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His alarm wakes him at 6:30 AM, but he doesn’t manage to drag himself out of bed until 6:45. It’s an uphill battle, same as any other day. The bed is so warm, and the morning air in his apartment is so bitterly cold. Turning the heat down at night helps him save on those utility bills.
Sliding on a pair of slippers, he bends down to scratch underneath his cat’s chin before stumbling into the bathroom. He flicks on the light, blinking in its blinding goldness, a stark contrast to the dark, murky blues of his bedroom. He showers, brushes his teeth, and does all that morning routine stuff, stopping only to have a brief cup of coffee before scrambling out the door. Always a few minutes later than he should be, but he doesn’t care. The rest of the world can wait.
He rides his bike to the train station, headphones tucked into his ears. It’s his one reprieve from the daily grind. He likes the feeling of the air rushing past his face as he speeds along: cut off, however briefly, from the rest of the world. It’s easy to ignore the weary, beaten-down faces of the people he passes on the sidewalk when he’s moving five times as fast. The music helps too. It keeps his ears from hearing the lonely din of the city: car horns, tires screeching, angry, impatient shouting. People always have somewhere they need to go. Somewhere else they’d rather be.
The one thing he can’t block out with speed or music is the colors of the city. The morning greys and blues, making everything look washed out in the final hours before the sun arrives to inject a little life back into the passing streets. But even then, the world he knows is made of steel, glass, and cinderblocks. Even when the sun does decide to show its face, there isn’t much color. Not much life left to revive in this concrete wasteland.
He arrives at the train station sooner than he’d like - his bike rides are always too short. He wishes they could stretch on forever, keep him permanently trapped in a liminal state between the lonely drear of his apartment and the bustling noise of his classroom. Sometimes he wishes he didn’t have to go to school.
Making his way through the turnstiles, he wraps his bike in the provided plastic bike bag. It’s common courtesy to cover your bicycle when using public transportation, to respect the space of the train and its other passengers. Weaving his way through the endless droves of people, he finds his usual platform, taking a seat at a bench to wait for his train.
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when he could just walk to his school, or ride his bike. But that was a different time, and he is glad it’s over. He doesn’t have many pleasant memories lingering in the halls of that particular school, no faces he misses. Most of what he does remember he wishes he could forget, but he’s in high school now, so it shouldn’t matter.
It isn’t like he was bullied. Quirkless kids were bullied, and he isn’t quirkless. For better or worse, he can’t say, but at least he wasn’t shoved around. Or punched. Or stuffed into a locker. His experiences were much more subtle. Passing stares in hallways, whispers in classrooms assumed empty. A wide berth in the crowd as he made his way from one class to the next. The nervous look in teachers’ eyes whenever he asked a question.
He didn’t get it. It wasn’t like he’d ever done anything to raise their suspicions. But as he grew older, he started to realize it wasn’t so much about what he’d done, but rather what he hadn’t. They were afraid of his potential.
It makes sense. Potential is one of the most frightening concepts in the world. It is a child of the unknown, and everyone fears the unknown.
Glancing up, he watches as his train pulls into the station, coming to a shrieking halt before opening its doors with a hydraulic hiss. He does his best not to make accidental eye contact with the passengers shoving their way out, pushing past one another like baby chicks trying to hatch. He never understood the point of hurrying, or everyone’s obsession with being on time. He always figured he’d get where he needed to be eventually, so what was the point of worrying about it? He had other things on his mind.
Rising from his bench, he turns the volume of his music up a few notches and guides his bike to the open train door. There’s another purpose to his music. Sometimes, if he spends too long around other minds, he can start to sense them. Nothing anywhere close to outright mind-reading - more like vague impressions. Core ideals. Goals. Emotions. The faint scent of whatever they’d had for breakfast, if it was clear enough in their recent memories. It could get overwhelming at times: all those minds brushing up against his own all at once - and he wasn’t even looking for them. As far as he could tell, his quirk didn’t exactly have an ‘off’ switch.
So he does his best to drown them out with music. He isn’t sure if it actually blocks out other minds or just forces his to divert its attention, but either way, he’s grateful for the protection it provides. His quirk seems to respond well to music in general - he finds it easier and more effective to place someone under his control by singing to them, for example. Like a siren.
He smiles ruefully, taking a seat on a bench in the train car. It’s not like he’s have many opportunities to test his theories, though. Even he isn’t positive about the limitations of his quirk, as conservative as he is about using it.
Maybe he would have had more chances to explore it if he’d been accepted into that hero school. The one he’d dreamed about attending since childhood.
The train lurches as it pulls away from the station. He sighs. No point in stewing wistfully about it now. The past can’t be changed. He’d failed the entrance exam, and that’s all there was to it. In lieu of the hero school, he’s attending one of the top ranking high schools in the country for conventional academics. He might become a doctor, or a psychiatrist. He’ll find a different way to become a hero, even if it means never getting to use his quirk, or finding out the truth behind it.
As the train thrums along, he crosses his arms and forces his gaze out the window, counting the lights of the tunnel as they fly past. He bounces his leg slightly, letting out the energy pent up from the anxiety-induced adrenaline rush pulsing through his veins.
The other passengers do their best to ignore each other, many of them hunched over phone screens. Feeling left out, he pulls out his own, tethered to the other end of his headphones. Swiping past his music app, he finds his way onto his social media feed, trying to anesthetize himself with the endless barrage of posts.
By the time the train pulls into the next station, he’s already wishing the day were over. He’s drained, the morning blues still lodged deep within his bones, and sitting in one place for so long is making him drowsy. The only thing keeping him awake is the subtle motion of his thumb as he scrolls and the mind-numbing blue of the screen.
As the train comes to a complete stop, he glances up. The doors peel away, letting out another crop of passengers and welcoming in their replacements. Just across the platform, another train has just pulled in, heading in the opposite direction. Once the passengers exit, he gets a clear view of the other train’s interior.
Sitting on a bench tucked just inside the open doors is a girl with cropped chestnut brown hair and round, faintly rosy cheeks. She’s reading a book, but it’s too far away for him to decipher the title. Right as the doors slide away, she glances up, making eye contact with him across the station.
For once in his life, he doesn’t want to look away.
She’s a total stranger, and yet something about her seems unbearably familiar, like a shop at the corner of an intersection he passes every day, without once looking over or taking notice - until just the right moment, when he glances over and suddenly it all makes sense, where that smell of freshly baked bread had been wafting from, all those years.
She reminds him of fresh bread, somehow. It could be the strange warmth he feels, maybe the roundness of her face. Or maybe that’s stupid, just a random crossing of wires from regions in his mind that should never be mixed.
But somehow he keeps looking at her. She’s clearly noticed him staring by now, but there’s no sense of discomfort. She smiles, her eyes closing into crescents.
He feels his lips part slightly, but he finds it impossible to smile back. He scrambles to think where he’s seen her before.
As she keeps smiling, he remembers. The sports festival, broadcast on national television just a few weeks ago. He’d watched her match, against that abrasive boy with an explosion quirk. She’d been absolutely fearless.
A lump forms in his throat. It could have been him pitted against her in that match, if he’d made it into the hero school. Or maybe he would have been watching her from the stands, silently cheering her on. Because of course he would have cheered for her. There’s no way he would have rooted for the other guy.
The echo of a monotonous voice sounding over the train’s PA system breaks him from the thought. As the doors of his train begin to close, he sees the girl across the platform raise a hand and wave at him.
He raises his own hand and tries to wave back, but it’s too late. The doors close and his train lurches away, and suddenly the whole world is grey again.
He closes his eyes, crossing his arms and doing his best not to think about what could have been.