Chapter Text
With a mind desperate to grab onto anything other than its own contents, Izuku started to notice some additional changes to the status quo. For starters, the previous shoving and “accidental” elbow pokes and trips he had previously encountered in the hallways had been starkly replaced by a metaphorical bubble forming around him that no one but Hitoshi ever penetrated. Hitoshi, and for some reason, Kacchan. The whispers, giggle, taunts and glares had increased what felt like tenfold, but anything physical outside of them had just… stopped over the past few days. Not even useful enough to be a punching bag anymore.
He was also sure he had caught some scared expressions cast his way, especially by some of the less popular kids, even when he wasn’t with Hitoshi, which baffled him more than anything else. Why would they be scared of him? Everyone here knew he was useless quirkless. Had people found out about his training? No, if that was the case Bakugo would have come to shout at him about “trying to surpass him in secret”, plus his skill level, if you could even call it that, was so fucking pathetic that they would have no reason to be scared anyways.
The unsolved phenomenon was so baffling and distracting that he almost didn’t have time for self-deprecation. Useless piece of shit. Can’t even tell what other people think about you? Are you six again? You’ve been studying this for years, why are you still so goddamn bad at it? …Almost. He internally screamed in frustration. Why did this have to be so complicated? Was he supposed to be hurt or avoided? Was he supposed to just be what other people thought, why would their opinions change so quickly why the fuck were people scared of him? His expression remained blank, but there was a sharp, persistent poking and aching in his brain, slowly building with each unanswered question repeated over each other.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Hitoshi sat quietly on the train to the training gym, occasionally glancing over to Izuku, and constantly mulling over the moral dilemma in his head. First off, there was no way Izuku hadn't noticed the change, and given his anxiety, there was little chance he wasn’t completely overthinking it right now. On one hand, telling him the truth now would be rude. It would be revealing another cruel thing the awful quirkist bastards were doing, and would probably get away with due to the school’s blindness too and even support of the horrible shit its "perfect heroic-quirked students” were doing. He scoffed bitterly and sighed. On one hand, ignorance is bliss, but on the other, withholding information about himself, especially when it was bothering him, felt somehow worse. Izuku had a right to know, no matter how ridiculous the rumors were. You’ll screw it up either way, you know you will.
Hitoshi looked back at Izuku again. He was usually a pretty straightforward person, so maybe it would be better to just ask him directly if he wanted to know. …or maybe that would fuck everything up by pressuring him and making his anxiety worse, who the hell knows! He couldn’t see too much emotion in the (beautiful) fucking freak green eyes next to him, but at the very least there seemed to be a steadily increasing hint of panic, so he should probably just ask already.
“So, umm,” the words felt dry in his throat, and dread pooled unbidden in his stomach, “do you want to know why everyone’s been acting so weird today?”
Izuku’s head whipped back towards him in a display of either desperation or nervousness, probably both given the subject matter probably the latter given who he’s looking at. His eyebrows quickly furrowed however, and he looked back at his lap, an uncomfortable tilt about his mouth before his eyes darted around the train car, and onto a few people not so subtly eavesdropping.
“Not now. Tell me when we get to the gym though, please,” he replied with underlying urgency.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Izuku tapped his foot nervously as he waited for the train to slow down at the station for the gym. Prolonging his curiosity any longer felt like it was dealing constant building psychic damage and making him want to rip his skin off from the frustration of waiting for something he couldn’t control, but the mere thought of asking for the info while still in public kicked his senses back into acknowledging long term consequences, instead of his minds’ stupid, weak, bratty impatience. No wonder everyone knows you as so pathetic and sensitive. Can’t even teach yourself to wait your own fucking turn, selfish asshole.
He felt the telltale shift that meant it was time for a stop, and he popped out of his seat like it was on fire, before shrinking back at the higher than normal amount of weird looks that got him and quietly pulling Hitoshi to one of the doors, humiliation coloring the shorter boys’ cheeks. Fucking nuisence.
Izuku was jolted by the voice next to him, though he supposed he shouldn’t have been.
“Lets… just get to the gym. You don’t seem overly content with waiting right now,” Hitoshi, voiced a correct observation in his familiar comforting drawl.
They were in the privacy of the locker room within a few minutes, and almost immediately the truth started to dribble out slow and awkward but relentless nonetheless, like water from a leaky faucet.
“So, well, not that i was- I wasn’t but i overheard a few different times, so enough to get the full picture of, you know, the the rumor, not that it’s a, umm, correct picture or anything, it’s not, ‘cause rumors are stupid, but-”
Izuku couldn’t help the pang of annoyance that came over him at the non-answer, and he certainly couldn’t help the overwhelming flood of guilt that succeeded it. Did you only just realize how annoying you really are? You talk like that around, like, 90% of the fucking planet, who are you to judge him for it, you damn hypocrite? Can’t you tell this is uncomfortable for him too, you fucking asshole? You should just listen to everyone and find the easiest way to-
He refocused on the boy in front of him, determined to escape the pain of his mind once again. Not now, he tried to tell himself. Not ever, he added with hesitance, knowing the world would never grant him the grace to make that one true, and felt a slight relief wash over him as Hitoshi took a deep breath. Good, they were back on track, and Izuku could get out of his head.
“There was this- one kid. I don’t know, like his name, who he is, but, like, there was some family member coming into town to stay with them, I think? Yeah, it was like an uncle or something. Anyways, this uncle had a daughter who several weeks ago was at the park, or school or something, i don’t know, but she was four, and she was playing with this older kid who i think was like, seven or something? The age ranged a bit, but the point was that the older girl had been diagnosed as quirkless for, like, a few years, and the dad -the uncle of this classmate who started the rumor, remember- found out that the kid his daughter had been playing with was quirkless, and he immediately, like, split them up, because of course he did, the world is full of assholes, and took her to the doctor to make sure she hadn’t caught any ‘diseases’ or anything, or maybe it was already about the quirkl- anyway, sorry, yeah, he was treating this other girl like she was some sort of feral animal, and when he took his daughter to get ‘tested’ they found out that the daughter actually did have all of the body parts the are unique to quirkless people like the appendix and shit, and he started freaking out. He- and this part is just- fuck, he apparenly dumped her. Like in a literal fucking ditch. A four year old. Then when he visited the rest of the family he started spreading the rumor of how ‘quirklessness is contagious’ and ‘this horrible girl that infected his daughter’ and shit, and that kind spread to like, the other people who obviously already had… negative opinions, and that ended up spreading to the whole school, so the school ended up being divided between people thinking it was a really funny prank to pull on you, and people who, like, actually believed it and were afraid you were going to turn them quirkless.”
Hitoshi ended the ramble with a few seconds of heaving breaths he had evidently forgotten to take enough of during the story, and Izuku could do nothing but stand there. This… this had to be a joke, right? The only believable part of the story was that two girls, diagnosed and undiagnosed quirkless had played together, and the dad had ripped them apart and left one to die once they found out -and wasn’t that morbid, that that was the believable part, but wasn’t it exactly what the teachers said his mom should have done when he first got diagnosed?
But the other part just straight up baffled him. Basic quirk biology was a requirement for first years, and advanced was required for third years, so how could a sizable portion of the school, from what he’d seen, believe that something like that was even possible? It was literally second-week-of-school level knowledge that quirks, or lack thereof, were programmed into someone’s DNA. How willfully ignorant were these people- stupid question, the answer is always however much they can get away with. For his quirklessness to catch he would either have to remove or replace every single line of quirk coding in someone else’s goddamn DNA, which not even the most powerful known quirks could do, let alone meer proximity to a quirkless body. It was like saying diabetes or neurodivergency was infectious -actually the latter had been a common rumor a long time ago, why did people consistently refuse research right under their noses-. He- he wanted to scream. To scream and shove it into their faces that they were wrong, and also what was wrong with the world, but he knew there was no goddamn point. If they wanted to be told the truth, they would have listened the first time, and it was so frustrating that he couldn’t do anything.
“That is… literally impossible,” he responded to Hitoshi as they finally started getting ready, a task put off by their engrossment in the rumor.
“I know it is,” the other boy responded with a weary sigh.
“What, do they think we have the power to control other people’s genetics? Spoiler alert, if we did, that. Would. Be. A. God. Damn. Quirk!” he let his anger rush into his voice in harsh steps and stops.
“It would be a pretty powerful one too,” the taller boy said back.
“Yeah,” Izuku couldn’t help but let out a snicker at the thoughts that came into his mind at that, “just give cancer to the person who’s pissing you off.”
Just like that, a fresh gleam of humor was suddenly in the two boys’ eyes.
“Try to weaken your enemy’s quirk, but end up accidentally giving them blue hair, and they’re just like ‘...huh?’”
“Attempting to calm down your friends’ stage fright and, and accidentally giving them autism,” Izuku replied.
“Bipity boppity boo, I cast turning your blood into glue,” Hitoshi shot back the statement only half comprehensible over the laughter both boys were soon fighting to hold in.
The possible applications only grew more and more unhinged as they made their way into the training room, and the half confused, half concerned looks of their trainers only caused the hilarity to mount even further.
Maybe things weren't so bad afterall.
…
He wished things could stay this way.