Chapter Text
Hitoshi is almost sixteen when it happens, but he hoped it never would. Never go so far that his life depended on him finally giving up, and leaving. Four more months and he would have been able to leave on his own. Freely by his own ambition apply for UA and give his dreams a chance to become his life. Walk away and start over with a light breaking the horizon. Four months and he would have made it. Even if the possibility of him getting into the hero program was slim, next to nothing really. He had hope and absolutely the grades to at the very least get a spot in the general course. Once admitted as a general student he could work his way up, compete in the sports festival, earn favor among the teachers, find friends and connections. Build himself a life there, find himself a future as a hero.
He swallows the blood pouring down the back of his throat. His nose thoroughly broken. Gagging at the metallic taste filling his mouth he tries not to throw up as it would most certainly make him pass out. If not because of his ribs, cracked and broken, because of the blood loss making his vision blurry and his thoughts slowing. He has to focus. There is no time, no time at all to think of the pain. There was no future in that moment, not for Hitoshi Hitoshi, only the thought that this was it. The horizon darkening, long overdue, he had been cutting it on the edge of luck for so long.
The man at the centre of Hitoshi’s vision moves towards him again, and the purple headed teen closes his eyes with the intention to blink, but they stay closed and in a moment too long he feels his resolve waiver and ebb out. The black all-consuming, falling.
The events of that night have been years in the making, but it does not make it hurt any less.
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To be a hero was the only dream Shinsou Hitoshi ever had. To save kids on the street, to save the girls walking through the night, to prove to the world that he could.
His life as a foster kid was never great. Sent from home to home to desolate child care institutions in far away prefectures. Where every other child over fifteen either ran away or as one girl he’d lived with, and actually talked to a couple of times, simply walked into the ocean. Only to be found drifting at the bottom of a dam. Foster kids that had the bad luck of outgrowing being cute, or the unfortunate lot in life to be born with a useless or dangerous quirk. They were, him included, beyond the help of idealistically detached social workers and dead eyed foster parents, with five to ten kids stuffed in attics and basement bedrooms. The state issued checks being the only thing keeping the adults away from financial ruin. He knows that there are good parents and adults in the world, he knows this but they are very rare.
Hitoshi Hitoshi is no stranger to abuse, his only memories of his mother were crying and shouting. He met his first foster parents at the age of five, but he doesn’t remember much of his childhood even after that. Most homes looked and felt alike. You are cold, you are hungry and you are alway alone. Always quiet. Questions were off limits, in every home that was the one rule. distrust and fearful eyes.
But of course he used it. Every child does when they grow up, how else can you learn? He would walk the streets at night, going by the principle that if a stranger asked him a question, he could ask one back. Maybe a thuggish looking man would come up and ask him what he was doing walking around at night, and he’d ask if the guy had a cigarette or something similar. And Hitoshi would simply make the thug, the vagrant, the runaway or the prostitute of the night sit down with him and tell him about their day. He had heard a lot of interesting things during those nights, some sad, some funny, some downright criminal. Afterward he always gave them something warm to eat, a tip for where they could stay for the night, leaving pamphlets on rehabilitation centers or the address of an shelter. But he never let them remember him, while he learned about the world the only way he thought he could. His defence was always that no one would help him master his quirk and how could he ever hope to become a hero and get into UA without a basic knowledge of what his quirk could do. Sometimes he’d get beat up or mugged but that’s just life and the risks always felt like they were worth it. To learn to grow.
Naturally this had all transpired when Hitoshi lived with the Kobayashi family, a rather nice but cold and uninterested couple with three other foster kids all under the age of seven. Hitoshi was thirteen, had lived with them for the last eight months and his dream of UA had begun to crystallize. There was a printed black and white newspaper article he had found online on Eraserhead, and Hitoshi was obsessed. Oh how he longed for the future at that time. Eraserhead was the exact type of hero he wanted to be. Life was not great but it was liveable.
And then one day Mrs Kobayashi was diagnosed with cancer and that life simply fell apart. The cancer was treatable but hard to beat and the expenses grew and the time the couple had for the kids living with them lessened and they were moved to new homes. At least the little ones were. Hitoshi, being somewhat of a teen and framed as a problem child with his dangerous quirk and habit of sneaking out, was not. Although the Kobayashis never cared about that and even let him earn some money on his own as an errand boy, or wash dishes or help old ladies with their groceries after school.
The new social worker assigned to him definitely cared and disapproved. She probably thought he was out stealing or using his quirk for evil… which if she had known the truth would have argued that he was doing just that. The social worker placed him in a group home, and for four weeks he was basically in solitary confinement. The other kids inexplicably hated him from the first day, egged on by the adults' poorly hidden fear. The group home was too far away from his school for his continued attendance, and this placement was only temporary so he didn't get a new school. He was not allowed to talk, not allowed to go outside unattended, and with the open hostility of the other kids he stayed quiet in his bed or if he had to in a forgotten corner.
At times they locked him in a utility closet for hours on end. He tried to get used to the poor food and oppressing silence that he knew he had experienced before. He tried not to think of the past and instead tried to focus on the future at the end of the tunnel, a tunnel that grew longer for each day.
Then one day he was placed in a home, to his surprise not at all far away from UA. It was a whole house, not big by any means but nice in an worn but meticulously kept kind of way. Clean, tastefully furnished but cold. Much like his first impression of Mrs and Mr Fujiwara. His social worker seemed convinced that this was the perfect home for him, that as much as anything set him on edge. He was sent here for them to straighten him out, to give him what he needed. According to the Social worker he needed discipline, a firm hand, something to ground him in reality. No silly dreams as she liked to call his futile attempts to explain his plans to apply to UA.
At first it didn’t seem too bad. There were strict rules, a lot of shores, and high demands on his grades and school attendance. After a while this evolved into a near obsession with his coming and going, there was no time to do anything between the end of school and the start of his curfew. This made it impossible for him to get a job, to participate in after school activities and to make any attempt to make friends outside of class. They made him sign up for advanced classes in the subjects he had previously shown to be good at like social sciences and literature and take extra work in subjects he struggled in like biology and maths. Oh how he struggled with maths, it was just hard and tediously time consuming. Give him a random subject in hero history or political theory and he would gladly bullshit his way through it until the next morning and score above average.
They did this not because they cared about his grades or anything to do with him personally. No, the obsession with school work was a way to control him. Take away all his free time. His responsibilities around the house only seem to grow. He made breakfast and lunch boxes for Mr Fujiwara, Hitoshi himself had to get by with whatever was left from the day before which was hard seeing as Mrs Fujiwara was meticulously picky about money and left-over food was the same wasted money in her mind.
Running at the last minute to the bus that took him to the train and then running to his school was as much outdoor training he would ever get in the Fujiwara household. School was in many ways a free zone away from the constant surveillance state that was his current home. No instead, at school he was invisible. He was the new kid with a scary quirk. In the beginning there were attempts of bullying mostly because he was quiet, weird and you know new and it was a fairly small school so it was a sort of customary bullying. But then they had an assembly his second week and they made him walk up on the stage and tell them his name and quirk and how it worked. His own fear and mortification was nothing compared to the fear and disgust in the eyes looking back at him. The policy became as follows; teachers gave him no attention and although they gave him fair grades it was with a studied indifference and cold detachment. The students he knew were curious and sometimes angry about his existence but they were told to stay away from him by their parents. Hitoshi had overheard a group of boys in the corridor complaining that if they were seen talking to him they’d get grounded or yelled at or punished. The school had no time for the trouble he represented. So he lived a solitary life at school and not even the bruises that began to appear made them look twice at him.
The abuse came as he knew it would with slaps for not doing his homework fast enough, getting grabbed and shacked so hard it left finger shaped bruises on his arms when he cleaned too slowly, or getting choked because he forgot himself and asked a direct question. They still allowed him to speak a little, he could answer questions. Preferably yes and no. In the late stages of his time at the house, Mr Fujiwara often encouraged him to beg and scream during the increasing physical abuse.
Now, four months away from the UA entrance exam it came to a tipping point. There was an accumulation of this abuse that led to that night. On all fronts that day had been a bad day, leading to a terrible evening, exploding in a disastrous night. Well mostly for Hitoshi, who exhausted and worn down from years of abuse and loneliness made a mistake.