#hero aca

“Can I still be a hero even if I’m quirkless?”

Toshinori stopped mid launch. He shouldn’t have. He was running out of time. He should take what measly few seconds he can rake together from his quirk and make a heroic exit.

His lung hurt. That sentence in of itself was a conundrum.

There was nothing to hurt.

So then why did it ache so much right now?

He turned back and looked at the kid, still mumbling on. Pain throbbed up and down his body like a stampeding herd. Very big horses with very big, spiked hooves made of staples and stitches and grafts.

He looked down and he did not see a kid.

He saw bruised knuckles. He saw chipped teeth. He saw callouses and scars and lips and twitches when a sound was just a bit too much like the bang of a gun.

He heard desperate pleas for help. He heard people dying. Horrible, terrible deaths. He heard bodies make sounds that no body should be able to make.

He smelled gunpowder and ozone and the fresh iron of blood and the unmistakable miasma of rotting carcasses and infected wounds and the even more horrid stench of gauze and disinfectant and hospitals and bodies being cremated.

He did not hear whatever the boy said next.

He heard, I leave the rest to you, All Might.

He thought about the rest.

He thought about sleepless nights when by the fourth day or so, everything started to lose meaning. When you no longer are tired you’re just— no longer are anything.

He thought about Torino’s feet meeting his jaw again and again and again. How it feels to swish mouthfuls of teeth and blood diluted saliva around before spitting them and getting up again.

It was always again. Never finally.

He thought about crying. Alone. He thought about fingers digging into fingers in search of someone to hold but finding only his own crooked, calloused hands.

He felt the thin bones of a skull crackling underneath those same desperate fingers like sacramental bread. He felt how soft everyone was underneath that thin, thin layer of measly bone.

Even the most rotten of people.

All he wished was to use those hands to help and all he did was sully them in blood.

Toshinori deflated.

The kid, of course, freaked out. Toshinori just— sighed. He couldn’t find it in himself to be bothered for some reason. He rarely could these days. They were just a red and blue and yellow mishmash of fights he rushed and press interviews he fled and fans he could not spare time and colleagues he no longer knew how to address.

And when you mush together so many colours, in the end, it all just becomes a murky grey.

Toshinori blinked to banish all that grey away and set on reassuring the kid that he was, in fact, the ‘real’ All Might. In the whatever flesh he still had on his bones pierced by hero-grade titanium implants.

The horror on the middle school student’s face somehow made his nonexistent side hurt all the more. Something in there bled still. And Toshinori, for all his raging inner fire, did not know how to cauterise it.

The kid was small. Barely five feet. Face soft and squishy, eyes sparkling and round even if they were red from crying and a bit jittery from residue adrenaline. His hands were delicate, fingers all straight and dainty. The only imperfection on them was a writer’s bump.

His smile was wobbly but it was honest.

Toshinori opened his mouth to say the words. To shove all that down and indulge this kid like he did all the others. Yes, even quirkless ones. He said to them what he himself would have liked to hear way back.

But then he closed it. The kid stared at him, at his hollow vessel of a body with anticipation exuding from every pore like an admiration-fuelled furnace.

He was so young.

He was so innocent.

Toshinori imagined that frame a few years from now. Bulkier but also getting kinda crooked. He imagined how those dainty hands would look covered in blood and dirt, twisted and slightly shaking from damage sustained.

He imagined those teeth kicked in, those eyes blackened, those protruding collar bones broken and remade again and again until there wasn’t a part of this child not contorted by the greatest profession of them all.

He imagined looking into those impossibly large eyes and seeing a lingering shadow behind them. A shadow of guilt and anger and fear.

He imagined the green-haired boy bleeding out on the ground with his entire insides splayed like a morbid art piece and he decided to spare a life.