Viridian: The Green Guide

Chapter 2: First Day of the Rest of my Life

When Izuku arrived at school the next day, his classmates had already heard both about Kacchan's invitation to jump off a roof and Izuku's idiotic run-in with the sludge villain and they had apparently decided that the two must be related.

"The loser, there are easier ways to kill yourself..."

"He was just being an attention hog. Can you imagine wanting to die on live tv?"

Izuku ignored them. He didn't want to kill himself, that was stupid and would break his mother's heart. Not to mention that if he killed himself, Kacchan would get in trouble for suicide baiting him. There were a lot of reasons why the teachers didn't bother reporting Kacchan for his...more explosive tendencies, but one of them was that if Kacchan's treatment of him were discovered, he might not be able to go to UA and Izuku wouldn't be able to live with himself if he was the reason Kacchan didn't become a hero. Well, he wouldn't be living at all in that hypothetical situation, would he? Whatever, it was still the same concept.

If he were to die doing vigilante stuff, on the other hand...

Izuku shook his head. He really shouldn't be thinking about stuff like that, it wasn't normal. He sat down at his desk and sighed at the flower someone had put on it. Apparently, there had been some sort of unspoken barrier against telling Izuku to kill himself but now that Kacchan had blown that barrier up, the other students were more than happy to follow his lead.

Izuku glanced over toward Kacchan, who was very determinedly not looking at Izuku. No, Izuku should stop thinking everything was about him. Kacchan just thought that the view out the window was much more interesting to look at than a worthless Deku like him and he was right. Izuku grabbed the flower and went to throw it away amidst a chorus of giggles and whispers from his classmates. He could handle this, it really wasn't that much worse than it had been and Izuku was used to insults and threats. Why should this new evolution be any different?

Izuku had been wrong. Suicide baiting was different than what he'd been through before. A few days ago, he definitely suspected that most people would be happy if he died, but now he knew it. Was living even worth it anymore? Maybe it would be easier...but Izuku still couldn't be responsible for getting Kacchan in trouble or making his mom feel guilty. He frowned as he started to walk home. Being quirkless sucked.

Maybe he should go out and do some vigilante stuff later? When he'd researched it last night, he'd originally planned on waiting a few months to go out so he could get in shape and maybe get some fight training, but after the day he'd just had...well, he wasn't going to go intentionally put himself in danger, he was just going out to get the lay of the land, right?

He took a detour to a nearby shopping center on the way home, since he didn't really have anything appropriate to wear for technically legal crime-fighting. His mom would be so worried if he somehow got a cold because he didn't dress warmly enough before going out all night, so he couldn't just wear one of his t-shirts. The problem was that all his jackets and hoodies were hero merch, not that there was anything wrong with wearing hero merch, but there'd been another vigilante, the Crawler, who wore an All-Might hoodie. Izuku didn't want people thinking that he was the Crawler because what if that guy got in trouble for what he did? Besides, it wasn't very polite to steal someone else's signature look.

He ended up buying a dark green hoodie. It was thick enough that it would keep him warm and the dark color would be good to help him blend into the shadows. Black would probably be better, but the store was out of black and he was left to choose between green or navy, so he figured he may as well match his hair.

There was a costume store next door to the department store he'd bought the hoodie at, so he decided he'd walk around and see what he could find to hide his identity. After looking at probably way too many different kinds of masks, he groaned in frustration. The simplest option would be to choose a simple domino mask, but one good punch and it'd be flying off his face. Not to mention that it might slide around and impair his field of vision, which wouldn't be safe at all. He was about to leave when he walked past a display of different goggles. That might be useful if someone tried to throw dirt in his eyes or something, right?