Chapter Text
Izuku considers it a crime to not act on the atrocity that is Takoba Beach. I mean, the whole thing is covered in trash! It probably seeps toxic chemicals in the water too! And no one bothered to clean it up for years. At least, not until now. Izuku knows that the U.A. Hero Course would be incredibly difficult to get into for someone Quirkless. So, he has to do everything he could to mitigate that disadvantage, including strength training. And what better way to train for an exam in 11 months than to take on a full cleaning project?
Izuku first brought this idea up to Mr. Mizuhara, who fully supported the idea and requested Izuku to wear a branded shirt during his cleanups. He then went to his mom.
“Izuku,” she began, “I know that you want to be a hero, but how does this help exactly?”
“It’s strength training! Also, I’m doing some community service too!” Izuku answered.
“Oh, well in that case, you’ll need some gloves, young man. Can’t have you getting infected.”
And so Izuku bought some thick gloves and began his cleaning mission.
Shota knows without a doubt that this green-haired kid is Shonanmaruae, that analyst who essentially saves lives every day with his work. Despite his eccentricities, Shonanmaruae presents professional-level analysis to the heroes who chose to seek out his help. And he was just a kid. Shota can’t let a kid fall into the clutches of villains, and looking at the pictures he demanded Nemuri send him, the kid was far too scrawny and meek to defend himself.
Shota spent a couple days tailing the kid, making sure he got home safe and without issues. He makes sure to catalogue his patterns of behavior, so that if anything unusual happens, Shota can recognize it. And he definitely recognized something.
“What’s he doing now?” Shota mutters to himself as he watches the kid, he learned his name was Midoriya, step outside his house, wearing work gloves, and walked to the trash heap that is Takoba Beach. Shota watched in slight amusement as Midoriya lifted various appliances and other assorted large pieces of trash and carried them across the beach to a pickup truck that periodically left and returned. Strength training, Shota assumed.
“Maybe not yet.” Shota tells himself as Midoriya rests while waiting for the truck to return. “I’ll talk to him next time.”
Izuku diligently writes in his notebook as he listens to an online lecture about support item design in his room. He had been taking some engineering courses for about a week, around the time he started his beach cleanup, in order to learn how to design good support items for himself. After all, a Quirkless hero needs to have tools to level the playing field. Ideas keep flowing into his brain as he listens, all of which are inspired by marine life.
“...maybe some sort of scale-like armor? Scale mail is a historical armor type for a reason, after all…or what about throwing darts made like pufferfish stingers? Or maybe have some sort of echolocation or low-light vision feature like most bathypelagic fish?” Izuku mutters to himself incessantly.
He feels a tap on his shoulder. “Hey, Zuku?” Izuku looks up and sees Kari. “How’s your class going?”
“It’s going good, Kari. I’m thinking about ideas for support items right now. See?” He shows her his notebook labeled “Marine-Based Support Gear #1”.
Kari grabs the notebook from Izuku and rifles through it. “Jeez, kid, these are some good designs. You thinking of going into Support?”
Izuku shakes his head. “I wanna be a hero! But I figured learning how to make support items would also be useful.”
Kari laughs softly. “I bet you’re gonna be a good one, kid.”
Izuku’s eyes began to water. Kari seemed like she knew he was Quirkless, but her words still meant a lot to him “Th-thanks.”
Kari pats his head.
Shota sips at his coffee while he waits outside the aquarium. He knows that Midoriya does pretty much everything here, so it’s only logical to confront him here. He feels his phone buzzing and goes to check it. It’s Nemuri.
Blanket and Pillow: Sho where are you
Blanket and Pillow: Teacher conference is in like ten minutes
Shota grumbles to himself. “Damn conferences, always taking my time from the important things.” He shoots a quick text.
Shave Dammit: Investigating
“That should be enough for her.” Shota thinks to himself. He pushes off the wall he was leaning on and tossed his coffee cup in the trash when his phone buzzed again. He groans quietly.
“Goddamn it.” He checks his phone.
Blanket and Pillow: Its about shonan, isnt it
“Shonan”, Nemuri’s nickname of Shonanmaruae, has become a sticking point with some of the other U.A. teachers. How could some fourteen-year old be the notorious underground analyst that picks apart heroes down to their bones and leaves with a fish fact? Everyone basically wrote Shota’s theory off as just a hunch. But he knows for a fact that Midoriya was Shonanmaruae, without a doubt.
Shave Dammit: I’ll update you
Shota decides to get to work. He walks into Aqua Wonders.
Izuku had to use every tool in his arsenal to not go full fanboy. Eraserhead, the Eraserhead, is in Izuku’s favorite aquarium, paying for a ticket! This is the third greatest day of his life! (First was his first day in the aquarium and second was his tenth birthday.)
Izuku cleared his throat as he put on the facade of a normal employee. “Welcome, sir! Right this way.” He addressed Eraserhead. Izuku could barely contain his excitement.
“Holy whoa, I’m talking to Eraserhead!! I’m giving a tour to Eraserhead!!” Izuku kept thinking as his brain went on autopilot, reciting facts about the various fish and sea animals. He eventually reached one fish, the yokozuma slickhead. “Now this fish here is one of my favorites.” Izuku began, putting his best lecture-professor voice on. “They were first found in Suruga Bay in Japan, collected by a Japanese boat named Shonan Maru, and they’re-”
“The largest species of bony fish in the deep ocean.” Eraserhead finished, cutting him off.
Izuku had to use every tool in his arsenal not to fall over and shatter the tank.
Shota guessed that Midoriya would slip. Some fact about a fish that he’d seen in the analysis reports would have given him away or something. He never guessed that the fact that would finally let Shota confirm Midoriya was Shonanmaruae was the very fact that Shonanmaruae used in place of his identity.
Shota takes a deep breath as he watches Midoriya freeze up. “Look, kid, you’re not in trouble. I just wanna talk.”
Midoriya stammers out a response. “I don’t know wh-what you mean, Eras-sir! Sir. Yeah.”
Shota massages his temples. He’s gonna have to teach Midoriya how to lie better. “I know who you are, kid, so let’s just talk. You’re not gonna get arrested or anything.”
Midoriya nods and walks off. “F-f-follow me.”
Shota sighs and follows along, shooting a text to Nemuri.
Shave Dammit: I win
Izuku sits down on one of the sensory room’s benches. He obsessively wrings his hands, making meaningless hand signs with his fingers that he saw in an anime to try and keep himself grounded. I mean, seriously, why does that one guy have four hands for his hand sign?
Eraserhead comes in shortly afterward and sits down next to Izuku. Izuku takes a deep breath and waits for the other shoe to drop: that he can’t keep doing his analysis as Shonanmaruae. He can’t help the heroes anymore. He can’t be a hero.
“I know that you’re Shonanmaruae.” Eraserhead says. Izuku braces, squeezing his eyes shit. “And I have an offer for you.”
Izuku looks up at Eraserhead nervously. “An…an offer?”
Eraserhead nods. “Yeah. I want to train you.”
Izuku grips the bench tightly to brace himself. “Eraserhead wants to train me?! A Quirkless nobody?!”
“Look, I know that this might seem odd. A Pro Hero wants to train some fourteen, fifteen-year old kid, that sounds weird to most people. But your analysis skill far outweighs your youth and inexperience. And I’d hate to see you be unable to have a shot at being a hero.”
Izuku’s jaw dropped. “I can…I can be a hero?”
The permanent frown on Eraserhead’s face seems to tilt up a little. “Yeah. You can be a hero.”
Tears begin to stream down Izuku’s face just as Kari walks in.
“Izuku, I got you a-WHAT DID YOU DO TO HIM?!”
Shota ambles into the U.A. teacher’s lounge. The meeting that Nemuri told him had happened was over about twenty minutes ago, and Shota feels like stopping by to get the summary. He crashed into the couch and pressed an iced coffee to his forehead.
“You good, Sho?” asks Hizashi.
“Just fighting off a headache. Apparently my target had a very protective older sister figure.”
“Don’t tell me you-”
“No, Zashi, I did not attack him. It was a misunderstanding. She saw him crying and assumed I caused it.”
“And did you cause it?”
“I mean, technically? He kept saying they were happy tears, but she wouldn’t listen to him or me. She couldn’t stop yelling.”
“What did you tell the kid, Sho?”
“I just told him he could be a hero and that I’m willing to give him some basic training before the entrance exam.”
“You WHAT?!” Hizashi and Nemuri say this in unison as Nemuri walks in.
“Just my luck.” Shota thinks to himself.
“Ohmygod the famous hardass Eraserhead took on a personal student?” Nemuri coos mockingly at him. “What’s next, you gonna burn that gaudy sleeping bag?”
Shota just sighs. “Yes, I took in Shonanmaruae as a personal student. He admitted to being Shonanmaruae, so you can’t say anything about it.”
“Ooohh, I can’t wait to see that little green kid around here, he’s so cute!” Nemuri squeals.
Shota curls up on the couch. His headache does not get better.
Izuku sits crosslegged on his bed, thinking about his first support item design.
“Well, it’s gotta be something versatile. I need at least one primary tool that I can use in a bunch of different scenarios. Maybe something like…tentacles? Or something tentacle-like. Squid have really strong tentacles, since they’re mostly muscle and use fluid to move them, rather than bone.”
Izuku scribbles this into his notebook. “Maybe having them be in gloves? That could work…now, maybe having an offensive tool would be nice. The tentacles would be good as an offensive tool too, but they’re better from far away and I’d need something for close range…”
He lays down, groaning. “This is hard.” He grabs a marine life book from his bookshelf and thumbs through it, looking at the animals. “C’mon…what kinds of items can I make?” He pauses on a page about electric eels. His eyes widen and he leaps up to write in his notebook. “That’s it!”
Izuku keeps scribbling and sketching, muttering to himself the whole time. “I can make them swap between modes with a voice command or something, and they can be my main weapon in all my hero costumes…of course I’ll need multiple, I need them for different reasons…maybe tone down the voltage on the gloves…make sure that the metal wire is segmented and fully prehensile…there!”
He looks down at his notebook, detailing a pair of gloves with two modes: Eelskin, which allows him to emit an electric shock from his palm; and Cephalopod, which has six metal tentacle-like structures emerge from his knuckles, three on each hand, that can be used for movement, restraining, and long range combat. Izuku writes the name of these gloves at the top of his notebook: “Dual Mode Gloves”.