SSD III: Silver

77. The Eyes That Grieve

Warnings: mentions of alcohol abuse and relapses.

Take care of yourselves please! You deserve to take care of yourselves (yes, even you, I will accept no arguments or constructive criticism on this statement). If it hurts, stop reading, please, I write to make people smile, not to cause them pain.

Here's the summary for people who want or need to skip this chapter:
Silver's been flinching and incredibly subdued since the end of the case. Hizashi thought it would pass but it's been days and it hasn't yet. Since Silver usually comes over on Sundays, he resolves to confront her then to make sure she's ok. He wants so much to help her but he knows he can only do so if she'll let him.
She doesn't arrive on Sunday, leaving Hizashi, Aizawa, and Eri all worrying about her. Hizashi asks his husband to watch out for Silver on his patrol.
Aizawa finds her towards the end of his patrol, while on the way to the club (thinking that's where she'd be). They have a very unpleasant conversation that's mostly Silver telling him to shut up and go away but in far less polite terms. She ends up leading him to a house; she goes inside but he stays out at her request.
When she emerges almost an hour later, she's shaky and jumps at the slightest sound. He keeps trying to ask her if she's ok. She tells him he has no right to be so worried about her, that he doesn't get to keep talking at her like she'll respond the way she used to.
He tries to apologise because he never meant to make it seem like what he did to her was nothing. It doesn't help. She gets frustrated that despite how many times he's explicitly asked him to leave her alone, he continues to follow her— it doesn't sound like heroic behaviour, does it?

Again, please tell me if you see any typos/bits that read weird cause this chapter isn't beta-read whatsoever!

Chapter 77: The Eyes That Grieve

The day after a man who'd killed so many quirkless people (children, girls) was finally arrested (not killed, though it had been a close thing) was normal. There was no mention of it in the news. Maybe if she'd killed him, it would've been in the news.

Quirkless Girl Kills Killer Of Quirkless Girls.

No. Newspapers weren't so kind, so fair. No.

The headline would've read something closer to: Quirkless Hero Trainee Kills. Or maybe: Here's A Reason We Never Saw Coming For Why The Quirkless Shouldn't Be Heroes. That one just sounded like clickbait.

It made her want to scream, but there was nothing she could do about it. This was, unfortunately, how the world worked, how people worked. Human beings could be kind, sure, but they could also be cruel and stubborn. Discrimination was something that permeated the known history of the species and it sucked, but that was how the world worked. That was the only world Silver knew, it was the world she'd grown up in, it was the world she lived in.

And nothing and nobody, no matter their good intentions, no matter their open ideas, could ever change that. That stubbornness? It was a virtue and a curse, and she hoped it would be the downfall of the species. They deserved that.

Still, just because the world wasn't kind, didn't mean she had to be cruel. Others discriminated, but she wouldn't, she refused to be to anyone what so many had been to her.

***

It was a Thursday, three days after the case was put to rest, when Hizashi started thinking something seemed off with Silver. In reality, he'd probably noticed it before too but he'd brushed it off as a fairly normal reaction to finishing a case until now. He probably shouldn't have done that, just because it was normal, didn't mean it was ok.