POV: Midoriya is confronted about being a villain and goes on defense.

~~~

They’re in Izuku’s hideout. It’s just his; he doesn’t want it to have any connections with the League so he can keep them safe. They were his family, after all.

Izuku’s cornered, his heart surprisingly calm, with Kacchan and Shouto having herded him into the hallway’s corner.
he can’t help but laugh.

What faulty thinking on their part.
He’s always had the upper hand. Always a hidden ace up his sleeve, that which only he knew of. He ruled over them, and probably always will. They were smart: but were they intelligent? Were they genius? Surely not. And Izuku was right.
The collar of his shirt brushed against his neck enough to snap him out of his thoughts. Kacchan was trying to interrogate him on why he became a villain.
(Truthfully, he doesn’t know if that’s what Kacchan was saying, but from the sentence he just zoned into, he’d assume so. It was along the lines of “Why did you go to the other side?! Why did you become one of them!!”)
“You wanted to become a hero, didn’t you, Midoriya?” Shouto says, crouching down to Izuku’s height and nearing him like Izuku’s a /scared fucking animal/.
He’s not an /animal/. And he never will be.

He’s a human, just like them.

Human’s just tend to be... terrible, sometimes.
And, well, Izuku knows that he’s going down that path of “terrible“, at least, to hero’s eyes.
In his, he’ll never be that bad. He’s not a pedophile, he’s not a /rapist/ (they deserve to be burned in buildings with no escape, and maybe Dabi will help him?), he’s not an abuser, hell, he just... he’s so /tired/ and he just wants to be /free/ of the /rules/ of society.
So, he does the best thing he knows how to do.

He scares. He frightens. He /intimidates/.
He snaps up, ramrod straight, his voice kind yet sharp as a knife, underlined with anger and malice. “Oh, little boy, when will you /learn/?” Shouto steps back as Izuku snaps a hand up to the left side of his face, mocking the scar on the snarling ice and fire user’s face.
“You don’t play with fire, unless you want to get burned!” He grins. A small lighter appears in his hand and he looks down at it like it’s his savior, before turning his eyes to the heroes and flicking it on.

More from For later read

I’ve asked Byers to clarify, but as I read this tweet, it seems that Bret Stephens included an unredacted use of the n-word in his column this week to make a point, and the column got spiked—maybe as a result?


Four times. The column used the n-word (in the context of a quote) four times. https://t.co/14vPhQZktB


For context: In 2019, a Times reporter was reprimanded for several incidents of racial insensitivity on a trip with high school students, including one in which he used the n-word in a discussion of racial slurs.

That incident became public late last month, and late last week, after 150 Times employees complained about how it had been handled, the reporter in question resigned.

In the course of all that, the Times' executive editor said that the paper does not "tolerate racist language regardless of intent.” This was the quote that Bret Stephens was pushing back against in his column. (Which, again, was deep-sixed by the paper.)

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