I was breathing convulsively. My body was shaking, tears were streaming from my eyes, but I could not break free from my bonds. My eyes darted frantically across the white room and the equipment surrounding me, even though the bright lamp above my head blinded them. The only thing I could do was beg in a sharp, squeaky voice:
"Please don't, please stop, I beg you…"
But they did not stop. They had never stopped before.
For a long time, I did not want to understand when and how everything went wrong. I did not want to, but I understood. From the age of four.
Before that, Dad would often toss me into the air, saying what a cool and awesome hero I would become, just like him, while Mom stood nearby and smiled tenderly. Later, he began to look at me strangely and anxiously, asking if I had done anything unusual. I understood that he wanted to know whether my Quirk had awakened.
My father was a cool hero with a powerful Quirk. I always watched with delight as he teleported from place to place. My mother could enhance her body for a short time, though she did not do it often and ate a lot afterward.
Months passed. My parents started whispering anxiously and taking me to various doctors. At kindergarten, the teachers began to look at me with strange pity. As far as I remember, several people also watched a man in a wheelchair on TV, and my friends talked to me less and less and stopped inviting me to play.
I started ignoring this quite quickly. Stories and videos about heroes helped me, especially All Might, although my father began to speak less about his career. An exciting feeling burned inside me when I read articles about heroes and villains, their battles, and various videos about saving people. And All Might — the hero whose very presence gives hope and accomplishes the impossible.
Dreams of becoming like him appeared in my head less often, but I did not lose hope. My Quirk could awaken later, or in the worst case, I could become a hero's sidekick, like David Shield was for All Might. So I began looking for study materials for support course students at hero academies. But when I found them on the Internet, I understood nothing, and I had to seriously study math, physics, and chemistry just to grasp anything.
Still, my enthusiasm slowly began to fade. The material was dry and boring, nothing like the stories about heroes.
On my fifth birthday, my parents began to look at me with a new emotion in their eyes: disappointment. When I realized this, hopelessness and despair slowly began to consume me. They started paying less attention to me, just like those kindergarten teachers. Dad began arguing with Mom and appeared at home less often. Mom more and more often gave off a foul smell, the same kind that drunk adults had at parties.
And I tried harder not to be seen and read comics, articles about heroes, and tried to understand boring formulas and laws of physics.
It all ended three months before my sixth birthday.
Dad left.
We moved to another apartment, a smaller one. That foul smell from Mom was constant. Strange men began to appear in the house.
At six, I started elementary school. As soon as everyone learned that I had no Quirk, the teachers' gazes held only pity or indifference, and my peers held mockery and contempt. My desire to socialize disappeared.
I was consumed by the desire to understand why I had no Quirk. I did not have the extra joint in my little finger, yet my Quirk was absent, something the doctors could not explain. I decided to go from the opposite direction — not to understand the absence of a Quirk, but the reason for its appearance. That turned out to be even harder.
"To this day, the cause of Quirks remains unknown, but there is a theory that each subsequent generation becomes stronger than the previous one." That is how most articles about the emergence of Quirks through genetics and the accumulation of mutations began, or something like that.
Although nearly two centuries had passed since the appearance of Quirks, due to prolonged chaos and disorder around the world, science had not advanced far, including the study of Quirks.
While pursuing this topic and attending school, I did not abandon the exact sciences and also paid attention to those around me. If nothing changed at school, at home strangers began appearing more often, and Mom told me to stay in my room or, sometimes, to go outside for a walk.
Already accustomed to their sometimes loud presence in the apartment and the growing mess, I would lock myself in my room and immerse myself in the world of heroes and villains, dreaming of my Quirk awakening and becoming a hero on par with All Might. No, surpassing him.
One call from the neighbors to the police about the noise from us changed everything. The arrival of the police patrol shocked not only Mom and her guests but also me. After they arrived and inspected the apartment, the matter did not end with just a fine. People began to come and ask me various questions.
I was afraid of the unknown and the adults' new actions, as I had grown accustomed to them bringing nothing good. The court, testimonies from neighbors, school teachers, unknown men, my mother's confused and slightly guilty expression, people taking me away and speaking too sweetly. And their words, "your new home."
An orphanage.
Thus, my seventh birthday passed in an orphanage. I cried for the first week straight. My hope that if my Quirk awakened or if I behaved well and entered a hero academy, everything would go back to how it used to be. Mom would smile as tenderly as before, and Dad, ruffling my hair with a kind smile, would call me his little hero.
That would never happen again. I alone was the last idiot who believed it could ever come back.
The attitude of the people at the orphanage, as if on purpose, was no different from what it had been at school. Except here they decided to show me my place as someone "Quirkless" even sooner.
Still, I spent far less time here than expected.
After a month, the caregivers called me and told me to pack my things. Later, some man with a bushy mustache came up to me and began explaining something about an upcoming building renovation, a lack of space, which was why I would be moved to another place, and so on.
I paid little attention to what he said. What troubled me was that he spoke just as sweetly as the people who had brought me here.
After packing my things, we left the shelter and got into a car. As I sat down, I noticed the man take out and open a small jar. He quickly brought it to my face. I held my breath and tried to jump out of the car, but after a quick blow to my stomach and an inhale, I began to drift into sleep.