I was going to do it until he told me to.

It's pretty easy to rationalize away ugly things like guilt and obligations when you accept that they don't exist past the grave. Sure, Mom would be sad. She'd move on eventually. Maybe Dad might even take her back without me around anymore. Yes, all my internet friends would surely wonder where I went. In the end, I was just a faceless, friendly stranger to them. They'd get over it. I had no pet to wait at my door and wonder where I'd gone, no friend to walk home from school with, no boyfriend or girlfriend of someone in between to tell me they loved me. The barista at my favorite internet café, who knew my order by heart, would have wiped my ghost from his memory within days to make room for the next bleary-eyed regular.

I had a rope zipped up tightly in my backpack (and a kitchen knife hidden in the back of my closet, beneath my old stuffed animals and worn, muddy shoes- just in case the rope wasn't long enough). Then Kacchan told me I should kill myself. Jump off the roof and hope for a quirk in the next life, he said. He was stupid, they were all stupid. Aldera Middle was only four stories tall- not a guaranteed death. Not by far. But suddenly, I was grasped by a whim of anger. I didn't want to kill myself anymore, not if it meant Kacchan won. So I climbed down the stairs instead of up, and nearly died anyway in a villain attack.

You all know this part: my suffocation, subsequent rescue, and letdown on the roof (both physically and otherwise). The one person who I thought would always smile, would always say, "You can do it!", would always help those in need… Left me hanging- not by rope, but by thin unraveling heartstrings.

That building was much taller than four stories. Without a doubt, a jump from that height would have had me seeing the grass from below, so to speak. All Might left me on that roof to die. And I refused. If he wanted me to die then, well, maybe I just wouldn't!

Once more I trudged down the stairs instead of up, and once more I nearly died despite it, ending up in the middle of a villainous conflict again, this time including Kacchan. I saved that asshole's life expecting nothing in return, yet somehow I was still disappointed. Then All Might showed up again with a sudden change of heart. I couldn't find it in me to be suspicious of him, not as tired as I was and especially not when he offered me my only chance- a quirk to call my own. For the next ten months, I lived day-to-day, never giving up only because the whole world was telling me I should. I pushed myself past my limits, improving myself until I felt nothing but pain and then doing it some more, just because I deserved it.

I failed the test anyway. Or so I thought. All Might wouldn't speak to me. I'd made a monumental fool of myself. Everything would be better if I were gone.

The letter came. Hero points, it said. I had passed. I cried. My success wasn't in any part for myself, or for a heroic ideal. I went above and beyond just to say "fuck you" to everyone telling me to do something that I had already planned, whether that something was failure or death. Life punched me in the face, and just to spite it I punched it right back and made it my bitch.

And I guess from there you all know the story from there: my quirk, my life… my hero academia.

"The gallows in my garden, people say,

Is new and neat and adequately tall;

I tie the noose on in a knowing way

As one that knots his necktie for a ball;

But just as all the neighbours- on the wall-

Are drawing a long breath to shout 'Hurray!'

The strangest whim has seized me…. After all

I think I will not hang myself to-day."

G. W. Chesterton, "A Ballade of Suicide"