Work Text:
Aldera.
A fetid breeding ground for quirkist middleclass malcontents who, with an almost complete certainty, fail to achieve their dreams and settle with someone they don’t love to have kids they don’t want, and will both live and die bitter and unhappy.
If the teachers had behaved properly, Taskmaster would not exist. If Taskmaster did not exist, no harm would have come to the school or the people in it.
Their own inaction brought this upon them.
Izuku uses the government mandated security system to gather evidence. He delivers the evidence to the police, the school board, and the Ministry of Education. He also sends firmly worded letters to the parents of each child guilty of bullying, along with evidence of the child’s actions.
The result:
Aldera is shut down. A majority of teachers go to prison, the rest are heavily fined, given community service, and are stripped of their teaching licenses, all are publically shamed by the media. Sixty-four children go into juvenile detention, ninety-eight are given community service. All victims of bullying are given counselling at the cost of the state and given the chance to enter schools where the zero tolerance policy is actually enforced.
Side-effect:
Students (former and current) and parents come forward all over the country to speak out against schools at all levels. Sixteen other schools are shut down, hundreds more are investigated and restructured; hundreds of teachers are fired and stripped of their licenses, forty-eight are known to go to prison. Four hundred and twenty-one children go into juvenile detention, ninety-four have aged up to adulthood and therefore go to prison; hundreds more, both children and adults, are given community service and placed under probation.
The country is at an uproar.
To address the new shortage of teachers, Izuku sets up a scholarship fund available for anyone going to school for teaching to apply for, with some conditions; the recipients must undergo additional training in conflict resolution, child psychology, quirk management training in children and teens, as well as programs on how to spot and stop bullying and preventing it. Izuku selects the managing personnel of the fund from the mass of parents of children severely affected by bullying. He knows they will make sure the money is used the right way and hold the budding teachers to sufficiently high standards. Once the fund is advertised, teaching programs see an influx of applicants.
The Ministry of Education promises to do better.
Izuku intends to hold them to that.
Katsuki Baguko is on probation and has six hundred hours of community service to perform.
Izuku didn’t include any acts committed against himself in any of the evidence.
Izuku Midoriya is dead.
Taskmaster is an objective spectator reporting current injustices. Izuku’s injustice is not current.
He will be keeping an eye on Katsuki Bakugo, still. Hopefully he learns his lesson during community service but Izuku takes nothing as fact until it has been proven. Katsuki Bakugo is more than welcome to prove himself.
Izuku moves on.
What is the next step?
He decides to stay with the children. He has handled school, now to handle the home.
Logical first step: the foster system and wards of the state.
Izuku breaks open the child services database and gets to work.
Sorting first.
Orphans, and removed from the family. Two list. Each list is divided into further categories; age, sex, adopted out or still in the system.
He spends several hours writing a complex program. Once it is finished, he feeds it the names and addresses of the adopting families. It returns with a collection of feeds for each family; any cameras in the house, microphones, home surveillance systems. Another program scrubs the audio; each instance of shouting, screaming, derogatory and/or threatening language is logged and tracked. When it is done cataloguing, Izuku sifts through them. Every incident where it is obvious any member of the family, child or otherwise, is coming to harm or is threatened, he catalogues it.
It takes many hours. Many days.
Izuku does not care. He is not certain he can care. Not anymore. Caring is… For the weak. Not really. He knows that. But caring is still a weakness. Izuku can not care. Does he want to care?
Once the catalogue is completed, he sends each file to the corresponding police precinct. Because they are delivered as anonymous tips, it is admissible in court.
Good.
Returning to the children remaining in the system.
He goes through the procedure again with group homes and orphanages. This takes much longer. The final catalogue is much bigger.
Izuku delivers it to the police.
He is not sure he wants to care. If one does not put oneself at risk, one will not be injured. The logical inference is the same for emotional matters. Caring is a weakness that can be exploited. One can only be hurt if one cares.
Based on everything Izuku knows about the world, the only logical thing to do is not care.
Contradiction.
If Izuku does not care, why is he shutting down bad schools and reporting abusive foster homes? If he truly did not care, he would not do those things. He would not stay up for almost seventy-two hours straight just to sift through audio and video files searching for kids being hurt.
Based on those actions, the logic says he does care.
Query: what does caring feel like?
Is caring an actual feeling, or simply a concept-name for a certain set of emotions felt for a certain person or object at a certain time or situation?
Izuku knows he used to care about his mother. Inko is dead. That is a fact. Can he still care about her if she is dead? When he thinks about her, there is something in his chest that hurts, even though he has sustained no physical wounds. Is that caring? Does the caring hurt if the person one cares about is dead?
Emotions are non-physical things; internal entities that cannot be explained. They cannot be catalogued, strategized, or categorized. That is confusing.
Query: Why did he care then, if he does not care now?
Wrong question.
Query: What has changed, between then and now?
Answer:
His attempted suicide was the instigator for change. Before, he cared. After, he does not care. This event changed something.
Query: what did the attempted suicide change?
Answer:
What is the answer?
When Izuku was six years old, Katsuki Bakugo assaulted him on the playground and Izuku required a visit to the hospital. Because of the concussion he sustained, he was given an MRI.
When Izuku stepped off the bridge, he fell almost twenty-five meters and likely only survived due to the elasticity of a child’s body. With that distance, it was like slamming into a concrete wall at terminal velocity. The brain damage would have been massive.
Izuku needs to get an MRI.
Query: What has changed, between then and now?
Answer: Traumatic brain injury.