Poisoned Paradise
By I am ONNMT. || Chapter beta'd by Tomoe Mami.
Ch1: Origin Story
When my Quirk activated, it nearly put my classmates in hospital, but our teacher was lucky enough to have a preventative item on standby. I sulked in the corner, pout hidden underneath a borrowed scarf as he phoned my parents.
"It's Yoshida-sensei," he told them. "Saki's got her Quirk. Congratulations; it's Toxic."
As if it'd be anything else. My pasty complexion and acid-green hair were huge red flags that, nope, I wouldn't get Erasure like dad. Nevertheless, I'd stubbornly refused the possibility of inheriting something that seemed so scary. In fact, I quit any precautions as soon as my parents were out of sight… Hence the accident.
Needless to say, I was grounded as soon as I got home.
"We'd understand if it was a mistake," mom stressed. "We'd understand if something leaked, but you took off your mask and coughed miasma."
She made it sound as if I'd done the second thing intentionally. When I argued otherwise, she realised I hadn't been wearing the former to begin with, so I got punished with an early bedtime too. I learned to keep my mouth shut after that.
But could you blame me for rebelling? What sort of (almost)-four-year-old wanted to be the freak who wore a gas mask to kindergarten?
A few months down the line, when morals and mortality finally clicked, I understood that my mom's reaction was perfectly reasonable. My epiphany may or may not have been influenced by my newfound ability to sneeze black goo. In any case, I recognised that I'd been a brat and apologised to my teacher again for endangering the lives of him and my classmates. Genuinely apologised; not pretending like I had been the morning after The Cough. If he was wondering why I was asking for repentance a second time, he didn't make his questions vocal. Instead he simply patted my head and warned me to be more careful next time. Considering I was forced to constantly wear that damned visor ever since, it was a pointless reminder.
Still, an accepted apology was weight off my shoulders. The only reason I'm still thinking about it is because he was recently arrested for negligence.
That was — disturbingly — unsurprising. Looking back, before the incident, Yoshida hadn't cared whether I wore my gas helmet, even though I clearly owned it for a reason. In fact, I'm certain my parents had outright told him it was to prevent contamination if/when I got a Toxic Quirk.
But he didn't do anything. It was obvious he didn't give a damn about anyone's safety but his own. He hadn't harmed any kids directly, but who's to say what would have happened if he hadn't been around when I started coughing up fumes?
Not all bad guys have secret lairs and plan to take over the world; some are much closer to home. The average person walks past eleven murderers in their lifetime – how many more everyday Villains, like pickpockets and fraudsters? Too many. That's why I became a Hero.
{{ word count: 530. }}
author's note: so i've been on this site for SIX YEARS. yeah, i can't believe it either. to celebrate, i thought i'd post this thing i started working on during NaNoWriMo 2017. Saki is a fun OC to write from the perspective of, and this fic is for The Diversity Writing Challenge, so hopefully my muse will stick around long enough for me to finish this at some point lolol.
love,
- ONNMT/Kou.
PS. her dad isn't aizawa; they just have a similar Quirk.
{{ published: 27th december 2017. || edited: 18th march 2018. }}