Chapter Text
Izuku [1:25PM]
Mom!!!
The last of the new Wild Wild Pussycats line just dropped and it has a limited edition hoodie
Can I go to the mall after school??
Mom [3:32PM]
Sure
Be home by 7
If you need money, check top right drawer of my dresser
And please remember to stay off your phone while you’re in school
Love you<3
Izuku tugged on the sleeves of his uniform, trying to rub out the ash on the still-smoking fabric. His wrists were raw and red where Kacchan had grabbed them before leaving for school.
He hadn’t had time to stop at home before the next train would be arriving, so he still had his backpack on. Even if he had stopped at home, he would’ve kept it with him; he always did, just in case he came across a hero fight that he could take notes on. Izuku had learned by now not to carry Hero Analysis for the Future No. 10 in the open—most people thought it was creepy, and number nine was missing a few pages because of it. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
The next train arrived, and he boarded single file behind a man with a bat mutation.
Izuku sat on the right side of the compartment, setting his bag in the seat beside him. It was nearly empty in the train; if he stayed at the mall long enough, he’d probably be able to avoid the afternoon rush that packed the railways every day.
Even though he hadn’t gone home first, he knew he had more than enough money buried in the bottom of his bag to get what it was he really wanted—the limited edition Tiger hoodie. He already had the other three, which had come out over the past few months, and now that the Tiger hoodie was finally out, he’d be able to complete the collection.
Izuku tapped his feet impatiently; his hands itched to get out his notebook and scribble notes on the woman in the corner with what looked like a passive wind manipulation quirk. Her clothes and hair swirled in an invisible breeze, but she didn’t seem to even notice. He had to force himself not to stare.
“Excuse me,” someone said, tugging on his sleeve. Izuku looked down to see a little boy with bubblegum pink hair staring up at him with wide eyes; he couldn’t have been more than five or six. “Can I ask you a question, please?”
“Kichi,” a little girl with green hair tied in twin braids hissed from behind the boy. “Stop it. Mama said no bothering people on the train.”
The girl looked about the same age as the little boy—Kichi, she’d called him. Another boy their age stood beside them with his hands tucked in his pockets, swaying with the motions of the train. He had a scowl that looked out of place on such a round face.
“It’s alright, I don’t mind,” Izuku reassured the girl quickly. Kichi bounced on the balls of his feet. “What did you want to ask?”
Kichi’s brows furrowed for a second like he was trying to remember what he was going to say. The girl huffed and rolled her eyes.
“He wanted to ask you your quirk,” she said, not fully pronouncing the ‘R’ in quirk, and poked Kichi in the cheek. That seemed to shake him out of his reverie.
Izuku’s heart dropped into his stomach like a lead weight.
“Stop it,” he whined, swatting her hand away. “Not what I was gonna ask.”
“Yeah, right,” the girl said. “Koshi, wasn’t he gonna ask about his quirk?”
The other boy behind them shrugged, his hands still in his pockets. He had curly black hair that flopped in his eyes when he turned his head. “I dunno. Prolly.”
“I don’t think you’d find my quirk very interesting,” Izuku said, laughing nervously. Explosions echoed in the back of his mind to remind him how wrong the words “my quirk” felt coming from him; they tasted like ash on his tongue. Kichi blinked at him long and slow like a cat, his mouth twisting to the side.
“All quirks are interesting,” he said after a moment. Then he waved his hands in front of himself, shaking his head frantically. “But don’t tell me yet!”
“Not this thing again,” the other boy, Koshi, mumbled under his breath. “Kichi, you got it wrong the last three times.”
“But I’ll get it this time, I swear!”
Izuku glanced between them, trying to figure out what they were talking about. All three of them looked like they could be siblings, despite the different hair color; they had the same eyes, and the same splatter of freckles across their cheeks. There were even matching friendship bracelets around their wrists. The girl just smiled at his perplexed look and shrugged, swinging her arms idly at her side.
“Okay, okay, okay,” Kichi said, clapping his tiny hands together; his nails were painted sparkly pink, Izuku noticed. “Gimme your parents’ quirks.”
Izuku blinked. “My parents' quirks?”
“He’s tryna guess people’s quirks ‘cause of their parents,” the girl, whose name he still hadn’t gotten, said. He didn’t correct her grammar. “He’s not very good.”
“Hey!” Kichi cried. An older man looked up and glared in their direction from the corner of the train car, and Izuku paled, mouthing an apology. “Yes I am, Koa.”
Koshi snorted. “No, you’re not.”
“Whatever,” Kichi said, looking down. “Never mind. Sorry for bothering you.”
Izuku recognized the look on Kichi’s face, he realized. He’d seen it in the reflections on passing windows, in the antique looking glass hanging above the fake fireplace in his living room, in the distorted mirrors between sinks in the school bathroom.
“Hey, wait,” he said quickly, pulling his bag out of the seat beside him. “Here, sit down for a minute. You can try to figure my quirk out, but if you don’t get it, don’t feel bad! It’s just part of learning. Mine would probably be pretty hard to figure out anyways.”
Kichi’s eyes lit up again, and he bounced over to plop down in the seat, turning to sit facing Izuku with his legs crossed under him. Koshi and the girl, Koa, followed behind him.
“So what’s your mom and dad’s quirks?”
Izuku put a finger to his chin thoughtfully, playing it up for the children. “Hm. Well, my mom has a telekinesis quirk; she can pull small objects toward herself. My dad had fire breathing.”
“Really? That’s so cool!” Kichi said, leaning forward. He was practically vibrating.
“Mhm.” Izuku nodded, then frowned. “Speaking of parents, where are yours?”
“Mama’s over there,” Koa said, replying for Kichi, who looked deep in thought. She pointed at the opposite side of a train, where a woman with black hair sat, reading a book. Izuku grimaced—did she really let her kids talk to random strangers on the train?
The man in the corner was still giving them a dirty look, and Izuku cringed. They were the only ones talking, so their voices sounded ten times louder than they usually would. Kichi started mumbling under his breath, and the man’s disapproving frown deepened, but Izuku couldn’t bring himself to shush him.
“Sorry ‘bout Kichi,” Koa said to Izuku, and bonked Kichi over the back of the head. “Stop mumbling, it’s tiresome.”
Izuku giggled at the way her mouth stumbled over the word, like she was repeating something she heard her mother say but didn’t know what it meant.
“Sorry,” Kichi muttered, covering his mouth with his jacket sleeve. It looked like he was chewing on the fabric to stop talking.
“It’s fine!” Izuku said hastily; his chest ached at the way he seemed to shut down whenever he was discouraged. “I mumble a lot too. I don’t mind, really!”
The man in the corner scoffed.
Kichi’s eyes were oddly expressive, Izuku had noticed, so he could tell just by looking at him that nobody had ever told him that mumbling was okay before. He still kept his sleeve over his mouth, but his entire face seemed a little brighter than before.
The train stopped, and the lady with the wind quirk got off. Three more people boarded, and Izuku looked at the screen flashing destinations; he’d be getting off in two stops.
Izuku sat back, clutching his bag in his lap, and looked around the compartment. Koa and Koshi were whispering to each other, and Kichi was still studying Izuku with an intense look, trying to figure out his quirk. He carefully avoided the gaze of the glaring man; other people were starting to give them annoyed glances, too, but none were as heated as the man’s.
“What’s your name?” Koa asked suddenly. Koshi looked up too, his face still set in that tiny glower of his. Izuku was beginning to think that was just what he looked like.
“Midoriya Izuku,” he said, smiling at them. “You can call me Izuku, if you want.”
“I’m Kokoa,” she introduced. “And that’s Kichi and Koshiro.”
Koshi and Koa must be nicknames, he noted. Koshiro nodded at him sharply in acknowledgement before tugging on his sister’s sleeve, and they went back to whispering to each other.
“I got it!” Kichi announced loudly. Izuku flushed at the looks the other passengers gave them.
“Really?” Izuku said, his eyebrows shooting up. There was no way that he figured out Izuku was quirkless—most kids his age barely even knew that quirkless people existed, much less that there were any that could be as young as Izuku—so what did he think Izuku’s quirk was?
“Your mom has telekinesis, and your dad can breathe fire, right?” Kichi said, bouncing in his seat. Kokoa and Koshiro both looked over Kichi’s shoulder at Izuku. “So you’d prolly have either telekinesis too, fire, or maybe something with both. And then I saw your shirt”—he had to stop himself from flinching when he grabbed at Izuku’s sleeve—“and there are burns on it, like it was on fire!”
Izuku nodded along, starting to understand his train of thought. It was wrong, of course, but he could see where he’d gotten the idea from.
“So what do you think my quirk is?” he said when Kichi didn’t continue.
“Oh, right! I think you can make fire from your hands!” Kichi said triumphantly. Koshiro and Kokoa glanced at each other. “But you prolly can’t control it very well, right? That’s why you got all burned.”
“Kiki, you can’t just say that,” Kokoa groaned, bonking him over the head again. “It’s rude!”
Izuku considered the hopeful look in Kichi’s eyes and the amused glances between his siblings. He knew exactly what would happen if he told them that Kichi was wrong—they would hold it over his head, and Kichi would be left feeling dejected and dumb. Izuku was fully aware of how much it hurt to be told you were wrong time and time again, and… he didn’t want to be the reason someone else felt like that.
“I can’t believe you guessed it!” Izuku laughed, holding his hand up for a high five. Kichi lit up, his eyes shining.
“Really?” he said. “I did?”
“Really?” Kokoa muttered.
“He did?” Koshiro said.
“Yep!” Izuku said, and the taste of ash was back again. His head ached like it was trying to remind him how much of a fraud he was; bile rose in his throat at the thought of lying to them, but he knew it would be worse if he’d shattered a child’s dreams instead.
Izuku hadn’t lied about his quirk status in years—not since he was five, freshly diagnosed as quirkless and desperate to be something other than his biology. He remembered the look Kacchan had given him when he said his quirk had manifested. Fire breathing, just like his dad, he’d said.
Kacchan had told him to stop trying to be like him and pushed Izuku into the mud.
“Wow! That’s the first time I got it right,” Kichi mumbled, more to himself than anyone else. His brows furrowed as he looked up at Izuku. “But why’s it hurt you? Don’t most fire quirks make you fireproof? And can’t you get special clothes? Oh! How hot’s it get? And how far can you make the flames? Can you make the flames really small and use them like a candle? Oh, you can toast marshmallows all on your own!”
Izuku blinked. Was this what he sounded like to other people?
“God, that kid needs a muzzle.” Izuku jerked around to stare at the man in the corner who’d been glaring at them. The man’s scowl deepened when he caught Izuku’s eye. “Tell your brother to shut up, will you? Some of us actually enjoy the peace and quiet.”
“Excuse me?” Izuku asked.
“You heard me,” the man grumbled. “That kid needs to shut the fuck up; he’s being disrespectful.”
Izuku could tell just by the way that Kichi seemed to deflate that it wasn’t the first time he’d been told that; wasn’t the first time Izuku had been told that, either. Some part of his chest—his heart or his lungs, he wasn’t sure—ached at how Kichi curled into himself.
He ran his tongue along the ridge of his teeth and carefully chose his words.
“Sir, I understand that you’re used to quiet on the train,” he said, “but with all due respect, I don’t think you have any right to tell a little kid that you don’t even know to shut up.”
Izuku buried his hands in the fabric of his backpack to keep them from shaking. His brain said to stop talking, but the look on Kichi’s face spoke far louder than his thoughts.
“The hell’s that supposed to mean?” the man said. Izuku watched his hand clench around the pole and prayed that he didn’t escalate this.
“He’s a kid,” Izuku said, shifting in his seat so that he came between Kichi and the man’s line of sight. “I think everyone here except you understands that sometimes kids are loud. And, if I’m being honest, you’re being a lot more disruptive than he was, sir.”
“He’s annoying,” the man insisted; Izuku briefly wondered if he was senile. “Don’t get pissy with me, now. Everyone else was thinking the same thing.”
“And yet you were the only one who said anything,” Izuku said, because apparently he didn't know when to shut up, either. Other people on the train were giving them odd looks again. “So why is that? Is it because, maybe, just maybe, nobody else agreed with you? Or is it because it’s considered rude to tell a kid to shut up? I ask you again to consider, just for a second, who’s being disrespectful here, sir.”
The man stood up, and Izuku did too, moving to stand in front of the three kids. His bag toppled to the ground from his lap.
Everyone always said he was too caring. Maybe that was true, but he didn’t think that was a bad thing; it just meant that if worse came to worst, Izuku would be the only one getting hurt.
“Sir, please sit down,” he said, smiling tightly.
“You sit down first,” the man spat, taking a step forward. He was taller than Izuku by nearly half a foot, though that seemed tripled by the way Izuku’s shoulders were trying to hunch in on themselves. He noticed for the first time that the man’s nails were shaped like needles.
“I really don’t want to cause a scene, sir,” Izuku said; he wondered if the sweat that seemed to drip nervously down the back of his neck was just him, or if everyone else felt the heat too. “Please don’t come any closer to me or these kids. We’ll be quiet until our stops.”
A hand tugged on the back of his shirt, though he wasn’t sure who it was. Probably Kokoa or Kichi—Koshiro didn’t seem like the kind of kid to get clingy. Their mother had finally looked up from her phone, Izuku noticed, and was staring at her kids with an appalled look. She didn’t say anything, though, which Izuku didn’t know how to feel about.
“No, fuck you,” the man snapped, and Izuku blinked. He hadn’t expected outright aggression. “ You have no right to speak to me that way. I don’t give a damn how you think I should be speaking to a disrespectful brat; both of you need to quit your yakking, got it?”
Izuku privately contemplated what kind of drugs could cause that level of stubborness, because there was no way he wasn’t on something.
Another woman on the opposite end of the compartment stood up; she had sea-green hair and a smile that didn’t feel like it belonged in the circumstances they were in.
“Hey, now, boys, what’s the matter here?” she said, fluffing out the wrinkles from her skirt. Something about her seemed familiar, though Izuku couldn’t place what it was.
“That bitch needs to mind her own business,” the man said, just loud enough for her to hear.
Definitely drugs, Izuku decided.
“Excuse you?” the woman said, laughing disbelievingly, but the man ignored her, focused solely on Izuku again.
“Listen, kid”—he stepped closer again, and the little hand gripping the back of Izuku’s shirt pulled harder—“I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, but you need to learn to fucking respect adults when they tell you do shit.”
Izuku flinched back, and the man took that as a sign to move even further into his space. An offended ache at the words pressed in from the back of his mind, and he pushed it back, fighting down the sickness that threatened to crawl up his throat.
“Don’t take another step,” he said as firmly as he could, but his voice came out high and squeaky. He put his hands up between him and the man, but it didn’t seem to deter him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the green-haired woman rushing toward them.
“Fuck you,” the man said, right in Izuku’s face, and Izuku’s hands burst into flames.
QUIRK: Fire Breathing
USER: Midoriya Hisashi
ACTIVATION: starts in lungs, results from mouth; intentional but can be activated by strong emotions.
PREREQUISITES: hydration for saliva.
ELEMENTS: heat generation; chemical saliva; fire resistance; heat resistance; lung enhancement.
EFFECT: allows the user to super-heat their breath, which reacts with user’s saliva to create fire.
SIDE EFFECTS: mildly toxic breath.
USES: ---
LIMITATIONS: fire can only travel about three feet; relies on hydration of user.
BACKLASH: minor dehydration; dry skin.
OVERUSE: extreme dehydration.
DEVELOPMENT: work on extending range of fire.
SUPPORT: water bottles; moisturizer.
PHYSICAL MUTATIONS: ---
ADDITIONAL NOTES: leaves a bad taste in the mouth; normal breath smells bad.