days. So she snooped, not something that she hasn’t done before, one might even call her good at it. And then she found something. Something awful that would change the course of several people’s lives, just a simple set of papers stuffed into an oversized teddy bear, but it was the most horrifying thing that Kuroko had seen up to this point in her life, she was familiar with the tonally disconnected tone of many scientific papers, but this was new territory. Time slowed as she read “Level six shift project” and it came to a halt when it began to mention the parameters.
“This can’t be real, there’s no…..way…academy city wouldn’t allow this would……”
They would. They HAD. And she knew that it would be true because she had already seen that the powers of academy city were already willing to kill orphans, and because Misaka came home every night from a fight.
She took a shower, it was a full hour before she even looked up from the bathroom tile and 2 more before she considered leaving steaming hot waters.
She simply had no idea what to do, what to say, what to THINK. A complete and utter loss, should she confront Misaka? Should she tell the authorities? No, these ideas were routed out painstakingly through agonizing levels of thought, she did not know how she should act, but she knew that these were nonviable strategies and she repeated this process on possibly thousands of ideas until she did know how to act. Know being used loosely here, she was by all definitions, unsure of this strategy, but it was the only one remaining. She could only let logic rule here, no matter how horrifying it all was, emotions would get in the way, so she decided. She lacked the firepower to destroy the project head on this had been eliminated as a possibility early on, and she lacked the resourcefulness on her own to do real reconnaissance on either accelerator or the heads of academy city, her only option: She must inform Uiharu Kanzaki and Saten Ruiko.