Work Text:
For a moment, all he can feel is relief -- that he is alive, that his backpack is somehow not destroyed, that the heroes who had all stood by, useless (more useless than even him) were no longer berating him for being foolish (for being quirkless), that Kacchan had finally left him alone. It lasts all the way through the moment All Might finally tells him those words he’s always dreamed of hearing, and, just as he starts crying what might have been tears of joy, his feelings of relief fall away fast.
Midoriya Izuku is not a fool.
He might cry more than anyone else he knows, be the least liked student at school, and have dreams just barely on this side of realistic, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t take things seriously. His plan to become a hero, while not very sound, still had more than two steps in it, and falling for whatever All Might is trying to pull is better off not being one of them.
Only a half hour ago, the hero ( his hero, the one person he had always, always looked up to) had been brutally honest, told him that he should stop dreaming and “be realistic”, and now?
“What sort of a sick joke is this?” he asks, and his voice is still shaky from the tears that were, only a minute ago, running down his face. He doesn’t look like it, not really, but he is so, so angry.
The man in front of him (All Might, the number one hero, the person everyone looks up to, the person he had thought he looked up to, had thought was honest if not kind) repeats the same words again, slowly but with an edge of what might be impatience. “Young Midoriya, you have shown yourself to have great heroic spirit and be deserving of my power, which I am offering to train you to receive. I assure you, it is not a joke at your expense.”
Not a joke at his expense?
“What else would it be?” he says, bitterly, and he is already angry and uncomfortable with whatever this is. He is still there, kneeling on the ground (with his scraped palms and his burnt, dirty clothes and the notebook that is, somehow, still more or less intact), and the man that is actually All Might stands framed by the light above him. “”I thought you were honest , I thought maybe you changed your mind, maybe you really thought --”
He finds himself crying again, but these tears are definitely not from his happiness.
“Maybe you think it’s funny or something, but it’s not! I know quirks don’t work like that, and I already know I’m never going to get one. You don’t need to make whatever point you’re trying to make about being realistic. I get it, quirkless kids like me can’t be heroes.”
If I wanted a quirk , he thinks, I would have listened to Kacchan . If I wanted to be realistic, I would have given up.
He picks himself up off the ground, because he can’t expect anyone else to ever do that for him, and he turns away (to leave, from his hero and maybe from his dream).
All Might, for a moment, looks like he might speak and might try to explain (whatever sick joke he’s trying to make, why he took Midoriya for the sort of fool that believed in fairy tales and a deus ex machina, how worlds where quirks could be passed on and were the only things to make a hero could ever exist), but he doesn’t.
Midoriya Izuku doesn’t bother to be relieved. Instead, he is still angry and crying, and he goes home.