The common room was packed.
Nearly everyone from Class 2-A had gathered around the television, some on the couches, some on the floor, some standing at the back with their arms crossed. The news had been running for hours. The same footage, different angles. Crowds surging against barricades. Reporters shouting questions no one answered. The faces of the accused flashing across the screen, one by one.
Kobe sat in the corner, away from the others, his back against the wall.
He watched.
The anchor's voice was grim. "Sentencing has been handed down in the Eden Project cases. Most defendants received harsh penalties, though some were granted lesser punishments due to cooperation or extenuating circumstances."
The screen cut to a list of names. Sentences flashed beside them. Thirty-five years. Forty years. Life.
Then the shorter ones.
Kaminari leaned forward. "Ten years? That is nothing. But then again, some of them are so old they will not even last that long."
Yaoyorozu nodded. "It seems arbitrary. The disparities are frustrating."
Another name appeared. Hideaki Kurogami.
The anchor continued. "Kurogami, a former Commission official and early cooperator with the investigation, will serve no prison time. He has agreed to continued cooperation with authorities as they work to fully uncover the scope of the project as well as serve a ten year probation."
Murmurs rippled through the room.
Ashido's voice was sharp. "That is not fair. He just gets away with it? While everyone else rots?"
Sero shook his head. "Rich people always find a way out."
Kaminari spoke. "It is because of the nasty relations regular people have with mutants. That is why he got away with it."
The room went quiet.
Kobe looked up. So did everyone else. A few mouths hung open. A few eyes were wide.
Even Kobe had not expected that. It was too slick. Too pointed. For someone like Kaminari, who stumbled over his words and laughed at his own confusion, this was something else entirely.
Kaminari looked around. "What? Why are you all staring at me?"
Iida adjusted his glasses. His voice was careful. Stilted. "That is not how it works for mutants. The discrimination they face is... it is not a benefit. It is a systemic... "
He stuttered. Stopped. Started again.
"The point is, Kurogami's cooperation is the reason for his leniency, he probably has information that lead to locking away the worst of them while also adding more to the case and its history. Not his mutation."
Kobe watched Iida struggle. Watched the words trip over each other, never quite landing. It was clear, suddenly, that this was not a conversation they had ever truly had. Not in a real way. Not in a way that mattered.
Ashido stood up.
Her face was pale. Her hands were shaking.
"I am going to get some air."
She walked out. Jirou and Uraraka exchanged a glance and followed.
The door clicked shut.
Kaminari looked at the floor. Then back at the room. "I did not mean any offence by it. It is just... it is up everywhere. Online. In the news. People seem a lot more scared to call them out when they so clearly do wrong."
Midoriya's voice was quiet. "Stop."
Kirishima stood. "Yeah. Just... stop."
He walked out. Others followed. Kaminari opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. No words came.
Soon, only a few remained. Kaminari sat scratching his head, his brow furrowed, his confusion genuine.
Kobe watched him.
He thought about what kind of person Kaminari really was. An idiot? Or just another potential bigot, who, even though he could not use his quirk the way he wanted, was still blessed. Still granted fortune for the circumstances of his birth. Still protected by a society that saw him as acceptable in ways it would never see others.
Kobe did not have an answer.
He stood and walked to the door.
Kaminari did not look up.
___
The history of mutants in Japan was not a pleasant one.
Kobe had read about it years ago, in fragments, in forums that no longer existed, in articles that had been buried under more recent atrocities. The shape of it was simple. The details were not.
Mutants had existed as long as quirks had. The first recorded quirk was a glowing child in China, but the first recorded mutant was a woman in Brazil whose skin turned to bark. She was burned as a witch. That was the pattern. Fear. Violence. Erasure.
Japan was no different.
Before the hero system was fully established the government looked abroad for solutions. They found one in old history of America. The Better Baby Competitions.
They were not called that here. The name was sanitised, localised, stripped of its original context. But the premise was the same. A way to birth powerful human children. Heroes of a new age. Strong. Healthy. Acceptable.
It was eugenics.
The goal was simple. Keep the population more human-looking. More palatable. More easily controlled. The methods were less simple. Incentives for parents whose children displayed desirable traits. Stigmatisation for those who did not. Quiet pressure, then louder pressure, then policies that did not need to be spoken aloud to be understood.
It failed.
Quirks did not care about human preferences. A child with two perfectly human looking parents could still be born with feathers instead of hair, with scales instead of skin, with eyes that glowed in the dark and limbs that bent the wrong way. The only reliable predictor was mutation itself. If one parent was a mutant, the chance increased. If both were, it increased further. But there was no way to guarantee a human-looking child. No way to breed out what they called undesirable.
So they tried other methods.
Segregation, at first. Informal. Neighbourhoods where mutants were encouraged to live, then required to live, then policed to ensure they stayed. Then the enclaves. The settlements. The walled-off sections of cities where mutants were dumped and forgotten.
One of the largest was in Osaka. The Nishinari district, already poor, already neglected, became a de facto mutant quarter. They built their own schools, their own clinics, their own markets. They carved a home out of a place that did not want them.
It was not enough.
The ones who hated them wanted more. They wanted a purge.
Major skirmishes broke out across the western half of the nation. Kobe had seen the numbers once. Thousands dead. Tens of thousands displaced. Entire neighbourhoods razed. The government looked away, then looked back, then looked away again.
Two pillars rose from the chaos.
The first was a woman named Hoshiko. She had the head of a crane and the voice of a storm. She believed in integration. That mutants should not retreat, should not hide, should not build walls around themselves. They should stand in the open and demand to be seen.
The second was a man named Tetsuo. He had skin like cracked earth and eyes like burning coals. He believed in segregation. That mutants should carve out their own territory, build their own nation, and defend it with blood if necessary.
They were enemies. Then allies. Then enemies again.
The fighting became so barbaric, so widespread, that other nations began to take notice. China threatened intervention. So did Korea. So did the United States, though their interest was less humanitarian and more economic.
The Japanese government moved quickly after that.
The Hero Public Safety Commission was formed. Heroes began to take their place. Mutant and otherwise. The skirmishes were suppressed. The purges stopped. A fragile peace settled over the nation.
But the Commission had learned something from the chaos. They learned that mutants could be useful. That they could be wielded. That a mutant hero on a billboard was a powerful message: See? We are not bigots. We have one of them on the team.
They were chosen specifically. The ones with the right look. The ones who could pass, more or less, as human. A woman with cat ears and a fluffy tail was acceptable. A man who was a cat, who sometimes walked on four legs and spoke in yowls, was not.
A man made of sludge, formless and grotesque, was obviously trash. A threat. A villain in waiting. No one would mourn him.
The line was never drawn clearly. It did not need to be. Everyone understood it. The good mutants and the bad mutants. The ones who could be saved and the ones who could not. The ones who deserved to be heroes and the ones who deserved to be hunted.
That line had never been erased. It had just been painted over. Again and again. Until the colours bled into each other and no one could tell where one ended and the other began.
Kaminari was not a bad person. Probably. He was just uneducated. He absorbed what he saw online, what he heard in conversations, what he read in curated articles that told him what he already wanted to believe. He took it as fact. He did not question it. Why would he? The system rewarded him for not questioning. For staying comfortable. For never looking too closely at the cracks in the wall.
He was blessed. He had a powerful quirk, even if he could not control it. He had a human face. He had never been followed through a store by security for no reason. He had never been told his kind were ruining the neighbourhood. He had never been asked to leave a public space because his presence made others uncomfortable.
He was safe. And safety made people stupid.
Kobe turned off the television. The screen went black.
The common room was empty. He sat in the dark and thought about history. About how it repeated. About how no one ever seemed to learn.
___
Ashido found me in the courtyard.
The others had gone inside after the news segment ended, but I had stayed. The air was cold, the sky was grey, and the benches were empty. I sat with my hands in my pockets and watched the clouds move.
She sat down beside me, after a few minutes of nothing and whistling from her she began to talk, first about herself, what she likes, dancing, food, and the colour pink. Then she told a story from her past, to many, me included, it felt familiar.
"I remember coming home from kindergarten once," she said. Her voice was quiet. Not sad, exactly. Just tired.
I did not respond. I waited.
"I was walking with my mum. We did not have a car back then. We walked everywhere." She paused. "I used to skip along. You know. Ahead of her. Behind her. Around her. I was a bouncy kid."
She smiled. It did not last.
"This one day, I was skipping along, and there was this boy. A little chubby. Had on a backwards cap. He was riding a tricycle. And he intentionally nearly rode it into me."
She looked at her hands.
"I was running to avoid it. He was older. He just kept coming. And he was laughing. I remember my heart beating so fast. I did not know why. I just knew I had to get away."
She paused.
"I fell into our garden. The hedge scratched my arms. And he blazed past on that tricycle, and he yelled, he yelled that he would fuck up me and my family of aliens."
The word hung in the air. Aliens.
"I was five," she said. "I did not even know what that meant."
She was quiet for a moment.
"You have probably been through something like that too. Living as an other in such small spaces is literally living as the black sheep on a farm. Everyone sees you. Everyone has an opinion. And most of them are not kind, or just overlooking you in some way."
I nodded. I had. Not in the same way. But I had.
"For so long, I wanted to move to Osaka. My cousins lived there. I thought if I could just get there, everything would be better. I would be around people like me. I would not have to explain myself all the time."
She sighed.
"But my dad's job kept blocking it. Transfers. Promises. 'Maybe next year.' 'Maybe when things settle down.'" She shook her head. "They never settled down."
She looked up at the sky.
"Eventually, we moved. Not to Osaka. To a quieter place. More mutants. Kinder people. I was finally able to live freer. As myself."
She turned to look at me.
"I was really surprised at what Kaminari said. Especially since he did not seem to give off any of that in first year. He was the first one to befriend me. He did the same to you too."
I thought about that. Kaminari, loud and smiling, attaching himself to people like he had known them his whole life. It was easy to like him. Easy to forget that easy did not mean safe.
"It was a little off-putting," I said. "I am not making any excuses for him. But I will hear him out first."
I looked at her.
"Are you willing to do that too?"
She smiled. It was small. But it was real.
"Of course. Especially if we will all be stuck together for the next two years." She closed her eyes. Opened them again. "But even then. He only gets one chance from me. When it comes to something like this."
I nodded.
The clouds moved. The wind picked up. Ashido stood and brushed off her skirt.
"Walk with me?" she asked.