Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Izuku leaned back in his chair. He stretched his arms above his head and looked down at the notebook in front of him. He’d started his notes on the villain attack this morning during roll call and had just finished them now as the teacher was making announcements.

There were plenty of advantages to everyone thinking he was quirkless and one of them was that teachers had a tendency to ignore him.

Speaking of that, the teacher was talking about something, high schools? Maybe? Something like that.

Izuku wasn’t too concerned. It was the beginning of his last year of middle school, and he already knew with absolute certainty where he would go for high school.

He caught the word hero from the teacher, and the classroom erupted around him with cheers and students ignoring the rule of no quirk usage in class.

Izuku wondered if he would ever get in trouble for using his quirk in school. Was it even possible?

It was actually a sort of a mutation quirk since it also gave him the extra toe joint. So they couldn’t fault him for always using it.

Well, there was the mind control part, but that was also something he couldn’t stop, no matter how much he wanted to.

Izuku heard Bakugou whining loudly about something, Izuku wasn’t that concerned. Bakugou made dramatic speeches all the time. At this point, Izuku could just replace anything he said with; ‘I am the best, and no one else is as good as me,’ and he didn’t need to worry about missing anything.

Izuku went back to looking over his notebook, checking for errors before closing the book up again, just in time to look up and see the entire class staring at him, then bursting into laughter.

Oh yeah, there was probably a reason you should pay attention in class.

“Huh? Midoriya? No way!”

“You can’t get into the hero course just by studying!”

Oh, so the teacher had probably told them that he was planning on going to UA.

If Izuku had really been quirkless, he probably would have defended himself. Maybe would have been nervous and tried to explain how the UA rules actually did allow quirkless students.

But he'd known that he had a quirk for his entire life, that was something he knew for certain. But he'd also learned it would be impossible to convince someone else of that fact. So Izuku had stopped bothering. He no longer cared about explaining himself. The only thing that mattered was what Izuku did. Justifying his decisions to other people wasn't worth his breath.

His quirk might have had no use whatsoever. But it had given him armor against the taunts of his classmates.

So, instead of panicking, Izuku blinked lazily at the class.

“Oh, okay.” He said, then looked back down at his notebook.

He would be a hero regardless of whether his classmates thought it was possible. There was no point to defending himself.

Izuku saw a familiar hand about to hit his desk. He grabbed his notebook and lifted it over his head.

Bakugou’s snarling face was inches away from Izuku’s nose. He waited for Bakugou to start shouting before dropping his notebook onto the ground behind him. The noise rendered inaudible by Bakugou’s shouting. Better let the pages get crumpled from the landing than charred by Bakugou’s explosions.

“Teach, Bakugou is breaking the no quirks in the classroom rule.” Izuku leaned back and tilted his head to the side to make eye contact with the teacher. Izuku was an unrepentant snitch regarding shit that Bakugou tried to pull on him since he was ‘quirkless.’ The teachers never did anything, but he could at least try.

Said boy seemed even angrier than before, somehow. And he launched himself at Izuku using his explosions.

Rather than try to meet him head-on, Izuku grabbed Bakugou’s arm and sent him tumbling past Izuku’s desk towards the back of the classroom.

His own explosions sent him over the desk and the one behind it, and then almost into the back wall of the classroom. Bakugou barely stopped himself from colliding headfirst with the blackboard.

There was a fair amount of snickering at Bakugou’s somehow even more angry expression. He might be the most popular in the class, but he was still an ass.

Izuku watched him for a moment before flicking his eyes back to the teacher, trying to convey ‘Okay, I did my part, now you deal with him’ with just his facial expression.

Figuring Bakugou wouldn’t try anything else, Izuku reached behind him to pick up his dropped notebook. He opened to the first page and the two columns of tally marks under the title. He added a mark to his column as the teacher made Bakugou sit back down in his desk.

Seventy-two Bakugou, ninety-three Izuku. Sweet, his lead was increasing again.

Bakugou probably still thought that he won more, since he only counted fights with no teachers around and ones where Izuku didn’t use his “Useless cowardly Deku tricks.” But Izuku counted them.

He knew that in real hero fights there would be no rules to follow and that any trick Izuku pulled would be just as effective for catching villains as Bakugou’s raw strength.

The side of Izuku’s mouth twitched upwards. He hadn’t even needed to stand up this time.

At the end of the school day Izuku slipped out of the classroom, days when he put a tally mark on his side were days when Bakugou would try to get Izuku after class.

It had been, what? Ten years since Bakugou had first come into his quirk. At this point, Izuku was probably more in tune with the other boy's habits than his own.

Izuku moved through the corridors of the school, taking a circuitous route to an exit he knew Bakugou wouldn't send a lackey to play look-out for Izuku.

After he opened the door, he paused to look both ways. No one.

Sweet.

He closed the door behind him before sprinting toward the wall surrounding the school.

He reached it going full speed, a speed which he turned into upward momentum with a trick he’d learned from a parkour class.

He balanced on the top of the wall for a moment before letting himself drop to the ground, bending his knees till they almost touched the ground on impact.

He straightened, but started to tip backwards due to the weight of his backpack. He pinwheeled his arms to stay upright, then sent them straight out forward after overbalancing.

Nailed it.

When he stood back up, he was greeted with the sight of a person staring at him.

Izuku froze.

The person had purple hair and eyes, and was staring with a sort of tired surprise that reminded Izuku of himself after seeing Bakugou do something exceptionally stupid too early in the morning.

“Hi.”

The purple haired person just kept staring at him.

“Don’t tell anyone from this school I did that. They told me to stop finding alternate exits after the roof incident.”

A purple eyebrow was raised. Purple eyebrows, huh. That meant the purple hair wasn’t dyed, probably a part of a quirk.

Izuku wanted to ask about what kind of quirk would give a person just purple hair and no other physical changes but decided against it.

There was awkward silence for a few moments.

“Bye.” Izuku said before turning on his heel and walking in the direction opposite the purple haired person. That was a good name, alliteration was always nice in names.

It was around five minutes later when Izuku realized he was walking in the opposite direction of his house.

Oh. Well, he could just figure out a route from where he was.

He wandered until he found buildings that looked familiar, then started in the direction he thought home to be.

Thinking back to the purple haired person, he couldn’t help but wonder what that interaction would have been like if he’d really been quirkless.

That was something he wondered often.

What if he’d been born quirkless?

It couldn’t have been all that different. Izuku's quirk was about as close to quirkless as you could get without actually being it.

So close, actually, that every single person Izuku knew was absolutely certain that he didn’t have a quirk.

His mom, his doctor, his classmates, and every other person he interacted with.

And sure, if he were quirkless that wouldn’t be a problem, they would be right, and he could deal with that.

But.

He had a quirk.

The most useless one he’d heard of.

It convinced everyone he didn’t have a quirk.

Well sure, there were the few places it came in handy, made him more confident. Having a secret that no one knew, even one he didn’t want to keep, made him feel comfortable. Knowledge is power, and he had knowledge—and therefore power—that no one else would ever have.

But what if he’d been born with a powerful quirk? Something like Bakugou’s, one that would springboard him to the starting line of becoming a hero.

That was useless to think about though, he’d been born the way he’d been born. And now he was going to work harder than anyone else to become the best hero he could. Useless quirk or not, he would do it.

The thought brought a wild smile to his face. He skipped forward a few paces, jumping up and slapping a sign telling him to watch his head. He hit the ground lightly and continued through the arch of the dark underpass the sign had been warning him about.

Izuku was most of the way through the underpass when he heard the noise of liquid moving behind him, and he half turned to see what it was.

His breath froze in his throat when he saw it. The thick green sludge was coming out of a grate on the ground. It formed into a single huge mass with a pair of bulging eyes and a huge wide-open mouth.

Izuku knew what this was.

A villain attack.

Chapter Text

He bolted towards the end of the tunnel. His combat training could do nothing here. The villain wasn’t something he could punch or get in a headlock. His only option was to run as fast as he could.

But all his training did nothing.

He bolted towards the exit, only to be engulfed in the sludge.

It was talking but all Izuku could focus on was the sludge as it forced its way into his mouth. Izuku tried to stop it from going down his throat. But his mouth was pulled open by the sludge surrounding his face.

He tried to pull at the sludge with his hands, but it slipped through his fingers. The villain said something in response but Izuku wouldn’t have been able to understand if he’d been trying, the sludge was surrounding his entire face but his eyes and forehead. He could feel it pushing into his mouth, nose, and ears.

His eyes started to water.

Izuku had wanted to be a hero for as long as he could remember. From the time he first saw that video of All Might he’d known he wanted to save people. He wanted to be someone who everyone could look to and feel safe.

But now, he was being attacked by a villain and there was nothing he could do.

Every moment he’d put into training would be wasted. All the time he’d put into making himself better was a waste in the face of the ingrained lead that the villain had been born with.

He kept clawing at the liquid engulfing his face, but he knew it was useless.

The edges of his vision were dimming.

So this was it. This was how he was going to die. Not in some great fated battle against villains, but in a dirty, empty, underpass at the sludge-like hands of a villain sprouting some nonsense about taking-over. No warning, no build up. Just dying in some random villain attack.

His work to become stronger was worth nothing now.

As sludge worked its way deeper into his throat Izuku wondered how long it would take Mom to hear about him dying.

- - -

Izuku was three. He had just eaten breakfast and was playing with his All Might figurines in the living room.

What quirk would he get? When Momma had been talking about quirks at breakfast she’d said that people don’t have a choice in what quirk they got. He couldn’t help but wonder though.

He wanted a quirk like All Mights, that would be so cool—

But that wasn’t the quirk he had, his quirk was something else.

The thought was suddenly there.

And there were lots of other thoughts he could somehow sense around him. Not really around him though. They were around his head. Not the outside, but the inside.

He reached out towards them, trying to understand what they were.

He felt them reach back to him and they started to explain themselves.

But it was too much. All of them started speaking to him at once.

Izuku jerked back, both in his head and with his body.

He held both sides of his head and fell back, hitting his head against the couch. The single thought had gotten into his head, but there were so many other ones, pushing in on him.

He pushed his hands harder against his ears. His eyes were watering. He shook his head against all the thoughts trying to push their way into his mind.

It was like dozens of people talking to him at once, each of them getting louder and louder as they all tried to tell him something different.

He couldn’t understand any of them, they were too loud. He couldn’t tell, he couldn’t even guess, what each were saying.

He pushed his hands into his head, they had to stop. It was too loud and he felt his own thoughts being pushed aside—

It was quiet.

The thoughts were gone.

Izuku cracked open an eye, the living room was exactly the same as it’d been before.

He peeked through the kitchen doorway, there was Momma, still washing the dishes from breakfast.

Izuku leaned back against the couch, wrapping his arms around himself.

He focused on breathing, and on the feeling of his mind only having his own thoughts in it.

He was too scared to try and search for the thoughts again. Maybe just thinking about it would bring them back, and they hurt.

Instead Izuku considered what he’d learned.

He didn’t have All Might’s quirk, which was disappointing.

But he now knew he had a quirk. He didn’t know what it was yet, but he had one.

It must be a good one too, since there was so many thoughts about it.

But why did he know?

Maybe that was just how people found out they had quirks. They just had a thing in their minds that told them everything they needed to know.

That seemed a lot more organized than everyone just figuring out their quirks on their own.

Momma must have just forgotten to tell him. He nodded to himself. That must be it.

He needed to go tell Momma though! This was exciting. She would be so proud of him getting a quirk, even if he didn’t know what it was yet.

He made his way to his feet. Wiping what was left of his tears onto his sleeve and running to his mom.

Once he was at her side he grabbed onto her skirt.

“Momma! I have a quirk!” Izuku smiled at his mother as he told her. She was going to be just as excited as he was!

Mom looked down at him, she was still at the sink, washing the plates from breakfast. Izuku couldn’t see her face, the light streaming in through the window only let him see from her neck down.

She started to say something, but Izuku was too excited to wait.

“The thoughts told me I have a quirk! I don’t know what it is yet, but I know that I have one now!” Izuku grinned up at Momma, he wished he could see her face to see how happy she was. She’d said she was excited to see when Izuku’s quirk came. Izuku moved from grabbing onto Momma’s skirt to hugging her knees.

“Izuku.” Her voice didn’t sound very happy and he looked up in alarm. Had he done something wrong?

“What Momma?”

She pushed him away from her knees. Then crouched down to eye level.

Oh no, she only crouched when he’d done something wrong. When she was happy she would always pick him up.

Izuku leaned back and saw Momma’s face.

Oh.

She was crying.

“Izuku, please don’t lie to me,”—What had he lied about?—“especially about something like this, when your quirk comes tell me right as it happens. But don’t make up stories.”

Izuku could only stare wordlessly at her.

What had he done wrong?

- - -

Izuku sat on a stool in the office.

Next to him was Momma.

Across from them was the doctor.

“You should probably give it up.”

Izuku didn’t look up from the All Might action figure in his hands. He had thought the doctor would open with something like that. He probably wanted to make sure the quirkless kid didn’t get his hopes too high.

“So there’s something wrong with him? Most of the other kindergarteners’ quirks have already manifested. He’s the only one...Quirks rarely manifest after the age of four, right?”

Izuku didn’t look up at Momma as she talked.

The doctor started to talk again. Asking Momma about her and his father's quirks.

Izuku decided he didn’t want to listen anymore.

He understood why the doctor thought he was quirkless.

He knew because he’d been able to listen to more of the thoughts, or Images, as he'd taken to calling them. He liked that name better.

He could only understand one Image each time he tried to ask his head about his quirk, then the rest would come all at once and he’d have to curl into a ball till they went away.

The most helpful thing he had learned was that his quirk had two parts.

First was what the Images called the ‘mutation’ part. It made it so even though he had a quirk he had the extra toe joint. The doctor would probably talk about that.

The second was the ‘emitter’ part. The mind control part. It made it so people would always come to the conclusion he was quirkless. In most cases that was the conclusion people would come to anyway. But the mind control part of his quirk made it so people came to the conclusion as soon as they heard him talk. Even just people Izuku passed on the street.

Izuku remembered a few months ago when he and Momma had been walking home from his pre-school.

They’d started a conversation with someone else walking the same way. Then the conversation had moved to quirks.

The person had ruffled Izuku’s hair and told him that being quirkless was hard but he would work through it.

Apparently, all it had taken to convince them that he was quirkless was that Izuku speaking.

Momma hadn’t denied that he’d been quirkless.

Maybe Izuku was really the one in denial.

He could really be quirkless and he was just crazy and making up the Images in his head.

The person on the street, that could be explained as them having a quirk that let them sense quirks.

He could just be making it all up.

But he couldn’t believe that.

If he believed he was wrong about this, then he might be wrong about everything. Without this one thing he was sure of, he could never be certain anything he believed was right. Because the knowledge of what his quirk was something he was more sure of than anything.

The only thing he could do to keep his sanity was to trust his gut.

Besides, it had never been wrong before.

Izuku looked up from his All Might action figure. The doctor was explaining how having an extra toe joint meant someone was quirkless.

Izuku so had called that earlier.

- - -

That night he’d sat at the computer with the video of All Might playing in front of him.

On the desk was a notebook. It wasn’t his normal one for taking notes of heroes. Today he was going to take notes on how to make himself stronger.

How could he become strong enough that even without a useful quirk he could save people?

This video wouldn’t help him.

All Might relied on his quirk to give him an edge. It was a tool so powerful that he could save anyone that he wanted. Izuku needed something like that. Something that would make him strong and fast enough that he could save anyone.

But just watching All Might save people wouldn’t give him that.

He closed the tab of the All Might video.

He searched how early someone could safely start working out.

“Izuku.”

Oh, Momma hadn’t left after she’d turned on the All Might video.

Suddenly she pulled him away from the desk and was hugging him. Wrapping arms around him and sobbing as she murmured meaningless comforts into his ear.

He wished she would let go so he could continue researching.

But she didn’t. She probably thought he was heartbroken. That the doctor telling Izuku he was quirkless was a surprise and that Izuku would be broken by it.

But Izuku knew this day had been coming. He knew eventually someone would tell Momma for certain that he didn’t have a quirk and she would lose the hope that she’d been holding on to.

Izuku wished he could offer her comfort. But if he tried to tell her he really wasn’t quirkless she would just think he was in denial. And if he tried to tell her he was fine with being quirkless she would think he was lying.

As always, Izuku couldn’t help her.

So he didn’t try. Instead, he let her cry.

- - -

Izuku had won the fight.

He was bruised, burned, and tired.

But he had won.

At eight years old, after who knows how many fights, he had finally beat Kacchan.

The kid that Kacchan had been bullying was fine. Still sitting behind him.

Unharmed.

Izuku turned his back to where Kacchan had limped away and gave the kid a bloodied smile.

He said thank you and hugged Izuku.

He asked him something that Izuku couldn’t parse. Probably asking if Izuku needed help with his injuries. Though Izuku couldn’t be sure.

He just shook his head.

After standing there for a bit, the kid left in the opposite direction of where Kacchan had limped off to.

Once he was out of sight Izuku let himself slump down to his knees.

Kacchan had been wrong with his taunts over the years. Izuku had always known that he’d been wrong about Izuku being quirkless. But now Izuku knew that Kacchan was wrong about Izuku being useless.

He’d also been wrong by thinking Izuku would give up his dreams without a fight.

Kacchan.

No, he wouldn’t call him that anymore.

Kacchan was a cute nickname that one child would give to their friend.

And he’d stopped being Izuku’s friend long ago.

Izuku pulled himself up. Wincing at how sore he was from the fight. He’d won, but it definitely hadn’t been easy.

He should probably enter a martial arts class or something. He would need the edge against Bakugou in the fights to come.

- - -

Izuku felt the sludge around him being blown away.

He could breathe again.

He was tired though, he could barely open his eyes. But he could see something familiar.

A brightly colored costume and a familiar smile.

All Might?

The world went dark again.

Chapter Text

Izuku was jerked awake by someone hitting his cheek. They weren't hitting especially hard, but it was still too much to count as a pat.

How had Izuku gotten there? The answer was on the tip of his tongue, but his head felt hazy and he couldn't quite find it. What could he find out about what was going on? He couldn't open his eyes, that would tell the person hitting him that he was awake and Izuku didn't want to lose whatever advantage he had. He’d just have to get information without sight.

What did he know about the situation? Well, his eyes were closed. He was laying on what felt like cement. His clothes felt vaguely damp, and his throat hurt, but there was nothing notable other than that.

So if he ignored the person hitting him, he seemed safe enough. So he just had to stop the person hitting him. What did he know about them?

They were hitting his left cheek repeatedly and saying some word over and over again. The voice sounded familiar for some reason, but the word wasn’t. Some other language. English? Yeah, that seemed right.

But that was enough just taking it.

He had the choice between fight or flight. He’d probably go with fight since this person was just hitting him for no reason.

He should start with some sort of grab, headlock would work best since he didn't know how the person was positioned.

Izuku carefully didn't let his breathing or expression change as he braced himself. Then launched upwards with both his arms and legs, to where he could hear the person's voice coming from.

He wrapped his arms around a neck.

A much thicker neck than he expected.

Shit. Big enough that Izuku couldn't wrap his arms around them and get them into a headlock.

Well, there goes that plan.

The person stood up, and Izuku’s feet left the ground, leaving him hanging with his arms wrapped around his attacker’s neck.

Judging by the fact that Izuku’s feet barely reached his attacker's knees, they were much taller than he had expected. That coupled with the fact that all Izuku could feel was pure muscle meant he couldn’t fight this person and hope to win.

“Damnit.” Izuku had been hoping that someone repeatedly hitting him would give him a chance to practice sparring.

He opened his eyes.

From a few inches away the blue eyes of All Might looked back at him. Oh, so that’s why the voice had sounded familiar.

Izuku had never seen All Might’s face this close before. His scleras were pitch black. That was weird, Izuku thought that would be something people would know and talk about.

All Might looked sort of lost. He was just standing dumbly with his arms awkwardly held up but not touching Izuku. Entirely at odds with the confident hero Izuku was used to seeing on his screen.

Izuku decided that he should probably let go of the hero now and unhooked his arms from All Might's neck, letting himself drop to the ground.

All Might hesitantly started to talk before he regained his usual rigor and began to explain something about the villain.

Oh yeah. That was how Izuku had gotten there.

The villain had attacked him and Izuku hadn't been able to defend himself.

All Might must have fought the villain and saved Izuku. The villain would have killed Izuku if All Might hadn't shown up. His training hadn't done anything. A low-level villain could have taken him out before he'd even had a chance to start being a hero.

His training hadn't been nearly enough.

He was going to need some other tool if he wanted to be able to save people.

He sifted through his backpack til he found his phone. Then opened his browser and got ready to search for alternate tools. He would need to act quickly if he wanted to master whatever he could get his hands on before the UA entrance exam in ten months.

A slightly put-off cough distracted him. Oh yeah, All Might was still talking.

The hero stood a few feet in front of him, posing and holding up a pair of two-liter soda bottles. Wait, was that the sludge villain in the bottles? How did it even fit in there? Where had the rest of it gone? Had the bulk of the villain been made of something extraneous? Or had separating the villains face from the rest of him meant the rest of the sludge was inert? 

Wait, oops, All Might had just saved Izuku. That was a pretty cool thing for the hero to do, regardless of if it meant that Izuku needed to get stronger.

Izuku bowed politely and let out a string of mumbled thanks, then straightened after what he figured was enough time.

All Might gave up on the pose with a sigh, then gave Izuku a double thumbs up around the pair of bottles.

The man turned away and stuffed the bottles into the pockets of his cargo pants. Then turned his head back towards Izuku and awkwardly waved at him, saying something that Izuku figured was a goodbye.

He dropped into a crouch and Izuku brought his phone back to his face. Tapping the search bar.

Wait.

All Might was a pro hero. He would know about ways that the heroes made themselves stronger. What would be a better way for Izuku to learn about how to be stronger than from the strongest man alive?

Izuku shoved his phone into his pocket and rushed towards All Might, he was crouched in the pose Izuku recognized as the one he went into when he was about to take off in one of his flight-like jumps.

All Might couldn’t leave yet, Izuku needed to talk to him first.

He reached out to grab All Might’s shoulder.

And was suddenly launched into the air.

Izuku probably could have thought this out better. Grabbing onto a hero that was about to jump hundreds of feet into the air was a less than stellar idea.

His grip on All Might’s shoulder slipped, and for a moment Izuku thought he was going to fall back to Earth before he managed to get a grip on All Might's leg.

He’d seen video’s of All Might’s jumps before, and in an intellectual sense, he knew that they could take the hero hundreds of feet into the air. But actually seeing first-hand how high the hero could jump was utterly different. They were going fast enough that Izuku’s hair was whipping around his face and he had to squint to avoid the air pulling at his eyelids. And the ground was so far beneath them that the people milling below looked like ants.

After a moment All Might looked down and saw him.

He said something then started flailing his leg, apparently to try and get Izuku to let go of him.

Izuku squinted at All Might through a single eye, then glanced between the hero’s face and the ground a few times. He didn’t want to try talking with the wind still blowing in his face like it was.

All Might seemed to pick up on the fact that Izuku falling right now would end in his death, and stopped flailing his leg. Instead, he pushed Izuku’s face into his cargo pants and grabbed onto the back of Izuku’s uniform collar.

Izuku couldn’t see whether they were close to landing or not. So he just held on as tight as he could and waited to see what was going to happen.

Eventually they landed.

All Might kept his footing and ended his jump with a few steps forward to maintain his balance, while Izuku ended up in a less than graceful tangle of limbs on the ground.

He opened his eyes and took stock of where they had landed.

It was a part of Musutafu Izuku walked through often. He thought he recognized the building they were on.

All Might said something Izuku missed, and he was reminded of what he had come here to ask the hero.

He needed to do it soon though, the hero was already walking towards the edge of the building.

Izuku could ask All Might if it was possible to become a hero at all without the use of a quirk. But he already had decided he was going to be a hero. He didn’t need to be reassured of that. He didn’t need All Might to tell him that he could be a hero.

"How can I become a hero without using a quirk?"

All Might paused and turned back from the edge of the building. And fixed his gaze on Izuku.

"Without a quirk...?"

Then things took a turn that Izuku wasn't expecting.

All Might transformed. Well. It wasn't really a transformation, it was more like he deflated. One second he looked like he could bench press a medium-sized truck, the next he looked like a light breeze would be enough to topple him. He also let out a rough sounding cough that was accompanied by a worrying amount of blood.

All Might let out a string of curses.

Oh, so it wasn’t intentional, he hadn’t been answering Izuku’s question. He’d just accidentally turned into a very sickly looking man, for whatever reason.

All Might sat down. Then started to talk.

He was as thin as a rail and the white shirt and cargo pants that had earlier fit him well were now loose and blew around in the breeze.

He also had the same haircut as before. But instead of being pulled up in the signature All Might style his bangs were drooping down in front of his face.

All Might pulled the hem of his t-shirt up.

The entire left side of his body was covered with a single gnarled injury. It was the color of a fresh bruise, and the skin around it was puckered and uneven.

Now, this was interesting. Izuku had never heard of this injury or the smaller form, so they were probably connected somehow. Maybe he should actually start to listen to what All Might had to say.

"Pros are constantly risking their lives. I cannot simply say, ‘You can become a hero without power.’"

What?

Izuku had asked how he could become a hero. Not whether he could be one.

All Might didn’t think that Izuku would be able to become a hero.

This was a waste of time.

The only thing talking to All Might had given Izuku was another person to add to the list of people that he would prove wrong by becoming a hero.

All Might was talking again, but Izuku started towards the stairs. He had a home to get back to, an afternoon run to do, and homework to get done.

Izuku yanked the door open and started down the stairs, letting the door swing closed behind him.

He took out his phone and opened the search engine. Back to Plan A. If the number one hero wouldn't give him tips on how to become a hero, he would just get them from the internet.

As he typed an explosion rang out in the distance.

Oh, villain attack, and a flashy one from the sound of it.

That could be interesting.

Once again he pocketed his phone. His search could wait until tonight, but the villain attack could be over in minutes.

He turned his walk down the stairs into a run, taking each flight in a few steps.

Once he was at the ground level, he started towards the sounds of explosions. Pulling his backpack into his shoulders to keep it from bouncing as he sprinted down the busy sidewalks.

Once he was at the scene, he found himself especially glad he had hurried. Even considering how big most public villain attacks were, this one was noteworthy.

It took up an entire street. The villain that Izuku couldn’t get a good view of through the crowd was in the center, and around them fires were littering the pavement. The orange light from the flames made the scene look almost hellish.

The pros were trying attacks, but none of them seemed to be successful. Izuku needed a better look at the villain before he could figure out why.

He ducked his way through the crowd. He wasn't precisely slim anymore considering all the training he'd done in the past years, but Izuku was small enough that he could weave through the people at a reasonable pace.

He ducked under someone's arm and found himself at the front of the crowd.

He saw the villain clearly for the first time.

Or rather, for the second time. It was the one from before. The sludge villain from under the bridge.

Izuku thought All Might had captured it? Hadn't he seen the hero stuffing the bottles into the pockets of his cargo pants?

But the bottles hadn't been there while they were talking on the roof. They must have fallen during All Might's jump.

He looked closer at the villain. It was now yelling something. But it wasn't yelling at the heroes, or even at the crowds.

The sludge was yelling at its hostage. In the sludge was a solid person. Oh. The fires must be because of the person's quirk. They were trying and failing to get out of the grasp of the sludge.

The person had blond hair and a middle school uniform and was struggling and letting off explosions.

Then the person looked familiar, and after a moment Izuku realized why.

He looked up at the crowd. And Izuku recognized the eyes of Bakugou Katsuki. But rather than looking proud or angry, his eyes held an expression Izuku had never seen on Bakugou before.

He looked terrified.

Before Izuku knew what he was doing, he'd passed the police line and was running towards the villain. He dodged the fires littering the concrete. What was he doing? Dealing with villains was the pro heroes job. Not a job for some random civilian.

But he couldn't stop now.

The analysis’s from his notebook flashed through his mind, and as he got within yards of the sludge villain, he pulled off his backpack and launched it at the villain's eyes. It reared back, and he reached Bakugou as it was distracted.

He started to dig at the sludge and managed to grab Bakugou's arm.

He pulled, and the sludge let out a squelching noise as Bakugou started to come free. Izuku managed to pull him out to his shoulder before he noticed that Bakugou was shouting something at Izuku. A question?

It could wait.

Just as Izuku was pulling Bakugou's second shoulder from the sludge, the villain stopped pawing at its eyes with its sludge appendages and started to lean back to them letting out a string of what Izuku figured were threats, considering the situation.

Bakugou wasn't entirely out of the sludge yet. He wouldn't be able to get free in time.

Izuku wouldn't be able to save him.

This was the second time that he wasn't strong enough to save someone today. Dammit.

Then someone else was there.

He grabbed Bakugou and pulled him from the sludge. Then held him, along with Izuku, under one arm while the other hand was drawn back to wind up for a punch.

"Detroit Smash!"

All Might.

As the world went dark Izuku wondered how many other people had been saved by All Might twice in one day.

- - -

Izuku looked up at the orange sky as he walked down the empty side road.

He had his phone in his hand, but he didn't feel like turning it on yet. He could have died today, twice. If All Might hadn't been in town, or if he'd been too slow, or if he's been stopped by that injury thing on his side Izuku would be in a morgue right now.

That was a unsettling thought to have.

If he were a hero, he'd probably have that thought often. Despite the glamor of it, heroics was a dangerous job. A single mistake could leave a hero seriously injured or dead.

But he wanted to be a hero. He wanted to be someone that people could look to and feel safe. He wanted to save people.

He could do that if he became a hero. If he got into UA, then he could get his hero license as soon as his second year of high school.

It wouldn't be easy, he knew that. But he also knew that he could do it.

He'd work hard, he'd be smart, and he'd use every tool at his disposal.

Izuku would be a hero.

The unmistakable sound of Bakugou shouting at him came from behind Izuku.

He let out a soundless sigh as he turned to face Bakugou.

He was twenty feet from Izuku, and as soon as they were face to face, Bakugou went into full-on yelling mode. Though admittedly Bakugou looked more upset than angry.

It was probably something about Bakugou not owing Izuku for today. That sounded in character for him.

After around a minute Bakugou turned and ran off.

Izuku blinked. That was all? No explosions, no grabbing Izuku by the collar? Bakugou must really be growing up.

Izuku snorted under his breath then turned back towards his house and started to walk.

Hopefully, he could get home with no more diversions.

All freaking Might appeared from around a corner. He was in classic muscle form, and he puffed out his chest and started to talk.

He even pulled a couple poses. At least until his body once again let out a puff of smoke and he shrunk to the smaller form again.

After a few seconds of coughing blood, he started to talk again.

The blood thing had happened earlier too right? Wasn’t that a really bad thing concerning someone's health? Coughing blood meant that he had blood in his lungs. Izuku should have paid attention when All Might had been explaining his injuries earlier.

Speaking of that, Izuku focused back on All Might and realized the hero was thanking Izuku for something.

For what?

Before he voiced his question, the hero's speech moved on to another topic.

Oh so now he thought that Izuku could be a hero. After All Might had told him earlier that his dreams were impossible, now he believed that Izuku would be a great hero.

Well, he seemed to have proved All Might wrong much faster than he anticipated.

“You are worthy to inherit my power.”

Izuku’s head snapped toward All Might’s face. What? Was he serious? Izuku had never heard of that being a thing. Was something like that even possible?

“You actually reacted to something I said!” All Might lifted his arms like making Izuku react to him was a victory, then continued. “I was worried that you were just tuning me out. Anyway. It’s just a suggestion. The real show starts after this. Listen, young man, you need to decide whether or not you’re going to accept my power.”

That was a massive shift, from telling Izuku that he should give up on his dreams to asking if Izuku would accept All Might’s power.

But regardless of that, this was what Izuku needed. If he had All Might’s power, then he would be so much stronger.

This could be just the tool that he needed if he wanted to pass the physical portion of the UA entrance exam in ten months.

Izuku focused back on All Might.

“Well, it’s up to you. What’ll you do?”

All Might had his hand on one side of his face, but his one visible eye was staring intensely at Izuku.

There really was no need for deliberation on Izuku’s part.

“I’ll do it.”

Chapter Text

Izuku continued to walk forward as he bent down at his waist and smoothly glided his hands down his left calf. Then straightened up to repeat the process with his right leg.

After a few more repetitions he switched from doing the calf stretches to a high-knee jog.

Usually, before he ran, he would do warm-ups, though almost never for this long. He'd been doing all the stretches he could think of for the past ten minutes or so.

The meeting place that All Might had told him to go to was further away then the park that he would typically jog through, so he had decided to take advantage of it by taking the chance to warm up.

Izuku switched to lunges, slowing down a bit to keep his balance. He was out of the residential area his neighborhood resided in, and now the only buildings visible were industrial.

The sun was rising, and it painted the buildings, along with Izuku's misting breath, a pale red.

The idea of All Might texting him instructions had only struck him as odd yesterday night. He'd lost his unreasonable fanboy feelings toward All Might years ago, but he was still the number one hero. One of the strongest people alive. But two days ago he'd offered Izuku his power. Now he was telling Izuku where to go so they could start Izuku's training.

Not that Izuku hadn't trained in the past, but now he was doing it so that he could inherit All Might's quirk.

He stopped lunging and transitioned to a jog, the buildings were thinning out, and the beach that All Might had told him about was coming into view.

Izuku was going to be able to save people, he wouldn't be helpless the next time he was attacked by a villain, and he would be able to help the next time someone needed to be saved.

Finally, he would be on even ground with everyone around him. Quirks gave people an ingrained head-start, and now he would be at the starting line with them. He could get ahead through his own determination and skill rather than being behind no matter what he did.

He’d tried not to dwell on it too much in the past, but the idea had always been lurking somewhere in the back of his mind.

Not that he was really quirkless, but since his quirk was so attached to the idea of pretending not to be a quirk then he could just pretend that he didn't have a quirk either.

He finally arrived at the beach, not that it really could be called that, it was piled with trash as far as he could see. Definitely not a place to enjoy a family picnic.

He slipped his phone from his sweat-shirt pocket, 5:48 AM, he had twelve minutes till the time that All Might had told him to be at the beach.

Though All Might seemed like the type of person to arrive early, so maybe Izuku wouldn't have to wait quite that long. He jumped onto the railing that separated the sand of the beach from the street and started to pace back and forth. It was one of the first parkour tricks that he'd mastered, mostly for the entertainment value.

He was right about All Might being punctual, after maybe five minutes of him pacing back and forth All Might arrived, pulling up in a pick-up truck that looked like it belonged in some American suburb rather than a densely populated area of Japan.

He got out after a few seconds and made his way to Izuku. He was wrapped in an oversized coat and a scarf and was holding a folder of papers under his arm.

He was in the sickly form again. Izuku wondered if the reason for why All Might had a second form was important. Hopefully, at some point, he could bring it up and figure it out.

"Greetings, my boy!" Izuku consciously made an effort not to tune out All Might. That could be considered rude, especially after the hero had offered to give his quirk to Izuku. "I hope you are feeling well, I don't know many teenagers that enjoy being up this early in the morning."

"I wake up this early to do training fairly often," Izuku offered, it seemed relevant. "It's not that much of a change for me."

"Oh yes, about your training." All Might hesitated for a moment, then asked, "You are sure that the plan you sent me is really what you're doing? It seems like an, an intense, um, it seems like something that someone as young as yourself would have difficulty following?"

All Might ended his statement by lifting the tone of his voice like he was asking a question. What did he want to know?

"Yeah. Yeah, it's what I normally do. I don't know anyone else my age that does anything as intense, but I've been building up to it for a while." Izuku paused, did All Might know something Izuku didn't, was something wrong with his training plan? "I've never seen anything that would suggest that it was bad for me to do as much as I do?"

"Oh no. No of course not, it's just that this was much more than I was expecting from someone as young as you, I assure you that it is in no way negative." All Might's expression broke from vaguely worried to excited. And he pulled up the folder of papers. "In fact, if you're really sticking to this plan then you'll be able to inherit One for All much sooner than I first anticipated!"

Oh, so that was the name of All Might's quirk.

“I had some reservations in choosing you, but it really seems like you’re going to do great!” All Might offered with a grin. “It looks like you’ll be able to take it within five or six months rather than ten!”

Five or six months.

Izuku wasn’t really sure what expression he was wearing but whatever it was made All Might let out an undignified snort.

“Oh yes, I forgot to tell you didn’t I?” All Might said, rubbing the back of his head. “This power is perilous for those who aren’t prepared for it. If you don’t have sufficient strength, then you will suffer serious damage when using it. And even after I give One for All to you, I would suggest that you continue training.”

“Wasn’t the fact that inheriting your quirk requires months of training something you should have told me when you were pitching your quirk to me?”

“Oh yes, well the thing about that is, you see that-” All Might started to wave his hands around in mostly meaningless patterns and jerked his eyes away from Izuku to stare at the piles of trash littering the beach. “Oh yes! I need to tell you about an important part of your training! You’ll be cleaning this beach.”

That was quite the subject change, Izuku eyed All Might for a second but decided to drop it.

“Cleaning?” Izuku asked, somewhat dubious, eyeing what little he could see of the sand.

“Yes! Along with everything else I’ve outlined here,” All Might said as he shoved the papers he still was holding towards Izuku. “It’ll be tough, but after looking at your normal workout routine, I have a guess that working hard is something you’re used to.”

Izuku started looking through the papers, wow that was detailed. All Might had even written when he should wake up and sleep. It was definitely more than Izuku had ever planned for himself. Though Izuku had never had any specific deadline in mind other than the UA entrance exam.

He supposed that he would have started ramping up his training to get ready even if All Might hadn’t offered Izuku his power. But this was ridiculous.

Well, almost ridiculous. It made sense that power like All Might’s quirk required alot from the person that inherited it.

Though Izuku found it gratifying that his work will have a real effect. He’d shaved four-ish months off of the time it would take him to be ready for All Might’s quirk. If it’d taken ten months then he’d barely have any time to get used to his new quirk before the entrance exams for UA. He sure as Hell was glad that he’d avoided that.

Izuku felt pressure on his stomach and sides and the world around the papers in front of his face tilted. He craned his neck around and realized that All Might had regained his larger form and was carrying Izuku under his arm towards the garbage covered beach.

“-ave to get him out of this ignoring people thing. Gran would’ve had a fit if I’d ever ignored him like this,” was what Izuku caught All Might’s muttering.

Well, he wasn’t wrong. Izuku really needed to train himself out of ignoring people, especially if he wanted to become a professional hero.

- - -

At the whiteboard, the teacher gave the lesson for the homework that Izuku was currently finishing.

He was at the back of the classroom so could get away with it. Though the fact that teachers generally avoided interacting with him probably helped.

The fact that he was allowed to do this was the only reason he was sane right now. He had been doing large amounts of his homework during his classes for the past several weeks. If he'd had to do all his day-to-day homework after school, alongside with All Might's training, his own research on heroes, and studying for the UA finals he'd probably go insane.

His grades were slipping, but he was getting better at figuring exactly how much effort he had to put in to get an acceptable grade. He wasn't in the top two of the class regarding grades anymore, but he wasn't at the bottom of the class. He was more hovering in the above average range.

All Might had been upset when he learned that Izuku’s grades were going down, but when Izuku argued that it allowed him to get more sleep All Might had conceded the point.

Which was actually a valid argument on Izuku’s part. Before he’d changed to his less dedicated system of doing homework he’d been barely getting enough sleep. Since he had a training session in the afternoon and had to get up at four in the morning for his morning sessions.

He’d noticed that he’d grown since he started doing more homework at school. Actually having time to get enough sleep was great.

There were all sorts of little things like scheduling that kept coming up, and it made Izuku think about how it was all becoming real. Izuku always knew he would become a hero, but now it was real and happening. He had a concrete plan for how he was going to get into UA. Though the training was less than pleasant.

Creating a final design for his costume had been fun. Even though it had actually been pretty hard. He’d realized his old designs from years ago featured little to no functionality. Eventually, he'd decided to go with something less eye-catching and more practical. The only things he’d included as personal touches were a homage to All Might's smile in his mouth-guard and the jumpsuit being his mom's favorite color.

This wasn’t the time to think about UA stuff though, he had math homework to do.

He leaned forward to finish a problem on his worksheet and his bangs fell in front of his eyes. He pushed them out of the way and let out a huff of frustration. That kept happening, he really needed a haircut.

The sound of a bell rang through the classroom and Izuku looked back up. Oh, school was over. He glanced down at his math homework, mostly done, though the last few problems were blank. He could just do them in English tomorrow.

He stood and started packing his stuff into his backpack, but a figure came into his field of vision and slammed a pair of smoking hands on his desk.

Huh, Bakugou hadn’t talked to him since the sludge thing a few weeks ago, had he? Oh well, it’d been peaceful while it lasted.

Izuku managed to pull his backpack on before Bakugou grabbed the collar of Izuku’s jacket with one hand and pulled Izuku upwards. He was glaring like Izuku rarely saw out of him anymore.

It took Izuku a moment to realize that Bakugou wasn't talking. He was just holding Izuku up by the collar of his jacket. Not that it was especially intimidating since Izuku was almost as tall and much bulkier than Bakugou was.

Though it was unnerving that he was just glaring instead of saying anything. Usually, there would be barely a moment between Bakugou's outbursts. Now he was just quiet.

Wait no he was talking now nevermind.

Not shouting though, just a sort of furious whisper that Izuku found a relief compared to Bakugou's more traditional shouting.

Izuku was on the fence on whether he should tune into Bakugou's speach. But maybe he should. He could use it as some sort of positive reinforcement with Bakugou to get him to shout less.

"-don't care what it is, but don't let whatever you're involved in get connected to me. You got it?" Oh, so that's what it was. Bakugou didn't want whatever ‘shady stuff’ Izuku was involved in to be tracked back to him. For someone as capable as he was, Bakugou was really worried about some small thing keeping him from getting into UA.

Izuku let Bakugou finish his speach.

He wasn’t gonna bother telling Bakugou anything about his training. If he avoided Izuku because he was worried about being caught up in Izuku’s ‘shady stuff,’ Izuku wasn’t gonna stop him.

Izuku realized Bakugou had stopped talking. He should agree? Probably, fifty percent chance of that being right anyhow. Izuku nodded as if he'd just heard and agreed to everything Bakugou had said.

Which was apparently the wrong thing to do, judging from the way Bakugou tried to lift Izuku up by his uniform. Well, that was the wrong call. Should’ve answered in the negative.

"-planning on letting whatever this is fall down on me? Let me tell you, if you-"

Oh well, time to bail.

One second Izuku's hands were raising in a vaguely placating gesture, the next Izuku looped his arms together below Bakugou's arms and yanked them violently upwards. Bakugou had a split second where he tried to keep his grip on Izuku's shirt before he realized doing so would gain him a pair of busted elbows.

Bakugou jumped back, hands starting to spark and teeth bared.

So now Izuku had the choice between fight or flight. Usually, he would be all for a match, but he had training with All Might in half an hour. And he didn't want to be late or need to explain to All Might why he'd gotten into a fight with a classmate for a reason he didn't actually know.

So Izuku took advantage of Bakugou backing off and made a break for the door. By the time he was through the doorframe he was going at a full-on sprint.

He ducked left, the opposite way as the front entrance of the building, and started weaving through the loose crowd of middle schoolers littering the hallway. After a few doorways, he found a stairwell and ran up two flights of stairs to the top floor. Once there he slowed down and exited the stairwell.

Now he just needed to get to the other side of the building and exit out the back door. It was his regular route for staying away from Bakugou when getting out of school.

However, when he heard a certain blond boy yelling commands to his cronies downstairs to block the staircases, he changed his plans. Time for Plan B.

He hadn’t had a chance to try it yet, he’d been waiting for a better reason. But this seemed like it was a good time to try it.

Izuku reached his escape route. The primary challenge was that it was a window on the third floor.

Not that bit that was any sort of repellent to Izuku.

He yanked open the window and stuck out his head, looking around. A few feet to his right was the rusty fire escape.

He shrugged off his backpack and tossed it onto the platform. No going back now unless he wanted to go around the long way.

He crouched in the windowsill and braced his arms on the sides of the window. He paused for a few moments, then launched himself at the fire escape.

He clanked into the side and his bottom half was left awkwardly hanging over the side of the railing for a moment. But he managed to pull himself onto the platform in a less than graceful tangle of limbs.

He laid there a few moments, then pulled himself upright. He pushed away the hair that had fallen into his eyes and grabbed his backpack.

None of this was actually necessary, or safe, but he figured that it was good practice for the things that he would need to do as a hero.

Plus it was a lot of fun.

Izuku made his way down the fire escape. Then he dropped the remaining tenish feet onto the dirt ground.

He made his way to the wall surrounding the school, he took his time to scale it, no reason to rush today.

Once he scaled it, he balanced on top, stuck his hands in his pockets, and took a leisurely look around.

He saw the purple haired person again. He was walking down the alley-way with his head down and his shoulders hunched, he didn’t seem to see Izuku.

Izuku could actually talk to him this time. The last conversation he’d had with the purple haired person, or Purple as he’s just decided to call him, he’d just gotten in trouble with the school for the Roof incident, but that had mostly blown over by now.

Izuku let himself drop down from the wall, in a much more controlled fall than last time, he barely needed lift his arms for balance.

Purple jumped as Izuku landed in front of him. He jerked his hands up from his pockets and took a half step backward.

“Hello.”

Purple kept his hands up and held his gaze evenly leveled on Izuku.

Izuku nodded at him.

“Why do you keep jumping down from the fence?” Purple asked. And wow his voice sounded just as tired as he looked.

“Because I’m training to be a hero and heroes do lots of weird jumping over things stuff so I figure that a bit of practice jumping over things can’t hurt,” Izuku told Purple.

“Oh.” Purple rubbed his forehead. “Of course you’re training to become a hero too. What else would a fence hopping guy like you be planning on doing.”

Oh, Purple was also training to become a hero. That was interesting. They could keep talking, but Izuku needed to get to his training session with All Might soon. They’d probably have other chances to speak later.

“Bye.” Izuku offered as he walked past Purple, this time making sure he went in the correct direction. 

Chapter Text

Izuku rolled his shoulders and winced at the soreness in his back and upper arms. He definitely needed to ice tonight.

Afternoon practice had been non-stop dragging large chunks of metal to All Might’s truck for three hours and he was definitely feeling it.

Not that All Might’s training was actually impossible. It was just terrible.

Actually, how much worse would have it been if Izuku hadn’t already been training before this? Before he started All Might's plan he'd had his own regimen, but without it? That would actually have been a living Hell.

He winced at the thought.

He interlaced his fingers, brought his arms up, and slowly leaned his arms as far back as they could go. The motion tipped his head up and brought his attention to the sky. The sun was still visible, though it was dipping down to the horizon. The sky itself was turning midnight blue but was lit up with streaks of pale orange-tinged clouds and the final golden rays of the setting sun.

He stepped to the edge of the sidewalk and stared at the sky for a few moments. He’d had almost no free time in these last few months and it felt great to just relax.

After a few minutes of mindless stillness, he shook his head and continued onward.

Mom had said that she would be home from work later than usual, so even with training after school, he had a while before he really needed to get home.

He wasn’t hungry, so getting food somewhere was out.

So what could he do for the next hour or two? He didn’t really want to go home. It was Friday so it wasn’t like he was in any hurry to get homework done.

He bent his neck downwards and examined his shoes. As he did, his hair swung down and curled unhelpfully in front of his eyes.

Oh, that was something that he could do. Yeah, a haircut would be perfect.

- - -

“Izuku! What happened to your hair!” It wasn’t quite a screech but it was close to it. It was definitetly much higher than Mom’s normal voice.

Izuku rubbed the back of his head. Rather than feeling his normal semi rat’s nest of curls his hand ran across a short stubble of hair. It was oddly disconcerting.

“I got a haircut.”

“I see that honey, but why so short?” Mom asked, she’d taken off her oven mitts and was gesturing for Izuku to let her touch his head. He had to crouch with his knees touching the ground for her to do so.

“I’ve always had longer hair, I wanted to see what it would look like short.” He’d had a mini heart attack when he’d first seen his hair in the mirror. He didn’t really dislike it, but he wasn’t sure that he liked it yet either.

“Huh” Mom seemed kind of entranced. She was repeatedly rubbing her hand back and forth across the stubble on his head. “It’s not even an inch long, but it’s still curly. It’s like you have a mossy helmet.”

Izuku couldn’t figure out whether or not he liked that comparison. He wasn’t often that concerned with what he looked like, but he felt off balance without his normal mess of hair.

“Oh Izuku,” Mom stopped rubbing his head and took his face in her hands. He stood back up and looked down at her. He’d been growing alot recently and it seemed like every day his mom looked smaller. She rubbed a thumb over his cheekbone, eyes watering.

“Look at you, growing up so fast. You look so grown up and handsome, I can’t believe you’re still in middle school, you look like you’re an adult.” She was really crying now. “With your hair so short you look so handsome. My little boy is all grown up.”

Izuku moved forwards and carefully lifted Mom up, pulling her into a gentle hug.

Her feet bumped against his knees. But she gripped him hard, hard enough that Izuku suspected she was hugging him as hard as she could.

He decided that he liked his new haircut.

They stayed like that for a minute before Mom started to laugh and Izuku set her down.

“See?” she said, rubbing at her eyes. “You’re getting so big and strong.” She patted his shoulder. “I mean, look at you, soon you won’t be able to fit through the door.”

A bit of an exaggeration, but it was true that Izuku had bulked up quite a bit.

“I think it’s ‘cause of all that food you’re feeding me.”

A few weeks ago Izuku had handed her the paper with the dietary restrictions and recommendations that All Might had given him. She’d just shaken her head and started cooking with these things in mind.

This was probably mostly due to the number of different diets and exercise regimens Izuku had gone through over the years. At some point, Mom had just accepted it as something he did and started cooking around it.

She really was great.

“Course it is.” Mom wiped her eyes and was pulling on her oven mitts. “Speaking of that, it’s Friday, so you have no reason not to help me with dinner tonight.”

“Ah dang,” Izuku said, “I guess I’ll just have to help you.”

“Oh yeah,” Mom said, remembering something and turning a little more serious. “Don’t just do something like that without telling me. I suppose a haircut isn’t a big deal, but still, you’re developing a habit of doing things without telling me. Just give me a heads up next time you’re planning something?”

“Alright,” Izuku agreed easily. He pointed at some vegetables set out on the cutting board. “These need to be cut up right? How thick do you want them?”

- - -

“Eat this.”

Izuku stumbled back from the long blonde hair that had just been offered to him out of the blue. He stepped back and tripped on the sand, but managed to regain his balance.

"Uh, that's hair."

All Might laughed at him, just straight up laughed at him. Not even a quiet laugh, he was in his big form so it boomed and echoed all around the empty beach. Admittedly it hadn't been Izuku's best witty comeback but still, he felt like the situation justified it.

Something about Izuku's displeasure must have made itself onto his face because All Might shook his head and quieted down.

"Yes, this is hair." He said, completely deadpan. Izuku gave him a flat look. "Let me explain though, to inherit One for All, the successor has to eat the DNA of the person before them. It doesn't matter what exactly you eat, just that you have to eat some of their DNA. Thus, eat my hair."

All Might stuck out his arm, offering it to Izuku again.

This might have been revenge on All Might's part for some similar non sequiturs and bomb drops on Izuku’s part. Maybe. Probably.

Oh well, looks like this was Izuku's life now.

- - -

It turned out that there was no immediate effect after he ate All Might's hair. Other than Izuku feeling like he needed to retch.

They ended up having a couple of hours to wait. They decided to kill time at one of the restaurants close to the beach. A twenty-four-hour American style breakfast place. It wasn’t really in line with Izuku’s diet, but All Might waved this away and told him to make an exception for today. It was the day he’d get his quirk. It was something to celebrate.

Once they were there, Izuku absently ordered an egg and sausage dish and focused on trying to feel the difference that One for All made. So far he'd felt nothing. He didn't feel any different. There was no feeling of energy, all that he felt was vaguely hungry.

He wasn't too worried. It would show up on its own time.

All Might though, he was another story.

They were sitting at a booth, waiting for food to arrive, with All Might across from Izuku. He was not so subtly freaking out.

He was leaning forwards, fidgeting with his fingers and occasionally muttering under his breath. It was pretty obvious that he was worried about the transfer not working. Which struck Izuku as odd. Why would All Might be worried about it not working? Hadn't he done this exact thing before, with him being the recipient?

Izuku couldn't figure it out, but he wasn’t concerned. Even if All Might's worries were justified and it didn't work, they could still just try again.

All Might quieted down and sighed, stilling his fingers and wrapping them around his mostly empty coffee mug.

"So how are you feeling? Anything seems different?" All Might asked, resting on his elbows on the table and leaning forward.

"Not really, but I'm not sure why it would. It's an emitter quirk, right? That means that the only time it does anything would be when I'm using it." Izuku said. It kind of felt weird to be the one reassuring the number one hero.

All Might seemed mollified by this though. He nodded and leaned back, crossing his arms.

"Good point, young Midoriya. To be honest with you, I can't think of a reason this wouldn't work. It's just a feeling, I suppose." He shook his head, expression troubled. "It's just something keeps nagging at me, but I can't think of what it might be."

Izuku wasn't sure what to say, so he just shrugged.

There was a brief pause, which was broken by the server coming with their orders, or rather, Izuku’s order.

"Here you go sweetheart." She said, laying down Izuku's plate. She turned towards All Might and set her platter on her hip. "You sure you don't want something too, hon? No offense meant but you look a missed meal away from being blown away in a stiff breeze."

"No thank you," All Might said, sounding embarrassed at the attention. "I wouldn't mind more coffee though."

"Alright hon," she said, shaking her head and refilling All Might's coffee cup. "Just send me a holler if you change your mind."

She bustled away to another table.

Izuku speared himself a piece of egg, but before he took a bite he asked, "Why not order a meal though?"

All Might paused, staring at his hands for a moment before coming to a decision.

"You remember when I was telling you about the injury I sustained?" Izuku didn't remember that, but he nodded anyway. "When I sustained it I had to have multiple surgeries afterward. In one of them, they had to remove my stomach. This means that I'm unable to eat proper meals, I have to drink specially made liquid meals instead."

Izuku winced at this. Not being able to eat sounded terrible.

All Might looked slightly uncomfortable and took a gulp of his coffee. There was an odd emotion on his face, something between regret and pain, and Izuku didn't like seeing it on his childhood hero’s face at all. Even if it was the skeleton version of his childhood hero.

For once Izuku decided that he would be the one to breach the awkward silence.

"So, since you can't be All Might all the time anymore, what do you do with your spare time?"

"Hmm," All Might looked better now that he was thinking about something. "Not all that much I suppose. Most of my time is spent preparing to teach at UA, I’ve never been a teacher before, so there’s a mountain of training and paperwork I need to sort through.” He shook his head, smiling. “I’m lucky I have a close friend on the police force that’s been helping me with all of it.”

Huh, a friend on the police force, Izuku supposed that it made sense, as heroes worked closely with the police, but he’d never really thought about it before.

“Though I find I actually enjoy just talking to people as my civilian persona,” All Might said, smiling into the middle distance. “I never really had time for that in the past."

"It must be weird, not being recognized all the time. I mean, you're All Might." Izuku was actually getting better at this conversation thing. It made it easier that All Might was the one doing all the talking, but Izuku was improving at listening to what people said.

Well, with some people, mostly just All Might. Izuku suspected the main reason he tuned people out was that they were never willing to believe he could be a hero. He had made progress though, he could listen to what All Might said consistently now.

"Well, actually, not as much as you'd think. I used to be a civilian. I wasn't always recognized the moment I set foot on the street." All Might chuckled.

"Huh, yeah, that's true," Izuku said. "I always think of you as 'All Might' the hero. But you must have been a real person at some point."

All Might snorted, but the corner of his mouth twitched upwards.

After that, they lapsed into silence, but this time it was comfortable rather than tense.

Izuku finished his breakfast. Or his lunch? It was breakfast food, but it was past noon. He stared at his empty plate. No, it was lunch, the classification of the meal was decided by the time, not the content of the meal.

Satisfied that he’d come to the right conclusion, he glanced around the restaurant. It had filled up since he and All Might had shown up. It was a Saturday, but Izuku wasn’t sure if that meant this was more or less busy than a normal lunch rush.

All Might noticed Izuku was finished, he stood up and walked towards the counter. By the time Izuku grabbed his gym bag and followed him, he'd already paid and was exiting the restaurant.

Izuku considered paying All Might back but decided against it. He was the number one hero, buying lunch for someone probably wouldn’t even register for him.

Izuku jogged a few steps to catch up with All Might. They walked abreast towards the beach. When they reached it Izuku found a grin creeping across his face. It had taken him five and a half months, but he had finished clearing the beach of the mountains of trash.

And since it was a Saturday afternoon people were trickling in to enjoy it. Sure, it wasn’t busy, but there were people enjoying the beach. He’d caused that, he’d been the one that made these people able to have a good time. It was an amazing feeling.

They didn’t stop there though, they went past the section of populated beach towards the pile of trash that was unobtrusively stacked on the sand, away from the waves. It was all that was left of the huge mounds of trash. They’d decided to leave this area alone so Izuku could practice with One for All without damaging anything valuable.

They reached the pile and stood side by side, examining it.

It was around fifteen feet tall at the pinnacle. The main body was closely packed together, but around it was a loose cloud of smaller bits of trash.

“So, any tips on how to use One for All?” Izuku asked, eyeing it.

All Might turned towards Izuku, hanging his hands at his sides and looking Izuku straight in the eye with complete seriousness.

“Make sure you clench your butt.”

Izuku had to fight hard to keep his expression serious, but he managed it.

“Also, I wouldn’t suggest trying something impressive on your first attempt,” All Might said, dropping his air of faux seriousness and resting his chin on his fist. “Even with all your training, there’s no way that you could deal with the full power of One for All. You’d end up with broken limbs at the least, not something we want without a hospital near.”

Izuku sent All Might a look to remind him how unenthused he was about All Might having only told him about this after Izuku had agreed to inherit One for All.

“Oh, yes, yes. I know,” All Might said waving a hand. “I should have mentioned that. My apologies.” Izuku may or may not have brought up this topic very often over the past months.

All Might had gotten better and better at reading Izuku since he started training. All Might was probably the only person who could make something of Izuku’s myriad non-verbal communications. Other than Mom of course. Izuku supposed it made sense that a professional hero would be good at reading people.

Izuku still ribbed on All Might for not telling him about the arm breaking thing.

Not that Izuku was all that good at giving people all relevant information, but still.

Izuku made a vague waving motion with his hand at All Might and ambled over to the pile of trash. He considered what he should try. His first instinct was to punch something, but All Might’s warning made him hesitant to do so.

So what should he do?

Well, even if it was able to be passed on, it still was a strength quirk. He should do a normal strength quirk thing.

He looked around for something to pick up. Oh, oh that would be perfect.

He picked his way through the debris field surrounding the pile and towards the medium sized minivan.

He’d moved it here a week ago, it had taken him an hour to move it from the shoreline to this spot, it was probably the biggest thing in the pile.

He crouched down at the side of the minivan and closed his eyes. What had All Might said? Clench your butt? Despite his ridiculous delivery, he’d probably been serious about doing that.

Izuku took a deep breath, clenched his butt, and thought about channeling his new quirk.

He crouched there feeling ridiculous for maybe a minute before he felt something happen. He couldn't quite describe it. He couldn't see any outward change, but he felt different. It was like something flowed from his core into his entire body. Filling every vein with subtle crackling energy that was completely unfamiliar to him.

It was like someone had pumped adrenaline right into his veins. Everything around him snapped into focus and the world around him slowed to a crawl.

He crouched there, just breathing. The sound of the surf crashing on the beach was crisp and somehow louder than just a moment before, the light from the sky was brighter and more focused.

So this was One for All.

Izuku focused on the minivan in front of him and reached out with his arms. He gripped the bottom edge of the car then lifted it upwards.

It moved unbelievably easily.

Izuku didn’t stop there though. He brought the minivan up to an angle and then carefully walked his hands down it until they were spaced a few feet apart and holding the minivan up by the center of the undercarriage.

Izuku let the car dip down a little bit, putting more weight on himself. Then he slowly balanced the car, leaving his arms fully supporting it.

He stood, bringing the minivan up with him. It swayed slightly as he moved, so he dug his fingers into the metal of the car to get a better grip. It was like sinking his hands into clay.

He grinned.

Izuku had gotten One for All and he was lifting a freaking car like it was a toaster.

He swung towards All Might, unbalancing the car for a moment before he managed to stabilize it.

But All Might wasn’t smiling, he was just wordlessly frowning at Izuku.

Even though he was confused, the feeling of his new quirk and the more potent feeling of victory was still rushing through his veins and he wasn't worried. He turned back towards the pile of trash and lobbed the minivan at it.

It went a bit further than he had intended and ended up hitting the top of the pile and sending an avalanche of junk down the slope. The car broke into two pieces, each half rolled down a different side of the pile before coming to rest with a crash.

Normally accidentally throwing a car would concern Izuku but right now it just made him laugh.

As he watched the heap resettle itself the feeling of power in his veins started to dissipate. Which was probably a good thing, he wanted somewhere without trash and rusted metal everywhere to practice moving around with his new quirk. He had the feeling it would be unpredictable.

He’d make plans later, but at that point, he just picked his way away from the trash pile towards All Might.

When Izuku was around ten feet from All Might he spoke.

“Oh well, I guess my worries were justified.” What? “Don’t worry, we can try again tomorrow. This isn’t an exact science. It’s expected that we’d run into some problems.”

Izuku snapped his head up to look at All Might, then froze.

Oh no.

He had a guess as to what was happening.

“It’s impressive that you’ve built up such strength even without One for All, and I’m sure that once you inherit it you’ll make a fine hero.”

Izuku stared back at him, unable to compose a single word. In one sense, this was an enormous victory for him. Izuku had long since believed in the existence of his quirk. He'd felt it deep in his core, even with the awareness that there was nothing external which he could use to verify it. He'd accepted that it was just something he'd experience forever while never being able prove it. But here was that external evidence. Something outside of Izuku's mind which verified what he'd known for his entire life.

Because his quirk, his original quirk, was still active.

It was convincing All Might that Izuku hadn’t inherited One for All.

But it wasn’t like it could keep doing that, his original quirk couldn’t be that powerful. If he used One for All enough, logic would overpower whatever control his quirk had over All Might.

He could work past this, it was just a temporary roadblock.

Right?

Chapter Text

Damn it.

All Might stood by Izuku’s side in his thin form with his arms wrapped around his torso. He was biting his lip and tilting his head to the right.

“Young Midoriya, I truly can’t tell you why this isn’t working.”

Izuku threw up his hands and glared at the sky. Why? Why was this happening?

“I know you’re frustrated,” All Might said, “I’m frustrated too, but we need to keep our heads on and work on figuring out how to pass One for All onto you.”

Izuku gestured emphatically at half of a minivan, which was mostly buried in the sand.

Sixty feet away.

“Yes, your throwing arm is quite impressive.” All Might said, waving one hand in the air and running his other hand through his hair. His fingers dislodged his bangs from their normal spot and left them awkwardly hanging over the top of his head.

Izuku let his hands drop to his sides and worked on keeping the frustrated noise in his throat from escaping.

Last night All Might had given Izuku one more hair to eat, which Izuku had reluctantly done. He’d hoped it would be enough to overpower the control that his quirk had over All Might.

Izuku had been wrong in that hope.

But it wasn’t like this was his last chance, All Might wouldn’t give up on trying to pass him One for All any time soon.

Izuku just had to figure out how to get around his quirk.

All Might combed his hands through his disheveled hair, then carefully plucked a few hairs.

“I would like to stay longer but I don’t know what else we can do today. Just try eating these over the next couple of days, I don’t know if all that we’re missing is quantity, but we’ll try.” All Might handed Izuku the hairs and started towards the road with wave that didn’t quite match the hero’s normal energy. “How about we meet Tuesday? An hour after we’d normally start training?”

Wow he was sure leaving quick. He was probably feeling guilty or something. All Might had a tendency to do that.

Izuku absently nodded at his retreating back.

He shook out his hands and bounced on the balls of his feet, trying to disperse some of the frustrated energy building in his chest.

What could he do to convince All Might that he’d inherited One for All?

He had to figure out how to outsmart his quirk. It wasn’t like it was some all-powerful force. Every quirk had some sort of activation system that could be disrupted, or some drawback that could be exploited.

He just had to think it through.

What did he know about his quirk?

Izuku loped over to his gym bag and rummaged through it until he found a pencil and his quirk analysis notebook. He sat down in the sand and opened it to a blank page.

He titled the page What I Know, then started to write out his thoughts in an attempt to keep them organized.

His quirk’s basic function was to make the people around him perceive him as quirkless, while also making sure that he knew he had a quirk.

The first part of this his quirk did through two methods.

First, a small physical mutation that gave him an extra toe joint that mimicked what a quirkless person would have.

Second, subtle mind control. It didn’t control the actions of the people around him. It didn't even affect their memories. It was more subtle, in a way.

All it did was take whatever they experienced, and hitwired their logical thinking to make them come to the conclusion he was quirkless. The activation his voice, when people heard him talk, his quirk would plant an anchor on them. After that it was able to disrupt their logical thinking.

The second part of his quirk was why he was able to figure this all out in the first place.

His quirk gave him information about itself, through the Images. They were essentially packets of information about his quirk.

The point of them was to make sure that he knew he really had a quirk. Since otherwise he would just think he didn’t have a quirk like everyone else.

Izuku looked over what he had written as he chewed on the end of his pencil. What could he do with this information?

Nothing really stuck out to him as an easy solution. But there had to be something.

What would his quirk be weak against?

For one, quirks that gave the user information about quirks and ones that stopped other quirks from working.

Izuku jotted that down in a corner.

He looked over the page for anything he could have missed, but no really good ideas came up. He could try and avoid talking to All Might?

No, that wouldn’t help, his quirk already had an anchor on him.

All that Izuku could think to do was to just keep working on using One for All, eventually solid proof would have to overpower his quirk’s control.

It didn’t feel like that good of a plan, but for now it was all Izuku had to work with.

He snapped his notebook closed and bounced back to his feet, brushing the sand from his shorts. He dropped his notebook into his gym bag.

He was filled with a sort of restless energy that dissuaded him from going home. So he stretched his arms.

He still didn’t have any concrete ideas, but he had a direction to go in.

Izuku stretched his legs, looking around the mostly clear beach. There were a few people, but it was a bit too cold out to visit the beach.

This would work for what he had in mind.

Izuku stood up straight, closed his eyes, breathed deep, and clenched his butt.

One for All crackled through his veins.

Izuku loosened his posture, bending his knees and letting his arms hang at his sides.

Then he started to run.

It started smoothly, but he quickly realized he’d misjudged how much space he had and almost sent himself tumbling straight into the waves.

He managed to stop himself a few feet from the surf, getting his shoes damp but avoiding getting soaked.

Okay, so he could go really fast. He just had the problem of going too fast to be able to control his movement.

Nothing a few hours of practice wouldn’t fix.

By Tuesday Izuku would be able to do something that would convince All Might that he’d inherited One for All.

- - -

Izuku planted his feet firmly with his right foot behind him and his left foot in front. He half crouched and lifted his arms into ready positions.

He looked forwards, narrowing his eyes and carefully lining up his shot. He flexed his knees a few times, then took a deep, steadying breath.

Izuku flung his leg out in a sudden, fluid kick. A burst of kinetic force shot out from his foot and surged towards the pile of trash twenty feet away.

It hit so hard that some of the rubble exploded upwards almost a dozen feet.

Izuku let out a breath and leaned back onto his heels, grinning at the rubble.

“Hmm. Try making your kick rounder so that you have more time to gain momentum. You’re just going straight at it and it’s not giving your leg enough time to gain speed.” All Might said, cocking his head to the side. “I congratulate you on your strength, but there are things I need to talk to you about.”

Izuku jerked backward, his mouth fell open and he stared at All Might.

“I’m going to try and get in touch with someone who knew the previous holder of One for All.” He actually looked quite nervous at the concept. Izuku was a bit curious but was too startled with the situation to ask about it. “He hasn’t answered his phone or email so I’m going to go to him to ask him for advice in person. I don’t know how long it’ll take. I’ll tell you what I find as soon as I find it”

Izuku felt a wave of frustration bubble up in the back of his throat.

Before All Might had shown up, Izuku had practiced for two hours to launch that kinetic kick with the power that he’d just managed. He’d been sure that it would be enough to override his quirk’s influence over All Might. But, here the hero was, still sure that Izuku hadn’t inherited One for All.

Maybe Izuku should try a more direct approach?

“Hey, All Might?” Izuku said. The hero nodded. “Are you sure that I didn’t inherit One for All? I mean, I’m doing some pretty strong things here.”

Izuku gestured at the pile of trash he’d destroyed from twenty feet away.

“No, my boy. You underestimate your own natural strength.” All Might shook his head and patted Izuku’s shoulder. “The transfer didn’t work, we need to work on figuring this out, not asking hypothetical questions.”

“But are you absolutely sur-”

“Midoriya.”

Izuku sighed. He’d let it rest for now.

He had to figure this out, but he needed to be careful about how he did it. From experience, he knew that trying to convince someone he had a quirk usually ended badly. He had to be careful to avoid misstepping.

But he couldn't just leave All Might to think that One for All had failed to pass over. He didn't want to do that to someone who had given him such a valuable tool.

He just needed to keep working on it.

- - -

Izuku sat in the booth of the all-day breakfast diner and poked at what was left of his dinner.

He'd shown up half an hour before All Might had said to meet him.

In part because the last time they'd gone to the diner All Might hadn't been able to eat, and partially because Izuku wanted to stay away from his house. The last few days had put him on edge and made him temperamental, he didn't want to get in a fight with Mom just because he was mad about something unrelated to her.

Izuku was pretty curious as to what the meeting was about. Yesterday, All Might had sent Izuku a cryptic text saying that he talked to his predecessor's friend and that it would be better if they were to talk in person.

What had they told All Might? What about it made him hesitant to just text or call Izuku and tell him?

Izuku didn’t think whatever it was would actually be helpful, but he was curious nonetheless.

The mystery was enough to bring him out of the emotional slump that he’d fallen into over the past week.

He used his fork to move crumbs into a pile and hummed in the back of his throat.

How much time did he have left to wait? He pulled out his phone. It read 6:57. So three minutes left.

So taking All Might’s general habits into account he would be here at any moment.

Izuku turned in his seat to get a better view of the entrance.

All Might didn't walk through. That was odd. He normally timed himself to be consistently just a hair early. It wasn't that Izuku was offended when someone was late to something, it was just odd that All Might was breaking pattern like that.

Izuku continued to watch the entrance for a few minutes before All Might appeared, several minutes after seven. This was the first time Izuku had ever seen him late for something.

He walked through the front door in his skeletal form, looking even more slumped down than he normally did.

Izuku waved him over and as he got closer Izuku noticed deep frown lines creasing his face. Had something happened?

"My apologies," All Might said, folding into the seat opposite Izuku. His voice sounded strained. "It was impolite of me to make you wait like this."

Izuku noticed he didn't say why he'd been late, had something actually happened? Izuku decided to bring it up later.

"That's alright.” Izuku said with a shrug. “What was it you wanted to talk about?"

All Might let out a puff of air and his head dipped forwards.

“Is something wrong?” Izuku asked, feeling slightly worried. All Might looked uncharacteristically… defeated? It seemed wrong to describe All Might like that, but that’s what it looked like.

“Nothing is wrong, my boy,” All Might said, face still covered by his drooping bangs. “There’s just some bad news I need to give you.”

“I, uh, okay. Take your time, I guess?” Izuku wasn’t really sure what to do with this. It was probably about passing One for All. Since that had already happened, Izuku wasn’t worried about it, but All Might’s expression was getting to him.

A few moments passed in silence.

"I'm sorry, my boy." All Might said, voice subdued. "I need to break my promise to you."

That sounded ominous. Izuku had a feeling he wasn't going to like this.

All Might looked up at Izuku. His black-ringed eyes were aged and sad, unlike anything Izuku had seen on the hero before.

"I made a promise to the bearer of All for One before me, that I would continue the legacy she left behind."

All Might kept his voice low. Izuku wasn't sure if it was for the sake of privacy or just because he couldn't say this any louder.

"I have a responsibility to pass on this quirk. But I don't have long to do that. I've spent valuable months training you to be my successor. Months I don't regret. But I'm under even more pressure to find a successor now than I was five months ago."

All Might let his head dip forwards again. His long hair fell back down, covering his face.

"I need to try and find someone else who can inherit One for All."

Izuku's hand tightened around his fork, then he flinched as it snapped in two.

He felt energy crackling through his veins and realized he must have activated One for All accidentally. He forced the energy to dissipate.

All Might snapped his head up at the noise and winced when he saw the two halves of the fork laying by Izuku's hands. Then he looked to the side and continued talking.

"An old sidekick who I trust suggested someone to me. A second year at UA." All Might normally had a very good poker face, but right now he didn't seem to be capable of one. His breathing was slightly uneven and every time he paused he bit his bottom lip and crumpled the space between his eyebrows.

“I’m going to arrange a meeting through my old sidekick. But I didn’t want to do that without first telling you.”

All Might was... All Might was giving up on taking Izuku on as a successor?

Izuku felt his face slacken and he slumped bonelessly against his chair. All Might didn’t think Izuku could be a hero.

Izuku had trained for months, and for years before that, to gain this quirk. But even the man who'd given it to him didn’t think that Izuku's effort had done anything.

Something swirled in his gut, some furious and dark feeling.

Izuku had taken All Might’s quirk, but the hero didn't know. He was going to try and find another successor.

Izuku lifted his eyes from his plate. All Might avoided his gaze, uncomfortably wrapping his arms around his torso and staring to the side.

Izuku’s anger stilled and was replaced by something thick and hopeless.

He took in a few deep breaths, trying to steady himself, blinking his eyes a few times to hold back the tears that were threatening to form.

“Why-” His voice broke on the word and he took a moment to calm himself. “Why did you give up so quickly?”

“I’m sorry, but you simply didn’t inherit One for All. I’m running out of time to find a successor. I need to make the most logical decision.”

“How do you know this is the best decision?” Izuku said, doing his best to keep his voice even. “How do you know I didn’t inherit One for All?”

“You didn’t,” All Might said with a frustrated exhale of breath.

Izuku had to stop for a moment to strengthen his voice. He couldn't afford to sound anything less than entirely confident and trustworthy.

“But how do you know? I mean, look at the things I’ve done. I threw half a minivan sixty feet, that isn’t something that a person can do through just natural strength!”

“My boy,” All Might said with his skeletal face hardening. “I've told you that you were underestimating your strength. There is a line between humility and self deprecation, and attributing your hard-earned strength to a quirk crosses that line. This isn’t something under debate. You didn’t inherit One for All.”

“But how do you know?” Izuku insisted, leaning forward and planting his palms on the table.

He knew that this probably wasn’t the best way to convince All Might that he had a quirk. But he couldn’t think of a good way to do it. He just had to keep pushing. “Maybe there’s just some outside force that’s making it harder for you to believe it?”

“Midoriya!” All Might snapped. Face hardening and eyebrows crumpling. He unfolded his arms and leaned towards Izuku, finally looking him in the eye. His words were dripping with regret, but they were quick and much louder now. “I know, I really do know, that I’ve completely failed you, but this will be easier for you if you just accept that the transfer didn’t work.”

“But how do you know for certain?” Izuku responded, just as loud. “You know that I’m doing things that require much more strength than a person naturally has.”

“I’m sorry,” All Might shouted. “It’s not your fault that you didn’t inherit One for All. But you didn’t.”

“Stop apologizing!” Izuku insisted, his tone was too sharp.  “You didn’t fail me! I inherited One for All! You need to listen to-”

“Excuse me, but I’m going to have to ask you and your son to leave,” said a firm voice.

Izuku snapped his head to the side and recognized the server from before. She was staring All Might right in the eyes. Izuku realized that the restaurant had gone silent. The worried faces of other diners were staring at All Might and him.

Oops, seemed they'd gotten pretty loud.

“Of course,” All Might muttered, ducking his head. “We’ll be right out.”

Izuku snatched up his bag and stalked out of the booth, he didn’t trust himself to apologize without sounding angry, so he didn’t try.

He quickly reached the entrance and slipped through. All Might slipped out a moment later.

The chilly night air settled around them and a heavy silence came with it.

Izuku slumped his shoulders and dug his hands into his pockets. He looked out towards the street. It was mostly empty, though a few pedestrians wrapped in heavy coats hurried along the sidewalks.

There were a few street lights scattered around, but even without them, it wouldn’t be that dark out. There was a blanket of clouds covering the sky, catching the light from the ground before it could escape and casting the street in orange half-light.

Izuku dug his neck into his hoodie as the night air brushed against it.

It was utterly silent other than the soft sound of distant traffic.

Izuku wasn’t sure what he should do. He knew this wasn't All Might's fault. But at the same time he didn’t trust himself to talk calmly yet. So they stood side by side for a few minutes.

Izuku saw All Might opening his mouth to say something a few times, but he never followed through.

Izuku wasn’t really angry at All Might. It wasn’t his fault that Izuku’s quirk was getting into his mind. If anything Izuku was angry at his quirk.

Being angry wasn’t going to solve Izuku’s problems though. What could he do? How could Izuku fix this?

He stared at his breath as it fogged in the air from the cold. It held no answers.

All Might’s plan didn’t really seem like something he would have come up with. All Might was smart and could make tactical decisions that lead to someone being hurt if the situation demanded it. But he never would have come up with the idea of giving Izuku up as a successor.

It could have been the person that All Might went to talk to. It wasn’t something that Izuku could know for certain though, he just didn’t have enough information.

Izuku didn’t have any answers.

Standing out here in the cold wouldn’t do All Might any favors though. Even with the large coat he had on the hero looked thin. Just looking at him made Izuku feel cold.

“All Might,” Izuku said, breaking the silence. He tried and failed to make eye contact. “I can’t stop you from doing this, and I won’t try to. You can try to give it to someone else, but I don’t think it will work.”

He kept his voice steady but there was still a lump of emotion clogging his throat.

“Thank you, young Midoriya,” All Might said, slumping his shoulders and letting out a breath of air. “Remember, I’m not giving up on you, I’ll still train you to get through the entrance exam, even if you aren’t my successor.

Izuku tried to think of something to say, some comfort to offer All Might, but words failed him. The silence came down onto them once again. Was there any reason to stay now? Izuku knew All Might wouldn’t leave first, he would probably stand here in the cold all night in some misplaced attempt to make Izuku feel better.

That wouldn’t make All Might any healthier though.

Izuku  took a step forward, tilting his head to catch All Might’s gaze. Izuku nodded at him and managed to give him a half smile that maybe looked kind of genuine. Then he gave All Might a small wave and walked away.

There really was no reason to stay, and hopefully, All Might would go somewhere warm as soon as he wasn’t motivated by guilt to stand next to Izuku.

- - -

Izuku let the sand sift through his listless fingers, it fell silently to the ground.

The only sound was the beating of the waves on the beach and the soft sound of the night wind winding through the sky.

Izuku took a deep breath of the salty air and let his head drop backward, above him was an intricate splatter of delicate stars in an infinite inky void.

Inside, Izuku was furious.

His anger swirled through him like a storm. It kicked and pulled, demanding to escape. It took all of his self control to keep from screaming at the silent beach.

His let his head drop forwards, cradling it in his shaking hands and taking in unsteady breaths. Izuku had thought that going here would help him calm down, but all that it had done was grown the anger that was now blocking his throat.

He needed to go home, he knew that. But he couldn’t do it like this. He didn’t want to risk saying something that he’d regret to mom, she didn’t deserve that.

Izuku just didn’t know what to do. Not right now, not how to fix this entire situation. He felt lost.

He needed to go blow off steam somewhere. He didn’t want to stay at the beach. But where would he be allowed to go work out this late at night?

Though, now that Izuku thought about it, it wasn’t really a  question of where he would be allowed to go, so much as where he could get into.

Izuku had an idea.

Chapter Text

Izuku punched with every ounce of his strength, channeling the frustration building in his chest into his fist and driving it forward with all the momentum he could conjure.

The punching bag jumped off its hook and went flying, sailing through the air before landing with a heavy thump in the far corner of the gym.

Izuku shook his hand out, letting out a hiss at the sharp pain from his knuckles. He looked down at his fingers and winced.

He’d forgotten to wrap his hand before he’d started punching, which was a good way to break a knuckle. He examined his hand for a few moments, twisting it back and forth.

His knuckles were bloody and probably on their way to bruising, but they weren’t all that bad, which was lucky. He should have wrapped them when he started punching twenty minutes ago.

He could have hurt them badly if he’d kept going without them wrapped. Stupid mistake.

Though it wasn’t like he was at his most focused right now.

He crouched and dug around in his gym bag until he found his hand wraps. He took a few minutes to carefully wrap his hands.

Once he was done, he trudged over to the punching bag, picking it up and swinging it over his shoulder. Then turned back to the center of the room.

His insides felt like a swirling mess.

The past week had been the emotional roller coaster of a lifetime. A week ago, he’d felt like he was on the top of the world. He finally had an actual useful quirk. He was at the same starting line as everyone else who was gunning to be a hero. But of course, his original quirk got in the way.

Izuku twisted the punching bag’s chain in his hands, squeezing his eyelids shut and taking in a deep, shaking breath.

What was going on with him? He was never this emotional. He’d accepted that people would think of him as quirkless, that people wouldn't believe he could be a hero.

What had happened? Why couldn’t he just get over All Might not wanting him as a successor.

He’d been alone in believing he could be a hero before. Why was losing his spot as All Might’s successor so painful?

Well, he knew why.

Izuku had begun to rely on the hero’s support.

Izuku could try and bring back the apathy he had in the past. Try to bring himself to completely ignore how everyone thought he was quirkless, how they thought he was useless. It didn’t matter, he would be a hero regardless of what they thought of him.

But he couldn’t do it.

This was All Might. His childhood hero. He was the one who thought Izuku was good enough to be a hero, good enough to be the number one hero’s successor.

But as of today, that faith in him was gone.

He didn’t want to think about that. He didn't want to think about anything right now. He strung the punching bag back up, steadied it, and took a step back.

He took the time to line himself up perfectly, perpendicular to his target, feet just wider than shoulder width apart, shoulders squared, forearms up in defensive box around his torso.

He sprung forwards and hit the bag with his right fist. This time he didn’t try for strength, just worked on keeping his form perfect.

Then he stepped back and did it again.

And again.

Don't think about everyone's expectations of him, their expectations that he'll fail at everything he wants to do.

Izuku switched to hitting with his left hand.

Don't think about the fact that All Might would never stop feeling guilty about this.

Izuku switched to series of quick punches, alternating which hand he used each time.

Don't think about All Might’s ragged breathing, about his bangs hanging limply in front of his eyes.

The world started to blur and shift around Izuku, but he just punched harder.

Don’t think about All Might’s ragged breathing.

Izuku took a step back to reset, forcing himself into perfect form.

Don’t think.

When his fist connected, the punching bag burst apart and sprayed scraps of cloth and sand across the gym floor.

He stood there breathing hard, ears ringing. In a distant way he felt the buzzing of energy in his veins. He must have activated One for All while he’d been distracted.

He consciously forced it to dissipate.

Looking at it more objectively, this may not have been the best way to blow off steam. He figured going to a gym and doing a workout would help. It had not.

He’d done his normal workout twice over before turning to the punching bag, but he still couldn’t find any of his normal balance and calm. He tilted his head toward the ceiling and pressed his hand to his eyes, then jerked them back at the jolt of pain he felt. He opened his eyes to see blood seeping through both his hand wraps.

He’d overdone it. He should have stopped at the punching bag when he first saw blood on his knuckles.

He sighed, it was too late for that now though.

Actually, how late was it? There was a clock in the gym but as it was currently hidden in the shadows he had no idea what it said.

He trudged to his bag and slipped his phone out of a pocket, then winced. 1:39 AM. He'd had no idea that it was that late, he was way too out of it to be working out right now.

He scrolled down on his screen and almost dropped his phone as he saw his notifications.

There were multiple texts and calls from Mom.

He’d never told her where he was. She must be worried sick.

He’d set his phone on vibrate during his talk with All Might then he’d never turned the sound back on.

Izuku had to text her.

She’d definitely want to know where he was.

He really didn’t want to tell Mom that.

He ran a hand down his face and sighed. He looked at the clock again. 1:40 AM.

He should get out of the gym and get home. He didn’t think anyone would show up here, but he didn’t want to be there if someone did come.

Sure, he knew the owner of the gym from his martial arts classes. But she’d never given him a key. He’d gotten in through an unlocked window, but that was still basically breaking and entering.

Though, looking around the gym, Izuku knew he wouldn’t be able to hide the fact that someone had been here. There were scraps of cloth and grains of sand scattered across the floor from the punching bag he’d accidentally destroyed with One for All.

Even if Izuku cleaned up what was left of it, she would still notice that one of her punching bags was missing.

Izuku belatedly registered that he’d just destroyed someone’s punching bag. He needed to do something about that.

A punching bag like that would cost at least ten thousand yen, right? He didn’t have that much on him, he should just come back at some point and leave that much for her to find.

He didn’t want to just leave the scraps from the punching bag just spread around the room.

He grabbed the broom from a supply closet and started sweeping the sand into a pile.

He systematically started brushing the sand to a single point, trying to be as efficient as he could. But it took a long time to get everything together. It had been one of the fifty kilo bags. There was a lot of sand to move.

It was thoughtless, mind-numbing work, but it helped him to stamp down the emotions swirling around inside him in a way that working out hadn’t done at all.

Huh, so at least this little breaking and entering escapade had been kind of helpful.

He still felt terrible, just more like he was in control of how terrible he felt.

He sighed and wiped down the broom of his fingerprints. Then stashed it back in the closet without touching it with his fingertips.

After that he went through the workout equipment he’d used and wiped down the machines with the towels the gym had around. Partially because it was good gym etiquette and partially for prints.

It didn’t hurt to be careful.

He was still angry, but instead of being a fiery and all-consuming fire, it was now a smoldering core of frustration.

Not that he was angry directly at All Might, not only at him anyway. He was the victim of this situation.

Izuku was more frustrated at his original quirk. It didn’t really make sense to be angry at an inanimate part of himself, but he still was.

He hadn’t thought that his quirk would try and hide One for All. He hadn’t really thought about what it would do, he’d just assumed that it would keep doing the same thing, keep hiding the fact that it existed at all.

-But his original quirk had changed when he’d gained a second quirk, it had grown into something that resembled how it was before, but much more powerful and with an increased ability to assess situations.-

Izuku stumbled. That hadn’t been something that he’d thought. That’d been an Image.

That was unexpected. He hadn’t had an Image pop into his head for more than a year now.

At some point it had just stopped, he’d assumed because his quirk thought it had told him everything he needed to know. But if his quirk was changing? It would have more to tell him.

That was weird though, he’d heard of people’s quirks changing, but most of the time it was just that the user had a new way to use them. It was probably just a side effect of One for All. He decided not to worry about it.

He considered what the Image had said though, and that explained it. His quirk had changed. And consequently there was new knowledge that he needed about his quirk, so it started talking again.

It was doing it differently though, when it had tried to tell him things in the past it had always shown him one Image, then flooded him with way too many Images afterwards. This time it just gave him one Image, then quieted down.

The Image said it had increased ability to assess situations, that would suggest it now knew that giving him too many Images wasn’t helpful. So it turned out that his quirk was just originally, what? Miscalibrated? The design of the quirk was just internally faulty.

So he had a glitchy quirk and gaining One for All had updated it.

Even ignoring its small glitches, his quirk was pretty terrible in terms of its general effect on him. All it did was give him the social ostracisation that came with being quirkless while making sure he knew that everyone was mistakenly socially ostracising him.

He’d have time to think about that more later though, for now he had to get a move on. He pulled his phone from his bag and winced. First at the time, 2:05 AM, and then at the notification list.

He still needed to text Mom back.

Even though he felt guilty about worrying her, he was glad he’d gone to the gym instead of going straight home.

He had a feeling that if he’d gone home to Mom before giving himself a chance to tamp down his emotions, he would have gotten in a shouting match with her. Not something he was keen to do, especially not after what happened with All Might earlier.

Izuku knew Mom would have preferred he had gone directly home. She was probably worried sick.

Yeah, he felt bad about that now.

He needed to reply.

<sorry, I just saw all these, I’m safe! I’m heading home i’ll be back in under 20 min>

She responded immediately.

<IZUKU! Are you okay? What happened? Where are you??>

She must have been awake and waiting for him to respond. Yeah, he felt really bad now.

He should respond though. He didn’t want to tell her that he’d broken into a gym though, what could he tell her that wouldn’t make her worry?

<I’m so sorry, i was frustrated with some drama and was at the gym late working off steam. I know the owner so she let me stay after she closed up shop and left. I had my phone on silent and i ended up falling asleep, i just woke up and saw this, i’m so sorry! For worrying you>

Falling asleep was a bit of a lame excuse, but it seemed believable enough. Plus it had a vague resemblance to the truth.

<I could come pick you up what’s the address?>

Izuku felt bad again. For staying out late and for lying about it. He’d have to make this up to Mom somehow.

<Don’t worry, it’s close, I’m be home in a bit>

Izuku slipped his phone into his bag, ignoring the notification sounds, and zipped it up. Then he carefully climbed out the unlocked window of the gym, clicking it closed behind him.

He belatedly glanced around but there was no one in sight.

It would take a while to get to his house if he were to walk, or even run, but he had a better way to get home.

He took his gym bag and stuck his arms through the straps, wearing it like the backpack it was not designed to be.

He took a deep breath and called up his power, its crackling energy filled him up and made the world around him snap into focus.

He took a step backwards, then sprung upwards towards the roof two stories up, he snagged the eaves with both hands, and hauled himself up.

He glanced around to get a sense of where he was, rubbernecking around until he saw a building he knew to be in the direction of his apartment.

Then he was off, jumping from rooftop to rooftop like some silent humanoid ninja bouncy ball.

The gym was at least two miles from his house, but it only took him a couple minutes to cross the distance.

Once he was within a block of his apartment, he let himself drop down from the rooftops into an alley. A few moments later he stepped onto the street, adjusting his clothes from the wind and pulling his arms out from his gym bag straps.

He walked the last block back to his apartment.

It was otherworldly walking around so late. Or so early? Regardless, it was strange. The normal sounds of the neighborhood were absent. The air tasted crisp but uninviting. The inconsistently spaced street lights turned some parts of the street a grungy yellow and other parts into shadowy recesses.

He wasn’t sure if he liked it or not.

He couldn’t wait around and take the time to decide though, he had to get back home.

Once he reached the stairs, he bounded up them three at a time until he reached his floor. He could have taken the elevator, but that would have been slower.

He made his way down the hall till he reached his door, then knocked lightly.

The door shot open and Mom stared at him breathlessly. She paused for a moment, eyes wide and apprehensive, then she let out a heavy breath and pulled him into a tight hug.

Izuku hugged her back.

He still thought that burning off some of his anger before coming home to Mom had been a good idea, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t feeling incredibly guilty about worrying her.

She pulled her face backward, pulling his head down to her level and looking at his face to make sure he was okay.

“Izuku. Oh Izuku.” Her eyes were watering and she was talking in a whisper. “Are you okay? I was so worried. I tried calling the police but they said that until you’d been missing two days they couldn’t do anything.”

Oh, she’d called the police? He should have listened to the voice mails or read the texts.

Time to reassure her though.

“I’m okay Mom. I’m so sorry for worrying you. I promise I was never in danger.”

“Alright. You don’t look too good though, are you sure something didn’t happen?” She swept a thumb under his eyes. “Were you crying? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.” He’d cried today? It must have been while he was at the gym and he just hadn’t realized it.

“Was it that drama that you talked about?”

Drama? Oh yeah, in the text that he sent her.

“Yeah, that.” He pulled his face into a weary smile.

“Oh, Izuku,” she said, calming down a little and letting go of him. “You fell asleep? You were safe though, right? The doors to the gym were locked? The owner of the gym knew you were there?”

“Yeah, of course.” Izuku lied.

“Oh, thank goodness.” Mom reached behind Izuku and shut the door. “I think I aged five years just out of worry.” She rounded on him, jabbing a finger in his face, switching from worried to disappointed in a moment. “You have to promise that from now on you’re going to call me whenever you’re planning on being out late. Even if it’s just a workout.”

“Of course I will,” Izuku said easily. “I promise something like this won’t happen again, but I’ll try to keep you in the loop anyway.”

“Thank you sweetie.” She patted him on the arm, switching from disappointed to friendly as fast as she’d switched moods a moment ago. Then straightened up. “Oh! You must be hungry! I’ll make you something as a late-night snack.”

“You don’t have to-”

“Nonsense. It’ll just take a minute, just sit down at the table and wait.” She hurried over to the kitchen and started industriously pulling things out of drawers.

Izuku followed her and started putting the dishes on the drying rack away.

“Izuku, sit down.”

“Sorry, I’m a rebel,” Izuku smiled at a ceramic bowl as he tucked it into a drawer. “I stay out late and I don’t do what my mom tells me to.”

Mom snorted softly but let him stay in the kitchen.

Izuku watched her from the corner of his eye. It was nearing three in the morning, but she was oddly energetic. There was a good chance it was just nervous energy on her part. Nervous energy she had because she was worried about Izuku.

He felt guilty again.

Once the dishes were put away Izuku leaned against the counter and glanced around. He realized that he still had his knuckle wraps on. He checked under the sink but didn’t see a familiar green bag.

“Hey Mom, did you move the first aid kit?”

She dropped the cardboard box she was holding and whirled towards him.

“Are you hurt? What happened?” Suddenly she was worried Mom again.

“I’m okay, I promise,” Izuku said, holding out his hands to her. “I just went a bit too hard on the punching bag. I’ll need a couple band aids, that’s all.”

She left out a deep breath, visibly deflating. She took a hold of his hands. He hadn't bothered to remove the wraps before leaving the gym, which was the only reason she hadn't already noticed. She let out a soft clicking sound as she turned his hands around, examining the faint spots of blood which were spreading across the cloth.

Izuku looked away, not able to stomach at her expression any longer. This had happened often enough when he'd first begun to work out, before he'd built up callouses or good habits. She'd been the one to patch up his knuckles back then too. It was almost embarrassing that it had happened again now. It made him feel childlike, like she was insisting on tying his shoes or something.

“Oh,” She let out a breath of air, deflating a bit and holding a hand to her chest. “It’s under the sink in the bathroom. Bring it here and I’ll clean your knuckles for you.“

“It’s okay, I can just do it myself.” He tried to duck away from her to no avail.

“Izuku,” Mom said, tone discouraging any argument. It was the kind of voice that told Izuku this would be a losing battle on his part. So he raised his hands in surrender and retreated out of the kitchen.

He made his way to the bathroom and crouched to extricate the first aid kit out from the mess that was their bathroom cabinet.

After he was done he stood back up, and caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror. He paused.

He looked terrible. His eyes were red and puffy and had deep dark bags under them. His hair was slicked to his head in some places from sweat and was unrulily sticking straight upwards in other places. Which. Come on? It wasn’t even two inches long and it was a total mess? He could see the places where sweat had dried on his clothes. Gross.

No wonder Mom didn’t let him make food for himself.

Izuku took a few moments to splash water on his face.

He didn’t look that much better.

He plodded out of the bathroom and back into the kitchen.

Mom nodded at him from the table, where she was sipping tea from a mug and nibbling on a piece of toast.

She looked more tired than she had just a minute ago. Her eyes had subtle bags under them and her hands were trembling slightly. So it had been an adrenaline rush, which was now wearing off.

Adrenaline rush at two in the morning. Ouch.

He set down the first aid kit then sat down at the table and grabbed a piece of toast for himself from the plate of snacks Mom had laid out.

As he took his first couple of bites, Mom pulled the first aid kit to her and pulled out some disinfectant and bandaids.

She stood up and went to the kitchen, then came back a minute later with a bowl of water and a dish rag.

Mom reached out for his left hand. Izuku held it out for her and she wordlessly unwrapped it.

She was careful about it, much more careful than Izuku would have been. She made sure to not put pressure on Izuku’s knuckles and when it was unraveled to the point that the cloth she was pulling off was touching skin she slowed down considerably to avoid pulling on any broken skin.

When she pulled off the last bit away from where it was tied around Izuku's thumb she paused for a minute.

Her mouth thinned to a flat line and her eyebrows twisted into an expression Izuku couldn’t identify. It seemed sort of sad, but at the same time angry. It made something in his gut twist uncomfortably to see her so clearly unhappy. After a few moments he wrenched his eyes away from her face and to his hand.

The skin around his knuckles was torn and slightly bloody, though it seemed like the hand wrap had absorbed most of the blood. The bleeding had mostly stopped, his ring finger and pinky were both mostly scabbed over.

Izuku thought it wasn’t that bad. He’d seen people break their hand from using a punching bag without properly wrapping their knuckles. A couple scrapes were the best outcome as far as he was concerned. He defininetly shouldn't tell Mom that.

Mom sighed, dipped the rag in the bowl, ringed it out, then used it to wipe the blood off of Izuku’s hand.

Once the blood was gone she used a spray on disinfectant to clean it. It hurt, not that much since it hadn’t had a chance to get infected, but it still stung.

Then she stuck brightly colored band aids anywhere it was still bleeding. And some places where it was done bleeding.

Mom let go of his left hand and reached out for the other, he obliged her and she restarted the process.

Once both his hands were uniformly covered in neon band-aids Izuku stood up and cleared off the table before Mom could do it.

By the time Mom bemusedly followed him into the kitchen, packed up first aid kit in hand, he’d already cleaned up.

Izuku wrapped Mom in one last hug as she entered.

“I’m going to take a shower, then sleep until noon,” he told her.

“Oh thank goodness,” she said, softly snorting. “I wasn’t going to say anything but you smell like last week’s trash.”

“That's a little harsh," Izuku said, then let his mouth tick into a smile. "What did last week's trash do to deserve that sort of comparison?"

“Oh my little boy,” she said, laughing quietly and shaking her head.

She pulled his head down till she could kiss his forehead, which involved him crouching until his knees touched the ground, and then left the kitchen first aid kit in hand.

Izuku stood in the kitchen for a minute after she left, staring out the window at the blackness outside.

He shook his head and flipped the light switch. The room plunged into darkness and he blinked his eyes to regain some sense of sight.

There was an odd feeling in his gut. After he’d been ‘diagnosed’ with not having a quirk, he’d tried to convince Mom he was fine in lots of ways.

He’d discovered the best method was to make a bad joke, and so he’d fallen into the habit of it.

He knew it was kind of dishonest, but after she’d stopped worriedly asking about if he was making friends he’d decided that it was worth it. Even if it meant he never could tell her about the things he worried about.

He needed a shower.

Izuku headed out of the kitchen. 

Chapter Text

Izuku blinked his eyes open, then twisted onto his stomach. 

Then winced at the pain that the motion caused.

Then winced again as he remembered why he was so sore. He’d done his normal workout multiple times yesterday.

That had been a mistake.

At least he didn’t have school today. There was no way he’d be able to focus on anything academic.

Izuku pulled himself out of bed and stretched. Which was rather painful but made him feel better, then stumbled to the bathroom. He flicked on the lights and blinked his eyes at the light. 

Only to stop and stare when he saw his reflection.

Had his shoulders always looked that big? His t-shirt was old, but it had definitely fit him better when he’d put it on last night, this morning. Whatever. He couldn’t have grown that much in one night, could he?

-His power was increasing his physical growth so as to make his unusual strength more explainable.-

Well. Uh? Huh.

- - -

Izuku vaulted over the wall, landing in a soundless crouch. Going this way had become a habit. Bakugou had become even more intent on fighting Izuku since the whole thing with the sludge villain and Izuku just didn’t want to deal with that.

He looked up and saw Purple looking at him with his normal half-closed eyes and half-dead expression.

“Hey, you said you’re planning on being a hero, right?”

Purple blinked. “I did?”

“Yeah,” Izuku said. “Do you want to do some training with me? My trainer and me had a falling out but I still have a guest pass to my gym for the next nine months.”

“Um,” Purple blinked, this time with what Izuku thought was more enthusiasm. “Sure.”

“Great,” Izuku said with a nod. “Meet me here tomorrow, same time. Wear workout clothes, the gym’s about half a mile away.”

- - -

He walked down the stairs to what had once been a trash covered beach. Rather than being covered by old refrigerators and microwaves, it was now filled with people.

Huh, Izuku hadn’t been here on a sunny day before. He definitely hadn’t been expecting it to be this crowded.

Oh well. He could ignore them.

He walked to the water, but while he was still walking he started to get a strange feeling on the back of his neck. He looked around and realized that people were staring at him.

What? He didn’t think he looked that out of the ordinary. Just another person on the beach.

But the look in their eyes was strange. It was… was that pity on their faces?

-His quirk now anchored onto a person simply through the act of that person seeing his skin.-

All these people were pitying him for being some poor, quirkless kid.

Dammit.

Ignore. Ignore. Just practice moving around with One for All active.

- - -

Izuku jumped over the fence, landing right in front of Purple. He should probably learn the guy’s name at some point if he was going to train with him. 

He’d remember to learn it at some point.

“So, what kind of training have you done in the past?”

Purple looked at him with his baseline ‘done with this’ expression.

“Hello, I’m doing fine. Thanks for asking. How are you doing?” Purple said, deadpan.

Izuku stared at him.

Purple snorted and looked to the side. Was that a smile at the corner of his mouth? Did the guy actually have emotions?

Not that Izuku could talk.

“No. I haven’t really trained before. I mean, I’ve gone on a few runs, and I do PE. But that’s about it.” Purple said this like he’d practiced it, and Izuku got the distinct impression from the way that Purple’s eyes fastidiously stayed just to the right of Izuku’s face that he was interested in how Izuku would respond.

He wasn’t going to think about that though. He wanted someone to train with, someone who wouldn’t take out a pillar of Izuku’s life by leaving.

Izuku nodded.

“Okay, I can work with that.” Izuku turned towards the gym, already thinking through stretches. “I’ll talk you through how to properly warm-up on the way there.”

Purple ambled along beside him.

- - -

Izuku knew All Might said that going all out with One for All would be dangerous, but it couldn’t be that bad right?

Besides, even if it was that bad, there were other people at the beach. Someone could call an ambulance for him if he ended up getting hurt.

Izuku pulled his fist back, bringing his off-hand into position and settling his weight solidly on the sand.

Then he gathered all the strength that he could, letting go of the constraints that he’d set on himself and pulling as much power as he could into himself.

Then he punched.

For a moment the power rushed into his arm, like a river flowing through his veins. It was like pure energy welled up from deep in his chest and flowed into his hands.

An incredible amount of force was channeled through his arm and tumbled towards the surf.

Then the power stopped.

It was like a hose was suddenly shut off. Izuku’s punch went through, but it was like it only got a fraction of the power that it should have.

The air moved and it let out a sound like thunder, but Izuku knew that it should have been more powerful, he could feel that there was more to grasp and use. But it felt like there was some sort of dam blocking him from actually using it.

Izuku narrowed his eyes, looking down at his right wrist and rubbing it with his other hand, it was just on this side of hurting. 

There was the sound of people clapping from behind him.

That didn’t make sense though. All Might had said that it was entirely possible for Izuku to hurt himself using this power.

-But his quirk was limiting the output of his power so he couldn’t injure himself. He could currently only use five percent of One for All’s power-

Seriously?

- - -

“Okay, stop for a second.”

Purple stopped. 

He was pretty good about listening to Izuku. The two of them barely talked at all, other than about training. 

This was their third training session and Izuku still didn’t know what school the guy went to.

He sort of liked that though. 

They didn’t need to talk, they just worked towards a goal together.

“Right now we’re only using light weights, but your knees are still going too far forwards. That’s not harmful now, but once we move to heavier weights, that’ll be all sorts of hell on your knees.”

Wait a second.

Purple knew that Izuku wanted to be a hero. They’d been training for the exam for over a week now. Purple must think that Izuku doesn’t have a quirk. After all, it only takes someone seeing his skin for his quirk to put an anchor on them.

But Purple hadn’t said a thing about how Izuku couldn’t be a hero.

That was… a pretty great feeling now that he thought about it.

“You need to think about how the weight of your body is distributed so you can make sure your knees don’t go beyond your toes.”

Purple went back to doing his backsquats. His form wasn’t great, but he was on his way to getting it. Izuku grinned.

A thought struck him.

“What do you know about self defence?” Izuku asked with a half smile.

Izuku could probably give him a few tips for the UA practical exam.

- - -

“Could I have your number? That’d make planning workouts easier,” Izuku asked.

“Sure, gimme your phone.”

Izuku handed it over. 

“Unlock it?”

Izuku took it back.

A minute of Purple silently tapping at Izuku’s phone later, he handed it back.

“I sent me a text from your phone. I’ll add your contact later.”

“Your name is Shinsou Hitoshi?”

“Midoriya, really, you didn’t know my name?” Purple, well, Shinsou, said with a hint of his sardonic smile.

“You know my name?” Izuku didn’t remember telling him.

“Yes, I do.” Shinsou raised an eyebrow at Izuku. “I asked some kid from your school. Did you know just saying ‘guy who looks like a brick house but is weirdly fast’ is enough for people to recognize you?”

- - -

“Hello, Midorya speaking.”

“Young Midoriya.”

Izuku pulled his phone away from his ear. The caller ID said All Might. 

He probably should have checked that before answering. Or give All Might his own ringtone that Izuku could specifically ignore.

That was mean. 

He might do it though.

“I have news. I told you what I was planning on doing the last time we met.”

All Might sounded upset, but Izuku couldn’t read anything beyond that.

Also, he was being vague. Probably meant the line wasn’t secure and that Izuku shouldn’t say anything too confidential. He should try and remember that.

“I made the attempt. But it didn’t work. I have come to the conclusion that the thing which I was attempting to give you has a maximum amount of times that it can change hands.”

Izuku sucked in air through his teeth, he’d known that this would happen. Didn’t make him feel any less guilty though.

“I think that it would be best if we were to meet somewhere to discuss this.”

Izuku stared into space, considering.

It wouldn’t end well though. They’d just end up shouting at one another again. Izuku desperately wanted to work it out. Wanted to somehow convince All Might about his quirk. Work around it. Do something clever which solved everything. But Izuku had a lifetime of failures on this front behind him, and knew that there wasn't some miracle cure for the problem that defined his life. Izuku wouldn’t be able to help, no matter what he tried.

“I don’t think that would solve anything.”

Izuku could hear All Might’s hurt through the silence on the other end of the line.

“Okay. If you so wish, Midoriya.” A short pause. “My offer is still open, of training you for the entrance exams without a quirk.”

“That’s generous. But no thank you.” That may have been a bit icier than Izuku intended. It wasn’t All Might’s fault. “Goodbye.”

A sigh. “Goodbye, young Midoriya. Good luck.”

Izuku hung up.

It wasn’t All Might’s fault.

“Who was that?”

Izuku looked up at Shinsou, he was looking at Izuku with an odd expression. A bit concerned, actually.

Izuku might have sounded, and looked, a bit more emotional than he intended.

“Nothing, just talking to my old trainer. It didn’t end on the best note.”

“Do you,” Shinsou paused. “...want to talk about it?”

“No, not really. It’s not that big of a deal.”

It wasn’t All Might’s fault.

It had been a month since he’d given Izuku One for All. It wasn’t that unreasonable of him to try someone else if he thought that his quirk hadn’t transferred to Izuku.

“Okay…” Shinsou’s eyes flicked around the room, then seemed to settle on something behind Izuku. “Do you know that people always seem to be watching you, like no matter where we are? It’s kind of weird.”

It was because pretty much everyone in the prefecture was certain that Izuku was quirkless and pitied him. His quirk now could create an anchor on someone just by them seeing him, so there were a whole lot more people who thought Izuku was quirkless than before. But it wasn’t like Izuku could just tell Shinsou that.

Actually, that gave Izuku an idea. What if he could go somewhere where no one knew him? Then he could actually do some experimentation in how his quirk works, and what its limitations were.

It would need quite a bit of setup, but it would be worth it if he could manage. Besides, it wasn’t like it could go that much out of control.

- - -

“Hey, mom. I’m home.” Izuku called, unlocking the door. “I brought my friend.”

There was the sound of someone dropping something.

Izuku walked into the kitchen to see Mom with an expression almost like a fish before she schooled her face into something more controlled in time for Shinsou to walk through the doorway.

“Sorry honey, you startled me, I dropped this.” She was looking at the pile of glass shards near her slippered feet. It may have been some kind of dish, or perhaps a cup, at some point. “Pass me the trash can, I’ll clean it up.”

Izuku handed it to her.

“Sorry, for being rude, darling. My name is Midoriya Inko, it’s nice to meet you.” She said, pulling shards towards her hand, then letting them drop into the trash can. “How did you meet Izuku?”

“Um,” Shinsou said, looking moments away from wringing his hands. “My name is Shinsou Hitoshi. Um, we’re both hoping to get into UA. So we’re training for it together. For the physical.”

“Oh, that’s nice. It must be fun to have someone to train with.” Mom said with an easy smile.

Shinsou shot Izuku a glance out of the corner of his eye, which Izuku didn’t bother trying to parse.

“Izuku, could you make us something to eat?” Mom said, not looking up from the glass that was clinking into the trash can. “Shinsou, what would you like to drink? We have water, milk, or coffee and tea if you’re willing to wait.”

“Uh, water’s would be great, thank you, Midoriya-san.”

Izuku busied himself with making some snacks.

He’d already finished his task for today. Mom knew Shinsou, and knowing him, would like him well enough that she’d trust him.

He let their talk wash over him, vaguely registering that they were talking about quirks.

Shinsou's had something to do with mind control, with a speech trigger. 

That would be helpful in hero work. That would mean some incredibly clean villain takedowns.

Izuku cut the celery into sticks a few inches long, setting some dip beside them, when he was distracted by the sound of sniffling.

He looked up to see his mom hugging Shinsou close as he cried into her shoulder. Izuku probably should have been paying attention.

He did not know how to deal with someone crying. Thankfully, it seemed like Mom had it under control.

“Listen to me young man, quirks are not what makes a villain. Actions are what makes a villain.” Mom looked up and made eye contact with Izuku. “There must be thousands of uses for mind control in a hero fight. Right, Izuku?”

This was something he could help with.

“If there was a situation where a villain had hostages, you could simply tell the villain to let them go. It would completely avoid any unnecessary casualties or injuries. You could stop a villain from destroying the streets faster than any physical hero simply by insulting them to get them to talk to you. You could calm down a crowd of panicked civilians, saving people that would otherwise be crushed.”

Shinsou started crying harder and Izuku panicked for a moment, but then Mom gave him an approving smile. Which meant that he’d said the right thing.

Well, that worked out.

Chapter Text

For once, Izuku walked out through the front gates of school.

The bell had rung less than a minute and a half ago, so he wasn’t worried about Bakugou and his cronies showing up as he left.

Over his shoulders, he had two bags. One was his school bag, the other the overnight bag he’d packed yesterday.

In it was enough clothes for the weekend, some light non-perishable food, a few items he picked up from the store, and a bit of cash. He’d try and spend as little of it as he could. Hopefully, he could find a cheap room somewhere.

He'd told his mom that he was staying at Shinsou’s house. The two had never gotten each other’s number, so the excuse should hold as long as Izuku kept giving her text updates.

Time for a field trip.

- - -

Izuku stepped off the train at the Kamino station, looking around at the dingy walls and flickering lights. Kamino had a bad reputation, so it wasn’t strange that the stop would be so run down.

It was still sad though. People lived here. Also, Izuku knew that the reputation was earned by Kamino having one of the highest crime rates of any area of Japan.

Izuku wanted to do something to make this place better, but what could he do? It wasn’t like he was able to help yet. 

He he was going to make people feel safe, he needed to become the best hero possible. This trip was the first step, he was going to learn more about his quirk.

Taking one last look around, Izuku promised himself that when he became a hero he would start cleaning up the streets.

- - -

The first thing Izuku was going to do was test the principles of planting an anchor. In theory, it shouldn’t be that difficult, he just has to figure out how much someone needed to see to think that he doesn’t have a quirk.

It wasn’t as simple in practice.

The most pressing problem was that showing no skin was kind of hard. It had taken him an entire afternoon of hitting thrift shops for him to find everything he needed, and even then, it wasn’t the sleekest of solutions.

He was wearing black pants and a grey sweatshirt, which was normal enough. 

However, on top of that he was wearing a black cloth ski mask that covered his neck, a pair of gloves, and a black fiberglass ski mask with tinted lenses. 

He was wearing a pair of black tennis shoes because he’d felt like his normal red ones would look ridiculous on top of everything else.

He was sitting on a bench on the side of a well-trafficked road, waiting for someone who didn’t look rushed to walk by.

For some reason, people seemed to be favoring the other side of the street. But after around ten minutes of waiting, someone approached him.

It was an older woman and what looked like a police officer. The woman was walking a half-step behind the cop with a half nervous, half accusatory expression on her face.

“Sir?” Izuku asked the officer. “Is something the matter?”

Their expressions didn't change to pity the moment he opened his mouth. One point to his quirk now having a different trigger than it did in the past.

“I’m going to have to ask you what you are doing here.” He said. Izuku had a vague idea of what was going on, the lady called the cops on him, probably thinking that he was a villain waiting around before an attack. While the officer was pretty sure Izuku’s just someone kidding around, or maybe had some quirk that required full-body coverage.

This worked just as well for what Izuku had planned though. He started fiddling with the cuff of his glove.

“I’m just waiting for something, sir.”

“Do you have ID on you?” He asked, not confrontational, but with that peculiar sort of bored authority universal to experienced beat cops.

That authority faltered as Izuku tugged at his glove, the woman also stopped her fidgeting to stare at the inch of Izuku’s wrist that he’d just bared.

There was a moment of staring, then their faces fell into an expression of pity.

So, that meant that even the smallest amount of skin meant that people were hooked by the anchor, frustrating but enlightening.

The officer started to talk again, Izuku readjusted his glove. 

When Izuku looked back up, the pair had already walked away. They were probably experiencing intense cognitive dissonance. One second, Izuku was some possible villain, next, he was some dressed up quirkless kid. There were probably some concerning implications that could be drawn from that.

Izuku wasn’t too worried. The real question was how he could use this. 

He stood up from the bench and headed down the street, towards his hotel. He probably could do more today, but he needed some time to think of further tests for his new discovery.

He could probably use this to hide his real identity if it ever became necessary. Cover his skin completely and suddenly no one’s going to recognize him.

Izuku could use it if he ever needed to go undercover when he starts working as a hero.

Strength was a common enough quirk that no one would raise an eyebrow at some unusually strong underground hero coming in to deal with a problem.

If someone who'd already seen his skin saw him and didn't know it was him, would they still think he was quirkless?

Izuku suddenly stopped. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled in response to something he couldn’t quite place.

He twists his neck around, trying to place the sensation.

There.

The feeling was coming from an alley to his right. He wasn’t sure what it was, but there was some sound that was setting off his subconscious alarms.

Izuku slipped into the alley, keeping his steps light and staying in the shadows of the buildings.

As he edged around a dumpster he was confronted with the sight of a man holding his arm around a child’s throat.

On the other side of the alley was a group of around a dozen children, the oldest being around ten and the youngest maybe four.

They were dumping objects out of the various bags and backpacks they were wearing. All of them were dressed in layered second-hand clothing.

Once the bags were empty, the oldest stood stepped in front of the others. She stood with a forced posture of confidence, watching the man with a calculating yet fearful gaze. 

The man sized up the items scattered across the alleyway.

“That’s all you have? Are you-”

Izuku coughed.

Both the children and the man snapped their heads towards Izuku. All except the child in the man’s grip, he remained perfectly still, though his eyes locked onto Izuku’s.

The kid’s eyes were pale orange with no pupils. They stayed steadfastly focused on Izuku even as tears appeared around the corners of his eyes.

"Listen. This isn’t any of your business.” The man snarled. “I don’t care if you’re some kind of new villain trying to prove yourself or whatever you are. This doesn’t concern you.”

Izuku thought about trying to correct him.

Izuku then considered the belongings spread around the ground around the man. The way the kid he had in his grip was holding unnaturally still.

It didn't take him long to make his decision.

Izuku flooded One for All into his legs and within an instant had twisted the man's arm backward and locked him into an unyielding sleeper hold.

The orange-eyed child fell forwards and stumbled towards the rest of his group.

Izuku flooded his arms with One for All. He kept an iron grip around the villain’s neck until he stopped moving, then Izuku dropped him.

He looked up at the kids.

They didn’t move backward, there was no space left for them to do so.

The oldest one pushed a younger one behind her and forced her expression into one of confidence and calmness.

“I’m not a villain,” Izuku said, doing his best to keep his voice quiet and level.

“You’re dressed like one.” She said, with the slightest tilt of her head.

“Accident.” 

“That’s dumb.” She said decisively.

Izuku nodded. She loosened her tense shoulders and looked around at the objects scattered around the alley.

The kids, on some unseen mutual consensus, swarmed forwards. They worked together to pack away the scattered belongings back into backpacks and bundles.

One of the older ones walked right next to Izuku and patted the villain down. He stood back up with a concerning number of wallets.

He handed one to Izuku. The ID matched the face of the man lying next to Izuku’s feet.

Izuku took the cash out from the man’s wallet and held it towards the leader. He couldn’t bring himself to feel bad.

She came forward to take the cash from Izuku's hand, and he gave her a final nod.

She nodded back.

The group suddenly streamed out of the alley, moving on some unseen and unheard signal. Maybe one of them had a telepathy quirk. Maybe they just had been together a while.

Izuku picked up the man and walked out to the street. It was a bit late, but there were still people out. He stood there with the man slung over his shoulders until he heard someone calling the police. Then he set the man down, setting his wallet, sans the cash, on his chest.

Then, with a few carefully controlled bounds, he was out of sight.

He stopped on a rooftop a few blocks from where he’d left the villain and slumped down onto a heating duct.

That had been…

Izuku didn’t even know how to describe it. He hadn’t thought, just reacted to what was going on. It’d been exhilarating. Kind of terrifying. He’d been calm earlier, But now his lungs were doing some strange things. He couldn’t quite get his breath back.

That was super illegal. He’d used his quirk to attack someone. That was vigilantism, very much so.

Could someone trace him to the crime?

He hadn’t bled and was wearing gloves. No one saw his face. The only people who got a good look at him were those kids, and he got the feeling they wouldn’t be talking to the police.

Besides, even if they somehow thought of something he didn’t and found him, if they started to investigate him, they’d find the records of him being quirkless. 

If they saw him in person they’d believe it.

The definition of vigilante depended on quirk use, right?

Suddenly Izuku had a thought.

Well. It wasn’t exactly moral. He was technically breaking laws since he really did have a quirk.

But.

He wouldn’t be hurting people. Well. He would, but he would be hurting the people who deserved it. It wasn’t like police were incompetent. The Pros weren’t corrupt, at least, not in the ways that villains like Stain liked to preach about.

But Izuku could give them a hand, couldn’t he? It wouldn’t hurt anything, would it?

It would be good practice for him. He never got a chance to go all out. It wasn’t really fair to do that to Shinsou. Izuku was only just teaching him the basics of martial arts. Going against Izuku at full strength at this point just wouldn’t be helpful for his progress.

This could give Izuku a chance to know what it was like to fight in a situation with high stakes.

Besides. He’d be helping to get the people who gave Kamino its bad reputation off of the streets.

He could make people feel safer.

Izuku took a few strides forward and jumped down from the roof, landing on the street with a thud. Where were the most dangerous parts of town, anyway?

- - -

The night passed in a flurry of high-intensity encounters, each person he saved or fought blending into a single blurry memory of adrenalin and split-second decisions.

Izuku punched the mugger’s face with precision and carefully controlled anger. The man's nose breaking instantly under his fist.

Izuku threw his phone, it hit the wall a few inches left of the woman’s face. It was a warning, make a break for it and Izuku might break something of hers.

The man with the shattered mask hanging around his neck stared at Izuku, breathing heavily and leaning against the wall to stay upright. He stared at the unconscious bodies around him with a mix of shock, disbelief, and thankfulness.

Izuku stepped in front of a flying mailbox, protecting the pedestrians behind him. The woman who’d thrown it searched for something else to launch. Izuku leaped towards her before she could find more ammunition.

Kamino apparently had a really high crime rate.

Chapter Text

The next day Izuku went to an army surplus store and bought a pair of combat gloves.

When he was there his eye caught on a television screen. On it was one of the people he saved last night. She was staring into the camera with an almost haunted expression.

“The, the guy was threatening me, he had a gun. I don’t think I had enough money,” she said, voice unsteady. “Then, out of nowhere, that vigilante showed up. It was terrifying. One second it was just the mugger, then he was there too. He moved so quickly- Like, some kind of teleportation quirk? But it worked faster than anything I’ve ever seen before. It was- It was brutal. For a second I thought the mugger must have been dead from how quickly he went down.”

She paused, closing her eyes, someone off-screen said something. She shook her head, then looked right at the camera.

“This vigilante, he might have been terrifying, but he saved my life.”

The video paused and faded out, revealing a woman sitting at a large desk.

“This is footage from an interview of one of the many people saved by the mysterious vigilante who appeared just last night in Kamino. Already he’s been given the moniker The Black Bandit. Over the course of a single night, this vigilante took down no less than sixteen known villains and an unknown number of petty criminals.”

“Among those he saved was the recently graduated pro hero, Grim Glider, who has agreed to interview with us today.”

A hero decked out in full costume walked into frame, and, yep, that was definitely the guy that Izuku had saved last night. This guy was a pro hero?

“Thanks for having me, the pleasure’s all mine,” he said, slipping into a chair with a smile half hidden by the mask that covered the top half of his face. 

When Izuku had seen him last night, his mask had been mostly shattered. Izuku assumed that the one he was now wearing was a replacement.

“So, let’s get into what everyone wants to know,” the newscaster said, leaning in. “What happened when you encountered The Black Bandit?”

The interview went on for a few minutes, with Grim Glider explaining how Izuku had saved him from an alley full of inexperienced villains looking for a quick reputation boost. That was new.

Grim Glider told the story of what had happened in the alley last night. Izuku thought he told the story with a little bit more emphasis on how dangerous the villains were than was accurate.

But he still felt his face grow warm when Glider talked about how skilled of a fighter Izuku must be.

The interview came to a close soon enough.

“Who is The Black Bandit? Why choose Kamino to act out his unlawful justice? How long will he remain at large?” the newscaster asked the audience. “In other news-”

Izuku turned away from the screen. 

It must be a slow day or something. Vigilantes rarely made the news. He had probably just accidentally picked a day where there was nothing better to talk about.

Izuku wasn’t going to stop, regardless.

It might have been illegal, but taking down bad guys felt like he was doing something right. 

There was little ambiguity about what he should do.

Well, ignoring the moral ambiguity of it all. 

But when the fights started, the only question of what he should do in a situation was whether he should go for a sleeper hold or a triangle choke.

He wanted to know what people were saying about him in the hero message boards, but when he reached his hand into his pocket all he came out with was a ziplock bag of plastic shards.

Oh yeah, that was all that was left of his phone.

It wasn’t that big of a deal. He and Mom had villain attack insurance that should cover a broken phone. Everything important was saved on his desktop anyway.

Izuku kept the shards in a ziplock bag though. He felt guilty for destroying it.

- - -

One moment Izuku was sprinting across the rooftops, the next moment an inky mass appeared in front of him and he was on street level.

He skidded to a stop and tried to regain his bearings. He was somewhere he didn’t recognize. Thirty feet way from him was that inky mass, swirling in an distinctly ominous way.

Some sort of warp quirk? Shit, it wasn't a hero he recognized. Some kind of villain attack launched against him because he was taking down villains?

He started sprinting again, maybe he’d get lucky and their quirk would have a cooldown time. If it did he could get away from them before they could react.

No such luck. After a few blocks, the inky mass reappeared in front of him and he found himself back on the same street.

He skidded to a stop again.

Shit.

His choices were to talk himself out of it or fight the user of a warp quirk. Neither sounded very appealing, but they were his only options.

Izuku slowly looked around, one of the buildings had a doorway with an unusually dark patch of shadow, he turned towards it and stood with his arms crossed.

After a few moments of heavy silence, the darkness consolidated into the shape of a person wearing a formal suit. Beside him, a pale-haired man appeared.

There was something strange about his appearance, and as he stepped into the moonlight Izuku realized what it was.

He was covered in hands.

Not living hands, they looked kind of like they had been preserved. He had a pair on his arms, shoulders, and hair. And one stuck on his face, which was super gross.

Handy walked towards Izuku until he was a few feet away.

For some reason, he was holding a mug with his pinky extended. Which Izuku felt was kind of counter to the whole intimidating villain look he was going for.

“The Black Bandit, huh?” Handy said, cocking his head. “I’d shake your hand. But…”

He brought his pinky down on the mug. Starting from the point of contact, it crumbled to dust.

Oh.

That made more sense.

That also meant that Izuku now had to fight two villains with powerful quirks, rather than just one. (A slightly hysterical part of his mind couldn’t help but think about what a waste of a perfectly good mug that had been.)

Hopefully, plan A, talk them into not killing Izuku, would work.

Izuku nodded at Handy, then at the warp guy who’d walked over to stand next to him.

“You don’t talk much, do you?” Handy tilted onto one foot and tilted his head to gaze at Izuku sideways. It probably would have been ridiculous if Izuku wasn’t so worried about dying in the next couple of minutes.

“I’m a little too busy for a chat.” Izuku did his best to shift his voice into the best average adult male impression he could manage.

No reasonable person would think Izuku was actually a middle schooler. His recent growth spurt had left him considerably taller than most adults.

That, along with his vigilante getup should be enough to hide his identity.

“You hear this guy, Kurogiri?” Handy said with a laugh, dropping his air of seriousness. “He’s a little busy, the guy spends two whole nights one-shotting every criminal in this city and he’s just busy.”

He pulled off the hand covering his face to reveal a concerningly wide and cracked smile along with a pair of blood-red eyes.

“Wanna play video games?” Handy asked.

Izuku’s mind did something like what happens when a staircase is one stair longer than expected.

It took him a moment to even realize that it’s a question. One that he needed to answer.

Izuku really didn’t want to know what will happen if he said yes. However, he wanted to find out what would happen if he said no even less.

“What game?”

- - -

To Izuku’s left, there was a silver-haired villain, one with the power to kill him with only the touch of his hand. To Izuku’s right, standing behind a bar across the room was a villain composed of black mist, one with the power to make Izuku’s escape entirely impossible.

Izuku was in a worn-down bar, which exuded an air of shady deals and questionable legality. It made perfect sense as a villain hideout.

Rather incongruous to it all, just in front of Izuku was a TV on which he was playing Smash Bros.

Seriously.

That was the game that this guy chose? What was this? A friendly sleepover between a couple of schoolboys? Izuku was a middle schooler and even he knew that they should be playing something more thematic than Smash Bros.

Not that what video game they played made much of a difference.

Izuku had never been much of a tech guy. He’d transitioned from online chat rooms to dojos around ten years ago and had never really returned to games.

Hopefully, having to ask what the controls were gave credit to the impression of Izuku being an adult.

They’d played a few rounds, and pretty much the whole time Izuku just kept dying over and over. He wasn’t really sure how the scoring worked and he kept on getting confused about what character he was. Not that Izuku was all that concerned about actually winning. Handy seemed quite distracted with beating the computer characters that he spawned rather than caring about what Izuku was doing.

Izuku tried to come up with a plan for how to beat these guys if it became necessary. The more immediately dangerous of the two was Handy. If he touched Izuku with five fingers then Izuku would be out of the fight. But the one that needed to be dealt with first was Warp, Izuku wouldn’t be able to do anything if he was there. His quirk made it so whatever Izuku did, it wouldn’t help. As soon as Izuku became a danger he could just teleport Izuku away to whatever battlefield would be best for Warp.

Possibly Warp could kill Izuku just as easily as Handy. If his range was long enough he could just drop Izuku into the ocean and let him drown.

So Izuku needed to take down Warp as quickly as possible, then either incapacitate Handy as quickly as he could or just make a break for it.

Warp was wearing a strange sort of armor around his neck. This probably meant that he had some physical component that required protection. If Izuku went after it he could hopefully take him down. That was best left for the last resort though. Talking with them was preferable to getting in a fight.

Suddenly the screen changed from Smash Bros to static.

“What?” Handy yelled, he must have touched his controller with all five fingers, since it crumbled to dust. “I was about to win!”

“Silence.” A deep and rasping voice commanded.

Handy immediately shut up, slouching back into his chair with barely a sound. A complete and utter change from his demeanor seconds before. 

“I apologize for my associate,” the voice from the screen continued. “I am an interested party looking to greet and offer a partnership to the recently debuted vigilante known as The Black Bandit. I take it that you are said person?”

Izuku very carefully kept from making even the slightest movement. So this was why the villains had taken him here.

Handy seemed way too unstable and impulsive to be a real threat. Something he’d revealed with the stunt with the mug. The best strategy would have been to keep his quirk a mystery so that Izuku wouldn’t know his abilities. But Handy had gone for spectacle rather than the best strategic choice.

Warp seemed professional and skilled, and armed with an incredibly valuable quirk. He didn’t seem the type to follow someone like Handy.

The person on the screen though. He quieted Handy, an uncontrollable and extremely dangerous villain, with only a word.

That meant that more likely than not that these villains were both working for this person.

Izuku needed more information.

“Who are you?” Izuku asked. It seemed like a safe question, didn’t give anything away.

“As I said, simply an anonymous party looking to invest time and energy into an up and coming person who seems to also realize the problems in our modern hero focused society.”

Wait, so they were, what? They thought that he was vigilanteing because he thought heroes were incompetent? And they were trying to convince Izuku to work with them?

Also, the voice had completely failed to answer Izuku’s question.

Izuku changed his position from sitting lax on his chair to leaning forwards with his hands clasped together.

“What is this proposal?” Telegraph interest. Make them think he was hooked. Hopefully, they wouldn’t attack him if they thought he might help them.

“You know that the hero industry has fallen into disrepair. If you join us you can help fix this society, destroy the rot that is destroying it. Build a new and better world from the ashes of the old.”

Wow, that was the whole villain spiel. If Izuku believed a single thing this villain was saying he might even have been interested.

Time to play hard to get. Or, play at playing hard to get? Either way.

“It’s true, there are deep problems with society. But I’m no villain.” Izuku crossed his arms, leaning back into his chair. “There’s a line between taking down the people the trash heroes don’t bother with and actually destroying the society that gives heroes their undeserved power. I don't know if I'm prepared to step over that line”

Please fall for it. Please.

“There is a line,” The voice agreed. Yes.

“I’m glad that you understan-”

“But,” the voice interrupted, “You’re lying.”

What? Shit, did this guy have some kind of lie detection quirk? Or was Izuku just not as good at lying as he'd thought he was?

“Kurogiri, Shigaraki,” the voice commanded. “Kill him.”

Chapter Text

The world froze, for a single crystal clear instant Izuku felt the world shift into complete clarity. It seemed like a single moment stretched impossibly long. Izuku felt his brain kick into overdrive and heard his heartbeat like a war drum in his ears.

The static on the screen froze, Handy had stopped in the act of lunging towards Izuku with a disturbingly gleeful smile.

There was black mist creeping towards Izuku from where Warp was standing behind the bar.

Izuku knew what he had to do.

He called on One for All and the world sprang into motion.

Izuku kicked backward to avoid Handy as he lunged towards Izuku.

The ground he landed on turned from hardwood to inky black darkness and suddenly he was shooting towards Handy’s outstretched fingers. Izuku kicked his leg out, sweeping it upwards and hitting Handy’s wrist with an ear-piercing snap. Handy jerked backward, clutching at his broken wrist with a shout.

In an instant, Izuku rebounded off the ground and shot towards Warp. The area in front of the villain filled with inky black darkness.

Izuku punched to the left with all the power he could muster, changing his trajectory enough to hit the wall to Warp’s right. He kicked off against the wall, speeding towards Warps unguarded back. The mist sluggishly responded, moving to stop Izuku from impacting with Warp.

Too late.

Izuku landed with both feet on Warp’s neck, flinging the strange piece of armor into the opposite wall. It impacted and fell to the ground with a metallic thunk, dented to the point of unrecognizability.

The black mist faded away to nothing.

The fight had lasted only seconds.

Izuku really hoped he hadn’t just killed Warp. The villain was probably resilient enough to survive being thrown around? Hopefully. As much as Izuku was fighting for his life right now, he didn't want to be responsible for someone's death.

Handy was still shouting, so Izuku launched himself forward and locked Handy into a sleeper hold, carefully keeping Handy’s fingers away from himself, until he fell unconscious.

Silence fell over the room and Izuku turned towards the static-filled screen.

“I don’t want anything to do with you,” Izuku stated. Just in case him beating up this guy’s employees wasn’t enough of a giveaway.

“You’re making a mistake.” The voice warned. 

“I disagree.” 

Izuku turned on his heel, walking with confidence he didn’t feel towards the door. With one final nod at the screen, he shut the door behind him.

Once he was outside, he started sprinting. He traveled across the buildings with as much speed as he could muster, changing direction every couple of blocks, just in case someone tried to follow him. After he was certain no one was following him, which took around twenty minutes of sprinting, he skidded to a stop and dropped into an alley.

He let One for All drain away, then took a few wobbling steps before evacuating the contents of his stomach onto the ground.

Gross.

He took a few more steps and slid down the wall to sit with his forehead on his knees.

That was terrible. He came so close to dying. He’d made so many bad choices. 

Who was that guy on the screen? He probably had enough power to completely bury Izuku if he managed to find him.

Shit.

Izuku needed to go home, but he let himself sit in the alley and breathe for a few minutes before dragging himself up to go and get his stuff from the hotel.

- - -

Izuku pushed open the front door as quietly as he could. Inside the house was dark and quiet. The living room light was off. Good. That meant that Mom wasn’t waiting for him to come home again. He slipped off his shoes and crept silently through the house. 

How could he explain why he'd shown up the middle of the night? He didn’t feel safe in Kamino after what happened. He’d even ran to another city to get on the train, just in case the villains were watching the Kamino train stations. 

But showing up in the middle of the night wouldn’t be good either since his story was that he was staying at Shinsou’s house.

He’d figure something out in the morning, he was too exhausted to think right now. 

Izuku opened the door to his room, then stopped and stared.

“Midoriya-san?” Shinsou blearily muttered from where he was laying on Izuku’s bed. He looked up from his phone screen and blinked at Izuku.

Izuku slipped inside, closed the door, and thought about flicking the light on before remembering he had blood on him. The light from the window was dim enough that Shinsou shouldn't notice anything.

“Midoriya?” Shinsou asked, suddenly more awake, sitting up. He was wearing one of Izuku’s shirts. The shoulders were far too wide for him. “You’re back? Where were you?”

Izuku stared at him.

He had no idea what was going on.

“...You’re here?” Izuku eventually asked. Oh man, his cover was so blown.

“Yes,” Shinsou said. Then he seemed to pause for a moment. He looked down at the shirt he was wearing, then at Izuku’s bed. “Uh…”

This was the first time Izuku had seen Shinsou at a loss for words. There’d been times where he’d decided not to speak, but never when Shinsou just couldn’t think of anything to say.

“We have a guest bedroom?” Izuku half asked, half stated. Well, they had a room that was half mom’s office and half storage room, but it had a couch that folded out into a bed.

“Your mom said that I should just sleep in here ‘cause it wasn’t set up,” Shinsou said in a tone Izuku had never heard from him. If the light was on, Izuku would probably be seeing Shinsou blushing. Reasonable enough, he had just stolen Izuku's bed without asking.

“Why are you sleeping at my house?” Izuku prompted.

“It was late and Midoriya-san didn’t want me going all the way home,” Shinsou said.

“Why were you at my house?” This was getting a little tedious.

“We were waiting for you to come home, Yagi-san already left, but I waited longer and your mom thought I shouldn’t walk home by myself.

“Yagi-san?” Izuku asked.

“Yeah,” Shinsou said, then he shook his head and seemed to focus finally. “Ya’ know, I kind of expected your trainer to be, like, All Might-level muscled and really into protein. Yagi-san was totally not what I was expecting.”

Izuku stared at Shinsou, then decided that it was too late to deal with this level of dramatic irony.

Everything had gone to hell, but it was too late to do anything about that.

“I’m gonna sleep,” Izuku said.

Then he walked to his dresser and grabbed a set of clean pajamas.

“I could move?” Shinsou offered from behind Izuku.

“It’s fine. Good night,” Izuku said, closing his bedroom door behind him.

He was far too drained to deal with this right now.

Izuku went to the bathroom, then took a shower to rinse the blood off and brushed his teeth in a daze. He put on his pajamas and stared into the mirror. His face looked strangely gaunt. Izuku hadn’t eaten much in the last few days.

He’d made enemies. He hadn’t meant to, but now some extremely powerful villain and his cronies would be looking for him.

Izuku sat against the door and buried his face in his arms.

He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do now. It wasn’t like there was anyone he could convince that he was The Black Bandit. If he tried to convince All Might it wouldn’t go anywhere but an argument, and he didn’t really know anyone else.

Shit.

He sat there and breathed for a while, trying to empty his mind enough to think.

Eventually, he lifted his head from his arms and blinked at the bathroom walls.

Would the villains be able to track him? It wasn’t like he’d done anything to identify himself. And it wouldn’t exactly be easy for them to have followed him. Especially with how he’d taken down their warp-capable member. What should Izuku do? These guys were dangerous, he needed to be careful.

What if he just did nothing?

If the Black Bandit just disappeared, the villains would just assume that they’d scared him badly enough that he just chickened out.

Which was pretty close to what Izuku was considering. Regardless, it seemed like a good idea, or at least the best available to him. Maybe that was why vigilantes were so rare compared to heroes and villains. They were targeted by both of those groups, and couldn't rely on help from anyone. That was a bleak thought. Izuku pressed his fingers into his eyelids.

Okay, but, what if Izuku waited until he got into UA and then started to work against these guys? He could find some hero at UA and somehow convince them that these villains were real and were a threat. Maybe he could even directly fight them once internships started.

It seemed like a good plan, if you accepted good to be a relative term.

Hopefully, it would still hold up when he wasn’t so exhausted.

Izuku stood up, stretching his arms and rolling his neck. He picked up his bag, then pulled out his Black Bandit stuff from it. The sweatshirt and combat gloves were slightly blood-splattered from the fights he’d been in, mostly just broken noses, though it was also from the few wounded people he carried to the hospital. He turned the sweatshirt inside-out and rolled it into a ball.

Izuku washed out the gloves in the sink. They were pretty nice, even had a layer of carbon fiber on the knuckles so he didn’t hurt his hands when punching. He washed them until the pink water turned clear, then dried them with a towel. They were dark enough that there weren’t any stains that Izuku could see. He wrapped them in a towel and put them into the bottom of his bag with his ski mask.

Everything else he put in his bag on top of these, then carried it all to the kitchen. He pulled a garbage bag from under the sink and put the sweatshirt in, then tied it and stuffed it into the trash can.

When he glanced at the clock it read 4:52. Ouch. He could even see the sun starting to lighten the horizon through the kitchen. There were times during his more intensive training schedules when he had regularly woken up before this.

He grabbed a pillow and blanket from off the couch and walked into the storage room. He stored his mask and gloves in one of the boxes in the closet. Izuku didn’t even bother unfolding the couch into a bed. He laid down with the pillow and blanket and was out within a minute.

- - -

When Izuku woke up, Shinsou wasn’t there. 

All Might was.

Izuku sat down on the couch and vacantly stared at his mom. Just to her right was All Might. Who’s name was apparently Yagi Toshinori. The sight of the world’s number one hero sitting in Izuku’s living room was giving Izuku whiplash.

Izuku wondered if that was the hero’s real name or just the one that he gave to civilians.

“You didn’t answer your phone when I called you on Friday night. I was worried, but I thought that maybe you’d just forgot to charge it.” Mom explained. “So I found Shinsou's contact information--It wasn’t that hard, there’s a lot of stuff online these days so it was easy to find his school email.--Anyway, eventually I called him so I could check up on you.”

“We were both surprised when we realized that you had lied about going to his house.” She said, giving him a slightly sour look. “We decided to meet up the next morning, Saturday, and try to figure out where you’d gone. We explored the neighborhood, checked some gyms, asked a few people.”

“One of the people they asked was me,” All Might, Yagi-san, offered. “I was concerned so I told them I was your trainer. I showed them our text conversations and we agreed to try and all search for you together.”

“We looked until the neighborhood got dark. Yagi-san called his police friend but they hadn’t seen anything. We went back to the apartment and waited in case you came home.”

“Eventually, I left because of an appointment I had this morning, but Shinsou stayed with Midoriya-san.”

“Shinsou almost left after that, but I was worried about him going all the way to Saitama late at night, so I had him stay in your bed since the guess one wasn’t set up. He left before you woke up so he wouldn’t worry his foster parents.”

“And I came back here this morning because I heard you had returned.” All Might finished.

Izuku listened to all this with a sort of horrified fascination. What a terrible string of coincidences that apparently just happened to spite him. It turned out that his phone breaking was actually a big deal.

A burst of steam interrupted Izuku’s thoughts. All Might had just transformed into his larger form.

Apparently, All Might was telling Mom about “trying” to pass on One for All to Izuku.

That was...something.

That continued on for a while. Izuku just sat there and let their conversation wash over him.

All Might transformed back to his thin form.

The buzz of their conversation turned to strained silence.

All Might looked pensive and apologetic, but Izuku had no idea what his mom was thinking. Her expression was totally blocked off in a way that he’d never seen before. She was just sitting on the couch staring down at her hands.

“Yagi-san... All Might.” Mom paused for a moment. Then she looked up at All Might with steel in her eyes. “Please leave. I need to have a talk with my son.”

Chapter Text

The room lapsed into silence as All Might left.

Izuku sat in his chair across from Mom, feeling paralyzed.

She still wasn't saying anything. She'd seemed okay when All Might was here, but now she'd gone silent and Izuku still couldn't tell what she was feeling. She was leaning forward with her hands clasped together in her lap, Izuku couldn’t see her face.

She reached out and gently grabbed his hand, turning his palm over and over in her hands. She let out a heavy sigh.

"Izuku," she said, voice calm and all the more deafening for it. "You had me terrified."

"I'm sorry, it was an accident," Izuku said, trying to meet her eyes. All he could see was the top of her head. The silver roots peeking through her dark hair seemed to shine with their own light.

"No it wasn't," Mom said, in the same quiet tone.

"I promise it was," Izuku said, voice growing louder and feeling wrong-footed. "I was going to keep in contact, it's just, my phone broke. I didn't have a way to contact you."

"I don't care that your phone broke, Izuku," Mom said in a defeated tone. "You lied to me. You lied to your friend."

Izuku pressed his lips together and tried to think. How could he get her to feel better? He was treading water and not making progress.

"I won’t do anything like this again, I promise," Izuku said, trying to sound soothing.

"Yes, you will."

Izuku froze, staring at her. He waited for her to say something else, but she just sat there.

Izuku pulled his hand from her's and stood up, backing away from her. He hovered a few feet away, hand on the back of the couch, feeling more and more unsettled after each second of silence. Mom never doubted him, she always took Izuku at his word.

"Listen, I wasn't in any danger, I promise," Izuku lied, Mom still hadn't moved and he shifted uncomfortably. "I never wanted to worry you, I just wanted to get some stuff done."

"I don't care that you worried me, Izuku," Mom said.

Izuku froze.

"You lied to me."

"I won't do anything like it again, I promise!" Izuku said, knowing it wasn't the truth.

"You've been lying to me for a while." 

Izuku stared down at her, not knowing what words he could say to fix this.

"You almost died twice fighting a villain."

Izuku flinched, he'd forgotten about that.

"You agreed to take a dangerous power that would change both of our lives, took on a new trainer, didn't even tell me about it after everything was over." There was a pause and her voice grew even gentler. "I know you, you’re my baby boy and I know you better than anyone. I know you were never planning on telling me." 

Oh.

"You've always been sad, grieving every opportunity you’ve lost. But you pretend you aren't and I love you even when you lie to me."

Izuku froze, not daring to even look up at her.

"When you were four years old, you grew up, and it was my fault," Mom said. "I failed you as a parent and I didn't even notice."

"Listen, it's alright, I-"

"Izuku, I need to do something for me." Izuku nodded, desperate to fix whatever had gone wrong. "Stop comforting me, please. It's not your job, and I never should have made it your job."

Izuku gripped the cushion tightly in his hand.

There was something in his throat, something painful and old. 

"It's alright for you to just feel things, please Izuku," Mom said. “I know you feel like it’s all your burden and I know part of it is my fault.”

Izuku shook his head quickly, eyes filling with tears until they blinded him.

“I never gave you a reason to trust me, and I am so sorry for that,” she said, “And I know that it’s unfair of me to ask this of you in some ways. But-” Her voice cut off for a moment.

Izuku could barely breathe. He finally looked up at Mom, she was looking back at him. Her eyes were filled with tears, they traced their way in huge droplets down her face like stars falling from her wide eyes.

"But I can't stand it anymore." Her voice of soft, "Please stop hiding everything from me. Please Izuku."

Before he knew what he was doing, Izuku rushed to kneel before her and tried to pull her into his arms. She gently pushed him back, taking his hands gently in hers.

"Izuku, you can't fix this with a hug." She whispered, staring into his eyes even as she cried desperately. Izuku knew he was crying just as much.

"I- I know." Izuku managed through his tight throat.

"You can't keep lying to me." Mom said, brushing a hand that was still holding his own under Izuku's eye, brushing away the tears there.

"I'm, sorry, I'll make sure-" Izuku snapped his mouth closed. No more platitudes. The temptation was so strong, just say that everything will be okay, just smile and nod and pretend that nothing could bother him.

He couldn’t do that. He’d messed up. He knew it. He'd been messing up in a way that he didn't even know, probably had been for years now. And he didn't know what to do about it.

 "I'll try, I- I can't tell you some things,” he said in a whisper, voice teetering on the edge of breaking. “I would if I could, but there are just things that I can't tell you, no matter how much I want to."

He stared into her eyes desperately, trying to tell her how much he meant it. Mom stared back at him. After a moment that seemed to last an eternity, she finally smiled and pulled him into a tight hug. Izuku hugged her back as tightly as he could without hurting her.

The room was silent and motionless other than the soft sound of sniffling and for a moment Izuku was safe and everything in the world was alright because his mom was holding him and she loved him.

Mom pulled back from their hug after a few minutes. She wiped at her eyes, sniffling, but smiling shakily.

She reached forwards and held Izuku’s face in her hands. She wiped the tears from Izuku’s cheeks and smiled at him with a tint of sadness.

She patted him on the cheek, then sighed deeply. She sat back on the couch and leaned against Izuku's side.

Izuku was reminded just how small she was. He had grown a lot in the past few months, and now he dwarfed her as they sat in their tiny living room.

“Any more incredibly important revelations, Izuku?” Mom asked with a smile in her voice.

Well, Izuku couldn’t tell her that he actually had One for All. Izuku just didn’t know any way to tell her without driving a deeper wedge between them.

Wait, did he forget to tell her about this weekend?

“Uh,” Izuku said, unsure of how to start. “Can I go grab something real quick?”

“What?” There was a note of dread in her voice.

Izuku tensed against her for a moment. But her hand tightened around his own and when Mom turned to him she was smiling with a slight hint of self deprecation.

“Okay Izuku.” There was a hint of laughter in her voice. “What’s another surprise today? Thank you for telling me.”

Izuku squeezed her hand, then left the room. He grabbed what he needed from the storage room. He sat down on the couch next to her with his Black Bandit ski mask and combat gloves.

“Have you heard of that vigilante that appeared in Kamino this weekend?”

“Izuku,” Mom said, a low note of exasperation in her voice. 

“Well, uh, that was, kind of, I mean, accidentally, uh…” Izuku trailed off.

“Accidentally?” Mom asked, voice dangerously lacking in emotion.

“I didn’t mean to, it just kind of... happened? If it matters, I already decided not to go out as him again?” Izuku couldn’t bring himself to turn his head and look at Mom directly.

“Izuku.”

Izuku didn’t so much as breathe.

“You’re grounded.”

- - -

Things, strangely enough, went back to normal after that. 

Izuku told Mom everything that he could. Told her that he met some villains in Kamino and an abbreviated version of the night he’d stayed out till two in the morning.

He didn’t see All Might again, he was vaguely aware that Mom kept in touch with him, but Izuku told Mom that they parted on bad terms so she talked to him but didn't invite him back. Izuku was grateful for the shield that his mom created even as he felt guilty for not talking to All Might.

It was strangely anti-climactic, even as it changed everything. He still went through the same motions, still went to school, still studied for his exams, still trained with Shinsou for the UA practicals.

He got a replacement for his phone, citing villain attack for its destruction. 

But it was different. Because when he was stressed and tired he told his mom and she offered help and warm tea and kind words. Because Shinsou stayed with them more nights than not until his Mom cleared out the storage room and told him to just keep his stuff there. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Izuku woke to hear the two of them talking over tea as Mom helped Shinsou through his moments of anxiety and insomnia. 

Sometimes, there was something ugly in him that was angry that Midoriya Inko chose this moment to start being a caring and attentive mother. But then he remembered that his defining trait over the past decades had been a continual stream of lies and that feeling died before it could come to the surface.

And that's good, because sometimes Izuku and Shinsou talked and laughed late into the night, joking about nothing and anything. Shinsou quietly told Izuku about his long string of foster homes and everything he'd gone through. Izuku didn't know when, but he'd gained Shinsou's confidence over the past months.

Izuku had never had a friend before, hadn’t let his mother in since he was four years old.

But now he had that, and it meant more than he ever expected.

The UA practicals were coming up, so Izuku trained with Shinsou, studied hard, and practiced with his new quirk. He learned things, like how if no one’s watching, activating One for All made him glow with green lightning and that he could now swim faster than he used to run.

He still lifted at the gym with Shinsou even though Izuku needed to borrow weights from other machines if he wanted to max out his weight, even if he wasn’t using One for All. 

Izuku avoided looking at the punching bag that was conspicuously newer than all the others, but the punch of guilt and fear was less than it had once been.

- - -

Izuku stared up at the huge building in front of him.

UA really was an impressive place.

Shinsou, who was standing beside him, made a sort of coughing noise. He’d spent the night with them, since his house was much further from UA than Izuku’s. Not that he needed the excuse, he spent the night at Izuku’s house every time he had the chance anyway. 

“They really do need to go all out, don’t they?” Shinsou muttered. “Gotta look all big and imposing.”

Izuku could see Shinsou’s hands shaking. That wasn't good. Shinsou preformed poorly when nervous. Izuku let his eyes rest of the flagstones and stopped. Shinsou reluctantly stopped beside him.

“It’s enough to make me nervous,” Izuku said in an undertone. He kept his gaze locked downward, but knew that Shinsou was staring at him. "Good thing I've worked just as hard as anyone else to get here. And have as much a right to prove I deserve to be a hero as anyone else.

Shinsou let out a huff of breath. Not angry, but not with the air of nervous energy he'd had before.

"Right," he said. He turned back to the UA building and took a deep breath. "Right."

When they needed to separate to go to their assigned seats, Izuku gave Shinsou’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze and they wished each other luck.

After the assembly and the written tests, Izuku stood in front of a huge gate and for the first time realized that he was going to be a hero.

He did nothing to stop the wild grin that spread across his face.

It was time to prove himself. Finally.

The bell rang and Izuku sprinted forward before anyone else started to move.

He took out robot after robot. Though he paused to help some other kids who almost got crushed under the wreckage.

He was punching a three pointer in the nose when a huge robot appeared. Oh. That was the zero pointer.

Izuku racked his brain trying to remember if the hero had told them it was going to be as big as a building.

Oh well. Izuku could just ignore it.

Until he saw someone trapped under rubble, right in front of the robot.

Her round face filled with terror even as she frantically tried to pull herself out of the pile of concrete while desperately calling for help.

Well. He’d probably be fine on points, at the very least better than most people. He already had a good amount and helping her was more important than scoring super high.

He took a moment to think, before sprinting forward with One for All activated and reaching the girl when the robot was only a few feet away. He planted his feet firmly on the ground and stood above the girl with his hands held high above him. He called for One for All and strength flooded through his body.

He had a moment to wonder if this was a spectacularly stupid idea. Too late to move now.

The robot stepped right onto his raised hands.

His elbows bent and his feet cracked the pavement under him, but he held firm. Within a moment the robot had tripped forward, wavering. But it continued onward with only a stutter in its step.

Izuku let himself collapse to the ground and a minute later the girl finally freed herself from the rubble.

She took a deep breath and flopped onto the ground. She pressed the palms of her hands into her eyes and held her breath for a few seconds. 

Izuku stood next to her, rubbing at his hands. 

She opened her eyes, staring at the retreating form of the robot, then at Izuku.

“Holy shit,” she breathed. Then she launched herself off of the ground and pulled Izuku into a tight hug. Izuku’s arms hovered above her for a moment, before coming to rest on her back.

“That was terrifying! Thank you! You were great, how the fu- uh, how’d you do that?” she asked, pulling away from him to smile at him, it only seemed a bit unhinged. “I need to sit down, give me a minute.”

She dropped to the ground again and leaned against a piece of rubble. Izuku saw her mouth form the shape of 'holy shit' silently a few more times.

“You’re welcome,” Izuku said eventually, he could feel his own heartbeat drumming like thunder under his skin. He sat down next to her and patted her arm.

The bell that signaled the end of the test rang out.

Izuku stared at the girl, she stared back. She stifled a laugh in her palm and Izuku snorted. They didn’t stop laughing until a healing hero came to check on them. The girl insisted on putting her number into his phone and told him to call him once he got his results.

After it was all over, Izuku met Shinsou outside the huge UA building. 

Shinsou put his phone away when Izuku approached. He had a sort of self satisfied smirk on his face that told Izuku that his friend’s tests had gone well.

“I made another friend,” Izuku announced, showing Shinsou the girl’s contact page. “We’re going to be heroes together.”

Shinous stared at him blankly, then shot his arm forward and grabbed Izuku’s phone out of his hand.

“Oh, what’s her name?” Shinsou said with a fake-innocent look.

“You have it right there,” Izuku replied with a smile that was just as innocent. “Why can’t you just read it?”

Shinsou stared at him and after a few moments Izuku broke and glared back.

“Uraraka Ochaco,” Shinsou said, handing back the phone.

“I knew that,” Izuku said with fake flippancy.

“It took three months of you jumping over walls at me before I got into your contact list, but I left you alone for an hour and she’s already managed it?”

“Should have gotten yourself in mortal danger of being crushed by a giant robot,” Izuku said with a shrug.

Shinsou snorted and started walking towards the exit.

“Of course you fought the zero-pointer, I should have expected that. Dinner at your house?”

“I didn’t fight it, it just stepped on me. Also, of course, Mom’s making celebratory udon.”

Chapter Text

Izuku’s muscles burned with strain. He paused to bring his head above water and took a deep breath. The feeling of One for All crackled through his veins, filling his movements with power beyond what they should be capable of.

Then he went back to paddling, each stroke of his arms smooth and fast. The ropes dug painfully into his arms, but he ignored the feeling.

As his head breached the surface again, he heard shouts from behind him and he stopped to listen. The people on the boat behind him shouted something, and Izuku looked in front of him to see the dock, only a few feet in front of him.

The people on the boat were still talking, but Izuku ignored it. He took a finally deep breath and swam to the dock, pulling the boat behind him. He grabbed the edge of the dock, and with a flick of One for All, launched himself upward.

He untied the ropes from his arms then carefully pulled the boat to the dock. The crew of the boat were still talking, thanking him and pronouncing their amazement that a “quirkless boy” could do what he just did. He focused on tying the boat to the dock. 

They tried to offer him money, but he dove back into the water before they could manage to give him anything. 

He pulled on One for All, and started to swim. He went fast, faster than he thought was possible. Faster than he could run before he started using One for All. Which was already pretty fast. Izuku tried not to think as he swam.

It’d been a week since the UA practical. He knew he must have passed. He knew it. He’d done well on the written portion. He’d destroyed dozens of robots, he must have done well, no one else in his group of practical exam candidates had come close to doing as well as he had. But there was a lingering feeling of doubt. A sliver of uncertainty. Something planted when All Might had refused to believe he had One for All. Something small and insecure. It was ridiculous but insidious. Izuku knew this. 

But he couldn’t ignore the feeling. 

He focused on swimming. Left. Right. Left. Right. Two strokes of the legs for each of the arms. Take a breath every third stroke of the arm. Move. Just focus on movement. Focus on the feeling of One for All crackling through his veins.

That had been the point of going out in the first place. Just movement. Exercise had always been Izuku’s way of centering himself. Focusing on training, don’t worry about the future or the past.

When he’d found the boat adrift, he’d offered to help because he wasn’t sure what else to do. They’d refused at first, but once he’d started dragging them back they’d changed to admiration and surprise. Izuku focused on pulling the boat and ignored them.

Right. No more thinking. Just focus.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

Focus.

But what if something happened during Shinsou’s test? What if someone rejected him because they were scared of his quirk for some reason?

God dammit.

- - -

Izuku got back to the house a few hours later. Muscles burning and sunburned along his back.

“Izuku!” His mom’s voice cried from inside.

Izuku panicked and One for All crackled as he flung himself through the entryway and into the living room. He hit the wall hard and left a bit of a dent in the drywall. He stumbled and pushed against the wall for balance.

“Izuku!” Mom cried again, she stepped out of the kitchen, waving a letter above her head. “You’ve got your letter! From UA!” Then she paused when she saw Izuku. “Are you alright?”

“Uh. Yeah. I’m-” Izuku leaned against the wall, pushing down images of the villains he’d met having somehow hurt his mother. “I’m fine. Just-”

He made a vague gesture. Then his brain finally caught up with what his mom had just said.

“Wait. It’s here?” The feeling of dread jumped up his throat. “It’s here.”

“Yeah," Mom said. She took a few steps toward Izuku, then touched his hand. He stared at the envelope. He knew it would be fine. It would be good news. 

“Hey. Izuku,” Mom said. Izuku looked up into her eyes. 

He tried to smile.

“You’ve got this, Izuku,” Mom said, pressing the envelope into his hand.

“Thank you,” Izuku said.

“Go on then,” she said, “Open it. I’ve been looking forward to this celebration dinner for months. You’re going to love it.”

“Yeah.” Izuku felt a grin pulling at his mouth. “Yeah I am.”

He opened the thing in his room, then startled as an image appeared above the opened letter.

It was All Might.

“Hello! I am All Might!” There was a pause. All Might looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Which you know. Midoriya.”

Izuku had a terrible moment where he thought that this was All Might trying to talk to him by faking a UA letter, then he continued.

“I am in town for one reason. I’ve come to teach at UA,” All Might said. There was a pause, like someone out of frame was talking. “Midoriya. You did well. You did unbelievably well. You far surpassed anyone’s expectations during your exam. I’m proud of you.”

All Might’s smile was wide and even though Izuku saw an edge of regret, he still saw pride on his face.

Izuku wanted to be anywhere but here. All Might wasn’t even here. It was just a recording. But Izuku still wanted to leave.

“You achieved a respectable amount of villain points. An amazing feat. But there was a second set of points to this exam,” All Might said. “These are the rescue points. They are awarded for helping other students, even when you were not told that this would benefit you.”

All Might’s smile turned bright.

“You would have passed merely with your villain points, but with the addition of the hero points, you scored the highest of all applicants of this year,” All Might said. “Congratulations, my boy. I know you’ve worked hard to be here.”

Izuku slumped into his chair.

He’d passed. He’d done well. He started to laugh, and almost wanted to cry.

“Midoriya,” All Might said, then paused, Izuku could see something sad behind the wide smile. “Welcome to UA.”

- - -

Shinsou joined them for the celebration dinner.

When he knocked on the door, Izuku opened the door so quickly it slammed into the wall. Shinsou stood there for a few moments. He looked windswept and tired. 

The silence lasted long enough for Izuku to worry that Shinsou might cry and he’d need to get Mom to come make him feel better.

Then Shinsou smiled. 

It wasn’t like his normal smiles. It wasn’t sarcastic or biting. It wasn’t even self aware. It was just happy. Just surprised and happy.

Izuku had rushed forward out of the apartment and swept him up in a hug. He’d picked him up and spun the two of them until he was dizzy, laughing all the while. 

Shinsou had made biting comments, but he’d been laughing too.

Eventually Shinsou had enough and escaped Izuku’s arms. Then he’d tried to grab Izuku in retaliation. It had quickly devolved into a brawl, neither of them caring about the fact that they were outside of the apartment and the neighbors were yelling at them to stop.

Eventually Mom came through the open door and they pretended nothing had happened. 

Shinsou proudly told Izuku’s mom that he’d passed his exams and she’d pulled him into a hug and cried tears of joy.

The celebration dinner included a lot of crying, but all of it was happy.

It was a fantastic dinner too. Mom had made them chicken teriyaki, beef bowls, and a number of sauces Izuku didn’t know the name of.

Between the two of them, Izuku and Shinsou could eat truly ridiculous amounts of food, but there was plenty to go around.

As they ate, Shinsou finally told the story of his physical exam. He’d used the techniques Izuku had taught him, along with a metal pipe, to fight a number of the villain bots. He’d also gotten rescue points from saving another student when they’d been surrounded by the robots.

Izuku had eventually told the whole story of his own exam to his mom and Shinsou. Shinsou had laughed, because at this point he’d accepted that Izuku was strong enough to seemingly survive anything. His mom had been horrified, but didn’t push the issue.

Shinsou spent the night again, and they talked about what they would do at UA, and then what they were do when they were heroes.

- - -

Before they could go to UA though, there was still middle school to finish. The news of Izuku’s passing had gotten to the staff. On the last day of middle school, after his final class, the principal pulled him into the faculty office to congratulate him.

They’d also brought Bakugou. Which Izuku took to mean that he’d also gotten into UA.

That was going to be a bit of a hassle. Honestly, since the whole thing with All Might, Bakugou had gone down considerably on the list of people that Izuku worried about, but he was the same as he’d always been.

When they were surrounded by faculty, Bakugou was perfectly still and contained. But Izuku knew that the instant they were alone he’d explode.

The principal was still talking, and Izuku shifted his weight from foot to foot.

He needed to think of a way to deal with Bakugou. For one, Izuku knew that the longer he put off the confrontation, the more Bakugou would work to corner him.

But honestly, some time in the last few months, Izuku had lost the plot of what Bakugou was angry at Izuku for. It used to be just that he was bullying Izuku for not having a quirk, but now it seemed more complicated. Maybe something like jealousy mixed in?

Izuku didn’t really think that analyzing Bakugou would get him anywhere useful. Sure, he could try and figure the guy out, but what was even the point? He honestly felt like he was a bit beyond whatever playground drama that—to all appearances—defined Bakugou's entire personality. 

There was silence around him, and Izuku glanced up. The principal had stopped talking and Bakugou was glaring at him.

Izuku bowed, because that seemed the thing to do. The principal waved them out. 

Bakugou was watching Izuku carefully. And Izuku knew that if he tried to run, Bakugou would just chase him. It wasn’t ideal, but the best way to deal with this would be letting Bakugou talk to him. 

Ugh.

Izuku pulled his backpack straps tighter and walked out the front of the building. They were barely out the front gate when Bakugou grabbed him by the collar and dragged him around the building.

It was faintly ridiculous. Izuku was a whole lot bigger than Bakugou these days. With his training, and the ways that his quirk was making him grow larger, he dwarfed most people. And while Bakugou was tall for a middle schooler, Izuku still stood half a head taller.

Eventually Bakugou pulled him around a corner and rounded on him.

He immediately started shouting. It was impressive, even for Bakugou, there was finger pointing, small explosions, the whole deal.

He was so invested in his rant that it took him more than a minute to realize Izuku had taken out his phone and was looking through the newest hero news.

That was when he threw himself at Izuku. Coming at him with swinging punches and wild kicks.

But Izuku had been training in martial arts for over a decade now and even without using his quirk, he was fast.

Bakugou sent a wild punch at Izuku’s nose, and Izuku ducked to the left, he grabbed Bakugou’s wrist as it passed and sent him flying past him. Bakugou screamed and rounded on Izuku. This time he was more controlled, sending two punches, then a kick at Izuku’s stomach. He dodged each of them, but knew that he was spending a whole lot more energy and Bakugou would win if this turned into a contest of endurance.

More than that, Izuku knew that he was just making Bakugou more angry. That he wanted a fight. That just staying out of the way was a bad idea. But he was tired of managing Bakugou’s moods. He was done with that. He was going to UA. They were on equal footing now. It wasn’t Izuku’s job to deal with whatever his problem was.

By the time that Bakugou started throwing explosions at him, Izuku had decided this was enough. Izuku grabbed him by the arm and launched him away. Izuku could see him getting up, preparing to attack Izuku again.

“Bakugou,” Izuku said. He slipped his phone into his pocket and crossed his arms. “We should talk.”

Bakugou’s head snapped up and he stared at Izuku.

Honestly, Izuku didn’t think he’d started a conversation with Bakugou for years now. Sure, he’d occasionally respond. But never started something.

“I tried that!” Bakugou snapped.

“Okay,” Izuku said. “Why don’t you want me to go to UA?”

“Because it was supposed to be just me!” Bakugou’s hands were sparking, but he wasn't actively attacking Izuku. “I was the only one who was supposed to get out of this hellhole! I was supposed to be the only one to get into UA!”

“Oh.” Izuku thought that maybe he knew that already. “Well. I also wanted to go to UA, so I applied. And I was good enough to get in.”

“Good enough? Good enough!” Bakugou shouts. “You weren’t just good enough! You, the quirkless, useless shit. Were good enough that you beat me in points! What the fuck? You lying, cheating bastard!”

“Oh I did?” Izuku thought about that for a moment. All Might had said that he’d gotten the highest score of all the applicants. Which meant that he must have beaten Bakugou. Izuku was reminded of that score he used to keep of his fights with Bakugou. Well, apparently this would be another tick for Izuku.

Izuku then made a mistake.

He laughed.

Bakugou screamed. It was pure hatred and rage. Izuku tuned out the series of curses and threats he spewed out in favor of dodging the series of explosions and hits that Bakugou sent at him. 

It was terrifying, maybe more than even his run-in with the villains. Izuku had never once seen Bakugou this angry, and it brought back memories of being weaker and smaller than him. Of being beaten again and again. Of burns and cuts he’d lied about to his mom.

Izuku jumped away from an explosion.

There was a brief tableau. 

Bakugou was breathing hard, hands flickering with explosions and teeth clenched. 

Then Izuku remembered that he didn’t need to stay here. He could just leave actually.

So he did.

He channeled One for All, gave Bakugou a mocking bow, then jumped up to the roof of a three story building.

He turned and took one last look at Bakugou. He was staring up at Izuku. He still looked angry. Izuku took a running jump away from him and within moments was blocks away from Bakugou.

Well, as far as last days of middle school go, that was pretty bad.

- - -

A month later, it was finally time to go to UA.

Shinsou had stayed the night, since his house was far away from UA and it was easier to commute from Izuku’s house. Not that he needed the excuse at this point, he rarely went home these days. Izuku didn’t ask how Shinsou’s foster parents felt about this. It felt like one of those things better to not bring up.

Izuku had spent the train ride reading hero news. Shinsou had spent it trying not to show how nervous he felt.

They’d been admitted to the same hero class; 1A.

Izuku was glad about that. It meant that if he ever zoned out in class, he could ask Shinsou about what he’d missed later. Always something nice to have.

The UA campus was a bit of a maze, but they’d eventually gotten to the right classroom. Izuku had ambled in, Shinsou slouched behind him.

The first thing he saw was Bakugou.

Oh.

Well.

He was here then. Same class and everything. That could only lead to trouble.

When Izuku first entered, Bakugou was arguing with another student about something or other. But the instant he saw Izuku he went silent. He was sizing Izuku up. And could see the rage in his eyes.  But Izuku knew that Bakugou would be cold and meticulous. There might be teachers around, so Bakugou wouldn't act until he knew what he could get away with.

Izuku decided that it was a problem for another time and went to sit at his desk. Shinsou slid to his own seat behind him, as silent and discrete as a shadow. He could be as sneaky as anyone Izuku had ever met,  when he felt the inclination to do so. Which was cool but also probably a symptom of anxiety.

Izuku was just taking his seat when the girl from the exams came in. Izuku felt bad but couldn't remember her name. But if he asked, Shinsou would make fun of him. So he just greeted her and listened to her talk about the exam again. 

They’d called each other after Izuku had gotten his letter, and he’d learned that she only just passed the exam. She had a very extroverted and cheery personality, so Izuku was glad to talk to her. But his attention was diverted by Bakugou, who was still watching the two of them with a look that made Izuku wary. 

Izuku was still glancing over at Bakugou, which is why he noticed the instant someone walked through the door.

It was All Might.

Of course it was.

“Hello students!” All Might cheered. “Congratulations on passing your exams! I am very proud of you all for your hard work and dedication!”

He was talking to the whole class but was looking at Izuku.

Izuku stared back at him blankly. He’d known that All Might would be teaching at UA but had hoped he could avoid him.

Looks like that wasn’t an option.

Izuku pulled out his phone and pulled up some news articles. He’d read them already, but there were always things that you could learn from hero fights.

He was just getting into an article about a recent fight with Mount Lady when All Might finally left. He packed his phone away.

When he looked up he was startled to notice that there was another teacher at the front of the class. Izuku hadn’t noticed him come in. 

And he was staring at Izuku. Izuku thought that expression on his face was curiosity. Izuku stared back blankly, he was used to being stared at the instant he met someone at this point. The teacher tilted his head, eyes narrowing.

“Change into your gym clothes and head out to the grounds.” He said, tone bored but eyes focused. He bared his teeth. “We’ll be doing evaluations today.”

Chapter Text

The teacher didn’t say anything to Izuku specifically, just sent them out to change into their gym clothes.

As they walked to the locker room, Izuku could tell when the students around him noticed him and were caught in his quirk’s effects. It wasn’t subtle, not really. They’d just look over at him, fully register his presence, then be convinced that he was quirkless. There was an odd jerkiness to them and of course there was the staring. Over the past few months, Izuku had gotten used to it enough that it was easy to tune it out.

One of the boys, a friendly sort with bright red hair, reacted by trying to talk to him. Izuku took one look at his overly interested expression and set his gaze on the horizon. His classmate continued to talk to him, and Izuku allowed himself to make vague noises of agreement whenever there was a break in his classmate’s chatter.

This continued into the locker room, by which time every single one of the boys was sending him the occasional glance. Izuku steadily ignored it and changed into his gym clothes.

- - -

“Right,” their teacher said. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere but there. “The one with the lowest score across all eight events will be judged hopeless and immediately expelled.”

Izuku blinked. That seemed a little extreme. He ran his eyes over his new classmates. Many of them had obvious physical quirks which would help them in these trials. But, it was more than likely that not everyone had a quirk suited for this kind of thing. It seemed unnecessarily cruel to expel someone from the school for failing a test as arbitrary as this.

Izuku shook his head, it didn’t matter anyway. It wasn’t his problem.

Then Izuku saw the look on Shinsou’s face.

Ah. Izuku’d forgotten. There was another person he had to be mindful of now. His teacher and classmates could do as they liked, but he couldn’t leave Shinsou high and dry. His mom would be sad if Shinsou was expelled on the first day.

Izuku sighed when he realized what he had to do. As a rule, he stayed out of the way of authority figures. It was a mutual thing. In elementary and middle school, they had been deeply uncomfortable with his presence and preferred to ignore it. He left it like that, since it gave him more freedom to do as he liked.

Izuku would prefer to be ignored, but he was alright with being a lightning rod if it protected someone his mom liked.

Izuku took a deliberate step forward. As one of the tallest students in the class, it was easy enough to get everyone’s attention. 

The teacher—what was his name again?—looked at Izuku with bloodshot eyes.

“Teacher-sama,” Izuku called. There was a shifting among his classmates, yep, that was his quirk anchoring onto the rest of them. 

“Midoriya,” the teacher drawled. His head didn’t move but his eyes deliberately rolled in their sockets to fix themselves on Izuku.

“That seems unfair.” Izuku started. It’d been a while since he’d pulled out all the stops with a hero analysis. Maybe he was rusty, but he still had it. “There are a number of different types of heroes who are not really suited for the kind of strength being measured in this exercise. It seems unwise to dismiss them due to failing this kind of test. If all the heroes which don’t fit into this specific mold are expelled or marginalized, then the heroes of the future would be left with a significant hole in their general make-up. What I mean is that there are heroes who are not optimized for fighting, say they specialized in something else, such as recovery, healing, or mental effects. These types would be disproportionately taken out from the pool of prospective heroes. Which wou—”

“Stop,” his teacher snapped.

Izuku did so.

The teacher stalked over to Izuku. His footsteps were utterly silent but everyone was watching them. Izuku was reminded of how prey animals go silent and still when a predator approaches. Izuku tilted his head, allowing himself a vacant smile.

“Okay then,” the teacher said, his voice very quiet. Izuku was only slightly shorter than him, but he felt uncomfortably small with his teacher’s glinting eyes fixed on him. “New deal, if anyone else gets last, they’ll be expelled. But you, if you don’t impress me, then you’ll be expelled.”

There was a collective drawn breath among his classmates.

Izuku thought about that for a moment. It wasn’t very fair obviously, but also…Izuku just tilted his head and said, “that sounds reasonable.” 

The hero’s blank face grew guarded. Izuku’d had a number of self-important teachers over the years. This guy—pro hero though he might be—wasn’t even the most ridiculous of them. The trick to it was to make sure they knew Izuku wouldn’t play their games, then leave them to ignore you for the rest of  the year. Seems that high school wasn’t that different after all. Izuku stepped back with a nod, already disengaging from the conversation.

After an awkward pause, the teacher continued talking. Students were moving and quiet conversations were starting.

Izuku stood there in thought for a few moments. This was a test. Izuku looked up at the teacher, who was gamely ignoring Izuku in favor of setting up the testing equipment. 

Everyone else couldn’t get last place but Izuku just had to impress the teacher. Well, there was one, rather clear, loophole there. As the tests started, Izuku just crouched and drew designs in the dirt with a twig. Was this a gamble? It seemed like the most straightforward way to deal with it. Was it what the teacher had meant? 

Their teacher didn’t have any visible quirk, which could mean he didn’t have one with a strong offensive capability. That could mean something or Izuku could just be grasping at strings.

Izuku flinched at a touch on his shoulder. He looked up and realized that Shinsou was there. He looked pained, which Izuku figured was because everyone in the class was staring at him. For someone with bright purple hair, he wasn’t terribly comfortable having people’s attention on him.

“50-meter dash,” Shinsou said, burying his hands in his pockets and looking away.

“Oh, thanks,” Izuku said absently, squinting at the dirt. Okay, 50-meter dash, decision time. Did he want to do well and risk Shinsou being expelled, or did he want to take the risk? He looked up at Shinsou, who wasn’t looking at Izuku at all. Well, if Izuku got expelled for trying this, he’d probably have been expelled sooner or later anyway. He ambled over to the starting line.

Bakugou was beside him, giving him a look that meant he’d be attacking Izuku the instant there were no witnesses. Izuku should keep an eye on that but for now he just ignored it and looked at the teacher. He was staring into the distance, expression bored.

Izuku let himself lower into a relaxed crouch, he could feel One for All, pulling at the edge of his consciousness, it felt like a coiled spring, ready to go off at any second. But right now wasn’t the time for it.

The starting gun went off.

Bakugou went flying forward with the help of his explosions, screaming all the way.

Izuku walked forward. It took the class a few seconds to pay him any attention. But when they did, the silence was absolute. Izuku could feel all of their eyes on him but focused only on the finish line.

“28.4 seconds,” the teacher said, not giving any hint of a reaction.

Izuku met his gaze and pasted on that polite smile he’d created for strangers who insisted on giving him unprompted pep-talks.

Izuku hummed and wandered off.

The rest of the tests went similarly, Izuku walked through the endurance running, barely tried for the upper-body training, and basically stayed upright for the toe-touch.

The teacher was no more forthcoming with his reactions as time went on. Izuku hadn’t had a teacher with a better poker face than himself for years, which was making this more risky than it might otherwise have been. Izuku considered the fact that he might have made a terrible mistake here, but then decided that it was too late to stop now, that would be even more pathetic than just getting poor scores on half the events.

The player that Izuku did not—but probably should have—considered came into play right after Izuku threw the softball five meters.

“Deku, you bastard!” Bakugou shouted, suddenly marching up to Izuku, who turned idly toward him. Oh, he’d made him really mad. Shouldn’t he be happy that Izuku was performing badly? “What the hell are you playing at!?”

Izuku shrugged and gestured at the softball.

Bakugou made a wordless sound of frustration and lunged toward Izuku, explosions sparking. Izuku, through years of training, reacted instantly and felt All Might’s quirk light up across his entire body. He darted forward, grabbing Bakugou by both the arm and the back of his shirt, then dragged him off his feet and further forward. Izuku continued the turn for another three rotations, moving his feet like he would while throwing a discus to build momentum, before finally releasing Bakugou and sending him flying out into the field.

He hung there for an unnatural amount of time, before he righted himself with his explosions enough that his crash back into the earth was just awkward rather than dangerous.

“67.2 meters,” the teacher said.

Izuku turned to look at him but the expression on the man’s face remained exactly the same. No reaction to Bakugou’s attack or what Izuku had done.

Okay then.

Izuku glanced at his classmates, blinking vaguely. They stared back with various expressions on the theme of incredulity. Izuku could practically see the cogs in their brain trying to work out the cognitive dissonance. And there was Bakugou, who even from this distance was visibly shaking with rage.

After all the activities were done, the teacher stood in front of the students and stared directly at Izuku, who blinked lazily back at him. Izuku stared at the buildings in the distance. Some of them seemed, almost…run down? abandoned? That was strange, UA was an extremely prestigious school. Why would they have buildings that were—

“Midoriya.”

His name brought him back to reality, and he saw that everyone was looking at him. That was honestly getting old. He couldn’t be that interesting. He was just standing there.

“I was lying, earlier,” his teacher said, face splitting into a disturbing grin. ”I was never going to expel someone merely for lacking a quirk suited for physical combat,” his tone wasn’t angry, instead it was an odd kind of amused.

Izuku abruptly felt rather ridiculous.

Which was absurd, because he’d never felt like that before. In his defense, he’d never before had a teacher just…admit that they’d done something unreasonable before. He had no idea what he was supposed to do in this situation. Which meant, of course, that he just kind of stood there and stared, before giving his teacher an assenting nod.

He should probably figure out the guy’s name.

“Anyway.” The teacher tilted his head at Izuku, something piercing in his expression. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“Er,” Izuku said. What had he been thinking? “Am I expelled?”

There was, just for a second, a break in his teacher’s expression. Something calculating and amused at the same time.

“That was profoundly stupid. You’re lucky I’m in a generous mood, so you’re not expelled,” his teacher said, turning abruptly and walking away, “Anyway, we’re done here. The syllabuses and such are in the classroom. Be prepared for worse tomorrow.”

And with that he disappeared around the corner.

…huh.

The scoreboard appeared in front of them.

Izuku had gotten last place. Which made sense, since that was what he’d aimed for. 

He took a cursory look through the scores, and realized that Shinsou had gotten second to last. Ah. Well, even if it had been some kind of trick, it was probably good that Izuku had intervened anyway. Izuku glanced around.

He found Shinsou laying on the dirt and breathing heavily. He was staring at the scoreboard with an expression like he’d been punched in the gut. Izuku caught his gaze for a second, but Shinsou just looked away. Izuku frowned.

The rest of the class were still there, comparing individual scores and talking excitedly. Izuku had no reason to stick around. It wasn’t like this test was meaningful. He was aware more than ever that a relevant quirk made all the difference in this kind of thing. In a physical test All Might’s quirk would always win. It wasn’t a question of heroic skill, it was just the brutal calculus of a world where people were either born weak or strong. If Izuku had done his best here, it would just have proven that he had a quirk suited for this kind of test, it didn’t mean he was a good hero, just strong.

Anyway, Izuku wasn’t there to compare himself to a bunch of high schoolers. Their comparative strength didn’t matter. What mattered was if Izuku was stronger than the villains he would fight in the future, they were the ones he’d have to beat, not a bunch of first year high school students.

There was something though. Izuku looked back to see that Bakugou was glaring daggers at him. When Izuku caught his gaze, his teeth flashed. Ah, that was a real problem. 

Not currently though.

Bakugou wouldn’t try anything else, not when there might be a teacher around to see it. He was an ass, just not a stupid one. Still, as he walked back to the main building, Izuku angled his body so that if Bakugou did attempt an attack, Izuku would be able to see it.

Chapter Text

Izuku was the first back to the classroom and spent the time flipping through the course curriculum. It wasn’t actually that different from a traditional high school…except only in the mornings. Afternoons were all for hero training. That was interesting.

That was promising too, it meant that the boring things only happened in the morning. After that, Izuku packed up his backpack and headed out.

The feeling of eyes on him told Izuku that he’d be having a conversation with Bakugou as soon as he was outside. The guy didn’t learn.

As he exited the building, he texted Shinsou that he had stuff to do before he went home and so would meet him at the house. 

He frowned at his phone, considering the text. Was that presumptuous? Shinsou had stayed at their house…for weeks? Now that Izuku thought about it, he couldn’t actually think of the last time Shinsou had slept somewhere other than their guest room. That was weird, really weird actually, now that he thought about it. Didn’t Shinsou have foster parents or something?

It seemed kind of irresponsible for them to—

The sound of explosions tipped Izuku off the instant before Bakugou would have gotten him. It was quick, but Izuku had been expecting it. Hence why he’d wandered into an abandoned courtyard in the first place. 

Years of experience made him drop and duck to the side. Bakugou always started with a right hook.

He launched himself up at Bakugou before fully comprehending the situation. He managed to snag the back of Bakugou’s jacket as he went and flung him away in a violent twisting motion. Bakugou righted himself with a series of explosions and landed in a half-feral crouch.

“What the fuck was today?” he hissed.

Izuku glanced at his hand, then realized that his phone was no longer there. He looked around for a second, before seeing that it’d been thrown to the other side of the courtyard and was…definitely shattered. Damn. Again?

Izuku sighed, half-heartedly slipping out of his backpack for maneuverability. He tossed it under a bench in the hope that it would be protected enough for the next few minutes. He deliberately slipped out of his jacket and tie, throwing them on the bench, before turning back to Bakugou.

“First day of school,” Izuku answered.

“You little—” Bakugou cut off his own insult by launching himself toward Izuku, who tried to dodge to the right. Unfortunately, Bakugou knew Izuku’s fighting style as well as Izuku knew Bakugou’s, so he had an explosion ready in the exact place Izuku dodged to. He got his hands up in front of his face in time but was still sent hurtling backward. He managed to transform his momentum into a tumbling roll before springing into a crouch.

Bakugou was across from him, waiting for him to recover in a surprising display of civility.

“What do you want now?” Izuku asked. “We’re both officially going to UA, it’s not like a couple explosions are going to make me quit.”

“Fuck off,” Bakugou said, hands sparking in time with his words. “That’s not—” He, to Izuku’s complete shock, forced his hands down to his sides. “What were you doing today? Why pretend to be weak?”

“I wasn’t pretending,” Izuku said, head tilted. “I was just being strategic. It worked, didn’t it?”

“You know what I mean!” Bakugou snapped. “You could have gotten one of the best scores in the class, those idiots are barely competent! I don’t know what happened with you, but don’t think that just because you've gotten stronger you can toy with the rest of us.”

“Wow, that’s rich,”  Izuku said, feeling One for All crackle in response. He forced it down. This was his fight. He’d beaten Bakugou plenty of times without it. “Now try applying even a shred of self-reflection onto what you just said.”

“I don’t toy with people!” Bakugou stomped toward Izuku, hands sparking but not raised. “I’m good, so I let people know. But at least I’m honest about what I can do and don’t pretend to be weak out of some kind of—”

Bakugou had never quite managed Izuku’s level of prediction in fights, so he was taken entirely flat-footed when Izuku’s fist made contact with his jaw.

Izuku continued the motion to the ground and brought Bakugou with him, keeping a hold of his shirt collar even as Bakugou sent a painful kick directly into his stomach. When in very close quarters, Bakugou couldn’t use his explosions, since he wasn’t entirely immune to his own fire. It was a weakness that Izuku had taken advantage of countless times.

The fight that followed wasn’t pretty. Or even particularly skillful. When pressed, they both fought like wild animals. 

But, more than that, something about this was bothering Izuku. It was in a moment when they’d separated, both carefully watching each other for the expected attack, when Izuku realized what it was. 

They were fighting as equals. It wasn’t like Bakugou had tracked Izuku down and surprised him. Izuku could have avoided this. He’d intentionally gone somewhere isolated and in doing so had tacitly agreed to fighting Bakugou.

The thought was enough that he didn’t react nearly fast enough when Bakugou flung himself at Izuku again. He was sent sprawling backward in a series of uncontrolled tumbles. Then suddenly Bakugou was on top of him, trapping Izuku’s arm with a shoulder and holding his sparking hand directly in front of Izuku’s face. His teeth were bared and his expression filled with nothing but extreme hatred.

Why the hell had Izuku come here?

“What? Nothing to say, you useless fucking Deku?” Bakugou taunted, bringing his sparking fingers close enough that Izuku could feel their heat on his face.

That was Izuku’s queue to say, ‘that’s an oxymoron and so are you’ or something equally defiant but pointless. Instead Izuku just stared back.

Bakugou grew more and more disconcerted as Izuku said nothing and made no effort to throw him off. Eventually he just shoved Izuku’s head back into the hard-packed earth and took a few quick steps back, still wary of Izuku’s retaliation.

Was that what this was? Just a series of endless retaliations?

“Why are we still doing this?” Izuku asked, pulling himself up to a crouch and absently pressing a hand to one of the fresh scorch marks littering the ground.

“What?” Bakugou said, taking another step back. He was holding his right wrist and grimacing. Maybe Izuku had overdone it with that Nikyo lock.

“Fighting,” Izuku clarified. “It always ends in one of us winning, then we just do it again within a week or two. What’s the point?”

Bakugou had barely reacted to Izuku’s punches, but reeled back from that. His mouth was moving, but didn’t form words.

Izuku gave him a few minutes, but there was nothing forthcoming. 

“Right,” Izuku sighed, standing up. He slung his backpack over his shoulder and picked up the shattered remnants of his phone. He glanced at Bakugou, who hadn’t moved. “I’m going to try convincing the school nurse to heal this.” He gestured to the brand new burn that stretched along his calf. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He trudged away.

This time, Bakugou let him leave.

- - -

“I’m home!” Izuku called as he walked through the door.

“Izuku!” Mom called back. As soon as she saw Izuku she let out a little alarmed sound. “What happened?”

This was rather inevitable. In elementary and middle school, Izuku had generally tried to clean up his uniform or change before mom saw all the burns and tears. Or at least come up with an anecdote explaining what funny incident had happened this time. But he hadn’t expected Bakugou to attack him on the first day—though he probably should have—so hadn’t had a chance to stash a spare uniform somewhere.

For a second, Izuku had the impulse to tell the truth. ‘Kacchan from kindergarten attacked me but also maybe I instigated it and kind of have been doing so for years now?’

But that didn’t come out, instead he shrugged awkwardly.

“Plus Ultra?” he offered, scratching at the back of his neck. “Things got a little out of hand.”

“Oh no!” she tutted. She pulled his pant leg this way and that, there was basically nothing left of it below the knee. “It’s healed?”

“Yeah,” Izuku said, trying to be cheerful. “They’ve got a support hero who can heal things instantly, it’s pretty great.”

“But still, your pants,” Mom said with a sigh. Then she seemed to realize what he’d said and her gaze sharpened. “Young man, promise me that you won’t let yourself get hurt just because there’s someone there to heal you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Izuku said.

“Good,” Mom answered. 

“Um,” Izuku said awkwardly, holding up something that had once been a cell phone. “But I did break this again.”

“Oh Izuku,” Mom said, shaking her head. “We’ve got to get you a—”

Izuku didn’t hear the rest of it, because Shinsou was standing in the doorway. Eyes flicking nervously at the various tears and burns across Izuku’s uniform. For a second, Izuku was sure Shinsou was going to get Izuku caught in yet another lie. But instead, he just got a little paler and ducked back into the living room.

Izuku frowned.

Was everyone acting odd today?

Well. He looked down at Mom—who was fussing with his uniform and making noises about contacting his teacher—not everyone.

- - -

“Why’d you do that?” Shinsou asked later that night.

“What?” Izuku asked, looking up from his laptop. He’d been trying to calculate how many hours of homework he’d have per day based on the syllabuses they’d been given. The results were not promising.

He blinked when he realized that it was much darker than when he’d last paid attention. Since he’d last looked up, Mom had disappeared from where she’d been doing paperwork at the dining table. Shinsou was perched awkwardly on the armchair, not quite looking at Izuku.

“Why’d you—” Shinsou stopped himself and scowled into the carpet. “Don’t get yourself into trouble for me, I can take care of myself.”

Izuku blinked at him. What was…? Oh yeah, Izuku had decided to do his stunt with the PE activities because he’d thought Shinsou would get last place.

“Don’t give me that look!” Shinsou said. “You know what I’m talking about. I don’t need a babysitter.”

“Oh, well,” Izuku stared into the distance and tried to think of a good way to say ‘it’s not so much that I want to babysit you as I don’t want Mom to be sad because you were expelled.’

“Just don’t do it again, okay?” Shinsou said.

“I mean, I thought you’d be expelled,” Izuku said. “I figured it was worth it.”

“You didn’t know that!” Shinsou snapped. “Aizawa-sensei could have just expelled you.” —Oh, that was his name.— “Or just decided to expel me anyway. And you didn’t even know that I would have gotten last place, you just assumed.”

“Well I was right, so,” Izuku said, looking back down at his laptop.

“You’re so… It was so much easier to deal with you when we just went to the gym together,” Shinsou muttered.

“Then why are you here?” Izuku asked. “Just leave. Nothing’s stopping you.”

The silence that followed was a little too loaded.

Izuku finally looked up and saw that Shinsou’s face was blank. Not a normal apathetic kind of blank, but the kind that someone put up when they couldn’t allow anyone to know that they were feeling anything. That could be bad. Shinsou wasn’t the type to stop himself from voicing his grievances. If he wasn’t willing to tell Izuku something, it was probably serious.

“What?” Izuku asked.

“Oh, fuck off,” Shinsou muttered, then stalked out of the room.

What?

- - -

Izuku woke up at 4:49 in the morning. 

He spent a good twenty minutes laying there, repeatedly opening his eyes to see that yes, only a minute had passed. He still felt exhausted. He knew that more than likely, getting up now was going to keep him exhausted for the rest of the day.

He closed his eyes and shoved a pillow over his eyes.

What was Shinsou so upset about?

Okay, no. Izuku refused to lie here and try to parse the motivations of other people. If they wanted to tell him, they could. Izuku threw the blankets off him and got up with a yawn.

He stumbled into the bathroom, his hair was doing that annoying thing again, where it was completely flat on the side that he’d slept on. He wasted a minute trying and utterly failing to fix anything. He gave up and went to the kitchen, where he grabbed a banana and a few spoonfuls of peanut butter. Then he went back to his room and pulled on his workout clothes. Finally, he spent a few minutes searching before he remembered he’d broken his phone yesterday. Ugh. Should he grab his uniform? No, he should have time to come back here before classes started.

He stepped out the front door of the apartment and stopped.

The sunrise was fantastic. A pale pink sky, edged with orange and deep red, dotted with pale, wispy clouds lit up with gold on the bottom edges.

He sighed and spent a minute there, leaning on the railing outside of their front door.

“Izuku?” 

He started, turning to see his mom standing in the doorway to the apartment.

She was wearing her pale blue scrubs and holding a huge thermos he knew contained a day’s worth of hot coffee, though she’d finish it within two hours.

“Mom,” he said sedately. “Mornin’.”

“Good morning,” she said, gaze caught on the sky behind him. She stepped up beside him, setting a hand on Izuku’s arm as she leaned in next to him. “Oh that’s lovely.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.

They stood there for another few minutes.

“Okay, I’ll be late if I wait any longer,” Mom said, giving Izuku a brief hug.

“All right. Here, I’ll walk you down.”

The elevator ride to the bottom floor was quiet. But once they stepped out Mom turned toward him with a frown.

“What happened yesterday?” she asked.

Izuku tilted his head. 

“First day of school?” he tried for the second time.

“Don’t—” She sighed and turned her head. “I thought you were going to start telling me things.”

“Did Shinsou say something?” Izuku asked, then cringed at himself.

“No. Izuku, I am your mother,” she said, rubbing a hand at the bags under her eyes. “I can tell.”

“Sorry,” Izuku said.

“Don’t apologize if you’re just going to—” She stopped and took a breath. “I’ve got a double shift so I won’t see you until tomorrow. I love you. Have a good day at school for me, all right?”

“Okay, you too,” he said, then stood there as she walked to the bus station.

He mentally cursed at himself for a while. But once Mom was out of sight he turned and started running toward The Beach.

Chapter Text

Izuku hadn’t meant to increase his pace. His plan had been to casually jog to the beach, take a few minutes to straighten up his head, then run back home.

Instead, somewhere along the run to the beach, Izuku had sped up to almost his maximum speed without One for All. It wasn’t something he could keep up for long, but he tried his best anyway.

By the time he got to the waterline, he was gasping for air and uncomfortably sweaty. He stopped at the edge of the sand and spent a few minutes with his hands on his knees, wheezing and thinking about how utterly ridiculous he was being.

He finally got some of his breath back and began pacing in front of the ocean waves.

Okay, so. 

Shinsou was upset for reasons that Izuku probably should know but wasn’t quite putting together. He’d been annoyed at Izuku interfering during the trial, but it hadn’t been as bad. He’d actually become hurt when Izuku told him he could just leave. 

But that shouldn’t be that upsetting. It was true, wasn’t it? Shinsou could do what he wanted. If he didn’t like interacting with Izuku, he wasn’t required to stick around.

…Maybe Izuku was being an ass.

He crouched on the sand, grabbing the wet clumpy sand and letting it fall apart in his hands.

Next, Mom was upset because Izuku didn’t want to tell her about the fight with Bakugou. Why did Izuku not want to talk about that? 

Well, telling her about this would probably lead to Izuku having to tell her about the real reason he’d come home from school covered in scrapes and bruises for years. It wasn’t even that he was worried she’d be mad or anything, he just didn’t want to talk about it. But Mom was interpreting it as something important that Izuku was hiding. Was it important? Izuku had never felt like it was. He’d always interpreted his fights with Bakugou as being between only them, so it just wasn’t anyone else’s business. Though if Shinsou ever came home from school that beat up, Izuku would probably feel like it was important.

Izuku smoothed down the crags of sand he’d created.

And then there was Bakugou, who was upset because Izuku was...not doing well in school? That one was the least upsetting of the whole tangle. In their fight at the end of middle school, Bakugou had been mad that Izuku had gotten into UA. But now his problem was that Izuku wasn’t doing well enough.

And beyond it all…

Izuku being ‘quirkless’ was viewed as a signifier of his being a failure. He’s taken One for All to deal with this, but in doing so has ‘ended’ a presumably long line of heroes who were all trying to make the world a better place. But even ignoring that, the strength limiter that his innate quirk put on One for All did legitimately make the quirk into a pale shadow of what it should be. But even with that limiting his strength, people found him using this power unsettling, unnatural. Him being both quirkless and this strong was impossible. Then again, if Izuku didn’t use his power, that was him taunting people by pretending to be weak. 

Izuku stood up, flicking the sand off his hands.

This was a mess.

This was a mess that Izuku was trapped in the middle of with no clear view of how to escape.

He started pacing again.

There had to be something, Izuku refused to just live his life stuck in this position. But as soon as he let himself think for a minute, he was reminded of Shinsou stalking out of the room last night. Izuku’d been sort of mean—or flippant? Something like that. But Shinsou wasn’t particularly sensitive, so Izuku must have hit on something already bothering Shinsou.

Izuku was so over this, he thought longingly of the days when the only person he talked to was his mom, and most of their conversations were about his workout routine or calorie requirements. He wanted that back.

Fortunately, that was when he passed the pile of remaining litter on the beach. After Izuku had cleared most of the beach, they left some for training with this quirk. But then after things had…devolved, Izuku’d never actually dealt with it all.

Well, this was at least one mess Izuku could clean up.

He picked up a minifridge and a broken walking chair. For a second, he considered using One for All, then decided not to. The whole point of the beach had been strength training. If he used All Might’s quirk it would be too easy. He lugged the trash to the normal pick up point, then returned to the remaining pile.

He spent the next while getting into the groove of moving the trash. It was meditative, almost. He’d done this for hours a day for months, and it wasn’t hard to return to that state. Just movement, just walking, just one step after another.

When perhaps half of the trash had been moved, Izuku felt a sharp pain in his foot, enough that he stumbled, almost dropping the awkwardly large round table he’d been dragging behind him.

“Fu—dge,” Izuku bit out. He stepped carefully forward and let himself drop into the sand. He carefully sat and bent his knee to see the bottom of his foot, only to see the head of a large nail sticking out from the sole of his shoe. “Fuck,” he said, more definitively.

That looked big.

His hand hovered above it. Take it out? Leave it in? He’d had his tetanus shot, of course. He’d been constantly dragging around rusty metal for months. And generally had been wearing hard soled boots to avoid something exactly like this from happening. But today Izuku had just started cleaning up with his normal running shoes—like an idiot.

Izuku groaned and covered his face with his hands. Did he need to go to the ER? This seemed like a situation where he should call his mom. But, one, he didn’t really want to talk to her at this moment; and two, he didn’t even have a phone right now.

Okay, that was bad. But, counterpoint; it was just a nail. These sorts of injuries happen all the time. It just took some medical attention and it’d be fine. Except Izuku really didn’t want to miss the start of the second day of school, even if he did have a legitimate reason. He was already on shaky enough ground with his homeroom teacher without skipping school. Could he just wrap it up? That’d be fine, right? Izuku knew some first aid, he could clean it well enough.

…On second thought that was a terrible idea.

Did the universe just hate Izuku? Of all the times for this to happen, right now had to be among the worst. He’d have loved a legitimate excuse to skip school just a few months ago.

Izuku needed to focus, he was being ridiculous. He had a problem, right in front of him. He needed to put together a list of his available assets and create a viable plan to solve said problem.

Instead, Izuku sat there, curled over his foot. He could feel his eyes prickling. No, Izuku would not cry because he had a nail stuck in his foot. The pain wasn’t a problem. Izuku’d had to deal with countless injuries, burns, and scrapes over the years. It wasn’t the pain. It was just that Izuku didn’t feel like he could deal with this today.

“Young Midoriya?”

Izuku froze. No. Absolutely not. Nope.

“Are you alright?” 

Izuku looked up, knowing exactly how ridiculous he must appear. Sitting on the ground in a pile of trash, holding his foot like a kindergartener who’s stubbed their toe.

“All Might, did you know that you have absolutely terrible timing?” Izuku asked, his voice was hoarse. It was probably just because he hadn’t talked yet today.

“Oh, dear,” All Might said, standing there in his skinny form, clothes hanging off him like sails. His eyebrows were drawn and he was looking over Izuku with a kind of close scrutiny that was absolutely not welcome at this moment. “Are you injured?”

“I don’t want to talk to you right now,” Izuku said, then winced. That was more curt than even Izuku thought was appropriate.

“My boy,” All Might sighed, crouching to be level with Izuku, his shirt dragging in the sand. “If you are absolutely sure that you don’t want my help, I will leave. Otherwise…”

Izuku couldn’t meet All Might’s eyes. Well this was already a disaster, why not make it a little worse while he was at it? He straightened out his leg in front of him, All Might took hold of his shoe, making soft tutting sounds and he examined the nail. Doing so jarred his foot and Izuku let out a heavy wheeze of air.

Izuku closed his eyes and tried to pry up some forgotten stash of composure.

“My apologies,” All Might said, setting down Izuku’s foot. “Midoriya?”

“Just give me a second?” Izuku asked.

Izuku felt All Might’s hand on his shoulder and tensed—but nothing happened. Izuku slowly let himself breathe out, releasing the tension in his muscles as he did.

“This is shaping up to be a pretty terrible day,” Izuku admitted, opening his eyes.

“Ah,” All Might said, apparently unprepared for that kind of honesty. “I’ve got a first aid kit in the car, come with me?” he asked, standing and holding out a hand to Izuku.

For a second, Izuku was tempted not to take it. He could figure this out. There were other runners out on the beach, he could borrow someone’s phone or something. 

Izuku reached out and took All Might’s hand. For being the approximate width of a fire poker, All Might’s smaller form had a whole lot of strength locked away somewhere. He pulled Izuku’s right arm over his shoulder and led him back to the road.

Izuku felt his connection to himself loosen a bit. All Might might have been talking, but it might have been ocean waves. All he really felt was the rising sun slowly bringing warmth back into his arms and neck.

He came back to something gripping his shoulder.

“Midoriya?” All Might asked. They were sitting, side by side, on the open tailgate of All Might’s dumb, American truck. Izuku’s eyes were on the horizon. He looked down to see that his shoe and sock had been removed and his foot bandaged. Presumably the nail had also been removed at some point.

“Are you alright?” All Might asked, it was always a little strange sitting close to him, with those black scleras and blue irises so bright they almost gleamed. All Might’s expressions were very intense, and right now they radiated a level of concern that forced Izuku to physically turn his body away for the sake of his own sanity. 

“I’m fine,” Izuku said, twisting his foot around. Some pain. Not really better or worse than before. “It’s just inconvenient, especially now.”

“Not your foot, young Midoriya,” All Might corrected lightly. “You.”

Izuku shrugged, feeling his shoulders harden again as he did.

“Okay, come on,” All Might said, easing himself off the tailgate and holding out a hand to Izuku. “I’m sure I can convince Recovery Girl to fix you right up.”

Izuku let All Might guide him to the passenger side. All Might got into the car and started driving them in the direction of UA. Izuku let himself sink into the seat. The time on the dash said 7:19. Izuku had class in less than an hour. He closed his eyes so he’d stop thinking about it.

“You’re at UA now, isn’t that something to celebrate?” All Might asked.

Izuku sighed. He was being an ass again. All Might was going out of his way to help, and he couldn’t even fake being thankful, or even polite. But despite him knowing he was being childish, Izuku couldn’t bring himself to talk, so they spent the rest of the car ride in silence.

Finally, All Might drove through a UA vehicle gate that Izuku hadn’t seen before and into an underground parking lot. Seriously? Did UA have infinite resources? Whatever. Izuku pulled himself back upright.

“Midoriya, I know that something’s wrong,” All Might sighed.

“I’ve got a hole in my foot,” Izuku explained, holding the door handle.

“I can quite clearly remember the day you ran six miles on a twisted ankle without telling me. I seriously doubt that a single nail could keep you down on its own.”

Izuku sighed, his hand leaving the door and lightly drumming a pattern on his seat belt buckle.

“It’s complicated,” Izuku said.

“Most things are,” All Might answered.

“It’s easy to say that, but a whole lot harder to deal with,” Izuku replied.

“Plus ultra, my boy.”

Izuku took a second to think. It wasn’t that he wanted to talk about this, not right now, not here. But where else? It wasn’t like Izuku knew a lot of people.

“I’ve been causing problems,” Izuku admitted. “I haven’t meant to but I have been.”

“I don’t think anyone would think it was intentional.”

“Well, it’s still me doing it. I made Mom upset—and Shinsou. Bakugou too…I guess, but that one’s fine.”

All Might let out a snorting laugh and Izuku smiled despite himself. There was a brief silence, and Izuku realized too late that it was getting uncomfortably heavy. He hadn’t talked to All Might, not really, since that night at the restaurant. Izuku was feeling the weight of that now. There was still a gulf there. Still a minefield of guilt and unbreachable miscommunication.

“So, what will you do about it?” All Might asked.

It took Izuku a second to realize the question was a response to what Izuku had said and not what he’d just been thinking.

“I don’t know,” Izuku said, shrugging a single shoulder. “I’ve got to fix it somehow. But that ‘somehow’ is the part I’m having trouble with.”

“I myself have had a poor track record with such things,” All Might said. Izuku glanced at him, but All Might’s eyes were boring a hole into the odometer. “The only advice I could offer is this; tell them what you feel directly, and in return, try to figure out what they feel. Beyond that, it is a case of finding your own path.”

Izuku sighed.

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. He’d been hoping for something a little more specific or novel, but this was All Might, he was about as straightforward as they come.

“We should get you to Recovery Girl,” All Might said. “Though I did want to ask you something.”

“Shoot,” Izuku said.

“Is Shinsou’s placement in your family not working out?”

“Placement?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,” Izuku said.

“Your mother’s effort to foster Shinsou-kun?”

Oh.

Oh shit.

Izuku stared into the dash.

A number of things clicked into place. Shinsou being around all the time. Mom’s extra shifts. Her doing a lot of paperwork. Shinsou suddenly becoming more attentive to Izuku’s reactions to things.

Shinsou being upset that Izuku told him to leave .

Izuku let his forehead fall onto the dash with a thump.

“All Might,” Izuku said, “I messed up.”

“Oh dear,” he said, sounding legitimately alarmed. “You really didn’t know?”

“I—” Izuku tried searching through his memories, looking for something obvious that he should have picked up on. He could see it, plain as day after being told. But shouldn’t he have noticed before. Shouldn’t they have told him? Had they told him and he didn’t notice or had they assumed he wouldn’t care and just not told him? Which one of those was worse?

“I’m sure it’ll be alright,” All Might said.

“No,” Izuku muttered into the dash. “I’ve—I really messed up, I’m such a—”

— useless fucking Deku! —

“Midoriya!”

Izuku jerked upright. There was legitimate anger in All Might’s tone, which Izuku had only heard once before. All Might was glowering, his arms were crossed and there was a distinct air of disappointment suffusing the car.

“Um,” Izuku said, unconsciously leaning into the car door.

“Midoriya,” All Might said, straightening as much as he could in the cramped pickup. “You are a very competent, smart, and strong young man who cares deeply about others. You should never, never say or think anything contrary to this, because as a hero it is your duty to embody the truth in all aspects of life. Do you understand me?”

“Okay,” Izuku said, then half-raised his hand like they were in a classroom. “But I still objectively messed up here and—”

“And what?” All Might said, Izuku could see wisps of steam appearing around him, like he was preparing to transform into his larger version. “You’ve been given a difficult path. But despite this, you’ve walked it with a determination and grit that no one could help but admire. Furthermore, there is no one, apart from yourself, who expects you to walk this path without making mistakes.”

Izuku could think of absolutely nothing to say to that.

“You understand?” All Might prompted.

Izuku nodded mutely.

“Good,” All Might said, then his shoulders dropped and he opened his door, muttering to himself as he got out, unheeding of the alarming popping and cracking sounds from his bones as he did this. He disappeared for a second, and Izuku was left feeling something between bewildered and comforted.

All Might pep talks were scary .

- - - 

Recovery Girl was typing away at her computer when they walked through the door, Izuku’s arm once again slung over All Might’s shoulder.

“Young man,” she said warningly. “My quirk does not heal infinitely, too many times and you’ll be too exhausted for it to be effective.”

“Right, of course ma’am,” Izuku said, as All Might eased him onto one of the infirmary beds.

“Don’t blame the boy, he was performing a public service and was injured in the line of duty,” All Might said cheerfully. He punctuated that by patting Izuku on the head, which he only tolerated because All Might had essentially just carried him to a medical professional.

“I’m sure,” Recovery Girl said dubiously. She undid the bandage and took a look at the injury. Izuku stared determinedly at the ceiling as she poked and prodded at his foot. “Stepped on a nail, dear?”

“Yeah,” Izuku admitted. “I probably should have been paying more attention.

All Might snorted and Izuku gave him a look, which did nothing to stem the amusement on the pro hero’s face. Izuku gave it up as a lost cause.

Recovery Girl went through a long list of medical questions that Izuku answered with what he considered to be admirable patience. Eventually she was satisfied after giving him a tetanus booster and healing the hole in his foot. Thankfully, the injury was minor enough that Izuku still had the energy to be conscious by the end.

“Now, be careful, and wear shoes with hard soles the next time you’re ‘performing community service’,” she muttered. Then she produced a spare UA uniform from a rather impressive stash in a cabinet and sent him to the bathroom to change. As soon as he was done, she gave them both a gumball and shoved them out the door of her office.

It only took a few seconds for that weight to seep into the silence once again.

“I thought you should know that I’ve been using my connections to expedite the process of changing Shinsou’s guardianship,” All Might said in a rush, looking distinctly sheepish. He scratched the back of his neck. “I didn’t think it would…”

Izuku stared at him.

“That’s…fine,” Izuku said. In all honesty, it was. As far as these things went, helping a foster child transfer to a home they preferred was pretty hard to criticize. Izuku sighed. “Plus, thank you for telling me, I guess. I probably would have made it worse if not, so.”

All Might’s face was getting dark again.

“No, no,” Izuku said, waving his hand to dispel any additional pep talk that All Might could give. “I’m just trying to say thank you, that’s all.”

“You’re welcome, Midoriya,” All Might said, a blindingly genuine smile appearing on his face.

Something about it made Izuku abruptly feel guilty. He looked away. He deliberately tightened and loosened a fist.

“I’m…still pissed at you,” Izuku said into the linoleum. 

“I know,” All Might answered.

“But—” Izuku gestured vaguely. “It’s not—It’s not your fault? I don’t know. It just happened, right?”

“Thank you, Midoriya, but please, don’t trouble yourself on my account,” All Might said, patting Izuku on the shoulder.

“It’s so hard to be mad at you,” Izuku grumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose.

All Might let out a booming laugh and Izuku smiled behind his hand.

It was a nice moment that ended when Izuku saw a wall mounted clock.

“I am so late,” Izuku said.

“Late for—” All Might seemed to remember that they were at a school. He pulled out his phone and looked at the time. “Midoriya! Your class started thirty minutes ago!”

“Oops,” Izuku said, scratching his cheek.

“Young man, your education is important!” All Might reprimanded, but he was smiling. He glanced at a window then gave Izuku a speculative glance. “What would you say to a shortcut?”

“What shortcut?” Izuku asked.

“This one,” All Might said, walking to the window and opening it. If beeped in protest, but All Might ignored it. There was a flash of steam, and he was standing there in his full muscled All Might form. “Well?” he asked.

Izuku looked over the ledge, they were on the fourth floor. “Yes, but how do we—”

The rest was cut off, as All Might had grabbed Izuku and casually held him under one arm like a sack of flour. Then he jumped out the window. 

The wind pulled at Izuku’s hair and swept into his eyes. There was a brief feeling of complete weightlessness. All Might had jumped a few hundred feet into the air and Izuku could see the entirety of the UA grounds along with a huge swath of the surrounding city. 

Once the moment of shock had passed, Izuku let out an excited whoop and All Might responded with his own.

They seemed to stay there, weightless, for longer than should have been possible, but then they were hurtling down back to earth. Just when Izuku was starting to worry about how hard they would land, All Might did something complicated with his legs using One for All that dissipated most of their momentum only a few meters before impact.

Okay, fine. Izuku had to admit that was really cool.

“Now, young Midoriya, what classroom are you meant to be in?”

“428…maybe,” Izuku said, after consulting his rather blurry mental schedule. 

“Hold on,” All Might said, before jumping back toward the main UA building. He had pretty impressive aim and managed to grab a hold of a sturdy looking column in a clean motion. 

He and Izuku looked into the classroom together.

A number of unfamiliar faces stared back.

“It’s further to the left I think,” Izuku said, waving at the stunned students.

“Onward we go,” All Might said, before carefully jumping to the next classroom. 

It took them four tries but they eventually found a classroom filled with the right people.

Izuku’s classmates reacted with various expressions of surprise, but the teacher, a tall blond man with a faintly ridiculous jacket, was facing the wrong way.

Since All Might’s arms were busy gripping the column and holding Izuku, he had to reach up and knock on the window himself.

The teacher reacted with almost comical shock and took a while to actually come over to open the window.

“All Might!” he stammered. “Wha—”

“Present Mic! I’m afraid I had to borrow one of your students!” All Might cried, before somehow switching his grip to the back of Izuku’s jacket and throwing him through the window and into the classroom. 

Izuku rolled twice before he could regain his balance and rise smoothly to his feet. He gave All Might a look that did precisely nothing to stop the publicity-bright smile on his face.

“Um, you had to borrow him for—” Present Mic tried to ask.

“Please mark his tardiness as due to my interference!” All Might said blithely, then directed a decidedly unsubtle wink to Izuku.

“Oh,” the teacher said. “That’s not really how that—”

“Go on, students! Seek your education!” All Might shouted unconcernedly, waving at the rest of the class. “Plus Ultra!” he cried before launching himself out into empty air. Within a few seconds he’d disappeared.

Izuku was left standing in the front of the class, feeling a little windswept but otherwise rather satisfied with the situation.

“Hello, my name is Midoriya Izuku. It’s nice to meet you, teacher-sensei,” he said, bowing politely before strolling back to his assigned seat.

“Oh, um, nice to meet…you too,” Present Mic said. He blinked at Izuku in confusion for a few moments. “Aren’t you the student who went up against the zero pointer?”

Izuku stared back at him.

“But you’re…” He stopped talking when he realized there was nowhere good for that sentence to go and instead whirled back to the board. “Anyway! Who can find the mistake in the following English phrase?!”

Chapter Text

It was only the second day of school, so it wasn’t like Izuku was sick of his classes or anything, but about three minutes after he sat down he remembered that he didn’t have his school backpack and consequently lacked his textbooks and note taking supplies. He attempted to force himself to pay attention to the lectures, which lasted about two minutes. He considered asking Shinsou to borrow his books and just read through the lessons, but that seemed inappropriate given the circumstances. 

So for the next several hours Izuku had the wonderful opportunity to sit in his too-short desk and think about how bored he was, his uncomfortable borrowed uniform, how hungry he was, and the fact that the tenuous social connections he’d managed to make were fraying in ways he fundamentally didn’t understand. Eventually though, it just settled into a general boredom, Izuku wasn’t really suited for extended periods of worrying.

He didn’t actually fall asleep, but it was a remarkably close thing.

As soon as class was over, Izuku shot out of his desk and slipped through the door before anyone else was even fully out of their seat; something he’d gotten pretty skilled at over the years.

He thought he had a clear shot to the cafeteria, but then there was the distinct sound of a number of people scrambling their way out of the classroom door behind him. Izuku glanced back and found that he’d collected a rather intent entourage.

He tried walking faster, only for them to start basically running to catch up.

On a hunch, he took a turn into a deserted hallway. Sure enough, the group blindly followed him into it and practically tripped over themselves when faced with him standing there, arms crossed. There were seven total, and Izuku didn’t know a single one of their names, which actually was not at all a meaningful metric, but he was fairly certain he hadn’t talked to any of them.

“Yes,” he prompted, not bothering to catch any of their eyes. 

There was the compulsory shuffling and awkward movement.

“Why’d All Might bring you to class?” one of them—the pink one—asked.

“Why wouldn’t he bring me to class?” Izuku asked. “He’s a teacher, isn’t he?”

“Why’d he bring you through the window?” the one with red hair asked.

“It was a shortcut,” Izuku said, glancing past them. On second thought, maybe he should have just continued onto the cafeteria, in a crowded place he could have lost them without having to actually talk to them.

“But why were you with All Might in the first place and why were you late?” the pink one asked, apparently having elected herself leader of the group.

Izuku stared at them. He still felt pretty exhausted. The lack of sleep, insufficient calories, and visit to Recovery Girl were getting to him. 

Also there was a hole in the bottom of his sneaker, which was really bugging him now that he was walking around.

“I was doing community service,” Izuku said with a shrug.

The pink one stared at him.

“Community service…” she said, then blanched, looking up at Izuku more carefully. She stepped forward and—in a whisper—asked, “What did you do?” 

Izuku had no idea what she was talking about. And he was hungry.

“I stepped on a nail,” he explained.

Her face did something funny.

“Is that a metaphor?” she asked tentatively.

“Sure,” Izuku said, before walking directly in their group. They parted rather suddenly, giving Izuku plenty of time to get past them and turn toward the cafeteria.

He had a whole minute and a half of silence before someone else interrupted him.

“Hi, Deku!” And there was what’s-her-name from the entrance exam.

“Don’t call me that,” Izuku said, perhaps more harshly than was warranted.

“Oh!” She went silent for a moment. “Sorry, I thought it was your nickname. I mean—that Bakugou guy called you that? It sounds, kinda like, ‘you can do it!’ you know? Sorry…” she trailed off awkwardly.

Izuku stopped for a second, looking down at her idly. She sort of smiled but fidgeted away after a moment.

“No, it’s—it’s fine,” Izuku sighed, rolling his shoulders and continuing onward. “He calls me that because he’s a jerk. It’s not a name I like.”

“Oh.” She took a few skips forward so she was beside him again. “Sorry, Midoriya, I should have thought about it before I said it.”

“It’s really fine,” Izuku said. His uniform was bothering him now. It was almost his size, but the legs were way too wide and the belt he’d been given had started digging into his hip bone. Nothing could go his way today.

There was most of a minute of silence.

“Um, I was wondering something, though,” she said.

“What’s that?” Izuku asked, knowing he wouldn’t like it.

“How’d you do the thing with the zero pointer during the exam?”

“It stepped on me, I didn’t do anything.”

“That’s not what I mean, like, that thing must have been way too heavy for anyone to just hold it, what’d you do?” She took another few skipping steps. “I didn’t think about it for a while, but when I did, it just didn’t make any sense. Were you wearing special braces or something? Do you know someone who makes hero costumes?”

They were finally in the cafeteria, the wave of noise was enough that she stepped closer to Izuku. He could see the very real confusion in her expression.

“No, I wasn’t and no I don’t,” Izuku said. He glanced around and caught sight of Shinsou on the other side of the cafeteria. Well, yeah, that seemed a little more important than continuing this conversation.

“But how did you—”

“I’m strong,” Izuku said, then abruptly stepped around a line of students, leaving her behind. He wove through the throng, it was easy enough; people were rather motivated about getting out of his way. That tended to be the case following all of Izuku’s growth spurts.

It was crowded, which kind of surprised Izuku before he remembered that there were non-hero students that went to UA, that would increase the number of people going here by a lot.

When he got to the other side of the cafeteria, he paused for a second. Shinsou was sitting alone at a booth. He had his head on the table, pillowed on his backpack. He didn’t have any food in front of him, which wasn’t great seeing as they’d be doing hero activities in under an hour. 

Shinsou didn’t react for a minute, then finally he turned his head and opened a single eye. When he saw Izuku he just groaned and closed his eyes again.

Izuku frowned, then slipped into the seat opposite Shinsou.

“Didn’t sleep well?” he asked. Shinsou’s insomnia defined rather a lot about both his personality and appearance, but at this point Izuku could tell the difference between Shinsou's normal exhaustion and the kind which only appeared after particularly bad nights.

“Leave me alone,” he said into his backpack.

“So, yeah,” Izuku said. He leaned forward and set his chin on his folded arms, bringing himself level with Shinsou’s face. “You okay?”

“I said, ‘leave me alone’.”

Izuku tapped his fingers on the table.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” he tried.

Shinsou let out a mumbled string of words he’d never say if Mom was within earshot. Okay. So he was actually upset. Izuku was right about that at least.

“I am, really,” Izuku said. “That was…not called for.”

Shinsou finally lifted his head off the table and looked at Izuku.

“You don’t have to apologize,” he said.

“Okay but I want to,” Izuku insisted. He’d rather been hoping that this could just be resolved as soon as he said sorry.

“What are you even apologizing for?” Shinsou asked, exasperated.

Izuku had to take a second to think about this. He’d told Shinsou to leave his house, which was kind of rude on its own, but really bad in the context of Shinsou maybe being fostered by Izuku’s mom. But if Izuku just said that he was okay with Shinsou living with them, he’d more likely than not take it as lip service or—even more likely—condescension, judging by the fact that Shinsou had taken Izuku trying to help him with the trials yesterday as exactly that. Maybe Izuku should be apologizing about the trials? But he honestly still felt like that had been a valid strategy. Plus, it’d worked out in the end so there was no reason for it to be a problem in the first place. Or maybe Izuku was supposed to be apologizing about assuming Shinsou would get last in the trials? Except Izuku wasn’t actually sorry about that, because he’d been right to make that assumption, and Shinsou would be able to tell that Izuku was being insincere. Unless Shinsou would be okay with Izuku just apologizing even if it was obvious he didn’t mean it? 

Why was this so hard ?

“...I’m not sure,” Izuku finally admitted.

“Yeah, I figured,” Shinsou sighed, putting a hand over his eyes.

“...do you forgive me?” Izuku asked, hesitantly.

“Could you just—” Shinsou neatly folded his hands together and pointed them at Izuku. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Yeah, you already said that.”

“No, not the apology thing,” Shinsou said, as he gestured vaguely at Izuku. “The whole thing where you pretend that you care about me.”

“Er—” Izuku said, abruptly feeling like Shinsou had just physically pulled the rug from underneath him. “Um, okay. What?”

“Please, it’s not that complicated,” Shinsou said casually, as if they were talking about laundry or an assignment. “It’s not even particularly hard to tell.”

“Okay, seriously—”

“Here, let’s go through this, shall we?” Shinsou interrupted. He raised a finger. “A couple months ago, you invited me to go work out with you. The only reason for this was that you had a falling out with your trainer and wanted someone else around.” Shinsou made a gesture at Izuku to keep him from interrupting. “That’s not an accusation, that’s fine, really. I knew it at the time and I know it now. You straight up said that to my face and there’s nothing wrong with it. You were obviously under no obligation to care about me, we were just training for the exam together.”

“Okay but that’s like, when I’d just met you—”

“Evidence the second,” Shinsou continued on without pause, raising a second finger. “You invite me to your house, supposedly to hang out. Great—we’re friends now…but then it turns out the actual reason you did that was so you could use me as a cover to lie to your mom about where you were that weekend. Do you even remember that? No, seriously; did you ever stop to think about that?”

Izuku’s mouth opened but he couldn’t quite figure out a counter to that.

“Evidence the third,” Shinsous said, raising a final finger. “The only reason you’re talking to me right now is because you feel like you’re supposed to…but you don’t actually care about any of this.”

Was that true?

It couldn’t be, right? But still, put like that it sounded pretty damning.

“Shinsou, I, um—”

“Nope, stop,” Shinsou said. “I’m not whining, I’m not complaining. I’m just telling you that you’re wasting your effort and you can stop with this whole charade.”

“But I do—”

“Izuku, what’s my given name?” Shinsou asked, tone not changing at all from his normal drone.

Izuku opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He’d heard it, somewhere. He had it in his phone, but that was destroyed again. Also Izuku looking it up would prove Shinsou’s point just as well. It was something with an ‘H’? Izuku didn’t even want to guess, getting it wrong seemed worse than not saying anything.

“Right. There we go,” Shinsou said, letting his head drop down onto the table. “Now, please don’t make me repeat myself again . You’ve chosen a bad time to get talkative and I need a fucking nap.”

Izuku stared at the top of Shinsou’s head for a few seconds. Various conversation threads popped up and dispersed in his mind, but then he realized Shinsou rarely asked Izuku for things, so he should probably respect it when he did.

Izuku stood slowly, Shinsou made no response.

He walked away.

He kept walking until he was out of the cafeteria.

Okay. He was really hungry but this seemed important.

He cared about Shinsou, right? Like, he’d helped him get into UA? That was something. Shinsou knew that though…but it wasn’t like Izuku had even known him before inviting him to the gym and training him for the UA exam. He’d just sort of done it on a whim.

That was fine—great even—if they were just classmates, but now they were—foster brothers?

Izuku wished he could call Mom or something. But he didn’t have his phone. Plus she’d not told him. Had she told him? She could have done it and it slipped past Izuku, but she’d have known that Izuku hadn’t known, right? If she’d wanted him to know she’d have made sure that he really did know.

Did she also think that he wouldn’t care?

Izuku stopped.

Did she?

She’d said it this morning. She was his mother. She’d know that he’d take a foster brother seriously, right?

But it wasn’t like Izuku had been that involved the past few months. He’d been off, both mentally and physically. He’d spent most of the break between middle and high school out of the house. Working out or whatever. He’d just left the house, not bothering to bring Shinsou with him plenty of times. If he’d really cared he would have invited his friend? guest? with him, that was the expectation, wasn’t it?

Could he blame Mom for expecting him not to care if he’d never done anything to demonstrate it?

Izuku took three slow breaths in and out.

He wanted to talk to Mom about this, but also didn’t want to know what she’d say.

He’d just have to figure it out. That’s what he’d told All Might. So that’s what he would do. And he knew where to start. Shinsou’d given him that much of a hint.

He walked to the 1-A classroom.

Once he was there, he saw a familiar flash of yellow behind the desk in the front and walked in. He crouched in front of the sleeping bag, a single eye opened and stared at him with a disturbing intensity.

“Can I have a class roster and a schedule?” Izuku asked.

“It was in the folder you got yesterday,” said the caterpillar.

“I forgot my backpack.”

“It’s in your email.”

“I broke my phone.”

Aizawa lay face down for a long few seconds, before rising from his sleeping bag in a single, ominous motion. 

“What sort of joke do you think this is? You're in UA, one of the most prestigious hero academies in the world, and you’re showing up without supplies on the second day of school.”

Izuku squinted up at his teacher, who didn’t look particularly offended, just deeply disappointed.

“I required medical attention this morning and I prioritized getting here as soon as I could over retrieving my school supplies. I assumed my presence as soon as possible was preferable to having all my things,” Izuku explained.

“...really?”

“Really,” Izuku confirmed.

“Ugh,” Aizawa said, then turned and walked out of the room. “Come on,” he said, not bothering to look back.

Izuku followed him down a few hallways and was instructed to wait outside as Aizawa went into the teacher’s lounge. After a few minutes, Aizawa reappeared, bearing pieces of paper. He didn’t offer them, just stared at Izuku with an not-quite-hostile shade of uncomfortable intensity.

“Come on,” he said.

Izuku followed him down another set of hallways into some kind of conference room.

Aizawa stood there, looking down at Izuku. He was remarkably hard to read. Izuku couldn’t tell if he was mad, tired, or bored; though perhaps it was one of those.

“I’ll give you this,” Aizawa said, waving the schedule and roster, “if you answer a question of my choosing.”

Izuku tilted his head.

“That seems kind of unethical, maybe exploitative?” he suggested, then added, “Aizawa-sensei, sir.”

“You want them?” Aizawa asked.

“Yeah, fine,” Izuku said. 

Aizawa spent a long time staring at Izuku, thinking through his question.

“Why would you risk losing your spot at UA?”

“What?”

“You took a gamble yesterday, if I'd so chosen, you’d have been expelled. Why not try your best to actually impress me?”

Izuku had been expecting something different, so had to think about it for a while. The bell for the end of lunch rang, but Aizawa’s pointed look told Izuku he couldn’t rely on the bell to save him here.

“The rescue points,” Izuku finally concluded. “In the entrance exam, there was a secondary set of expectations which we weren’t made aware of until after the test. Yesterday, I was the only one who wouldn’t be automatically expelled by being in last place. So it was the best case scenario, assuming that you were telling the truth. I was taking a risk, but it protected the rest of my classmates. That’s what being a hero is, right? Taking risks so that other people will be safe?”

Aizawa stared long and hard at Izuku, which was a losing battle as Izuku could stand and stare blankly at someone for hours should the need arise.

“Why did All Might come to greet you, specifically, on the first day of UA?”

“I’m afraid that is beyond the scope of our deal, sensei.” 

There was a moment of absolute stillness in Aizawa’s face, then his mouth did something complicated.

“Don’t be late again, you’ll get a demerit,” he said, passing Izuku the papers.

“Yes, sensei,” Izuku said. “Except I’m late right now, so.”

“Your teacher is All Might, will he mark you tardy?” Aizawa asked, with an unexpectedly authentic curiosity.

“No, probably not,” Izuku admitted. He waited for a moment but his teacher seemed content to leave it at that. Izuku took the chance to scan through the class roster.

“Shinsou Hitoshi.” He stared at the paper, trying to force it into his memory through pure force. “Hitoshi, that’s his name. Okay, I can remember that.”

“What.”

“Hitoshi,” Izuku repeated, turning and walking out of the room without a second thought.

Chapter Text

By the time Izuku got back to the cafeteria, lunch was no longer being served and the students had long since filed back into their classrooms. He sighed and turned back to the 1-A classroom. This day just felt longer every second.

When he got there, All Might was standing at the front but he paused when Izuku stepped through the door and gave him an assessing look.

Izuku just waved the papers in his hand and shrugged. “Aizawa-sensei,” he explained while walking to his desk.

Shinsou—Hitoshi—was in his own seat, which was rather awkward for Izuku, since that was directly behind his own. But Shin—Hitoshi didn’t look up at Izuku’s entrance or try to make eye contact of any kind. He just sat there deliberately staring at his desk.

Izuku sat at his own desk and tried not to let too much tension into his shoulders. He knew that he had to do something, but he shouldn’t try to do it too soon. Shinsou would still be there tomorrow, and trying to do something before he was ready would just make him more angry with Izuku.

So instead he looked at All Might and made an effort to at least look like he was paying attention.

They were doing some kind of battle training. Well that was something.

Compartments appeared from inside the walls of the classroom and ordered racks of numbered boxes appeared. Those were the hero costumes the school had promised. Okay, now Izuku couldn’t help but be interested.

The process of going to the locker room and changing was no less awkward than last time. But the excitement of seeing his costume for the first time was enough that it didn’t matter. He’d been pretty precise about his requirements when he’d sent in the form, so he knew about what it would be, but seeing it in person was just different.

It wasn’t especially flashy; a green jumpsuit with red, white, and black accents. Though it did have some special features; the belt could be undone to work as bandages; the shin guards were designed so that he could use them as weapons if necessary; and there were areas of extra support around the knees and elbows.

But that wasn’t the important part.

The important part was that he was entirely covered.

Between the boots, gloves, and full face helmet, there was no way someone could actually see his skin. Which meant that when he was wearing it his quirk wouldn’t be able to anchor onto anyone new.

Izuku smiled and was pleased to find that not a single thing changed on the outside of his helmet.

It wasn’t perfect, of course, this was only mark one. Though the only significant issue Izuku could see right now was that it was way too tight in the chest and shoulders, which wasn’t great as it limited his range of motion. Had Izuku grown even more in the past weeks? At this rate it was going to be a real problem for his long term maneuverability. He tried rolling his shoulders back and forth only to realize that there were at least three guys in the locker room conspicuously trying not to stare at him.

Seriously? He was just standing there.

Izuku trudged out of the locker room and across campus to the meeting place. It was in front of another one of those abandoned buildings. Oh, wait, yeah. Yesterday, Izuku had been wondering why so much of the campus was in poor repair, but of course UA had abandoned buildings. Maintaining them would be a waste of resources if their purpose was to be destroyed during hero training anyway.

“Midoriya!” All Might called. Izuku realized that at some point the rest of his classmates had appeared around him. He made a vague noise of acknowledgement. 

All Might gave him a thumbs up and proceeded to explain that they would be put in teams of two, assigned either villains or heroes. The villains would be defending a nuclear bomb and the heroes would be trying to secure it or capture the villains.

“Midoriya, you’re first! For your teammate you get…Uraraka!”

Izuku tilted his head, trying to match a face, or at least a costume, to that name. Thankfully, she appeared within a few moments.

Oh, that was what’s-her-name from the entrance exam. Izuku reminded himself, Uraraka. Uraraka. He’d feel pretty stupid if he made the same mistake twice in a single day. Uraraka.

Her costume didn’t seem particularly practical, but then again, her quirk wasn’t ideal for close quarter combat, so it wasn’t necessary for her gear to be optimized for that. She gave him a smile as she moved to stand next to him, but it was considerably weaker than the ones she’d given him previously.

Izuku gave her a nod, and they lapsed into silence as the rest of the teams were drawn up.

Hitoshi was paired with some guy who was half covered in ice. The two of them were standing side-by-side, apparently competing for who’s expression could scream ‘I don’t want to be here’ more.

“And for the first battle. The heroes are Team A! And the villains are team D!”

Uraraka stiffened beside him, so Izuku assumed that was the team they were on.

He looked across the room and saw a smile spreading across Bakugou’s face.

Ah, that was a bad sign.

- - -

“So, game plan,” Izuku said, once they were standing outside the building, “I’ll get Bakugou and you get Iida.”

“Shouldn’t we stick together?” Uraraka asked, looking up from the blueprint in her hands with growing concern on her face.

“Bakugou’s going to go after me no matter what I’m doing,” Izuku explained. “It’s better to keep him away from the actual objective. Keeping him on the ground floor works for that.”

“But are you going to be okay?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Bakugou’s really strong and his explosion quirk is really dangerous, though.”

“And I’ll be fine,” Izuku said. He tried giving her a reassuring expression, but realized that with his helmet she couldn’t see his face at all and the entire venture was pointless.

“That’s not really a plan,” Uraraka said. “What if something goes wrong? How are we supposed to back each other up if we’re in different parts of the building?”

“It’ll be fine,” Izuku said, clipping the capture tape stuff to his belt. “You go through the roof, I’ll go through the first floor. You should sneak down to the level with the object, try to be silent. Once me and Bakugou start being loud, that’s your signal to go after the objective. If I finish up with Bakugou before you’ve gotten the bomb, I’ll come join you.”

“How do I get up to the—”

“Can you use your quirk on yourself?” Izuku asked.

“Um, well yes, but not for long and—”

“Great, I’ll throw you,” Izuku concluded easily.

“Um, okay.” She was still staring at him. “What?”

“You use your quirk on yourself, then I throw you upward, once you’re at the right height, you cancel your quirk and land on the roof,” Izuku explained.

“That sounds super dangerous and adds an unnecessary risk,” Uraraka pointed out.

“But it’d be quick and would work,” Izuku defended.

“What if I miss the roof?” Uraraka asked, but with waning conviction.

“I’ll catch you. Come on, the timer’s started.”

Uraraka sighed.

“You’re sure you can—”

“ Yes. ”

“Okay, okay,” Uraraka said, throwing up her hands. “Let’s do it.”

“Cool,” Izuku said, then crouched and laced his fingers together. 

“And you’re sure you’ll be good against Bakugou—”

“Timer, Uraraka,” Izuku reminded her.

“Timer, right, fine,” she said, then tapped her own shoulder with all five fingers. She stepped forward into Izuku’s hands. He spent a moment making sure his aim was right, then sent her floating toward the roof of the building in a controlled motion. There were a few moments of uncertainty, but Uraraka continued on a smooth trajectory to just above the roof. After thirty seconds of slow movement, she canceled her quirk and fell onto the roof and out of Izuku’s line of sight.

“You good?” Izuku asked, touching the headset attached to the outside of his helmet. 

“Yeah,” Uraraka said, breathless. 

“Do all gloves you wear turn weightless?” Izuku asked.

“...yes, why?” Uraraka asked.

“I was just wondering, could you use your quirk to—”

“Timer, Midoriya,” Uraraka reminded him.

“Right, right,” Izuku muttered, then walked directly towards the front door of the building. “Wait for my signal.”

“Stay safe,” Uraraka said.

“You too,” Izuku said, then crossed the threshold.

Once inside, it was pretty clear that this wasn’t a normal building. There was no paint or finished surfaces anywhere. It was just endless corridors of bare panels and blind corners.

Izuku managed to get to the second floor before there was a sound of movement.

He pressed himself into the hollow behind an open door and listened carefully. He could faintly hear footsteps.

Trying to be quiet wasn’t exactly Bakugou’s style, but Izuku knew well enough that Bakugou was willing to change his patterns if it meant things would better go his way. Izuku lowered himself into a crouch, making sure that none of his body was visible as the footsteps turned into the nearby hallway. Izuku shifted his head around, trying to get a better handle on where exactly the sound was coming from. When it was close enough, Izuku stepped out from the hollow and launched himself forward.

Only instead of launching himself toward Bakugou, it was that guy in the armor, Iida.

By the time that Izuku had registered his mistake, the guy had already used his quirk to launch himself backwards.

Izuku wound up landing awkwardly and almost ran into the wall. That would have been the end if he hadn’t been able to then dodge across the hallway as Iida was suddenly rushing toward him again, capture tape in hand. 

“Midoriya! Bakugou’s—!” came Uraraka's voice from his headset. Then there were explosions as the sound cut out.

Which meant that Bakugou had known what Izuku had thought Bakugou would do, so had intentionally not done that. Which in retrospect was obvious, since Izuku predicted Bakugou’s actions all the time. And meant that Izuku shouldn’t have expected—

Izuku’s entire body was spun around as Iida’s capture tape attached itself to Izuku’s forearm guards and yanked him down the hallway.

Focus.

Izuku managed to pivot around Iida’s hit-and-run attack and yanked on his end of the capture tape to unbalance Iida and send him flying. Unfortunately, he corrected almost immediately and disappeared into another corridor.

Izuku needed to get to the top floor—but he couldn’t leave Iida here, he had to deal with him now, otherwise he’d just attack from behind once Izuku was up there. Izuku pulled the capture tape from his belt and unwound it into a loose coil in his hands. The seconds trickled past at an intolerable rate, and all Izuku was able to do was stand there in the empty hallway and wait for Iida to appear again, it wasn’t as though Izuku could chase him.

But he needed to be clever about this.

If Izuku was a super-fast hero in training, which direction would he attack a fellow student from?

Izuku let himself kneel into a relaxed crouch and felt One for All crackle up from his core and flow into his limbs. Energy pooled there, like a coiled spring. Izuku forced himself to remain still. It reminded him of holding too much air in his lungs. A distinctly uncomfortable feeling, but bearable in the short term.

There was a sound from behind him, and Izuku released the energy from his legs in a single instantaneous movement. The world blurred as he brought himself up in a semi-controlled flip. That left him upside down and directly above when Iida’s charge sent him right through where Izuku had been a moment before. 

Or—more specifically—Iida’s charge sent him directly through the loose coil of capture tape hanging below Izuku’s hands. There was a brief, violent twisting as all of Iida’s considerable momentum was transferred through the tape to Izuku. This sent him flying in the same direction as Iida had been moving a moment before.

There was a brief period where they were both sent flying in uncontrolled arcs. Izuku smashed into something that was either a wall or Iida, then bounced off in another direction.

He hit the floor hard and was sent sliding along the tile. 

It took him a moment to reorient, then he was pulling himself to his feet again.

Iida was there in front of him, struggling against the capture tape he was entangled in. Izuku leapt forward and stopped the movement, yanking the tape to fully capture Iida with hurried motions.

“Iida has been captured!” boomed All Might’s voice from the little headset. 

Izuku slumped back.

“Hero! You dare capture me! I am a villain of the highest caliber!” Iida shouted.

It took Izuku a long minute to realize that Iida was just getting into character.

“Don’t do crime?” Izuku tried, then pulled himself to his feet.

Where was the stairwell? Izuku had the blueprint of the building, but was entirely disoriented from being thrown around so thoroughly.

“Uraraka has been captured!” All Might announced.

Damn.

Izuku chose a direction at random and sprinted. It took him a few more turns before he caught sight of a stairwell. He activated One for All and sent himself bounding up the stairs an entire flight at a time. He forced himself to slow down at the end, then was launching himself into the hallways of the building’s top floor.

“Uraraka?” he whispered, pressing a hand to his headset.

No answer. Either she was unconscious or her headset had been broken.

Izuku finally knew where he was, so he took a couple turns until he could see into the room with the fake nuclear bomb in it.

There were clear signs of explosions having happened here very recently, but Izuku couldn’t see Bakugou or Uraraka. He stepped forward carefully, aware that Bakugou knew he’d have come up here as soon as possible and was likely planning a surprise attack.

But the point of the exercise was the fake nuclear bomb. Izuku crouched and pulled One for All into his legs.

Before he could leap forward, there was a deafening crackling from behind him, and he was forced to dodge to the left as Bakugou’s grenade wrist thing came screaming down where Izuku’s face had been a half-second before.

Izuku turned his momentum into a roll and landed on his feet on the far end of the hallway.

“Didn’t know you’d send someone else to fight your battles for you, Deku,” Bakugou said, teeth flashing in a self-satisfied grin.

“What’d you do to Uraraka?” Izuku asked, lowering his center of gravity in preparation for Bakugou’s next attack.

“I’m not actually a villain, you dumbass! She’s fine, just tied up in the capture tape!” Bakugou snarled, throwing up his hands, which would have been less threatening if not for the giant grenades mounted on them.

“Okay,” Izuku said, eyes flicking over to the nuclear bomb.

“God, every time I forget how insufferable you are. But then I see your stupid face again and it all comes back,” Bakugou drawled.

“You can’t see my face,” Izuku pointed out helpfully, gesturing to his helmet.

Izuku could practically see Bakugou forcing himself not to fly directly forward and strangle Izuku. Honestly, it was a kind of performance art.

“I thought about what you said, yesterday,” Bakugou said, taking a slow step forward.

“What’d I say?” Izuku asked.

“You’re so fucking dense it hurts,” Bakugou snapped. “About why we fight, what the hell else?”

Right, honestly with everything that had happened so far today, that had kinda taken a back seat. With all the problems Izuku had with the people he actually cared about, Bakugou’s never ending tantrums were pretty insignificant.

“So what do you think? Why do we fight?” Izuku asked, taking a half-step back to get a view of his other paths to the objective.

“It’s not complicated,” Bakugou said with bared teeth. “It’s because you’re not supposed to pretend that you’re a challenge to me, you’re not even near my level. You’re a pebble under my foot. I’m the only person from that snake-bit middle school who’s going to be worth anything. And I’ll beat you as many times as it takes for that lesson to sink into your thick skull.”

Izuku thought about that.

“Okay, so that doesn’t really make sense,” Izuku pointed out. “Because I beat you, like, not always, but I did manage it a couple times.”

Bakugou’s hands sparked dangerously.

“Don’t get me wrong, you’re plenty good at fighting,” Izuku allowed, “I’m just also good.”

“You little shit,” Bakugou snapped. “You’re a cheater. You’re sneaky. That’s not being good at fighting.”

“And we’re back to this again,” Izuku said, gesturing vaguely. “If I was really so much worse than you, there’d be no point in trying to prove it, it’d just be obvious that you were better than me. And, yesterday, you’d have been pleased that I did badly on the test, since that just proved that you’re better. But that didn’t happen, me doing badly was actually a problem, which means that…” Izuku had to take a second to run that through his mind. “Which means that you think that I am good, since I’m approaching or at your level. So me losing reflects badly on you, because me failing means that you were beat by someone who wasn’t even that strong. That about right?”

Bakugou looked a little shocked, but that translated into anger within a blink.

“You’re so wrong I don’t even know where to start.”

“Eh, okay,” Izuku said, rocking on his heels. “Here’s something else though, someone suggested that I should just tell people how I feel, so I’ll give it a shot.”

“That’s so stupid—”

“You’re all wrapped up in your superiority nonsense, you’re pathologically obligated to prove yourself to everyone every second of the day. I’m not. I don’t care about what people say or think. My point being that I wasn’t fighting you because you were important. You were just the strongest person around and willing to fight. You were a training dummy, a benchmark for my own strength. Useful, but not important.”

Bakugou’s grin grew ridgid. 

“So that’s the truth of it,” Izuku said easily. “I just don’t really care about you.”

“You little…” Bakugou breathed, face growing more intense each second. He took a step forward. His face wasn’t that normal mask of anger. There was something more personal, more real there. Had Izuku really hurt his feelings with that? Did everyone have to be so upset just because Izuku wasn’t telling them how important they were to him?

…That was a bad thought. Izuku shouldn’t be thinking things like that. This was what was getting him in trouble again and again. But what? Should he lie? It wasn’t like Izuku owed Bakugou anything—except for a decade’s worth of injuries.

“What's wrong?” Izuku asked, tilting his head. “I thought I was a pebble? Do you need a pebble to care about you?”

“Shut. The. Fuck. Up,” Bakugou said. He flipped a switch on one of his gauntlets. “You know. The support department did something for me,” he muttered, then held up his gauntlet for Izuku’s inspection. “My quirk works by combusting the nitroglycerin-like substance I produce. So I asked them to create something which lets me stock it up for an ultimate attack.”

“That seems incredibly dangerous,” Izuku said, taking a step back.

“Yeah,” Bakugou said, then pointed his gauntlet directly at Izuku’s face. Even from five meters away, it looked dangerous, too dangerous. “And it’s all primed and ready to go.”

On further reflection, maybe All Might’s advice should not have been applied in this situation.

Bakugou pulled the pin on his gauntlet.

Izuku had enough time to pull up One for All and launch himself directly away from Bakugou; he'd reached the end of the corridor by the time the explosion hit him.

His entire world went black as his body was sent through the wall of the building.

Chapter Text

There was a crack in the ceiling. Izuku spent a long moment considering it.

It wasn’t particularly large, just a spidering line along a single one of those little foam-ish tiles that they put in the ceiling of schools and stuff. It crossed from one side to the other in little zigzags, like a cartoon zipper.

When the crack failed to hold his attention, he looked around. There were desks and beds and other furniture. He felt weightless. He wasn’t feeling any particular emotion, just a kind of vague nothingness that spread in numb flashes from his core to his fingertips. It took him a few minutes for it to belatedly click in his mind that he was back in the nurse's office.

That meant he’d lost the battle training.

Which meant that Bakugou just got another point.

Dammit.

Izuku sat up in his bed.

There was no one in the room with him. It was sort of quiet and peaceful. There were distant sounds of students and the clock told him he’d been unconscious for a couple hours. He was kind of disappointed at having missed the rest of the battle training rounds. He wanted to see the abilities of his classmates. He had a vague idea of what they were capable of from how they’d used their quirks in the assessment the other day, but he was pretty sure that seeing them using them in combat capacities would be way cooler. Eh, maybe there were recordings somewhere.

He took stock of himself. No bandages, his limbs all moved correctly, he had all his fingers and toes. He didn’t feel that terrible. There wasn’t any sharp pain, just exhaustion. Though his face was sore, more like a mild sunburn than anything. But he also felt incongruously exhausted.

There was a movement at the door.

“Oh hello there, dearie,” Recovery Girl called, stepping into the room. She closed the door and stood there, leaning heavily on her cane and staring at him with narrowed eyes. “Did you know that you’ve set a record?”

Izuku spent a second feeling vaguely startled before realising that he was meant to respond. Though he failed to come up with something to say in an appropriate interval of time and wound up just staring at her in silence anyway.

“Three visits to me by the second day of school,” she explained. “It’s never happened before.”

Izuku blinked.

“For the burns yesterday, for the nail in the foot, and right now,” he said, thinking carefully. “I mean, does the nail thing count, it was—”

“Yes,” Recovery Girl said.

“Alright then, ma’am,” Izuku said, raising his hands in surrender. 

Recovery Girl scowled and prowled over to him. She pulled up a swiveling stool and produced a clipboard.

“Is Uraraka okay?” Izuku asked.

Recovery Girl deflated slightly and sighed.

“Your teammate is fine,” she allowed. “She didn’t need healing, unlike you.”

“Oh, good,” Izuku said.

Recovery Girl used her cane to hit Izuku on the head—very lightly, but still.

“Hey,” Izuku muttered.

“It is not ‘good’ that you were sent to me unconscious the second day of school,” Recovery Girl huffed. “You had a concussion and first degree burns. I used my quirk to heal you and it sent you unconscious for almost four hours, that’s not something to be taken lightly, young man.”

“I didn’t really mean it like that,” Izuku tried.

“I’m aware, that doesn’t mean that you should learn to treat your own injuries as tangential,” Recovery Girl huffed. 

“Yes, ma’am,” Izuku said.

Recovery Girl eyed him like she understood exactly how little he meant that.

“Midoriya, that boy destroyed half of a building with that attack he sent at you.”

Izuku froze, having no idea what the right thing to say was in this circumstance. He hadn’t thought that Bakugou’s behavior was going to matter. No one had ever really cared before. Then again, Bakugou had always been the big fish in a small pond. Now, he was only as important as the rest of the hero hopefuls.

That was hilarious. 

And weird, super weird, actually.

“I kind of baited him?” Izuku admitted, for lack of anything else to say.

“That’s no excuse! That young man is a hero in training and should be held to that standard,” she said. Recovery Girl stopped talking, though it was more from being too angry rather than being out of things to say, so instead she leaned forward and flashed a little light into both of Izuku’s eyes. “No concussion. You should thank your support staff. Without them you’d likely be in an actual hospital. Your helmet held up better than the wall you went through. They’re going to have to tear down the building after what that young man did. Deeply irresponsible of the support department to give him a weapon like that.”

Recovery Girl paused to scribble something down in her notebook.

“And don’t think I didn’t notice that the burns you got yesterday looked a rather like the result of that boy’s quirk,” she added in a low tone.

“That was a personal thing,” Izuku said instantly.

“Personal,” Recovery Girl repeated dubiously.

“Yeah,” Izuku said, nodding. “Not a UA Hero Course thing.”

Recovery Girl’s mouth set in a tight line.

“Young man, as a student of UA, everything you do is a ‘Hero Course thing’, whether it happens during school hours or now, it reflects on us and also we have a responsibility—not to mention a desire—to ensure your safety and comfort.”

Izuku fidgeted in the intense silence, Recovery Girl was looking at him expectantly and he kind of hated it. Normally he was entirely comfortable when people weren’t talking, but there was a sort of pressure in the room that made him want to leave as soon as possible.

“Is my costume okay?” Izuku asked, loudly.

Recovery Girl’s eyes were narrowed and she crossed her arms. Izuku just sat on the bed and stared blankly at her.

“Yes,” Recovery Girl allowed. “It’s in better shape than you are.”

Izuku would have said that was good, since he liked his costume, but judging from the expectant look on Recovery Girl’s face, that would not have been taken well.

“Anyway,” Izuku said, wondering what he was supposed to do now. His sentence just sort of petered out and he was left staring at Recovery Girl again.

She sighed, running a hand over her temple.

“Where’s All Might?” Izuku asked, impulsively.

“And why would he be here?” she asked, eyebrows arching.

Izuku didn’t actually have an answer for that.

Recovery Girl smiled at his expression and patted his cheek.

“I know,” she said conspiratorially, “about All Might trying to give you One for All.”

“Oh,” he managed. “That’s…cool I guess.”

“But to answer your question,” Recovery Girl said, smiling beatifically, “he was here earlier, but Principal Nedzu called him in for a meeting, which I suspect might be about you.”

“Oh.” Izuku paused, thinking about it. “Is getting hurt that big of a deal?”

“Normally, no. This is a hero school and things like these happen more often than we’d like. Standard procedure is that Bakugou will face consequences such as expulsion or suspension, or at the very least be put on strict probation. Put in cases where a hero student is targeted by another student, we avoid putting any additional stress on the one who was targeted.”

“I don’t think Bakugou should be expelled.” Why did Izuku say that? It’d be hilarious if he’d be expelled. But something about that just didn’t fit right with Izuku. School without him would be just…weird.

“I suppose we’ll take that into consideration,” Recovery Girl said, eyeing Izuku. 

He considered telling her that Izuku had knowingly dug into multiple of Bakugou’s greatest insecurities and then continued to taunt him even knowing that he was getting more dangerous with each additional word Izuku had said…but, Izuku wasn’t that invested in Bakugou remaining at UA. 

Eh, whatever. Uncontrollable rage aside, Bakugou wasn’t stupid. He’d probably manage to claw his way out of the hole he’d dug for himself. Izuku was content to stand on the sidelines, pointing and laughing.

“So why did Nedzu want to talk with All Might about me?” Izuku asked, deciding a subject change was in order.

“I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.”

“Oh, I’ve got no idea,” Izuku said, he was pretty sure he hadn’t even met the principal yet.

“Well, I’ve no doubt he’s concocted some plan or another,” Recovery Girl said. She sank back into the bedside chair, which forced Izuku to look almost straight down to focus on her face. “But anyway, there was something else, something rather important I wanted to talk to you about.”

“What’s that?” 

“You do realize that All Might’s other form is a secret, don’t you? This morning the two of you came in here without a thought in the world. Imagine if there’d been another student here for an appointment with me. It’d have been a headache and a half, we’d have had to come up with an entire cover story for why this unknown adult was at UA.”

“Oh, sorry.” Izuku had absolutely not thought about that. He was more used to All Might’s smaller form than his big one. He’d forgotten that it wasn’t common knowledge.

“That’s alright,” Recovery Girl said. “Nothing came of it today, but please keep that in mind for the future.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Izuku said, rubbing absently at his neck. The skin there was still kind of painful, like a bad sunburn, he winced.

“Careful,” Recovery Girl said. “You’re not quite healed yet, don’t go opening any abrasions after I went through the effort of healing them.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Izuku repeated, folding his hands and trying to look innocent.

Recovery Girl let out a long suffering sigh.

“You heroes, it’s like you’ve got nothing better to do than get yourself hurt,” she tutted. “Anyway, you stay here and rest as long as you want. Once you’re feeling up to it, you’re free to go. Come here again tomorrow morning and I’ll fix you up the rest of the way.”

“Okay,” Izuku said, “thank you.”

He lay back down in the hospital bed.

- - -

He spent another two hours there, most of it dozing, before he decided that he needed to get home at some point and convinced Recovery Girl to let him go without a supervisor to make sure he got home—and he only had to lie about how he felt a little bit to manage it.

By the time he got to the 1-A classroom, he was already regretting it. He was feeling exhausted just from walking through a few hallways and sat at his desk. On it were two pathetic looking pieces of paper—the entirety of his school supplies for the day. He folded them into little squares and tucked them carefully into his borrowed pocket.

He set his head on the desk and spent a few moments just breathing. 

Eventually he forced himself out of the seat and started the long journey back home. He only dozed off on the train twice and even managed to get off at the right stop.

By the time he got back to his apartment, he was tired enough that he even allowed himself to use the elevator instead of the stairs. 

He finally unlocked the front door and stepped into the apartment. 

Shinsou’s shoes were there but Mom’s weren’t. Great.

Izuku kicked off his damaged sneakers and spent a few moments sitting in the entryway. He was hungry. He was tired. He wanted to take a shower. But he also didn’t want to talk to Shinsou.

He allowed himself to sit on the entryway step and waste time. He rested his head against the wall and closed his eyes, just for a second.

- - -

“Hey, Izuku, get up. Izuku!”

Izuku opened his eyes a moment later.

Shinsou had appeared in front of him, he was crouching on the linoleum, hands on Izuku’s shoulders, looking strangely worried.

Everything felt rather slow and syrupy. It took Izuku a few long moments of vague blinking to notice that the light from outside had changed and that his arm was thoroughly asleep from the way he’d been leaning on it.

“Should I call Inko-Sama?” Shinsou asked, already reaching for his phone.

“ ‘ey,” Izuku finally managed, brain starting to actually catch up. “Calm down,” he muttered, swatting off Shinsou’s hand and scrubbing at his face. “I’m fine.”

“This is fine?” Shinsou asked.

“I’m just tired,” Izuku said, then pushed Shinsou out of his space. He stood up slowly, looking blearily around and shaking out his arm to wake it. “Recovery Girl’s quirk takes your energy to heal you. It just hit me right as I got home, what time is it?”

“It’s—” Shinsou huffed and grabbed Izuku’s arm when he swayed. “It’s like seven. When did you get here?”

“No idea, phone’s still broken,” Izuku muttered, magnanimously allowing Shinsou to drag him down the hallway to the kitchen. 

“Your phone is broken,” Shinsou repeated in realization.

“You tried to text me, didn’t you?” Izuku asked.

“Shut up, I thought you were ignoring me,” Shinsou muttered. 

“I could ignore you on purpose, if you'd prefer,” Izuku offered. 

Shinsou swatted Izuku’s arm and then forced him into a chair at the table.

“You’re really okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” Izuku said, resting his chin on his fist and yawning. “I’m fine.”

That earned him a dubious look, but Shinsou just turned around and started futzing around in the kitchen. Izuku watched idly as he pulled together some leftovers and managed a full dinner for the both of them.

They ate quickly and without talking, which was good because Izuku was absolutely starving and wouldn’t have been able to pause to speak anyway.

Once the food had evaporated, they were left in silence.

“Um,” Izuku said.

“Nope,” Shinsou said.

“You don’t even know what I was going to say,” Izuku pointed out.

“Don’t I?” Shinsou asked, exasperated. 

Izuku managed to meet his eyes for about two seconds before turning his gaze away and tapping his hands on the table.

“You need a nap,” Shinsou said.

Izuku sighed.

“Quit it,” Shinsou sighed. “It’s fine.”

“But—”

“I said to quit it,” Shinsou said.

Izuku threw up his hands and let his forehead thunk into the kitchen table.

“Go to bed,” Shinsou groused, kicking Izuku in the shin.

Izuku closed his eyes and hummed contentedly.

“Dude, dude,” Shinsou muttered. Izuku ignored him entirely until Shinsou physically grabbed Izuku by the shoulder and hauled him up to his feet.

“Inko-sama wouldn’t let you just sleep at the table you urugh—” Whatever else Shinsou might have said was cut off when Izuku actually started to use Shinsou as a crutch, “Why the hell are you so—heavy—you—”

Izuku gave in with a final snigger and actually stood up. He ruffled Shinsou’s hair, which earned him another kick to the shin, and proceeded to walk over and pass out on the couch.

- - -

Izuku blinked his eyes open and looked around. He was still on the couch in the exact same position as before, though now was covered by a throw blanket. 

The light from outside was gone and now instead of feeling completely exhausted he just felt a normal amount of tired.

And Shinsou was still there.

He was sitting on the armchair next to Izuku, phone inches away from his nose and eyes flicking across it like a zombie. 

“We didn’t have homework, did we?” Izuku asked.

Shinsou jumped, shoulders jolting and nearly dropping his phone. He managed to catch it, then powered off the screen, leaving the living room only illuminated by the reflected lights from the streetlamps down below them.

“You’re fine,” Shinsou muttered.

“So we did?” Izuku asked, shifting around and stretching.

“Izuku, you were sent to the hospital, I’m sure you can get an extension,” Shinsou said.

“Nurses office, totally different,” Izuku said.

“ Hero school nurses office,” Shinsou pointed out.

“I didn’t get a note though,” Izuku said, eyes finally adjusting to the dark enough that he could see Shinsou’s disgruntled face. “What time is it, anyway?”

Shinsou grimaced and looked at his phone.

“Like, three,” he admitted, then leveled a look at Izuku and added, “Yes, I know, shut it.”

Izuku just huffed out a breath. He’d learned not to call Shinsou out on his terrible sleeping habits a long time ago, it wasn’t worth the sass.

There was a brief silence. Izuku tried not to feel awkward. Things had never felt awkward with Shinsou before, but there was a definite tension that was hard to get past.

“Inko-sama got home from her shift a while back,” Shinsou said idly into the silence. “She said that she has something to talk with you about but didn’t want to wake you.”

Izuku winced. That would probably be Bakugou exploding him. Not a conversation he was looking forward to.

“So, um, how’d your battle training go?” Izuku asked, trying to sound normal about it and not like he was desperately trying not to sound weird and awkward.

Shinsou rolled his eyes, but huffed back into his chair and stared at the far wall.

“My partner basically just won by himself,” he said.

Izuku tilted his head, running through his memories of the day.

“The ice guy?” he asked.

“Todoroki,” Shinsou corrected idly. “He just froze the entire building, including our opponents’ feet, then we walked in.”

“That sounds overpowered,” Izuku said.

“Yeah.”

They lapsed into silence. Izuku spent more time trying to work through what he was supposed to say. 

All Might’s advice hadn’t worked on Bakugou, but maybe Izuku should have known that would be the case. But would it work with Shinsou?

Except Izuku still wasn’t sure what the actual problem was.

“Hey,” Izuku said, ignoring the way Shinsou instantly let out an annoyed groan and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t mind you being here. I—I don’t want you to think that you’re not welcome, because you are. You’re—” Izuku ran out of words entirely and he made a vague gesture with his hands trying to encapsulate the rest of his meaning. 

“Gee, thanks. Glad we established that. I’ll see you tomorrow,” Shinsou muttered, standing and stepping toward his room.

“Dude,” Izuku snapped.

Shinsou stopped, staring at Izuku blankly. Izuku’s shoulders rose self-consciously. 

“What?” Shinsou sighed.

Izuku shifted uncomfortably. He’d been hoping that Shinsou would start talking and he could work off of that. He already felt lost; about what they were supposed to be talking about and what the state of things between them was. Shinsou had always been better at starting and shaping conversations, Izuku had never really picked up the knack for it.

“What are you mad at me for?” Izuku finally asked.

Shinsou pinched the bridge of his nose again.

“Izuku, it’s fine ,” he said, but the tone of his voice made it obvious it was a lie. 

Izuku shifted uncomfortably.

“But you said that you didn’t think that I care about you,” Izuku tried. “And that’s—”

“Stop it,” Shinsou said, making a slashing motion in the air. “I shouldn’t have said what I did yesterday at lunch, okay? I was tired and it was a complete overreaction. We’re fine. You really don’t need to worry about it.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Izuku said.

“You’re such a—” Shinsou pressed his hands together and started pacing around the room. Izuku watched him carefully but gave him a few moments to get his thoughts together. Soon, Shinsou returned to the same armchair and sat with his arms crossed, watching Izuku moodily. “Can we just pretend that it didn’t happen?”

“But you said it, probably because you think it,” he pointed out.

Shinsou uncrossed his arms to drum his fingers on the arm of his chair. His shoulders were coiled tightly and he’d started to look in the direction of his room again.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Shinsou said, clamping his hands on the armrests with a distinct finality.

“Why not?” Izuku asked.

Shinsou looked over at him, eyebrows raised.

“Why not?” he asked, and it was like whatever vulnerability Shinsou had been willing to show was physically draining out from his face. “That’s rich, coming from you.”

Damn it.

Izuku spent a moment shifting on the couch, meeting Shinsou’s eyes levelly. It was dark in the room, but there was enough light coming up through the window from street lights below them that Izuku could make out Shinsou’s expression. His eyes were glittering, and Izuku could tell that whatever leverage in the conversation he’d managed to find was gone. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Izuku sighed.

“What?” Shinsou asked, face forcing itself into something friendly and rictus. “Come on, Midoriya Izuku asking someone else to talk about themself? That’s a fish asking why everybodies so obsessed with water all the time.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to talk about myself,” Izuku said, drawing his shoulders up. “It’s just that I…don’t.”

“What’s the difference?” Shinsou asked.

“I just—” Izuku paused and took a moment, trying to force himself not to be angry. He wanted to mend bridges, not cause more problems. “People normally don’t want to know. And when I do tell, they just don't believe me. It’s basically always better to just keep things to myself.”

“That so?” Shinsou asked, still sounding so self assured that Izuku wanted to punch a wall. “Then, if I asked you a question, would you answer me? Or would you just dodge the question and pretend that there wasn’t a problem?”

“I’d answer it,” Izuku said.

Shinsou’s eyes narrowed. He leaned forward, fingers laced together and gaze fixed unsettlingly on Izuku’s face.

“Tell me then, what the hell is your and Bakugou’s deal?”

Oh.

Good.

Izuku had been worried that Shinsou would ask about something actually important. 

“What about him?” Izuku asked.

“He tried to kill you!” Shinsou answered. “Not to mention that the day before that you came home with burns on your uniform that looked suspiciously like his quirk and I know for a fact that you didn’t get them during actual class.”

“He didn’t actually want to kill me,” Izuku explained.

“He blew up half of the building ,” Shinsou said, fingers splayed.

“So?”

“You were in the way of the explosion,” Shinsou said slowly—like he couldn’t believe how stupid Izuku was being.

“But I wasn’t even that hurt,” Izuku pointed out, reasonably.

“You were unconscious and literally smoking,” Shinsou answered.

“Well—wait,” Izuku paused and took stock of the conversation. “Why am I defending him? What the hell? He’s a shithead. He should get expelled—or suspended—or something. Whatever happens when you attack other students, I mean.”

Shinsou pressed his hand to his face again. 

“Izuku what the hell is his deal?” he asked, sounding defeated.

Izuku considered that as a question.

“That’s a long story,” he said, grimacing. “And it’s…” He considered saying personal , but considering the whole conversation they were having, that would probably not be taken very well. “It’s complicated. I’ve known him for basically my entire life. We don’t get along.”

“You’re childhood friends with Bakugou,” Shinsou said, sounding distinctly dubious.

“More like—” Izuku paused to think of a correct descriptor before settling on, “Childhood enemies.”

“That’s not a thing,” Shinsou pointed out.

“Your face isn’t a thing,” Izuku answered evenly.

“What does ‘childhood enemies’ entail, exactly?” Shinsou asked.

Izuku tilted his head from side to side and thought about it. “Lots of snide comments. Siccing the teachers on each other every chance we could get…Fistfights in the park.”

“Which culminated in Bakugou exploding a building with you in it?” Shinsou asked.

“I think he just assumed that I’d be fine,” Izuku said. “He has some kind of superiority complex that I interact with in a weird way and it makes him think that I must be invincible. It’s like a whole thing. I’m pretty sure he needs therapy.”

“What?”

Izuku looked at him, head tilted.

“You don’t think he needs therapy?” 

“No, that’s obvious, but what the hell does him having a superiority complex have to do with him having a problem with you?” Shinsou asked.

“Oh, well, it’s just that, a lot of the time, I was the one winning the fist fights in the park,” Izuku explained.

“You’re…aware Bakugou can explode things with his hands, right?” Shinsou asked, cautiously.

“Sure,” Izuku allowed, “but I’m really good at punching things.”

There were a few beats of silence. Something brooding and thoughtful was growing on Shinsou’s face, and Izuku was pretty sure that he didn’t like whatever conclusions he was drawing at all.

“I’m going to go out on a limb, and assume that Bakugou was the one to start it,” Shinsou said.

“What makes you think that?”

“Because I’ve interacted with him for more than thirty seconds.”

Izuku let out a wordless sound of concession.

“You know that’s kind of fucked, right?” Shinsou asked. “And so is you keeping it a secret for years.”

Izuku grunted in acknowledgement.

“But you’re not going to tell Inko-sama?” he asked.

Izuku nodded.

“Even though what’s going on is pretty clearly identifiable as bullying—or arguably physical abuse—and you keeping it a secret is just letting Bakugou get away with it?” Shinsou asked.

Izuku felt One for All activate and was forced to spend a long few moments not doing anything. He met Shinsou’s eyes. He didn’t look regretful or even apologetic, just had on a casual mask of his normal self assured douchiness. There were a lot of things that Izuku wanted to say in response, but most of them were too cruel to ever be spoken aloud, especially to Shinsou. So he settled on being nonchalant.

“It’s like you don’t even know the first rule of fight club,” Izuku said, eyebrows raised.

“This isn’t a movie,” Shinsou answered. “And, besides, the whole point of Fight Club is that the wanton violence in the name of ‘true’ masculinity is toxic and damaging both to the men who take solace in it and the people around them who care about them.”

“You just watched that in a youtube video,” Izuku accused. “I know for a fact you haven’t even seen the movie.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s not a good point,” Shinsou said, crossing his arms defensively. 

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Izuku answered.

“Really?” Shinsou asked. “So you’re telling me it wasn’t Bakugou, someone with the power to literally summon explosions out of thin air, intentionally targeting the quirkless kid because he knew that you wouldn’t have the same edge to use to defend yourself?”

Oh.

Right.

It was like a bucket of ice water thrown over him.

Izuku had almost, for a moment, forgotten who he was, forgotten what his life was like and the immutable rules that held sway over him. Because he’d sort of felt like a normal person for a few moments

But he didn’t get that, he didn’t get to be just a normal person. There were always going to be people who just weren't going to get it. He had been trying to explain himself to Shinsou, but he’d learned over and over again that there was no point to doing that. It only ever was going to end in Shinsou telling him that he was weak and needed to be protected; needed to have things explained to him.

Because Izuku was useless.

He spent a moment staring at Shinsou’s face, noticing idly that Shinsou was still talking, but not registering the words as anything more than meaningless background noise. Izuku didn’t need to listen to this.

There was no point.

Izuku stood up and walked away, ignoring the way that Shinsou was buzzing like an insect beside him.

Shinsou tried to follow Izuku into his room, stepping into the doorway and grabbing Izuku’s shoulder to try and spin him around.  

Izuku still had All Might’s quirk active, he couldn’t figure out how to turn it off, so he had to be infinitely careful not to shatter Shinsou’s bones as he slowly took hold of Shinsou’s wrist and drew it away from himself. He spent a ponderously long time wondering what to do now, before he looked up at Shinsou’s face, and realised that his brother had been trying to escape—had been since Izuku had grabbed him.  His eyes were wide and frantic. He was trying to yank his wrist from Izuku's grip, putting his whole body into the motion and probably hurting his shoulder with how much he was struggling.

It was hard to notice, not when all of Shinsou’s strength was negligible compared to One for All, even just the limited portion of it Izuku had access to.

He had to be careful with his timing to make sure that Shinsou didn’t fling himself into the wall as soon as Izuku let go of him. The instant he was able to, Shinsou was stumbling back into the hallway, holding his wrist to his chest like it’d been burned.

He wasn’t talking anymore, just watching Izuku with wide eyes.

“Sorry,” Izuku said. “I just—Fuck. Sorry.”

He had no idea how the hell he was supposed to deal with the way that Shinsou was looking at him, so he just shut the door.

Chapter Text

Izuku pulled himself upright and stared at his backpack lying innocently on his desk.

Yesterday had been his first day of real classes and he had no idea what they’d learned. He’d spent most of the day in a blank haze and had missed even more than he normally did.

Today’s classes would probably be rough. At least he could make sure that he ate enough that he could actually enjoy whatever they were doing for the hero activity in the afternoon

Assuming Bakugou didn’t explode him again.

Still, he felt infinitely better than yesterday. The faint feeling of sunburn had mostly dissipated and the exhaustion was gone.

It was only five, which meant that Izuku was able to shuffle into the bathroom and kitchen without fear of running into Shinsou or Mom, neither of whom he wanted to talk to right now.

Mom he probably should, though. That wasn’t going to be fun.

Shinsou…Izuku didn’t know. He really, really didn’t want to. But also not talking to him sounded like a super shitty thing to do and Izuku should probably be apologising as soon as he could.

But he was also still pissed, which was a recipe for it spiraling even worse, somehow.

He shouldn’t be angry. It was unfair and petty. Shinsou was affected by Izuku’s quirk the exact same as everyone else and it wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t blame anyone for thinking that he was quirkless if they were being brainwashed into it. It was petty and unfair but also Izuku couldn’t get himself to stop feeling like that.

He’d talk to Shinsou tomorrow.

- - -

He spent the train ride wishing that he had his phone. Both because he was days behind on hero news and because riding public transport without it felt way more awkward.

When he got to campus, there was a crowd of reporters gathered around the gates.

Once they saw someone in the UA uniform, they surged toward him, but as soon as they got a good look most of them descended into confused mutterings before scattering like the red sea when he walked through them. It probably helped that he was taller than any of them and was staring people who got too close to him directly in the eye with as much intensity as he could manage.

He went through the gate and made his way to the nurse’s office.

There were other students present this time, so Recovery Girl kept the conversation strictly to things related to his injuries.

She used her quirk on him one last time, and though he felt tired again, it was nothing like yesterday, and at least he finally wasn’t limping anymore.

He got to the 1-A classroom and found it completely empty.

He wandered over to his desk and pillowed his head in his arms. He was almost asleep when his impromptu nap was interrupted by someone opening the door.

“Midoriya!” Uraraka exclaimed.

Izuku sighed and twisted his head to see her standing in the doorway. Her normally genial face was twisted into something uncharacteristically intense.

Dear lord.

What did she want from him? Izuku let his forehead thump into the desk again.

“Hey!” Uraraka complained. “I’m trying to talk to you.”

“Okay,” Izuku allowed.

“You could at least look at me! I showed up like an hour early!”

“Okay,” Izuku said. “Why?”

“Because—Because I want to apologise!” Uraraka said.

Izuku blinked and finally lifted his head.

Uraraka was standing in the aisle in front of him. She had her hands on her hips and her cheeks were comically red with heat.

“What for?” he asked.

“You got hurt!” she said, like it was as simple as that.

“Oh,” he managed. “You don’t have to. It was my fault.”

“I’m your teammate! I should have done something!”

“It was my plan,” Izuku pointed out. “It went bad. We failed. That’s my fault. That’s all there is to it.”

Uraraka scoffed. Her round face grew intense in a way Izuku hadn’t thought she was capable of. She stomped over to the seat in front of him and sat sideways in it. She folded her arms over the back of the seat and leaned forward into Izuku space.

“Sure, right,” she said, “And I—who was half of the team that just lost—had nothing to do with it?”

“My plan.”

“Midoriya, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I am, in fact, in the UA hero course! I also have this little thing called agency. I knew that your plan wasn’t going to work. I thought that Bakugou was smarter than you were giving him credit for. I thought we should stay together. I should have done something, explained my concerns, worked with you, even just refused to go through with your plan. But what did I do?”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing!” Uraraka exclaimed, throwing up her hands. “And more than that! I went up to deal with Iida, but really it was my responsibility to go after the objective no matter who was there. You at least managed to capture one person. Bakugou took me down so fast it wasn’t even funny. If I’m going to be a hero, that can’t happen. I failed this test just as much as you did.”

“Are you…arguing that I should blame you for this?” Izuku asked, twisting his neck to get a better fix on her face. 

“Yes!”

She had her cheeks puffed out with exasperation. But her eyes were serious and met Izuku’s evenly. It was clear that this wasn’t something that she was willing to give up on. Izuku didn’t know if he should be touched at the thought or annoyed at her stubbornness. 

“Okay, it’s your fault,” Izuku conceded, shrugging.

“Hey!” Uraraka protested. “Not like that! I mean, like, that it’s both our faults. And that, more importantly, both of us need to learn from this. We need to look at the ways that we messed up today and get better in the future.”

Izuku stared up at her, then finally felt his mouth twitching.

“Okay,” he said.

Uraraka gave him a look and asked, “Really?” 

“Really,” Izuku said. 

“Are you just saying that?” she asked.

Izuku considered that with a tilt of his head.

“No, I’m not just saying that,” he decided.

Uraraka broke out in a grin more reminiscent of the sun than a human face. Izuku felt a vague sense of second-hand embarrassment just at the pure genuineness displayed there.

“We’re agreed then, we’d do better next time?” Uraraka asked.

“Yeah, okay,” Izuku said.

- - -

He managed a good hour of light dozing before he was forced to wake back up at Aizawa appearing at the front of the classroom.

Izuku sat up.

“Midoriya, how good of you to join us,” Aizawa said, entirely without inflection.

Izuku tilted his head, then decided that this was probably one of those things that he wasn’t supposed to respond to. Izuku met his gaze because his other option was looking at Shinsou, who was watching Izuku from the corner of his eye, and he didn’t want to do that.

Aizawa let the moment continue on for a few seconds, then without any apparent concern turned his eyes on the rest of the class.

“Today we’re picking student representatives,” he said. “Figure it out.”

The class erupted into sound again.

Izuku sat there for a while until he was given a piece of paper, presumably to vote. He wrote down Uraraka, since she was the only one Izuku knew the name of and wasn’t in active conflict with.

He pulled open his textbooks and leafed through the content they’d learned yesterday until the class had quieted down.

In the end, Izuku had one vote and so did Uraraka, he looked back at her. She stared back, then burst into a bout of poorly disguised laughter. Okay, so apparently they’d voted for each other. A sign of poor communication but also objectively hilarious.

In the end it was the girl with the spiky black hair. Izuku didn’t know anything about her but she seemed fine. 

The rest of the classes went more normally. Izuku spent half the time zoning out and the other half skipping around the textbooks to see what content they’d cover over the rest of the year.

- - -

“Yo, Midoriya! You’re okay!”

“Dude, how are you?”

“What’d you say to Bakugou?!”

“That takedown of Iida was so slick! How’d you manage that?”

“Midoriya-kun, I apologize for the behavior of my teammate!”

Izuku stared at the pack of classmates who’d swarmed around him the instant he’d tried to walk to the cafeteria for lunch. They were staring at him with wide eyes.

“You know this is hero school, yeah? You’ll have to learn how to take injury a bit less seriously,” Izuku said, and it was only after the various alarmed looks crossed their faces that he realised maybe that was the sort of thing he should keep to himself.

Eh, whatever.

“Anyway, I’m fine,” he said, and walked out the door.

At the very least, he’d gained himself nearly two minutes of time without being pestered for answers. But inevitably someone appeared at his elbow. 

Izuku turned, then realised who it was.

“I need to talk to you,” Bakugou muttered, his hands in his pockets.

“That’s great,” Izuku said. “I’m going to get some lunch.”

“I need to talk to you, alone ,” Bakugou hissed.

“What if I don’t want to do that?” Izuku asked.

“Why not?” Bakugou demanded.

“Remember when you exploded me yesterday?”

“Since when do you care about that sort of thing?”

“Beats me,” Izuku answered.

“You’re such a fucking weirdo,” Bakugou said, rolling his eyes. He reached out and grabbed Izuku by the shoulder in an attempt to yank him into a side hallway. It achieved exactly nothing since Izuku saw it coming a mile away and braced himself, but still, for good measure he casually swept out a foot to trip Bakugou up as he continued onward.

He started humming absently as Bakugou took a few stomping steps to catch up, hands sparking.

“Careful, cameras,” Izuku informed him, tilting his head in their direction.

“I’m not going to attack you, shitface,” Bakugou snarled.

“Could’ve fooled me.”

“I actually just need to talk to you,” he said. “Alone. Come on, just follow me. If someone sees us together I’m going to get into even more shit with these idiot teachers.”

“I need lunch though,” Izuku said, gesturing toward the cafeteria.

Bakugou’s eyes narrowed.

“You bastard,” he muttered. “I’ll get you something from the vending machine, then, you’ll come talk to me.”

- - -

Once Izuku had extracted enough snacks from the vending machine that Bakugou’s hands were sparking dangerously and his eyebrow was doing the Thing, Izuku wandered over to sit in the weirdly shaped nook area on the ground floor underneath one of many stairwells of UA. Bakugou spent a few moments looking around and looking super suspicious before stomping over and sitting next to Izuku. He stole a bag of chips without any remorse whatsoever.

“So you get a huge talking to or what?” Izuku asked, mouth full of trail mix.

“Fuck off,” Bakugou muttered.

“So that’s a yes. That sort of thing happens when you explode somebody, or so I’ve been told,” Izuku said, nodding.  “What did you want to talk to me about, anyway?”

Bakugou spent nearly a minute just loudly eating. “When the hell did you become a real person, anyway?” he asked.

Izuku reached over and swatted Bakugou on the back of the head.

“Hey, fuck off,” Bakugou said. “You’ve been ignoring literally everyone for years. Teachers, classmates, me, your mom. But now you’ve got, like, a personality and shit. You’re talking back to Caterpillar. You’re asking questions. It’s like you switched back on overnight.”

“I always had a personality,” Izuku said.

“I know that,” Bakugou muttered. “But you only showed it when we were punching each other. The rest of the time you were like a fucking robot.”

“There wasn’t a point.”

“To being a person?”

“Sure.”

Bakugou scowled.

“You’re such a fucking Deku,” he muttered.

“Don’t call me that.”

Bakugou stilled, head tilted dangerously. There was one of those moments of complete stillness, and then he was tossing aside his bag of chips to grab Izuku by the shoulder and attempting to trap him in a lock. Normally Izuku would have been able to escape, but his attempts to keep his snacks from being crushed were enough of a distraction that Bakugou was able to beat Izuku with pure martial arts for once.

He ended up on his stomach, one arm locked behind his head and the other spread across the linoleum. On the other hand, his cheez-its were uncrushed, so he wasn’t that upset at the loss.

Izuku tried unsuccessfully to break out of the hold with a few exploratory movements, but Bakugou knew his tricks well enough. Of course, Izuku could have just called on One for All and punched his way out, but that felt like cheating.

“I can call you whatever the hell I want,” Bakugou hissed, still breathing hard.

“Wait, was that a pickup line?” Izuku asked.

Bakugou’s immediate reaction of sputtering fury was enough of an opening for Izuku to break his way out of the lock and grab Bakugou’s collar and slam him into the wall, Izuku used the moment of disorientation that caused to drag him into a more elegant wrist lock at let Izuku kneel above Bakugou and left more space between them. As soon as Bakugou realised that he wouldn’t be able to escape, his hands started sparking dangerously.

“Careful,” Izuku chided mildly. “If I show up somewhere with soot marks on my uniform, our ‘idiot teachers’ are going to start drawing conclusions pretty quick.”

Bakugou snarled but his quirk dialed down.

“Anyway, what was it that you wanted to talk to me about?” Izuku asked.

Bakugou’s teeth bared in a snarl, but it was obvious he wasn’t able to escape Izuku’s lock and instead he just twisted around to watch Izuku with an expression of waspish intelligence through the corner of his eye.

“I know what you’re hiding,” he announced.

Well, this was going to be good.

“You’re too fucking strong,” Bakugou said. “Like, you’re trying to keep it a secret but I know what human beings are capable of and you’re going beyond that. There’s something unnatural about you. And I figured it out. You must have contacted someone, made a deal or something. It was around the last year of middle school, you suddenly got way faster and stronger. You must have met someone with the quirk to give someone else super strength.”

Izuku stared at him.

“Holy shit,” Izuku muttered.

“So I’m right,” Bakugou muttered, face splitting in a self-satisfied grin.

“No. Well—sort of,” Izuku said, “I cannot believe you’re the one to figure this out. Someone else gave me super strength. What the hell?”

Bakugou made an attempt to escape the lock, which Izuku stopped without much thought.

“This solves so many problems,” Izuku said wonderingly.

“What? No. Fuck you!” Bakugou snapped. “I’m trying to blackmail you.”

“What?”

“I’ll fucking tell everyone that you’re a lying cheat and are using someone else’s power to be a hero if you don’t tell them that everything’s fine between us and that yesterday was your fault and there’s no reason for me to get kicked out.”

Izuku paused.

“You literally exploded me,” Izuku pointed out.

“You were talking out your ass and deserved it,” Bakugou muttered.

“Dude, what if I, like, died or something?” Izuku asked, though honestly there was something comforting about how absolutely consistent Bakugou was about not giving a shit about Izuku’s health and wellbeing.

“You’re fine, don’t be such a baby,” Bakugou snapped.

Izuku forced himself to return to the topic at hand.

“Anyway, that’s terrible blackmail material,” Izuku said. “You don’t have any proof beyond me being strong and even if it was true, it’s not like it’s illegal. It’ll just help me because people will stop treating me like I’m made out of glass all the time.”

Bakugou paused, thinking.

“Dammit, you’re right,” he muttered.

“I’m always right,” Izuku answered.

That was enough of a provocation that Bakugou finally lost control and used a strategic spark from his quirk to get Izuku to let go of Bakugou’s shoulder and he was able to break the hold. Then their fight descended into a series of increasingly childish and ineffective jabs.

There was the sound of someone entering the stairwell above them and they finally separated, uniforms askew and hair thoroughly ruffled.

They paused for a few moments as there was the sound of someone walking down a flight of stairs and then exiting to another floor. As soon as they were alone again, Izuku started talking.

“Anyway, why would I want you expelled?” he asked. 

Bakugou paused.

“You said it yourself, I’m ‘useful, but not important’,” Bakugou muttered, scowling.

Izuku blinked.

“Useful,” he repeated. “So why would I want you to leave? You’re like the only person who’s ever treated me like a threat.”

Bakugou squinted. “And that’s a good thing?” he asked.

“Obviously,” Izuku said.

“So, you’ll tell the teachers that we’re fine and there’s no reason for us to get separated?” he asked suspiciously.

“Yeah,” Izuku said, easily.

Bakugou finally dropped his defensive posture and threw up his hands.

“You’re a fucking alien,” Bakugou concluded.

“Rude,” Izuku muttered, cautiously dropping his guard and returning to his cheez-its.

“It’s not rude. It’s true,” Bakugou answered.

“That is very often not the case,” Izuku countered.

Bakugou just made a vague noise of acknowledgement and started eating his chips again.

They managed a few minutes of silence before the fire alarm went off.

- - -

Bakugou insisted on straightening both of their blazers and ties before they were seen by anyone else, which was deeply funny, so when they emerged into the yard they looked perfectly respectable and unsuspicious—except for the fact that Bakugou had apparently been specifically banned from interacting with Izuku without adult supervision.

So, Izuku was immediately the focus of a number of incredulous stares when he and Bakugou casually joined the larger group of their classmates out in the yard. At least Shinsou was far enough away that he hopefully hadn’t noticed.

He comfortably used his years of experience to ignore them all and continued to eat his chips.

Once the whole alarm thing was finally dealt with, they returned to the classroom.

- - -

Aizawa announced that they were going to be doing some kind of special rescue training and they had to change into their costumes again. Thankfully, Izuku’s was ready to be worn again so he didn’t have to resort to his UA gym uniform.

He loaded onto the bus with the rest of the students and let his head thunk against the window.

He was the only one wearing his helmet, but that was fine. It was nice being able to watch everyone without them knowing. Not so much because he was being discrete so much as it meant no one tried to talk to him when he accidentally made eye contact.

There was a spirited discussion about quirks that started almost immediately, but Izuku could see his classmates staring between Bakugou and him, trying to get a read on what was going on. Izuku wished something else interesting would happen and the attention of the class would shift to someone else.

But that wish immediately proved useless as one of his classmates—the redhead whose costume didn’t have a shirt for some reason—smoothly slid into the seat next to Izuku with a wide grin.

“Hey there, Midoriya, right?” he asked. His teeth were sharp, like a cartoon shark. “I’m Kirishima Eijiro, nice to meet ‘cha.”

“Hi,” Izuku said, thinking about what strategy he might use to get into another seat. “Are the teeth related to your quirk or did you file them to look like that?”

Kirishima paused. There was a loud snort from somewhere behind them.

“Um, no,” he said. “They, um, grew in like this.”

“Okay,” Izuku said, turning his face toward the window and trying to project the air of someone who’d just finished a conversation. It didn’t work.

“So, you know Bakugou?” he asked, at least he’d lowered his voice a little.

Izuku immediately hated this. He’d literally told Shinsou yesterday that he didn’t hide things on purpose, but he also desperately didn’t want to even approach getting into this with someone who he’d just met. He knew that he had to say something, but couldn’t think of anything that would let him get out of it. 

“We went to the same middle school! And if you’ve got questions about me then ask them to my face, dipshit!” Bakugou shouted from across the room, which cut Izuku’s Gordian knot quite cleanly. At least Izuku could depend on Bakugou’s asshole-ishness.

“Bakugou,” Aizawa said from where Izuku had thought he was sleeping toward the front of the bus.

Bakugou instantly started twitching, but managed to shut his mouth for once as he stared down the teacher. After about thirty seconds of weirdly tense silence, Aizawa settled back in his chair.

Bakugou’s hands were clenched, but for once he wasn’t even sparking in irritation, which was remarkably self-controlled for him.

Kirishima gave Izuku a wide-eyed glance.

“Well, you heard him. He’s the one to ask,” Izuku said with perhaps too much enthusiasm.

Kirishima’s mouth opened, but he actually did set his shoulders and walk over to Bakugou, which meant he was braver than most people. Though perhaps that was to be expected of a student of a hero school.

Izuku settled back into his seat, staring out the window. He had more important things to think about.

Bakugou had figured out that Izuku couldn’t be as strong as he was without outside intervention.

That was interesting. That was fascinating. That probably meant that Izuku hadn’t been working nearly as hard on getting around his quirk’s limitations as he should have.

Then again, he’d basically given up on the whole idea literally years ago, just accepted that it was easier to ignore people than to correct them.

But Bakugou had figured it out.

Well, not exactly, but at least he’d come to a conclusion different from what anyone else ever had. 

Why Bakugou? Because he hated Izuku a lot and had a particular reason to want to believe that Izuku was as strong as he was due to an outside force rather than Izuku being strong in his own right. Would he be able to replicate that with other people?

Izuku’s quirk convinced people that he didn’t have a quirk.

Or, more specifically, it led people to come to the conclusion, from little to no evidence, that he must not have a quirk. It didn’t mess with memories, just conclusions. And now Izuku was realizing that it didn’t necessarily force people to believe that he was a completely unaltered human, either.

Should he start telling people this? Would telling them that someone had used a quirk on him to make him stronger work? There would be questions. He’d need some sort of explanation, because otherwise people would start wanting to know who exactly had done it.

He spent the rest of the bus ride staring at nothing and coming up with plans.

- - -

The USJ was enormous. Izuku honestly hadn’t been expecting much, since he’d been tuned to the underwhelming field trips he’d gone on in the past, but this was nothing like the zoos and museums he’d visited before.

They were greeted by Pro Hero Thirteen, who Izuku recognized immediately. She was well known for her rescue operations. Pretty cool that they could get her to be a guest lecturer. Izuku wondered if she’d gone to UA. A lot of well known heroes had, and it made sense that UA would bring their graduates back to teach the next generation of heroes.

Izuku looked back at Thirteen, she’d said something about…quirks being dangerous? No shit.

Izuku’s attention was grabbed by Aizawa, who’d turned to look into the plaza below them. Some aspect of how he was standing instantly told Izuku something was wrong.

Izuku took a few steps forward, and saw something that brought him immediately to a stop.

That was that warp villain. And in front of the enormous crowd of what Izuku was pretty sure were even more villains who were walking into the USJ through his teleportation quirk was that Handy guy.

Those were the villains that had tried to recruit him when he’d gone out as The Black Bandit.

Ah.

Not great.