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Her dreams are full of bombs she can run from.
Gunshots and explosions and running and—
Gojo Izumi is alone and she has been for a long time. By the time she arrived here fighting was already akin to photosynthesis - easy and natural and needed to survive, to be able to eat and breathe and feel, but not close to the things a teenage girl should need. A girl is a bud, but she is not a plant, and Izumi has been stepped on so many times that bud may very well be dead before it blossoms.
Even if she escapes, she cannot go back. A reminder over and over floods through on the speakers.
Early on, she screamed and cried and banged on her own door, but it never went anywhere.
Early on, she tried to talk to the boy next door, but the both of them were beat for it.
Early on, she…
When she’s trained and tortured, over and over, she cannot stop to flinch or cry. She cannot ask questions and get answers. When she’s on the battlefield she is reminded that she is being slowly designed to be unstoppable.
To be inhuman.
When she dreams of getting out, she wonders what she’ll do first. Some of them are imaginative - she’ll order a burger, and she’ll move into a nice house and—
And there are people there who love her. Not her parents who died or her enemies or the police but smiling face, warm arms around her from a boyfriend lover. She goes to bed content and loved and normal. She was never accused of murder. She graduates high school and makes it into college somehow. Maybe she even falls in love.
Most importantly, she never has to fight again.
Other times they’re realistic but… hopeful. She finds a way to clear her name. She finds out the name of the people who push her past humanity and beat her and whisper in her ear in a voice that will never escape her head. She clears her name, and goes back to school.
She finds people to love. Even if now they are still nameless, and faceless. She survives. She escapes. She feels like she can cry again, and laugh, and…
Live.
Her dreams are full of bombs she can run away from.
In her waking memories she knows they want to erase her. Erase Gojo Izumi and replace her with “Prototype 01: IZUMI”.
She knows she keeps getting stronger. She knows they’re changing something about her.
She knows they think she’s just a hepless teenage girl and think she’s a pinnacle of human evolution all at once, and she can’t decide which she hates more.
In her waking memories she runs towards the bombs, to stop them. That’s what she has to do. She gets better and better at it.
Fighting is getting closer to breathing, and she hates it. But she cannot stop. Giving up is not an option. Every day she grows stronger, so too does her chances to escape.
She can’t stop fighting. She can never stop fighting.
A thought surfaces, one night. They’ll brainwash her one day, if she doesn’t find the strength fast enough.
Erase her, but did she ever exist? Is she remembered as anything but the rumor of a fighter?
Perhaps she hasn’t existed since she was 10, and her mother died, and her father followed.
He said she’d find happiness and love. She wants to believe it.
In her dreams, she screams at the bombs, and sobs surrounded by all the fires and shots of her life.
Waking up is the only time she bothers to cry.
Even when she escapes, it will be a fight. But so be it.
She dreams anyways.