The ceiling was wrong.
I knew that before I was even all the way awake. It was too clean. Too white. My ceiling had a water stain in the corner and a little glow star sticker near the light that I never took down. This one had nothing.
I sat up.
The room was big. Like really big. But I was also really small, which made the room feel even bigger. I looked down at my hands and just stared at them for a second.
They were tiny.
What the fuck, I thought.
* * *
I got up slow because my legs felt weird and short and my balance was completely off. Everything about moving in this body was just slightly wrong, like wearing someone else's shoes.
The room had a lot of stuff in it. Toys on shelves, all lined up neat. A building set. Some action figures. A racetrack on the floor that someone had started putting together and then gave up on halfway through. Books. A desk with a small lamp on it.
It looked like a kid's room. A happy kid's room.
I walked to the door and opened it.
The hallway was warm. There were pictures on the wall but I was too short to see them properly. I followed the stairs down, holding the railing with both hands because the steps felt too big for my legs.
The living room opened up at the bottom.
There was a girl on the couch. Maybe ten years old, sitting cross-legged with a tablet, not paying attention to the TV behind her. A woman stood in the kitchen doorway looking at her phone. She was pretty. Really pretty actually. A man came around the corner with two mugs, same age, same kind of look.
They were all good looking. Like an unrealistic amount.
I had no idea who any of them were.
I looked around the room trying to find anything that made sense. That was when I saw the calendar on the wall near the kitchen. It was one of the big paper ones where you cross off every day. Almost all of January had an X through it.
January 12th was blank.
And inside the square in small neat handwriting it said: Akira's Birthday.
I looked at that for a second.
Then everything hit me at once.
* * *
It was like getting hit by a wave.
Memories. A whole flood of them, all coming at the same time, too fast, crashing into each other. My memories. The ones from before. The house. The computer. The fire. FREYA's face on the monitor right before everything went dark.
And then they started leaving.
That was the part that was awful. Feeling things go. Faces I couldn't hold onto. Things I knew just slipping out and I couldn't stop it, couldn't slow it down, couldn't do anything except watch it happen.
My legs gave out. I hit the floor on both knees and my hands went down after.
I think the girl on the couch said something. I couldn't really hear it.
[He is losing memories. What is happening. Where are we. I need to do something.]
Something shifted in my head. My hearing got sharper all of a sudden, sharp enough that the TV in the background wasn't just noise anymore. It was a news broadcast. A reporter talking over footage of a city street.
All Might had just stopped three villains. Fifteen minutes.
There was a pause in my head. Just one second.
[Fuck. Akira. You are in My Hero Academia.]
And then the floor.
And then nothing.
* * *
I woke up somewhere brighter.
Fluorescent lights. That clean sharp smell. A paper cover on the table I was lying on that crinkled when I moved. A doctor's office.
There was a woman in a white coat looking at a tablet. And right next to me, close enough that I felt her before I saw her properly, was my mom.
Not the woman I didn't recognize from the living room. My mom. I just knew it, the same way you knew things about people who had been around your whole life. She had dark hair and she was watching me with this look on her face like she had been scared and was now trying very hard not to show how scared she had been.
She said my name when she saw my eyes open.
"Akira."
Her voice cracked just a little on it.
The flood of memories from before was mostly gone. What was left from my old life was fragments, bits and pieces, things I knew without being totally sure where the knowing came from. But the other memories, four years of this life, of this family, this house, this name, had filled in around them. Quietly. Like they had always been there.
I was Akira. Mostly.
She put her hand on my face and I let her. She was warm.
"You awakened your quirk," she said, and she was smiling even though her eyes were still wet. "You gave us a scare but you're okay. You're okay."
I blinked up at her.
"Cool," I said. "What is it?"
She laughed a little. The kind of laugh that comes out when you've been holding your breath too long.
* * *
They were all there.
My dad, Saionji Kaito, was by the window with his arms folded. He was tall and calm the way he was always calm, like nothing was going to knock him over. He worked with his hands for a living, the technical side of the family business, and it showed. He had this quiet funny side that came out sometimes when you weren't expecting it. His quirk was called Steady Hand. It fit him.
He gave me a nod when he saw me looking at him. Small one. That was a lot coming from him.
My mom, Saionji Mizuki, was still holding my hand. She ran the business side of things, all the paperwork and compliance stuff, and she was sharp in the way that meant she noticed everything and forgot nothing. Her quirk was Recall, perfect memory. That explained a lot about her actually.
My sister Hina was ten and she had been standing two feet away from the table for who knows how long trying not to burst. She had my mom's sharpness and way too much energy and a quirk called Static Pop that let her make little electrical bursts, which absolutely suited her. She was staring at me like I had personally wronged her by passing out without explaining myself first.
"Okay but what happened," she said the second she decided she had waited long enough. "You just fell down. You made a really weird face first and then you just fell down and Mom yelled and—"
"Hina." My dad's voice. Quiet. That was all it took.
She stopped but she kept looking at me.
The doctor explained things to my parents. I caught some of it. Sudden manifestation. A little unusual but not unheard of. Some follow up tests would be good.
I wasn't really tracking all of it. I was just looking at my family. These three people who I was meeting for the first time in some real way and had also known my whole life.
It was a weird feeling. I couldn't totally explain it.
[He is stable. He kept enough. I kept enough. We can work with this.]
The doctor finished. My mom asked some questions. My dad nodded. Hina lasted about thirty more seconds before she stepped up and poked my arm.
"Are you actually okay," she said, quieter than her usual volume.
I looked at her.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm okay."
She nodded like that settled it. Then: "So what does it do."
I almost smiled.
"Don't know yet," I said.
Which was true. The doctor hadn't finished explaining. But I also knew it was something. I had felt it when I woke up. Something in my body that hadn't been there before, or maybe had always been there and was just finally awake.
My mom squeezed my hand.
[We have time, Akira. Not as much as I would like. But enough to start.]
I looked at my mom. My dad by the window. Hina already thinking of her next question, I could tell.
January 12th. My birthday. My quirk. My family.
"Okay," I told the doctor. "Tell me everything."