Chapter Text
As far as Inko Midoriya had been concerned, there were two points in time when her son’s life changed forever. The first occurred when Izuku was only five years old, without him even present as it played out.
As Izuku and Hisashi, her dear husband, were out getting ice cream after the boy had been so brave during his appointment, Inko stayed back to discuss the results with his doctor, a lanky brown-haired quirk specialist who looked like he had been barely practicing a year. She would have doubted him under any other circumstance, but the sheer level of pathos radiating from him and the way his eyes darted carefully across the documents served to at least somewhat assuage her worries. “Mrs. Midoriya–firstly, may I call you Inko?”
“Of course, Dr. Kanryo.”
“Well in that case, call me Joshu.” He opened a manilla folder on his desk, revealing a few x-rays and test results. Smiling wearily, he asked, “Good news or bad news first?”
“Bad news,” Inko asserted.
“Smart woman.” Joshu sighed and picked out an x-ray of a foot from the stack. “How much can I presume you know about quirk development?”
“Not very much, unfortunately,” Inko shook her head, “My husband and I both have relatively weak quirks that came in when we were six or seven, so we never had to think much about it until now.”
“Yes, I noticed that. Attractive telekinesis and fire breath?” A nod. “Interesting. Well, simply put, quirks are all but unquantifiable. We know that they’re stored in DNA somehow, but the structures and encoding that they develop is too complex and subtle for us to determine exactly how they’re passed on and activated. Usually it’s a combination of the parents’ powers or some sort of logical development, but mutations aren’t as rare as we’d like to think they are. I’m not boring you, am I?” He slid the x-ray across for Inko to examine. “One of the best indicators we have right now is toe joints. There is a particular joint in the pinky toe that serves no real purpose. You would never notice without a scan, but quirked people lack that joint and have a single segment, sort of an indicator of further evolutionary development.”
Inko quickly caught where the doctor was going with this, her eyes landing on a circled spot of the image, “So Izuku has this extra toe joint? Does that mean….?”
“Yes, and not really. Based on current research, about 95% of quirkless people possess this additional joint and 90% of people with it are quirkless. So even though it’s not technically impossible…”
“Izuku probably won’t have a quirk,” her voice went hollow as she reached for the other documents, which Joshu willingly slid across to her.
He nodded.
Inko placed a hand over her mouth and struggled to breathe while Dr. Kanryo stood and got her a glass of water. Quirkless in this day and age…..when Inko was a child, quirks had barely just started being common. Neither of her parents had one and her mother had abandoned her family because of her sudden power, apparently joining an early incarnation of Humarise before passing. But ever since then, with each passing year, more and more people developed powers, until now, when, out of all of the children born the same year as Izuku, there was estimated to be only one in four hundred children who would never have a quirk. In the parenting forums, whenever someone brought up quirklessness, it was nearly always accompanied by the words bullying, isolation, and depression.
The world had changed. Cruelty hadn’t.
“You’ve just moved to Naruhata, haven’t you?” Joshu asked softly as he returned, abandoning the professional intonation he had been using so far and adopting a more personable tone. “There’s a lot of resources here for parents that need it. The Velocitor Agency sponsors a charity that does support programs for situations like your’s.”
She nodded, “We moved here a couple months ago for my husband’s work. Izuku misses his old friends but he’s been adjusting pretty well. I just….I wish I knew what would happen now.”
“You just need to be there for him, Mrs. Midoriya. Everything else will sort itself out.”
Inko shook her head and smiled. “You have a point. Dr. Kanryo, I just hope you’re right.”
Izuku did not cry when she told him. From that day on, even when he came home with bruises from being caught after school by bullies or when Hisashi had to leave on another work trip, she could tell that he tried his best to be strong for her sake, like she was the one who needed it.
– – – – – – – – – –
The second time that Izuku’s life changed forever, the circumstances were….far more eventful.
Gripping his mother’s hand as she sprinted ahead of him, he struggled to keep track of which streets she had led him down. With the power out and the streetlights dark, neither could read the street signs very well and his mom was too busy keeping them moving to be the one to try.
On a nearby block, a giant villain with a body of simmering light continued to strike out at the hero bounding through the sky around it. The blackout had started a few hours ago, and Izuku’s mom had made the two of them huddle in the back closet of the apartment when the explosions went off and people began rioting and running amok through the streets. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem much worse than any of the other major villain attacks so far this year.
The downside of living in a city with so many heroes, his mom had commented, was that they were constantly getting notifications to shelter in place or head off to one of the designated evac areas. Very rarely were they instructed to switch from the former to the latter as they had been now, however.
“Just a little further, Izuku!” She shouted, yanking his arm harder and panting, barely keeping her pace. She’d been checking out the window when the villain appeared from nowhere, exploding into existence in a blast of light and forming the strange plasma body that was slowly moving through the warehouses. It looked like only one hero was keeping up with it, darting around the massive figure like a fly, and Izuku couldn’t help but to watch, enraptured. He’d lived in Naruhata for six years now, yet he wasn’t quite sure who the speck could be. Ingenium didn’t have that level of mid-air mobility. It could be one of his sidekicks, but none of their quirks exactly fit the bill either. Could Captain Celebrity have come back to Japan to help? Even then, his flight was far more fluid than this strange sort of bounding, often bouncing off buildings or streetlights. There was also the possibility of the underground hero he had heard about, or one of the many vigilantes that always had any information about them removed from the hero forums, but that was a frustrating void of information for him.
He’d have to check the forums once they were safe again.
As he was watching and rushing after his mother, however, Izuku caught sight of something else in the distance. Each time the hero attacking the villain managed to land a strike on it, a few shards of light broke off from its body and went flying, crashing down nearby. As the mother and son were running between two rows of empty, darkened office buildings, a stray bolt of plasma struck one whose shadow Inko was just about to step beneath.
The glass windows shattered, raining down over the street like a swarm of butterflies, and Izuku’s mom stumbled to a stop to avoid the shards that tumbled down to the ground beneath, sticking an arm out to deflect her distracted son. Izuku bumped into her and stumbled back a couple meters, barely managing not to fall backwards and glancing upwards at the building illuminated by the villain who continued to move forwards in the distance. As his mom stared straight forward, waiting until things had settled, Izuku’s gaze remained trained on the skyline above them. To his horror, more than the glass of the building had crumbled, as one corner of the roof shifted and a chunk of concrete detached, tumbling straight downwards. Izuku mentally tracked its path down and–
“Mom, look out!” She twisted around to look at him in alarm, expecting to see some sort of villain approaching him, painfully unaware of the debris moments away from flattening her.
Realizing that there was no good way to explain the situation to her in time, Izuku bent his knees, tilted forwards, and dashed towards his mother, gritting his teeth and letting the spikes of his hair flow freely behind him. Inko’s expression slowly changed from anxious confusion to mild terror as it occurred to her what was happening, all of it too fast for her to react properly. It was like those few paces had turned into the full length of the street, each step marked by a fist-sized chunk of rock breaking free and inching ever closer to his mother, the only person who had always been there for him.
As his red sneakers slapped against the pavement and his lungs burned, Izuku realized that he wouldn’t be able to move fast enough. Inko was too far away, she was too overwhelmed by the sudden disaster, he was too slow and too weak and too useless to help. He would never be good enough, he wouldn’t. Not to save her, not to be a hero, not to be like All Might.
Still, though, he pressed forward. If he could just get there fast enough, tackle her out of the way of the rubble before it hit and bring them both to safety. If only he could move as fast as the whirlwind of panic that shot through his mind.
Only when he looked up, a single short step from his mother, a few painful seconds after he had expected to see her die, did he see the rock lolling through the air, drifting down towards her as if gravity had been canceled out. Had it been hit by someone’s quirk? Ignoring a pressure building in chest, he glanced up to his mom and realized that she was the same. She moved like she was suspended in molasses, trying to jolt backwards out of the path of the meteor, but slowed to a crawl. Only Izuku moved at his full speed, still running to her.
Izuku slammed into his mother, knocking her backwards and out of the path of the object, slow as the both were, and mother and son splayed across the ground as air rushed into Izuku’s lungs and Inko seemed to resume her normal movement, shooting upright and swiveling her head, confused and trying to assess what happened. Then, as he lay there unmovingly, his head went light, his vision went dark, and he fell unconscious.
– – – – – – – – – –
Izuku awoke, staring at a white tiled ceiling, laying on a cot with a thin tube needle pressed into his arm. Sitting up slowly, he followed the tube attached to the needle to an IV bag on a trolly, before glancing around and letting it sink in that he was in a small hospital room, with the door opening out to a dimly lit, out of the way hallway. His mom sat in a folding chair, leaning on the palm of her hand with her elbow crooked against the door frame and her eyes closed. Lifting the thin, white sheets that had been placed over him, he saw that he had been changed into a hospital gown at some point. Struggling to piece together what had happened before he had blacked out and how long it had been, he turned the clock on the side table towards him, wincing when it squeaked against the plastic sheet that it sat on.
Inko stirred awake at the noise and immediately leapt towards Izuku, wrapping him in a hug, “My baby boy!” she yelled, having quickly burst into tears, “You saved me from the falling building, but then you passed out! I was so scared for you that I turned around and rushed you here. They…..,” she swallowed, throat dry, “They’re still trying to figure out what happened. How do you feel?”
“I think I feel okay,” Izuku returned the gesture, “I’m just…kind of confused about how I saved you.”
“Do you remember the villain attack? What about our evacuation?”
He gently shrugged off his mom’s hug, which was starting to further agitate his aches, and she instead settled on the far edge of the bed. “I remember everything up until I tackled you out of the way of the debris, but I’m still just kind of confused about what happened afterwards. I think…I don’t know.” He couldn’t have actually used a quirk, could he? There was no way that someone like him would have a power like that. It had to have been someone else nearby, somehow.
“Hey! I thought I heard someone awake in here!” A new voice joined the fray, and both mother and son looked up to see a straight-postured man wearing what looked like a silver suit of armor with pipes poking out of the elbows walk in. He wore no mask, and his short-cropped blue hair framed a smiling face and grayish eyes. “Good to see you doing alright, kid! I talked to your mom when she brought you in and everyone was pretty worried about you!”
Izuku went pale and his eyes went wide.
“Er, should I call a nurse?”
With the tube running into the arm being the only thing preventing him from leaping straight out of the bed and right at the visitor, Izuku shot a hand into the pile of his clothes that lay at the foot of his bed and retrieved a notebook. “You’re–you’re Ingenium, the Turbo Hero! You took over the Team Idaten Agency after your mother Velocitor retired and you’ve been teaming up with Captain Celebrity a lot while he’s in Japan! Your quirk, just like your mother’s, and a lot of your relatives, is Engine, and it’s been enhanced by your father’s quirk Rebound, which letslet him quickly bounce off walls and change direction. I saw youliveathteEastlakemalleventwhenyoudidthechairtyracewithAllMightbutI’mprettysurethatyoulethimwinbecause-”
Izuku paused to catch his breath and Inko interjected, smiling knowingly and slowly standing, “He’s a bit of a fan.”
“Ha, I can tell!”
Turning to Izuku for a second, she added, “Now that you’re awake, I can call your father and tell him that he can cancel his red-eye. The second he heard about the villain attack, he ran out of the meeting he was in,” she giggled and swept out of the room.
Quickly checking his watch, Ingenium smiled at Izuku and, a bit slowly and awkwardly due to the rigidity of his armor, sat down in the chair Inko had been using.
Nervously flipping through his notebook pages, Izuku struggled to make eye contact with the hero, “Mr. Ingenium, could I, uh, well, could I maybe…”
“Get my autograph?” Tensei Iida extended his hand and eagerly took the paper and pen, scrawling his hero name on the empty page and using a special flourish to make the ‘m’ at the end look like a lightning bolt.
Staring ecstatically at the autograph once it was handed back, Izuku couldn’t believe his luck. Most heroes did publicity events where he could usually get a signature after waiting in line a few times, but Ingenium was so popular that getting to the front of the line before the hero had to go back on patrol was a nightmare. The only autograph he had that might have been rarer was his one from Crimson Riot, mostly due to him having effectively vanished since retiring.
“Y’know, Izuku,” Tensei leaned back, “I should really be the one asking you for an autograph.”
The gears in Izuku’s head stopped turning in synchrony. “What?” The pen, which he had been using to make notes about Ingenium’s costume and exhaust pipes now that he was seeing them up close, slipped from his hand.
“The villain we fought today–we’re calling him the Bomber Villain. He’s been responsible for a lot of trouble these past couple years–you might have heard about the Instant and Next-Level villain incidents–and tonight was his final attack. He had us on the ropes, but we managed to defeat him without any casualties. And can you guess who that’s thanks to?”
“Captain Celebrity?”
“Not quite.”
“That hero that I saw darting around the villain and leading him to the old warehouse district?”
Tensei paused before answering, “Technically true but not what I was talking about. It’s you, you’re the reason why.”
It wasn’t Izuku’s head that stopped spinning this time; it was the whole damn Earth. Everything that had just happened (he presumed that it had been the night before? He never did actually look at the clock) was still being processed, and it took a few moments for Tensei’s words to line up with his memories. “You mean….?”
“Yep. I talked to your mother and it sounds like you saved her life when that building collapsed. If you hadn’t been there for her, there would’ve been one casualty last night, and that would’ve been one too many in my books.” He chuckled, “You must have one hell of a quirk to have done that.”
There was the kicker. Izuku immediately receded into the bed, sinking into the sagging pillow and feeling the metal bars of the headboard press into his spine. Of course, Ingenium was clearly mistaken. There was no way that a worthless, quirkless piece of trash like him could have saved his mother. He must be mistaken or she must be lying to make him feel better. He wondered how the hero would react when he found out–scoffing and sneering like Bakugou had or letting it dawn on them with mute horror and avoiding him like all of the kids in his elementary. He’d barely noticed the IV in his arm before but suddenly it felt like it was digging in and he could barely focus with the way it was jabbing right into his-
“You alright, kid?” Ingenium broke his spell, having moved to the side of the bed and holding out a cautious hand for Izuku to grab.
Izuku squirmed away from it and managed to eke out, “I’m, uh, well, I don’t exactly have a quirk, sir.”
Ingenium paused, as if his engines had stalled out from pure confusion. “Really?”
“No. I have the extra pinky toe joint and Dr. Kanryo in the quirk specialists’ ward says that it probably means I won’t develop one unless-”
“Do you want some water?”
“What?”
Ingenium pointed to an empty glass on Izuku’s bedside table that he hadn’t noticed before. “You’re probably thirsty after all of this. Do you want me to get you some water?”
“Sure?”
Izuku waited in dull silence for the two minutes before Ingenium returned, humming a jazzy tune. However, as the hero crossed the threshold to the room, he suddenly (and inexplicably) lost his balance and wobbled a moment before pitching forward, letting the arm holding the glass of water swing forward and sending the object flying right at Izuku.
Expecting to have only a few short moments before the object collided with his face, Izuku raised his arms in an ‘x’ in front of him, immediately wincing away. After a pained moment, though, with no glass smacking into him or shattering on the ground, he lowered them reluctantly and saw that the glass was floating in mid-air, It was continuing gradually on its arc, a blob of water drifting out from the brim, and Izuku was able to easily reach out and grab it. He glanced over to Ingenium, expecting a reaction, only to see that the hero was also moving in slow motion.
As soon as he noticed this, everything sped up back to normal. “Did I….do that?” he squeaked.
“I don’t know who else could have!”
“But I don’t have a quirk.” Izuku let his voice drop a tone, willing to do anything to keep his panic from seeping in and revealing that he was on the brink of a complete and utter breakdown. He was quirkless, that was obvious, he’d never exhibited any signs of having a quirk before, why would he now? He had the extra toe joint, for goodness sake. There was no way, there was no way, there was no way. How could he be nearly a teenager and only be developing a quirk now? “So how could I?”
“Well,” Ingenium rubbed the back of his head somewhat sheepishly, “That’s not exactly the case. You know much about quirk science?”
Izuku didn’t respond. He was a hero nerd, first and foremost. Unfortunately, that meant that the furthest his knowledge of quirks went was breaking down how the powers of various pros worked in order to keep track of their range of abilities and potential super moves. It didn’t quite include some of the deeper nuances of the craft, like awakenings and Singularity Theory. It had been years since he had researched that stuff, years since he’d accepted that none of it would ever apply to him. It was a weakness, he knew, but the kind of quirk analysis that interested him as a potential career didn’t quite include it.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Ingenium chuckled, “Well, do you know what a delayed awakening is?”
Flashes of late night internet rabbit holes, endeavors in the vain hope that he still had a chance of being a hero, flashed through Izuku’s mind. “Sort of. I know they’re pretty rare.”
“True, indeed. They’re late bloomers, people who seem quirkless for a lot longer than usual until a sudden moment when a power manifests. Can you guess what kind of moments cause that change?”
Izuku shifted further away from the hero, still doubting what he was saying but feeling it click together, “High emotion, like seeing your mother about to die.”
“Right on, kid. When your mother told me what happened, it sounded like you were able to slow down time around you and move at incredible speeds. Pretty cool if you ask me. But then I saw on your chart that you’re listed as quirkless and figured it must have been a mistake. Judging by what I’ve just seen…seems like you might want to talk to a quirk specialist again.” With that he stood and breezed out the door, but paused in the doorway and raised a finger before he went, “One last thing–if you ever need some help learning to use your powers, just give me a call. I love helping out fellow speed quirk users.” Then he was gone.
Alone again, Izuku looked at the clock. The display included a small panel to the right that counted the seconds as they passed, and he began to count along with them, managing to sync up with the rhythm of time. Then, he closed his eyes and focused. He imagined the gears and mechanisms of the clock slowing, the persistent tapping of footsteps outside his room entering a ritardando, and himself moving faster than everything else in the world around him. He counted to twenty, maintaining the same pace that he had caught onto. Then, he opened his eyes and saw that only five seconds had passed.
Huh. Pathetic as he was, that wasn’t as bad as it could have been. He caught his breath and tried again.
– – – – – – – – – –
Inko woke in the middle of the night, heart in her throat, and drifted down the hall, to right outside the door to her son’s bedroom. Ever since they’d gotten back from the hospital, she couldn’t shake a strange nagging in the back of her mind.
It was paranoid, she knew. Izuku had been happier than he’d been before, and Ingenium had helped him get an emergency appointment set up with Dr. Kanryo. After a couple of hours, Izuku’s paperwork had officially been updated, with him listed as a late bloomer who had the quirk Fast Forward, which let him accelerate his perceptions, thoughts, and movements to about five times their usual speed. She supposed she shouldn’t have been as shocked as she was.
It had only taken him a day to bring up U.A. again and she didn’t know how to respond. Hisashi was always better in that regard.
Hearing a strange, sudden, crying noise from inside Izuku’s room, Inko paused her ruminating and knocked lightly on the door before, having not heard a response, gently easing it open to peek inside.
Izuku was laying in bed, a sight that normally gave her at least some peace, but he was thrashing about, his arms snapping back and forth as his brow furrowed intensely. Every few moments, another uneasy yell or grunt escaped him, despite him still clearly being asleep.
She’d seen this before, in a video when she had gotten First Aid certification. Her son was having a seizure.
It was stupid, she realized as she ran to call an ambulance, to think that his life was done changing.