Double Life

Chapter 12

Juvi didn't so much as wake up as launch upright in her bed, gasping for breath.

The next she was being overwhelmed by her parents diving for her as they cried her name.

Only one eye was able to see over their shoulders, but it was enough to see the frumpy guy in black with eyebags down to his mouth and several layers of palm width ribbons piled around his neck like a scarf. He also had the weirdest yellow goggles on his head.

"Eraserhead?" she squawked.

The dead-eye duck stare of his blinked. "Huh," said a hidden mouth behind the 'scarf.'

"What was that, honey?" asked her mom.

But that was all she was able to get out from the force of their hugs.

Turns out, she'd been asleep for a week. Nothing had been able to wake her up this time. A quirk specialist from Tokyo had flown in with his team to examine her themselves and been able to discover that it was her quirk refusing to turn off that was keeping her asleep. Since they couldn't find any quirk suppressant strong or effective enough to turn off her quirk so she could wake up, the diagnosis had been partiularly grim.

Somehow, the specialist had managed to get in contact with a friend who then got in contact with Eraserhead, who had a rare quirk that could turn off quirks with just a look.

Said Eraserhead looked half asleep against the wall when her parents, and the three or so doctors in the room she hadn't noticed until now due to her relieved parent's blocking the view, had finished explaining. One of the doctors, an aging man with bottle-cap thick glasses that almost looked like googles, all but rammed his way in between her parents to start poking around the stuck on electrodes of the brain scanner on her head. His fingers on her felt like a man touching an especially high-tech computer.

"Can I go home now?" he asked.

"You saved our daughter's life," said her father, his voice shaking more than she'd ever heard it. "Please let us repay you, somehow."

"I'm a hero. It's my job."

Juvi was staring at him for a whole other reason. Once again, an anime character had become real life before her, and it hardly did the real thing any justice. Cosplayers made Eraserhead out to be a lot hotter and more feminine than he really was. He looked like he hadn't slept the entire time she had been asleep, his gristle of facial hair had spots missing where the hair just didn't grow in, and his hair was greasy, borderlining slimy dreads.

She found herself frowning at the most important fact of all.

Eraserhead was her all time favorite character...and he looked like he hadn't bothered to so much as look at a shower or take a nap in a month.

And because he was her favorite character, she knew he didn't even listen to his own friends, so why would he listen to some random teenager being prodded by a bald man in oversized glasses?

"Juvi? Sweety? What's wrong?"

Juvi instantly felt guilty for her thoughts. Here she was worrying about a complete stranger who was fully capable of not only keeping himself alive, but twenty or so student's a year, while ignoring her own mother who looked like she hadn't slept or eaten in a while either. Her mother, her only one, in both lives, who cared enough about her to be so worried.

She looked at her father, comparing his features to the glassy clear memories of the woman she had just killed. For some reason, they were clearer than every before, almost more than her own, and she could see now that Jubilee's father looked nothing like Juvi's. They had the same dark hair and similar height, but that was all.