Controlee

35. Hiraeth

This is going to be sad.

Rule 64: Help when you can.

With her chat with TT much shorter than she'd hoped, and the need deep in her soul to run all the way home, Otsuka found herself a good ten minutes early standing outside the door. She missed the slap of concrete against her trainers, ricocheting all the way up her shins, and she'd only been standing here a few seconds.

It was understandable, her not wanting to go inside, of course it was. She hadn't even really thought about it, Nezu and the detective from yesterday wanted to speak with her. She'd literally been midway through a meeting with a villain when the text had come through, Otsuka wasn't the kind of person who'd assume that was a coincidence she shouldn't worry about.

She gave herself the chance to catch her breath. If she'd managed to handle the meeting yesterday and seeing TT today, then she could handle anything. The world couldn't throw any worse curveballs.

Now she just had to remember which pocket she'd put her key in. She patted the pouch on the front of her hoodie to find she was lacking any solid objects, and it wasn't like her leggings had pockets, they were female leggings and according to the fashion industry, women didn't need pockets. She thought back to the morning, running herself through what she'd done and trying to figure out if she'd ever picked the keys up. She definitely had, she'd walked to the door, but then she'd realised she'd forgotten her phone. She'd left the keys on the table when she'd gone into her room to find her phone. She didn't remember picking them up after that.

Great. A knock would have to do. Good thing she knew they were in. She was going to have to make a sign to stick on her bedroom door just to remind her to take keys whenever she went out.

Yamada was the one to open the door to her, her keys dangling from his finger. If he noticed the red rim around her eyes, he didn't say anything, she was just glad the puffiness, and tear streaks had had some time to fade. And managing to grab tissues from the nice librarian had been a godsend she needed today of all days.

She reached up, unhooking the keys from his finger with a smile she knew looked more like a grimace, before dropping them into her pocket and sidling past him to the table where Aizawa wouldn't make eye contact with her. Detective Tsukauchi (she was pretty sure that was his name, but after what happened during that meeting, she couldn't be blamed for not being certain) offered a pitying smile which soon became him following Aizawa's suit. Nezu smiled too, hands steepled on the table.

She didn't like it when Nezu smiled.

"Ah, Otsuka, please take a seat."

She didn't like it when they told her to sit down. She'd lost two people who knew her inside out, closer to her than family, as well as other people who— while they hadn't exactly been close in the slightest— had been people who'd known her, who she knew she could rely on in an emergency even if they weren't the fondest of her on a normal day. So if she'd been and done that and was still standing, what more could they tell her that would be enough to knock her down?

She took the seat anyway, because she'd been raised to be polite and told to respect her elders' wishes.

"Otsuka, I'm sure you're aware of the secrecy surrounding control schools."

She nodded. It was a stupid question really, she'd been in a control school for the better part of her life. Eight years there to seven in the real world, only an idiot wouldn't understand the secrecy that surrounded it. She wasn't even supposed to let people know she was a controlee, the tour her new classmates had received was unheard of. Heroes were allowed to be aware, both about the schools and the people in them, especially if it affected them in some way, but the only other people who were allowed any knowledge of it had to either be involved in the inner machinations of managing a school, a child in the school, or the immediate family of a child in the school. And every single one of those people had signed away their rights to say a thing about it to anyone under threat of imprisonment.