Chapter Text
Midoriya Izuku is almost nine years old when he realizes it’s never going to get better. He looks up from where he is, pushed onto the ground, and he sees how even the quiet kids laugh at him and the teacher has already turned away. Izuku already knows that life is not fair, that not everyone was created equal, but he still thought that maybe if he tried hard enough everyone would change their minds.
Instead, he has a couple of bruises on his knees and the sleeve of his shirt is still giving off a few wisps of smoke. It had caught on fire from one of Kacchan’s explosions going off too close. His skin didn’t receive any burns, this time, but the ones from last week are still healing. As much as Izuku wants to think that Kacchan didn’t do it on purpose, he knows that he’s going to be a great hero someday with the quirk that everyone compliments, Izuku also knows that it’s not a coincidence that he’s always the only one injured.
Kacchan hurt him, and the other kids laughed, and the teacher didn’t care, and it was all because he was quirkless.
That isn’t going to change, the people around him aren’t going to change. But he can change something, can’t he? The thought lingers all afternoon, all through the classes where he has to deal with a messed up uniform and whispers from his classmates, even as he walks home and his mother greets him at the door.
Maybe Midoriya Izuku is never going to get a quirk, but he doesn’t have to be quirkless. It would be better to show off something weak, be quickly dismissed, rather than taunted and the only quirkless kid in the neighborhood. It’s not like he wasn’t planning to become a hero anyway, and one more trick on his side can only help.
He has time, but not too much time. He has to figure out something within the next few months or maybe a year, because while no one expects an eight or nine year old to develop a quirk so late, no one expects them to fake one, either. But the longer he waits, the less likely it will be that anyone believes him.
It would be better, too, if it wasn’t something unexpected for him to develop. As much as Izuku wishes he had a quirk like All Might’s strength, there’s both no family history of similar enhancement quirks nor any realistic way for him to fake it. There is nothing outside of serious weight training, which he’s probably too young for. While he could reasonably fake some sort of intelligence or memory quirk, it falls short on the secondary requirement of being flashy and unusual. No one is going to believe him if they can’t see it work.
Whatever quirk he chooses has to be both something he could reasonably demonstrate and just unusual enough. It has to look like a quirk and not a magic trick.
His mother Inko’s quirk Pull , the attraction of small objects, comes from her own father’s weak quirk of Minor Magnetism and mother’s Kinematics quirk that allows her to manipulate the direction of an object in motion. On the other side of his family, Izuku only knows about his father’s Fire Breath. It’s exactly as the name describes, although he barely remembers the quirk or much about Hisashi from before he left to work overseas.
His grandmother’s quirk would be too hard to achieve, and while there’s a potential in trying to recreate a magnetism quirk, Izuku is more drawn to the idea of breathing fire. It’s a classic magic trick from before the time of quirks, isn’t it? It’s also dangerous, but being a hero is going to be dangerous, so Izuku (perhaps mistakenly) figures that it shouldn’t be much of a deterrent.
It’s the first step he has to take, after all, if he wants anyone else to believe in him.
IIt’s a lot harder to find information on fire breathing than Izuku expected. About a week later, while he’s supposed to be working on his homework, he scans pages on the internet that he hopes have the information he needs. A lot of the top results all have to do with quirks and heroes with fire abilities, ranging from the Number Two Hero of Japan, Endeavor, to a sidekick going by Ember whose quirk is only being able to dim and control the temperature of fires.
Neither of them even have fire breath specifically! Sure, there are also a few others scattered here and there, such as a man with a quirk called Dragon Breath that allows him to exhale fire and momentarily shape it, which has Izuku itching to take notes in one of his journals.
He has to remind himself, though, that it’s not what he’s looking for. Quirks, although they often border on scientific and blur into the biological, are still too unknown for him to directly imitate their functions. From what he knows, his father’s Fire Breath was the result of a uniquely flammable aerosol produced around the back of his throat. Hisashi could release it at will and it would ignite upon contact with air. While technically an emitter type, he had additional mutations that kept him from being burnt or damaging his lungs, something that Izuku is pretty certain he doesn’t have.
And he’s searching for magic tricks, as interesting as all that is. Unfortunately, most modern magic shows and performances are either small time card tricks and sleight of hand or built around quirks for the larger groups that can shell out the money for a non-hero, work based license. His first investigations such as checking the Wikipedia pages on fire tricks ended up in only giving him an overview of the risks and a couple world records. It takes a couple of pages and a trawl through three separate forums before Izuku even encounters suitable information.
He can’t find too much detail on the history of fire breathing, but after he takes a break to focus on finishing his actual schoolwork, Izuku spends a couple of hours reading up on how it can be done. He needs to find two things in particular, the right type of fuel and a method of ignition. Basically everything is followed by lists and lists of everything that can go wrong and why he, not even nine years old and without any form of an instructor, should not be even thinking of attempting any of it.
....That’s not going to be what stops him, though. He’s had a couple of days to think about it and his mind is already made up. He’s going to try and he will succeed by the time school takes a break for the summer.
By the time his birthday comes around in July, everyone is going to know that Midoriya Izuku has a quirk.