1 temptation

Izuku Midoriya tried to like heroes. He really did. That was difficult, however, when it had only been a month since the number one hero himself had crushed Izuku's dreams like a stale cracker, and then simply watched as Kacchan was attacked. Izuku wondered what would have happened if Death Arms hadn't prevented him from running in at the last minute. Maybe he would have impressed All Might, who would have taken him on, and taught him how to be a hero. Izuku scoffed at his own thoughts. Him, a quirkless loser, impress All Might? Yeah right.

As it was, All Might had gotten his act together eventually and Kacchan had been alright, if unconscious, when he was retrieved from the sludge villain's body, and Izuku had spent the last month quietly selling off his All Might merchandise and harboring a growing resentment toward hero society. Which is what led him to where he was now, sitting at a sketchy internet cafe, about to tell a random internet acquaintance, who in all probability might be a villain, how to kill a minor hero.

He had found the post on one of the more underground hero forums, the kind that often included posts about vigilantes and villains alongside the heroes. Izuku didn't necessarily want to be on it, but he was holding onto a hope that if he just continued doing the things he enjoyed before everything went to shit then he might eventually start feeling a spark of something besides anger. The post itself hadn't been that long, just one question:

Whyher0es301:

Completely hypothetically, how would one go about killing Mt. Lady?

A simple post like that shouldn't have changed his life. Izuku should have just ignored it, or maybe told the police, especially after he read through the users old post and discovered that, even if they weren't a villian, they were definitely a villain sympathizer. He should have not given it a second thought and turned to more reputable forums to try and dig himself out of his growing depression.

Instead, he did none of that.

For the next week, the question repeated in Izuku's mind like a broken record, his mind latching onto anything that could cut through his apathy. How would one go about killing Mt. Lady? She was a new hero, prideful, and media hungry, which might explain why she was one of the hero world's rising stars, but Izuku knew she had weaknesses. He found himself at more and more of her fights over the next week, trying and failing to convince himself that he was there because he liked Mt. Lady, not because he was analysing her weaknesses. It had only taken him three days to realize that his hero analysis books contained enough information on heroes weaknesses that he could probably kill any hero he wanted to, with a little work. The thought made him sick, but it still didn't stop him from seeking out Mt. Lady's fights and it definitely didn't stop his brain from obsessing over how to kill her.

It would be laughably easy, Izuku realized, to use her love of the media against her. Pretend to be a reporter, lure her into a densely populated area with narrow streets to prevent her from using her quirk, ask for a selfie and stab her through the heart while her eyes were focused on the camera, then blend into the crowd before anyone realized she was dead. He tried to leave it at that. He knew how to kill her, so he really didn't need to be thinking about it anymore. After the week he'd had, he really should have expected that putting the issue out of his mind wouldn't work. Anyway, it was all hypothetical anyway, right? What was the harm in private messaging the poster and describing his plan, as well as a few back ups, just in case. After all, it wasn't as if the poster was actually a villian, just a villian sympathiser. Mt. Lady probably wouldn't end up dead. And Izuku could make a dummy account at an internet cafe just in case, so that no one could track his IP address, and then he'd never have to use the account again and maybe he'd actually be able to finally stop thinking about this.

A little over an hour after walking into the internet cafe, Izuku signed out of the account he'd made, M4sterM1nd404, and walked out the front door feeling oddly relieved.

Izuku Midoriya tried to like heroes.

It didn't work.

Izuku's life went about surprisingly unchanged after his brief descent into maybe villainy. There had been several times since then when he found himself on a verge of a panic attack, wondering what he could have been thinking, sending off his notes like that. Every time he managed to calm himself down by justifying that the person he messaged probably just thought he was some creep for taking his post seriously. The poster hadn't even expected a response, he was just venting frustration, probably, so nothing was going to come of it. He wondered, in those moments, if he was a bad person for feeling sad about that fact. He knew he was.

It had been eight days since Izuku had messaged the poster and he had just finished banaging himself up from Kacchan's latest attempt to put him in his place. The beatings had become even worse since the sludge villain incident. From what Izuku could gather from Kacchan's rants between his explosions, he was trying to prove he wasn't some weak ass victim or something like that. The end result was that Izuku spent most of his life nowadays alone and in pain, but how was that any different from every day since he turned four?

Izuku was just tugging his shirt down to hide the bandages as he left the bathroom when he heard his mother gasp and drop a pan in the next room. He ran in to find her staring open mouthed at the TV, the news anchor standing on what was normally a busy street, the shot backlit by flashing police sirens.

"...As of yet, police have few leads on the identity of the attacker, only saying that he might have some sort of stealth quirk considering how quickly he was able to disappear in the aftermath of Mt. Lady's death this afternoon. A vigil for the fallen hero will be held…"

"Isn't that terrible, Izuku! She was such a new hero too. Who would do something like this…" His mother turned back into the kitchen, trying to distract herself by preparing dinner. Izuku simply stared at the TV in shock, not really seeing anything. The poster had been serious after all. He had actually done it. Which meant that he, Izuku Midoriya, a hero fanboy, was now accessory to a hero's murder. Izuku's started to hyperventilate only to be violently knocked out of his upcoming panic attack by another thought. Mt. Lady was dead. That meant that he, a quirkless Deku, had beaten a hero. An unfamiliar warm feeling welled up in his chest and he fought down a smile. He wondered if this made a bad person.

He knew it did.