─── Chapter Three.
❛ UNDER MY SKIN ❜

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ IT WAS IN THE SECOND GRADE, thin dark stockings and polished ebony shoes soaked to the bone with mud. One small child, dull and dreary, hidden beneath the scalp by a head of thick lilac hair, stood before a wall; Her fingers dripped with fragmentations of crystal raindrops, falling into the pristine carpet of her father's study, balled into minuscule fists of chipped nails and gnwaed skin.

The Wall; Minami Chizue's father was a stubborn man, strict as the stick he slammed into the ground, straight-laced with all emotions other than anger. The man more often than not let his fury consume him, sweet eyes turned cold at the sight of any displeasure. His displeasure was the child he was forced to call daughter; Minami Chizue was his biggest regret.

A small thing, seven years old — almost eight — and still afraid of the shadows before her father's weary eyes, teeth rickety and old from their workings over her bleeding lips. Chizue stood, a mess of ghostly smiles and torn knees, to face her father's steel tongue. The bows on her hair, symbols of sweet youth, wilted into streams of sagging ribbon, pinks and blues against the shock of lilac hair.

"Again." He commanded power, burnt and bloody, but power nonetheless, voice deep and gravelly, and Chizue had learned long ago that if there was any sound close to hell, it would be the sound of her father's voice.

The shoulders holding up her head trembled viciously, aching as her head bowed deeper, closer to the floor, closer to the stench of expensive perfume and incense intermingling with the salty touch of a rain's soft embrace against Minami Chizue's soft damp cheeks. Whether from the downpour outside or from her father's crude bite, no one outside the closed door would (or could) testify otherwise.

Chizue lifted her head a fragment of a degree, eyes scanning the face of the man she called Father. He held nothing but loveless contempt and hatred in the depths of his shadowed eyes, cobalt blue beneath the harsh contrasts of the overhead light.

Takeo took her father's face; Every semblance down to the pin-straight navy hair and lanky frame, but Minami Chizue had her father's cold, condescending eyes. Her older brother was lucky in that aspect. His warm brown eyes — traits of their mother — counterbalanced the young features of their father as a child, but Chizue was forever stuck with the cold gaze of her father every time she dared look in the mirror.

"You disappoint me, Chizue."

Meek and useless, out of breath and desperate, Chizue scrambled to beg for her father's mercy with the palms of her hands on his carpet floor, fingers tightly etched against it in hopes that she would tear everything apart in that god-forsaken room.

"Father, I —"

"What have I told you about getting home on time? The youngest daughter of the Minami family, going around splashing in mud has besmirched our good name. Do you have no self-respect?"

Heavy was the hand that held the crown, much like Minami's father was built from heavy words, books he read just to know infinitely more than all those he looked down upon, cold eyes with the only purpose of seeing the grime of the world.

"I'm sorry, I got sidetracked." Pitiful excuses stemmed from the girl's sanguine lips, thorny brambles crawling up her skin and painting her a rosebush with no roses to give; The Minami family had long torn off all the pretty flowers, leaving behind a chaos of vines and poison that consumed Chizue amidst the flutter of decaying petals.

Seven-year-old girls needed to take after their mothers, silent and complacent. They needed to be on time, exactly where their father wanted them to be at the time he commanded. Young girls were not allowed to show interest in things like the thin trail of mucus below a snail on a rainy day, or stare out of windows in the dead of night in hopes that some monster might steal her away from her wretchedly cold house.

Young girls were built to be like dolls, strings leading to their fathers and only to their fathers, their brains only to follow the orders of those who held the tangle of strings in the palm of their hands. Minami Chizue knew what young girls were made of, satin or velvet between their pink cheeks and soft button noses, but she couldn't bathe in the luxury of youth when her father wanted her to be nothing more than another version of a perfect child.

"That is always your excuse." Hot breath, Chizue instinctively recalled it to be thick with wine, fanned her small face. Her father loved the taste of wine, loved anything that was high-class, accessible only to those who could buy it. That may be the very reason he held no love for his daughter, who was born to love everyone instead of buying that affection.

"Hold out your hands." The thick metal cane in her father's grip thumped an eerie rhythm as he got closer to the young girl, whose face contorted into disillusioned panic.

"Please, Father! I promise I'll never do it again!" The child's screams were blurred by the sound of thunder, hot flashes of lightning illuminating the room.

Minami Chizue was to emerge from that room minutes later, mouth snapped shut and a stinging, throbbing pain in her balled fists, tear marks staining her cheeks and a message ringing in her head.

"How can I trust a liar to tell me the truth?"

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‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ HOT WHITE FLASHED ACROSS THE THIN LAYER OF SKIN ABOVE CHIZUE'S EYES, lids fluttering open as the dismissal bell shook her brains from side to side in her mottled head. She blinked away the dizzy spell from the sudden bad dream, thin distorted frequencies pulling at her ears and buzzing below the hair of her skin.

The startled chatter of her classmates worked a dull melody in Chizue's temple, and she brought up a hand to massage it in hopes it would disappear the longer she rubbed the wretched thing. It didn't, instead the pulsing rhythm grew louder, and she made her way to the door.

With one hand against her eye, rubbing circling motions with her fist and the other limply by her side, Minami Chizue took a stand beside Iida Tenya, class president and, although hardly, acquaintance.

"What's going on?" A grumble escaped Chizue's lips, directed at the bespectacled boy. Iida, for all his smart words and 100-percent scores, didn't know how to talk to women, especially none with the title Minami, and therefore didn't know what to say when an old family friend finally began acknowledging him again.

"General studies class." he creaked out awkwardly, going stiffer than he already was. Chizue spared him a look of strange pondering, and went on her way.

"It's so loud." With a murmur more to herself than anyone else, Chizue slumped her way through the loud sound of talking, reaching the front where the only person she was facing the back of was Bakugo.

Fuse lit and eyes furious, slanted lips pursed into a thin line and hands posed to attack, the blonde yelled his head off as he and a tall purple-haired teen at the front had a stare down. Chizue blinked and looked at the boy.

"Wow, we could pass off as twins." The girl blurted the words without even hearing them pass through her ears, muffled and curious beneath the rumbling sound her vocal cords made after a good, long, nap. She prayed her hair was still somewhat tamed.

The class went silent.

"What? Purple hair is not as common as you'd think." She hummed to no one in particular.

The boy, who looked like he hadn't slept in a millennium, spared the girl a look in his sunken eyes. "And you are?"

A thin string of annoyance wrapped around the Minami girl, white-hot and subdued only under the context of her bigger heart. Standing face to face, nose upturned to stare the boy in the eye, she realized her height failed her at that moment. Gangly limbs and bony structure towered over her, and Minami Chizue decided that if there was a competition for looking most like a sleep-deprived human, this boy would win it.

"Minami Chizue." With the air of as much politeness she could muster out of her falsely sugar-coated smile, eyes glittering beneath the harsh overhead lights, Chizue bestowed the boy a name and a piercing look, scrutinizing his very being from his onyx dress shoes to the points of his tangled violet hair. "You?"

There was a silence where the boy contemplated the girl's existence, her name creasing his brow and spreading his frown thinly across his pale, almost sickly face.

"Shinsou Hitoshi." He answered with finality, as though the name had finally broken free from the constraints of his muddled mind and brought to the forefront of his thoughts. Smooth and simple, a name Chizue could possibly remember.

"Nice to meet you, Shinsou." The girl nodded her head, and realizing she had no more purpose staying in the classroom any longer, took her leave. "Well, bye. And good luck!"

Slipping past the crowd was easy for someone who lacked the flashiness of the hero course, who could easily blend in with the rest of the common people at U.A. Chizue snaked her way through bitter gaits and bunched up fists, bored out of her mind and in need of something to kick-start her heart into excitement for the sports festival. It was a wonder how Minami Chizue, a girl built off smiles that never fully reached her eyes and those that betrayed her feelings all at once, could've entranced the hero world just long enough to be considered a candidate for recommendation at U.A, or how she managed to do so without the looming legacy of her father's life's work coming back to bite her in the ass like a rabid dog out for blood.

Class 1-A murmured their shock at Minami Chizue's simple goodbye, watching her be swept up by the seemingly never-ending crowd of grey students, blurry faces and voices that no one would ever remember outside of their own lives. There always seemed to be a wall between them and her, even if she smiled and shared with them everything she owned in an attempt to have any semblance of a friend — she had never been allowed to have any when she was a child. Her skin was thick and subhuman, almost as though the more Class 1-A tried to understand her, the further away she grew, until she was nothing more than a big question mark hidden beneath bright eyes and jittery smiles.

Who was Minami Chizue? Why did such a question even exist, knowing her long enough to be able to piece the fragments of her personality into one big puzzle? The fact of the matter was, Minami Chizue was but a name that didn't fit the mold of the lilac-haired girl, didn't stretch far enough to hide the scars and deformities of a child who was never considered family in the first place. All her bright smiles couldn't hide the look of a girl who was abstained from her purpose; A girl who was meant to love, instead sealed away into the makings of her father's cruel hand.

"She's kind of creepy." Kaminari Denki blurted out to no one in particular, realizing his mistake when the piercing predatory eyes of Mina Ashido and Kirishima Eijirou dug into his skin. "Not in a bad way..."

"Don't you have brain cells to kill?" The pink-skinned girl raised a brow. Minami Chizue, although without knowing, was easily one of the coolest people the acid-user had met, and when the time came to it, Mina Ashido defended her own like a fierce lioness, fangs bared and claws sharp. Boys were stupid, never understanding a woman's struggle until it was laid out in front of their eyes.

"Ouch." Kirishima grinned.

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‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ FROM BENEATH A PILE OF DISGUSTINGLY UGLY PLUSHIES, smushed under thick fur and soft velvety stuffing, lay Minami Chizue, girl turned jelly, awaiting the return of life to her terribly dreary home. Takeo, like every single day this week, had yet to come home from school on time, still out having fun with friends. Chizue often got jealous, because she was a superficial being and never really understood the inner workings of friendship-building in the way her older brother so easily grasped.

Her grandmother was still fast asleep, the elderly woman's favorite pastime as of late. Her knobby bones and crooked teeth were hardly fit for conversation with a young teen, whose mind ran half a mile quick and tongue just slow enough to contain every minuscule idea from the second she thought of it to the moment she blurted it out.

A house without its mother ran itself dry, cupboards empty and fridge cold and bleak. The woman in question, less-than-famed underground hero Aqueduct, was off on duty, as she was almost every hour of every day, her patient children and mother awaiting her return on the weekends or perhaps the late-night glimpses of a tired body dragging itself to the bedroom, too worn to talk or to bid them sweet dreams.

Minami Chizue loved her mother, a feeling larger than life itself, nestled into the pits of her heart. She ached to be in her presence, to be treated as though she were three years old again, wrapped in her mother's loving arms as she stroked the girl's hair and told her she was perfect the way she was. It burned deeply in her veins, the need to impress the woman who loved being a hero above anything else, to keep that love close enough to feel it.

Knocks, none too soft against the thick wooden front door, echoed through the silent house, and Chizue grew lazy, sinking further into her sheets instead of getting up to open the door. The knicks grew louder, sounds equivalent to a rampaging bull ramming its horns and thick-skulled head into the door.

"Takeo, if that's you, you're so dead." Chizue muttered, hauling her rotting body off her mattress with as much fatigue as someone who worked twenty-four hours without rest.

Behind the door stood two figures, one the size of a baby elephant and the other a shriveled tree.

"Inasa." The Minami girl observed the bear of a boy with slight apprehension. "Hi."

From the boy's side, Takeo grinned. A face contorted down to the small lines around his mouth, one that could only mean Minami Takeo was plotting something.

"I heard your school is holding a sports festival in a few weeks, so I brought you a sparring partner."

Chizue felt her eye twitch involuntarily. Inasa Yoarashi was good for many things — skydiving, air conditioning, karaoke — but sparring was not one of those things. His fists were the size of dinner plates, each finger the size of a can of soda, thick-headed and even more inconsiderate when it came to explosions of power against like-minded quirks that reacted the same way his did.

'I hate you.' Chizue's eyes spoke a million languages, sharp tongue flicking to practically drown her older brother in her hidden anger. Instead, she forced out a smile from the depths of her stomach.

"Great."

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‎✷ RAY SPEAKS !

this is like a world record guys I've never updated a fic so consecutively since like 2022

almost 3k words and literally ZERO katsuki interactions ++ lots of backstory bc honestly the plot is js running away from me atp 😭 butttttttt next chapter theres def gonna b some crumbs at the very least! sorry for the sad backstory it was either make her dead dad the worst ever or kill sb off and I didn't wanna do that so yeah...!

might do a time skip straight into the sports festival idk guys lmk what would b best cuz idk anymore 😞😞 next ch is still undecided hopefully i can get some cute moments between kats and chizue b4 they rip each others throats at the sports festival !!

also does anybody have any ideas on how to further their relationship bc everything feels so surface level atm and I wanna get more in depth with their dynamic but dk how!! lmk if u do tho id greatly appreciate it xxxxxxxx

any feedback ?? i love 2 hear about opinions, etc when it comes to my writing !

pls vote & comment ,,,, i love the support !! it rlly motivates me when i get any type of support on my stories!!! nothing is too small , js don't be a ghost reader 😭 that pains me bc i wanna get to know yall & ur opinions 😞

if there's any grammar mistakes etc pls lmkk !

anyways pls enjoy i love yall kisses & until next update mwah !

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───── RAY !