Chapter Text
The classroom was rather loud and boisterous, thirty young boys and girls all charging towards their seats. All but one, anyway. The children, each aged between three and four, looking rather peculiar in some form or other. A little girl with bright blue hair and, quite frankly, huge front teeth that had grown down to her chin. A large patterned and rounded tail poked from under the hem at the back of her school uniform shirt, slapping onto the wooden chair as she sat down. A small boy with golden eyes and flowing seaweed growing on top of his head. A pair of identical twins, talking in sync and tapping their webbed feet onto the hard floor. Even the teacher, leaves sprouting from his broad shoulders, looked a little bizarre. This, however, was more expected in today’s world and was considered perfectly normal. Four-year-old Lysander, who was still struggling with learning Japanese, walked over to his desk at a slower and likely more reluctant pace. The young boy sat perfectly still, trying to pay as much attention to the teacher as possible amongst all the chattering and staring straight ahead. Most other children paid no mind. He was already known as a quiet boy and clearly, he had no issue being regarded as such. His teachers and mother would become concerned frequently, worried that he wouldn’t fit in. No other pupils knew of his past and so they would prod and whisper about him. The little English kid. The quiet little English kid without a dad. Children, even this young, can be cruel. Lysander had quickly learnt how to hide emotions from everyone, his mother included. He always wore a blank face. His mother had even contacted a child psychologist, one that was supposedly good at helping the youth that had gone through trauma, but no real results came from it. Ever since his father had gone AWOL, he was a total recluse and he barely said a word to anyone at all, and simply refused to show any sign of a quirk. This, frankly, provided the crueller children with more ground to pick on him. More than once, the older kids had been caught tormenting him and once, physically hitting him. Lysander never complained. Never said a word. Sometimes his bullies got bored and gave up, looking for other sport but most kept coming back. It became a game, a bet, to see who could force him to crack.
“Yes alright, settle down all of you.” The teacher’s voice came from the front of the classroom. There were many loud scrapes of chairs being dragged into place and a sudden hush from the highly talkative class, the leafy teacher clearing his throat before speaking again.
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Lysander enjoyed learning. He was a tiny bit slower than the others, due to having to learn Japanese as a second language alongside everything else, but he kept on working hard. Since it was a lunch break, he had taken out a notebook containing lists of different words to spell, alongside a simple sandwich, and was working on getting these spellings right. He paid no attention to anyone else around him, the young boys and girls running around and making far too much noise. A soccer ball was kicked Lysander’s way, aimed directly for his frame by one of the nine-year-olds who was smirking as it got close. Lysander, though young, was accustomed to this sort of behaviour. He saw the projectile out of his peripherals and figured it would probably hurt, and so made a quick decision to dodge forwards, crouched on himself. The offending object whizzed past, clinking against a chain-link fence, and bouncing twice against the floor. Instead of acknowledging it further, or the one who kicked it, Lysander simply straightened up and went back to his notebook. Needless to say, nine-year-old Hideki was displeased by his miss and scowled before stomping over. He stood next to Lysander, the quiet little quirkless freak, and slapped the notebook out of his hands and onto the floor. Lysander did not move. Did not flinch. Did not even look up. He simply sat there, staring at the notebook. Hideki stamped his foot angrily...directly onto the spelling book, now covered by a dusty footprint. Only then did Lysander move. He turned his head up slowly. His hair, a shoulder length black with odd streaks of violet running through it, framed his small face and cold, glaring eyes. It didn’t seem likely for such a young child to possess such a malicious glare, but Hideki was most certainly caught in one. Lysander, never moving his piercing stare from the boy next to him, slowly leant down and grabbed hold of the spelling notebook. Hideki’s foot was still on it, however.
“MOVE.” The quiet boy only spoke one word, his voice was a calm contrast to his eyes. It jarred Hideki so much that he took a step back. Still keeping his gaze fixed on the bully, he picked the book gingerly off the ground and set it onto the small wooden table he was sat at, before simply turning away. Getting momentarily scared, Hideki stammered out,
“D-Don’t ignore me!” His left arm swelled, the pink flesh flexed to twice its normal size and started growing thick jet back hair quite rapidly, covering the limb.
“Hideki Mato!” The shrill voice of a female teacher sounded. A middle-aged woman wearing a lime green button up jacket with a pair of old-fashioned pinstripe trousers was walking over purposefully. The hairy arm suddenly moulted and deflated slowly, like an air bed that had been poked with a nail. The teacher stood before the two boys, gazing down at Hideki disapprovingly, most of his little gang staying in the background. “You know full well that you are not permitted to use quirks within this school.” This was not strictly true, but the children all knew you would get punished for using quirks on others. Hideki Mato stared at the ground, wordlessly shuffling his feet. “Are you okay, Lysander?” The woman asked. Being the school’s Japanese teacher, she spent plenty of time with the boy and knew how to actually pronounce his name. The cold, dark eyes flicked up to look at her.
“He stepped on book.” He murmured, gesturing at the now embarrassed bully. Lysander lowered his arm and held onto his left wrist awkwardly. It was itching.
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The teacher, who had deftly defused the earlier situation, stood at the front of the class, relaying sentences written on the large chalkboard, picking out pupils to have them fill the blanks. Lysander, still rather void of expression, could relax a little. He wasn’t called on much, for which he was grateful. He furrowed his small brow, frowning at his left arm. It had been itching for over an hour, a persistent itch that begged to be scratched. And he certainly had, the skin of his forearm was bright red and covered in small scratch marks. Truthfully, the child was put out by this, but also intrigued. Every so often, his arm would pulsate as something under his skin started rippling. It would stretch against the skin, as if whatever it was, was searching for an escape. Every single time, it brought the itch back. His hair, longer than most boys his age, hid his expression from his fellows. There it was again, his eyes widened very slightly, a part of his arm, in the centre, moved under the skin, and a blue line bulged outward. He was a little too young to know exactly was what moving around inside his limb, all he knew was it looked and felt weird…itchy. Really itchy. The silently suffering child bit his lip, scratching faster, the itch refused to go. Suddenly, a lightbulb fizzed into life in his head, a great idea! Clearly his rather chewed nails weren’t good enough! He needed something more, a bit sharper, to sate the itch, and he had the perfect tool in mind. He waited for another agonising few minutes, the itch getting increasingly worse and worse. When the class was allowed to move from their desks to be given specific roles for this lesson, Lysander walked in the opposite direction from the teacher’s podium and to the desk where school supplies were resting, from spare erasers, staplers, and glue. This also included scissors.
“Lysander?” He heard the confused voice of the teacher calling out to him and the silence of the other children. He gripped the handles of the sturdiest and sharpest scissors he could see, pulling them apart. “Lysander dear, this way.” The voice again, speaking kindly, perhaps assuming he had misunderstood the instructions. A few of his classmates giggled. The child said not a word as, still turned from the rest of the class, the slid the open scissors across the bulge in his arm. Not enough. He did so again, pressing down with the metal and digging it into the skin of his arm. The itch increased rapidly as Lysander furiously scraped the scissors across his wrist and along the length of his arm. The teacher screamed, finally seeing exactly what he was doing, and rushed over. With a flinch, Lysander scraped the scissors across his skin one more time…his wrist bled openly, dripping down, the bulge depleting as scarlet drops trickled out. “Yoshi! Go get the nurse!” The teacher shrieked, one of the identical twins jumped in shock, as she roughly snatched the scissors. Lysander sighed.
“Itch gone.” The greying teacher stared, her face growing pale, as the dribbling blood stopped mid-air. It still poured freely from the boy’s arm, the blood halting in its descent and each perfectly spherical droplet hovered below the pale outstretched limb.
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Emilia Okita, formally Blake, rung her hands, sitting at the gleaming wooden desk. Every so often she would glance out of the glass to watch her son in the waiting room. Sitting opposite her was a kind faced man with black and orange striped hair, wearing a traditional white coat and trousers. Between getting the frantic call from her son’s teacher that he was injured, rushing over, having to explain the situation as best she could and then rushing over to the large, imposing doctor’s office nearly a half hour drive away…Emilia was having a decidedly stressful day of it.
“Well, our basic tests revealed the obvious cause for this little…outburst.” The voice was as kind and reassuring as the face. Behind the man, an x-ray image showed the bones of the child’s foot. In one of the toes, it seemed that the two typical joints had moulded into one. The doctor glanced through the window at the child as well. The child in question was sat perfectly still, turning his arm around every few moments, tilting his head as he watched. Crimson blood was swirling and spiralling two feet above the boy’s arm, swaying as a charmed snake might, a fluid and thick rounded tendril. No member of medical staff could get close enough to stitch the wound closed, the blood would morph into a sharpened point, following any movement. The child’s eyes too would remain fixed on the nurse or doctor until they left the room. “Our x-rays confirm that he, as expected, possesses a quirk. I believe that,” He says, gesturing towards the child through the glass, “is likely to be said quirk.” Emilia nodded, a little distractedly, staring out at her little boy. “Mrs. Okita?” She closed her eyes momentarily, turning her head from the window and opening them once more to look at the doctor. “When you moved here from England you filled out some paperwork, detailing yourself, your son and your quirk…might you be able to tell me about it first-hand?” Emilia sighed and rubbed at her eyes. She had known it would happen at some point, she just wished it wouldn’t. Nevertheless, she had brought her only child, her pride and joy, to Japan for assistance with his quirk as he aged. She knew better than anyone how dangerous it could be. She began to speak in a shaky voice, ringing her hands once again.
“It started with my great grandmother, who had a quirk that could reject alien liquids from her bloodstream. No sickness lasted; no virus persisted. She couldn’t even get drunk. When she got married and got pregnant, her one and only child showed signs of the same quirk. She also possessed a form of my great grandfather’s quirk; I think it was some heat resistance one. Then, when she too grew up and got married to my grandfather, she had three children. The first inherited their father’s water control quirk, the second got some unusual steam related ability. My mother found that she possessed variants of quirks from her parents and grandparents, not to mention strange new components that had apparently evolved over time, mutated during pregnancies.” The doctor had been nodding along, checking through notes and official looking documentation, but looked up here to gaze back to the child. His head was tilted curiously, watching the fluid tendril of scarlet. The doctor turned his head back to the mother.
“I see…going through family history, it appears that you made a name for this phenomenon?” Emilia nodded, clearing her throat.
“My grandfather coined it first. He was deeply religious, and I think he was a bit judgemental.”
“Judgemental of a quirk evolving?”
“Yes, and that it was ‘infecting’ his children. I’m certain my mother used it to spite him. I dislike it. It makes my baby boy sound like a monster.” The doctor simply sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Official documents state it as the name given to the quirk, regardless of any personal feelings. Mrs. Okita, it might be an important step in a few years to allow him to decide. Or he may simply continue secluding himself. At any rate, in my experience, children adore the dramatics. He might enjoy the sound of the name.” Emilia looked through the window once more at her little angel. The dark tendril of blood slowly retracted back inside the boy’s arm, the cut made with the scissors was no longer visible.
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It took barely a week before the itching came again, though the child was safe at home. He knew something sharp would stop the itch. Whilst he found it easy to sneak into the kitchen, most of the counters were out of his reach. His arm began to flare with pain, feeling like it was being consumed in scorching flames. The boy lost patience, slamming his fists onto the leg of the large kitchen table…where he found a loose nail. He pried it from the wood and quickly stabbed at his arm, wincing in pain at first. Shocked by the sudden banging noise, Emilia Okita rushed into the kitchen, screeching when she saw her only child. She was barely a foot away, reaching out for him, when the tendril of blood burst forth from his arm. The four small stab holes all leaked dribbling blood, most of it contorting and conjoining in the middle to create the crimson form.
“Itch gone.” The child’s small voice sounded relieved. A quick call to the doctor was in order, Emilia tapped her foot impatiently as she was forced to hold. Once someone finally picked up, the boy now had the bloody tendril wrapped around his arm like a python, she didn’t even have a chance to speak first.
“Ah, Mrs. Okita, perfect timing! I received the final test results not too long ago; I do believe I can confirm what this…itching is about.” She whimpered in relief, feeling herself deflate somewhat.
“And?” She asked, in a somewhat demanding tone.
“Well, quite frankly, his body and heart are creating more blood than they should.” A pause. Emilia looked a little faint. “From this, it’s safe to say that the extra blood your son inadvertently creates, the more pressure it puts on his veins and arteries. The itching is most likely the best way his mind can process something needing to get out. If it happens again, please try to have him remove the blood.” She muttered a quick word of thanks and put down the phone, before gazing at her son. She took a deep breath.
“Lysander honey, can you put that down the sink?” The young boy’s eyes snapped to his mother, confusion shining within. “T-Too much of this in there.” She stammered, pointing at the revolting tendril, and then gently touching her child’s arm. “Too much makes it i-itchy.” The boy’s eyes lit up.
“Okay!” He chirped. Emilia blinked; he hadn’t sounded that cheerful in months. She watched as he appeared to be concentrating, the blood swirling away and diving into the kitchen sink. It kept coming, gushing out of his arm like a stream, Emilia tried not to panic. She was about to shout at him to stop when the flow suddenly died down. She retched a little, quickly turning on the hot tap to wash any remnants of it down the drain. Meanwhile, Lysander gazed at the open wounds on his arm; blood was sticking to them, pulling and stitching the skin back together.