Double Life

Chapter 1

She was thirteen-years-old when she dreamed of being born.

There's a reason our memory isn't developed at that age. It's not a great thing to remember. Being squeezed out of everything you know through a too small, thumping, hot hole just to get freaked out by your own scream and headache. And your eyesight isn't all that great, but oh! Boobs.

The dreams went on. While her friends mentioned having dreams of flying, losing all their teeth, and going to school without their pants, she had dreams of having her butt wiped, never getting her body to move how she wanted, being hypnotized by lights and shapes, and more boobs. Her only comfort was that, while she was dreaming, she didn't remember being thirteen and impressionable.

But it wasn't anything to alert her dad about since it technically wasn't getting in the way of her grades or sleep, so life went on.

At fourteen her dad finally admitted he wasn't raising kids, just funding a house for them all to fester in, and gave up her and her two younger siblings to foster care. There wasn't any high hopes for adoption since they were all over the age of ten.

In her dreams she'd learned to walk, babble, and discovered her favorite food was applesauce. She had an excellent chew toy that Mommy always kept nice and cool for her. Sore gums on iced squish was...sublime.

Fifteen through eighteen were the years she graduated early from High School and got a job so her and her siblings could be together and out of hellish foster homes. She learned why her dad might have been burnt out, but also learned just how awful he was for giving up his family. She'd always been the mom for her siblings since their mother died, and she couldn't imagine a life without them.

At night, a girl named Juvi learned to talk, tried more foods, got into all sorts of cubby holes and general mischief, and started Kindergarten. After her fourth birthday party her parents started watching her extra close for the expression of her quirk. Her mom asked her lots of questions about her dreams while her dad tried giving her math problems that looked like Aztec squiggles. She couldn't remember her dreams, and she was still learning to count, but she liked the attention and did her best to please.

After finishing her general education classes online, which took three years since her time was split between work, her brother and sister, and breathing, Jubilee finally got to take the first class towards her Math degree. The university she applied to demanded she be on campus for the classes, which meant time had to be taken from somewhere.

Jubilee chose sleep. She had never valued sleep too much, as she'd never had a problem with it. Her biological clock had been perfectly in tune since that first baby dream when she was thirteen, so every night she fell asleep and woke up exactly on time without an alarm clock.

But she hadn't been trying to go to school full-time and work full-time with two teenage siblings still needing her attention.

Thus, for the first time since she was thirteen, she found herself nodding off.

And waking up on the other side in the middle of the night, five-years-old and covered in a cold sweat as memories of being a stressed out adult slowly faded from her mind.

A little Juvi ran to her mother, heart racing, to tell her what she could remember of the details before they disappeared entirely. Her mother, a woman who had been dead on the other side, smiled wide before shaking her father awake. The same father who'd left them to social services with blank eyes, dark shadows, and unkempt facial hair.

Feelings of an eighteen-year-old and five-year-old mixed in her head, fighting for dominance, till her little body rebelled and she threw up over her mom's carpet slippers. She'd cried from the pain until the last of the memories leaked away and she was left just herself. Just five, still reeling from what her mother insisted was a quirk induced dream, and still Juvi.

Juvi Baiyoso.

Her parents got up to comfort her with an early breakfast and her favorite honey milk tea. She couldn't stop looking at their little apartment with its lack of table, barstools at the counter, and the blanketed kotatsu in the living room. It seemed smaller than she remembered, and she kept coming back to the kotatsu and the short, floor level couch. They just looked so odd and she couldn't figure out why. She couldn't figure out why seeing her parents working in the kitchen together made her chest hurt and her eyes water. She didn't know why she kept looking behind her and kept expecting two more heads to pop out from the hallway.

Sometime mid-morning, Juvi's tired little body finally fell back asleep.

And woke up as Jubilee Brant, with the home row keys of her laptop imprinted on her face.

Jubilee cut down her college time to part-time again so she could get better sleep. Her brother was graduating early at seventeen, though not as early as her, so he could help hold up the house until their younger sister could graduate. They had big dreams for the day they could claim their adult privileges and shake off the heavy shackles that came with being orphaned children.

When her head hit the pillow, Jubi Baiyoso went to get her quirk registered, found she could count to a hundred before everyone else and learned about the one other boy in her class who'd never get a quirk. She'd been afraid of being him, once upon a time, if only because the other kids treated him weird for that. Now she had her quirk, though, she didn't understand why they did. It was supposed to make him weak maybe? But all her quirk did was make everything feel alien and left her with headaches in the morning. Being quirkless didn't sound so bad anymore.

He was such a nice boy too.