Flea

Chapter Sixty Six

Then a shot of her lower back. Jagged slashes, he imagined from a knife, tore apart its minefield of bruises. They were so savage, even mostly healed, that the wounds seemed inflicted by more beast than human.

Further videos followed of interviewers painfully coxing Maeve to release information regarding Greyhound's criminal activities. She was cleaner and dressed in normal clothes, but those made no difference to continuous darkness behind her eyes. When the toddler finally cracked, under pressure to save lives nobody could ever legally prove police had put on her, the breadth of detail she divulged left Hawks even more shell shocked than he already was. He knew she was a genius, of course he did, but seeing a toddler's face screwing up in childlike concentration to then discuss the inner workings of blackmarket deals involving murders was unsettling to say the least. It was clear she'd witnessed some of those killings personally.

There was a palpable shift in attention from whoever was sitting behind the camera after that, and question after question were directed at her regarding her quirk, whether Shota Aizawa was an adequate foster father, and if she'd be interested in 'training programmes for gifted children.' It was near painful to watch the toddler realise she was being backed into a corner, but being too shy and frightened to do anything about it.

A sudden time lapse occurred, and Hawks assumed the sudden drop off in footage was when UA offered Recovery Girl protection in return for her services.

Snippets followed of an older girl nearly entirely in laboratories. She'd gotten better at hiding shadows behind her eyes, but they were still there.

"Tell us what you've been working on with animal studies."

"I kill them."

"Maeve, you shouldn't joke-"

"I'm not joking. I sit here and kill rats in convoluted ways. Been doing that for weeks. Can you ask Professor Kyoshi about that on camera, actually? He won't let me bury them."

"Why don't we talk about what you've learnt instead? I hear you might be working on spinal cord injuries, have any stories there?"

"Mmm... stories. Well. You can't fix something that isn't broken, so for my research they paralyse the rats and I try to reconnect their spinal cords. I saw one climbing out of its crate once, before the procedure, and I thought 'that one is too smart to live in a place like this.' So I let it go, but in a couple days it just ran back and waited for me to open its cage. Looked at me like it had just accepted it's fate instead of trying to face the world outside. If I have to feel one more of them die I'm quitting the programme, tell the professor that from me. I don't care about the contract anymore."

She seemed to learn over time to keep the painful thoughts to herself. They progressed instead to dark humour, with her explaining the mechanism of puke pints, then to cheerful absurdity.

There was a skip for several months. Hawks double checked for any scrap of information regarding that period but came up blank. It itched a part of his mind that could never just let things be. Internet. Nothing. University archives. No trace. Hospital records. Classified.

The shadows were darker when she came back to the point her aqua eyes were nearly black. Recovery Girl's movements were stiffer and had lost the assuredness she'd spent all previous footage gaining. Up until that point she'd perked up whenever asked about her plans for heroics. After, the child seemed distracted and her face struggled to conceal utter disgust at the concept even though she never removed her distinctive bodysuit from that point on.

Fragments of film passed, and the only thing that seemed to genuinely give her enthusiasm was when she talked about dance. Hawks found a video clip of one of her competitions - her last, as a matter of fact- in which a 14-year-old Maeve stood awkwardly on stage. She was wearing a cheap superhero costume which sported a red cape reminiscent of All Might and looked like she'd gotten lost on the way from trick or treating. Hawks knew it was going to be embarrassing, cute, or both and frankly was ready for some light entertainment.