Motivation (Rewrite)

ᴏɴᴇ

This entire fic is written in the Georgia font in my docs. That is all.

The entire situation was idiotic and Kazue hated it.

A single piece of paper would determine his future for the next three years and well beyond that, and he didn't even have the decency of a goddamned choice in the matter. The sheet might have had five lines and their respective short response spaces, but for Kazue, it may as well have had two with the dotted signature line at the bottom.

The brown-haired teenager sighed under his breath, resting his elbow on his desk and pinching the bridge of his nose in annoyance. The second Tanaka-sensei had passed out the high school selection papers, Kazue knew exactly what he'd have to write if he wanted higher education than junior high school. Not that he couldn't teach himself everything, but a high school diploma was fairly important if he wanted to go to college and-slash-or get a job.

Anything other than a heroics school would mean no signature from his father, which meant that Kazue wouldn't receive a single application. Beyond that, the selection of hero schools in Japan that were actually proficient in teaching were far and few between.

Realistically, the only two high schools that Kazue could write down were Ketsubetsu Academy and his father's alma mater, Yūei High School. Quite frankly, Kazue didn't care much for either. Ketsubetsu was... fairly well-rounded, to be completely honest, but didn't excel at anything in particular. Yūei, on the other hand, was highly-ranked in terms of academics and astronomically famous in terms of heroics.

For the sake of his sanity, Kazue was leaning toward putting Ketsubetsu as his first choice and Yūei as his second, but he also didn't want to have to deal with what would result from bringing the sheet home for his father to sign. Not only was Number Seven a Yūei graduate, but so was one of his two sidekicks. The annoying one, specifically.

Goddamn it.

With an irritated hiss of breath from between his teeth, Kazue put pen to paper and wrote down the two names.

The end of the school day came quickly, largely due to the fact that Kazue caught up on sleep during the majority of his classes and read manga under his desk during the rest. Paying attention was... something he rarely did, deigning to do his own research at the beginning of the school year after they received the syllabus. Besides, if he slept during the day, that freed up time to get more things done late at night.

He was out the door within a couple seconds, his backpack already slung haphazardly on one shoulder and second arm weaving its way through the other strap. No use hanging around longer than required, and it wasn't as if Kazue wanted to spend any more time with his hero-obsessed classmates. Hell, it wasn't even just his classmates.

Ah, heroes. Pretty much every kid dreamed of being one whether it was realistic or not to the point where Kazue was essentially one hundred percent certain that everyone in his class had written down Yūei as their top choice for high school. Honestly, it didn't even matter that they lived in Mustafu, the same city as the hero school itself, but that it was that goddamn prestigious.

Quite frankly, Kazue didn't entirely understand the whole hype around becoming a hero. From what he'd observed, most kids decidedly did not embody the selfless image of a hero that went into the profession out of a want, a need to help others.

No, they just wanted to be famous.

Kazue had zero motivation whatsoever to seek out a profession that was highly sought after for fame. The spotlight was exactly the opposite of where he wanted to be: out of the public eye, doing a repetitive task for the entirety of the work day. Preferably from behind a desk.