TW: this chapter will have an analysis about society, mental health disorders, references about Japan's current society, self-hate, guilt, bullying, abuse, ostracizing and indifference, as well as internalized ableism and abandonment issues, so please, if this might make someone feel uncomfortable, don't read this and take care of your mental health.
Also, I don't mean to offend anyone while posting this, and should someone feel sad or uncomfortable, tell me so I can censor or change a part of the story for a less triggering one. Plus, this chapter holds some of my views about reality and society, but chances are I'm wrong so, please, don't let them influence your point of view, okay?
Finally, all the references to Reddit and Wikipedia in this story are completely fictional.
Recommended OST: watch?v=3L1DEvzsftw
Flashback: Three and Two Days before Izuku's awakening.
"Izuku tried to take his own life, Miss Yaoyorozu."
Katsuki couldn't believe Hound Dog's words…
No, the nerd would never do something like that, he was strong, stronger than almost everyone…
It meant they couldn't find him in time…
"But you did." Murmured a distorted voice inside of his head. "You and many others contributed to this day, after all… Isn't that what you have always wanted?"
No, he never wanted Izuku to die… He wanted him to leave him alone, to stop bothering him, to stop looking down on him, as if he needed pity!
"You wanna be a hero, nerd? I have an idea for you." Said Aldera Katsuki in his mind, as he remembered his past. "Go take a swan dive off a roof, and pray for a quirk in your next life."
He ignored Momo's guttural screams as she eventually passed out.
He ignored the lesser screams, a sudden decrease in temperature, voices distorted by swollen throats, asking for apologies and begging for forgiveness after realizing their mistakes.
They all thought they broke a young boy so much in three weeks, that he didn't want to exist anymore.
But they didn't… In fact, if they could measure their guilt into numbers, their actions could at most be 20% of Izuku's reasons to die.
Instead, they tore away the hopes and dreams of a person who was slowly healing from his previous wounds, destroying all his progress and reverting him to a previous state.
All he remembered was falling to the ground with a thud, and everything turned into darkness.
When he woke up, somehow, he was in his room, with Eijirou sleeping in a futon near his bed, apparently taking care about him…
Maybe they carried him away during that time, as he remembered the reason his mind just shut down, as he couldn't withstand that sorrow.
Izuku wanted to end himself, as he didn't have the strength to live anymore.
And he was one of main culprits… There was no way he could avoid thinking that.
He was supposed to protect Izuku, to be there for him, to have been a genuine childhood friend, not a bully…
The question was… Why did he ended up hating Izuku so much?
What did he do to him to earn that hatred?
His realizations from the previous day told him that Izuku truly cared about him, even if he didn't see it like that but… How did their bond turn into something so dark?
"Man…" Said Eijirou as he woke up, yawning a bit. "How are you feeling? You know, after what happened…"
"I don't know… Eijirou, I don't know…" Said Katsuki as he used his best friend's name, probably because a nickname would have been inappropriate in this situation. "All I know is that I have far more responsibility than all of you combined."
"Were you a…" Asked Eijirou, praying to whatever deity that his fears weren't true… "Bully?"
"Yes, I was." Answered Katsuki as he looked down in shame. "Except for three people in our class, every single person there bullied Izuku one way or another, but I was the worst."
Eijirou couldn't speak… Didn't he hate bullies?
Didn't he swear to protect the innocent?
And he ended up befriending a bully…
"If you, Hanta and Mina don't want to be my friends anymore, I would both understand and accept that." Said Katsuki in a sad tone. "It's the least I deserve after everythin' I've done…"
"Would you like to talk about it?" Asked Eijirou in a neutral tone. "Look, I won't lie to you… I don't think I will be able to trust you unless I know most of the context, and as I hurt him as well, I have no right to betray you… Maybe if no one else hurt him and your past ended up being revealed but, I'm willing to give you one chance. I can't speak for Hanta and Mina, though."
"Sure, but I think I'll need a day to do some research because… I don't really understand why I hated him either." Answered Katsuki in a sincere tone. "Just one day, and I'll give you all your answers, tell Mina and Hanta that I'll tell them everythin' too."
"Thanks, Katsuki." Said Eijirou as he prepared himself to leave. "Would you like something to eat?"
"No thanks, I have enough stuff in my mini-fridge." Answered Katsuki. "If you want somethin' just take it, okay?"
Saying that he didn't, but thanking him anyway, Eijirou went to talk with Mina and Hanta, while he locked out his door, took some salt crackers with apple juice, and started to do research about quirkless people.
He needed to understand why he hated Izuku… Because before they had quirks, and even before he was diagnosed as quirkless, he still cared about him.
His first search was:
"How many quirkless people are in Japan?"
Thankfully, he found a small site with statistics so, he ended up copying them into a Word document:
Total Population in 2.020: 126.190.000
Total Population in 2.170: 120.000.000
He remembered that Japan had a low birth rate at the time because of society itself, as studying and getting a job was so important that those who failed their college admission exams had a big chance of becoming hikkikomoris on some cases, not being able to leave their houses and interact with people as they were afraid of the future, or they worked minimum wage jobs for the rest of their lives…
Also, since the costs of taking care of a child were so high, and those who could graduate from college and get a job focused so much of it, that they couldn't form a connection deep enough with someone to start a family.
Apparently, after the Quirk Era started, Japan's population slowly managed to stabilize itself, after they abandoned their isolationist and xenophobic beliefs to learn more about other cultures and people in the process.
Number of People with a Quirk in 2.170: 96.000.000
Number of People without a Quirk in 2.170: 24.000.000
Then, he found out another piece of history…
The first quirked people were victims of many types of abuse, bullying and mobbing, being hated just by existing, not being able to make friends with anyone except for those who weren't blinded by fear (or other quirked people, as rare as they used to be back then), even being attacked in public, beaten up by others and so on, thinking that they could destroy that "decease" before it spread into their country…
But it turned out that many people had "Q-Genes", a special set of genes that allowed quirks to develop and evolve, and even if they couldn't develop powers, their children were more or less destined to have them…
And the roles slowly reversed, as many people who were victims of the Anti-Quirk hate mobs passed their hatred of the quirkless towards their children, and they did so with their own children, explaining the reason why so many quirkless people were hated and bullied so much today, despite being innocent compared to their ancestors.
After that, he found out more information about percentages, how those twenty-four million people were distributed in the country.
He got shocked into his core when he found the data.
60% are older than 65 Years Old: 14.400.000
35% are in between 19-65 Years Old: 8.400.000
5% are younger than 19 Years Old: 1.200.000
Apparently, in the next 25-35 years, a huge chunk of Japan's quirkless population would be gone… And less and less children were born quirkless too…
They were slowly fading away and dying, and by the sixth generation, only 4% of people would be born quirkless, and by the seventh one and beyond… Perhaps some spontaneous mutations every once in a while, but quirkless people would be functionally extinct.
At least in Japan.
What he didn't understood was… If there were more than a million quirkless people around his age, where were they?
Had they been more quirkless people in Aldera, Izuku could've had at least one friend…
So, he already knew his next question.
"Where is the youngest generation of quirkless people?"
Eventually, he found an answer in Wikipedia.
"Japanese Quirkless Exodus in between 2.154-2.160."
Since it was clear that most people didn't care about quirkless ones, and the government itself barely cared about their existence, most people with quirkless children ended up migrating to other countries with stricter laws about discrimination.
Some of those countries were Perú and Brazil (whom already had a decent Japanese population even before Quirks appeared, so social integration was a bit easier), the United States (who had very strict laws about quirkless hate, as those who did so ended up in jail for a long time), as well as México, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Egypt, South Africa, Ethiopia, Morocco, Taiwan, Thailand and India, among others.
Some other countries like China and South Korea shared most of Japan's views about the quirkless so, they were out of the question.
In total, over 800.000 quirkless children, as well as their families, ended up migrating to avoid abuse and mistreatment, as well as to start anew, leaving 400.000 of them in the country, either because they couldn't afford to go somewhere else, or because their families didn't care about them.
This data actually explained everything…
Auntie's… No, Miss Midoriya's (he didn't deserve to call her that after his actions) income wasn't enough to pay for two plane tickets, and learning another language in such a stressful situation wouldn't have worked either.
So, they were stuck in Japan, and she probably knew the kind of future Izuku would've ahead of him… And she was powerless to stop it.
She even had to abandon her job as a baker to focus completely on supporting Izuku, thankfully her husband still sent her money, or so he heard when the hag talked with her via phone every once in a while.
Izuku could've had a way out of so much torment and despair, but sadly it never happened… How much guilt did Miss Midoriya bear inside of her?
Knowing that your child lost his best friend, that he ended up coming home with bruises and sometimes scars, as well as horrid words whispered in his head every single day, because they knew they had power over him, and they wanted to use it as much as they could.
Which reminded him, that only three people before Yuuei somewhat cared about him without counting Miss Midoriya… Enough to support him indirectly, but not enough to risk social suicide and be hated too.
Shine Face, Flamethrower and Bloated Cheeks were a small group that always hung out with each other, and they were the only ones who didn't mock him, nor they bullied him or laughed about his suffering.
When they had to do group work, they always invited Izuku to work with them, because otherwise he would've gotten a zero in that assignment…
Once, when he arrived early, he saw them scrubbing Izuku's desk, which probably had insults, slurs and God knows what else written in them.
Also, back when Tornado Hands tossed Izuku's lunch in the trash, he found them secretly sneaking some onigiris and orange juice to Izuku's bag, to ensure that he could at least eat something in his route towards home.
But they didn't stand up for him anymore than that, as everyone knew that helping a quirkless person, meant that you were as unworthy as them, so they had to be careful.
Still, what they did made them at least redeemable, since everyone else either laughed at Izuku, or they used insults and psychological torture towards him, as well as physical abuse like pushing, making him stumble and fall with their feet, throwing his backpack in the trash, tackling him from the stairs (at least once or twice), and the occasional punch or kick as well (mostly from Rocky, as well as from him).
He had to live in that hell for years… He couldn't imagine it, as he gained acceptance and popularity just by existing, by being himself, he didn't have to earn someone's friendship or respect as far as he knew.
He could've joined almost every single group (except for the one with Izuku's allies), but after Yuuei, he knew that many people may have disliked him in Aldera, but they were too afraid to say that to him…
Gorou Araraki, aka Fingers, and Daiki Enomoto, aka Fangs, were probably the only friends he had in middle school…
Back then, the three of them, as well as Bat Wings and Izuku, promised that they would become the strongest heroes in Japan, and they would share their own agency together.
But then Izuku got quirkless and everyone hated him, Bat Wings disappeared at the end of elementary school, and he stuck with Fingers and Fangs until he graduated and never looked back at his past…
He abandoned them.
He abandoned the few people who truly cared about him, despite their flaws and mistakes…
Remembering their own Facebook chat, he opened his account after more than a year without using it… And his worst fears were realized.
They left the chat a few months ago, but not without leaving a single Word document attached there.
Not willing to waste more time, he downloaded it to his computer before reading its contents…
To: Katsuki Bakugou.
From: Fingers and Fangs.
"Hello Katsuki… Man, we both wrote parts of this letter to be fair towards you, so please forgive us if you find some inconsistency.
Just saying, we're not talking to you because we want to leech from your status as a Yuuei student, but instead, to talk about our former friendship.
We've noticed that you probably never cared about us… Are we right?
You just dropped out cold after graduation, no messages, no calls, nothing… Were we that unworthy to you?
Heh, I guess we kind of deserved that… This new high school opened up our eyes, and we finally understand a lot of things we didn't before.
We let you hurt people in our classroom, including Izuku… Because, and believe us, if there's no quirkless student in a class, the next targets are likely weak quirked people like us.
There's a bully far crueler than even you used to be, he dominates towards everyone in class, and no one does anything to stop him.
It's like that old quote said… People won't fully develop empathy towards a situation unless it happens directly to them…
We're being bullied, and that's what it took us to realize how horrible people we were.
In a way, we think this is our punishment.
We wonder if this is how Izuku and some of those people from elementary school used to feel…
Katsuki, if you ever read this letter, please… Make it right.
You have to make up for your mistakes, you have to stop this cycle before it gets out of control… Try to apologize to Izuku, make campaigns to stop bullying once you become a hero, because if you don't, abuse like this will continue, people like us will keep making other's lives a living hell.
Anyway… We also wanted to thank you for all the moments we spent together. They meant a lot to us…
We wish we would've kept that promise we made as kids, alongside Tsubasa and Izuku, that we would become the best hero team ever.
Just look the kind of heroes we ended up being…
Thanks for reading Katsuki, and no, we didn't block you, we just deactivated our Facebook accounts to keep a low profile, so please, take care and fix all of this. You don't have to contact us again if you don't want to, we're not doing this to manipulate you or guilt trip you, okay? As we're paying our just desserts."
P.S.: there's a subreddit that also helped us realize a lot of this, hope it helps you too.
r/QuirklessConfessions
Fingers and Fangs… He truly forgot about them, and the promise they all made until a few minutes ago…
How could he?
HOW COULD HE?!
He really was cruel and indifferent towards his childhood friends… Wasn't he?
Why did he have such high standards towards others?
Why couldn't he accept his friends the way they were?
Trying to take a small breath, he decided to open the subreddit…
Apparently, the site could be viewed by everyone but, to post there, you had to send a scanned copy of your I.D. to prove you were truly quirkless, or at least if you knew a quirkless person, and since the mods were also quirkless, albeit living in other countries, they wouldn't share these data with others.
He clicked on the first post, which said:
"Stop pretending to care about people if you don't truly mean it." By "xxxxxxxxxxxQuirkless702".
"I have a villainous quirk, being the ability to see people's auras when I focus, and because of that, I've always had a hard time making friends or connections with others, but I ended up befriending a quirkless girl (will call her Hikari, but that's not her true name), and we slowly became best friends.
Apparently, our high school had very strict quirkless discrimination and bullying policies, so anyone who bullied or treated someone badly, would be heavily punished… So many people instead did something that had severe consequences for Hikari, even if their intentions weren't evil.
You all may ask, what could be worse than being insulted, getting psychological and physical violence, or being treated like garbage? While it's true those things are cruel, at least when people does so, you know their true intentions, and you could technically recover after leaving middle or high school, right?
The only worst thing is… Making others think you care about them, only for those feelings to be a lie. That's what happened to Hikari, and that's what ended up breaking her.
Even I believed that they cared about us… They talked to us normally face to face, some people were overly kind, but they always were busy to talk to us via chat or when we were outside of school, though we didn't notice it…
When we graduated, Hikari couldn't make new friends at college, neither at her new workplace… But she told me that as long as she had me, her family, as well as some of our other high school friends, she would be fine.
They slowly started to drift away from us, they only talked to us when we started the conversation, or when it was our birthday or holidays like Christmas, Golden Week, Setsubun or Happy New Year, and eventually even that stopped too…
A guy who was friends with both of us asked me to come talk to him, and he told me that while he truly cared about us (as he was one of the few people that kept reaching out), most people ended up being kind because they were afraid of punishment or retaliation, or because they thought they were doing the right thing…
When Hikari found out, she ended up having a nervous breakdown, and was put into a mental hospital to recover… After months of treatment she was finally allowed to leave but, she lost the ability to make new connections or friends forever.
Aside from me, and that guy who told us the truth, as well as her family, she doesn't trust anyone. Some people from our past went to apologize to us, and said they wanted to be friends for real this time, but I ended up telling them that they shouldn't do something if they don't truly mean it, and that it's too late for that.
Hikari's aura is dim, dull and shattered… She will never be the same again, and despite never being "bullied" the way some quirkless people were, she ended up being as damaged as them…
Just imagine that kind of pain.
Imagine all the memories you had with many people in High School, like doing group projects at someone else's house, hanging out after class, going to their houses to play sports or videogames, going to school trips and so on, laughing with them, crying with them… You may even think that if you were to fail making friends somewhere else, you would at least have some people to back you up.
Only to find most of those memories were a lie in the best case, or that all of them were in the worst.
As people said… The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions.
Signed by: Akari (not my real name, just an alias)."
Fuck.
FUCK.
FUCK!
FUCK!
Katsuki had to take a deep breath to stop the tears flowing from his eyes, realizing that this is what Izuku ended up feeling after the traitor conflict started…
That all the good experiences they've ever had since they met, how they ended up being on better terms after finding out about One for All, ended up being a lie, and they waited until they could to leave him, and maybe if the whole traitor thing never happened, they would've done so after graduation.
After getting that information… Katsuki started to think that, for someone to pity you, to think of themselves as stronger or better than you, there must be a base for such thoughts.
What advantage did Pre-Quirk Izuku had over him?
Aside from his analysis notebooks… Nothing else.
He had a better physical condition, lots of confidence and self-esteem, acceptance from teachers and classmates (but in retrospective, he knew it was because they were afraid of him, or they expected him to mention Aldera after he graduated to gain popularity), as well as a loving family.
He even had Gorou and Daiki, but he never reciprocated their friendship, and now, it was too late… He never asked for their phones, and had no way to communicate with them as far as he knew. Still, if he had the chance, he would try to find them to properly apologize too and protect them.
Izuku only had Ms. Midoriya as someone who wasn't afraid to show compassion towards him, and three middle school classmates whom at least cared enough not to hurt him, but not enough to stand up for him against everyone else.
He went a decade without a single friend.
He withstood a decade of torture, bullying, being critiqued, mocked, hated, rejected and treated with shivering, cold indifference.
But at least no one pretended to care about him, as they never liked him, and they always made clear what their opinions towards him were, but somehow, they never did what Hikari's classmates did.
The rest of the posts he read gave him very bleak and dark perspectives…
How some quirkless people's parents, whom even had quirked children before, ended up becoming neglectful at best, or outright abusive at worst, because of the stigma they had to bear, as well as their loss of social life and acceptance.
How some quirkless people never knew what was like to know the love of a friend, nor the love of a parent towards them, as they paid the price for the sins of their ancestors actions decades ago…
How some quirkless people succumbed to mental illnesses such as severe depression, abandonment issues, eating disorders, dissociative disorders, paranoid personality disorder, borderline personality disorder and even suicide, among others.
After that, he went to his Facebook to check out his former classmate's profiles in their middle school group… And what he saw, it shocked him to his core.
Aside from Deku's supporters, whom kept a low profile, and Gorou and Daiki, whose profiles were deactivated, all of them ended up being so happy… They had many pictures smiling, laughing with their old friends, as well as new ones, acting as nothing ever happened, as they already moved on.
One final post he read gave him the answers he wanted to seek, despite being so short compared to others.
"Even if you leave a place where you were treated badly or abused, you will still be a Prisoner." By "xxxxxxxVoidless298".
"You will remember everything people has ever done to you, every single insult, hit, act of indifference, their laughs echoing in your mind, no matter how much you try to ignore that… While they'll move on eventually.
Their actions towards you were just a speck of dust in their lives, something not worthy of remembering, and they will keep living their lives, smiling, crying, laughing and just going on, not caring about the damage they inflicted on you or other people.
And that's the worst part.
As you eventually become a prisoner of your own mind, you lose your ability to make connections, you lose your self-esteem and self-love, you lose your sense of purpose and existence, you start to question that maybe, just maybe, you did something to deserve it.
Because, thinking that everyone else is wrong, that we live in a world of monsters, and only few people are truly kind, is very scary to think about.
And society itself, the same society that betrayed you and countless others, tells you that you must fix all the damage, not just your own mistakes and faults, but also the damage others inflicted on you, and should you fail to do so, you would be blamed as a toxic person, or someone lazy and/or unwilling to change.
There are genuine, toxic people that truly want to hurt others, that's true, but sometimes… Those we call "toxic", are hurt, damaged people who don't know better coping mechanisms, people who are drowning in pain, and don't know how to escape it."
It was too much…
That information was too much…
Because of that, Katsuki decided that he wanted to sleep for a while… At least he knew the reason he hated Izuku for so many years.
A mixture of factors, like a misunderstanding, thinking that his concern was pity, the environment he grew up with, focusing too much on quirks, strength and pride, as well as his own desire to win and aggressive tendencies, plus a small part of him didn't want Izuku to die in battle, plus that he never listened to his parents…
As he slept, his only thoughts were that he was willing to make everything right, to save Izuku from himself, to destroy Aldera Katsuki and save the original Kacchan from the darkness his heart was surrounded with…
Hello, the author here!
Don't think I will be able to post more chapters for a while, because I'm going to start college exams and there's a lot of stuff to study u_u
Also, it's true that in canon no one in Aldera cared about Izuku as far as we know, but I kinda made a similar story in Spanish a while ago, and took some of the names and headcanons from there to add some context XD
Hope you liked the chapter, please take care and have a good day! :D