Bottled Up!

‘Twas a happy girl that munched on a McDonald’s pie. Sigga savored each bite of the baked delicacy, enjoying the flavor and the accompanying memory provided. It was a rather rare thing for her to find herself in a fast food joint. She had held onto that coupon from earlier doubting she’d ever actually get around to using it. A rather large portion of the food she generally ate was either whole or cooked in her dorm kitchen. For that reason, today’s opportunity had been exploited in full.

She blinked at the text shown on Asahi’s phone, wondering what had prompted this question. “What’s yours?” The sly girl immediately shot back in a wittily incisive manner. It was clearly a you first sort of deal.

The student found it a little surprising to see how quickly the boy had devoured the rather paltry meal. Either he was super hungry or, perhaps, the environment he had been raised in dictated you ate quickly or not at all. The girl nudged her container of fries indicating Asahi was welcome to them as well. There weren’t many left, but she didn’t seem to have any qualms with sharing the leftovers with the bandaged scrub hare. Besides, she still had some lewd pie that was in need of consumption.

Sigga licked her fingers as she finished the Sweet Fromage. It was quite good in her opinion. It seemed unlikely the Belgian Chocola would be able to meet her newly set standard for inappropriately named baked goods. Nimble fingers scooped up the remaining pie half so the girl could try the next and final sample.

Sigga’s attempt to bite into the second pie-half failed. The space that was supposed to be occupied by the pastry was woefully... not. Looking down at her arm she could now see, as well as feel, the muscular tendril holding her arm in place. Octopus? There was only the single limb present, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have seven, or who knows how many, more of them hidden away. She silently wondered if the fleshy fiber functioned like any of his other limbs might, or if it behaved more like some sort of subservient assistant. If it was the latter then it would have been doubly impressive.

She read the information he volunteered on his phone with a rather neutral expression. Though the young girl gave no indication of it, the manner in which he had held her arm back had actually made her slightly uncomfortable. He probably hadn’t meant to, but regardless of his intent the sudden display of strength brought back memories of those in her past that chose to impose their own will on the student. Sigga quickly banished those thoughts. They were entirely irrelevant here, and were unwanted in any case.

As the tendril withdrew, disintegrating into a crimson mist that flowed back towards Asahi, Sigga wondered if the active thought reading part of her quirk would have been able to function through the auxiliary limb. For that matter, she wondered if she still had a quirk. The fish girl had not used any facet of her quirk for over three months; not since her plane landed in the land of the rising sun. Did people ever lose their quirks?

With nothing to restrain her Sigga devoured the Belgian Cocola in a single bite, surveying Asahi with her gaze. “How about Edward?” The girl suggested, mouth full of chocolate pie. It was a joke of course, but you couldn’t always tell with Sigga. The name had been meant as an option for what he could name his Red Tendril. Obviously when he had said he didn’t have a fancy name for it, Asahi probably wasn’t expecting a suggestion, much less one that was English.

Chewing thoughtfully, the bald girl leaned back in her seat. Her eyes looked away for a brief moment, then turned back to face the table between them. She wasn’t sure if she remembered to taste the second pie-half before swallowing it. A finger picked unceremoniously at her teeth before the girl grabbed another napkin to wipe her face and any saliva that had gotten onto her digit.

Not bothering to check if anyone else was looking in her direction, the girl suddenly lifted up the front of her shirt. Well he did ask. Her hand tugged the cotton only slightly above her lower ribs, revealing the thin, purple slits that were her gills. There was only a second to look and back down the shirt went. “I can breathe underwater.” She explained, then added. “It’s not the only thing I can do, though.” Then, for the first time since Asahi’s tendril had grabbed her that canny grin returned. “But the rest is a se-cret.~”

She had offered up more information to him on her quirk than to anyone else that had asked up to this point. That well-intentioned admonishment she had meant to deliver earlier about trusting strangers was something the girl would have done well to send her own direction.

That feeling of discomfort from when the tendril had gripped her arm earlier was now recognized for what it had been; what it was. Fear. Sigga’s grin had vanished, as did the wrinkles around her eyes when they saw the change in Asahi’s. The girl hated being afraid of things. She knew that feeling was useful for survival, but it also got in the way of rational thinking. It made understanding the situation and risk assessment much more difficult. And it made it feel like she had acid in her veins. It was one thing to tell oneself to not be afraid, an entirely different thing to will oneself to heed that advice.

As the various occupants of Mickey D’s vacated the premises, the teenage girl remained rooted to her seat. If he had been trying to intimidate her, he could consider his endeavor a success. But that success was undermined by the fact that it had caught her by surprise. If his amicable demeanor from before had been an act, it had sufficiently deceived the girl. But if it was genuine, like she had thought it to be, then it made the girl’s very rudimentary mind painting of Asahi to be that much more incomplete.

She found it strange that he was so fixated on what her quirk was, but that thought was replaced with the focus required for Sigga to answer the boy. “I can manipulate thoughts and memories.” The student managed to say the words without any audible waver to her voice. Her fear hadn’t been usurped, but rather assimilated in part by other thoughts and emotions. She was feeling some disappointment, but it wasn’t directed at the one she had just shared a meal with. She was disappointed with her own inability; her futility in adequately reading Asahi. A rather silly thing to have expected of herself, but there it was. And there was also curiosity. Curiosity as to why his mood had shifted to such polarizing anger. It would have been easy to dismiss him as just another sociopath, but Sigga knew it wasn’t that simple. Human minds were more complicated than that. Her own foster sibling had been diagnosed with Asperger’s, and the fish girl herself had once been thought to be bipolar. She knew firsthand, as well as anyone, that people were more complex than simple labels.

Though hidden from Asahi’s view by the table, Sigga’s hand was griping her water bottle tightly. It was helping ground some of her fear and help the girl think more clearly. She waited for his follow-up question. Her mind churning on how to deescalate the situation, but she was also ready to bolt from the place if it became necessary.

Though neither of the two knew it, there was irony in the way they perceived each other. While Asahi considered Sigga’s secretive behavior to be despicably adult-like, the fish girl thought the street urchin’s intimidation tactic to be equally as such. The girl didn’t hate all adults, though. There were good ones out there, like her grandfather. She just didn’t like the kinds that were in positions of authority. Those ones tended to act with impunity, inciting violence or threatening others with it. Sigga didn’t care for violence, and thought those that used it as a cudgel to bully others into getting what they want were an exceptionally lazy or impatient sort that refused to put in the hard work required to getting what they wanted through dialogue. Dialogue couldn’t get you everything though…

While the menacing look the boy had been giving her seemed to subside, Sigga’s muscles remained tense. That feeling of fear, though now under a bit more control, was not about to leave her. Her amber gaze didn’t look away from him when his attention turned to his phone. While the situation seemed to deescalate without any additional intervention on her part, besides curtly answering his question, it could just as easily change back to what it was moments ago like it had the first time. Though he couldn’t have possibly known it, simply saying please would have gotten him the same answer his threat had. The girl didn’t advertise her quirk in places people knew her, but it wasn’t really a secret otherwise. Maybe it should have been, though.

His phone came up again with a new question. Using his voice to communicate was probably something he only did when riled. He could very well have been using the message he typed on his phone as a distraction. It would have worked too. The instant she looked at his phone would have been the moment her guard would have to drop in order to read what he had typed. She knew that. She knew that, but she looked at the phone anyway. What school did she go to? By chance?! Did he think her so craven that she would answer any of his questions just because he threatened bloodshed and may have had her quaking in her boots?

She could have easily answered falsely, giving him the name of one of the alternative schools she had considered applying to if UA hadn’t worked out. Instead Sigga said flatly, “I’m not telling you that.” Asahi had withdrawn his phone, though despite the obvious typing that was going on he hadn’t produced it immediately again. It was safe to assume the worst.

The pouty expression failed to have an impact on the bald girl’s now very cautious demeanor. Asahi’s appearance no longer stirred any of those maternal instincts Sigga may have previously begun fostering for the bandaged boy. The sudden divulging of information likewise didn’t put her at ease now that the trust that had been slowly developing between them had eroded so, though it did give her mind something new to mull over; something to distract her from that vitriolic fear she was still silently fighting.

He being a third year suggested the boy was probably about two years older than her, unless he skipped a grade or fell behind which wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility. He was a little taller than her as well, but she had previously assumed the age gap between them to be much smaller based on his rather wiry frame. At least there hadn’t been a cost associated with that assumption. She didn’t recognize the high school he went to, but that didn’t mean very much seeing as the only schools in Japan whose names she knew of were the few that focused on education in heroics. What she did know is that his demeanor had shifted from openly hostile right on over to openly cooperative. Or at least that’s what she would have considered it if her intention had been to interrogate him for information that might prove useful if she were interested in writing his biography. But everything he had just typed out could easily have been a lie.

It was difficult to find the courage to replace that feeling of dread with a different emotion, though when Asahi brought his phone up for another look the girl’s expression changed to a very visible scowl. The McDonald's getting vacated meant that their environment had become far more private, a detriment for someone who had just been threatened and desired a bit of that security normally afforded by a public restaurant. Though completely new to the concept of bluffing herself into believing a falsehood, the fishy teen’s inner monologue was already doing a bang-up job of convincing it’s inner identity that it wasn’t afraid of the threat made, but rather furious that such abuse had been directed at her. Unfortunately this ran counterproductive to the girl’s desire to make wise moves that kept the situation from escalating again.

“And just why would I tell you any more about her?” she quipped, as if they were speaking of a third party not present at their table. Perhaps that idea wasn’t all that absurd seeing as the girl that had previously been laughing her ass off was now giving her counterpart a hardened stare. A part of her already regretted telling Asahi what her quirk was. Another part was silently screaming at itself, What are you doing?! Stahp! Retreat! The girl shifted in her seat, folding a leg up onto her knee.

The stern look Sigga was giving Asahi got a little bit muddled as the student listened in on the only side of the phone conversation she could hear. There was some valuable information the sharp girl gleaned from the few words spoken. Though, more importantly, her mind was now raising some rather alarming questions. It was undeniable that a plot she wasn’t privy to was currently in play, but she was unable to suss out its nature. Her mind offered up a hypothesis, reviewed the evidence gathered in her memories over the past hour, and quickly shot it down as unlikely. A new, vaguer, hypothesis took its place. This one had data equal in size both affirming and disaffirming the hypothetical narrative in play, but no fact was strong enough to dismiss or confirm it outright. Before she could come up with an alternative, the boy set his phone on speaker. Sigga listened.

Amber eyes, looking only a little more confused and surprised than before, moved from the phone back to Asahi as he rasped out a short apology. It was difficult to infer any specific emotion in the voice itself, but the boy’s body language suggested a bit of contrition. That wasn’t something she could simply take at face value anymore though. It’s not like she could know for certain if he actually regretted his threats for any reason other than disappointing whoever was on the other end of the phone. Not unless she… No. Sigga dismissed the thought. She did agree with this Kyou Kazumi’s selection of words describing Asahi’s actions though, but wasn’t about to jump in to chastise him. As soon as the phone conversation would end, the two of them would be alone again. That was inevitable.

Her eyes drifted back to look at the phone as the voice on the other end continued to address the girl. The offer of a free favor was somehow even more perplexing. What kind of text did he send? She was finding this one-side conversation utterly bizarre. Then this purported Kyou Kazumi hung up.

Asahi was looking at her again and she, looking straight back at him. A rather pregnant silence filled the hollowed out restaurant. While the boy was trying to gauge her, see how she was going to react, Sigga was doing the same. Her eyes scanned him, but she didn’t say anything. Some of the anger that had been visible in her expression, whether it had been fabricated or otherwise, had faded. But she still stayed silent and did not move from her seat. Or give any additional indication to how she felt or what she was thinking. The girl did now have several questions for him but was electing not to voice them. Like it or not, the ball was once again in the boy’s court.

In some corner of the building they could hear new customers entering the McDonalds, likely completely unaware of anything that had been happening at Asahi and Sigga’s table.