0 - Saṃsāra
The sun was rising. Some of its brilliant rays infiltrated through the uncovered gaps of the window. A bright yellowish hue invaded spots, nooks and crannies of an otherwise dark room. Fresh morning air danced a slow waltz with the rustling curtains, executing a smooth back and forth movement. Outside, trees softly swayed to the rhythm of the blowing wind and people walked and talked following the tune of life.
The room in question belonged to a renowned hospital. Or that's what happy reassurances and transient gossips had so confidently guaranteed. For a place so supposedly busy and crowded, this particular room was empty. The deadness, the immobility exhibited by its only patient and resident created the illusion that there was no one at all. The electrocardiogram's beeping was proof that whoever was mutely lodging there was alive, and not a corpse waiting to be relocated to the morgue.
She distantly entertained the idea of being dead. Even others in similar predicaments sported more liveliness than she did. The nurses or doctors wouldn't convince her otherwise, no matter how much they smiled and promised her she was in the pinnacle of health. She may have been inhibited, but she was no fool.
She had observed how other patients moved, how they breathed, how they reacted, how they spoke. None were as inert as she was. It took a while, but she noticed sooner or later. Even that comatose man she once met while being transferred to another room looked more active in his stationary form than she did when awake.
At the end of it all, it wasn't her intention. She couldn't help it to be so… distracted. Focusing on the outside world was complicated. She tried and tried, per her caretakers' instructions. They told her that focusing on material things or topics of conversation would 'stimulate' her brain.
Her record time of concentration was about half a minute. Thirty seconds of existence before she zoned out yet again. She could recall whatever was said to her and ponder about it in detail, but her attention span was limited. If she didn't actively participate, her musings went somewhere else.
There was a lot of interesting things in the world. She was invested. But there was something lacking within her. And that something is what curtailed her connection to reality so easily. A feeling of emptiness settled inside her mind. It diverted her thoughts from the superficial to the essential.
A beep. A brush of a curtain. An echo of a conversation she had no part in.
Nothing.
She twisted her mouth. She failed to concentrate again. Then, she sighed.
She was trying to listen to the sounds around her, and imagine from where they came from, from whom or what, and why. She hadn't blinked at all during that time, believing it would keep her anchored to reality.
Who was she kidding? Her eyes weren't dysfunctional. The thing behind her eyes was.
The only meaningful exercise she could perform was staring blankly at anything, in hopes that some errand realization enlightened her. Maybe someday, something would spark the wrecked fuse inside her skull.
Until then, she was merely a bland decoration in the border of disappearance. She was so quiet, so riveted to her silent state of living. Inorganic objects accomplished more than her.
Except her, everything moved and sung. Everything, from the cars and their powerful engines grumbling in the distance, to the swishing blinds of her room voicing drowned whispers into her ear. Even the motes of dust floating in the air had something, however insignificant, to tell.
On occasions she felt compelled to halt her breathing, careful to not disturb the minuscule specks. Maybe they would appreciate the mindfulness. Maybe they would reward her with something else other than dreary reticence. And had she strained her ears, thinking the particles of dirt would share their knowledge of the world and her when she didn't have any?
Maybe she did. The doctors would never know, and that was her little secret. She got a few glimpses of what happened to those who claimed to hear voices that didn't exist. They were taken somewhere else, either by deceit or by force. Staying any longer in this dull prison that smelled of bleach and sour chemicals felt maddening. Perhaps the spark she sought was elsewhere. It must have been elsewhere. It must have been somewhere.
In the meantime, she still confided in her soulless companions. They had no personal interests, no ambitions. She had no doubts they would bless her with unequivocal wisdom. If only they could speak.
People were different. People had yappy mouths and polluted hearts. They talked a lot and said too little. Their moments of 'honesty' simply tainted their messages with misleading flavors, opinions she did not want. They only thing she wished for was the naked, colorless truth.
Unfortunately, humans also proved to be liars. Small or big, inconsequent or critical, but they spelt lies all the same. She only became aware of them when the facts were revealed to her by something else, however. It could be a sheet of paper that clearly contradicted the doctor's cheerful analysis of her well-being, or the frequent tittle-tattles of doctors and nurses in love who were actually cheating behind each other's backs.
She learned many things during her confinement. Some were undesirable. A few were useless. None conformed to the knowledge she really wanted to pursue. But the prolonged intervals of solitude granted her various ideas born from her experiences, and a lot of leisure time to think about them.
She reached surreal conclusions after spending so much time alone, thinking. What little of common sense she had left told her that her custody at the infirmary would be extended had she decided to share her weird deductions. One of them was particularly worrying.
The realization irked her mind whenever anyone decided to talk to her or around her. It turned the act of speaking into something scary, something unpleasant. She herself felt discouraged from using words. It was an easy way to mislead others, and be misled by others. Something as essential and natural to people's way of life, such as talking, just seemed alien or even harmful to her.
What defined the truth? What was a lie?
The dictionary shined some light on the matter. It also made things more confusing.
The truth was a statement in accordance with reality. Lies were false assertions, a distortion of the truth. It must have sounded so simple for the average John Doe.
However, lies were intrinsically born from the truth. If the truth was never discovered, would lies even exist? If everything was a lie, then where was the truth? To discover a falsehood, you would first need to discover the reality it was trying to conceal. If everyone lied, then no one was a liar, because the lie became reality and thus in unison with what was. And so, the truth was lost forever. Worse, it morphed into a lie, for the lie had become the truth and the truth, its enemy.
Lie, lie, and something will remain. Lie enough times, and the lie as truth shall reign.
Perhaps that was the reason she couldn't listen to people for too long. Her attention deficit was caused by something else, but she also contributed to that by not merrily swallowing every tidbit of information others tried to feed her.
The world itself didn't lie. The proofs were everywhere if she cared and dared to discover them all. The scratched walls had seen people come and go. The beds had lingering scents and wrinkled covers that once belonged to both the living and the dead. The floors still bared the trails of folks' destinations in the form of faded footsteps.
So much to learn and discover. So little to be said.
That's why she tried to listen to those which never spoke, those without life, those that mingled with the planet and were overlooked by virtually everyone. The possibility was slim. But they would probably tell her secrets no one else would ever disclose to her if she listened long enough. She was, all things considered, not much different from them. She was less, in some ways.
Right now, her new interviewee was the ceiling.
It was white, plain, empty. Nothing decorated its surface. Nothing distinguished it from other ceilings. A hollow canvass with a color so pure it was despairing.
It was like staring into a mirror.
This one-sided 'conversation' quickly turned into a staring competition between blank slates. And boy was she talented in the art of mindlessly glaring at nothing?
The ceiling shared the same stoical silence as its inanimate brethren. She longed for an answer as much as she enjoyed the soundless understanding there was between them. The ceiling probably had nothing to say. She also had nothing to say. Both were likely expecting someone with more color and not as tight-lipped to share the many gospels of life with them. In the meantime, they basked in the company of an existence similar to their own.
Her new choice of a talking partner wasn't random. She wanted it to be mildly meaningful today. After all, she was finally leaving the hospital.
The announcement didn't come off as a surprise. They couldn't keep her locked up permanently. Or at least that's what she thought before learning some stayed in the hospital for years. Fear always lingered in the back of her head, but at least it prompted her to act like she was a perfectly functional human being.
There was not a single day when she wasn't treated like glass ready to shatter from a careless touch. The cretins surrounding her expected she wouldn't notice. Mouths spewing a never-ending barrage of flattery about her recovery and worried looks that instantly expressed the opposite message were her daily bread. What people accomplished with their dishonest praises and misplaced concerns was making her angry.
She was disconnected from the world and herself. That was obvious. But there was a marked distance between 'disconnected' and 'handicapped'. All who saw her apparently settled for the latter option and thought she would be too dense to discern their intentions.
Soon after first waking up in the hospital, the motive behind the lies was unveiled.
She simply had already crossed the point of no return. Any attempt at healing her abnormality or even mitigating its effects would be futile.
Slips of the tongue that she heard as 'she's a lost cause' or 'what a poor thing' were awfully frequent between nurses who talked about her. It fitted her. She couldn't do anything else other than gazing into empty space. Thinking about how screwed up she was and how little could be done to change that was as productive as she could get.
She could probably live with it, given enough time. Starting everything anew didn't seem like a bad option either.
Yet, her will to get on with her life only eroded as time passed. She was a cracked mirror. Everybody was trying to gather the pieces for her, clumsily putting them together and then acting like nothing had ever happened. They refused to acknowledge she had been broken, burst open and grinded into glass dust. They refused to speak of what brought her to their nice little hospital with nice, lying nurses and nice, contradicting doctors. In their denying of her real condition, they also forbade her of getting a real solution.
Liquid swelled up at the corner of her eyes. A blink later, it evaded her, like everything else did.
Bitterness found shelter within the black box of her mind. It stayed when nothing else did, morphing and deforming into something uglier, unrecognizable.
Her face remained neutral and glazed through that and many other hideous emotions plaguing her head. The crowd wanted a spiritless puppet out of her and she would oblige. What else was she good for, anyway?
"Hmm…"
A sharp sting punctured the back of her neck. She winced and her depressing train of thoughts was suddenly lost, just as any other idea she ever conceived.
Goosebumps appeared on her left arm. Shivers forced her left eye to twitch and wink. Small hairs on her skin suddenly stood up, pointing to the left like arrows.
She closed both eyes, almost in a practiced gesture. Darkness and white dots flashed across her vision. A few more tears formed beneath her eyelids, product of her dry globes finally getting a deserved rest. She took in the newly formed penumbra and accepted its embrace. She melted into it, became one with it as all things lifeless in that room.
As she did, the countless blank points floating around in the shadows began moving in evident patterns. No longer were they a simple visual effect of closing her eyes too quickly, but genuine things that existed and shifted in the space before her. Through her shut eyelids, she was able to distinguish them nearly entirely. Only when they came across her line of 'sight' did they actually abandon their stasis and fluttered around.
Sometimes they twirled too quickly for her to focus on them. Sometimes they gently levitated in the hollow expanse. Each white sphere moved at different speeds, but all of them had the same destination in mind. They settled in the crevices and interstices of the murk. No nook and cranny, however secluded or tiny, was left unoccupied. What first looked like pale sand brainlessly gyrating on black paper gradually took a specific shape.
The shape stirred, contorted, until it finally turned into something identifiable.
She surveyed a tridimensional image of her hospital room.
Every single thing was perfectly outlined by snowy contours, down to the smallest, most inconsequential detail. All edges, vertexes and corners had been traced masterfully, with strokes that looked like something out of an architect's steady hand and precise mind. It was a bona fide blueprint of the room she was in. The in-betweens were dark and inky, transparent as the purest glass on earth despite their seemingly opaque and void silhouettes. She could see the pencils stored away within drawers or the little remedy flasks tightly secured inside a lone refrigerator.
The experience was something akin as seeing through a wall of glass; the eyes could journey where the hands couldn't.
She didn't know whether to laugh or cry upon thinking about it. Her eyes were closed.
She slowly turned her head. She did so till she had the door leading to the hallway just in front of her.
The hallways were also sketched out through the wall. She could detect a few nurses idling around or an injured person being transported on a stretcher in the distance. The people were outlined with much more detail than objects. They appeared like white shadows full of those tiny white orbs, vibrating and quivering ever so-slightly.
Her attention quickly diverted from them. Instead, she focused on the white shadow closest to her room, the one that first disquieted her. She scanned their shape and facial features. After that, she noticed this particular shadow had less swarms of chalky spheres inside compared to the others.
Someone was in the hallway. Only one or two seconds were needed for her to distinguish who it was.
"…Doctor," she softly whispered.
The door responded accordingly, alerting her of someone's presence as it clicked unlocked.
A sudden headache forced her eyes to open. She craned her neck slowly.
Someone peeked from the half-open gap of the entrance. Once he confirmed she was awake, he invited himself inside and saluted her with a smile.
"Howdy once again, young lady!" he greeted her. "I apologize for intruding unannounced. I know you dislike having visits."
She spared him a blank look.
This man was her doctor, the one who checked up on her the most. His name was… she didn't remember. He only told her one time and she only ever called him 'doctor'. He was an old man, somewhat short, bald, with thick round glasses and a bushy white moustache. The only attire she had ever seen him wear was a white coat. It was as bland of a costume as his fake cheerfulness.
"…Hello." She returned her head to its original position. "Is it that time already?"
"Why indeed, young lady," the doctor said as he nodded. Then he pulled out a clipboard he had been holding under his arm. He turned over some papers and pointedly analyzed them. "Your condition has been improving tremendously. It would be a waste to keep you trapped here when you could be having fun outside. You've got a life to live, after all."
Then, he leaned towards her and spoke in a low voice, as if sharing a secret.
"It really is a shame to let you march away, though. We rarely have patients so cooperative and the staff has enjoyed taking care of you," he said so with a wink and a chuckle. "But you didn't hear that from me! The doctor has no preferences and treats all his patients equally."
She produced a hum, non-committed as everything she did. Hunched postures and bags under bloodshot eyes were common amongst the medical staff. They probably slept a mere quarter of what she did. Someone like her was the ideal person to supervise. After all, did it matter if she was taken care of or not? She was broken already.
"Either way, I want to run a small test and double-check you're absolutely fine."
There it was. For all the congratulations and compliments she received from 'healing' so quickly, there still was something that would never be restored. She was damaged goods and everyone knew it. The really irritating part was that no one possessed the nerve to admit it. What could they accomplish by deceiving her so much?
…The answer was in plain sight. But the cruelty of it made her sick. She forced the thought of it down.
Swallowing bile and frustration, she tried to prop herself up. The doctor immediately put a hand on her shoulder and other beneath her back, helping her into a sitting position. She would have grimaced with rejection if making just about any facial expression didn't feel physically painful.
"First, let's remove these bothersome bandages. I'm sure you must be fed up, having them fastened for so long." The doctor began circling his hands around her head while stating the obvious. She did her faithful acting of a lifeless body and didn't resist him.
The old man started untying her binds little by little with practiced motions. The pressure that squished her head for so long finally subsided. A brief, sharp pain made her wince. Light-headedness subtly transformed into a full-blown headache. Twitches circling her eyes were the only proof of her discomfort, which she hid behind a dispassionate face.
Once the bandages were put aside, the doctor took ahold of her face and slowly started turning it around. He murmured under his breath for a full minute as he examined her in detail, before letting her go and nodding.
"Good, good. Your wound is fully closed. Physically, you couldn't be better, young lady."
The man grabbed something from one of his pockets - a small mirror. He offered it to her.
Without so much as an evanescent signal of his eyes, the doctor was urging her to see for herself. She didn't possess the courage to snatch the thing right away. She set her eyes on it with the guilelessness of a child first learning how to handle a knife. Her hands intertwined over each other and struggled, one twitching to grab the object and the other preventing the deed to be carried out. Her feelings weren't in a much different position, curiosity and dread wrestling to determine an outcome that she considered absolutely detestable.
A shaky index and thumb joined with the mirror between them. She guided it in the air, until it was in front of her.
The reflection exhibited pallid skin, and if not for slight pink on her cheeks, she might as well have been ashen in color. Short and wavy black hair flowing down her head made a marked contrast against the alabaster complexion. A blue-violet tint embellished the irises of slightly irritated, lackluster eyes.
Once upon a time, this person may have been considered a beautiful girl. Anyone looking at her now would only see a remnant of someone that wasn't there anymore. It was a degraded version, an incomplete design. She had read somewhere that people were unique and irreplaceable - no single human could be the same as another. And she… she was just that.
A unique and irreplaceable creature indeed, crippled and forever ruined.
Defective.
Scrappy.
Warped.
That wasn't a normal girl. That was the empty husk of a human.
She resisted the need to wail or break the mirror altogether, and inclined her head. With a hand, she moved pieces of hair away from her face.
It was hidden, but there it was - a jagged scar that began on one side of her head and ended just slightly above her ear. It clearly went deep and was considerably wide. Hair avoided it, leaving it in the open for the world to see.
She pursed her lips, unsure on how to react while seeing the source of all her grievances. How was she supposed to behave, anyway? One could only suffer the loss of something by comparison of what was once had. She had nothing. She was nothing.
That scar wasn't much of a scar as it was a birthmark.
"Now that we have taken care of that," suddenly said the doctor, interrupting her brooding, "I will ask you some simple questions to test your knowledge. If you have trouble remembering, you can always use the notebook I gave you to help yourself. You have been writing on it, am I correct?"
She squeezed out a feeble "yes".
The little notebook in question was resting on her nightstand. She glanced at it for a second and shook her head. She didn't need it. After spending so much time in that forsaken hospital, with people hammering deceptions into her head on a constant basis, she knew the script she had to enact by heart.
The doctor retrieved the mirror from her before she could toss it through the window. He put his hands behind his back and seemed pensive for a bit. Then he mumbled a question.
She knew were this was going. She believed herself to be confident enough. She could answer without the shattering the lie, could she?
Of course she couldn't. It took a particular type of dishonesty to believe one's falsehoods straight-faced.
"What is your name?"
And it simply took one phrase for her will to live to take a leap into the depths of hell.
It was the easiest question, at the same time the most horrendous of them all. Merely intoning the beginning of the syllable pricked her tongue. Something vile and foul was stuck in her throat. Every fiber of her being tried to stop her mouth from fabricating fiction. Her head hurt, and she felt nauseous. She pushed through the repulsion anyway, knowing any other response would have been detrimental.
With the determination one would need to stick a knife inside their gut, she took a deep, measured breath, and answered.
"Akira Hiragi."
Her tone had an evident tinge of trepidation clinging to it. A doubtful expression flashed across the doctor's face. It lasted an instant and they were already on the next question before she could mimic it out of pure habit. She was good at mimicking what she stared at. Ceilings. Plants. Dead people.
"When is your birthday?"
According to the accounts of many witnesses and others involved, everything occurred on a rather tragic 17 of July. That was the day she came into being. Nobody believed her, assuring that was the day she was hospitalized instead. Either way, the doctor was asking for Akira Hiragi's birthday, not hers.
"January 1st."
Saying it aloud proved to be complicated. It was like someone asked her to name the color of the sky and the only correct answer was 'red'. Intoning it slowly became a necessity. She didn't feel above biting off her own tongue to stop talking, but making a bloody mess didn't feel like the best option either. The interrogatory continued.
"Do you have relatives? What are their names?"
"Kyouya Hiragi and Minami Hiragi." The doctor tilted his head to one side. Akira fumbled a bit and looked aside. "…Father and mother. My parents."
Akira preferred calling them biological progenitors. They were just that and amounted to nothing of greater importance. She had no attachment to those people at all. They had come to visit her many times in the past. No one was pushier than them when it came to rehabilitating her. No one became more disappointed than them when they realized she was incorrigible. At the end they settled for the lesser evil and accepted her as she was - a blunder.
Some would mistake it for parental love. She thought of it as cynicism.
"How old are you?"
'Young enough to start all over again' was an option. After all, this was a distasteful farce - a theatre play put on by miserable and cruel souls to continue a tale that had already concluded. They couldn't let go of their deceased and opted for her as the medium to channel their inane fantasies where nothing had gone wrong.
Nobody cared about her.
It was only the reminiscence that came from her that held any true significance, if only a little.
An eternity of unjust captivity was as bad as a lifetime of pitying looks. Knowing a dubious answer would deem her as truly impaired, needy of further repairing, she chose to lie. She just wanted to get out.
Akira bit the inside of her cheek.
"14 years old."
The doctor bobbled his head in a weird movement. The next question took its sweet moments to appear. She gulped in anticipation, purposefully avoiding eye contact.
"Do you possess a Quirk?"
"I was born Quirkless."
Now she was telling half-truths and half-lies. She wasn't responding to the actual question. Akira Hiragi was born Quirkless. Her parents, people who knew her, and old medical records assured this as a proven fact.
But she knew things. The walls and the floors wanted to tell her something. They didn't have mouths, and that's why they didn't talk. But they shared their eyes with her to see things no one else saw. They allowed her to feel the same way they felt.
It could have been the gift. It could have been madness. It could have been a gross mix of both, almost proper and fitting of someone as distorted as her.
Akira suppressed an anxious wheeze. The doctor didn't want to know if she had an individuality or not. She would never tell him either. He wanted to know if she could identify herself correctly.
The girl contained a sigh of relief as the doctor accepted her response with yet another nod.
"I could perform more elaborate examinations…" At the sole mention of that possibility, she tensed up. "…But it would be wasteful. You have demonstrated your mental capabilities and reasoning are in tip-top condition. Your memory retention is also working pretty well. Even if you can't bring up personal evocations before the accident, you should have no trouble."
Akira deflated, sighing nervousness and hope away.
She should have no trouble.
Nobody could act like she actually had reasonable chances of living a normal life anymore.
Presumably sensing her mild distress, the doctor placed a hand on her shoulder again. He spoke in a pacifying tone, thinking it would ease worries. It did not.
"Don't look so downcast, young lady," he quietly insisted with a friendly expression. "Your sickness is a grave issue, and that is undeniable. But no person in this planet is defined by the problems they have. It's how they confront those difficulties and come out even stronger that matters. You have been a splendid, resilient human being during your recovery. I give you my word."
She could only find strength to bite down on her dry lip. She wanted to weep.
No one was defined by their problems. Was that really applicable to someone who existed as the result of a problem?
Nobody understood. Nobody would ever understand. The best she could do was pretend. After all, she was a living pretense.
The rest of the day passed in a monochrome blur. Before she even realized, the sun that so eagerly illuminated her prison had lost its luster. She regained some lucidity by the late afternoon, when a nurse informed her that she was finally free to go. It felt strange to wear anything else than the white robes of the ill, but she made the effort of changing into the normal clothes that had been brought to her. Giving the impression that she was sad of leaving was the last thing she wanted.
Akira disregarded best wishes and get-wells alike. They didn't matter much, coming from the people who treated her like she was completely disabled. She simply walked out of her room and mindlessly sauntered through nearly empty hallways. After making some wrong turns and having a nurse personally guide her, she finally made it to the hospital's reception room.
Akira looked from one side to another. There was nothing particularly remarkable at first glance. Then, a dark figure appeared amidst a sea of white walls and clothed people.
It was a woman. She was definitely mature, particularly tall too, but sported a sense of refined beauty in her. Her hair was pitch-black. Her eyes were dark as well, but upon closer inspection, the focused ones would distinguish a distinctive blue-violet gleam in them. She wore a simple black coat.
The woman simply stood there. She loitered around, at times seemingly avoiding other patients or doctors all the same.
Akira stood in a corner. Her feet twitched, but ultimately refused to step up.
She didn't have to move anyway. The woman noticed her before she could make up her mind, and began strolling in the girl's direction.
Akira's heart beat faster. Dizziness took over her mind. Cold sweat formed on one side of her forehead. She thought she would be shoved to the ground if she stayed in the woman's way. Her gallant stride seemed so rigid she felt she would be stepped over.
As soon as they were close enough, two long arms pulled Akira into a tight hug.
Ah. Of course, this was her mother. She wouldn't do something like that. Or so she hoped.
"Good afternoon. I'm glad to see you standing on your own two feet for a change, sweetheart."
The girl cringed.
"Your father and I missed you. Do forgive him for not being here to see you. His job has him shackled as usual."
Akira didn't return the affectionate gesture. She simply endured it. The result was an even tighter embrace. She felt the air abandoning her lungs.
"It's okay, though. You will have lots of time to catch up with us. We're finally having you back…"
She stayed still as the taller woman towered over her form. Akira felt a hand combing through her hair, mindfully avoiding touching her scar. At times the hand pulled strands in a forceful manner. It grabbed and pulled and Akira said nothing.
"Please don't leave ever again."
An order, disguised as a heartfelt plea. Her tone of voice was sweet and loving. Akira could almost hear the way her mother smiled, satisfied. Then she planted a kiss on her cheek and took her by the hand.
She decided to vanish in the gutters of her mind. Even after zoning out, her mother's smile remained where it was.
Papers signed and formalities exchanged, Akira was officially dismissed from the hospital and they went their merry way home. Medics and patients alike stared at her with some distant admiration shining in their eyes. Some saw her as an achievement of the health system and the successful efforts of its experts. Others looked up to her as an example of what they wanted to be - someone who surpassed her afflictions and returned to the place she belonged.
The reality was far bleaker.
She was just filling in someone else's shoes. She was a substitute.
Akira Hiragi—or what was left of her—finally left the hospital.
- ~Author's Note~ -
Hi! Nice to meet you all. I'm Rosso Angelo.
Let's start by saying I'm quite the crazy fan of My Hero Academia. I've followed the series when it began getting some considerable relevance, but was still relatively taking baby steps. Since then I've been gobbling up its manga and anime till there was nothing left to experience. I was never invested in superhero themes all that much, but this series got a special place in my heart. The way it handles things like the eternal fight between good versus evil, a society where superpowers are the norm, and what it truly means to be a hero aside from a simple job, is splendid like not many other works.
Having said that, I confess this story won't be particularly focused on heroes or villains - at least not at the beginning. I did want to write something purely focused on that. But given that the whole series already touches upon those conflicts and does it almost perfectly, I believed it was reasonable to write something a bit detached from the usual.
It would be risky of me to assume the genre of this work when it's so fresh, but I guess I'm aiming for some psychological thriller, mixed with lots of action and whatever else I come up with. Maybe romance! I'm a sucker for romance. Maybe I'll add it when you least expect it. And don't worry; if it comes to it, it won't be forced at all. I like my works to be coherent above all else. I shall control my impulses to add ridiculous stuff... for now.
All in all, expect some dark stuff to happen later, followed by bright moments and rainbows. I like happy conclusions.
Although this isn't my first time writing in this fandom, it is the first time I do it seriously. This project has some serious thought put into it from the get-go so I expect to update on a semi-regular basis (which is about a month each chapter or less, if college, writer's block or life don't get in the way). I make zero promises, though. My schedule sometimes is a complete mess, and my inspiration isn't as consistent as I would like it to be. I can work my butt off and still won't update until I'm complete satisfied with what I write.
The update time may shrink based on the support this story has and the reviews I get. Reviews are fuel for my brain. As a wise friend of mine said, I'll do a backflip and probably destroy my back for reviews. So gimme lots of them, pls. I wanna know what reviewer-senpai thinks about my story.
(On all seriousness, please review if you have the time. It helps me improve as a writer and that's my main goal.)
With nothing else to say, I hope you enjoy the crazy nonsense I write.
Needless to say, I do not own My hero Academia.
Until next time!
(04/02/2021)