CoH fic - Bugaisha - 2/5
Title: Bugaisha
Part: 2/5 (part 1 can be found here)
Fandom: City of Heroes
Character: Takuya Kawazoe, others mentioned
Genre: character origin/respec explanation
Word count: 2,991
Warnings: none
Notes: This part is all narrative and it's long. Sorry. Again, takes place before the I10 Rikti invasion. And "bugaisha" means "outsider".
Takuya stepped into his room and swung the door shut behind himself with barely a notice. He felt horrible. He didn’t bother to turn on the lights, but simply went over to the bed, sat down, and then lowered himself onto his side. Eyes shut, he waged an internal battle to not be sick, willing the churning in his stomach and the aches in his joints to settle themselves.
Takuya had never felt this sick. It had started a few weeks ago when he’d advanced to learning self-teleportation. Each time he teleported, it felt like he was being crushed from the inside, which was painful enough, but the discomfort and sensation of wanting to be sick lingered for hours afterwards. His trainer at the Academy had told him that a lot of teleporters experienced discomfort, that he would get used to it, and had chastised Takuya for continuing to rely on his raptor pack to get around. He wanted to believe the man, and each time he teleported, Takuya hoped it wouldn’t feel as bad, but so far he didn’t seem to be getting used to it, as promised. In fact, it almost felt like it was getting worse.
This was bad when he was with his usual team. Takuya needed to be alert and sharp, he needed his mind to be focused. And being an empathic healer meant that he was already feeling it every time one of his teammates took a shot or was burned or otherwise wounded. The last thing that Takuya needed was to be dealing with his own physical problems on top of that. If he failed, then someone could be badly hurt or worse. So, he’d been doing his very best to ignore how ill he felt, but it was getting more and more difficult. Privately, when he returned to his room and curled up on the bed like this with the lights off and his arms wrapped around himself, Takuya silently and plaintively wondered how long he would be able to keep going like this.
It was in Takuya’s nature to be quiet and as unobtrusive as possible, which was why he’d mentioned this problem to no one except his teleportation trainer at the Academy. He did not want to be a bother or a problem. But obviously Amberfyre had noticed that there was something wrong, and Takuya knew it was perhaps only a matter of time until others started figuring it out as well. Most importantly, Takuya did not want anyone to be hurt because he was feeling badly and might be slow to react. But his other fear was that, if others knew that there was a problem, he would be removed from the super group, perhaps even from the Academy, and that he would have to return to Japan a failure.
That thought pained him, because Takuya felt as if he were maybe starting to find a place for himself here - in the super group, in Paragon - and that was something he had never really felt before. Certainly he’d felt at home growing up in his small town in the Niigata Prefecture on the west coast of Japan, and he felt comfortable and loved in his extended family. But from the very earliest age, his empathic abilities had set Takuya apart, and kept him from truly fitting in with his peers. Other children found it strange when he talked about being able to see their auras, or that he could predict coin tosses with unerring accuracy. At the age of six, Takuya told one of the little girls that he played with that he could feel something bad inside of her, and that she should go to a doctor. Only days later she was in the hospital with a ruptured appendix, and the other children in the neighborhood were frightened and started spreading the rumor that Takuya had caused their friend to get sick.
His parents knew better. Takuya sometimes seemed unfocused and spacey, often spending hours staring at apparently nothing, but it wasn’t because he was strange in the head, or slow, or mildly autistic as some of his early teachers suggested. It was simply because he was seeing and feeling things that other people couldn’t. Takuya’s mother was a low level empath with the ability to occasionally pick up on the emotions of others. According to her family history, the abilities originated far back in their genealogy. She recognized what was happening when the eyes of her eldest son would glaze over and go blank - it meant he was picking up on something.
Like her, Takuya could feel emotions, but unlike her, he also felt energies. He could feel the physical conditions of others by sensing the biochemical signals their bodies broadcasted. He could see auras, not just around people, but around objects as well. He could sense the movement of electricity, and vibrations from the quiet powers of nature. He occasionally picked up on currents and the imprints of events from the past. He even saw probability fields as color, constantly changing and chaotically swirling as conditions changed and chance shifted accordingly. But worst of all, Takuya’s open mind often felt the backlash of negative energies when bad things happened. Violence and malevolence had energies all their own, they were far-reaching and strong, and not knowing how to control his abilities, young Takuya could not prevent them from crossing into his mind and hurting him.
His mother gave him what gentle training she could, but having only a fraction of the ability he potentially possessed, she could not teach him to block his mind from the near constant bombardment of information and sensations that were always around. His father, a quiet and contemplative man, encouraged Takuya’s focus on the real world by engaging him in games and nature walks through the pine forests close to home. And it was he who bought five year old Takuya his first set of Tarot cards, after noticing how intrigued his son was with a deck they happened to see in the window of a bookstore on a visit to Niigata. As with all card decks, Takuya saw each card shimmering with a different color according to probability, but the Tarot deck had so many more colors, so many more possibilities. Over the years, the young empath learned to use the Tarot as a means of focusing, of filtering out all the mental background noise, and of easing the turmoil in his mind when it was assaulted by negative energies.
Takuya had always been a very shy and reserved person, having inherited both traits from his parents, and being so obviously different from others his age only made him that much more skittish. But in spite of being intimidated by social situations and being labeled as “creepy” or even evil, he also did his very best to be friendly, polite and kind. And he maintained a strong belief in the inherent goodness of others. When children taunted him or called him names, he decided it was not because they were bad. They simply didn’t understand. When he was picked on and targeted by bullies, he didn’t think it was because the aggressors were mean. There were perhaps other circumstances that he was not aware of that prompted their rude behavior. Insecurities, problems at home, and the like. Takuya did not like to judge others and amazingly enough; he was able to maintain his optimistic belief that others were good, even when he was forced to come face to face with some of the worst humanity had to offer.
At the age of seven, Takuya was abducted from his home by a neighbor, a man named Seika Hagiwara, and taken across the country to Tokyo. Hagiwara had recently lost his job and had a large amount of debilitating gambling debt. He had heard rumors around town that Takuya was possibly some kind of witch and could make predictions, so in desperation, he took the boy from the park where he was watching the other children play, and put them both on train to Tokyo. He hoped to cash in on the horse races with Takuya’s psychic help.
Unfortunately, Takuya had been unable to do as the man asked. Though he wanted to trust and help his neighbor, a man he’d known at least in passing for most of his life, he was simply too frightened, and the mental onslaught from being in such a large city made him unable to focus on the rapidly changing probability fields around the horse track. Himself frightened and appalled that he’d committed such a crime, Hagiwara grew furious and frantic. He left Takuya tied up in the disused basement of the seedy apartment building he’d taken a room, and then fled the city. Three days later, overwhelmed by guilt, he turned himself in at a police station in Sendai, and told the authorities where to find the boy.
Those three days were a nightmare for Takuya, trapped in the middle of a busy metropolis, an untrained psychic with an open mind vulnerable to all the energies the city could generate. Simply the crush of biosignals from so many people was enough to overwhelm him, but every act of violence, every fight, every moment of anger from the immediate vicinity was like a gunshot through the head. The collective depression from those who lived in the slum area made him wish he himself were dead. Three days felt like forever and the longer he went without food or water, the weaker he became, and the harder it was to withstand the constant pain.
But even in spite of enduring such a horrible time, Takuya had no anger for Hagiwara. Instead, he felt compassion for a man who had given into such acts of desperation, and inwardly he harbored a great deal of sadness and guilt that he’d been unable to help his neighbor. Nor did he lose his faith in other people, in spite of being mentally assaulted with so much violence and hate and anger. He told himself that he could not possibly know what circumstances led people to commit ugly acts, and therefore he was in no position to pass judgment on anyone.
By the time he was a teenager, Takuya had learned to deal with being psychic and could put up with the intrusions into his mind if he focused very hard on other things, like the ever-changing colors of his Tarot cards, or the drawings that his younger brother liked to do. Meditation and tai chi also helped a great deal. But the situation still wasn’t ideal, and Takuya was a very lonely and introverted boy because of it.
Japan had a highly active superhero population, and the attendant agencies to manage them, but Takuya’s parents were wary of pushing their sensitive and quiet son in that sort of direction. Instead they made inquiries into possibly getting him some more professional training, just so that he would be able to block out the energies that were painful to him and hopefully live a normal life. At the age of seventeen, Takuya traveled to Tokyo to be evaluated by the Japanese chapter of GIFT. It was a difficult trip for him, being in the midst of such a large population of people and all of their individual energies, not to mention the myriad of the different types of man-made powers that ran through the city. But it was also painful to remember what he’d been through when taken to Tokyo at the age of seven.
He and his parents were told that, while there was a small training center in Tokyo for those with abilities like Takuya’s, the best place for him to go would be the Paragon Academy for Mutant Psychics, in the United States. The training and instructors there were unsurpassed.
Takuya had a very difficult decision to make. Stay in his quiet small town and simply get by with his mind being so painfully open to anything and everything that touched it, or travel to a foreign country to stay in a large undoubtedly energy-noisy city and hopefully learn how to block the pain and get a handle on his own head? The thought of being so far from his family and everything he knew was an intimidating one for him. Though he had occasionally traveled with his mother, an editorial photographer, when she did location shoots around Japan, he’d never been out of his country before. And cities were upsetting. He would be by himself in a very large place that he didn’t know. That was a frightening thought.
But, in spite of having had to deal with so much already in his life, Takuya tried his best to be an optimistic person and to look forward to the future. He felt that if he could learn to control his abilities, then that would go a long way toward ensuring that his future would be worth looking forward to. So, after he finished secondary school, Takuya came to the United States and Paragon City, and became a student at the Academy.
Even in the short space of a year, he learned so much. He was trained first in how to block himself mentally and how to focus his abilities on sensing only certain types of energies only when he wanted to. It was a difficult skill to learn, but the incredible mental relief he felt when he finally mastered it was worth the struggle. He was also taught defense and how to channel his own power outwards, though he did not care to do so. Takuya had a pacifist attitude through and through and did not like to hurt others. But life in the city, even dorming at the Academy, quickly showed him that knowing how to defend himself probably was a good idea, whether he wanted to acknowledge that or not.
What he enjoyed more was discovering that he had a natural skill at using his abilities to heal. It was such an easy step between mental diagnosis and healing, that he was shocked and rather ashamed that he hadn’t already made the jump. With practice, he learned to hone his sense of when others were hurt to being able to specifically feel exactly what was wrong, and channeling his personal energies to fix it. That was incredibly fulfilling and made Takuya feel useful and proud of being psychic for the first time in his life.
When he was nineteen, and had reached a certain level in his training, Takuya’s advisor at the Academy asked if he would be interested in participating in an apprenticeship program with a super group. The Academy regularly placed its especially gifted students with groups around Paragon, as real experience was considered the best training. At first Takuya was hesitant… he certainly didn’t think of himself as any sort of hero, after all. He was just a young man trying to control a head full of hurt. But his mind was changed after his advisor had him speak to the head of one of Paragon’s prominent groups, and the man stressed the need for healers among the city’s various super powered teams. Looking at it that way, Takuya realized that - even if he wasn’t a hero - he could at least do some good and help to protect those brave people who protected others.
His parents expressed worry when he called to tell them of his decision, concerned that their quiet sensitive eldest son might be overwhelmed by the duties of a team healer. But they also understood his need to try and his desire to do good for others. They were proud of him for those qualities. So they gave him their blessing, and very soon after, Takuya was assigned to the Defenders of PIE super group. Arrangements were made for him to live at their base, just like one of the heroes, while still attending training at the Academy as his abilities continued to develop.
And it was here, with the members of DoP, that Takuya felt as if he were finally finding his niche, his place to belong. There were some adjustment problems, and he felt like he was an outsider who didn’t consider himself a hero, but he was growing very fond of his teammates, especially those he went out on missions with most often. Kaal and Lyneia, Madame Frostbite, Lightbringer, Kederran Miklsohn, Sergeant Sunburn, and especially Terecito - they were all welcoming and encouraging, and he greatly admired their bravery and commitment to helping others. He now saw it as his duty to keep them healthy and safe while they did their jobs.
Which was why this sickness and pain brought on by teleporting was such a distress. Takuya was used to pain; he’d lived with it for most of his life. But it was the fear that it would affect his ability to keep the others safe that stressed him the most. He did not want to let them down, he did not want them to be hurt or suffer if he failed. Takuya couldn’t stand the thought. They were his friends, they had accepted him. What if something happened to one of them because he was unable to focus?
He was startled out of his heavy worried thoughts by a knock on his door, and opened his eyes to darkness. The room felt hot and his stomach was still churning, his joints still aching. He didn’t really want to move, but it would be very impolite to ignore someone at his door. As he pushed himself up, Takuya did have to wonder who it was. People didn’t usually visit him in his room, except for Terecito on occasion when he had a new stash of comic books to share. Gathering himself, taking a deep breath, Takuya went to the door and pulled it open.
He was surprised. There stood Heat Lightning, the leader of the super group.
Part: 2/5 (part 1 can be found here)
Fandom: City of Heroes
Character: Takuya Kawazoe, others mentioned
Genre: character origin/respec explanation
Word count: 2,991
Warnings: none
Notes: This part is all narrative and it's long. Sorry. Again, takes place before the I10 Rikti invasion. And "bugaisha" means "outsider".
Takuya stepped into his room and swung the door shut behind himself with barely a notice. He felt horrible. He didn’t bother to turn on the lights, but simply went over to the bed, sat down, and then lowered himself onto his side. Eyes shut, he waged an internal battle to not be sick, willing the churning in his stomach and the aches in his joints to settle themselves.
Takuya had never felt this sick. It had started a few weeks ago when he’d advanced to learning self-teleportation. Each time he teleported, it felt like he was being crushed from the inside, which was painful enough, but the discomfort and sensation of wanting to be sick lingered for hours afterwards. His trainer at the Academy had told him that a lot of teleporters experienced discomfort, that he would get used to it, and had chastised Takuya for continuing to rely on his raptor pack to get around. He wanted to believe the man, and each time he teleported, Takuya hoped it wouldn’t feel as bad, but so far he didn’t seem to be getting used to it, as promised. In fact, it almost felt like it was getting worse.
This was bad when he was with his usual team. Takuya needed to be alert and sharp, he needed his mind to be focused. And being an empathic healer meant that he was already feeling it every time one of his teammates took a shot or was burned or otherwise wounded. The last thing that Takuya needed was to be dealing with his own physical problems on top of that. If he failed, then someone could be badly hurt or worse. So, he’d been doing his very best to ignore how ill he felt, but it was getting more and more difficult. Privately, when he returned to his room and curled up on the bed like this with the lights off and his arms wrapped around himself, Takuya silently and plaintively wondered how long he would be able to keep going like this.
It was in Takuya’s nature to be quiet and as unobtrusive as possible, which was why he’d mentioned this problem to no one except his teleportation trainer at the Academy. He did not want to be a bother or a problem. But obviously Amberfyre had noticed that there was something wrong, and Takuya knew it was perhaps only a matter of time until others started figuring it out as well. Most importantly, Takuya did not want anyone to be hurt because he was feeling badly and might be slow to react. But his other fear was that, if others knew that there was a problem, he would be removed from the super group, perhaps even from the Academy, and that he would have to return to Japan a failure.
That thought pained him, because Takuya felt as if he were maybe starting to find a place for himself here - in the super group, in Paragon - and that was something he had never really felt before. Certainly he’d felt at home growing up in his small town in the Niigata Prefecture on the west coast of Japan, and he felt comfortable and loved in his extended family. But from the very earliest age, his empathic abilities had set Takuya apart, and kept him from truly fitting in with his peers. Other children found it strange when he talked about being able to see their auras, or that he could predict coin tosses with unerring accuracy. At the age of six, Takuya told one of the little girls that he played with that he could feel something bad inside of her, and that she should go to a doctor. Only days later she was in the hospital with a ruptured appendix, and the other children in the neighborhood were frightened and started spreading the rumor that Takuya had caused their friend to get sick.
His parents knew better. Takuya sometimes seemed unfocused and spacey, often spending hours staring at apparently nothing, but it wasn’t because he was strange in the head, or slow, or mildly autistic as some of his early teachers suggested. It was simply because he was seeing and feeling things that other people couldn’t. Takuya’s mother was a low level empath with the ability to occasionally pick up on the emotions of others. According to her family history, the abilities originated far back in their genealogy. She recognized what was happening when the eyes of her eldest son would glaze over and go blank - it meant he was picking up on something.
Like her, Takuya could feel emotions, but unlike her, he also felt energies. He could feel the physical conditions of others by sensing the biochemical signals their bodies broadcasted. He could see auras, not just around people, but around objects as well. He could sense the movement of electricity, and vibrations from the quiet powers of nature. He occasionally picked up on currents and the imprints of events from the past. He even saw probability fields as color, constantly changing and chaotically swirling as conditions changed and chance shifted accordingly. But worst of all, Takuya’s open mind often felt the backlash of negative energies when bad things happened. Violence and malevolence had energies all their own, they were far-reaching and strong, and not knowing how to control his abilities, young Takuya could not prevent them from crossing into his mind and hurting him.
His mother gave him what gentle training she could, but having only a fraction of the ability he potentially possessed, she could not teach him to block his mind from the near constant bombardment of information and sensations that were always around. His father, a quiet and contemplative man, encouraged Takuya’s focus on the real world by engaging him in games and nature walks through the pine forests close to home. And it was he who bought five year old Takuya his first set of Tarot cards, after noticing how intrigued his son was with a deck they happened to see in the window of a bookstore on a visit to Niigata. As with all card decks, Takuya saw each card shimmering with a different color according to probability, but the Tarot deck had so many more colors, so many more possibilities. Over the years, the young empath learned to use the Tarot as a means of focusing, of filtering out all the mental background noise, and of easing the turmoil in his mind when it was assaulted by negative energies.
Takuya had always been a very shy and reserved person, having inherited both traits from his parents, and being so obviously different from others his age only made him that much more skittish. But in spite of being intimidated by social situations and being labeled as “creepy” or even evil, he also did his very best to be friendly, polite and kind. And he maintained a strong belief in the inherent goodness of others. When children taunted him or called him names, he decided it was not because they were bad. They simply didn’t understand. When he was picked on and targeted by bullies, he didn’t think it was because the aggressors were mean. There were perhaps other circumstances that he was not aware of that prompted their rude behavior. Insecurities, problems at home, and the like. Takuya did not like to judge others and amazingly enough; he was able to maintain his optimistic belief that others were good, even when he was forced to come face to face with some of the worst humanity had to offer.
At the age of seven, Takuya was abducted from his home by a neighbor, a man named Seika Hagiwara, and taken across the country to Tokyo. Hagiwara had recently lost his job and had a large amount of debilitating gambling debt. He had heard rumors around town that Takuya was possibly some kind of witch and could make predictions, so in desperation, he took the boy from the park where he was watching the other children play, and put them both on train to Tokyo. He hoped to cash in on the horse races with Takuya’s psychic help.
Unfortunately, Takuya had been unable to do as the man asked. Though he wanted to trust and help his neighbor, a man he’d known at least in passing for most of his life, he was simply too frightened, and the mental onslaught from being in such a large city made him unable to focus on the rapidly changing probability fields around the horse track. Himself frightened and appalled that he’d committed such a crime, Hagiwara grew furious and frantic. He left Takuya tied up in the disused basement of the seedy apartment building he’d taken a room, and then fled the city. Three days later, overwhelmed by guilt, he turned himself in at a police station in Sendai, and told the authorities where to find the boy.
Those three days were a nightmare for Takuya, trapped in the middle of a busy metropolis, an untrained psychic with an open mind vulnerable to all the energies the city could generate. Simply the crush of biosignals from so many people was enough to overwhelm him, but every act of violence, every fight, every moment of anger from the immediate vicinity was like a gunshot through the head. The collective depression from those who lived in the slum area made him wish he himself were dead. Three days felt like forever and the longer he went without food or water, the weaker he became, and the harder it was to withstand the constant pain.
But even in spite of enduring such a horrible time, Takuya had no anger for Hagiwara. Instead, he felt compassion for a man who had given into such acts of desperation, and inwardly he harbored a great deal of sadness and guilt that he’d been unable to help his neighbor. Nor did he lose his faith in other people, in spite of being mentally assaulted with so much violence and hate and anger. He told himself that he could not possibly know what circumstances led people to commit ugly acts, and therefore he was in no position to pass judgment on anyone.
By the time he was a teenager, Takuya had learned to deal with being psychic and could put up with the intrusions into his mind if he focused very hard on other things, like the ever-changing colors of his Tarot cards, or the drawings that his younger brother liked to do. Meditation and tai chi also helped a great deal. But the situation still wasn’t ideal, and Takuya was a very lonely and introverted boy because of it.
Japan had a highly active superhero population, and the attendant agencies to manage them, but Takuya’s parents were wary of pushing their sensitive and quiet son in that sort of direction. Instead they made inquiries into possibly getting him some more professional training, just so that he would be able to block out the energies that were painful to him and hopefully live a normal life. At the age of seventeen, Takuya traveled to Tokyo to be evaluated by the Japanese chapter of GIFT. It was a difficult trip for him, being in the midst of such a large population of people and all of their individual energies, not to mention the myriad of the different types of man-made powers that ran through the city. But it was also painful to remember what he’d been through when taken to Tokyo at the age of seven.
He and his parents were told that, while there was a small training center in Tokyo for those with abilities like Takuya’s, the best place for him to go would be the Paragon Academy for Mutant Psychics, in the United States. The training and instructors there were unsurpassed.
Takuya had a very difficult decision to make. Stay in his quiet small town and simply get by with his mind being so painfully open to anything and everything that touched it, or travel to a foreign country to stay in a large undoubtedly energy-noisy city and hopefully learn how to block the pain and get a handle on his own head? The thought of being so far from his family and everything he knew was an intimidating one for him. Though he had occasionally traveled with his mother, an editorial photographer, when she did location shoots around Japan, he’d never been out of his country before. And cities were upsetting. He would be by himself in a very large place that he didn’t know. That was a frightening thought.
But, in spite of having had to deal with so much already in his life, Takuya tried his best to be an optimistic person and to look forward to the future. He felt that if he could learn to control his abilities, then that would go a long way toward ensuring that his future would be worth looking forward to. So, after he finished secondary school, Takuya came to the United States and Paragon City, and became a student at the Academy.
Even in the short space of a year, he learned so much. He was trained first in how to block himself mentally and how to focus his abilities on sensing only certain types of energies only when he wanted to. It was a difficult skill to learn, but the incredible mental relief he felt when he finally mastered it was worth the struggle. He was also taught defense and how to channel his own power outwards, though he did not care to do so. Takuya had a pacifist attitude through and through and did not like to hurt others. But life in the city, even dorming at the Academy, quickly showed him that knowing how to defend himself probably was a good idea, whether he wanted to acknowledge that or not.
What he enjoyed more was discovering that he had a natural skill at using his abilities to heal. It was such an easy step between mental diagnosis and healing, that he was shocked and rather ashamed that he hadn’t already made the jump. With practice, he learned to hone his sense of when others were hurt to being able to specifically feel exactly what was wrong, and channeling his personal energies to fix it. That was incredibly fulfilling and made Takuya feel useful and proud of being psychic for the first time in his life.
When he was nineteen, and had reached a certain level in his training, Takuya’s advisor at the Academy asked if he would be interested in participating in an apprenticeship program with a super group. The Academy regularly placed its especially gifted students with groups around Paragon, as real experience was considered the best training. At first Takuya was hesitant… he certainly didn’t think of himself as any sort of hero, after all. He was just a young man trying to control a head full of hurt. But his mind was changed after his advisor had him speak to the head of one of Paragon’s prominent groups, and the man stressed the need for healers among the city’s various super powered teams. Looking at it that way, Takuya realized that - even if he wasn’t a hero - he could at least do some good and help to protect those brave people who protected others.
His parents expressed worry when he called to tell them of his decision, concerned that their quiet sensitive eldest son might be overwhelmed by the duties of a team healer. But they also understood his need to try and his desire to do good for others. They were proud of him for those qualities. So they gave him their blessing, and very soon after, Takuya was assigned to the Defenders of PIE super group. Arrangements were made for him to live at their base, just like one of the heroes, while still attending training at the Academy as his abilities continued to develop.
And it was here, with the members of DoP, that Takuya felt as if he were finally finding his niche, his place to belong. There were some adjustment problems, and he felt like he was an outsider who didn’t consider himself a hero, but he was growing very fond of his teammates, especially those he went out on missions with most often. Kaal and Lyneia, Madame Frostbite, Lightbringer, Kederran Miklsohn, Sergeant Sunburn, and especially Terecito - they were all welcoming and encouraging, and he greatly admired their bravery and commitment to helping others. He now saw it as his duty to keep them healthy and safe while they did their jobs.
Which was why this sickness and pain brought on by teleporting was such a distress. Takuya was used to pain; he’d lived with it for most of his life. But it was the fear that it would affect his ability to keep the others safe that stressed him the most. He did not want to let them down, he did not want them to be hurt or suffer if he failed. Takuya couldn’t stand the thought. They were his friends, they had accepted him. What if something happened to one of them because he was unable to focus?
He was startled out of his heavy worried thoughts by a knock on his door, and opened his eyes to darkness. The room felt hot and his stomach was still churning, his joints still aching. He didn’t really want to move, but it would be very impolite to ignore someone at his door. As he pushed himself up, Takuya did have to wonder who it was. People didn’t usually visit him in his room, except for Terecito on occasion when he had a new stash of comic books to share. Gathering himself, taking a deep breath, Takuya went to the door and pulled it open.
He was surprised. There stood Heat Lightning, the leader of the super group.