Nighthawk - n. a recurring thought that only seems to strike you late at night—an overdue task, a nagging guilt, a looming and shapeless future—that circles high overhead during the day, that pecks at the back of your mind while you try to sleep, that you can successfully ignore for weeks, only to feel its presence hovering outside the window, waiting for you to finish your coffee, passing the time by quietly building a nest.
...
"What is good?" The words drip from his mouth like blood and ink, dreams of shadows and laughter lingering behind his eyes, their echoes mocking him on the ceiling. "What is evil?"
The room is dark, the moonlight filtering in the only real light, but Izuku… Izuku can see regardless. He knows his room looks the same as it did that morning, when he woke up. He knew it was scattered with All Might posters and All Might figurines, and that there was a shelf for his notebooks, and his desk had his finished homework on it. It was all so painfully… normal.
Like nothing had happened.
(Blood spilled outwards like flowers blooming from the ground, so red, so red, like roses are supposed to be. Can you take a breath, dear man? Can you still breathe?)
He feels like laughing. Or screaming. Or both, really. Anything but this oppressing silence, pressing into him on all sides, consuming him like death must have come for that man. That man-
He had a name, Izuku reminds himself. Yamada Kenichi, His name was Yamada Kenichi.
Yamada Kenichi is dead now.
Not coming back.
He still sees, in his mind's eye, the hole in his clothing, blood staining the blue fabric brown. He could still, even after he'd scrubbed himself clean again and again and again, smell the gunpowder in his nose. The scent of sweat, of dirt, of blood pouring from the wound. He could still hear, in his ears, echoing like a stubborn ghost intent upon a haunting, the man's last ragged, broken breathes. He could see it, still, the pain in his eyes, the desperation, the despair, before it all faded away and vanished.
(He could see the glassy stare of death)
"For mother," he had whispered to himself, a mantra to keep him going when anyone else would have stopped. "For mother, for mother."
How had it come to this point? How had things gone and changed from what it had been to what it was now? From him sitting at the table and laughing with his mother, his only real worry being what Katsuki might do to him at school, to this? To his mother in the hospital, breathing only because of machines, a disease no one even knew the name of killing her slowly…
To him, having killed a man.
("For mother, for mother, for mother.")
There were reasons for this. There were reasons for everything. He needs the money, couldn't go without it. Needs the money to pay the bills, to fend off the loan sharks, to keep his mother alive-
Was it enough?
"What is good?" He whispers to himself, in the darkness of his room, the only light that of the moon. "What is evil?"
He doesn't think he knows the answer to that, anymore. The world had always been black and white to him, as stupid as that sounds. It had never really occurred to him that murderers, people who killed, that villains, might have a reason for doing what they do. It had always just been… Heroes and villains. Good and evil. Right and wrong.
What was the difference between the two of them?
Unbidden, a conversation he had heard between two of his classmates came to mind. It had been a week ago, and they had been discussing an anime-though which one he couldn't quite recall-and one of them had written a poem about it. It wasn't a very good poem. The lines didn't flow very well, and the subject matter was all over the place, but-
There was a stanza, in that poem, that had stayed with him.
He whispers those words now, like a secret that shouldn't be told, lest something that shouldn't overhear be there. But maybe he wants to be caught? Maybe he wants to be found? To be tried for his crimes, for the information he sold that ruined people's lives, for accepting the money he needs to keep his mother alive, for killing Yamada Kenichi so Izuku could keep living.
"Who is it who weighs the soul?
Who is it who checks the balances?
Who is it who sees our sins?
Who decides if we've sinned at all?"
He pauses, lets the words settle over him like a cloak, and just breathes. It's… difficult. The weight of it all is suffocating, even when held up by the mantra that is "for mother, for mother, for mother."
"What is good?" He feels like a broken record. "What is evil?"
Izuku killed a man today. He killed a man who had come for revenge. Izuku sold the information that lead to Yamada's life falling apart. He hadn't known what the information would be used for, hadn't cared to ask. He knew that most of the information he sold wasn't being used for anything good, had seen it in the way that heroes had started falling to weaknesses only Izuku had ever known before, and yet-
He still sold it. Willingly. Gratefully. When he had seen the aftermath on TV, he hadn't regretted it. He still didn't regret it. He needs that money, desperately.
"What is good?" He asks. "What is evil?"
The silence of the room is the only response.
…
AN: Written for Villain Izuku Week over on tumblr! The prompt was "Evil." When I wrote this, I asked myself "Why would Izuku become a villain when he wants nothing more than to be a hero?" This is my answer.