The sounds of my mother's sobbing still haunt me. Even now, I can hear her muted cries from every direction when I attempt to sleep. She believed the pillow would muffle her cries and the walls were thick enough to keep them within her bedroom. She would always start soon after entering her room for the night, and it would continue well into the early hours of the morning. She finally collapsed from exhaustion and an eerie silence devoured our home.
The next morning, she would pretend nothing was wrong. She never acknowledged the fact she had been crying, and that's when I learned it was a secret for only her to know. She hid her true emotions behind the piles of makeup she spent an hour applying every morning in the bathroom when the only person to ever see her face was me.
The mother I saw during the day was a completely different person from the one I heard during the night. Her voice, which was normally filled with kindness and laughter, was corrupted with pained gasps and broken cries. Even as a toddler, I knew my mother was hurting badly. Out of respect for her desperation to shield me from her pain, I never once asked her about the crying that kept me awake at night.
At first, I thought maybe her sadness was caused by her lack of a quirk. Although I'd never seen one before, mother would tell me stories of heroes. They all had amazing special abilities and would use their quirks to defeat villains, who decided to use their quirks for evil. There was one fatal flaw to this theory though. My mother always held such a terrified expression when she told me about them. She thought she hid it well enough, but the shaking in her voice was the same as it was each night.
When I first asked her why she didn't have a quirk, my mother explained that although most of society had developed these strange abilities, there still existed a number of the population that had nothing. My mother was one of them, as were her other family members. It was at that moment that I gave up on ever developing a quirk of my own. I did not want my mother to feel lonely if I developed one while she had none, and I never wanted to experience the reason she feared quirks so much.
We were able to spend almost every moment of every day together. Our front door didn't have a doorknob like the other doors in our apartment, and my mother had told me many times that I was not to ever go through that door - even if it was open. We found all sorts of ways to pass the time though, even if I could never experience the wonderful outside she told me about.
My mother would spend hours each day reading aloud to me. She even switched back and forth between different voices, making the stories even more fun. And as I grew slightly older, I soon began to read little words when I thought I could recognize them. Mother said I was much smarter than other little girls my age, and that she would prepare me for all the difficulties I would have to face.
When I was good, she would sometimes reward me by showing me her photo albums. She had all kinds of pictures of herself and the rest of her family, whom I had never met. In these times, she would tell me true stories about my grandparents, my aunts, and my uncles. Although I was unable to meet them in person, I had always felt a strong connection to my mother's family.
My mother was the only living being other than myself I knew and interacted with. We had no one other than each other. My mother had told me her friends couldn't talk to her anymore, and that the rest of our family didn't know where she was. As for me, I'd never been given the opportunity to make friends in the first place.
I got used to the cold stone floors and the dim light that emitted off the candles mother lit each morning before waking me. We didn't have any electricity, although I hadn't known what that was at the time. Instead, we had a stone fireplace that provided our main source of heat. On the especially cold days, my mother would heat up the water in a pot and pour it into the tub as a treat for the two of us to share - a warm bath.
To end the day, my mother would lock me inside my bedroom at exactly 7:30pm each night until the next morning. Sometimes I would cry, beg, and scream in hopes that she would let me out, but she never budged and refused to explain. I would pace around my room for hours until my mother's wailing echoed off my bedroom walls, and waited for complete silence before I could finally sleep.
I couldn't contain my curiosity as to why she was so strict regarding my curfew. To obtain answers, I made a grave mistake. Hiding in the closet by the front door, I remained silent as my mother tore through the house in her search for me. Determined to discover why it was so important she lock me in my room, not a single sound left my lips.
I couldn't keep track of the time very well from my hiding spot but the grandfather clock's chiming occurred at the exact moment a harsh tapping came from the other side of the door. Knowing it to be 8:00pm, I emerged from my hiding space within the closet as someone jiggled with the wooden door from the outside.
Having never before seen it open, my entire body froze in anticipation as I hoped to catch even the tiniest glimpse of the world outside. Instead, it was blocked by a man who slipped in through the smallest crack and slammed the door shut behind him.
Perhaps I hurt his feelings, and that was why he attacked me, but the fear I felt upon seeing him was unexplainable. After all, what's a 6-year-old child to think upon seeing a man with such anger, malice and pure hatred directed at the world?
My mother was there in an instant, shoving my body behind her as she demanded I go to my room and close the door. I wished I could have listened, but the ultimate fear I was feeling had taken over my body. My tiny legs were frozen in place, keeping my eyes fixated on the monster in front of me.
Mother's body was thrown across the hallway and into the wall. It smashed on impact, sending her flying into the living room on the other side. Her screams echoed off the walls and it couldn't help but seem familiar - familiar to the cries I heard every night from within my mother's bedroom.
The stranger's hand was cold to the touch as it roughly wrapped around my face. My tears fell harder as the grip tightened and my feet lifted from the floor. He remained completely silent at first, examining me with his heavily scarred face before allowing me to fall onto the floor.
My mother shot into the hallway with a screech. She was bleeding from her head and her left arm was twisted in a way it shouldn't have been. Mother charged towards the stranger, but he lashed out a hand without hesitation and she was once again sent flying across the hallway and onto the ground.
He then turned against me, slamming a heavy foot down upon my stomach. The high pressure threatened to explode my insides. I wished I could have hidden my weakness and stopped crying. The pain had been unlike anything else I'd ever experienced before. So I cried. This only seemed to make him angrier, however, and his attacks grew to be much more violent.
The stranger tortured me with pain throughout the night - both physical and mental. He beat me down to the ground with maniacal laughter. Even destroying my spirit, he continuously struck my mother down each time she tried to stop him. I cried until all my tears had dried up, and my mother cried with me.
The stranger showed up every night from that day on at exactly 8:00pm. I would try to hide as my mother instructed, but he always found me and hurt both my mother and I. Finding that hiding didn't work, I once made the grave mistake of going against my mother's wishes and trying to run outside the front door. A trap had activated immediately and almost snapped my neck.
Each night, the stranger would appear and unleash his power upon me. Bruises began to form, turning brown and purple until my skin was nothing but. At first, I tried to fight against him, believing that the heroes my mother had told me about would show up to our rescue and take us away from this place.
It was at that point I realized the place my mother and I lived in was never our home - it was our prison. This man had held my mother hostage here since before I was even born, and I had been raised in complete secrecy. Other than the man and my mother, no one else even knew I existed. No matter how long I endured, a hero would never come to my rescue.
That was when this stranger truly opened my eyes. He explained to me the true intentions behind heroes, and that my mother had simply told me white lies in order to spark hope in me. I couldn't express my anger when I was forced to learn the harsh truth. Heroes were simply individuals who used their quirks to remain in the spotlight and make money. They didn't care about those they rescued or what occurred regarding the villains they faced.
I was very young when the stranger finally told me of his true identity. He had never meant to hurt me during our nightly training sessions, but teach me how to become strong. He explained that being my father, it was his job to make sure I became powerful. That way I could team up with him to rid the world of the selfish individuals calling themselves heroes.
I did everything as he said in order to continue my training, and tried to live with the growing gap between my mother and me. She began to push me away as if I were a disease, trying to trick me into thinking my father was the true bad guy. He had already warned me of the lies she would attempt to tell me, and in the end, her words held no effect over me.
I realized over time that my father was the only individual I could trust. He had always been looking out for me from the start. He locked me away from the world in order to protect from those that called themselves heroes. He hadn't wanted me to be brainwashed with the sense of security they had forced onto the rest of society. He beat me to improve my endurance and the number of hits I could take. This way when I took down the false heroes, I would be able to handle even the strongest quirks. His vocal taunts and cruelty would keep me from trusting others as easily so I wouldn't be betrayed.
My father had paved the way for me so I could become more powerful than any of the pro heroes and teach society that its heroes were nothing but fakes. This was the only way to achieve a perfect society, according to my father, where I could live freely in the outside.
My lack of quirk had always been a concern, however, and that is when my father gave me the greatest gift of all. Once he had perfected my physical and mental training, he gifted me with a quirk to best suit my abilities. It wasn't too significant at first, but I knew it could develop into a powerful ability.
It was difficult at first, but with intensive training, I was able to use my quirk more effectively. My father still wasn't satisfied with my progress, however, and constantly ordered me to work harder to master my quirk. I did exactly as he said, training more diligently than ever.
I didn't understand why he pressured me to master my quirk so much until he used his own abilities to gift me a second one. Although it was less combat-based and more for obtaining knowledge, he had created an incredibly powerful combination. With my two abilities, I trained all day and all night to become stronger than those my father wanted me to defeat.
Our plans came crashing down when All Might showed up. The secret base where he had hidden my mother and I was discovered by the so-called pro-heroes my father taught me about. He had broken down the door with a single kick, looking beat up and broken.
"Fear not, citizens, for I am here!"
Those words had burned themselves into my soul ever since that day. He had swooped in assuming we needed rescuing, but my mother and I were fine as we were. We had been happy in our home, even if was originally made to serve as a prison. The heroes had swooped in and took the glory for 'saving' us when we had never needed saving.
My mother had cried of joy when they showed up, however, begging that I be locked away in a cell to rot before I harmed anyone. She warned that I had the blood of a villain and should be imprisoned before I began to pose a threat. This had surprised me coming from my mother, but my father had told me she was not mentally stable. After all, she had come from the outside world before he rescued her.
The heroes chose not to heed her advice, to my surprise. While my mother was taken to live with my grandparents, it was made clear that I was not welcome in her family as she opted to refuse her responsibilities as my mother. The heroes didn't protest against her decision, and instead designed a new system for my care.
Knowing of my relation to All For One and my training under him since I was little, the pro heroes deemed me unpredictable and unsafe. However, they did not wish to judge me for the crimes of my father when I hadn't yet done anything wrong. Instead of deeming me as a criminal, they decided I deserved a chance to prove I wasn't a villain.
The staff members of a prestigious hero school known as U.A. were given joint custody of me since I was still a child and given the responsibility of providing for me. Of course, this meant I was constantly moving between houses with various different teachers and staff members. I seemed to have a bedroom in each one of their houses and was constantly being switched back and forth.
What angered me most, was the freedom they stripped from me through the bracelets and anklets I was forced to wear on my limbs. The special machines were created to cancel out quirks, rendering me without my abilities majority of the time, and could only be removed by U.A. staff members.
Despite all this, I was not as easy to sway as one may think. With the brainwashing done to me by my father from a young age, I was convinced that the heroes were the true villains. In addition, I understood very little of the outside world. Even after I was taken in by the pros, I was kept in a hospital under strict watch for quite a while following my rescue.
I remained in the hospital up until a day before classes started at U.A. High School. At that time I was taken in by my first pro hero guardian, and showed around the home I would be staying in for the time being. The transition was more difficult than expected though, having changed my lifestyle so suddenly in such a significant way.
At the time, I was overflowing with pent up anger and the desire for vengeance on the fake pro heroes that claimed to have 'rescued' me. After all, I had never wanted to be rescued. I was happy living in my cold, dark prison along with my mother and daily visits from my father.
I didn't know how my viewpoints on life could change so much by meeting the students and teachers of U.A. High, and how finally receiving a chance to see the world would alter the way I saw it.
This is the story of how I went from being a villain to becoming a hero.