A Tarnished Hero

Chapter 6: One Foot in the Grave

As the wind swept past Izuku while he flew through the air, he made sure the bodies strapped to him wouldn't fall to their deaths. He couldn't help but reminisce about the time he spent fighting in The Lands Between compared to the enemies he faced in Japan.

It was surreal. He still remembered his dream of wanting to become a hero back when he was still young with an arrogant, but still normal Katsuki. The time when the two would play heroes as they vowed to be partners when they grew up.

They drifted apart when he found out Izuku was quirkless, and society deemed him a social outcast. Come to think of it, it wasn't just his fault Katsuki became the way he was the last time he saw him.

They fed him the concept that quirkless were lesser than their quirked counterparts. The more he thought back to it, the more it made sense.

Hell, it all started back when they were in kindergarten! Kindergarten! They would be no older than six years old at that point, and every adult knew that a child's mind was as malleable as clay.

And as they continued drip-feeding him those discriminatory thoughts all the way into his teenage years, he grew worse and worse until the moment where he thought that discriminating quirkless people was the norm.

It was fucked up.

So yes, Katsuki didn't shoulder all the blame. Was he blameless in the entire fiasco that was his hellish life? No. In fact, he held the topmost seat of Izuku's most hated. It was funny. Izuku only realized that Katsuki was never his friend the moment those parasites managed to get in his head when he died.

Chuckling morosely, Izuku wondered if Katsuki ever got into U.A. If they did a background check, they either would've found the skeletons in his closet - to which Izuku would be happy to have the blond Pomeranian placed inside a mental ward or get therapy until he could get over himself - or they would've found nothing.

Izuku couldn't put it past the teachers and the principal of that school to sweep under the rug the harassment and borderline criminal acts - suicide baiting was not to be taken lightly - to present their model student to the hero scene with roses and diamonds. They have, after all, the book on Meta-Liberation in their curriculum.

Idiots, the lot of them. The idea behind the ideology was wonderful, quirks being used to help society or better one's life without restriction, but not all people have equal quirks.

Some are blessed with extremely powerful quirks, like for example, No. Thirteen's black holes. While others were gifted mundane abilities, one of his former classmates could attest to that.

One of their core concepts was to better their quirks to further enhance their lives, but what if it couldn't? What if said quirk have a hard limit that no matter how much time and effort you put in, there was no way to increase the cap?

It just takes a little divide between a group to create an imbalance. And as history has shown time and time again, those with power are able to take control of the weak like pawns on a board.

But this time, instead of a weak person in charge forcing a strong front, the person in charge was a literal walking nuke. There was no way to oppose him, other than another walking nuke, and if they happen to have previous unsolved discourse?

The end result wouldn't be pretty.

The phantom burns he felt every now and then was a reminder that, for all that society failed Katsuki and him, Katsuki was the one who failed the most. His pride and arrogance are what made him the menace that he was, and he couldn't look past it to see whether or not something was wrong.