Chapter Text
Midoriya Izuku is two years old when he sees his first hero fight.
He and Katsuki sit beside each other, dressed in matching All Might onesies and gripping matching All Might figurines in their small, chubby hands as Bakugo Mitsuki struggles to get their damn TV working.
“It’s super cool! Hero fights are awesome, you’re gonna love it!” little Katsuki exclaims to his best friend, who sends a sunshine-bright smile his way in reply.
“I can’t believe you’ve never seen one! It’s sooo awesome!" Katsuki continues to ramble, and his grin is wide even as he complains to his mother, "Hurry up mom!”
Mitsuki rolls her eyes at her brat, cursing his quick speech development. Really, sometimes having an overtalkative kid was just a curse, no matter the bragging rights.
Finally, finally, the TV screen flickers to life, and news about a hero fight comes on. Izuku and Kacchan sit, entranced, as the hero and villain dance around each other, shooting projectiles and quirks and jabs. They lean forward and their jaws drop a little more in silent anticipation when one of the villain’s punches miss the hero by less than an inch and the hero quickly moves to incapacitate them in a flashy and impressive-looking takedown manoeuvre. Kacchan immediately starts cheering and poorly replicating the hero’s moves, and Izuku’s eyes stay glued to the scene, mouth agape.
As the criminal is taken away and the news reporter moves onto discuss other things, Katsuki introduces a new game to Izuku: Heroes and Villains. Mitsuki indulges the two children and play the villain, and the rest of the playdate is spent ‘attacking’ her in various ways.
When Izuku goes back home, he asks his mom about hero fights. They spend the rest of the afternoon until dinner researching heroes, and by the end of the research session they both know more about spotlight heroes, rescue heroes and underground heroes than they probably need to.
By the end of dinner, Midoriya Izuku makes a decision.
“Mama, I’m gonna be hero!”
And Inko smiles and laughs, “I'm sure you will, Izuku.”
(Later she will respond to the same statement with tears and apologies, but for now she is supportive. For now, they are happy.
But the universe is not fair or kind, and things will not stay this way for long.)
***
Midoriya Izuku is three years old when he and Kacchan decide to be a hero duo when they grow up.
“We’re gonna be the best hero duo ever, Kacchan!” Izuku giggles.
“’Course we are, Zuzu! We’re gonna take out all the bad guys!”
“And save everyone!”
“Yeah, that too, whatever. Let’s go outside!”
With that, a promise is made between the two, and they run off to play with their peers. The teachers coo at their cheer, and huff in amusement as they dominate the playground.
(Soon they will scowl and look on with pity and dismissal at one of the two and place burdensome expectations upon the other, but that is not yet here and now.)
For now, Zuzu and Kacchan play on the playground and at the park and in their homes, and their childish promise tethers them together; like two peas in a pod, as they say.
(Later, this promise will tear them apart, and there will be resentment and grief and longing where there was once kindness and camaraderie and love, but for now they remain friends. For now, they remain family.
But the universe is not fair and the universe is not kind, so things will not stay this way for long.)
***
Midoriya Izuku is four years old when his mother takes him to see a Quirk specialist.
He tries to be a good boy and stay still in his seat, tries to understand the big words coming out of the moustached-man's mouth, but he can't help but bounce in anticipation in the hard plastic chair and wave around his All Might action figure - the one that Kacchan has an exact duplicate of, the one he was holding when watching his first hero fight.
He's just getting into a re-enactment of the video of All Might's debut when his Mama taps his shoulder to make him pay attention again.
“...and so while he does not have the extra toe-joint, your son may as well be quirkless.”
Izuku's world freezes in place.
His grip on his All Might figurine loosens until it falls from his small hands and clatters to the floor.
He is quirkless.
This is the thought that echoes through his mind all the way back home, and when he finally tears his gaze away from the computer screen replaying the video of All Might’s debut to meet his mother’s eyes, he asks, with the slightest sliver of hope in his heart-
“Can I be a hero too?”
The hope is splintered when his mother starts crying into his shoulder as she apologises again and again and again, and with every apology a crack appears upon the surface of his small heart until it is like fragmented glass, barely held together by atom-thin fibres.
He goes to bed that night with his fragile hope and fragile heart and echoes of the voice of a man who used to love him as his son turned vile, spoiled by his quirklessness – and he curls up in his bed, back against the headboard and forehead pressed to his knees and cries until he has no more tears left to cry.
***
Izuku finally lies back down in his bed that night, and his mind is groggy and tired but still lingering on his ‘diagnosis’ – as if his quirklessness is and illness, a disease (maybe it is-) – and his mind jumps backs to the video of All Might’s debut, and he plays it in his head over and over and over-
And suddenly, he is falling.
Izuku’s stomach drops because he is falling and wind – no, whispers taken physical form whoosh past him and through him and in his mind and he looks around and sees.
He sees - he is falling in an infinite expanse of nothing and everything, and it is so bright yet so dark and he knows, he knows that if he were to concentrate on the whispers-made-tangible around him and through him and in him he would hear all the secrets of all the universes, but the nothing and everything is surrounding him, suffocating him and he can’t breathe or think and he is falling, falling, falling-
And then he is awake.
He does not bolt up, nor do his eyes jolt open. No, he simply… wakes. Shifts from a state of unconsciousness to consciousness.
His breathing is normal and his heart beats steadily – but he knows subconsciously that if he thinks of the nothing-and-everything his breathing will become too quick and his heart will beat too fast, so he unconsciously pushes the half-formed memories to the back of his mind.
He blinks at the ceiling and lies there.
(He does not go back to sleep. Midoriya Izuku is four years old and has an average four-year-old’s intelligence – he does not know why, but he is scared to go back to sleep. He has no understanding of the complex intricacies that are emotions and reasoning, but he knows he is afraid of going back to sleep.
So he doesn’t.)
Midoriya Izuku lies in the bed, blinking at the ceiling, and a distant part of his mind thinks that the action is slower than normal, that the ceiling looks a bit fuzzy and a bit blurred, like looking at a staticky TV screen through water, and his body feels like it weighs more than it used to, but he pays no mind to these observations and just lies there.
He doesn’t realise when, or how, he fell asleep again, but he finds himself waking up once again to his Mama’s cheerful laughter and tries to forget about his dream as he converses joyfully with his Mama. (Children are perceptive, so unfortunately perceptive, and Izuku knows right away that his Mama’s cheer is fake. But he is also kind, so unbelievably kind, so he grins at her the best he can and doesn’t ask about the empty place at the dining table where his father usually sits.
There is a small part of him, buried deep within his soul and only accessible when he is unconscious, that can go beyond Earth and the stars and the cosmos, that can communicate with the universes itself, and this small part nudges him in certain directions. Unknowingly, he complies, and he doesn’t ask about the grief and pain in her eyes either.)
***
Midoriya Izuku goes to preschool the next day with splintered hope, a glass-fragile heart, and memories of a broken dream, and as he is pitied and ridiculed and ostracised by his teachers and peers he thinks that not having a quirk is the worst thing to happen to him.
But the universe is not fair, and it is certainly not kind, and he does not know it yet but Midoriya Izuku will learn that there are worse things to being quirkless.
(Through the quirk he has received he will witness worlds wherein he hurts and breaks and fragments until he shatters, regardless of his quirk – because of his quirk – and he will witness these worlds and think that he is fortunate, oh-so fortunate, to have been diagnosed as quirkless, despite the words laced with cruel, mocking anger spat in his face, the bruises and bleeding noses he receives, the spider lilies scattered on his desk.
He will reconsider this when he goes to sleep after a certain day when he is fourteen and wakes beside a grave etched with his own name, but that is still not to happen for a long while.)
That day when Midoriya Izuku goes to sleep, the first bruise of many to come blossoming on his chest and new fragments cracked across his heart, he returns to falling and the expanse of nothing-and-everything and the whispers-made-tangible surrounding-through-in him, and wakes once more to blink slowly at the fuzzy-blurred ceiling, breathing slow and heart beating slow and feeling heavy again. The next day he awakens to the chirping birds with no recollection of how he fell asleep, and he buries the memory of nothing-and-everything and whispers-made-tangible and the fuzzy-blurred ceiling once more.
Preschool used to be fun, filled with joy and laughter and friends and Kacchan, but now it’s filled with pity and taunts and loneliness and echoes of explosions ringing in his ears, and Izuku starts to think that preschool isn’t so fun anymore.
But Izuku keeps chasing after Kacchan and eating dinner with only his mom and buries memories of strange-scary-fuzzy dreams, and for a while this is all he does.
(Soon he will sit up in the bed after awakening for the first time that night, feeling fuzzy and heavy and slow, and he will look around and realise it is not his bed he is sitting up in. He will scramble up and press himself against the headboard of the not-his bed and see himself lying in it, sound asleep.
He will open his mouth to scream, and the sound will not leave his lips. He will open his mouth to cry, and the sob will not leave his throat.
He will try to go to his mother, but find himself unable to leave the bed, tethered by some invisible string to the boy who is not him, the boy who could not be him, so he will curl up in the corner of the bed and silently cry himself to sleep.
He will awaken in his own world, and he will cry loudly in confusion-incomprehension-relief. His mother will burst into his room and will be relieved that her son is safe, assume it was just a nightmare. The same will happen the next night, and the next, and the next.
It will take many, many more nights until Midoriya Izuku realises he travels to other worlds in his dreams, and it will take many more still until he accepts this.
But for the time being, he is blissfully unaware, and for a little while longer it will remain this way.
Mercy is a beautiful, incredible thing, more so than most realise. But the universe is not fair and the universe is not kind, and its mercy for one, even for a child, especially for this child, runs thin quite quickly.
Perhaps being quirkless would have been a better fate for this one.)