Worthless Necessity [HitoZuku]

Chapter 131 - My hate, left behind

Given that it was still rather early in the morning, most of the students just hung around the common room, enjoying their Christmas gifts. Apparently, 1-B also had a Secret Santa event, so most of the other students were just hanging out in their respective dorms.

Midoriya gently traced his finger over the packaging of the huge set of Rubix's cubes that Shinsou had given him as he settled down in his bean bag, and gently peeled the plastic packaging open, taking care not to rip it, and took out the really basic, three-by-three-by-three cube.

He had seen a two-by-two-by-two cube, but he had first started off with the three-by-three-by-three cube. Midoriya gently turned the sides of the cube, messing up the colours, the feeling of the cube turning about in his hands simultaneously being both familiar and foreign to the green haired boy. He hadn't known it had been called a Rubik's Cube; he had just called it a Colour Cube ever since he found it.

He remembered first seeing the cube while helping his mother to clear out the storage room in their apartment, and he had taken it out to show his mother. His mother had revealed that it had been his father's while he was still a teenager, and that he had always enjoyed playing around with it in between tinkering around with his support items. Midoriya's five year old self had been really intrigued by the colourful toy, and he had started playing around with it, with his mother's permission; after all, he didn't want to mess up anything by accident.

As a child, he had never been able to figure out how to solve the puzzle. He had only been able to solve one face, and he had even gotten up to the point where one face, along with the first layer of the adjacent sides being solved, but he could never have figured out how to solve the rest of the cube. His mother didn't know how to solve the cube either, despite having a bit of knowledge of support items and engineering, so Midoriya was just left fiddling with the cube every day until his father came home from overseas.

Midoriya's hands shook as he held the now messed up cube in his hand.

His father had been the one to teach him how to solve the cube, and Midoriya had spent countless months just playing around with it, entertaining himself while his parents were busy. He really liked to spend time with his parents, and his father had even set aside and entire day for them to play around with coming up with support items, and even though Midoriya had no idea of all the big, scientific terms, or the names of all the equipment his father had liked to ramble on about before his mother stopped him, he just enjoyed hanging out with them.

Midoriya felt his throat getting tighter.

He didn't have any friends in neither preschool nor elementary school; at first, he had been small and scrawny, and had been the target of kids who had very obvious mutant quirks. Then he had been declared as quirkless, completely destroying his chances of making any friends at all. His teachers didn't care at all, believing everyone else over him, and outside of his own home, Midoriya had no support at all.

His parents were the only one that cared about him, and they were gone.

The greenette felt tears threatening to spill from the corners of his eyes, and he just locked his eyes on the cube, his shoulders drooping.

He knew how to fix the cube; he had done it countless times, just shuffling the sides around, the only sound in the room being the plastic pieces rubbing against each other as Midoriya gradually increased the speed at which he solved the Rubix's cube, though his small hands had mainly been a reason why he still took a few minutes to solve the puzzle. He had even attempted to solve the puzzle without looking at it, since it was one of the challenges that people did when it came to solving Rubix's cubes, though he had never been able to do it properly, always being off by a few steps. But it did help him to train his memory and his ability to think ahead, though the context of solving a puzzle and fighting a horde of villains were two very different things altogether.