**Age 9-14**
Gotham's public school system was a joke, overcrowded classrooms with burned-out teachers, metal detectors at entrances that rarely worked, violence that administrators pretended not to see. Suguro attended because absence could draw attention from social services, but he learned nothing from his classes that he hadn't already taught himself years earlier.
Instead, he learned other lessons. He learned which hallways to avoid, which students were dangerous, which teachers could be manipulated. He learned to make himself invisible not with his Quirk, but through careful social engineering. He was the kid nobody remembered, nobody noticed, nobody cared about. It was perfect camouflage.
His home life continued its familiar pattern of abuse and neglect. His grandmother had grown worse over the years, drinking more, raging more, her mind showing signs of decline that made her even more erratic and dangerous. Suguro had stopped trying to predict her moods or avoid her violence. Instead, he endured it with the same clinical detachment he brought to everything else, treating each beating as an exercise in pain tolerance, each verbal assault as meaningless noise.
But he was growing, and with growth came strength. His understanding of his Quirk had reached sophisticated levels. He'd moved from simple observation to active experimentation, using the books Dr. Webb had left him as guides for understanding chemical synthesis and biological processes.
His room had become a makeshift laboratory. He'd stolen equipment from the school's chemistry lab beakers, test tubes, and basic measuring instruments. He'd acquired chemicals through various means: some stolen from shops, some purchased with money he'd pickpocketed, some synthesized from household products. It was crude, dangerous work, but Suguro approached it with the same methodical precision he brought to everything else.
The experiments were conducted on animals—rats he trapped in the alleys, stray cats, pigeons. He observed their reactions with detailed documentation, noting variables, adjusting concentrations, mapping the relationship between dosage and effect.
**Entry 457:** *Rat subject exposed to concentrated sample shows immediate fear response. Attempting to flee from cage despite no visible threat. Response lasts approximately 90 minutes before subject returns to normal behavior. No apparent lasting effects.*
**Entry 458:** *Increased concentration by 30%. Rat subject shows extreme panic, self-injurious behavior. Died after 45 minutes—cause appears to be cardiac arrest from sustained terror. Need to find non-lethal maximum dosage.*
**Entry 459:** *Three rats exposed simultaneously to moderate concentration. Subjects attack each other, apparently perceiving cage-mates as threats. Only one survivor with injuries. Fear appears to make them aggressive toward anything nearby.*
By age twelve, he'd successfully created a liquid version of his fear toxin while it was crude and unstable, it was functional. By thirteen, he'd refined it enough to control duration and intensity with reasonable precision.
He tested it once on a neighbor's dog, a vicious untrained animal that had attacked him several times. He'd put a few drops on some meat and left it where the dog would find it. The results had been dramatic: the dog had gone completely insane with terror, attacking its own shadow, fleeing from invisible threats, until its owner had called animal control to take it away.
Suguro had watched from his window with cold satisfaction. This was power and this was the weapon that would protect him.
But the most significant event of these years happened when Suguro was fourteen, on a December evening that would change his trajectory forever.
His grandmother had been worse than usual that week, screaming about money, about the burden of raising a teenager, about how Suguro was worthless and ungrateful. She'd taken to locking him in his room for entire weekends at a time, sliding minimal food under the door, raging drunkenly outside about how she wished he'd never been left with her.
Suguro had endured it with his usual detachment, using the forced isolation to work on his experiments. He'd recently had a breakthrough in stabilizing his liquid toxin, and he was eager to test the new formulation.
On this particular evening, his grandmother unlocked his door and told him to come make coffee. She was entertaining a friend, another elderly drunk from the building and wanted to seem like a proper grandmother who had her grandson help with hospitality.
Suguro complied without argument. He moved through the apartment like a ghost, starting the coffee maker, preparing cups. His grandmother and her friend were in the living room, talking loudly about their various complaints and grievances.
The new formulation of his liquid toxin was in a vial in his pocket. He'd been planning to test it on rats that evening. Instead, looking at the coffee pot, a different thought occurred to him.
What would happen if he tested it on a human subject?
What would happen if that human subject was his grandmother?
The thought came to him with the same clinical curiosity that drove all his experiments. She had tormented him for fourteen years. She had beaten him, starved him, locked him away, reminded him daily that he was worthless and unwanted. She was a perfect test subject, no one would question if she had a mental breakdown, no one would investigate too closely, no one would care.
Suguro stood in the kitchen, the coffee pot burbling, the vial in his hand. He'd reached a decision point, and he made his choice with the same cold logic he applied to everything else.
He unscrewed the vial and added it to his grandmother's coffee cup. The toxin was colorless, odorless, tasteless. She'd never know.
He carried the cups into the living room and handed them over. His grandmother took hers without even looking at him, dismissing him with a wave. "Go back to your room. We don't want you lurking around."
Suguro returned to his room but left the door cracked slightly, watching through the gap.
For several minutes, nothing happened. His grandmother drank her coffee while complaining to her friend about rent prices. Then, mid-sentence, she stopped.
Her face went pale. Her eyes widened. The cup fell from her hand, shattering on the floor.
"What's wrong?" her friend asked.
His grandmother stood up slowly, her eyes fixed on something across the room that Suguro knew wasn't there. "No," she whispered. "No, that's not... you're not real."
"What are you talking about?"
But his grandmother was backing away now, her hands raised defensively. "Stay away from me! You're dead! You're supposed to be dead!"
Whatever she was seeing, it terrified her absolutely. Her face contorted with pure horror, and she began screaming—raw, animalistic sounds of primal terror. She stumbled backward, tripping over furniture, and then she was running, still screaming, heading for the apartment door.
Her friend tried to grab her, but his grandmother fought her off with surprising strength, driven by whatever nightmare was unfolding in her mind. She yanked the door open and ran into the hallway, still screaming.
Suguro moved to his window, which overlooked the street seven floors below. He watched as his grandmother burst out of the building's front entrance, running into traffic without looking. A car swerved to avoid her. She kept running, and then she was at the fire escape of the building across the street, climbing it with frantic desperation.
A crowd was gathering below, pointing up at the screaming woman climbing higher and higher. Someone must have called the police, because Suguro could hear sirens in the distance.
His grandmother reached the roof of the building 12 stories up and kept running. She was trying to escape something that was chasing her, something only she could see.
She reached the edge of the roof and didn't stop.
Suguro watched her fall with the same clinical detachment he brought to all his experiments. It took approximately three seconds for her body to hit the pavement. The crowd screamed. People rushed forward, but Suguro knew from the impact that she was already dead.
He stepped back from the window, and simply walked to his desk and opened his notebook.
**Entry 721:** *First human test of concentrated liquid toxin, Formula 7-B. Subject: 64-year-old female, history of alcohol abuse. Dosage 1 vial. Results: Immediate and extreme fear response beginning approximately 4 minutes after ingestion. Subject experienced vivid hallucinations causing panic severe enough to override self-preservation instinct. Subject death occurred approximately 15 minutes after ingestion due to fall from building while attempting to escape hallucinated threat. Conclusion: Formula 7-B is highly effective but requires dosage calibration to prevent unintended lethality in future applications.*
He began to dump his chemistry equipment and experiments into the sewer grate in the alley beside their building while hiding his journals and books in an abandoned phone booth behind their building knowing that he had time while waiting for the police to come. They would have questions, but he already knew what he would say: his grandmother had been drinking heavily, had become erratic and paranoid, had run from the apartment before he could stop her. He was just a traumatized fourteen-year-old who'd witnessed his guardian's mental breakdown and death.
They would believe him because he would play the part perfectly. He'd learned from years of observation exactly how people expected a scared child to act, and he could mimic it flawlessly.
What he felt, in the aftermath of his grandmother's death, was simple. It was satisfaction at a successful experiment, relief that his tormentor was gone, and cold certainty about what he was.
He was a killer now. He had taken a human life with the same clinical precision he brought to his animal experiments, and he felt no remorse whatsoever.
He was exactly what his grandmother had called him: a freak. A monster. Something fundamentally wrong and broken.
But he was a monster who understood fear better than anyone alive, and that understanding was power.
The investigation was cursory at best. Gotham police were overwhelmed with hundreds of cases, and an elderly alcoholic with a history of erratic behavior dying in what appeared to be a psychotic episode barely registered. They interviewed Suguro, who performed his role as traumatized grandson perfectly: voice shaking, tears in his eyes (forced, but they looked real), confusion and shock evident in every word.
"She just started screaming," he told them, his voice breaking. "I don't know what she saw, but she was terrified. I tried to stop her, but she pushed me away and ran. I didn't know she'd—" He dissolved into fake tears.
The detective patted his shoulder awkwardly. "It's not your fault, son. Sometimes people with... problems... they have breaks from reality. There was nothing you could have done."
They asked if he had any other family, and Suguro said no, which was true, as far as he knew. His mother was unknown to him, just someone that had abandoned him, his father was also long missing, likely dead and unknown to him , and his grandmother had been his only relative in America.
"You'll need to go into the foster system," the detective said. "At least until we can figure out permanent placement. I'm sorry."
Suguro nodded meekly, playing the role of frightened child, but inside his mind was already calculating. The foster system would mean oversight, questions, limitations on his freedom. That was unacceptable. He'd spent fourteen years surviving under his grandmother's control; he wasn't about to trade one cage for another.
That night, as the detective made calls to arrange temporary foster placement, Suguro gathered everything that mattered: his notebooks, his chemicals, his equipment, the small amount of cash he'd stolen and hidden over the years, the books Dr. Webb had left him
When the social worker arrived the next morning to take him to a temporary group home, the apartment was empty. Suguro Crane had vanished into Gotham's sprawling underworld, just another missing kid in a city that produced them by the hundreds monthly.
He was fourteen years old, had murdered his guardian in cold blood, and was now free for the first time in his life.
The question was: what would he do with that freedom?