Disclaimer: I do not own My Hero Academia or Axis Powers: Hetalia
Prologue
…
Alfred remembered.
No—America remembered.
He stared up at the starry night sky, and remembered.
He remembered the day that Quirks had first appeared—in China of all places, honestly. He remembered the mass hysteria, the disbelief, the countless theories of why.
It hadn't been long for China himself to have a Quirk, and then the rest of the nations followed.
He remembered when Arthur had first proposed the idea that it might be better for nations to—fade away, to be forgotten.
Not that many people had even known about Nations—there wasn't even an official file in the government on them, for god's sake, it was really only their bosses and a select few other government officials who knew about them.
But...things had been changing, and as much as America had hated to admit it back then, England had been right.
And the rest of the Nations, from Belgium to Russia to China to Lithuania to Canada, had all agreed too.
So they quietly disappeared, only giving their bosses a single message of goodbye.
And then they started getting younger.
Almost all of the Nations experienced this—there had been panic among them for a while, before all of the oldest Nations had come together and come up with a theory as to why.
Society was destabilizing—Quirks were changing the world, and it was only natural that they would change the Nations too.
Society was, quite literally, going backwards, and their Nations were going with them.
It was the only plausible theory, really.
It was why the younger Nations—like America, or Canada or Mexico—had grown so quickly. Because their countries had processed and made advancements quickly. Because their people—the people that colonized them, had come from places that were already prospering and they had taken that knowledge and skill with them to their new homes.
Whereas, the older Nations like England or China or France had aged slowly, because it had taken them such a long time to innovate and change. They had built the base that the younger nations had thrived upon.
The Nations were getting younger because their growth, their advancements—they were going backwards.
America had been nineteen before the Change.
(Yes, there was a capital letter there, deal with it)
Now, he was sixteen.
It had been...jarring, to say the least, adding in those changes along with their Quirks.
But that wasn't the only difference.
A new career began to appear in the aftermath of the Change, once everything had...mostly settled down.
Superheroes.
And where did the need for heroes come from?
From supervillains, of course.
And of course, it would be a bit ironic for America of all people to be a villain, would it not?
Unless being a villain helped him change the world to be a better place than being a hero would, which America found to be very ironic.
America would always, always, always do his best to be the hero, even if it meant being the villain. Even if he was nearly half a decade younger now, even if he felt like a lost child sometimes, alone and wandering through a haze of strangers.
America stared up into the stars and remembered.
"Come on, Al," Matthew murmured beside Alfred from their perch on the rooftop. "We'll be late."
"Alright." Alfred smiled, jumping down and landing on his feet like a cat.
Arthur was waiting for them, a dark cloak and mask disguising him. "Finally," he sighed, tapping his foot impatiently. "I thought you'd take forever."
Alfred laughed. "Lighten up, Iggy." Arthur snorted, while Matthew hid a smile.
In a world full of heroes, there can still be injustice.
It was ironic.
Singularity, though, was trying to change that, make the world a better place piece by piece by being villains.
Starting in Japan. (Where Yuuei was.)
There were the stars in history, and then there was the dust that they left behind. Alfred found that to be very fitting, in more ways than one.