917A new story! Like most of my fics this will feature canon and non canon LGBT characters, most of them minor.
Suzanna Hemmings stared up at the ceiling of an otherwise empty warehouse. There were spiderwebs dripping from the windows, thousands of hours spun into webs of fine silk that glitter in golden sunlight. They sparkle with dew. Cracks in the ceiling let dying sunlight stream into the room, where dust dances in the beams.
It's beautiful, really.
What is not beautiful is her sister, crouched over her body, laughing and screaming and sobbing all at once, snot and tears and splotchy red skin ruining what was a lovely face.
What's not beautiful is the knife sticking out of her chest, and the blood pooling under her back. Sticky, warm, and wet. She'd like this shirt too.
Suzanna Hemmings is a detective. She is good at what she does, it barely takes a minute for her to drink in all the information from a crime scene she needs. She really loves tricky, messy murders that make her think, and complex hiests that lead her on a run.
That's all because her father is good at what he does, and her sister is good at what their parents do.
Suzanna Hemmings is the black sheep of the family.
She had never cared for committing crimes. She liked to solve them, to put pieces back together and figure out the order of events and the motivations of everyone involved. She liked to watch people crack and panic when their carefully woven webs shred to pieces. There was nothing more fun than watching people who were certain they'd gotten away with murder pale with horror when she revealed that they'd failed. No thrill could compare to digging up money and watching wannabe thieves shake like leaf's when she proved how they'd done it.
Maddison had to stop her, of course. Suzanna had been about to turn over evidence that would prove that her sister's fiance had conned a man out of a quarter of a billion dollars.
Suzanna knows people. So she knows that Maddison didn't come here with the intention of killing her, for all that she'd brought a knife with her, and she knows that she's going to grieve and have to tell their parents what she did. That part, for Suzanna, isn't punishment enough, but it's all that she's going to get.
Death in a warehouse at the hands of her baby sister, all for money, all for greed.
Suzanna Hemmings closes her eyes to the golden light in Maddison's hair, and glittering tears on her cheeks.
It's cold, she thinks. So, so, cold.
Kono Suzume grows up in a house of light and laughter.
Her father is a bright man, Kono Sanjiro, with slitted red eyes and sharp teeth that gleamed when he smiled at his children and dripped literal venom the few times someone managed to truly spark his temper. Her mother Chiasa is a stern woman, but fair in her ways, with dark eyes and black nails that gleam with poison.
She has five brothers, making her the youngest of six.
The oldest is Takahiro, who by the time she is five has already moved out with his girlfriend.
After that is Shisui, halfway through highschool and aiming for a business degree.
Seiji and Satomi are twins in middle school, and Kaname is the closest to her in age, only two years older than her.
Everyone in her family is amazing. All of them have some kind of incredible ability related to poison or venom. Kaname has both, his long teeth gleam with it and his sharp nails are kept in thick gloves when they go out, just in case. Mom wears the same ones.
Suzume was once named Suzanna Hemmings, and so it didn't take her long to figure out what had happened and where she was. She had had her existential crisis (or maybe a reverse existential crisis? If an existential crisis was being confronted with one's death, what do you call being confronted by one's second life?), accepted that she wasn't going to be able to change what had happened or where she was, and grieved accordingly.
Six years is a long time, the first two of them she had basically been a prisoner of her own body. There wasn't much to do but think. She'd scared the life out of her parents, who had taken her to no less than four pediatricians when she was too quiet. Far quieter than any of her brothers had ever been, and quieter than any baby should be.
She'd felt bad about it, really.
But she had been in mourning, and in no mood to humor strangers, beyond demanding her necessities.
She'd come out of it when she could finally walk properly, and talk, and terrorize her elder brothers. The twins were her favorite target.
Ah, Cain instinct. She'd been the eldest before, a life full of 'help your sister learn to be better' and 'you're older, you should know better than to retaliate'.
Now she was the baby, and she was fucking living for it.
"Mom!" Kaname shrieked at the top of his lungs, "Suzume took my action figure!"
"Kaname, you have to share with your sister," Chiasa chided. She was flicking through the mail, sorting it into important stuff and junk when Kaname went tearing into the kitchen, Suzume on his heels and clutching a Crimson Riot action figure that was, indeed, her brothers.
"I do share with her! I share everything with her!" Kaname stomped his foot on the linoleum. Suzume hid behind their mothers leg, sticking her tongue out at Kaname.
Seiji looked up from where he was building a model of a cell on the living room floor. "At least you don't have to share your face."
Satomi kicked his leg from his place on the couch. "Please, everyone knows I'm the pretty one."
"Boys."
They both cringed at their mother's tone.
They were supposed to be on their best behavior. Taka was coming home with his girlfriend, Rio, tonight and they were supposed to behave. Shisui was holed up in the room he shared with the twins, studying for his finals. Kaname and Suzume shared a room too, but it was currently covered in a city made of refurbished boxes and soda bottles, where heroes and villains collided.
Kaname was a dreamer, and he wanted to be a hero more than anything.
Suzume didn't, but she played hero with him and they had silly names for each other. He was Krait, like the snake, and she was Suzumebachi even if they didn't know what her quirk was yet. They're just games. Suzume says she wants to be a hero, because that's what all kids say at some point here. The truth is, she knows she'll probably go back to being a detective, or maybe a lawyer. A doctor could be interesting. She's not worried.
"Here, Kan," Suzume finally pushed the little hero in her hands into Kaname's grasp. Crimson Riot was his favorite, and she'd just been teasing him.
Kaname snatched it from her with a sniff. Suzume smiled at him regardless.
Chiasa shook her head at the two of them.
"Kaname, go clean up. Suzume here, start shucking this."
Chiasa shoved an armful of corn at her youngest daughter in a ploy to keep her out of trouble.
Suzume wasn't normally interested in kids toys, unless she was fucking with her brother. She liked video games, but the only ones she had the hand eye coordination for were way too low level to be interesting. All the books that she was allowed to read were for children, and therefor also boring.
Chiasa had realized early on that if her daughter was bored, only trouble would follow. So she always did her best to come up with a task for her, something to keep her idle hands from doing the devil's work in their house. Especially after the time she'd nearly flooded the basement.
Suzume does as she's told, and Chiasa goes back to sorting the mail. Their stack of bills keeps getting higher and higher. Chiasa couldn't go to work with Suzume so young, but now that she's about to start elementary school maybe she can get a part time job, or something. Having six kids is not cheap.
For his part Sanjiro works at night, and Suzume is pretty sure that whatever he does isn't strictly legal.
Not that she had any plans of bringing that up.
No-siree.
She did think it was ironic, though. Born into a criminal family twice? What are the odds?
Apparently as good as being reborn period.
The door opened and Taka came in with Rio, a lovely woman with white hair piled in thick waves on top of her head and bright, cheerful red eyes. She wasn't very tall, and she was always dressed nicely. Some days she even had small rings draped on her little crown of horns. If Suzume noticed the knife in her boot, she never brought it up.
Just as they came in, Sanjiro came out of his room, dressed casually, and Chiasa uttered a soft 'oh'.
It was enough to get everyone's attention on her.
"Mom?" Taka asked, coming over to kiss her cheek, ruffle Suzume's hair, and peer over Chiasa's shoulder.
"It's from the doctor. Suzume's doctor."
Suzume paused her shucking of corn. They'd taken her to a doctor two weeks ago. They'd checked her blood, x-rayed her whole body and done all of her vitals, reflexes, and had her run on a treadmill for a bit. Then they asked about two million questions about her teeth, her nails, and prodded her lower jaw where Sanjiro had two small bulbs that held venom.
It didn't take a genius to know that they were looking for her quirk. At five with no quirk she's considered a late bloomer, and considering that most of the quirks in her family are mutation type quirks it's extra weird.
"Is Suzume okay?" Rio asked immediately, her brows furrowing with worry.
"Open it up, Chi," Sanjiro encouraged.
She ripped it open with her long nails and pulled out the packet of paper inside. Suzume's test results.
The corn was all bare, even the little hairs were gone, so she set that down and climbed onto a chair to try to look.
Chiasa went pale as she read on. With shaking hands, she handed the papers to her husband.
The color drained out of his face, too, and Taka took the packet impatiently. He looked just as worried as his fiance.
"Am I gonna die?" Suzume asked, since no one would tell her what her own damn test results are.
It was Rio who took a breath and composed herself first, while Taka looked horrified. At first Suzume thought it had something to do with the poison. Had she inherited poison, but not a resistance to it? She didn't have fangs or long nails, which was unfair. She wanted those.
But then Rio looked at her, so so sadly, but it wasn't with fear or grief that would come from a death sentence on paper.
Suzume realized when she was going to say a second before the words came out of her mouth.
Rio didn't have to crouch to meet Suzume's eyes, since she was standing carefully on the chair still.
"Oh dear," she said with no small degree of kindness, "It's your quirk. You don't have one."
Quirkless.
"Ah."
The twins stayed silent in the living room, horrified. Kaname stood at the door between the bedroom hall and the kitchen, Crimson Riot clutched in his hands.
"But, if Suzume doesn't have a quirk, how can she be a hero?" he asked, his lower lip starting to trembled.
If anything, Rio looked sadder.
"She can't."
Chiasa broke into tears and Sanjiro rushed to comfort her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and holding on tight. The twins, stunned, grabbed each other's hand and stared at her like it really was her death sentence on that paper.
Kaname's Crimson Riot hit the ground and tears streaked down his face. Taka and Rio watched her sadly.
Suzume stared at the paper still in Rio's grasp. She didn't cry. She didn't scream. But she was pissed.
Don't I deserve fangs and claws? As a treat?
What bullshit.
Life is hard. That's not new information for Suzume, really it isn't. The first time around she had been raised by loving, wonderful parents who just so happened to like poking her with tacks so would cry and cause a scene and take attention off the jewelry story counter long enough to pocket a few diamonds, and had taught her to pick just about any lock by the time she turned eight. By twelve she could jack any car that wasn't entirely electronic based, and even those it just took her a little longer and required more equipment. Mom had been a thief. Was a thief, always a thief.
Dad cleaned up other people's messes. An 'extraction specialist' he called himself, with a second major in clean up crew. He was very good at getting blood out of clothes. He'd brought Suzanne along with him sometimes, since she was small enough to get into places that he couldn't and get evidence that was beyond his reach. It was because of him that she knew which way blood splattered, how to tell something unplanned from something premeditated, and where to look for needle marks between toes and under nail beds.
By the time she was fifteen Suzanne hadn't killed anyone, but she had gotten her fair share of exposure to corpses and bank vaults.
She had been raised to be a criminal. She had learned on her father's knee. She perfected herself under her mother's hand.
They were good parents, if not good people, and it was such a disappointment the first time she accidentally solved a criminal case while talking to a school friend whose dad just so happened to be the police chief.
She'd seen more than she should have before she was out of high school. She knew life wasn't fair. She knew to get what you wanted you had to take it.
This life is a different kind of unfair.
She has no quirk.
Which means she's at the very bottom rungs of society.
It doesn't matter that a good chunk of people have quirks that aren't visible, or powerful, or useful. She doesn't have one at all, and for some stupid reason the teachers at school decide that it's a fan-fucking tastic idea to go around the room on the first day and have everyone say their names, their quirks, and what they wanna be when they grow up.
That's when it starts.
She should have lied, in retrospect. Said it was 'detective' or 'mind reading' or something boring or hard to prove.
She does lie, sort of.
"I'm Kono Suzume, I don't have a quirk, and I want to be a hero."
She doesn't, but she's been saying that long enough that it comes out. Which starts the rest of the little kids on a truly insane tirade.
"Someone without a quirk can't be a hero!"
"No quirk? That's so lame!"
"But heroes have to be strong and you can only be strong with a strong quirk! Like All Mights!"
Suzume has to practice all of her self control not to tackle the most annoying child near her.
It's the start of a trend that will follow her for the rest of her life, she knows. Someone without a quirk will never be a hero.
Kaname finds something similar in his class two years above her.
Poison is a villain's quirk, and therefore he can't be a hero.
(nevermind that their dad is definitely some kind of criminal, and Taka's fiance is certainly breaking some laws. No one knows any of that and this is how they react?
Is this why Sanjiro became a criminal in the first place? Because he has a villainous quirk?)
Kaname responds, naturally, by starting as many fights as he can with anyone who insults him or his baby sister, insisting that they can be anything they want to be.
And maybe if it was just her she would have changed routes. Maybe she would have decided to be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a fucking mystery novelist.
Instead, after two months of harassment and insults that teacher's at this underfunded school do nothing to assuage, she finds herself sitting at a park between their house and the school, Kaname at her side, crying tears that look green and venomous. Poisonous?
His lip is split and swollen, and he's going to have a black eye tomorrow. He'd started another fight when someone pushed her down and called her something cruel. She doesn't even remember what it was, the names all blur together, and she doesn't really care. She doesn't care what a bunch of little kids call her.
What she cares about is the injustice of it all. The teachers do nothing to stop it. They children learn their cruelty from their parents and siblings.
Society sees her as somehow less, somehow lacking, even though she is no less of a person simply because she doesn't have six arms or fire for hair or anything else.
More than that she's angry for Kaname.
He's a dreamer with a good heart and dripping fangs. He sees the injustice in the world and refuses to accept it. He fights, and bleeds, all because other kids are mean and adults are useless.
And Suzume-
Rage bubbles in Suzume's chest.
She dabs his eyes and his bloody lip with her sleeves. They're thin, even with Chiasa back to working they're strapped for cash with five children and a wedding coming up. Suzume doesn't know the whole story, but she knows that only Rio's brother has been invited to the wedding. No one else from her family.
"Maybe they're right," Kaname nearly chokes. He'd broken into wracking sobs as soon as they were far enough from the school that none of their classmates would see, tucked into a stack of bushes at the edge of the park. In the spring they'll bloom with purple flowers, but for now the leaves are turning gold and red.
"No," Suzume said, firm and certain. Any silly sibling squabbles are forgotten, when it's the two of them against the world.
"Maybe we can't be heroes," Kaname doesn't seem to have heard her. "I can only hurt people with my quirk. I can't even hold your hand without gloves. And you don't have a quirk at all."
"No!" Suzume snaps, louder and more forceful. Kaname's head jerks around so fast to look at her she worries he's given himself whiplash. They're the same. Dark hair, dark eyes. His fang poked out against his bottom lip when he bites it. There's and indent there from constant pressure.
"No," she says again, softening herself for Kaname. "They're not right about us. We can do anything. We can be heroes, Kan. No matter what they say."
She's not a charismatic person. If she had to describe herself it would be somewhere between annoying and practical. And stubborn. Very, very stubborn.
But right then Kaname looks at her, a head shorter with her black hair spiking all over the place, like she's offered to hang a new star in the sky just for him.
"You really think so?"
Of course she does. The world is stupid, and biased, and people can't see past the shining lights that popular heroes cast to realize that not all of them have battle quirks, or even quirks that are all that useful. She thinks of All Mights side kicks, David Shield who's quirk is bendy fucking fingers, and Sir Nighteye, who can see the future but only once a day and fights with his bare hands or small projectiles. They're no less heroes than anyone else.
Off the top of her head she can come up with a half a dozen others.
"Yeah. We'll just have to work harder to show them. Right?"
Kaname starts to smile. It's small, and his lip starts bleeding again with it, but it's there all the same.
"Okay. Let's be heroes, Suzume."
"Mmm. Right."
Suzume doesn't care about being a hero. She really doesn't. But Kaname does.
And, on top of that, it's the best way she can think to tell the rest of the world to go fuck itself.
Suzume doesn't want to use their families' small funds up on something unnecessary, but the fact of the matter is if she and Kaname are going to be heroes they're going to need training. Her especially.
Suzanne had never been much of a fighter. She could manage if she absolutely had to, but it wasn't her forte by any means. Now, she's six years old and weak and defenseless.
It's not acceptable.
While their parents don't flat out refuse to let them become heroes, it's obvious they aren't fans of the idea. They dissuade them from too much hero merch, either because the price is too high or they don't want to encourage a fixation she doesn't know.
It's pretty obvious, at least to Suzume, that they don't want their younger children knowing where Sanjiro goes at night. Taka has to know, his fiance most certainly has blood under her nails. But they want to protect their youngest, and Suzume can respect that. It's entirely possible that this will make getting into hero school more difficult, but she will worry about that in eight years, when it's actually relevant.
So she has to be careful about asking to take martial arts.
It's not something that occurred to Kaname. Apparently it's not something that occurs to a lot of people, so focused are they on their quirks that martial arts are starting to die out.
People are fucking stupid.
Suzume hates asking, because she knows that they're strapped for cash, but she has to ask any how.
"Some of my friends are doing after school sports," she starts one day at dinner. Kaname looks at her, surprised. He knows she doesn't have friends at school. The other kids had realized that if they picked on her, her scary big brother would come after them, but she was still quirkless, still a freak, and her brother was creepy.
Yeah, life wasn't fair. What a bitch.
"Oh yeah?" Sanjiro asks. For him it's breakfast, but he always eats it with his remaining children. Shisui has been locked up in his room more and more lately, so he's not there for that. Her second eldest brother feels so far away some times, locked up in the dark, buried in books, desperate for a way out.
He definitely knows what Sanjiro does for a living.
"Mhmm. Emi is starting to shoot a bow, and Momo is in ballet, and Hinawa is taking Aikido with Maki. They want me to come with them," the last part is a lie. The first parts are true.
Her parents exchange a look.
"Kaname could come too. It would be so much fun!"
"You want Kaname to learn ballet with you?" Chiasa asks, looking amused, and worried all at once. It's impressive.
"No!" Suzume makes a show out of puffing her cheeks out, and turns watery black eyes up at her mother. "Aikido!"
Chiasa reaches over to ruffle her already wild hair. It's barely held back by a headband. "Aikido is an expensive thing to be involved in, dear. I don't think we have enough money this month for the two of you to go. I'm sorry."
Suzume had thought that might be the case.
That doesn't mean she likes it. It's probably not very heroic that she wishes her dad would break a few more laws so she can learn how to throat punch someone.
"But Aikido teaches people how to fight. And I don't have a quirk, so I can't fight back if someone is picking on me, and Kaname-"
"Is someone picking on you?" Sanjiro asks suddenly, his brows furrowing. Chias frowns deeper. Suzume hadn't realized it, but she hadn't told Sanjiro about their children. She hadn't told him about the times she'd been called to pick them up from school early, or fetch a bag of frozen peas for Kaname's black eye, or apply a little dinosaur themed bandaid to his scrapes.
"Sometimes," she admits, poking her chicken with her chopsticks. "I don't have a quirk. Everyone is supposed to have a quirk. And Kaname doesn't like people being mean to me."
Every word out of her mouth makes Sanjiro's face tighten in carefully maintained anger. When he speaks again she can see his fangs dripping neon green venom.
"You should have told me." It's aimed at Chiasa.
"You already work too hard. I can handle the kids."
"You should have told me," he repeated. "They're my kids too. If something like this is happening…"
She looks at Kaname, who looks back at her, his black eyes just as big as hers are.
"Sanjiro," there's a warning in Chiasa's voice. The kind she uses on the kids when they're being to mischievous and about to break something.
Seiji stands up suddenly and says, "We'll do the dishes!"
Satomi catches Suzume and Kaname by their wrists and tugs. "C'mon, you guys have homework to do."
"We do?" Kaname asks, confused.
Suzume doesn't fight the twins while they usher the pair from the room, and into their own. She even goes along with their games of heroes vs villains so they can distract Kaname. Even in the room, she can hear the argument building outside.
It's… concerning.
She's never seen her mother and father fight over anything more severe than laundry. She hadn't expected this reaction of all things.
She's getting rusty. It's been a long time since she's had to read people, she's been content to just let her family do as they would without her trying to predict their every move. She didn't need to do that here.
Except maybe she should have in this case. Maybe she should have kept quiet, knowing they didn't have a lot of money to burn, knowing that Sanjiro has at least a little bit of a dangerous job.
She wraps a thin towel around her shoulders like a cape and jumps on Satomi's back with a battle cry.
She'd known that money was tight, but around here most martial arts classes didn't go over six thousand yen a month, roughly fifty dollars. To be that strapped for cash?
Yeah. She feels bad for asking and getting her parents into this fight in the first place.
Not that Suzume will let Kaname know. He's older than her, sort of, but he's so much sweeter, so much more innocent.
He drops to his hands and knees behind Satomi, their villain, while she jumps at him from the front and trips him over their other brother. Satomi goes down, with Suzume on top of him in victory.
Their parents are still fighting.
They start another game.
Hey y'all! I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this whole childhood arc, so we're going fast.