A normal life, free of Pendulum (Epilogue)

The training Aizawa had described you had been rigorous; there was a period of time where you were equal parts surprised and disgusted with your own capacity for anger, scheming, and potential towards evil. The early days were the roughest. Benefactor had told you that Pendelum meant being a special class of person; when you deprive someone of power, even power they've worked hard not to use, the result is a violent lashing out. For a long time, you plotted some sort of escape or **** from Aizawa.

Being a hero and a teacher, another part of Aizawa's job was making sure that young men like yourself understood the reasons for his ridiculously punishing training. After about a week, you finally began to understand. Completing seemingly pointless, annoyingly rigorous training without the use of your quirk had refocused your attention on your own physical fitness and wellbeing. In a short period of time, you'd moved from a person who was constantly thinking about his quirk to one who barely remembered he had it.

Yet, still it persisted in your thoughts, like a stubborn splinter that occasionally summons just enough pain to remind you that it needs to be excised.

Aizawa's training began your transformation and other responsible heroes finished it, providing you physical and logical challenges every bit as difficult as ones heroes faced. As Eraserhead had promised, when you finished, you were still unable to attain the status as hero, though the man himself told you: "you have the strongest discipline now of any student I've ever taught... for better or worse. If you were to join the police **** now, you'd be an exemplary officer and a help to heroes everywhere. Of course, the way you are now, it's up to you to decide your own destiny. You've had a full education now and the government reparations for your hardship under Benefactor should be sufficient for you to live how you want. You don't need that quirk any more."

It was a good thing, too, because Pendelum had disappeared completely, or so it seemed. Perhaps your total determination that you would never use it had actually destroyed it. One day, Benefactor had disappeared from your brain and along with him the urge to use your power. Was this the "satisfaction" with your own life, which he'd told you would erase the quirk? Or was this simply forgetting how to use a talent that you've neglected for too long? Either way, you didn't think you could control someone's mind if you wanted to.

You ended up going into police-work after all, hoping to put a stop to other criminals who'd exploit people like Benefactor had. If there was one lingering regret about the way your training under Aizawa and the others had shaken out, it was that the training really had been so intense and private, you had few relationships outside of heroes, all of whom viewed you now as someone to be respected, but also, to be kept at an arm's length. It had turned you into the cliché sort of cop who sits alone in bars after work and drinks away the day's problems. Still, if a tendency to enjoy **** and solitude was the worst of your vices, you thought you could say you'd successfully avoided becoming the protégé that Benefactor wanted you to be.

Sometimes, you thought about it: how things might have been different if you hadn't allowed the heroes to do the right thing and instead had **** Ms. Joke to vouch for you. Every time you thought about it, it just wanted to make you drink more. Those times had been as cursed a gift as there could ever be; a time that you wanted to return to, despite knowing they were the most **** and dangerous days of your life. Ever since that time, you hadn't trusted yourself around others and that had turned you into a person who's never really around others.

Then again, you were still young. Maybe in some ways, your mind was still a child's. After all, you'd overlooked an important factor; there are those insufferable people out there who reach out even to those who deliberately avoid all others.

One day as you were drinking, a familiar hero with sea-green hair and dressed in bright orange showed up at your favorite bar, looking more out of place than anyone ever had in the establishment. Your expression didn't change when you looked at her; you simply went back to your drink. However, once she sat down next to you and started slapping the back of your trench-coat you found yourself laughing in spite of yourself. You'd avoided her so long, you forgot how brilliant her smile could be, and for that matter, how infectious her laughter.

"You're a hard guy to find sometimes, Ren Yamada! What happened to that date I asked for?" Emi grinned, leaning to the end of the bar so that you'd have a harder time avoiding her eyes.

You told her with a hint of guilt that cutting her out of your life had been necessary for the sake of controlling your quirk. That quirk was hitched to the confused, romantic feelings of a young man. Getting rid of those feelings had been essential.

"Yeah? Well, I guess we both knew it was that way. You really made good on your promise, Ren... Such a responsible person! Just the kind of guy I'm looking for these days," she joked, leaning her elbow on the table and smiling.

Her words had come out as a joke, true. They couldn't be anything more. For all she knew, you were married with kids on the way. She was still ten years your senior, even if her looks hadn't depreciated at all in the half a decade it took you to get your life and career together. The two of you were always a longshot.

But as you sat in the bar, pondering your loneliness over the past handful of years and remembering how much you'd sacrificed...

You thought you deserved to be happy for once. Without hesitation, you grabbed hand of one hand over hers. When you did, she leaned in and kissed your lips, right there in the bar. The bartender watched the two of you, the oddest pair he'd ever seen, as one of her gloved hands found your tie and held you there, locking lips and passionately refamiliarizing yourselves with each other's tongues. You'd given her your answer: you didn't see her words as a joke. In response, she'd made clear: they weren't.

The night you spent with Emi after that stint in the bar was like rediscovering yourself-- the part of you that knew how to smile, indulge yourself, and be happy, without cloistering off the feelings that threatened to bring Pendulum back. This time, it wasn't a nervous young man, watching with eyes like saucers as his role model hands him a toy. With no obstacles, you and Emi enjoyed yourself as adults; she'd replaced her bed with something better and cleaned up her room a bit, but the rest of the setting was familiar, as her costume-gloved hands held onto the headboard and the mattress creaked beneath your excited thrusting. You were all the way inside her, making love in the truest sense of the word, having discovered a passion that you couldn't believe you'd ever given up.

"Even us heroes get weak for a guy in uniform, you know? You really did become a man in that time off!" Emi giggled happily, wearing a grin of excitement as your hands gripped onto her hips, allowing you to drive yourself deep inside. There were no toys or condoms this time; the two of you, reuniting after all of this time, had a certain commitment to each other. Not just you, but even she had lived in a way that cut yourselves off from things you really wanted. Now that you both had the chance to claim it again, with no obstacles, the sex was passionate and uninhibited.

As you filled Emi full of your semen, you kissed her lips, stopping her witty banter for a while as the two of you explored each other's mouths and bodies. You both went to sleep satisfied that night, then picked it back up in the morning, then the next night, and so-on, so-on, as your busy work schedules would allow.

It was no surprise to anyone when Ms. Joke had your baby. This child was a real son, one who wouldn't be worried about any dark gift his father figure handed down to him and could instead appreciate just Emi's side of it. You'd never known your real father, but you didn't hate him-- Benefactor may have ripped you from your family at no fault of your birth parents or he may have taken you off the streets. The important part was just that you be the father now that you'd always needed when you were a scared, confused Beneficiary.

Emi retired from the hero business to teach while you continued to work as a policeman. From unnatural circumstances, you'd found a life that was more comfortable and normal than you'd ever imagined. There were rough patches, of course-- you may have become a bit more of an alcoholic than you realized-- but together, your family got through them. What is resisting **** next to resisting the urge to manipulate minds, after all?

As life became more domestic and less adventuresome, when you'd emptied a few damnable bottles and were working tough cases, the old guy did appear to you again. He was angry; furious even. "You threw it all away, Ren! I gave you everything! You were royalty and you traded your crown to join the commoners! No, that's not it. You could have accomplished anything and everything... Think of the hero you could have been! The lives you could have saved! Remember that thug that beat you down in the alleys tonight? He and every one of his accomplices escaped... You could have stopped them in their tracks, you ungrateful little fuck!" the apparition bellowed, channeling the former JDSF hard-ass self that you'd never actually had the chance to see.

During those hard times, you just had to laugh and remind yourself the weight of the world wasn't on your shoulders. You'd done Japan the greatest service possible by sealing that quirk of yours away forever. Even in those hard moments of the job where you thought to yourself, "what I wouldn't give to make this jackass slap the cuffs on himself," you recognized the greater good.

And when you lay with your wife, enjoying her laughter and her jokes, no matter how bad they were, you were certain you'd made the right call. Maybe there was another Ren out there, in another world, who was living happily with Pendulum, who'd found a way to use it for that kind of good without abusing it, but Aizawa had promised you that you couldn't become a hero on this path and you hadn't. But that was okay.

"Hey Honey... Whatcha say I put the kid to bed and the two of us film a new sex-ed film together?" Emi cooed to you from her side of the bed, setting aside her study materials to begin tracing her bare finger upon your chest, while flashing you irresistible doe-eyes. When she got like that, you were practically under her mind control. "Or would you rather do the bikini photo shoot? I'll bet I can still fit into that old thing~"

Laughing at that embarrassing memory of your first intimate night together back when you were barely an adult, you put it to her this way: seeing her in that would either be sexy as hell, or you'd get a good laugh out of it.

And when it came to Ms. Joke, either one was okay.