Collateral Damage| bnha

chapter sixteen| body

This chapter contains brief mentions of sexual assault that, while not explicit, may be distressing to some readers. If you feel uncomfortable, feel free to skip this chapter and I'll be happy to add a short summary later on.

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I knew men hurt women the moment that my mother told me not to marry someone like my father. I just never understood all the many ways they could do it.

To be completely honest the reality of my inferiority just because I was a woman was those kinds of realizations you always have in the back of your mind but never truly care to think about. Sort of like knowing that your parents never loved each other, and that your mother was doing her best to keep herself together in front of her children. Because that's what mothers do, keep themselves together. Even if she was only sixteen when she was forced into a loveless marriage.

But having a disadvantage just because I was a woman never truly bothered me, because I already had enough disadvantages to worry about. Being a man wouldn't have changed the fact that I had a quirk I couldn't control, a father that despised me, a brother that resented me, and an accident that deemed me a villain for the rest of the world. Being a woman was more like the constant in an equation full of variables.

Sure, my father hated me but he still tried to take me back after the accident. And of course the way I was treated by the Sone sucked, and my quirk was basically a ticking bomb and my mother was killed by a villain. My life was difficult enough as it was. But being a boy or a girl wouldn't have changed that, it wouldn't have changed anything.

That was until it did.

The sludge attack. I was walking back home after a day of aimlessly wondering if anything in my life is important at all. After pondering on how much does hero society fucking sucks.

My phone had begun glitching after what it seemed like a good 20 minutes of walking, the lights around me were dimmer and I could barely hear any chatter in the street. "Stupid phone" I hit the side of it attempting to fix it somehow, but the phone just froze despite my desperate clicking. "Now what?" I exclaimed desperately, looking around me for some type of sign that could tell me where I was, I shouldn't be far from the station at this point.

No street signs. For that matter, no signs at all. The windows and doors around me were mostly shut, there were no voices anywhere, it was too dark to even see which side of the sidewalk I was on, and the only thing keeping me from running into a wall was a dim lighting post and the flickering light of an old bar. I wondered how I made it here in the first place, I was sure that I was following the directions on my phone, I was sure that I had typed the name of the station, not whatever this street was.

I shouldn't be here.

I reached for my phone again out of instinct, but it was useless given that it was still frozen. I knew that whatever I did I just had to move to some place else, anywhere but here where I was all alone. Bad things always happen when no one is looking.

"It won't work" a haunting voice announced emerging from behind me, "Your phone I mean" I stood still, tightening my grip. "Not unless I want it to"

I realized then that I was in fact following correctly the directions on my phone. Directions that led me here. In the middle of an alleyway. All alone.

Fear was nothing but a survival instinct, a feeling to remind us that there are predators waiting to attack us. But fear could also be a weakness, one that prevents you from talking when you should scream, from moving when you should run, from hiding when you should fight.