Chapter Twenty-Three

                                    

                                          
"Young Todoroki! Why the long face?" A deep voice startles Shouto out of his reverie and he glances up to see the impossibly tall and slender figure of All Might staring down at him with a soft grin. The retired teacher motions to the spot next to him. "May I?" Shouto absently nods and moves his bookbag and rests it on his lap.There's a short pause before All Might sits down next to him, his long legs folding and his knees almost touch his chest. Shouto studies him through the corner of his good eye and realizes that All Might is studying him back.
                          
"My dear boy, if it's any sort of consolidation for you, I am a great listener." All Might smiles gently down to Shouto, his shadowed blue eyes crinkle up and Shouto can't help but to return the smile with his own small one. It's been a long process but he's learned to be more open with feelings. Where he would have once shied away and mumbled something about how he's not at all bothered by anything- Shouto finds himself pausing. He glances down to his hands that are clasped on his bookbag. There's still that rolling inner turmoil to keep everything under lock and key but Shouto gently reminds himself that sometimes, it's okay to shine a light on his emotional vulnerability. Well, at least that's what his seemingly new posse of friends tell him. Bakugou and Shinsou.
                          
Never in a thousand years had Shouto thought that he would make good friends with either of them. They make an interesting trio, none of them really truly fitting in, all of them come from different walks of life and they don't really share a lot in common. Had they been pieces of a puzzle, none of them would have properly fit together at all. Each one belongs to entirely different puzzles and they come in an assorted array of colors, painted details and shapes. There is however, one thing that serves as the scissors that cuts them to allow them to interlock with one another.
                          
The simple fact that all of them had battled against the stereotype of walking in the footpath to villainy. It had been a hard pill to swallow and even now, Shouto can still taste the bitter aftertaste that refuses to leave his mouth. It's an idea that he had never really thought that he would have to constantly battle against. Being the son of a once prominent hero with a respectable family name, Shouto had been able to easily excel with whatever he put his mind to, with no one to doubt or second guess him. No one had even blinked twice at his dream to become a hero, seeing who his father is, most people were more surprised that his elder siblings haven't become heroes.
                          
However, after the cruel turn of events, Shouto finds that he's now marching against the crowd and their growing waves of doubt and fear that seems to sink into the very marrow of his bones. It feels like a constant uphill battle and Shouto has the understanding that he has to work thrice as hard as his peers to even begin to prove that he has no ounce of wish to become what many of his family had chosen for their own lives.
                          
Shouto can only imagine how hard Shinsou had been fighting for his own dreams when his quirk had come in. To have been branded as a future villain at such a young age, the hurt that Shinsou must have gone through is mountainous. Bakugou, more or less had the most normal life out of the three of them. After his kidnapping, however, the media had twisted it from him being an unfortunate victim in the early stages of a coup d'état to being degraded to a hot headed young man whose future only holds villainy.
                          
It's sad to think that everyone around them develops their own opinion like a hive mind and then try to forge and warp Shouto, Bakugou and Shinsou into what they believe in. He supposes that it only takes misinformation to be planted into the minds of the public and it will cultivate into mass hysteria. If that's the end goal of the League of Villains, then Shouto believes that they have gone above and beyond in achieving that particular goal. The masses are in tattered shreds and there had been low ranked heroes that have been getting taken down by a mixture of waning confidence and furious civilians. Shouto had noticed that a lot of students enrolled in the hero classes have either switched to one of the other departments, which is a first in the school's history, or just dropped out of Yuuei entirely.