Chapter Text
Qing Qing City lit up first.
That was how the history books would eventually put it — lit up, like a switch had been thrown somewhere under the skin of the world. A baby born glowing, softly, harmlessly, like a nightlight left on in a hospital room. Doctors called it a fluke. Then it happened again, in a different hospital, in a different country, to a baby who could bend a spoon just by looking at it. Then again. And again, until "fluke" stopped being a word anyone used, and a new one took its place.
Quirks.
By the time Inko Midoriya was lying in a hospital bed of her own, sweat-damp hair stuck to her forehead, cradling a red-faced, squalling newborn against her chest, the word had already stopped being new. It was just what the world was now. Some people could breathe fire. Some could turn invisible. Some could do nothing more than make their own hair stand on end, and even that was enough to count.
Inko didn't care, in that moment, what her son could or couldn't do. She only cared that he was warm, and small, and hers.
"Hey," she whispered, voice cracked with exhaustion and something close to wonder. "Hey, sweetheart. It's okay. Mom's here."
The baby's cries softened into hiccupping little coos. Two tiny fists worked at the air like he was trying to grab hold of the sound of her voice. Inko laughed — a wet, breathless sound — and pressed her lips to the crown of his head, to the dark green hair already curling there, damp and impossibly soft.
The space beside her bed stayed empty. It had stayed empty for a while now, ever since the divorce papers, ever since she'd stopped waiting for a man who was better at drinking than he ever was at staying. She didn't think about him tonight. There wasn't room to. Not with this much love taking up all the space in her chest at once.
"You're gonna do something amazing," she told him, quiet enough that only the two of them would ever know she'd said it. "I don't know what yet. But I know it. A mother just knows."
The baby cooed again, and Inko decided that counted as an agreement.
They let her go home three days later, and Izuku Midoriya's life began in earnest — ordinary, small, entirely unremarkable, exactly the way any mother would want her son's first years to be.
By the time he was four, most of the mystery had gone out of the world, replaced by the mundane business of finding out exactly what your child could do. Some parents dreaded the appointment. Others counted down to it. Inko fell somewhere in between — hopeful, but never so hopeful that she forgot to be careful with her hope.
The clinic smelled like antiseptic and the particular brand of bubblegum-flavored anxiety that comes standard in every pediatrician's office. Izuku sat on the edge of the exam table in a paper gown that crinkled every time he swung his legs, humming some half-remembered cartoon theme to himself, utterly unbothered.
Dr. Tsubasa had been doing this a long time. He'd delivered good news to plenty of parents and bad news to plenty more, and somewhere along the way he'd stopped being able to tell, just from a kid's face, which kind he was about to give them. He lifted Izuku's foot, turned it gently, and looked — really looked — at the small toe.
Two joints. Not three.
He set the foot back down slowly.
"Mrs. Midoriya," he said, and something in his voice made Inko's stomach drop before he'd said another word. "Can I speak with you for a moment?"
He explained it the way he always did — gently, clinically, with as much kindness as the facts would allow. No extra joint in the pinky toe. No latent activity in the bloodwork. No Quirk. Izuku Midoriya, four years old, was — by every measure medicine had for it — Quirkless.
"I have to say," Dr. Tsubasa added, glancing back through the open door at the boy still humming to himself on the table, "he tested at a developmental level I don't often see. Way ahead of the curve. Whatever he ends up doing, he's got the mind for it."
It wasn't the news Inko had let herself hope for. She smiled anyway, thanked the doctor, and gathered her son into her arms in the hallway outside, holding him a little tighter than usual.
"Mommy?" Izuku asked, small hands patting at her cheeks. "Why are you sad?"
"I'm not sad, baby," she lied, and kissed his forehead. "I'm just happy. I'm just really, really happy."
He believed her, because he was four, and because he loved her, and it would be years before he understood that some tears come from both places at once.
The years did what years do. They passed.
Izuku grew the way saplings grow — slowly, and then all at once. He kept his mother's kindness and somehow, against every reasonable expectation, kept his own good humor too. He was the kid who cried at sad movies and the kid who laughed loudest at his own jokes and the kid who could explain, in exhausting and endearing detail, exactly how a hero's Quirk worked if you gave him even the slightest opening to do it.
He was also, increasingly, the kid other kids decided they didn't need to be nice to.
It started small. Katsuki Bakugo had been his best friend once — really and truly, the kind of friendship built on scraped knees and shared juice boxes and promises to be heroes together someday. But somewhere around the time the other kids' Quirks started manifesting and Izuku's never did, something in Katsuki curdled.
"You're still coming, right?" seven-year-old Izuku had asked once, notebook already tucked under his arm, on his way to watch a hero interview rerun at Katsuki's house like they did every week.
Katsuki had looked at him for a long moment — a look Izuku wouldn't understand the weight of until years later — and said, "Why would I hang out with someone who's never gonna be anything?"
It got worse from there. Not all at once. Cruelty rarely announces itself; it just accumulates, one small cut at a time, until the wounded person stops noticing which cut did the real damage. Classmates who used to invite him to birthday parties stopped. A teacher, grading a paper on career aspirations, had written "be realistic" in red pen next to the word "hero" and handed it back without comment. Katsuki's crowd found a nickname for him that stuck harder than any of them meant it to.
Izuku kept smiling anyway. Not because it didn't hurt — it did, more than he ever let anyone see — but because somewhere underneath the hurt, he still believed the thing he'd believed since he was small enough to sit on his mother's lap and watch grainy hero footage on an old television: that someday, somehow, he'd prove all of them wrong.
By fourteen, he had an IQ that made his teachers uncomfortable, a notebook collection that filled two shelves in his bedroom, and a dream that refused, stubbornly, to die.
The morning it finally did, it started like any other.
Izuku was halfway to Aldera Junior High, notebook already open in his hands, weaving through the sidewalk crowd with the practiced ease of someone who'd learned to read while walking years ago, when the first explosion of sound stopped him in his tracks.
A building down the block had a fist-sized hole punched clean through its third floor. Smoke curled from the wound. A crowd had already gathered at the police line, phones raised, and Izuku pushed himself up onto his toes to see over the shoulder in front of him.
"Citizens, please remain behind the barrier!" Backdraft's voice boomed through his helmet's speaker, arms spread wide as he held the crowd back, steam hissing faintly from the joints of his suit. "This is a hero matter — let the professionals handle it!"
Beyond him, a villain the size of a delivery truck was stumbling backward down the street, roaring, swiping at a lattice of dark, glossy wood that had wrapped itself around one of his arms.
"You have used your Quirk to commit criminal acts," Kamui Woods said, calm as still water even as the villain thrashed against his restraints, wooden limbs extending from his own arms with eerie, plant-like grace. "Lacquered Chain Prison!"
More wood lashed out, coiling tight — and then didn't hold. The villain wrenched free with a bellow, stumbling sideways into a parked car, and for one breathless second it looked like Kamui Woods had lost him.
That was when the ground shook.
"Sorry I'm late, everyone!"
A woman — no, Izuku realized, adjusting his glasses, a giant — stepped over the police barricade like it was a curb, blonde hair whipping in a wind of her own making, and drove one heeled boot into the villain's chest with enough force to fold him over the hood of a bus.
"Canyon Cannon!"
The crowd went, for half a second, completely silent. Then the phones came up in a wave, and the cheering started.
"That's — that's Mt. Lady!" someone nearby shouted. "She's huge! I heard she's making her debut today!"
Mt. Lady straightened, one hand on her hip, and flashed a triumphant smile at the nearest camera. "That's right! Today's my debut, everyone, so I'll take it from here! Leave the rest to me!"
Izuku's pen was already moving before his brain had fully caught up with his hand, scrawling half-formed notes in the margins of a page already crowded with them. Gigantification — full-body scaling, doesn't affect base strength ratio, must burn calories at an insane rate to sustain that mass — how long can she hold the form—
"Gonna be a hero someday, kid?"
Izuku blinked up. A man beside him — briefcase in hand, tie loosened for the commute — was smiling down at the notebook with the particular fondness adults reserved for kids who were visibly, harmlessly obsessed with something.
"I — yeah," Izuku said, and for a second the old, easy hope rose up in him like it always did. "Someday."
"Well, good luck to you." The man clapped him once on the shoulder and moved on with the rest of the dispersing crowd.
Izuku watched Mt. Lady take a bow for the cameras a moment longer, then closed his notebook, tucked it under his arm, and kept walking to school — a little faster now, buoyed the way he always was after seeing heroes work. It never got old. He didn't think it ever would.
He had no idea, yet, how much that morning was about to cost him.
Aldera Junior High's homeroom smelled like chalk dust and impending adulthood.
"All right, settle down," the teacher said, dropping a stack of printouts onto his desk with a slap that didn't quite cut through the noise. "I know, I know — you'd all rather be doing anything else right now. But it's time to start thinking seriously about your futures, so pay attention."
He held up a printout — a career survey, name and desired path at the top, blank lines waiting to be filled. "I'll hand these out in a minute. Fill them out honestly. I already know what most of you are going to write, but humor me."
A ripple of Quirk activity went through the room the second his back was turned — someone's fingers sparking, someone's hand briefly turning translucent, the low murmur of showing off that happened in every classroom in the country, every single day.
"Hands to yourselves," the teacher said without even looking up. "No Quirks in the classroom. You all know the rule."
"Oi, don't lump me in with the rest of these extras."
The voice cut through the room like a blade, and every head turned toward the back row, where Katsuki Bakugo had his boots kicked up on the desk in front of him, arms crossed, a permanent scowl carved into his face like it had been there since birth.
"Bakugo—" the teacher started.
"I'm not writing my future down on some form like I don't already know exactly where I'm going," Katsuki snapped. "I'm not most of these idiots."
"Ohh, listen to this guy," someone muttered from the second row, and a ripple of irritated laughter went through the class.
"You got something to say?" Katsuki rounded on the room, and the laughter died just as fast as it had started. "Shut up. All of you."
"He's just mad because his mock exam scores make the rest of us look bad," a girl near the window said under her breath, just loud enough to be heard, and this time nobody laughed — but a few smiles flickered, quickly hidden.
Katsuki's palms crackled — small, involuntary sparks, more habit than threat. "I aced that mock exam. Perfect score. You think any of you are gonna touch that? I'm going to U.A., and I'm gonna surpass All Might himself. Top hero. That's not a dream, that's just what's gonna happen."
"U.A., huh." The teacher flipped through the printouts in his hands, and something on one of the forms made him pause. "Well, since we're on the subject — Midoriya. You're applying to U.A. too, aren't you?"
The room's collective attention swiveled, as one organism, toward the desk near the window where Izuku sat with his notebook still half-open in front of him.
For a second, nobody said anything.
Then somebody laughed — a short, disbelieving bark — and it was like a dam breaking. Laughter rolled through the classroom in a wave, kids turning to each other, some outright pointing.
"Him? Going to U.A.?"
"He's Quirkless, dude, what's he gonna do, take notes at the villains until they surrender?"
"I heard his entrance exam score is gonna be, like, one point. For showing up."
Izuku's ears burned. He kept his eyes on his desk, jaw tight, and tried to remember that this happened almost every week now, that it would pass, that it always passed.
"H-hey," he started, voice smaller than he wanted it to be, "I'm not trying to—"
BANG.
The desk in front of him cratered under a small, controlled explosion, smoke curling up from Katsuki's outstretched palm. The laughter cut off instantly.
"Don't," Katsuki said, low and furious, "put yourself on the same level as me. You're Quirkless. You've got nothing. Nothing to fight with, nothing to protect anyone with — you'd get yourself killed in the first five minutes and everyone would have to feel sorry about it."
"I'm not trying to compete with you," Izuku said, and his voice steadied as he said it, some old stubbornness rising up under the hurt. "I know I'm not you. I just — I've wanted to be a hero since I was little. Since before either of us knew what a Quirk even was. I'm not gonna know if I can do it unless I actually try."
For a moment — just a moment — something flickered behind Katsuki's eyes that wasn't quite anger. It was gone before Izuku could name it.
"Tch. Whatever." Katsuki dropped back into his seat, propping his boots back up like nothing had happened. "The exam's impossible for you. Save yourself the embarrassment."
The class had gone quiet again, but it wasn't sympathy in the silence — it was the particular, awkward quiet of people who agreed with the boy who'd just said something cruel but didn't want to be the one to say it out loud. A few kids exchanged glances. Someone snickered, quickly smothered.
Izuku picked his pencil back up, stared hard at his notebook until the words on the page stopped swimming, and didn't say anything else for the rest of class.
He almost made it out of the building without incident.
He was crouched by his shoe locker after the last bell, notebook open on his knee, thumbing through a news article on his phone about the morning's villain attack, when a shadow fell over him.
"Heading home to write more of your loser diary?"
Izuku didn't answer. He'd learned, somewhere in the last few years, that answering usually made it worse.
Katsuki crouched down across from him, and for a second Izuku thought — hoped, stupidly — that maybe this would just be words this time.
Then Katsuki's palm ignited.
The notebook went up in a small, controlled burst of sparks and smoke, pages curling black at the edges, and before Izuku could even reach for it Katsuki had already snatched it from his hands and hurled it out the open window behind them. It hit the pavement two floors down with a soft, terrible thud.
"You know," Katsuki said, standing, brushing invisible dust off his blazer like he hadn't just done anything at all, "if you really want to help everyone the way you're always going on about — you could just jump off the roof. Save the rest of us the trouble of watching you fail."
He walked away laughing before Izuku could find a single word to say back.
Izuku sat there a moment longer, staring at the empty space where his notebook had been, and then went downstairs to retrieve it from the pavement, careful with the scorched pages like they were something breakable. In a way, they were. Four years of hero analysis, singed at the corners, smoke still curling faintly off one burnt page.
He held it against his chest and didn't cry. Not yet. He'd gotten good, over the years, at not crying until he was somewhere no one could see.
He thought about it that night, lying on his bed with the notebook open on his chest, and the memory came up the way it always did — unbidden, worn smooth from replaying.
He was five, sitting cross-legged in front of the television, watching a shaky camera clip of a man in blue and yellow standing over a hundred people he'd just pulled from a collapsing building. The man wasn't even out of breath. He was laughing — a huge, booming, delighted laugh, like saving a hundred lives was the most fun he'd had all week.
"Why?" a reporter had asked, breathless, into the microphone. "Why do you fight so hard?"
The man had grinned, put a fist to his chest, and said something that a five-year-old Izuku had memorized so completely he could still recite it in his sleep, word for word, seventeen years later: because I am here.
"I wanna be like him," five-year-old Izuku had told his mother, eyes shining, pointing at the screen. "I wanna smile like that when I save people."
That was before the clinic. Before the two-jointed toe. Before Dr. Tsubasa's careful, apologetic voice explaining what "Quirkless" meant to a woman who already knew, deep down, that the word was coming.
He remembered watching the same clip again, months after the diagnosis, sitting on the floor of his bedroom with tears streaking silently down his face, and asking his mother — really asking her, needing an actual answer — "Mom? Can I still be a hero? Even without a Quirk?"
Inko had knelt down in front of him, taken his small hands in hers, and — instead of answering — had started to cry too.
"I'm sorry," she'd said, over and over, like the apology could fill the space where the answer should have been. "I'm so sorry, Izuku. I'm so sorry."
He hadn't understood, back then, that she wasn't apologizing for the Quirk. She was apologizing because she didn't know how to tell her son that the world might not let him have the one thing he wanted most, and there was nothing in her power to fix that.
He understood it now. He'd understood it for years. He just kept hoping, anyway, that understanding wouldn't have to mean giving up.
The slime came out of a manhole two streets from his apartment, and Izuku's first thought, absurdly, was that it looked less like a villain and more like a spill.
Then it spoke, and the spill had teeth.
"Perfect," it hissed, a voice bubbling up from somewhere inside the shifting mass of it. "A little hideout. Come here."
Izuku didn't even have time to run. The slime surged forward and swallowed him whole from the shoulders up, thick and cold and suffocating, forcing itself into his throat, his nose, blotting out the world in wet, grey darkness. He clawed at it, nails scrabbling uselessly against something that had no solid surface to grip, lungs screaming, vision sparking at the edges.
I can't breathe. I can't breathe, I can't—
"Have no fear, young man!"
The voice hit like a physical thing, and a heartbeat later, so did the wind.
"TEXAS SMASH!"
The air itself seemed to detonate. Izuku felt the slime's grip shatter around him, felt himself weightless for one disorienting instant, and then the world went dark for real.
He woke up on his back, staring at a sky gone orange with sunset, and for a few seconds his brain simply refused to process the enormous, impossible, grinning face hovering above him.
"Ah, good, you're awake!" All Might said, crouched down with both hands on his knees, blond hair catching the light like a second sun. "You gave me quite a scare there for a moment, young man!"
Izuku's mouth opened. Nothing came out. He tried again.
"You're — you're All Might."
"The one and only!" All Might straightened, laughing, thumb jerking toward his own chest. "Not to worry — the villain's been dealt with. You're safe now."
Izuku scrambled upright so fast his head spun, patting at his own pockets in a full-body panic before his hand closed around his notebook — scorched at the edges, but intact — and inside its cover, in careful, unmistakable handwriting, a signature that hadn't been there that morning.
"You— when did you—"
"Couldn't resist," All Might admitted, grinning. "Saw the notebook fall out of your bag while I was pulling you free. Figured a young fan deserved an autograph for his trouble."
For one shining, ordinary moment, Izuku was just a kid meeting his hero. He clutched the notebook to his chest like it might evaporate, and something that had been clenched tight in him since that morning's classroom finally, briefly, loosened.
Then the rest of the day came rushing back, and the words tumbled out of him before he could stop them.
"All Might — sir — can I ask you something? Something important?"
All Might paused, one boot already lifting for what was clearly meant to be a dramatic exit. "Of course, young man. Ask away."
"Can someone become a hero—" Izuku's hands were shaking; he pressed them flat against his notebook to still them. "Even without a Quirk? I've wanted this since I was little. I've studied every hero I could find — their Quirks, their fighting styles, their weaknesses, everything — I know more than most kids who actually have powers, I just— I don't have one. Not one. And everyone keeps telling me that means I can't, and I just—" His breath hitched. "I need to know if they're right. I need to hear it from someone who'd actually know."
All Might was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that Izuku's stomach began to sink before a single word had been said.
"That's a serious question," All Might said finally, and his voice had lost some of its boom, settled into something quieter, heavier. "So I'll give you a serious answer, because you deserve that much."
He crouched back down to Izuku's eye level.
"Being a hero isn't about analysis, son. It isn't about how many Quirks you can name or how well you understand a fight before it happens. Every single day, heroes walk into situations where the only thing standing between a stranger and disaster is our own body — our own strength, thrown directly into harm's way, again and again, with no guarantee we walk back out. That's the job. That's all of it, underneath the cape and the cameras."
"I know that," Izuku said. "I've always known that. I still want it."
"I believe you." All Might's eyes were kind, and that made it so much worse. "But wanting something and being equipped to survive it aren't the same thing. I can't tell a boy with no power to walk into that world, knowing what waits for him there. I won't lie to you and pretend otherwise, because a lie today could cost you your life tomorrow." He reached out and rested one enormous hand on Izuku's shoulder, gentle despite its size. "There's no shame in finding another way to help people, young man. The world needs more than heroes. But I can't tell you this is one you can have. I'm sorry. But it's the truth, and you deserve the truth more than you deserve comfort."
Izuku didn't say anything. There wasn't anything left to say. He just nodded, once, and stared at the pavement between his own shoes until the tears blurred it into nothing.
He didn't see All Might's expression shift — didn't see the flicker of something like regret cross the hero's face — because he wasn't looking up anymore.
All Might straightened, and there was a brief pause, a soft rustle of fabric as he checked his own pockets, frowning faintly at some looseness in his costume only he could feel. He peeled a strip of medical tape from somewhere inside his jacket, fixed two small bottles more securely against his leg beneath the fabric, and by the time Izuku did look up again, All Might was already crouching, already coiling to leap.
"Take care of yourself, young man," he said, and then he was gone — a streak against the darkening sky, gone before the boom of displaced air had even finished rolling down the street.
Izuku sat alone on the curb for a long time after that.
He didn't remember most of the walk home.
He remembered the notebook, still clutched against his chest, the autograph inside it feeling less like a treasure now and more like a punchline. He remembered his mother's face when he came through the door — the immediate, instinctive alarm of a parent who can tell, in half a second, that something in their child has gone quiet in a way it wasn't quiet that morning.
"Izuku? Sweetheart, what happened?"
"Nothing," he said. "I'm fine."
He wasn't fine. He went to his room, sat down at his desk, and stared at the wall for a long time without really seeing it.
The weeks that followed had a strange, colorless quality to them, like watching his own life through glass. He redrew his U.A. application twice — filled it out with careful, mechanical precision, the way he'd have done any assignment — and then never sent it. He didn't sign up for anywhere else, either. He sat at his desk, scrolling through hero forums and villain reports out of habit rather than hope, the notebook shut and pushed to the corner of the desk where he wouldn't have to look at it.
Inko noticed. Of course she noticed. She'd noticed the exact day the light went out of his eyes, could have told you the hour if pressed, and she didn't know what to do with the quiet, hollowed-out version of her son who now moved through their apartment like a guest in someone else's house.
The dream that had carried him through years of bullying, years of being told he was nothing, had finally, quietly, gone out — not with the dramatic finality of a door slamming shut, but with the soft, anticlimactic fizzle of a candle that had simply run out of wick.
He didn't cry about it anymore. He'd done all his crying already, out loud, alone, on a curb two streets from home, in front of the one man whose opinion he'd trusted most in the entire world.
There wasn't anything left after that except the quiet.