Gabriel North [Villain] [Done]

Born to Abigail and Martin North in a small town in northern Maine. Martin was the one who Gabriel derived his Quirk from, as Abigail was one of the increasingly rare Quirkless individuals. Martin was absolutely against the notion of children but his future with the woman he loved depended on his desire to have kids, so he made the absolute worst decision of pretending he wanted to have them as well and thusly was Gabriel brought into the world.

Gabriel’s early childhood was largely unremarkable. His father was a distant man who spent most of his time at work or away from home, but his mother's warmth more than made up for it. He was doted on, the only child of a woman who wanted a family. He was sociable for his age, made friends easily and thrived at school.

Gabriel began to withdraw as he grew older. Found it harder to get out of bed, to drag himself to school and deal with teachers and his fellow students. Hobbies lost their appeal, hanging out with friends seemed dull and pointless. The common theory rested on the fact his parents had split up the summer before Highschool after a couple years of turmoil. Gabriel had stopped seeing his father, a fact he’d confess if asked about was pretty great.

One summer at the end of his first year of Highschool his mother planned a beach day celebration for her birthday and did everything she could to get her son to go, hoping to crack his pubescent withdrawal. He refused, he was comfortable at home, cozy in his little shell. He ended up getting mad at her persistence, told her to leave him alone and slammed his door.

“Go away” is a hell of a choice for last words.

Years prior he’d developed his Quirk, the ability to manipulate water, and yet he lost his mother from drowning. The long lonely summer with his father gave him the time he needed to cement his understanding that life was just...funny like that sometimes. Not funny like, haha, just, you know...weird. Life was weird and pretty cruel. He knew that he absolutely deserved to be punished for his behaviour, it was his mother’s birthday and he refused to just spend the day with her at the beach but wasn’t this a little much? Of course, he knew that if he was there he could have saved her. Of course, he knew that now he was living with him, his father who never cared that he was born in the first place, he knew that he was living with a man who would resent the fact that he was forced to raise this child he never wanted on the day he lost his wife.

But his father never blamed him, nor did he have a cruel word to say about Gabriel. It was so much like before, he was just there. Food was stocked, rent was paid, the lights stayed on but even though he was with his father, Gabriel was alone from that moment to the end.

Gabriel went through school, he never excelled but did well enough that his teachers never were concerned. He participated, he raised his hand, he assembled a small group of friends of people the second he graduated he never spoke to again. He picked a university halfway across the country that he paid for with a combination of loans, some money set aside from the passing of his mother and a part-time job. He said goodbye to his father and that was the last time they spoke, barring an unattended friend request on a long since abandoned social media account.

Gabriel went to university, repeated the process, found some nobody friends, passed his classes, rarely went out. Life was meant to be survived and the best way to do that was to keep it even, never exciting, never meaningful but no surprises. No loss.

It was something small that started it all.

He’d graduated, and sought work attaining a fairly nothing temp position in an office doing some minor projects. He was liked well enough, a steady employee who came in did his time and left without issue and so he gradually moved into a full-time position. Day in. Day out. The same work, the same faces, the same cubicle, the same conversations. Deadline after deadline after deadline and he just worked, lost in why he even cared to survive this life in the first place.

The human soul isn’t meant to just survive. It’s supposed to crave, it’s supposed to hunger and strive and thrive and Gabriel just thought he could turn that off. He could pretend he didn’t have those feelings, he could bury it all deep down but only for so long.

So, in the end, all it took was something small, a deadline that had been moved without his notice, a minor dressing down for having dropped a ball he didn’t realize he was supposed to be holding. That’s all it took, a dumb, quiet, easy to move past disagreement and the floodgates opened.

A power he buried down inside himself exploded forth, his office was totalled and walked out of it boiling inside a sudden new drastic life path set.

Existence was a cruel stupid joke and in truth the only thing that really gave any sort of feeling was struggle, terror, anger, fury, the only things that ever made Gabriel feel good, hell, feel anything were those emotions so he let them burn, and decided that he’d do others the favour and let them feel it too.