Double Life

Chapter 2

At twenty-years-old, Jubilee had a falling out with her youngest sister. She'd gotten a boyfriend without telling either Jubilee or their brother, which wouldn't have been too much of a problem if he wasn't an absolute skeezeball who constantly smelled of skunk. After announcing her pregnancy with a shriek and river worth of tears, their baby sister slammed the door of their little apartment and blocked their calls.

When she finally fell asleep, she was Juvi again, living in a country she now knew was Japan and wondering how she knew about multiplication and division without anyone having taught her. Her parents had given her quirk the tentative name of 'Lucid Dreams' and hearing about her magical proficiency in math had given her father the courage to finally fill in 'Mathematical Dreams.' It would be the perfect combination of his and her mother's quirks: Calculator and Lucid Dreamer. They weren't flashy quirks that got you the hero role on the playground. But they had their uses, which father and mother were more than happy to explain to her.

She knew she dreamed vividly, but she could only remember her dreams when she just woke up. Before she could write down what she could remember, the dreams would slowly drain out, leaving her frustrated, her head hurting, and unable to stop staring at random things like tatami mats or her tamago breakfast and chopsticks. One particularly bad morning she forgot how to use chopsticks and ended up crying in frustration because Mommy didn't understand.

The quirkless boy ended up in another class because Juvi got moved up. Still, she'd see him sometimes in the cafeteria or on the playground and still couldn't understand how he was less than anyone. One time, with her head hurting just a little more than usual after an unexpected nap in class, she ended up throwing her lunch tray at the stupid spikey-haired boy who kept letting loose firecrackers in the quirkless boy's face. He'd roared at her, hurting her head, and something alien to Juvi, something much bigger and older than her, pulled back her shoulders and roared back.

Coming from a tiny little girl, it just enraged the bullies more and they decided chasing her down and tugging on her pigtails like horse reigns was just retribution.

Until the quirkless boy came down on their heads in a mess of green curls and snot, flailing his fists and bawling to 'let her go!'

So they all ended up in the principal's office and they all got suspended.

The quirkless boy shot her a little smile, but Juvi only barely saw it. She was much more afraid of the stranger that had filled her little body in that one, angry moment.

When she fell asleep, Jubilee would muse about having dreams of a world where superpowers were common before splashing cold water on her face to try and calm the puffiness that came from crying yourself to sleep at night. Somewhere in the world she had a little niece or nephew that she'd never be able to protect.

At twenty-two, halfway to her Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and starting a minor in teaching, Jubilee's brother moved out to attend a university in the State next over. He let her cry on his shoulder for a long time before finally getting into his beat up old Honda and driving away. He'd done what she had, getting his general education credits out of the way at a community college before applying to a specialized university. He was going to be a pediatric psychologist in order to help kids like them who had been screwed up by their childhood. And also, and he only said this during that quiet bewitching hour when they weren't quite ready to go to bed, he wanted to know what to do should they ever get to help their little niece or nephew. It made Jubilee wonder if she really wanted to be a Mathematician.

One morning, when she woke up as nine-year-old Juvi, that something older and disillusioned woke up in her chest and she found herself running to the quirkless boy as fast as she could. She found him just as he raised his arms to block a blow to his head, once more by the spikey-haired boy and his lackeys. For the first time she really looked at him. He had the biggest green eyes she'd ever seen and a face full of freckles, which weren't all that common in Japan, even a Japan filled with all sorts of quirks. She screamed at the top of her lungs to draw over a teacher, threatening and spitting until the bullies left. She didn't care that all three had looked at her like she was a lunatic, she kind of felt like a lunatic. All she could really comprehend in her throbbing too-small, too-big head was a desperate, sickening need to care. To help.

"You're not worthless or useless," she said through tears. "I'm sorry it took me so long to help. I'm so sorry, but don't you--you're not useless. You're wonderful and wanted and--and..."

The misplaced burning in her chest faded and the quirkless boy managed to catch her by the arms as her legs turned to jello as her head cleared. She was small again. Small, confused, and very, very scared.

Could nine-year-olds go crazy? Would she have to go to a crazy hospital like in the movies? Where they chained people to beds and all the doctors wore white?

It was the quirkless boy who finally talked her back down to earth. The teachers somehow never found them in their bushy corner of the playground, which was all well and good, because the quirkless boy--no, Midoriya Izuku--helped her realize she wasn't crazy. Just cursed with a quirk that made no sense.

That didn't mean all the other kids didn't think she was crazy.

A few months after her twenty-fourth birthday, Jubilee got in a car accident. She was T-boned by a driver trying to text at the same time and sent into a week long comma.

On the other side, Juvi had a horrific week of insomnia, broken up by brief, dreamless respites brought on by her mother using every over the counter sleep aid she could find. A tingling came into being on her neck that quickly turned into a maddening itch. Her father found her on her bed with her hands covered in blood, the muscles and tips of her vertebrae bare to the world. Only then did they rush her to the E.R. where the doctors gave her the most intense sedative they could give to a child.

Only then did she wake up on the other side as Jubilee in a hospital bed, her bleary-eyed brother at her side.

Stuck to bedrest for the next two weeks, Jubilee found herself left to peruse around her battered laptop into an old hobby of anime watching. She mostly watched it for nostalgia's sake; a quiet hommage for the peaceful hours spent under the blanket as a child with her siblings watching Dragonball Z, Astro Boy, or Inuyasha. Even before their mother had gotten sick their parents had been far too willing to tune out the children with cable and movies.

A lot had changed in the anime world since she'd last seen it as a teen. She didn't recognize any of the pictures she saw, and she felt kind of silly for watching animated TV shows as a grown adult. But being stuck in bed, just coming out of a coma of nightmares, and not having seen her little sister for four years, Jubilee needed comfort. So she clicked on the anime listed on the top, advertised for having several seasons and being popular.

My Hero Academia.

It was a lot more emotionally in depth than she remembered anime being. Though she remembered bawling at an Inuyasha movie once. But she'd been twelve. That hardly counted.

One fall morning, eleven-year-old Juvi woke up remembering her dreams perfectly for the first time.

It hurt trying to organize her young mind around twenty-four years of memory and it made the scar on the back of her neck itch. But she was too stunned at the revelations it gave her. Mouth dry, she scrabbled for her phone on the nightstand and pulled up her best friend's contact--the only one at school who NEVER questioned her sanity.

"Hey, Juchan," came the painfully familiar voice on the other side, high and childish. "What's up?"

"Zuku," she swallowed and licked her lips, trying to wet her mouth. "That explosion guy, his name is Bakugou Katsuki, right?"