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You are a child.
You are three years old, and men on TV wield the power of gods at the tips of their fingers. They are praised (admired, revered, worshiped) for performing the bare-bones of a profession that was never meant to exist in the first place.
You watch as a deity - never a man, not anymore, because who would be able to perceive the Symbol of Peace as just another one of us, when the spotlight at his back shines bright enough to blind? - rises from rubble and fire, and you hope, long before you can fully grasp the concept of hoping; decide your greatest wish is to be like them, and you do not understand your mothers fearful gaze, when you receive it.
You (are) were child.
The age of five comes and goes, and the power you receive is none at all. At such a young age you can’t really understand why your peers ridicule you, or why the teachers elect to do nothing about it, but you will learn, soon enough.
That year, the faces of the ‘gods’ plastered on the sides of buildings and the lengths of billboards feel mocking instead of comforting, the action-figures on your shelves now make you weary.
It isn’t much later then your diagnosis - quirkless, spoken like a sickness, a disease - that the boy you still call your best friend beats you to the ground and leaves you to die. That day, you realize that no one is going to save you.
One day you were a child, and then the next one you weren’t.
You were a child, and then you were quirkless.
Not all men are created equal in the first place, but you barely count as human. You just hadn’t realized it until that moment.
You are quirkless.
You are quirkless, and you are nine years old but that doesn’t matter anymore, because people like you aren’t worth as much as everyone else. You know that, because now that your mom works late hours, after dad left to work in the United States (you find it’s not hard to pretend you believe the lie you were told, when you want it to be true just as much as the liar), you have a lot more hours to browse your computer alone. It takes you a while to find it, but there are news articles with people like you in them. ‘Thirty-one quirkless gone missing in Shibuya, police have no leads.’, ‘Quirkless suicide epidemic, tragedy or act of higher power?’, ‘Fifty-six-year-old quirkless arrested for fraud, lied about quirk for years?!’.
You planned to find something nice to show your mom, when she came back from work (if only just so she stops crying, stops apologizing for giving birth to you, stops looking at you with only regret). It turns out you aren’t able to. Figures.
You are quirkless.
It hasn’t been long since your eleventh birthday, and you have not seen your mother in a while (she’s busy, is the excuse you tell yourself every time you wake up to a post-it note and a bento-box). It’s a slow, painful, and horrible, and a long time coming, but you would be hard pressed to say you see her more then once or twice every month (‘it’s okay,’ you say into the crushing loneliness of your own home, ‘she still loves you’. You pretend it doesn’t taste like a lie, every time you hear it).
To fill the hollowness that perseveres where the money in the counter and the food in the fridge cannot reach, you begin texting message-boards and forums made for other people like you. You make friends for the first time in years, but it’s a double edged sword, when the suicide rate for quirkless people is still just over 50 %.
You are eleven, when you lose three of your new friends to suicide within the same week (Jun on Sunday, Akio on Wednesday, Hifumi on Friday, almost perfectly timed, like some sort of sick joke, where you are somehow the punchline). You remember being the one to try to talk them down, remember being the one to fail them.
You are eleven when you first wonder what it would be like to jump (to fall, to fly even for just a moment). The fencing is cold against the palms of your hands, and it’s taller then you, but it wouldn’t be too difficult to climb over. You don’t. Climb over it, that is.
You are eleven when you find out you are a coward.
You are quirkless.
Fourteen is when someone first tells you you’d be better off dead to your face. Fourteen is when the god you’ve worshiped becomes a man in front of your eyes, it’s when the man who was once a god tells you what you’ve always known (and you don’t know why it still hurts so much to hear it). Fourteen is when you decide to die. Fourteen is when you get offered a quirk and a chance at the unachievable, and it’s when you accept it on the spot. Fourteen is when you get your life back, and loose so much at it’s cost, even if you don’t realize it quite yet.
You (are) were quirkless. You are now a legacy to uphold.
You have given it your blood, sweat, and tears, and for once it all has come to fruition. You have been granted a spot at the school of your dreams, and a legacy fit for a god (- what you don’t see, is what you’ve always known, is what you’ll learn by blood spilt because you’ve refused to learn by hand of fate: you are no more than human -). You are not quirkless anymore, by force of a gift, and you celebrate it for all of a night. You mother hugged you for the first time in half a year - She apologized! -, and all is good.
That is until the friends you have, the ones that (are) were like you (the ones you have been slowly pushing away. When did you start doing that? When did you start to think yourself too good for the friends you have? The people who know you best in the world?), message you like they do every night. They ask about the exam. Wish you the best of luck. They root for you like no one else has. It is then that you realize the kind of betrayal you have committed. Now, their kind words feel like hot, scorching guilt on your chest, their encouragement feels regret deep in your stomach.
Your legacy feels like (a burden) an ultimatum.
You do not message back.
The days go by, their messaging gets more frantic, but you cannot bring yourself to face what you did, or lie to the people you’ve betrayed. Their fear turns to anger, turns to hurt, turns to grief. You read their final goodbyes and know what they think happened, because you’ve had to write the same messages, draw the same conclusions, when there was nothing else left to think.
In a way, you know they are right. The quirkless boy they knew is gone. You have killed him.
You are a legacy to uphold.
You are fifteen when your homeroom teacher tells you and your classmates you are still children.
You get it, you really do.
Your classmates are children (children training to be good little soldiers, children headed to a war they have no part it, children, children, children), so he looks to their side, and sees fluffy green hair, a good quirk, and dusted freckles on baby-fat cheeks, and he thinks ‘child’. Sometimes you wish he were right, but he isn’t (can’t be). You were a child, then you were quirkless, and now you are a legacy you have to uphold.
(Legacy. Legacy of hope, legacy of heroes, legacy of nine – ‘the ninth,’ sing the shadows that now live in your dreams, their voices are seven, or eight, and then they are one, ‘so, you are the ninth’; the shadows merge, and separate, feel terrifyingly unnatural in the most comforting, natural way. You wonder if you are finally going insane -).
You (are) were a legacy to uphold.
It is two years later when it all comes to an end.
You engage in battle like the warrior you were never meant to be, you take down enemy line after enemy line with practiced ease (after the hundredth time it happens, you no longer wonder about the fatalities, all the destruction and devastation you leave behind in your wake, or the concerning amount of blood that covers you like war-paint – yours, theirs, your comrades, the civilians’ -, you can’t find it in yourself to care the way you know you would have, one day. You stride forward at inhuman speeds, and pretend you do not feel like the worst kind of monster for it), and you triumph above all adversity.
You are seventeen when you die. They call your tragedy ‘heroic’.
You are seventeen when you die, alone and afraid, and they call you the Beacon of Hope (it’s wrong, wrong, wrong, so, horribly wrong, but the only people that will know it, the only people to ever truly know you in life will never even know your name. To them, you’ve been dead for three years, and they are better for it. You liked the person you became even less then who you used to be before it all happened). The people who utter your alias like a prayer (not your name, never your name -- to history, you will forever be nameless) will never know how scared you were, with your fist raised to the air, as you realized that death drew near. They will never know how much pain you were in, being rushed to the hospital, they will never know the fatal blow only struck true because you hesitated for a second too long, wondering if living beyond the Final Siege was really worth it (if a glorious death, fitting to end a legacy, would not be better then a life as someone you cannot bear to be). They will never know the days you spent over-working yourself until your hands bled, or how you cried for hours the first time someone celebrated your birthday in nearly a decade. They will also never know of the people you elected to leave behind. They will never know of your betrayal.
Though perhaps that is how it was meant to be. For you to die as a stranger to the world. Become immortalized as a Hero, a Beacon, a God.
They will never acknowledge it, and neither did you, but in the end, you were just a child, weren’t you?