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13. (We all have our) Places

Somewhere, out there, things are dying.

It's a matter of life and death. Death is dark, death is going to the light. It's the coldness of your skin and the warmth of flickering flames as the body gets cremated. It's being six feet under and memories that live above. If there's life after death, then what would it be? Is there something more than your soul having to reside in a cage made of flesh, blood, and bones? Is there something more than feeling mortal pain, and the pain of death has nothing to do with the pain of simply being dead? Or is it the pain of the memories that live on that hurt the most? The grief that wracks the body and strains the soul. The pain and misery that accompanies the lingering sadness that just never leaves. Grief is a neverending process of being sad, like how there are sunny days and rainy days.

Would it be great, to never feel sadness? To never feel pain? To never suffocate yourself under the pain of heartbreak? To never scrape your knee? To never have anxiety eating at your head in the latest hours of the night? To never have unbearable misery pull at you until you can't help but to let go of the flood of tears just trapped underneath your eyelids? The feeling in your throat, like you have something stuck back there and yeah, you do. What is it? The inevitable force of anguish trying to tear you apart limb from limb.

What a world it would be, to never feel such things.

What a world that will never happen.

Why? Because things are taken and destroyed every second of every day. Why do people do such generous actions? Why do they even try when the problem will fester all over again? It's like putting a bandaid on a bleeding cut and then going back to lying in a bed of broken glass. Constantly having to come up with temporary solutions to things that will keep going on and on and on. An endless cycle until one or the other side is inevitably destroyed completely.

And, despite it all, you can try to cure the symptoms. Sadness is something that's guaranteed with life. It's almost as much of a guarantee as death will be, and if not that then it's a direct result of death. If you attack a problem at the roots, then it's bound to wither and die off before it gets the chance to grow further and reproduce. Cut off a beast's head and the body is bound to bleed out and die. There are multiple ways to prologue and slow down a problem from reaching its worst point, but there can only be one true solution.

And the point is that people and things die off countless times in a single day. Death is the one thing that can be guaranteed in life. When everything else seems like a lie, remember that the sweet eternal slumber will never be one.

And so, throughout life, you can do whatever it is to keep it away. Whether that life is natural or otherwise.

And meanwhile, with sadness, the only thing suitable to do would be to attack every root of the problem and watch the rest happen in its own time. There will be people who oppose, but all will be well in the end. After all, not everyone trusted people until after they died and their true genius started to show. The advice of the public is never a stable one.

But even so, what has always been true doesn't always apply to the concept of quirks. Out of everyone, he knew that the best. Quirks will always be the exception.

This particular one especially.

Quirks are . . . oh what's the best way to describe them? Sudden power. The need to be better because of it. False righteousness. Bright light as well as dark shadows. Shadows that like to crawl. Light that likes to dance. Looking more monster than human. New medical advances. The ability to be more unethical. The ability to further medical breakthroughs.

The need. The desire to break them down. To tear them apart from the user's skin and take them into a special library. A special library filled with quirks like relics, almost painting them like murals to let their memory live on. Each quirk that entered him becomes a part of him sooner or later, with some quirks taking longer than others. Eventually, the individuality gets stripped away and leaves nothing but a docile quirk, just waiting for All for One to take it in as one of his own.