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Part 1 of For The Want Of A Nail
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Stats:
Published:
2020-01-02
Completed:
2021-07-14
Words:
191,001
Chapters:
94/94
Comments:
20,696
Kudos:
68,880
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13,362
Hits:
2,684,591

Deku? I think he's some pro...

Summary:

Yagi Toshinori watched the green haired boy walk away after saving his friend and shook his head. While the boy's actions were heroic, he was just too reckless. He walked in the opposite direction, thinking about a time he could meet the candidate Sir Nighteye put forward.

Izuku Midoriya goes home and decides that, even if he can't be hero himself, he can still help them with his analysis. Cue Izuku catching the attention of multiple heroes who are a little more open-minded and willing to see the potential in a quirkless kid.

This fic has a discord.

Notes:

I've had this idea running around in my brain for a while. I was going to try to finish the story before publishing any of it but *shrugs* I got impatient.
Hope you enjoy!

(See the end of the work for more notes and other works inspired by this one.)

Chapter 1: Hope and Heartbreak

Chapter Text

Even after an hour-long shower, Izuku still felt the weight of the past 24 hours clinging to his skin. All Might looked down on him from every wall in his room, judgmental eyes staring straight into his soul.

You can’t be a hero

Not without a quirk

Be realistic

Izuku went to bed crying for his broken dream.

His room looked empty without all his All Might merch.

It wasn’t that Izuku hated All Might now, it’s just that every time he looked at the smiling hero, all he could think was you can’t be a hero. Just because Izuku was finally coming to terms with that fact didn’t mean he needed it playing on a loop in his head every time he’s at home. He still had a few posters up from some of his other favorite heroes, but he’d changed his sheets to a plain black set that he’d found collecting dust in the linen closet paired with a gold pillowcase. It wasn’t official merchandise, but it reminded Izuku of Eraserhead anyway.

It had taken a few days for him to gather the courage, but Izuku had finally sat down and updated his hero analysis notebooks, leaving out the parts on All Might’s secret weakness. It was… oddly comforting. He had thought it would be painful and it was in some ways, but it was mostly familiar, like his analysis was the only part of himself that hadn’t shattered alongside his hero dream. That was why he found himself, during his latest bout with insomnia, browsing a lesser known hero forum. He’d found it several years earlier and quickly figured out that a lot of underground heroes used it to communicate with each other, since it offered encrypted chats and accounts were only known by random numbers, rather than usernames. He’d spent about two weeks back then figuring out which accounts corresponded to which heroes, but he had never posted himself. As Izuku drowsily scrolled through old posts, a crazy idea occurred to him. If he couldn’t be a hero himself, why couldn’t he help the real heroes be better?

In the morning, he’d blame it on sleep deprivation and then promptly die of mortification, but that didn’t change the fact that, at two o’clock in the morning, Izuku Midoria sent ten underground heroes in depth analyses of their quirks and fighting styles.

New Message

12579: (Eraserhead)

Thank you for the analysis. It was eye opening to see my strengths and weaknesses from an outside perspective, not to mention the ideas for improvement.

Izuku was hyperventilating. Eraserhead, the Eraserhead , had thanked him for his analysis. The Eraserhead! It almost made up for the Kachaan and his lackeys beating him up again during lunch. Not quite, because the bullying had gotten worse since the sludge villain incident, but it came close! Several other heroes had also sent him messages thanking him, while others, who had apparently heard of his analyses from their friends, had asked him to send them theirs. He was just finishing up verifying the identities of those who had requested analyses (to make sure he wasn’t accidentally helping any villains) when he saw a blinking notification in the bottom left corner of his screen.

New Message

12579: (Eraserhead)

Do you analyze villains?