65) meet my monsters

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They say that love is the cruelest poison of them all. It seeps through the cracks in your bones and squeezes your heart until it stops beating, driving away all rational thought and voice of reason. They say it kills you slowly, like a parasite sucking at the back of your neck every night underneath your pillow: silent, slow, and deadly.

Midoriya Inko, however, disagrees.

Love can be cruel, sure. But it's not the cruelest. Love was never the cruelest thing to happen to her.

Hate was.

You may argue that love and hate aren't all that different from each other, but to Inko, there couldn't have been two more opposite things in her life.

Hate for her was her own naivety. Hate for her was her failures. Hate for her was that quirk.

She sits at a steel bench somewhere inside the city in the far parts of southern Japan, throwing oats onto the ground for the birds to eat.

At night, the park pigeons are her best distraction. Unraveling the pecking order can be all-consuming to Inko.

The red one is alpha, as he's hogging most of the food and bullying the others away with his large size. Yellow speckles seems to be next, since it's obvious he doesn't have a problem with continuously challenging the red one. And the poor little green-footed pigeon is clearly low on the list, as he's barely eating at all.

Inko throws more in his direction, using her shoe to ward off the other two dueling pigeons.

It's not a particularly nice night, as it's cold and dark and overall damp, but she prefers it like this. She enjoys the smell of the oncoming rain, and she likes to hear the disgruntled murmurs of the crowds of people in the distance on their way back home from work. It makes her feel whole again.

Something she hasn't been in what seems like ever.

Another pigeon joins the trio, this one all black with a gray neck, and she watches with minor curiosity to see what this will do to the unspoken hierarchy.

Red immediately goes for the bodyslam, but the little green pigeon is the one to stand up for the newcomer this time. He pecks the red pigeon in the throat one good time, and that seems to resolve the issue.

The order is maintained, but there's less bullying now.

Inko smiles and wishes all of life could work that way.

Watching the environment around her is something she had to learn to enjoy. When she was younger, she didn't care much for the little things. She wasn't into the bird-watching or people-observing thing. She found it weird, honestly. But now—upon her therapist's instruction—she finds that maybe it does help.

And maybe she does like it.

The truth is, if she's left alone for too long with nothing else living around her, she becomes... unsure again. She sees things. She hears them.

She doesn't like not knowing if those things are real or not. She dealt with that every day for years, and she doesn't want to go back.

At least the pigeons are real. She likes that they're brightly colored. Most pigeons are like that nowadays, as mutant and transformation powers seemed to affect them the most when quirks first started developing. They've evolved into something even more beautiful. Inko doesn't know how she didn't see it back then.

Late night joggers pass by and laugh at her kindly, and people with children walk and coo at the growing number of birds by Inko's feet.

She doesn't look at the parents. She never does.

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