Months bled into years as time went on. Money was somehow never going to be a problem, not only did both my parents have about forty million each in life insurance (why they needed that much or how they managed to pay for it was beyond me, I was just grateful I had it) they also had millions in savings for me to live in comfort for the rest of my life.
They also wanted me to stay isolated, I'm sure. But things had hit a point where I was sick of living off the nonperishables my parents had endlessly stocked the shelves on the basement with. I had eaten enough Campbell's soup for me to gag every time I looked at the label now.
The outside world was scary to me as I drove down the streets. Scranton had many small brick-walled shops with graphic spray-pained pictures on them. Many were to ward off metas like me. I knew for a fact that the world outside my home hated me, but I didn't know how bad it was until I was in the grocery store looking for food.
I had a black hoodie on with the hood up, covering my calculating features. My jeans were white-washed with rips going down. My father had once hated me in ripped jeans, but my mother would buy them for me anyway. Just like how my mother hated my obsession with baggy hoodies and knee-high laced combat boots. My cart was slowly filling with perishable foods and more canned stuff that I was growing to hate.
I watched how mothers would look at me and I would look back. They would pull their children away from me with my ringed eyes. The thing that marked me as different, as a meta.
I couldn't have been in the store for longer than an hour before I pushed the wagon towards the counter. A teenage girl was there, snapping her gum. She froze as she saw me walk up. I did my best to pull my hood over my face as I started placing items on the belt. She stood frozen as a man came over and placed a hand on her shoulder.
"Take a break, Makenzie, I'll get the girl," he said. The girl scurried off as fast as possible as the man started scanning my items.
"Did you find everything you needed?" He asked, filling the silence with something. I could feel the hatred, anger, trepidation, and anxiety of me being this close. It was thick in the air.
"Yes," I answered with a small voice, doing my best to back up as far from him as possible. What had happened in this town?
He quickly finished and finally looked up at me and make eye contact. Part of his anger and anxiety faded at the sight of me cowering from him.
"That'll be one hundred fifty dollars and thirty seven cents," he said, as I pulled out my card and almost threw it onto the counter between us, hoping this interaction would be over soon.
After he did whatever it was he did with my card, he handed it back.
"Need any help out, little meta girl?" He asked, and I could feel the hatred in his voice as I shook my head and quickly walked away. I could feel his stare all the way to the old gray Four-Runner that David had bought me for my eighteenth birthday. It was my one way to and from the comforts of my home to the outside where I could feel the hate of people like me, just for existing.
I smelled the smoke in the air before I saw the fire from the small shop across the street.
I ran over as I looked through the shadows of the small boutique store for anyone inside, and I saw a woman laying on the floor behind the counter as the fire edged closer to her. Many people stood outside, watching and staring at the woman.
"Someone, do something!" I screamed at them, "She's going to die if we stand here just staring!" Dozens of watchful eyes turned towards me, malice in their gazes as they looked at my eyes and the shadows peeking out of my hoodie.
"Why should we help her," one man asked, stepping up into my face. "She's a meta, and the world would be better off with one less of you." He spit at me as I steeled my mind and emotions to face this growing hatred at my presence.
"Because, like you, sir, she's a human. Standing by," I said while walking around him, "is the same as murder. Are you willing to waste the life you have feeling guilty?"
I ran inside at the sound of protests behind me. I found the woman crumbled up and checked her pulse, hoping for something. Anything.
A small cry broke me out of my trance. A small girl was behind the counter, hiding from the people outside. Her green eyes locked on mine and I noticed the lack of the ring around her eyes, yet, she reached out for me.
"Please help my mommy, please," she pleaded. I felt the pulse under my fingertips and I lifted the woman onto my back and reached my hand out for the little girl.
She missed my hand as a beam from the ceiling fell. She screamed and I screamed with her.
I took the woman outside and ran back in as the yelling outside intensified with the fire department showing up.
I ran back in and called out, "I'm here, I put your mommy down outside. Can you hear me?"
A small yes came from behind the counter again.
"What's your name, sweetheart?" I asked, forming a plan in my head to get her out of here. I needed to keep her calm so I could hear where she was and if she ever lost consciousness.
"Grace," she said, a small voice. I formed a dagger in my hand, hoping to cut through the beam to clear a path.
"That's a pretty name. We match, we're Grace and Serenity," I joked with her as I burned my hand placing it over a flame.
She giggled and I tried calling the shadows to help put out some of the flames.
"Miss Serenity," she asked, peeking out from behind the counter. She was so small. "Are my mommy and I going to die?"
My heart broke at her words and I coughed as the black smoke found its way into my lungs.
"No, Grace. I'm going to keep you alive, okay?" I asked as my shadows were exposed to the bright light of the flames. I bit my lip to stop a scream from forming as they put out part of the flames for me.
"Okay," she said, her green eyes watching me as I fought to get to her.
I kicked the beam. At first, all it did was splinter. Then, it cracked, before it finally broke apart and cleared a small path for me. I ran at Grace and picked her up and threw her over my shoulder before turning to see the flames had covered the path out.
I coughed again before planning something else to get us out.
"Miss Serenity, look," I heard Grace say and I turned, trying to see what she saw. There was another door, not blocked by flames, instead blocked by a rack of clothes.
"Good eye, Grace," I said, running for that door and reaching up to cover my nose and mouth with my hoodie. I could feel the soot and felt the heat of the flames as they picked up around me. I coughed again before putting Grace on the floor to work on getting the door unblocked.
I tried as hard as I could to get it moved, but it wouldn't budge. I felt the sunlight from the windows next to me.
Wait, windows.
I grabbed a shirt off the rack and wrapped it around my hand before punching through the window. It shattered and was easier to kick it the rest of the way out after that.
I turned around to get Grace, when I turned a man in a fire suit was there waiting for me to hand the girl over. I noticed the ring in his eyes and nodded at him before handing Grace through to him. Another man without a ring came to get me then and helped me walk to the ambulance as the adrenaline started to wear off.
They put an oxygen mask onto my face as the crowd started thinning out.
"That's it, breath slowly," the man said. He was watching me carefully as I took in as much air as I could in slow breaths.
"Grace!" I heard as the woman from earlier ran for her daughter. "Don't you ever scare me like that again!" Grace nodded with tears in her eyes as she hugged her mom. She looked over at me and said something quietly to her mother before they both came over to me.
"Miss Serenity," I heard Grace say as she threw herself into my lap and smiled up at me. "Thank you for saving us."
~~~~
My twenties hit me hard and fast as I trained and prepared for more people to come after me. I knew that my actions were wrong, and that now I probably had a target on my back from the Underground.
I had to be more careful than ever.
Today was a lazy day, with me just getting to do some of the things I loved doing. I had no college courses to do and I refused to do any extra training today. I smiled as I put on a pair of oversized sweatpants and a white long-sleeved shirt that hugged my body tightly. My hair was thrown into a messy bun with two strands out and framing my face.
Naya laid herself down next to me as I curled onto my window seat in the newly remodeled living room. Bookshelves lined the walls with a large television placed in a hole that David had created for when he wanted to watch the news.
I think I just sitting there with a book for a good few hours before I felt something tug at my very being. It was just like that day where something was leading me towards a fate I wasn't prepared for yet.
I stood up and heard Naya stir before she settled again. I followed the pull towards my father's old office, the one room in the house I had never gone into before.
The room was hidden down the hall behind a heavy wooden door. As I pushed into it, the stuffy hot air hit me. I coughed at the dust in the air as I stepped inside and flipped on a light. The light in here was brighter than the rest of the house and made me cringe into it.
There were two separate file folders on the desk with one of them wide open. The only thing I recognized about it was my picture.
I stepped around the desk to look at it.
The first page had all of my basic information staring back at me along with a picture from my twelfth birthday. I flipped to the next page and found a copy of a birth certificate, but it was written in Japanese rather than English.
"Nanako Akiyama. Birthday of May 16, 2000. Father: Benjiro Akiyama. Mother: Amy Akiyama (metahuman)."
Why would this have been included in a file about me? It didn't really make sense to me.
The next page was detailing the story of a baby found on the side of a road, and it asked for the parents to come forward to claim her. It was from Arizona. I only barely remembered my time in Arizona. We moved away when I turned four and my powers first appeared. It scared my mother to death because all that happened that day was me injuring myself with no clue how it worked.
I shivered at the sudden assaulting memory. This must have been from when my parents found me and took me in.
The page after that was one detailing a missing children report from somewhere in Japan. It detailed a pair of twins with silver rings around their eyes being taken from their home. Their names were Nanako and Kitiara. I looked at the picture and gasped before running to the kitchen and grabbing a picture of baby me off the counter and held it next to the image in the folder.
An exact match.
I dropped the frame and heard a yelp from the living-room, signaling that I had woken up Naya with the crash and sound of shattering glass. I looked down at my shaking hands before looking back into the folder.
It was me. I was one of those missing girls. Why hadn't Dad ever told me that he found out where I had come from.
Then I noticed that there was no definite part of Japan where I was from in any of the papers.
The last page of the folder was a detailing of my history with my powers.
"Serenity can cast shadows out from anywhere she can imagine in her mind's eye."
A picture of me was next with shadow-like tentacles coming out of the floor.
"She can mold these shadows into people with their own conscious and mind, or they can be completely under her control."
It was a picture of me with my first shadow manifestation I had called Ruby.
"The downfall is that these shadows and their manifestations are susceptible to lights. Hurting them causes burns onto Serenity in the same place where the light hits them first."
It was images of my skin with burns from different locations. I remember each and every one of them and my hand reached down to touch the scarring of one on my abdomen from the day my parents were killed.
"Serenity's powers have only grown the more she has used them. At the age of nine, she developed a new ability of seeing the future of any person she looks into the eyes of for at least ten seconds. She informed me today that I would be murdered by a man she could only call 'The Demon Lord of the Underworld.'"
I had forgotten about that memory completely. How much had I completely blocked out of my head from seeing the futures of the people I see?
"Amy Akiyama has the ability to completely heal herself unconsciously and gained the ability from her mother to completely bring someone back from the dead in exchange for her own life. This ability is generational and is believed to have been passed onto one of her twin daughters, and it is believed that-"
The rest of the page is blank after that. I felt my heart racing and my mind and body aching. What was this file? And how much more did my father know before he passed. He seemed to have been writing more before he was killed, so what else had he left for me to find?
The next folder on the desk was labeled with my name in elegant scripting on the tab. I swallowed before reaching for it.