Carnivore

vii) Indutias Relaxantur

SOMETIMES, ZINNIA WISHED SHE WAS BORN QUIRKLESS. If it weren't for her quirk, a lot of changes would never have occurred. And in truth, she found it hard to accept that she was.

If she was born quirkless, she wouldn't be expected to shine above and beyond her family by her parents, she wouldn't be expected to perform impossible miracles by her siblings. And she wouldn't be judged as villainous purely because her quirk was more grim than the heroic super strength, or the highly powerful elemental ones. She was often told by Kali that it was alright to be herself, and that there was absolutely nothing at fault with her, but that didn't mean there weren't expectations bubbling there beneath the surface, either.

Zinnia herself was rather familiar with her own shortcomings, as well as the pressure her so called "existence" caused for her family, no matter which side if the fence they stood.

There used to be a time where she would believe that good things come to those who wait, but as the years passed and she grew older, more emotionally ragged, she came to believe there was no such thing any more.

It was a crisp Saturday afternoon a week since she had been found by Kirishima in Hosu General Hospital, and a week since she had given up on the prospect of entering a hero school on scholarship. In truth, she had never been that confident about the scholarship opportunities, but she had hoped to be proven wrong in spite of herself.

And like the many times before, Zinnia really hated it when she was proven right. Today unfortunately was no different in the grand scheme of things.

She had expected following Claudia's retaliation to her with the flowers last week that, upon Kali's discharge, she would be inadvertently forced out of the house as soon as the woman arrived home. It came not so much verbally or the more common form of being shoved out the front door and down the steps, but in glares of vitriol that spoke a million words.

While Kali was upstairs getting herself tucked into bed, as per doctors orders, Claudia and Dimitri essentially stalked after Zinnia in an attempt at herding her out of the house.

Had Kali not been awake to hear any such commotion, Zinnia would have instead been grabbed by the scruff of the neck and thrown out by force.

So now, Zinnia was ambling out of the public library to head to the hospital, as she did most days she didn't have school. She half wondered if the locks of the front door would be changed at the rate things were going.

It wasn't too much of a "problem" if they were. She could sleep on the bench in the locker rooms if push came to shove.

The city streets were lively with the recent announcement that the number one hero, All Might, was now working at Yuuei as a teacher, with reporters coasting the city more politically than usual in an attempt at catching a glimpse of the symbol of peace, anywhere.

It was all overhyped, overdrawn, and at the end of the day, the number one hero's known presence in the city over the past ten months didn't make that much of a difference in the number of patients rushed into the emergency ward every week. Only when Zinnia's quirk wasn't needed to be used on a patient at least once a day would she ever state that things were getting better.

And even so, if Zinnia had been accepted into one of the Hero Schools on scholarship, she was fairly sure she would still feel just as jaded with the hero society as she was right now. What the public saw on television was a sugar-coated version of reality, where the patients in critical were never known unless they were of popular status.

It wouldn't change, and perhaps because of that, she was sure that she would never fit in with overzealous showmen.

She wasn't like Kirishima, who had so effortlessly gotten into the Hero Course of Yuuei and had the personality to befriend nearly anyone he could take an interest in. And she wasn't like the others who followed such a society.