SSD III: Silver

59. This was Always the Story of Someone who Died

PART III: Silver

It was raining. Fitting really, it was almost a good thing, it needed to be raining today, even the weather had to bow to the events of the day. The universe owed that much.

He'd never done something like this before, he had no idea what to wear, no idea what was expected of him. He hoped he wouldn't have too much asked of him. Purple hair flattened against his skull by the rain, Shinsou stepped towards the cemetery in the black clothes he'd decided on in the end, fiddling with the plastic wrappings of the bundle of flowers in his palms.

It had happened such a long time ago now, but was still so fresh, at least that's how it felt to him. Silver was gone, as was their homeroom teacher, even their English teacher had seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth. Keenan went unseen the whole time and nobody would tell them anything. Even Miss Midnight was sombre the whole week, constantly checking her phone during lessons, waiting for something they guessed.

Everybody knew something big had to be up when school was cancelled for the day, they had no idea of the real proportions though. When the news hit two days later, they understood.

All their teachers were back by Monday, even Mr Aizawa. Most people figured he would take a day or two off after being held hostage for a week but— when they remembered how he'd come immediately after the USJ attack in their first year, despite being so heavily injured he was essentially a walking mummy— they really should've seen it coming.

So life continued as normal: a huge global underground corporation with ties to several multi-billion dollar companies across the world was taken down almost overnight, one of the greatest heroes in Europe was dragged into a court case kept carefully away from the public eye, and the class tried to ignore the way their homeroom and English teachers' gazes lingered on the empty chair at the front. It wasn't just those two either, a lot of the teachers did it.

All the teachers were back, yes, Keenan was even there teaching them as the school's weapons master, but Silver hadn't been seen.

There was a funeral not long after, for every hero who'd fallen in what was described as an epic battle between the hidden dark and the brightest lights by all the media outlets who could get their grubby hands on even the tiniest titbits of information about it. It was more a mass memorial really, tea lights burned brightly, filling the streets with stars. Anyone and everyone was welcome. Real funerals were much more personal, smaller events with only the closest friends of the dead, and those all came much later than the first memorial.

It had been organised so the majority, if not all, of the graves were in the same place, and it had been turned into a beautiful space filled with trees of all greens. It looked more like a park than a cemetery and all kinds of people wandered through it daily. Not many of the big or well-known heroes were involved in the fight, but plenty had become famous from it, the effect it'd had on the world was so ground-breaking, it couldn't have done anything else, so the unknown had become household names.

And all of this change, all of this effect, all of it came from one little quirkless girl.

She could so easily have been overlooked, and according to the media she didn't even exist, but the students of 2-A knew the truth. It had taken a while to get one of their teachers to cough it up, but Keenan wasn't one to keep things a secret on orders he disagreed with. Silver Runt was a hero in their eyes, no matter how much she'd told them she wasn't, without her, those underground villains would have gone unnoticed perhaps forever. For a criminal, she'd done a heck of a lot of good.

Taking a deep breath, Shinsou's grip around the flowers tightened as he closed his eyes, pushing the memories from his mind to clear his head as he found what he was looking for. He stood there before the grave of a killer, a child, and a truly kind soul.