Chapter Text
Izuku’s eyes were shut tight as echoing whispers played over the earbuds.
“I was born with lightning in my heels, set a spur onto my ankle, bit a horse under the steel. And I lost hope when I was so young…”
Two weeks. Two weeks since he’d exposed himself, and he was still processing. All of his homework was turned in. He’d come in after school was closed to take his final exams, passed them with flying colors, and now his mom was finishing up all of the paperwork to start his homeschooling.
“Had an angel on my shoulder, but the devil always won. And, oh, I lost it all when I got high, and I can feel you even now, breaking horses in the sky. I can taste you in my rage, and in the sweat upon my brow.”
“I think you’re really painting me into something I’m not,” Gremlin whispered and Izuku took a deep breath in, held it, and exhaled.
“And I went home, chasing twisters in the canyon, my cathedral is the badlands. Dust and devils on my conscience, come back to me, darling.”
“Then what are you?” Izuku asked softly.
He didn’t feel like he wasn’t himself nowadays, and that was perhaps the scariest part. He shouldn’t be himself. He should feel off, like a latex glove that was just a bit too loose on the hand, wrinkling at the fingertips and pulling at the joint between the thumb and index finger.
“So kiss me now, this whiskey on my breath. Feel the lives that I have taken, what little soul that I have left. And oh, my God, I’ll take you to the grave, the only love I’ve ever known, the soul I ever saved.”
“You haven’t killed anyone,” Gremlin pointed out diplomatically.
“There’s lots of ways to take a life,” Izuku replied.
“And I went home, chasing twisters in the canyon, my cathedral is the badlands, dust and devils on my conscience. Come back to me, darling.”
“I cannot tell if your response is deep and philosophical or foolish.”
“Isn’t all philosophy foolish?” Izuku shot back.
“And I’ve been waiting for so long now. I can feel you in the hollow, and every cloud on the horizon. Come back to me, darling…”
“Look, you made it to all the oh’s, can we stop the drama and get back to what we were working on?”
“You don’t know the first thing about forging blueprints,” Izuku shot back, but opened his eyes nonetheless and focused on the computer screen in front of him.
“I do know the first thing about building things,” Gremlin pointed out and Izuku pursed his lips in irritation as he grabbed his tablet.
“This is extremely different from blacksmithing, Grem. There’s actual electrical wiring.”
“I have been paying attention,” Gremlin sniffed. “Enough to know you put a 14 gauge wire where a 12 gauge should be, and if you submit that, even the stupidest of novices would know you flipped your hot and neutral wires and you’re going to blow the whole thing up with that charge. Where did you even get the idea to swap out a kyber crystal for an arc reactor?”
“Insanity, probably. I’m just thankful they made a novelization of Iron Man 2,” Izuku replied with a shrug as he relabeled the wiring. “Now I just need to figure out how to downsize it and recreate it in this world.”
“And lock a solid beam of radiated photons in place,” Gremlin added smugly, reminding Izuku of just why he’d been putting this off. Summer break was going to be a nightmare.
“Don’t remind me,” Izuku replied with a groan and slammed his head onto the desk. “I think I’m approaching this all wrong. The arc reactor only works in Marvel because the Tesseract exists in Marvel, but it doesn’t exist here, so if I just made a new element, it would probably not even work here, but I need this lightsaber to make sense, and a mystical crystal is going to make less sense than a new element capable of turning the entire planet to clean energy created by a fifteen year old child who miraculously does not want to go to college for bettering the planet.”
“Have you considered simply googling a theoretical lightsaber and how it would be powered?” Gremlin asked, rather patronizingly, but all Izuku could do was stare blankly at the laptop screen, because he was right.
“... But I want to make an arc reactor,” he said, before he could stop himself, and Gremlin let out a hiss of irritation.
“I don’t think irradiated photons are going to work. You’d just poison yourself. Look up theoretical lightsabers.”
“You’re so annoying.”
“I am the only common sense you have.”
With a sigh, Izuku pulled up Chrome and let out a full blown pout as he navigated to the search bar and looked it up.
“...Huh. Actually possible.”
“Theoretically possible, but we don’t have the means of powering it yet.”
“...Plasma and magnetic fields?”
“That is what it says, yes.”
“...20 fucking megawatts?”
“You’d better figure out how to make an arc reactor.”
With a strangled cry, Izuku slammed his face into the keyboard and let out a quiet screech, little more than a dog whistle of a noise as Mom poked her head into the living room.
“What is it, baby?”
“I have to discover the new element from Iron Man 2 for aesthetics,” Izuku complained.
“Have you considered worrying about the aesthetics of dirty laundry all over your room before the aesthetics of a Nobel Peace Prize next to your week old socks?”
“Mom, please, I’m in a crisis. ”
“You have been in a crisis over this thing for two weeks, you can stand to go clean your room,” Mom sniffed, and Gremlin snickered. “Gremlin agrees with me.”
“You don’t even know what he’s saying!” Izuku protested. “And the One Ring of Power should not be the person you want to agree with you!”
“Sure he should be,” Mom replied airily. “He’s got more self preservation than you. You have to go meet that teacher in an hour. Go get your laundry picked up, please.”
“But how would I protect myself from the heat?” Izuku muttered under his breath as he scrolled through the page.
“Izuku.” Oh, Mom had a mad voice.
“I’m going!” Izuku shut the laptop and climbed to his feet so he could dart into the bedroom and start picking up his laundry.
“Daja Kisubo,” Gremlin hummed, and Izuku groaned.
“That’s magic, I can’t recreate that.”
“You can study it. Isn’t magic just science we don’t understand yet?”
“If that was true, I would have figured you out by now,” Izuku grumbled as he viciously picked up the dirty clothes all over his floor and tossed them into the hamper. “...Is this shirt clean?”
“Smell it. And just because my magic doesn’t make sense doesn’t mean other magic can’t make sense. The rules of Pierce are not the rules of Tolkien, are they?”
“The magic of living metal would entirely subsist off whatever energy dictates my quirk, and we have no idea what is going on with my quirk,” Izuku pointed out. “Objectively, my quirk has no basis in science whatsoever, not even theoretical, and it will continue to not make sense for many years to come. So studying something made directly out of magic is just not going to work. At least the arc reactor has some scientific basis.”
“I told you to smell the shirt.”
“It’s dirty,” Izuku said, without even a whiff, and tossed it into the hamper.
“And it wouldn’t hurt to try. If you can recreate Daja’s metal, the uses would be numerous.”
“ Or I could go with a force field.”
“That would affect the grip.”
“...Listen, if I wanted you to argue with me all the damn time, I would have named you Katsuki.”
“Do you have any other options?”
“I can argue with Mom.”
“You can try. ”
“You don’t have to make it sound so ominous.”
“I would rather attempt a dragon sickness intervention for the entire line of Thror at once than argue with your mother.”
“You need to stop being funny. It’s not cute.”
“Good.”
“You’re obnoxious,” Izuku said with a sigh and tossed the last dirty sock into the hamper. “Why do I even have to train with this guy, anyways?”
“Because you are a risk to not only Japan, but the entire world, and you have me.”
“I’m more of a risk to the lifespan of a washing machine,” Izuku muttered darkly.
“Also, your uncle is a long range fighter, with limited close combat skills, but this man is all about close combat, which you’re going to be relying on excessively.”
“I just really don’t like the idea of having to prove myself to anyone. Is that so bad?”
“You don’t have to prove yourself to anyone.”
“Yeah, you would say that.” Izuku collapsed facedown on the bed and let a muffled scream get swallowed up by his pillow.
“We could just eat h---”
“No,” Izuku hissed.
“You didn’t let us eat the other teacher. I will take this one as an apology.”
“You don’t even eat. ”
“It’s about the satisfaction.”
“Can’t you just ask to eat Jeff Bezos like a normal person? ”
“Who is that?”
“Oh, you’ll pay attention to voltage and circuitry but not politics.”
“What use do you have for politics?”
“You’d be surprised at how much they’re needed for heroics.”
“Morality was always a political issue. I’m not surprised.”
Izuku paused as he mulled over that thought. It was a moral duty, wasn’t it? But… Morals were different for everyone, weren’t they? What did morals even look like for Gremlin?
“Do for others what they will not do for you.”
“...There are so many layers to that that I do not want to unpack right now,” Izuku said and dropped to his knees to reach into his bed and pull out a pastel pink backpack, sporting an impressive set of bunny ears and “BUNNY” printed across the zippered pocket in big, bold, English letters. “We need to get going.”
“Oh, you will actually use the bag of holding now?”
“Aizawa knows, so why not?” Izuku retorted with a shrug as he unzipped the bag and made his way to the desk to scoop the lightsaber that was already made and the blasters into the formless black hole. “What should we take?”
“The boom.”
“I’m not making a habit of using a thermal detonator. We need the stuff I actually need in combat.”
“I vote for explosions.”
“The day you get opposable thumbs is the day this becomes a democracy.” Lucy’s cordial, Jack Sparrow’s compass, the time turner, (you never know when you need to ruin the space time continuum), the Dresden bracelet belonged on his wrist, you couldn’t go wrong with a Swiss army knife…
Izuku’s eyes fell on the line of swords on the wall opposite his bed.
Well…
“Excalibur…”
“It’s huge; wait until I get a little more muscle.”
“The Sword of Truth is just asking for trouble.”
“Well, obviously. ”
“Scalpel?”
“Rapier isn’t my style.”
“Is stabbing people even what you want to be doing?”
“My uncle literally shoots people with live ammunition. I’m just keeping on the family tradition.”
“Needle is small and doesn’t have any curses attached to it.”
“That entire book series is a curse.”
“Arya survived, did she not?”
“That’s not reassuring. She’s got anxiety. I think.”
“Coinspinner.”
Izuku paused, his hand brushing over the white dice engraved into the hilt of the blade.
“It’s a risk. It could just leave and not come back.”
“It’s fickle enough to like a master such as you.”
“Was that a drag or a compliment?”
“Heads a drag, tails a compliment.”
“Hilarious,” Izuku deadpanned as his hand danced over the hilt.
“You shouldn’t have brought the thing out, really. It could disappear at any time and cause some real damage.”
“Same thing could be said about you. ”
“If I could wander off at will, the books would have ended before they even began.”
“You know what I mean,” Izuku shot back as he memorized the dice set deep into the hilt. It looked like an ordinary sword, but it certainly had a mind of its own.
“I think you like it when things have minds of their own,” Gremlin teased and Izuku hummed, not even bothering with a comeback for that one.
“If you want to claim him, claim him. Just understand he is what he is.”
“You certainly aren’t what you are,” Izuku replied as his fingers brushed over the leather bindings and trailed up to trace over the curve of the pommel.
“It is certainly interesting you chose the Coinspinner to bring out.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Have I ever elaborated?”
“No.”
What had even possessed Izuku to bring a sword of power out? Did he have some kind of fascination with harbingers of the doom of man? Granted, it wasn’t Coinspinner’s duty to bring about the apocalypse. Not like Gremlin. His primary function in life was to simply cause problems, and gods, Izuku liked the whole concept of it.
“Just take the sword, Izuku. This is painful to watch.”
“Oh, shut up,” Izuku snapped, but he grasped the sheathed sword all the same and tucked it into his bag.
To be fair, the sword hadn’t left yet. Technically, Izuku had been its master for a month now, though…
If he really was the damned thing’s master, how the hell had his life just imploded?
This felt like a fae deal more than anything. Technically, Izuku was insanely lucky. Guaranteed a spot in one of the most prestigious hero courses in the world, taken out of a school where he was routinely bullied and harassed, given an underground pro as a personal trainer, somehow got Katsuki to keep his mouth shut after trauma dumping on him, of all people, but this sure as hell was a roundabout way to bring him luck. A really roundabout way.
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Izuku,” Gremlin said in a singsong voice, and Izuku hissed down at him.
“I’d rather the luck look a little more cinematic than this.”
“Just make sure you keep track of all the eldritch entities ruining your life.”
“Very funny, Grem,” Izuku muttered and zipped the gaping hole into nothing shut. “I’m not even going to use him. I have a lightsaber.”
“As a blade, he has little use anyways. As a magic item? The uses go farther than you could ever begin to understand with your little human brain.”
“That’s great, Grem. Ready to go?”
“We have one hour.”
“Yeah, but I want to go now. ”
“Are you avoiding the lightsaber?”
“No.”
“Liar.”
Izuku just rolled his eyes and slung the backpack over his shoulder before stepping into the meadow and out into the abandoned warehouse. Really, Aizawa had issues. This seemed like the worst place to train. Where were the mats? It was dusty as hell.
“You should have told Mother you left.”
“I don’t even call her Mother, can you stop that?” Izuku pulled out his phone all the same and shot her a text.
There was something peculiar about existing in an abandoned warehouse. The air was hot and muggy, Tokyo in the summer, and you could just sit and watch the dust dance in the shafts of sunlight that peered in through the broken window panes. It was uniquely still, in a way that seemed almost wrong, because while you could still hear the bustle of the city outside, it felt like you were in your own little bubble, existing independently of the chaos.
“You did not bring water.”
“I have an hour; I can go get a bottle.”
“Snacks.”
“I don’t need snacks. Mom’s cooking.”
“You need snacks.”
“You’re such a pain,” Izuku said with a sigh and tightened the backpack straps before stepping out into the open air.
It was a quick trip to the corner store, with his baseball cap pulled low over his face to hide his identity as he drifted through the aisles to pick up a cold bottle of water, an equally cold bottle of green tea, and a pack of pocky, just for good measure. The cashier was a bored high school girl, chewing on some gum and popping it obnoxiously as she twirled her hair around one finger. She didn’t even bother to meet Izuku’s eyes, and for that, he was grateful. He’d had enough attention with this whole debacle to last a lifetime. The Quirkless stress manifestation was now known across the nation, and everyone knew what his face looked like. He’d been “saved” by All Might, though in Izuku’s opinion, he’d done most of the saving. All Might had just shown up and flexed for the cameras a bit.
The knowledge of All Might’s secret was still weighing on him. What was he even doing in Musutafu to begin with? It was all very questionable, as far as Izuku was concerned. Of all the places to pick, here was where he went? Izuku couldn’t quantify that. He was still sticking around, too, and that was making Izuku nervous.
As he shuffled his way back to the warehouse, his phone pinged with another text. With a sigh, Izuku pulled it out and checked it.
Tosh: What are you doing today
Izuku pursed his lips thoughtfully as he thought about his reply.
Zuzu: Uncle is sending me to work on my quirk with someone.
Tosh: Mom’s got like three straight days of meetings at UA for planning the next semester and asked if I want to come.
Zuzu: owo
Tosh: I’ll be in Musutafu… If ya wanna like. Meet. Or something.
Izuku thought about it for a second as his feet left marks in the dust on the warehouse floor. On one hand, internet friends were internet friends, and he never met up with them if he could help it. On the other hand, it was Tosh . He wasn’t just an internet friend. He was Tosh . So perhaps…
Well. His mom was friends with his surrogate father. It was a little unavoidable, wasn’t it? They’d bump into each other sooner or later.
Zuzu: I can ask my uncle if I can tag along with him to UA. He’s got the meetings, too.
Tosh: Cool.
Zuzu: Cool.
Zuzu: Did you read Ranger’s Apprentice yet?
Tosh: Yeah I started it. Kinda surprising, actually.
Zuzu: What’s surprising?
Tosh: There’s zero magic or cool shit. You only ever care about a book if it gives you ideas for support gear.
Izuku paused for a second as he thought about that. Was that true? Wow, he really was predictable. That was almost embarrassing.
Zuzu: It’s the attention to detail, though. You can tell Flanagan put a Lot Of Thought into the whole thing.
Zuzu: I can appreciate attention to detail. Right down to the fighting styles with dual knives and physics that goes into it, and the making of a recurve bow. Idk. I like that sort of thing.
Tosh: Lol don’t you ever just enjoy the story
Zuzu: If I didn’t enjoy the story, I would be far more forgiving for bad prose exchanged for intricate world building.
Tosh: You’re so weird, dude.
Zuzu: Guilty as charged.
Zuzu: I’d rather a writer describe the things from their imagination with as much love and care as they describe the scar under a character’s eye. It’s just not as interesting or real when they are just using writing as a vehicle for a dnd campaign with a control freak DM.
Tosh: Guess so. Have you figured out the arc reactor problem yet?
Zuzu: never mention that again
Tosh: That bad?
Zuzu: My initial hypothesis was wrong. I would need 20 megawatts at minimum powering not only PLASMA but also a strong enough magnetic field to hold IN the plasma AND a forcefield or some kind of metal that wouldn’t burn the hell out of my hand, and that kind of metal does not exist.
Tosh: Sounds like you are in way over your head.
Zuzu: I WILL have a lightsaber.
Tosh: It’s very you to create the future of clean energy so you can have a toy.
Zuzu: Please stop making fun of me. I’m very serious. Lightsabers are gonna be the new wave.
Tosh: And you only have to make an entirely new element pulled straight through the pages of a comic book to do it.
Zuzu: If Jules Vern can create a submarine and advance naval and eventual nuclear warfare for the next several hundred years because he wanted to write about a fucking squid, I can change the future of clean energy in the name of having a damned lightsaber.
Tosh: Whatever you say, lol.
Tosh: Just don’t let it blow up in your face.
In hindsight, Izuku was going to have to talk Asuma into letting him tell Power Loader his secret. The living metal and arc reactor would be so much easier to recreate if he had access to his lab and didn’t have to deal with an excess of questions. And, didn’t every hero need a support hero in the background? Izuku could have Power Loader. He deserved Power Loader, since he was bereft of David Shield.
Zuzu: It’s not going to blow up.
Tosh: You’re making plasma. It’s going to blow up.
Zuzu: shhhhhh
Locking his phone and slipping it back into his pocket, Izuku hauled himself onto a crate and took a long sip of cold green tea. Aizawa should be here soon, and Izuku was not looking forward to the whole ordeal.
Like clockwork, there was a scuff, and Izuku looked up as Aizawa entered the warehouse, hands stuck in the pockets of his coveralls and shoulders presumably hunched under that voluminous scarf.
“Hey,” Izuku called and screwed the cap back on before he slipped off the crate.
Aizawa simply grunted and looked around the derelict mess. One foot nudged aside a broken piece of wood and he twisted his lips to the left as he seemed to consider the options of the warehouse.
“...I’m here?” Izuku said awkwardly.
“Noticed,” Aizawa replied curtly. “First thing’s first. What did you bring?”
Izuku shrugged off the backpack and unzipped it before spilling everything onto the floor.
“Uhm… Okay, so there’s Jango Fett’s blasters, they sound cool and look smooth, Count Dooku’s lightsaber, since it looks classy, Jack Sparrow’s compass, because you never know when you need something like that, Lucy’s cordial, that’s a no-brainer, Hermione’s time-turner, I went with the one from the novels, not The Cursed Child or whatever it was, just because the lack of limitations is just asking for trouble, and then there’s Coinspinner, gives you unbelievable luck, it’s probably never going to leave the bag of holding…”
“It gives you luck?” Aizawa interrupted, and Izuku sighed.
“Yes. It was designed to start wars, but…”
“Don’t you have enough items designed to start wars?”
“It’s not going to start a war here; it’s removed from its purpose. The only real problem is it’s super fickle and might leave when it feels like it.”
“And you don’t see how that can cause a problem?” Aizawa asked, and Izuku shrugged.
“No one’s going to start a war over a sword. This is the 22nd century.”
“I can think of a few people willing to go to war over a sword.”
“It’s really not an issue. Gremlin hasn’t been a problem, has he?”
“That remains to be seen,” Aizawa replied cryptically as he surveyed Izuku with a level of dubiousness Izuku had never seen on a single other human being before.
“I’m actually fine,” he assured him.
“I’m sure,” Aizawa responded, and then came an awkward silence as Izuku struggled to find what to say. How did you even tell a hero that actually it was fine that a fourteen year old child was running around with the One Ring of Power and calling him Gremlin and making friends with him?
“You don’t,” Gremlin hissed, and Izuku tsked at him in irritation, because that was not helping the situation.
“You don’t trust me,” Izuku finally said, and Aizawa leaned up against the wall, arms crossed as he studied Izuku.
“Would you trust you? Because from where I’m standing, you’re freshly fourteen, a middle schooler that’s been abused and bullied by your peers, who’s been hiding the fact that you were technically Quirkless online just so you could make some friends, with world ending powers, and the One Ring of Power hanging around your neck.”
Izuku’s hand pressed into the scar on his chest he never bothered to heal. It was ugly raised skin, still pink and a perfect imprint of his own hubris. Even if Gremlin one day left him, Izuku would always have this scar to remind himself of the very real consequences of his power. He wasn’t going to forget it.
“You did a background check on me?” He asked.
“Yeah. All your social media, your Dark Web dives, forum posts from when you were ten.”
“...Oh.”
That was beyond creepy. Had Izuku ever been cancel-worthy? He couldn’t recall.
“When you were thirteen years old, you made a hashtag,” Aizawa continued. “Do you remember it?”
Izuku’s brain whirred, trying to remember just what shit he was up to at thirteen years old. What hashtag?
“Stay with me tonight,” Aizawa added when he saw the confusion on Izuku’s face. “Legislation was passed stripping legal protections for Quirkless students. It was no longer classed as quirk discrimination for them to be bullied at school, but rather fell under other bullying, which had far less harsh restrictions on punishment for the school itself and instead diverted those punishments to the individual students, which was dealt with by the individual schools, not the law. It closed the options of investigating schools.”
Oh. Izuku’s other anonymous burner account. He forgot about that.
“It didn’t take off,” he said quietly. “Just trended for a minute and then they forgot about it because there was no face behind it to take credit.”
“All the accounts were anonymous, weren’t they?” Aizawa asked, and Izuku shrugged.
“Most Quirkless people are anonymous online if they’re going to admit to being Quirkless. It’s bad enough outside. No one wants to get doxxed.”
He missed that account. It got suspended eventually. He was in a fight on a daily basis. Apparently, calling someone a “quirk” was a slur, and he got locked out ages ago, never bothered to come back. He’d been pretty popular, too. It felt like a lie, now. Back then, though… Being Quirkless was largely a social descriptor. There was nothing more to it. It felt like he was Quirkless. Living day in and day out, hiding who he was, surrendering to the constant vitriol and hatred and pain.
But he wasn’t really Quirkless. He could back out at any time. Real Quirkless people couldn’t do that. Sure, Izuku would then have to submit to all manners of horrors, lose everything, join his father in a disappearing person, but… But he could back out. Real Quirkless people didn’t have that luxury, and he couldn’t help but feel awful.
Even if in every sense of the word, he was Quirkless.
“Stay with me tonight was a call to stop suicide,” Aizawa said, and Izuku shrunk down in on himself.
“Yeah.” He wasn’t sure where they were getting with this conversation.
“Do you know the success rates of a real stress manifestation?” Aizawa asked, and Izuku swallowed.
“There’s a seventy percent chance the subject will survive.” He’d looked it up, after everything was said and done. There was almost no information on the phenomenon, just a single study done ten years ago. It was incredibly weird.
“Do you want to know why there’s that thirty percent error window?” Aizawa continued, and Izuku looked at the ground.
“Stats didn’t say what happens. I assume the quirk is too much for a body that was never supposed to manifest one.”
“No. You should never trust statistics. They always leave something out. The thirty percent is the people whose bodies can’t take the stress any longer, and the manifestation pushes them over the edge. It’s not illegal. Everything designed to pull out the quirk is illegal, but the act in and of itself is not. Much like lynching in America was tried as a murder, not a hate crime.”
“...Why didn’t I find that?” Izuku asked, and Aizawa pursed his lips.
“Because the world operates based on what’s reported. And if major media outlets, even smaller publications don’t report, and it’s not discussed on social media, what are search engines going to show you?”
“...Why are you telling me this?”
“I get why your family made you pretend to be Quirkless. You have a power that’s not something that should be present in a vulnerable six year old. But you’re going to need to remember. If what happened hadn't happened, very often stress manifestations are caused by parents or peers. That’s why they aren’t really discussed. I’m not sure you would have made it through school without someone giving it a shot. So if you’re going to keep playing this as ‘Quirkless kid had a stress manifestation’, you need to know what that generally entails.”
“...Is that why Asuma never explained what…” Come to think of it, Asuma hadn’t talked about it, had he? Izuku had only ever known about late blooming as a potential option for him, once he could more easily defend himself, or if he accidentally exposed himself in front of someone. Stress manifestations had never even been brought up.
“That’s not the kind of thing you discuss with a child, Midoriya.”
Gremlin was silent. Izuku kind of wished he’d say something.
“...Why were you talking about the hashtag?” Izuku asked after a long pause, and Aizawa pursed his lips.
“To see your face.”
Izuku’s brows furrowed in confusion and he tilted his head at Aizawa.
“What?”
“Some people can write very well about things they will never experience. Some people write even better about things they know about intimately. I need to know what kind of writer you are.”
Izuku’s eyes dropped and he had a brief flashback to what he said to Katsuki in his meadow.
“I don’t think you need to know about that,” he said after an uncomfortable pause.
“Your entire well being is my job on more levels than one, problem child. I do, actually, need to know about that.”
“It’s not actually suicidal ideations it’s just…”
“Logic?” Aizawa challenged, and Izuku realized how incredibly hollow and lifeless that sounded. For all his love of books and creation and dreams given life, logic was a very, very poor excuse.
“I think we should just start training,” Izuku finally said, and Aizawa arched a brow.
“Avoidance is noted and respected. Have you tested whether or not you can leave a living being alone in the meadow?”
“Yes. A spider did fine, so it doesn’t just stop existing when I leave.”
“Have you ever tested how fast you can move?” Aizawa asked, and Izuku shook his head no. “How many times you can jump before you get exhausted? Distance limitations?”
“Beyond distance, nothing, and distance is pretty immaterial. I can go anywhere I can see, I’m pretty sure. I once sent myself to New York from a picture on a postcard when I was ten.”
That had been a bad day. Mom had nearly killed him, and Asuma was ready to help her hide the body.
“You went to… Okay. So if you have access to Google street view, you can just go anywhere. This is fine.” Aizawa turned aside and rubbed a hand over his face, and Izuku got the impression that absolutely nothing was fine.
“Do you have cloaking for your library?”
“No, I just made a second pocket dimension,” Izuku replied cheerfully, and Aizawa stared at him for a moment before blinking hard and rubbing his eyes.
“That’s great. How are your books going to charge if they’re not in the pocket dimension?”
“They’re still in the pocket dimension. Just. Really in the pocket dimension. Like, deep in there. They actually charge in two weeks now! Wild, huh?”
“And you’re absolutely sure that won’t rip the fabric of reality?” Aizawa asked dryly, and Izuku shrugged.
“Funny thing about reality ripping is you wouldn’t really be able to tell, anyways. Depending on which book you’re reading, of course, and there were no specific rules that the pocket couldn’t be put in another pocket from the book I took it out of.”
Aizawa stared at Izuku, and Izuku blinked at him innocently.
“Do you want to quit yet?” Izuku asked bluntly.
“No,” Aizawa grit out.
“Wait.”
“You really don’t want to be here, do you?”
“I just don’t like being treated like a criminal when I’ve really done nothing wrong.”
“You went full blown vigilante on live television.”
“Beyond that.”
“And if you were a criminal, I wouldn’t be teaching you. If you’re going to be a problem child, be a problem child that actually uses some brain power, because I know you have it.”
“Technically speaking, the first heroes were criminals serving out their probations in America. We just gentrified it,” Izuku corrected with a sniff.
“And that was one hundred and fifty years ago. This is now. You couldn’t be a hero if you so much as got detained by police.”
“And that’s bullshit,” Izuku muttered. “Statistically, ‘scarier’ mutation quirks are---”
“Disproportionately detained by police, yes, I know. The world’s fucked up, you’re mad, you don’t even want to be a hero, you’re young and full of ideals, I get it. So I genuinely cannot figure out why you didn’t just reach into a Men In Black novel and just…” Aizawa trailed off, and Izuku arched an eyebrow.
“Erased yours and Nezu’s memory and implanted a new one? As if that would stop Nezu. He’d figure out the discrepancies. I can’t do everything. I still have to exist here.”
“And if you had to wipe someone’s memory?” Aizawa challenged.
“I wouldn’t talk to you about it.”
“Heroes are the checks for police, anyways,” Aizawa pointed out. “Japan has a low case of mutation discrimination. We’re not America.”
“I’m aware,” Izuku drawled.
“Why are you actually doing this?” Aizawa asked, and Izuku’s eyes drifted down to his own chest.
“There’s nothing more conforming to the status quo than being a hero, Eraserhead. Checks. Balances. Control. Oversight committees. Orders. When you’re a hero, your job is to hold up the status quo. That’s probably the perfect place for someone like me to hide. Other people can rock the boat, but I’d just end up blowing it up, and then everyone’s drowning.”
The words sounded hollow to Izuku. That wasn’t what he really wanted to say. But the reality of the thing was that that was the logical choice, the logical reasoning. It was what made sense, for what he was and what he was doing.
“Would you believe me if I told you you’ve made me hate liars?” Gremlin asked, and Izuku swallowed harshly.
“Is that the answer you’re sticking with?” Aizawa asked, and Izuku scoffed before looking aside.
“Dreams are for the people who could never know what the stars look like, Eraserhead. That’s the whole point of dreaming. Can we start training now?"
“...Fine,” Aizawa said and began to stalk towards Izuku. “I’m going to very clearly line out what we’re doing here. You can rely on pre selected support items you can pass off as collectibles or things you made. You cannot rely on books. Ever. So we are going to rewire your brain to forget the primary function of your quirk. You will jump. And jump. And jump. Containment is going to be your best friend. You will be a support combat type hero. And a speed type. You are going to be fast. Understood?”
“Understood,” Izuku said. “But…”
“But what? ”
“...I need one more support item. One second.” And before Aizawa could even stop him, Izuku was whisking through the meadow to grab his newest charged book and whisking out right behind Aizawa, flipping through the book to the marked page.
“Midoriya, what are you doi---”
“I said one second,” Izuku replied as he pulled off the magnetic bookmark and tucked it in his back pocket. Reaching up again, he ran his index finger across the lines of text to find the sentence he needed. “Ah. There we go.”
His hand reached in as he circled around and the ink melted against his skin, the cool pages enveloping him as his fingers closed against the cold, squirming metal. Without another word, he pulled out, leaving the pages completely intact as the ink dried on his fingertips, brandishing a wriggling, massive robotic scorpion.
“Midoriya, what are you doing?” Aizawa demanded as Izuku tilted his head back and opened his mouth. His free hand snapped the book shut as Gremlin started to cackle. Aizawa’s scarves flew at him, but it was far too late.
The scorpion was dropping into his mouth and Izuku let it crawl down his throat, scarcely resisting the urge to choke on the thing. Aizawa seized the book from him and flipped it back and forth as Izuku swallowed harshly. Pain erupted at the base of his skull as the scorpion stung him, and he winced once, only once.
“Izuku, what did you just do? ”
“Made myself a martial arts god,” Izuku replied casually as the rush of information overtook him. “Should we test it?”
“...No?”
And all Gremlin could do was cackle.