Carnivore

i) Advenae

SLEEP WAS ABSENT ON ZINNIA, and she felt worse for wear because of it. Her first night out of hospital was spent staring up at that ceiling, mind tumbling and gut churning as the doubt and fear began to claw their way into her, carving out her innards to create a permanent dwelling within her. And soon, the alarm clock at her bedside was ringing in shrill call for 5am, its twin bells chiming at the mallet's command before her fingers fell upon it to silence it.

The anxiety was so strong, she almost felt nauseous.

However, Zinnia picked herself to get organized.

She vaguely understood the dress code for the new school to be a white button up shirt, dark teal skirt and a blazer just like Kaminari and Eijirou's. She hadn't been provided one of course, as it was such short notice, but if she could dress in an attempt to get suitably close, then it would be better than turning up in cargo pants and a jumper.

The closest she had was Sarayashiki's uniform, the second set that hadn't gotten splattered in egg that day.

So she dressed in the uniform to the school she was expelled by, swapping her usual knee-highs for those full-length leggings she seldom wore in order to cover the rather distinct impalement scars in her leg, and she left the black blazer on its hook at the front of her closet. She tightened the collar of her shirt with the red tartan ribbon that matched the skirt, inwardly sighing when she realized that the scarring around her neck couldn't be hidden. The top half of the scar, of the thumb and two fingers with the attached palm were visible in a shiny, unpleasant pink against her skin, and no amount of adjusting or anything could hide any more. She had contemplated finding one of her long-sleeved, turtle necked tee shirts, but decided that was going much to far out of respectable dress codes right now.

She fought with her hair, at first uncertain as to why there was a mass of hair that refused to tie into the plait she was attempting, until she vaguely recalled that she had cut some of it off the day of the villain attack.

It was to use as a medium to reinforce her quirk so she could lower people to the ground from the third floor.

She stood there silently, left hand absent-mindedly tracing along the length of hair that still remained long; A small curtain of it beneath the top half of her head, like some kind of final fantasy character, she guessed.

It might have been her ongoing condition, but she found herself having a lot more trouble remembering certain facts than she probably should have.

She remembered Ohara Shizuru, who was taken out by the lead villain who seemed to know her painfully well. She certainly remembered that eventually, the bunny girl had wound up caught and brought upstairs just before Zinnia herself had been thrown straight out that window.

But she couldn't remember much else.

The faces of the villains, sure, she could remember that, the manner in which she found, but beyond that? Nothing.

It was an endless sea of black when she tried to sift through her memories, and for some reason, she was strangely content to leave it as that.

She had more important things to concern herself with, after all.

Zinnia decided in the end to just plait the whole longer length of wavy hair and leave the rest to do what it wanted, which was unfortunately to absorb any humidity in the air and slowly frizz up. It was pointless to try and remedy it when she didn't have the pins or the product to do as such, and she didn't have the free time to dye her hair back to its regular shade of seamless black.

It was around quarter to six by the time Zinnia had tugged on the only pair of enclosed shoes she had left –a pair of black and green high-rise converse– and sat herself down on the front steps of the porch to stare out at the cold, empty city streets. She had naught but a roughly dust off black and orange backpack she'd dug out from her closet, filled with just a small pocket of money for train fare, lunch plus the visitors card that had been given within the envelope from Yuuei. Her phone and whatever belongings she had back at Sarayashiki was still somewhere there, waiting to be collected by somebody on her behalf. It was just good luck within bad on her part that she tended to only take her purse when she knew she wasn't going to be at school.