Chapter Text
Being told you aren't cut out to be a hero is hard. Being told you're better suited to being a villain is harder. Especially for a little kid who wants nothing more than to be like all the cool superheroes he sees all the time on tv. Going to school and having all your classmates suddenly fear you after you accidentally made someone pour his juice all over himself doesn't fill a kid with very much confidence in himself. Luckily, Shinsou never had to endure endless teasing and taunting and fearful glances from the time he was four years old until now. That would have been terrible. Unbearable even.
But that's how Shinsou doesn't let it affect him. He pretends it never happened. It's easier than any other method he's tried to use to forget. Hurting himself just made him numb. Writing everything out made him feel too much. Acknowledging that it happened means acknowledging that maybe deep down he knows what people said to him was true. And so Shinsou pretends it never happened. He's been mostly successful too. That is until Monoma brought it up during their match against Class 1-A.
"I've always been told I could never be a hero," Monoma said both nonchalantly and in the flamboyant way he always spoke. "They said my quirk was too weak."
"What are you talking about?" Shinsou asked. He had been caught off guard by the admission.
"Well you see, when I was a kid all my classmates said my quirk was lame. So weak that I could never be a hero with it." Shinsou was shocked by the openness with which Monoma was telling him this. "I believed them too. My quirk wasn't as cool or useful as any of theirs. Even among my family, my sister's quirk was way cooler than mine. My parent's too. They were all more useful than mine so I felt like I'd never amount to anything. But I got over it."
Shinsou looked at him blankly, slightly irritated. Having gone through a very similar experience he wishes he could have just 'gotten over it’.
"Oh don't look at me like that Shinsou. I'm joking. Obviously. Though I suppose not entirely. I got over the feeling of uselessness. I started 'borrowing'-" Monoma used air quotes around the word 'borrowing'. "- my classmates' quirks and using them better than even they could. I didn't feel useless anymore. But people didn't like it much, me taking their quirks and all, it made it hard for them to keep bullying me. So they started calling me a villain. Saying things like only villains steal things. It doesn't bother me now though because I'm going to be a better hero than any of them will ever be."
"Why are you telling me this?" Shinsou didn't understand where all of this was coming from. They barely knew each other, why was Monoma telling him all of this personal stuff?
"I like you. You and I are the same type." Shinsou was mildly taken aback. It wasn't hard to assume someone with a quirk like his would have been bullied and called a villain, but how was Monoma sure enough that he was to say that type of thing. Shinsou wasn't going to ask how he knew.
After a bit more conversing they split up and got in position. The fight was chaotic and left Shinsou with a sense of failure, not just because his team lost, but because he barely contributed. His teammates along with his opponents assured him he did well but he didn't truly believe them. Being a hero meant he needed to be stronger and faster. He needed to be better.
Despite his sense that he had failed, the teachers disagreed. He passed his transfer exam and was placed in Hero Class 1-B. He was ecstatic. This was all he'd ever wanted; a chance to become a real hero. But it was also not what he wanted. He felt out of place packing his things in the general studies dorm. Saying goodbye to his classmates was harder than he would have ever expected. They'd been together for a year and he was leaving them for another class. It felt like cheating on a partner.
Walking into the 1-B dorms felt like a betrayal. Being greeted with smiles and excitement should have made him excited but it felt wrong. Moving into a dorm that looked identical to his old one filled him with a sense of familiarity but it was accompanied by the off-putting unfamiliarity of being on a different floor in a different building with different neighbors. It wasn't right but it was all he'd ever wanted, right?