Chapter Text
“Yo, Slowpoke! Will you hurry it up? I don’t have all day for you!”Jay yelled.
“Will you stop yelling! I’m coming, jeez. I couldn’t find my shoes,” y/n yelled back.
“Maybe if you, I don’t know, cleaned the pigsty you call a room up, you could actually find your shit,” Jay suggested.
“Oh, shut up. You still haven’t cleaned the kitchen. There’s still dishes in the sink,” y/n smirked as she emerged from her room.
“I should make you clean it just for saying that,” Jay replied, grabbing his coat and keys off of their respective racks.
“You can try, but me and you both know it won’t work,” y/n chuckled.
“Oh, trust me. I know. It took me bribing you with icecream just to get you to fold the damn towels,” Jay rolled his eyes, pushing his sister out of the front door.
“Hey, I’ve been busy. I was studying and training for today,” y/n argued, trying to plead her case for why she hasn’t been doing her chores.
“Yeah, and that’s why I let you get away with it, you little gremlin. But once you take this recommendation exam, you’re cleaning up. Whether you make it into UA or not,” Jay told her, backing out of the driveway.
“Aye, Aye, Captain,” y/n saluted.
“Why am I related to you?” Jay sighed.
You laughed at the memory, it was rare to have a quality moment with your brother. He was a busy man, trying to keep the city safe as a police officer.
You looked down at the acceptance letter in your hand, with a small smile on your face. Your hard work was finally paying off. You had trained for that day for months, pouring over everything that you knew and shaping your body into perfect working order. It was difficult especially since you had limited guidance, but you made it work.
You texted your brother to let him know that you made it into UA, but you knew it would be a while before he could even think about replying to your message. You thought about calling your parents but quickly decided against it, realizing that you would either be met with a brief voicemail telling you that they were too busy to bother or a lengthy lecture on the importance of hard work and dedication in hero-ing. Neither sounded particularly appealing so you settled for working out instead.
Because both of your parents were pro-heroes back in America, you could afford luxuries like a house with a training room and equipment. Though they mainly just bought you whatever you wanted as some lame excuse of an apology for being absent your entire life or they bought you what they thought you needed to be a better hero.
Quite frankly, it annoyed you. Sure you were appreciative, but they couldn’t just apologize. They spent almost all of their time being pro-heroes. And when they weren’t being heroes they were running their agency. And when they weren’t running their agency, they were advocating for some environmental, social justice, or political issue. They brought change to everything they set their minds to and were great at everything. Well, everything except being parents.
They didn’t even treat you like their kid, they treated you like some sidekick who had come to them for help.
Ever since you could remember, their idea of quality family time was training. Whether it was quirk training, fight training, or forcing one of the many languages that they taught you down your throat. All they ever did was train you.
Birthdays, what were those? Just another day of training. Christmas, you mean another reason for your birth givers to buy training equipment. The only reason you still remembered when Halloween was because your teachers would do Halloween themed games and activities on the day of or day before it. Your parents did even take off for Thanksgiving, always said that it was a useless holiday that they could be working during. So, that's what they did. They worked.
They worked through Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s day, the 4th of July, Labor day, even New Years'. Leaving you and your brother to pull together lame celebrations in a lame attempt to cheer yourselves up. Each missed holiday was a slap to the face and a knife to the back.
By the time you were 10, you were so used to it that you didn’t even participate in holiday-themed activities at school. They seemed lame to you, useless even. You couldn’t find the point in them. It was just another lonely day, eating food out of a box and attempting to do beginner’s algebra.
You walked into the large training room and walked over to the far side of the room where the mats were. You wrapped your hands and stretched for a while, making sure that every muscle was loose enough to where you didn’t have to worry about injury, before heading over to the equipment and beginning your rigorous training regiment.
Whenever you worked out, it was like you got lost in your own head. You would zone out for hours as you pushed your body to it’s limits. The only way to really get out of the headspace was to have someone yell at you or your body to start screaming at you to stop whatever you were doing.
“Hey, Sis. Sis? Y/N!” Jay yelled snapping you out of your thoughts.
You realized that you had been running for over an hour as your eyes panned from the timer on the treadmill, over to your brother who was looking at you from the doorway.
“Oh. Hey, Jay. How was work?” You gave him a small smile in greeting.
“It’s work. But why don’t you get yourself cleaned up? I have a surprise for you in the kitchen,” he said as he motioned you out of the training room.
You nodded as you climbed off of the machine, grabbing a towel to wipe your sweat away as you made your way out of the room.
You quickly took a shower throwing on a pair of sweats and an old t-shirt as you rushed back into the kitchen, curiosity overtaking your thoughts.
“Alright, you gremlin. I thought it was only fair to get you a little something as a congratulations for making it into your dream school,” Jay said as he presented you with a brown paper bag.
You carefully opened the stapled paper as the smell of spices and grilled meat invaded your senses.
“Is this what I think it is?” You asked, bubbling with excitement.
“If you’re asking if it’s Mexican food from a Taqueria, then yes it is exactly what you think it is,” he smiled.
“Jay, what the hell! How did you even manage to find Mexican food, let alone a damn Taqueria in Japan?”.
“That is top-secret classified information. But hurry up, it smells good and I’m starving,” he replied.
“And you call me a damn gremlin,” you sassed as you pulled out the containers of food.
You had been craving Mexican food for weeks now. It was something you and your brother would always eat back home and you could never seem to find any places around here that sold it, besides TacoBell, if you could even consider that Mexican… or food.
What you didn’t know was that your brother had been searching for a Taqueria ever since you mentioned your craving. Every time he was on patrol, he would be on the lookout for any places that even resembled a Mexican restaurant, making note of them in one of his many notepads before visiting the places during his breaks to see if the food was any good.
It was perfect timing, when the day after he found a place, you texted him saying that you had been accepted into the hero course at UA.
“I’m proud of you, y/n. You know that, right?” Jay said to you after a while of chewing-filled silence.
“Yeah, I know, Jay. You’ve been my biggest supporter, even though you never even wanted to be a hero. I appreciate it,” you told him with a gentle half-smile on your face.
“So, I’m assuming you didn’t call them today to tell them the news?” Jay raised his eyebrow at you as you got up to put your dishes away.
“Nope, if they care they’ll call,” you shrugged.
“Well, I guess they’ll find out on your birthday,” Jay rolled his eyes.
“Yeah, if they even remember that,” you tsked.
“Give them some credit,” Jay challenged.
“Dude one year they gave you a half popped bag of kettle corn and it didn't even have any salt on it. Don’t tell me to give them credit,” you retorted.
“Okay, fair point. Now, let’s hurry up and clean the kitchen. I got the early shift and you still have school,” Jay responded.
“Ugh, don’t remind me,” you whined.
“Oh, stop it and grab the dishtowel,” he asserted as he pushed you towards the sink.
For the next few weeks, you trained as often as you could. Now that you were in UA, you had to work even harder to ensure that you could keep up with the students there. Getting into UA was no easy feat, by any stretch of the imagination. The kids there would all be talented and all qualified to become great heroes and you knew you had to keep up with them.
Failure was not an option. Whether that thought was your own or thinking your parents had drilled into your head, you couldn't tell. But you did know that would go above and beyond to be the best in that class.
In between training and keeping the house clean, you worked on your hero costume design. It was difficult to decide exactly what you wanted but you knew you wanted it to be scarlet in some way.
It was always such a majestic color to you.
A/n: This is a little short, but it is mainly a background chapter. More to come!