A/N: A short story has arrived!! All I knew going into this was that I wanted to write about my favorite anime character, and I let the story spiral from there. Can you guess who he is after reading this? I love being aloof with stories. The best ones always keep readers imagining, so let's dive in together and learn how strong we really are.

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All I ever wanted to do was—be someone others could depend on. Be someone I could depend on.

In the wake of a tragic aftermath, those words rang true as day through the shark toothed boy's head. His fiery red dyed hair, which was usually perfectly kept into pristine spikes, was now messy and out of place. Soot from an explosion blast resembled the darkened roots that used to gleam so un-proudly across his entire head.

"Oy, don't give up on us now, y'hear?" Another voice rattled off aggressively in his ear, distorted and far away, even though the sandy haired dynamight boy was right next to him. "Oy! keep your eyes open!" That gruff voice was one the riot of a hero could recognize anywhere. Always screaming, raving about some imperfection that he himself could obviously push beyond.

It must have been exhausting living that kind of life, wishing to always be the best and number 1. To the crimson spiked boy with his body just about crushed under rubble, it seemed he still couldn't come close to being good enough.

"B?" His sharp pointed teeth managed to push out in a crumpled whisper. His vision was starting to turn crimson from blood build up. "Did I—do good?" The riot coated in more than just red cloth sputtered. That question was always on his mind and somehow never left it. It sickened the Dynamight hero, who was currently trying to topple over the boulders and rubble that was crushing the life out of the only other hero he respected.

"E, you idiot! You ask me this every time we end a fight!" The exploding boy's words were as sharp as his skill on the battle field. Unfortunately, he wasn't the muscle of this duo. That title was reserved for the shark toothed riot, who had already used up the last of his reserves of hardening to hold up an entire collapsing building for one weakened dog to escape. "Of course y'did good! You always do! It's dumb to even question otherwise!"

Green and charcoal rounded gauntlets were thrown harshly to each side, clanging to the ground and most likely cracking with the brute force. It didn't matter. Material could be replaced and remade at any point in time. A human life? That was priceless, unmatched, and short lived. Each moment that passed by would never be able to be recreated or rekindled, and watching as that life was slowly fading away in front of him made the pessimistic firecracker of a boy hope he could come through in time.

"But..you were right." The heroic shark toothed boy sputtered. He tried to harden the skin around his hand to see if he could still possibly be useful. Nothing seemed to be working in his favor today.

"Stop it. Stop talking. I need to concentrate." The talking was actually the least of the functional boy's worries. If anything, hearing the crushed hero on the ground talk was the only thing keeping him grounded from losing full control of himself. Behind the dark body suit with red straps crossing perfectly in an X over his torso, his heart was racing faster than it ever had before.

There had been many in his lifetime who he had told to go die. This one though, had been the only person to understand and be patient with him. No one else could understand his rage, or realize that it was just a mask for emotions he wasn't capable of showing like others could. A lifetime of trying to be perfect would do that to a damaged soul.

"I—I should have just walked away."

"Stop it!" He shouted again while trying to precision blast some of the larger boulders. However, there was a fear of those bits and pieces rolling forward and caving in the rest of the trapped riot. What would he do then? "Don't you dare say that again!" There wasn't another hero for miles.

"B, I don't want to die.."

"You're spouting nonsense...and don't say I'm right." He utterly prayed in this moment for every other outcome than what was currently unfurling. "God, you can tell me I'm right any other time but right now!"

"But—what if there's not going to be a next time?"

"THEN I'LL MAKE SURE THERE'S A NEXT TIME!!" Rage was beginning to boil over and splatter like oil in every direction, flammable and untamable. Dangerous. "I'll kill you if you wuss out on me now!"

The boy who usually had a toothy grin, now had crimson eyes that were fading in color. But as he watched the other try his hardest to free him from this stony prison, it was obvious that there was good in this crumbling world. Heroes did exist, and the riot of a boy had been blessed with knowing one of them. The most internally broken of them all, but the only one willing to claw his way through a boulder to make sure the other lived to see tomorrow.

That was the bond of being true heroes.

"Thank you B. I'm truly glad I got to meet someone like you." The tan muscled boy under rubble spoke in sputters to his comrade, unaware if he would be able to see this through to the end. Whether it was the extreme blood loss that tingled his taste buds, and was most definitely pooling around in hot puddles underneath him, or his soul leaving his body, it all ended with the same result.

"Wait—WAIT, NO!" Words blurred into nothing more than radio static. "E!" Sight became nothing more than a void of empty darkness. It must have been a dream, maybe another plane of existence? The boy who had a darkened scar above his left eye could still feel, could still sense himself just enough to know he was still hanging on to life. But his limbs were numb, useless to any sort of movement that would help save him. Heh, guess this is really unmanly of me... the inferno hair styled boy uttered to himself, as the heart beat in his ears slowed.

Then, the riot of a boy woke up. When had he even lost his senses?

There was a steady beeping, but god did his body feel as if it had been torn to shreds. That was ironic, seeing as his body had quite literally been fabricated to never break. It was his whole motto that got printed onto every cereal box and toy with his likeness on it.

Become a wall that's unbreakable! In this world of favorable superheroes and those who wished to destroy it, a motto seemed to be the only thing that had kept him hanging by the threads of this fragile dream.

"H-hello?" The shark toothed breakable hero uttered. Bandages were covering half of his vision from above, and even if it wasn't the pain throbbing through his head would have impacted his vision anyway. There goes my 20/20 vision... he tried to joke with himself. It was all just a coping mechanism to stray himself away from how truly terrified he was. The beeping sounded like a hospital heart monitor, but where was his heroic partner? Where was the Dynamight boy? "Is—anybody there?"

"E? You're awake? Oh my god, E!" The bed ridden hero turned his head toward the sound, seeing blurs of reds and blacks with a touch of sandy gold. He knew those colors right away. They moved toward him like he was going somewhere forever. "They said there was only a 20 percent chance of you wakin up!" Just as fast as the injured aspiring number 2 hero heard the words, they were fading away again. Guess I am going somewhere. Words became just as muddled and mixed as the famous flamboyant colors everyone knew on the aspiring number 1 hero. "Jesus E, don't be an idiot and scare me like-"

Fiery unbreakable hues of red slipped back into a world of nowhere. He couldn't hear the rest of his partner's sentence. Even his mind couldn't keep him together. How truly weak he was. One could only hope that everyone else had been saved from the wreckage, cause the powers above sure hadn't decided if he would.

Some memories passed through his mind, like feathers floating down a creek. It was strange. None of the memories were of him. Well, of course they included him, but the images being experienced were focused on everyone other than himself. An elderly woman he had helped cross a busy intersection of a prefecture, a mother that for some reason decided that he was the one to ask about how to raise her son with good morals. The hero himself was only just a kid fresh out of highschool at the time. What would he know about raising a child? One could argue that he still was one even with a few years of real hero work under his belt.

"Just...give your child the most love you can, and always remind them that they're good enough no matter who they decide to become." Those were the words he had told the woman who had stopped him on the sidewalk during his mid-day patrol. The riot hero had forgotten that memory. It had seemed so minuscule within that moment. Yet, he remembered an emotional smile crossing over his own expression as he thought about what those words meant to him.

Those were the words...I wanted to hear as a kid. Back when he wasn't dying his hair every month to be the powerful red it was now. Back when he got the scar over his eye because he tried to wipe away tears with his newly shard formed skin. He had never felt good enough to embody who he really wanted to be.

"You...you came to save me? After how I've treated you...and the others? After how terrible I've been?" A raspy, somberly gruff voice replaced the woman and child. Darkened sandy locks of wildly unkept hair pushing forward in his view of the memory. The Dynamight boy's eyes were covered by his long bangs. It was him, and the dyed red boy remembered this memory vividly. 

"B, of course I came to rescue you! You think I'd let those villains take you away from your dream?" Back then, the number one hero went by a much more violent name. Something to do with explosions, being a God, goodness the shark toothed boy was glad those days were over. They were just growing freshman boys who were trying to make adult decisions and failing miserably. "You haven't become number 1 yet! And I don't know if you've noticed, but I don't think anyone here wants to see you making banters about how you're going to win and defeat everyone...oh wait."

He remembered how much of a riot both of them had in that moment. Laughing, getting lightly blasted in the face for making that comment. The scarred boy had indeed projectiled himself in the air across a bloody battlefield to save this weirdly angry future hero. It had been the best decision he ever made, no regrets.

But why this...why now?

"E, you're a lunatic y'know that? A lunatic who's a..." A possibly dying riot hero watched as the other boy turned away from him and mumbled the words, "great hero." The boy watching all of these memories flash past him wanted to cry, he tried his hardest. However, all that came out were choked up sobs. He guessed one cannot simply cry in a void space of their own intelligence.

He wanted to scream, to know why this was happening to him, to know why people couldn't just live their lives contently. Why did there have to be villains that needed heroes to stop them? Why did so many good people have to come close to losing their lives, and still be under appreciated by those who didn't have a clue what they went through each day?

"B said I'm a great hero...so why do I still not feel like one?" Tan skinned hands snaked their way through his own jelled spikes of crimson, finding tuffs to grab hold of for a lifeline. "I, I spent years training for this...I dedicated myself to this...but...why am I still making mistakes?!"

"You're still gonna make mistakes, even 20 years in. S'just the way it goes. I thought I could be the best and blow all those extras away with my power, which I did technically. But, even with as great as I am, I'm still trying to...let people in and let all this damn anger go. S'not easy E. S'not easy for anyone."

"B!" The choked up hero called out to the memory that had already come and gone from time. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm trapped here like this! I'm sorry I just...want to be good at this. I wanna stop being a screwup who can only be confident through a persona of me!"

That was when the shark toothed riot began to understand. Eyes wide as the galaxy and falling like stars toward his calloused hands. These memories, they were all of others who he had impacted. Sure, it was the hero Red Riot who had done it, but a glimmer of a thought came to light. His rank, these memories, they wouldn't exist without his innermost self. The boy who had jet black hair that hung in front of his eyes. His trials and errors, as painful as they were, they made him E.K. He already knew it, it was what had gotten him this far.

How did I forget? That was the thought that turned his opaque world clear again. The mind of the epiphany concerned so boy began to spin. The memories even beginning to blur and distort themselves.

Where was he going now?

Was he going to die in anxiety filled sadness?

Was he going to wake up and find a new version of himself like the sandy blond hero had said?

"The antlered boy had never seen a look so sad, so deprived of life and will to live. Yet he saw that there was amazement in that royal girl's eyes. Maybe it was the moonlight from which he devoted himself to, or maybe it was the way the tears cascaded down her sun believing cheeks. She could see him, the first person to ever look upon him and not show utter disgust." That raspy voice of the sandy spiked boy was strangely calm as he read the words from a hard cover bound book. Strange, the shark toothed boy never knew the other enjoyed reading. This was something altogether new.

As the injured boy became aware of his surroundings, he found that he was no longer in a hospital. The lighting was pale, and the paint on the wall was even paler. He was lying on a pullout bed in a living room apartment that belonged to his heroic friend at the top of the charts. Of course. "Tsk, how does anyone read this sappy stuff?" The room was so simplistic and minimalistic, just like the flashy explosion hero. Something in that boy's tragic childhood must have taught him to detach himself from items that weren't a necessity.

"Heh, so you finally...decided to read the book I told you about." The newly awakened riot hero half heartedly chuckled as he turned to look at the other boy. The book unfortunately fell to the ground, most definitely ruining some of the perfect pages that the original owner tried to keep pristine.

"E?!" None of those minor inconveniences really mattered now. The owner of the apartment scrambled to his feet, busting his knee on the coffee table and hopelessly cursing over it. "Outta all the things to wake y'up, course some idiotic fantasy romance book would be the thing." The anger wounded hero said as he hissed from the injured knee. He was now forcing his weight on it in order to be by the other's side.

"That old rival of yours gave it to me when we graduated from the academia. He said it'd remind me of what it means to never give up. To see that...everyone struggles to be who they are." A splitting headache suddenly pounded through his head, an aftershock of just waking up from a major injury. The sandy haired boy reacted quickly, as hopeful top pro heroes did in their line of work. Protect the injured, ensure that the head is monitored. That line was drilled into their very being as their fates intertwined with the line of hero work.

"Tsk, even when y'er injured and wake up from a coma you still ramble nonsense." His caretaker was smiling lightly now. Normally the shark toothed boy's babbling would have led to a deep scowl and many more insults that were never taken seriously. The lighthearted inspirational boy knew it was all a facade to show dominant power. They were just yin and yang like that, a raging sun and calming moon that surprisingly worked perfectly in sync with one another.

"B, that's not very manly of you."

"Tsk, whatever, the manliness is reserved for you anyways." The sarcastic firecracker rolled his eyes in a lulled attempt to look annoyed. It didn't work at all.

"B, I was so scared..." The emotions came barreling in like a blast of nitroglycerin, charged up and ready to destroy. "I really thought that I—I know that I didn't-"

"E...stop." The caretaking pro hero's voice dropped an octave. It sent a chill down the riot boy's spine as the tears which were threatening to spill down his cheeks stopped in their tracks. That was the power of Dynamight. "Don't finish that sentence, cause I know s'just gonna be some crap about how y'shoulda did something different."

The riot of a boy fell absolutely silent from those words. He was correct, his partner in hero work was always correct. They were the only two who had analyzed and understood each other in high school when no one else would. "Mhm, knew it. Don't let those words come outta your mouth or I will actually throw you out this window." Little known fact about the number 1 hero, was when he signed onto the calorie storage hero's agency with the red spiked idiot, he requested an apartment on the top floor. Maybe it was another superiority thing, but falling from that height would most definitely kill him for real.

That would be very unhelpful.

"Heh-heh, now that's very unheroic of you." They bantered on for a couple more minutes like this, reacquainting themselves with normalcy. The injured boy had no idea, but it had been 3 weeks since he was last in the conscious world.

"Hey, E, don't go beatin yourself up for the nonsense that day, kay?" The Dynamight hero looked away, hiding a scowl deep as a canyon as he latched a strong hold onto the other's bicep. "No one could have seen that crap comin. The reporters called you a true sacrificial hero for stayin behind when no one else would."

"B..."

"So DON'T ever go callin yourself anything less than amazing, y'hear?!" Something wet fell onto the fiery spiked boy's arm. Was it beginning to rain? No, they were indoors, so that was an illogical thought to begin with. Was it- "Don't EVER stop being anything less than who you are E! Or I'll-" He heard a sniffle, stiflingly quiet but very much there. The eventual number 1 hero in all of Japan was crying.

Not even his own mother's seen him cry since he was a toddler. He knew this, because the boy's mother had told him over a dinner one night where things got oddly personal. "God, why do you bring out things in me I try not to experience?"

That's when the riot clocked him straight in the head, bending the lower portion of his left arm up to connect in a soft blow that was like a light tap to people in their line of work. There was no intent to harm, otherwise he would have used his ability to roughen the skin over his hand. Yet, it hurt more to see how his partner in heroics only swayed lightly. He didn't even flinch. Pain was nothing to people like them. A blow to the face was a paper cut to a hero. They were taught to be numb to pain ever since day 1 of the hero track.

Being thrown into battle is the only way to learn! - said every hero educator. The fact was that yes, it did teach them, but exactly what he was still unsure. How to ignore their own physical pain? How to ignore themselves as a whole and put others above them? How the only people who could ever understand them were others in the same profession? The world outside the bubble had no idea what it really took to be a hero. Otherwise, no one in their right mind would send their child to be one.

"Because I understand you B. You're all I got until we both get better at this." The shark tooth boy grinned, showing off his perfectly pointed teeth that fit together so nicely with his tanned skin when in its jagged form. "You stayed with me in the wreckage, and I realized...that I impacted you. You impacted me." That's when the boy with the red dyed hair finally saw the crimson teary eyes of the other hero. They were now staring eye to eye. "I-"

"You've always been someone I could depend on, no one else. You put me in my place, tell me I'm being an idiot, and when I look back in fear—" The number one hero paused for a moment, swallowing to find the right words. "You're always there E, every time. Don't even know why y'stand by me but, I can't thank you enough for it."

"Heh, I dunno either." The shark toothed boy who constantly dyed his hair to keep his persona was now chuckling. "But—B?"

"Tsk, yeah E?" Sparkling dull moonlight was beginning to seep into the high rise apartment of the number 1 hero in Japan.

"Have you—ever seen me with dark hair?"

~WL (WC)

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A/N: Thank you so much for reading! I've been working on testing my skills of describing people without using their names. So this was great practice for that. I wanted to write a short story to show how far my style has come from what it used to be. This will be a testament to what you can expect with my future work in progress that I'm working toward getting published! It's a big dream, but I don't want to shy away from reaching this goal. I loved writing each line of this, and it really brought me back to when I used to write consistently on here. When I can start the publishing process, I'll start promoting myself again on here. My journey with Wattpad is not quite done yet.