Chapter Text
It was hard to watch with that blinding sunlight, Shouta remembers. He gazed fixedly through squinting eyes at the pro hero, poised on the burning building. Their silhouette was framed by sun behind them. Despite the smoke, the it still shimmered through. I want to be encapsulated in the same warmth one day, Shouta thought.
An arm came between him and the scene. “Get back, please. It’s not safe for civilians at a close distance,” called one of the sidekicks. Upon seeing the Shouta’s curious eyes, the sidekick’s serious expression softened to a smile. “We heroes need space to do our work, you know.”
Shouta, being in the very front, went back a few feeble steps, trying to avoid stepping on anyone’s feet. He wanted to protect his spot at the front as much as possible.
Shouta heard a roaring cheer from the crowd behind him, signaling him to glance back up at the spectacle. Utilizing her formation quirk, the hero had begun to make a walkway from the top floor of the structure, carefully stepping down from every stair synthesized. She hitched a little girl who found security in burying her face in the hero’s back, probably nervous about how any other person she would see would be the size of little pill bugs.
Shouta could barely see it, the sun was irritably shining back right where all the action was, as if it wanted him to look away. He refused, focusing harder, raising a hand to shade his face.
Just then, the hero stepped down again, only to find no stair to support her weight. The staircase behind her began to crumble.
The mortified gasp of the crowd almost drowned out the the high pitched scream, followed by a soft but gut-wrenching thud.
The noise reverberated through Shouta’s small frame, and for a second, he forgot how to breathe, his eyes reverting to a dull black, hair falling back into place at his sides. Out from behind him pairs of hands began shoving, grabbing, pulling at him. Masses of cloth and people suffocated him and his sight, a disadvantage of his short stature. Maybe he should be thankful, to be spared the sight of that twisted body for any longer.
Shouta sobbed in the pitch black of his room, not wishing to be seen, not wishing to see. The dark image of the little girl burned in his eyelids just like the sun had that day. Tangled in crumpled bedsheets, he wept and gasped until his eyes ran dry.
Shouta was only 10 years old.
***
It was more rational, Shouta thought, to simply avert his eyes, if he wanted to avoid the same incident from ever happening again.
And he wanted to. Very very much.
The next day at school was not very pleasant. Although Shouta usually preferred a cloudy day, that morning he felt that the sun hid behind those clouds, ashamed of him.
The classroom chatter was filled with talk of the incident, classmates throwing the topic left and right, without a care. It felt like the whole world was constantly shoving the crime in his face, or maybe they always did and only now he actually cared. Shouta doesn’t know, and he wishes he couldn’t didn’t care so much.
Their wretched tones blended in with the ones of the media on television that morning. What happened here? How do you feel? Did you see it?
Do you have any words for victim’s family?
Shouta had shut off the TV before the voices could continue, his face buried in a pillow which had been dampened after a breakdown. He didn’t even watch, only listened, as if his curse would somehow creep beyond the screen and to the sullen-looking heroes on the screen if he dared glance. He took comfort in the silence followed by the trickle of tingling static.
“I don’t know,” Shouta feebly answered to all of the questions his peers chirped at him, who have flocked around his desk in a semicircle. A housefly irritatingly whizzed around, making advances at his dark locks, which he dismissed with the slight flick of his head.
“You don’t know? But it was the only thing everyone’s been talking about! Did you see that hero, Amalgama? She looked so sad, didn’t even want to talk to the reporter girl, I saw.” One of the classmates, Kobayashi, yapped, earning a bunch of “yeah”’s from his friends.
The fly buzzed closer, irritably tickling his ear before crawling on the desk. “I haven’t been keeping up with things, I had homework.” he said dismissively.
The group traded looks. “But I mean, you were there, weren’t you? I saw you. And your quirk - “
Shouta harshly slammed his desk, the resulting sound making his peers flinch. “I said, I don’t know, so leave me alone. Go away.”
Kobayashi’s face soured just as the homeroom bell sounded. “Fine then, weirdo,” Shouta barely heard the addition made after he walked away, the flock dispersing. “maybe it was you after all.”
Shouta turned over his hand, staring at the grimy corpse that once resembled a fly with glowing eyes.
As for the incident, Shouta was never questioned by investigators on what happened that day, and the case went cold.