Chapter Text
The world isn't black and white, and Shouta learned that at a very young age. When his quirk activated two months before his fourth birthday and sequentially caused his father to drop the laundry he'd been levitating by his side all over the family cat, Shouta was cursed to the grey edges of the world. His parents had celebrated his coming of age with bittersweet smiles that night, but it wasn't until years later that Shouta recognized that look in their eyes.
A child born to a hero and ex-villain, cursed with a hybrid of their powers wasn't something they had ever wanted.
It wasn't as if his home had been short of love. If anything, it overflowed the little cramped apartment he'd grown up in. They'd been a happy family. His mother worked from home as a writer, and sometimes when his father was off hero-duty the three of them would pile together on his parent's bed and watch movies until Shouta fell asleep, caged in the safety of his parent's arms. In the morning, Shouta would watch his parents dance and laugh in the kitchen while making breakfast and would cheer when his father gave into the puppy eyes of his wife and son begging for him to sing to the radio for them.
When he was old enough, his mother began homeschooling him. His parents told him it was because his mother would be lonely without him at home to keep her company. They bought him shelves upon shelves of books, and he spent long, cozy afternoons curled up with his mother in the living room reading together. Sometimes they would take day trips out to museums and parks. He loved those days the most, because after spending a long exciting day out, him and his mother would return home just in time to meet his father coming in, and they would order takeout instead of cooking.
Even with all this good, Shouta wasn't never blinded to the world. Even as a small child, he wasn't gullible like most kids his age, was always told he was too smart for his own good. And he knew something wasn't right. He heard the neighbors' whispers in the hall, saw the way they stared at him and his mother when they left the apartment.
"If that whore didn't spread herself around they surely wouldn't let someone like her live here, even if she slept her way into a hero's bed. That brat of hers is just going to end up the same way she did, with those same bloody eyes. Little bastard is just like her."
He asked his mother once what their neighbors meant, what those words were, and she responded with just a smile and a shake of the head, telling him it was nothing for him to worry about. The sadness in her tone didn't escape him though. He may not have known what the neighbors were talking about, but even his child mind knew that they weren't like the others around them.
Some nights he would hear his mother cry herself to sleep in his father's arms from his room. Some nights he would hear his father quietly cursing their neighbors with words Shouta didn't know but recognized that the neighbors themselves used them. Some days, his parents would hold him close and assure him they would keep him safe, but never told him safe from what when he asked. They would tell him it wasn't his fault the neighbors looked at him the way they did, but they wouldn't tell him why they looked at him that way.
When Shouta was eight and old enough to use the computer all on his own, he looked up his own mother's name for the first time. He wasn't entirely shocked at what he found.
An old mugshot, an article reporting a string of violent gang crimes linked to his own mother's name, and an entire gossip article talking about the marriage between his parents, nasty words spouted towards his mother for stealing his father away, and praise towards his father for taking up the job of "keeping the villain in line". He'd suspected this. His suspicions didn't prepare him for the reality however. None of the neighbors' ugly stares and whispered words prepared him for it.
He didn't speak to his parents for a week, until he broke down during dinner. He cried in his parents arms that night until he passed out from the exhaustion.
The next day they had told him everything for the first time. How his maternal grandparents had been villains themselves, how his mother had known no other life outside of villainy until she had met his father across the battle lines. How her own parents had left her behind to save themselves, and how they had been caught a month after in a bank robbery gone wrong anyways.
They told him a love story, of how his father had fought for her freedom, how he had pulled in a dozen favors to prove that she'd been raised to this life and deserved rehabilitation rather than prison, and how his mother found love and warmth in the hero who'd fought the system for her.
They told him about the private little wedding with only his father's friends attending, welcoming his mother with open arms and warm smiles, and how a year later they'd been blessed with a child with his father's hair and his mother's eyes and named him Shouta, and even though the world was a mean place, there would always be love and warmth if you looked hard enough.
The neighbors' harsh eyes and whispered curses didn't feel so bad when Shouta knew the truth.
Only a few months after, he tentatively asked his mother if he could be a hero.
"Papa's a hero, and he saved you. I wanna be a hero, too."
She'd cried and told him she would be with him every step of the way. They added meditation and yoga with his father and martial arts with his mother in between his regular lessons.
When Shouta was 10, a new family moved in down the hall. They weren't like the other neighbors, and on their first day, they went up and down the hall introducing themselves. Shouta had never met people quite like them. The two women introduced themselves as the Yamadas, and had brought along a boy Shouta's age, with the brightest yellow hair and the strangest green eyes Shouta had ever seen. Shouta had only met a few other kids before, and they'd all belonged to his other neighbors who had ushered them away and told them mean things about Shouta that weren't true.
Shouta had expected this to be the same, but the strange blonde boy, Hizashi, stuck himself to Shouta like glue. During that first meeting, the boy had introduced himself and when Shouta had tried to ignore him, knowing where this would end up anyways, the boy just sat himself down beside Shouta on his family's old couch and yammered his ear off about nothing and everything while their parents chatted in the kitchen.
After that first meeting, the boy was suddenly around all the time. If they passed each other in the hall, Hizashi would shout his greetings, regardless of Shouta's efforts to act like the blonde didn't exist. Sometimes on weekends, their parents would all meet up in one of the apartments to chat or share dinner, and one of the boys would be dragged along, Shouta significantly less enthusiastic about the meetings than Hizashi.
Shouta can't remember when, but at some point, those meetups became less and less grueling. At some point, Hizashi's constant chattering was met by Shouta's own, significantly quieter words. And at some point, instead of being dragged to meetings, Shouta started to look forward to spending time with the blonde.
When Hizashi first saw Shouta's quirk in action, when Shouta instinctively erased Hizashi's excited shout before it could break the windows, the disgust and anger never came. Shouta was met with a million even more excited questions about it, and a rushed promise to become heroes together.
Hizashi glued himself to Shouta's side, but at some point Shouta stuck right to him as well.
When Shouta was 12, the world took his parents from him in the hands of a misguided vigilante, who had been convinced his mother hadn't paid for her crimes. His father had jumped between his mother and the enraged vigilante but hadn't been strong enough to stop the man. It didn't save his mother, who was killed right after his father. They'd been out on a date, celebrating their 13th anniversary.
Shouta was staying the night at the Yamadas' apartment when the news reported the incident, loud and blaring right into the living room as Hizashi and him were scarfing down their dinner. Hizashi's mothers weren't fast enough to change the channel before Shouta saw.
After a long and gruesome trial, the vigilante received ten years in prison and 200 hours of community service once he was released. For vigilantism. The killer was never tried for the murder.
The Yamadas took him in. Shouta's father had no living family, and his mother's only family had been her parents, still in prison for organized villainy. The moment the question of where he would go came up, Hizashi's mothers took one look at each other and said they would take him, if he would be okay with that. There was no question in Shouta's mind, so he went home with them.
Shouta didn't remember much after that. The now family of four had to move from the apartments. Hizashi's mothers said the apartment was too small for four people, but they all felt the loss of Shouta's parents. They had stopped taking the elevator and instead used the stairs, because using the elevator meant walking past Shouta's still empty childhood home. So instead of staying in a tiny apartment in a building full of bittersweet memories, they packed up and moved to a little two story, three-bedroom home in a tiny neighborhood, with a yard just big enough for Shouta to practice his parents' lessons.
Public school wasn't something Shouta had been prepared for on top of the host of other things he was struggling with without his parents. Without his mother to teach him any longer, Shouta was enrolled with Hizashi in the nearest Junior High.
He was okay for the first month. Being naturally quiet as he was, he faded into the background while Hizashi took the brunt of the other students' interest, and he wouldn't have it any other way. He was content to stick near Hizashi's side like a shadow, to be introduced by Hizashi as "my brother Shouta", to be ignored when the other students would realize he wouldn't talk to them if Hizashi wasn't already in the conversation.
But then, somehow, his family history got leaked, and things changed. Hizashi tried all he could, would defend Shouta at every chance, but that didn't change the fact that whispers and rumors floated around the school now. Shouta would come to school and find the word villain scratched into his desk, and his locker would be filled with cruel notes.
At first, nobody dared do anything to Shouta with Hizashi in sight. Everyone liked the blonde, and didn't want to lose him as a friend. But over the months, the whispers that followed him evolved into shoving in the hallway, knocked over lunches, and cruel notes shoved into his locker and desk.
The day Shouta came home with a blackeye because Hizashi had been gone to a doctor appointment was the day the Yamada parents went to the principal to file a complaint. They were told the teachers hadn't witnessed any such "alleged" events. Shouta was taken home with apologies and promises from Hizashi's moms to make sure it was taken care of.
Shouta knew they couldn't do anything for a villain's son.
Applying for Yuuei with Hizashi was a given. Actually getting in wasn't. They both aced the written exam, had spent months studying together late into the night. But the practical exam was biased. As much as Shouta had known going in that he would completely bomb it, facing robots with only his bare hands and a quirk useless against non-quirked enemies, it didn't stop the bitter anger from following him home that day.
It didn't slow him though. He'd told his parents he'd be a hero, that he'd make them proud, and through it all, that hadn't changed a bit. So, when Hizashi got into the hero course and Shouta was placed in General Education, he threw himself even deeper into his personal training.
He had one chance to impress his teachers at the Sports Festival, and there was no way he was going to lose.