KATSUKI POV
I never gave the future much thought.
Course, I knew I'd be a hero. Cause that's what all the best people were- heroes- and that's all I wanted to be.
When you're the best, you're invincible. You can take on the world and even if you cry and get some blood on your shirt, you walk away knowing you're the one who made it. You're the one who won.
And I wanted to win just like All Might. Just like the symbol of peace and the one person in the world I actually looked up to.
Once I got my quirk, everything started comin together. Everybody said I was destined to be the best, that it would be easy, I was gifted, that I'd be a hero for sure, that nothing could get in my way.
Turns out they were wrong: Everybody.
Because it wasn't easy, even when I said it was. I worked, and I bled, and I cried, and I worked again to keep up with those words everybody spat at me.
I didn't want to be the best anymore, I had to be.
I didn't want to win, I had to.
Whenever I'd get the feeling of certainty slipping through my fingers- whenever I thought I'd crumble beneath the weight of my own expectations- whenever it was just too much-
All I could do was hide behind my own strength like it was a barricade. I kept everything out, everybody out. I wasn't invincible just because I was the best, I was invincible because no one could see the real me behind the wall I built...
If only people knew that strength, that wall was paper-thin. That if the wind blew a certain way it'd fall and so would I.
I thought my entire life would just be that cycle. Try, work, bleed, cry, start over. Try, work, bleed, cry, start over. Until all that'd be left of me was pride and ego that just suffocated who I wish I could let everyone see...
Then I met someone. Someone who didn't seem like an everybody...
She was a gladiator of a girl. The kind that could bring you to your knees and smirk when you shivered yet also become fragile at a few words.
She dreamt of seeing the sky and cozy conversations by a riverbed. She wanted freedom and love and joy and laughter and a life unrestrained by a past filled with awful things she didn't deserve.
God, she was beautiful- she still is- but it wasn't even her pretty eyes or her messy hair or those cheap headphones or her ugly laugh- it was the fact that she felt like a reflection.
She thought no one could see, but I did.
I saw someone at the mercy of orders disguised as love turned into a shield. She hid from the entire world with her strength just like I did.
When I realized she didn't fight for herself, it made me angry. It made me feel like even if we were opposites, we were the same, and when she couldn't understand she was worth more than a weapon, it hurt.
What was worse is I never realized the reason I liked her so much wasn't because I saw her.
It was because she saw me...
You're not a star. She said, lying under the dying light of suns long defeated by the expectations everybody put onto them. You're just a boy...
I carried her home that night. Because for the first time, I didn't feel that weight threatening to crush me. Because she took it all away without even meaning to.
