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1A had a ‘surprise’ training at the USJ on the other side of UA’s absurdly large campus the first Friday of the week. That was fine, except it did mean Julia’s brother, their best friend and Izuku’s unknowing crush Hitoshi, and the new friends they were making in their class weren’t available for lunch, leaving Julia to her own devices. Or at least she would’ve been left to her own devices if she didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to sit with a few of her 1C classmates.
She was trying to branch out, make friends who weren’t the same level of semi-feral with formal hero training that the rest of her family was. Don’t get her wrong, she loved the family she’d been adopted (and semi-abducted, sort of) into, but to that day she still felt like she was the only ‘normal’ one.
To a certain extent, at least. She had killed a man, but she’d been driven more by desperation and revenge than a sense of duty and ‘I have the training, so what’s the harm’. It was fine, it was a one off occurrence anyways. Her assassin/vigilante days were behind her now. The issue was she could feel her sense of ‘normal reality for civilians’ slip a little further away with each passing week- she needed to connect with her 1C classmates sooner rather than later if she wanted to keep it.
That was easier said than done.
Izuku and Hitoshi kept trying to kidnap her, and that was before she’d been introduced to the girls in 1A. Ashido and Uraraka immediately called dibs, trying to adopt her for themselves instead in a move that was causing mild friction with the boys. That and the fact she casually knew Nedzu and their homeroom teacher (she still wasn’t sure how they pulled off letting her into her papa’s homeroom class) made the rest of 1C a little wary.
Cackling so hard she almost fell out of her chair during lunch at a technically inappropriate manner didn’t help all that much.
“You’re American, right?” Ige Kairi, a tall girl with pin-straight, shoulder length black hair, amber eyes, and a deep, unabiding love of all things romance asked after glancing at her phone. Ige was kind, clever, fairly calm, and since she sat in front of Julia they’d already had a few solid conversations. It was a pretty decent start to a friendship, Julia thought, so long as she didn’t do something to fuck it up.
“Is this another food or slang question?” She’d already been asked several of those.
“No.” Ige shook her head. “Do you know who Charlie Kirk is?”
“...yeah.” Julia’s eyes narrowed. Where was this going? Of course she knew who Charlie Kirk was- he’d started as a meme because of his supreme assholishness before turning himself into an alt-right talking head. There was no quantifying the amount of harm he’d encouraged from others, if not outright done himself. “I may have been raised in America before I was adopted, but that doesn’t mean I agree with him.”
“No, I didn’t think you did.” The dark haired girl rushed to assure her, putting one of her hands on top of Julia’s where it rested on top of the table. “”You’re very sweet. No, he died.”
“What?” That couldn’t be true, the world wasn’t that lucky. Evil people didn’t just die. “How?”
“It looks like he got shot at a speaking event. In Utah? Am I pronouncing that corr- oh.” The poor girl didn’t even have the chance to get the sentence out before Julia half-snatched her phone to get a look at the headlines plastered across the social media site Ige had pulled up.
It was true. He had been shot, in the neck looked like. Of all the people in the world, the guy who’d openly said victims of gun violence were an expected consequence of the second amendment and that was worth it had been fucking shot.
The first giggle bubbled up before Julia could stop it. She hadn’t even noticed the wide smile growing on her face, something reminiscent of the terrifying smile Shouta and Izuku sometimes wore, that’d been concerning the teens sitting around her. A second giggle followed on the heels of the first one and then she was laughing, so intensely she relinquished Ige’s phone back to her so she could wrap her arms around her stomach.
“Are you okay?” Ige asked, eyes wide with horror. This wasn’t the reaction she was expecting, it wasn’t even a reaction she’d considered, and she didn’t know what to do.
“You know-” Julia tried to get out, but she was still cackling too hard. It took another false start before she could get the question out. “You know how you asked me on our first day if I was scared to go to a hero school because we could potentially be attacked by villains and I said no?”
“...yeah?” Ige nodded, glancing at their classmates across from them. Everyone was staring, just as concerned. “You said you weren’t.”
“That’s because I’m used to it.” The dark words sounded almost uncanny juxtaposed with the fact Julia was still giggling around them. “There’s hundreds of school shootings every year; we have active shooter drills as often as we have fire drills.”
“What?” Ige and a few others reacted at the same time.
“I thought that was fake.” Hiyabusa, one of the boys (short with scales and a forked tongue indicating a snake quirk), hissed.
“Kirk said it was worth it to keep the second amendment- to keep guns.” She explained when confusion crept across a few people’s faces, voice going high and tight as the more intense cackles threatened to return. “He got- he got fucking shot.” She got another glance at the headline on Ige’s phone, now lying forgotten on the table, and that was it. She was hit by a wave of schadenfreude and intense catharsis so big Hizashi was sent to find her and take her up to Nedzu’s office until she could calm back down.
She did end up talking to Inui about it for a while, but since she kept randomly bursting into laughter every time she thought about it Julia decided to just finish the day in Nedzu’s office. No point in making her distraction everyone else’s distraction too.
It was a considerate thought, but it wasn’t fully successful. Her classmates sitting around her spent the rest of lunch online, looking into school shooting rates and going down the rabbit hole of the truly vile things Charlie Kirk had spouted. A handful were still a bit put off by how intense her seeming delight had been in the face of someone’s violent death, but most were just concerned about her.
She’d not only been adopted by a family in another country, but a pro hero family. Ige didn’t know what Julia’s story was yet and she wasn’t rude enough to ask, but she could only imagine it got worse than just the specter of imminent death every time she went to school. That was the day Ige decided they were going to be best friends, and that she was going to show Julia how safe and fun a Japanese school could be.
She had no idea Julia’d pulled a similar trigger herself and didn’t need the support, but Julia would be glad for the friendship all the same.
The first year’s first ever rescue training was always a long one, often running well into the late afternoon, if not early evening. Because they weren’t expecting the boys back any time soon after normal classes let out for the day, Hizashi just took Julia back home. That’s where Shouta and Izuku found them, Izuku barging into Julia’s greenhouse in the back yard where she was tending the plants too toxic to cats to keep in the house.
“Did you see-”
“Of course I saw.” Julia turned to glance at him with a wide grin, one hand running over one of her favorite wisteria bonsais. The grin dimmed slightly. “Not the video itself though- Nedzu blocked it for me, thank god. I feel awful for his kids and everyone who had to see it, that had to be rough. Not for him though, he reaped what he sowed.”
She turned back to her plants, picking up plastic pots one by one to judge their weight. That’s why she preferred using plastic, it was easier to judge how dry the were by how light they were.
“The killer’s still on the loose.” Izuku noted, already checking for new updates on his phone as Julia watered what needed watering in that section. “Looks like the guy they took in initially was the wrong one and had to be released.”
“Hah!” Julia didn’t bother hiding the short bark of laughter- it was just her and Izuku, she didn’t have to. “I’m just glad this one’s escape plan was better than mine. I wouldn’t’ve made it out of New York on my own.”
“I’m sorry, what?” She froze when she heard Hitoshi’s shocked question. Unlike Izuku, he’d been distracted by Hizashi for a minute (the greenette didn’t stop when their papa asked how the USJ went, he was a man on a mission, but the purple boy didn’t want to be rude). He’d finally joined them, just in time to hear an unfortunately large piece of the ‘unfortunate past’ puzzle that’d been alluded to. Julia’d fucked up.
“I can explain!” She whirled around to face her shocked friend, water sprinkling out of her watering can’s spout.
“Did you kill someone?” Hitoshi asked at the same time.
“I’ll go get dad and papa.” Izuku didn’t leave Julia alone with the mess she’d just found herself in, he pulled Hitoshi along with him by the hand. Their dads would know how to handle this, he was sure of it. Julia followed at a much slower pace, torn between terror she’d ruined the new start she’d spent the last two years building for herself and dread that Hitoshi was going to hate her.
That wasn’t something she needed to be so concerned about. Hitoshi was friends with them for a reason- a large part of that was because they’d both faced a similar discrimination to what he had with his ‘villainous’ quirk. They didn’t think he was one, and he didn’t think she was either.
“Hitoshi!” She sputtered when he pulled her into a tight hug. She’d been wiping tears from her eyes- talking about her sister always made her cry- and now her arm was caught at a weird angle. He didn’t let go.
“No, shut up, I’m hugging you.” He muttered into her ear, though he did let her shift enough to get more comfortable before she hugged him back. It felt nice, knowing she wasn’t hated. “You’re picking up Izuku’s mumbling habit- I could never hate you. Either of you.” He reached forward to squeeze Izuku’s shoulder with one hand- the Julia’s brother had thrown his own vigilante past under the bus during the conversation to try to salvage things.
“Thanks Hitoshi.” Julia finally pulled away, accepting the tissue box Shouta held out for her. “You’re the best.”
“I already knew you were both bad-a, I mean, awesome.” Hitoshi glanced at the adults, staring at him with twin raised eyebrows. “This changes nothing. Although I am shocked you went with a gun. Would’ve sworn you’d go with poison.”
“Guns are less traceable, you goober.” Julia rolled her eyes. She was just relieved she hadn’t ruined her first friendship (aside from Izuku) since coming to Japan.
“What does ‘owo’ mean?” Shouta, who’d always been less attached to the internet than Hizashi, asked with a frown a few days later. When Julia found out why he was asking, she straight up left the room. That explanation was neither her circus nor her monkey and she wanted to have her mini-mind break over watching the Governor of fucking Utah have to read it out in peace.