#I feel bad about fridging my absolute girl tahara but

[theotherpacman]

my beloved mutual @bothsloth-originals drew my bnha oc and now I need to talk about her and since this is the blog I actually talk about bnha on, here we go

cw: violence, death, it's very sad, also sort of spoilers for my unfinished fic teach me how

her name was tahara keiko and she was quirkless. she was heavily bullied because of it, but she stood up for herself and fought back, which only added to her mistreatment, as her bullies would retaliate even worse when she did so and also her teachers/principals saw her as a delinquent who started fights/invited trouble.

the main person who bullied her was her classmate, a hero hopeful, an arrogant entitled piece of shit with a powerful quirk. he didn't get into ua and it made him bitter and angry and even more violent. he beat her bc his violence against her specifically was socially sanctioned: everyone knew and nobody cared.

when they were 16, he was beating the shit out of her as he had done before and it went too far and she died. he killed her. a local hero saw and had him arrested, but during the trial, even though the fact that he murdered her was irrefutable, her status as a quirkless delinquent made her seem less innocent, and his status as a potential hero (he may not have made it into the top hero program this side of the country but he still had potential) made him seem less guilty, and in the end, he was let go.

izuku was 11. he liked watching the news bc sometimes he got to see heroes in action. he saw the trial, and it changed everything for him.

he'd always known that people hated and mistreated him for his quirklessness. he'd even feared that one day he would be killed for it. but he'd never thought that killing him would be so easy. that the whole of society, even a judge in a court, would rule that the murder of a quirkless person is permissible. that her life, and by extension his life, doesn't even count as a life at all.

the trial made his own death not only real but inescapable, in his mind. izuku saw himself in tahara, and in her killer, he saw katsuki. depite all the hundreds of times that katsuki had said "die" and "I'll kill you," izuku had never taken it seriously, until now. until he realized that katsuki would never, ever be blamed for anything he did to izuku, not even if he killed him. now, he felt certain that one day, what had happened to tahara would play out all over again: katsuki with his fire and fists, and izuku on the ground, bleeding.

he still loved katsuki. always.

tahara's murderer became a hero.

Guys why am I kinda proud of it

@averagecygnet-blog did I do her justice