Chapter Text
Izuku stares at the retreating form of All Might in — well, he’s not quite sure what he’s feeling. Disbelief? Heartbreak? Complete and utter despair? Perhaps all of the above. take a swan dive and pray for a quirk in your next life! Shuddering, he steps closer to the edge of the rooftop, and for a moment, he wonders if perhaps...
“No one believes in me,” he whispers, and takes another step — i’m sorry, izuku! — then another, until he can look over the ledge. “Maybe I should just — no!” He shakes his head, and stumbles back before he can carry those treacherous thoughts any further.
“No one ever believed before, and it hasn’t stopped me,” he tells himself firmly, wrapping his arms around himself in the mockery of a hug. be realistic. He takes a deep breath, holds it, and blows it out. “Why should it stop me now?”
He refuses to break here.
It would be easy, so easy.
you should just give up.
Midoriya Izuku is made up of determination and spite, and he just got another dozen things to fuel his drive. He raises his head and heads for the door. He has things to do, things to plan — after all, he created his best plans under pressure. Once inside the building, he never hears the explosions, and thus never runs to save Bakugou Katsuki.
Bakugou Katsuki gets saved by All Might, but the delay from All Might’s hesitance to act means that Katsuki ends up hospitalized due to the attack. He gets pneumonia and spends a week and a half in the hospital recovering. He returns home angry and with a healthy fear of suffocating to death — but Midoriya Izuku will only ever see the angry side, and not the side of Bakugou that is scared and traumatized.
———
When Izuku goes home, he looks up at the walls of his room, covered in posters of All Might. be realistic. He looks around at all the figures and other merchandise smiling down at him. no, you can’t be a hero. That smile doesn’t inspire hope in him anymore. be realistic. The realization is a bit devastating. Izuku shudders, and starts taking the posters down, one by one, and carefully rolls them up. Part of him wants to destroy each piece of merchandise.
But he has some items that are worth quite a lot, and Izuku’s half-baked plans need money to become fruitful. So he ignores his urges and just takes a photo of each piece, and puts it away. A photo, and put it away. It’s tedious and time-consuming, and it gives Izuku time to think more on his plans.
be realistic. Izuku laughs. be realistic. No one believed in him. That was fine. It really, really was. He laughs even harder, and it takes on a bit of a hysterical edge — no, you can’t be a hero. He would be a hero. He would. He’d just work even harder. No one could take this from him. No one could take his resolve from him. He would never, ever quit.
take a swan dive — Izuku’s laughter dies in his throat. No. He would never let anyone have the satisfaction of breaking him like that. pray for a quirk in your next life — be realistic — you should just give up — i’m sorry, izuku! — No one believed in Izuku and that was fine. He would be his own goddamned hero, and this was just his origin story.
He needs to start training his body. He’ll have to research it more, of course, but he knows he needs to change what he eats. He can sell his merch for money for a gym membership; there’s a small one that’s a ten-minute walk away, he thinks. He needs to find a place to learn how to fight, too. Perhaps start with self-defence courses?
He has to work harder than ever before. No one else was willing to give him hope, so he had to work even harder and fight harder than ever before and give himself hope now. He would do it. He would. He did not care if the whole world turned against him. He would not stop.
He would never stop.
———
Izuku has ten months to become stronger, and he doesn’t waste a second of that time. He starts with running, and talks his mom into changing his diet, once he finds the perfect one online. He finds free self-defence courses and takes those, and then when he masters that, he finds a dojo that takes quirkless people — and wasn’t that a pain to hunt down? He goes to the gym five days a week, and lifts hand weights while he studies and spends his weekends hunting down the perfect support weapon and learning how to use it.
He does not stop for a second. He can’t afford to slow down. He doesn’t have anything to make him stronger or faster or let him blow things up, so he has to work harder to earn the same things. He doesn’t mind, he tells himself, stifling down the bitterness that threatens to consume him some days.
He’s going to be a hero, and that thought — it’s enough to keep the fire in his chest burning, no matter what Kacchan or his mother or All Might or anyone else says.
The day of the Entrance Exam arrives, and Izuku is nervous — but he worked so very hard for this, and he thinks it’s paid off. He knows he’s so much stronger and faster than he was when he started to really fight for this, and he wants this more than anything, so really, there’s just no choice but to do well.
He lets his mother fuss over him and feed him a light, but nutritious, breakfast of fish and miso soup, and then he has to rush to the school — he has an extra step when he signs in, as part of the rules for bringing in a support weapon. Once he gets there, he nearly falls, and is saved by a very nice girl — but he doesn’t have time to really thank her properly. He should have gotten up earlier; he feels very pressed for time.
He submits his weapon for final approval, and they clear him quite quickly when it becomes apparent that his gear really is nothing more than a very large, but completely normal, knife — the dark-haired man that examines it seems unimpressed with his choice in weapon, but it wasn’t Izuku’s first choice, either. It was hard to obtain weapons that he could use as a civilian. His dojo had refused to approve him for weapon training, because he was fragile. So he’d had to settle for a knife and practice in his room late at night under the guidance of videos.
Still, there’s a part of him that’s just thrilled when the man hands back the knife and a paper with a stamp of approval. For a moment, it’s easy to pretend that he’s really a student in UA, that he’s living his dreams, and he’s in the hero course and — and Izuku never wants to let this feeling go.
Resolve bolstered even further, Izuku thanks the dark-haired man profusely for his help and rushes off to take his written exam.
The written exam is the most difficult exam he’s ever taken in his life, but it’s still not — being difficult compared to exams given at Aldera is not impressive, you see. It’s a hard test, but it’s not impossible for Izuku. The essay portions in particular are even rather enjoyable for Izuku, and there’s a short analysis portion that he ends up running out of paper on — and wasn’t that thrilling, to finally get to flaunt his love of analysis?
UA really was amazing. Izuku wanted to stay here so badly. He has to do well, so he can stay at this strange and wonderful school where (so far, at least) no one comments on his quirkless status, and they give tests that are exciting and include the things he enjoys the most. Now that he’s had just a taste of his dream, he wants it so badly that he thinks he’d do almost anything.
Anxiety starts to build in his chest again. Izuku ruthlessly stomps it down. He has done everything someone like him could do. Be realistic, All Might had said. Well, Izuku had been realistic, hadn’t he? He’d stopped hoping for a miracle and started fighting tooth and nail, and — and — and he wasn’t going to let himself ruin this for him!
He swore he would never, ever give up, Izuku reminds himself. He was going to be his own hero. He was going to pass UA’s entrance exam. He was, because he had to. He would not stop. He would never stop.
He turns in his exam with a bright smile. He passed. He knows he did.
Present Mic is loud and exuberant when he explains the practical portion of the exam. Robots, he says, and Izuku is a bit worried, but thank god he chose a bigger knife and not the smaller ones he’d originally considered; he thinks he can probably get his blade through the joints of at least the one-pointers, maybe even the two or three point ones. He just has to aim for the vital looking spots, he thinks it will be almost instinctual —
“And you!”
Izuku flinches as a dark-haired boy in glasses shouts at him — was he mumbling again? He barely processes the scolding the boy gives him, something about being rude? How embarrassing... he bites his lip and waits for the presentation to be over. He takes a deep breath in, holds, and slowly pushes it out, then he follows the group out to the testing grounds.
It’s time.
Izuku is going to get into UA. Izuku is not going to stop. Izuku is going to be a hero.