Chapter Text
Shuuzenji Chiyo knew that some people talked of her as one would a hurricane. At the core of her being, she was capable of being calm and utterly peaceful, but one only needed to leave that bastion of safety to find just how difficult and chaotic life could be. She thought this was perhaps an accurate description, though she didn't like being compared to a force of destruction when her quirk and her calling in life was to heal.
That being said, some people seemed not to understand how close to death they came before she intervened. The chaos she had become so known for was in the hope of scaring her patients into some form of self-preservation, if only to avoid her. Over time, she had developed almost a sixth sense for when someone was being stupid enough to land in her care. When it happened when most of the students should be in the dorms and starting to settle in for the night, she resigned herself to returning to the infirmary before whatever hapless soul she needed to heal decided to take their chances somewhere else.
She was sitting at her desk with a set of injury report paperwork ready to fill out when the timid knock on the door announced the arrival of her injured patient.
"Come in," she called, watching to see which of the children had done what this time.
Midoriya Izuku opened the door, his freckles much darker against his shockingly pale skin. "Hi, sensei," he whispered. "Sorry to come to you so late." He turned to someone behind him. "I told you she'd be here. She always knows."
"Quit bragging and get in, kid." And that was a voice Chiyo also recognized. Torino Sorahiko had brought children to her a fair few times in the years he was teaching at UA. To be fair, they were normally doing something stupid with their quirks at the time, but many times it was because he pushed them on. He was of the opinion that stressful environments were required for making breakthroughs with one's quirk and actively facilitated such things, much to her consternation.
Apparently, he hadn't changed all that much. She sighed. "What happened?"
Midoriya had the decency to look sheepish enough for both of them and Torino merely looked bored. "In my defense, all he said was 'try to use it and let's see what we're working with'."
"That sounds like him." She led Midoriya over to one of the beds, shooting a dirty look in Torino's direction. "You came straight here?"
"Yes. After I told him you would definitely be here, even though your office hours ended at 3pm." He chuckled. "And that you would definitely track us down if we didn't come here."
"I would have, that's true." She patted the bed. "Sit down, dear."
Once he sat down, she could see the problem for herself. His arm was broken. No, as she examined it, 'broken' was a word much too small to describe the damage she was looking at. It was shattered. Every inch of his right arm was one big nasty bruise, and it was a miracle he was even conscious right now.
Or perhaps not. She didn't often see Midoriya in the infirmary when he was still a student, and when she did, it was always for something major that he claimed wasn't as bad as it looked. She had to point out that it was exactly as bad as it looked every single time—sometimes worse—but his pain tolerance was skewed enough to make out that it didn't hurt as much as it would hurt someone else. That alone was why she made sure to impress upon him the need to divulge every injury to her or whoever was patching him up, regardless of how bad it was. The big things could kill, but so could the small things, and no one would know.
"Pain on a scale of one to ten?" She asked, more curious than anything else. His answers were always odd.
"Uh, four? Maybe five?" He looked down at his arm. "I know it's broken, I know it hurts, but it's not... I don't know, it's just not as bad as I thought it should be."
"That is because you, my boy, are abnormal." Chiyo reached up to pat his cheek. "I need to get an x-ray of it to see if you need surgery to put the bones back in place before I heal them and remove any fragments that could cause problems. Hopefully not, but this—" She gestured at it. "This is far more severe than most broken bones have any right to be. How did you do it, anyway?"
"He threw a punch." Torino was leaning against the wall nearby. "I thought it would be fine because Toshinori was fine when he first used it, but that kid always did have more luck than sense." He sighed. "Wish that bit would have held out for him."
"Yes, well, bones shouldn't break like this," she told them. "They are built to handle a lot of stress, and normally bones break because force has been applied in an unnatural way, either from the side or by twisting. For this to happen, the energy you used would need to overwhelm the level of compression your bones are equipped to handle to an extreme degree."
"That makes sense," Midoriya muttered. "Regulation would be the first step to learn, I suppose. One for All is like an ocean of energy and I don't know how to take just what I need."
"Meditation," Torino muttered. "First place we start is going to be meditation, because this is not going to be easy or fun, and I don't think Shuuzenji wants us in here more than we need to be."
"Certainly not," she scolded. "I realize this is a difficult situation, but I don't want you in here breaking bones like you have plenty to spare. If you start making up for the time you didn't spend in my infirmary, Midoriya, I will use you as an object lesson in every single one of my first aid classes, and I'll make sure they can practice on actual injuries."
Both of them blanched, to her inner glee, and she led Midoriya over to the room with the x-ray machine. Working for a school as prestigious as UA meant she had access to practically everything she would need to run her own hospital. The only thing she really lacked was a staff, but there weren't enough healing quirks in the world to try and deprive other people of access when she was already there.
Still, having someone else on call would be useful at times like this. Perhaps it was time to bring up the possibility of hiring a nursing assistant to Nezu again. It would be excellent experience for everything from emergency care to general wellness, as well as the occasional brush with surgery. Chiyo had kept up on her medical license even beyond the abilities of her quirk because being able to heal with a kiss wasn't always enough.
Ah, she had almost forgotten about experience being an x-ray technician. Or really anything that had to do with large medical scanners that were sometimes replaced by quirked individuals. There were plenty of jobs in the medical industry that didn't rely on the genetic lottery, and she wished more people understood that.
Leading Midoriya over to the x-ray table, she helped him arrange his arm carefully, trying not to jostle the injury too much. If she were about to see what she suspected, it wasn't wise or pleasant to move that arm much. Yet another reason to absolutely lambast Torino for his lack of care. She'd helped heal All Might enough over the years to understand just how powerful the quirk was, and 'stock-piling strength' was always going to be a recipe for disaster when it was passed down after nearly 30 years of growth since Yagi first received it. It was always bound to get to a point where it would be too overwhelming to use.
After taking the x-ray, Chiyo helped move Midoriya back over to one of the beds while she developed the film. He and Torino started talking about their plans to make sure he didn't end up back in her infirmary again anytime soon.
The image in the x-ray resolved, and it was about as bad as she was expecting it to be. The bones in his hand and arm were shattered. They had probably torn up a lot of the surrounding tissue, which was why his arm looked as bad as it did, and it was probably luck that only Midoriya could have that he didn't seem to be bleeding out internally. But this wasn't something she was capable of healing in one session.
It would serve him right to have to take time off to deal with this broken arm, but Chiyo knew first that it wasn't his fault this had happened and second, that he could and would go out on his next shift with a broken arm in direct defiance of her medical advice. If he were younger, she would heal it herself because a younger body could take a little more strain without sustaining permanent damage. But as young as he was, he was still firmly in adulthood and something like this could be debilitating in the worst way for his career.
With a sigh, she returned to the main part of the infirmary. "I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?"
"Bad news." Midoriya looked grim, like he was expecting her to say that she needed to amputate his arm, even though he should know that would never be her first option.
"Alright, bad news." She held out the x-ray film for him to see. "That's your arm. The bone is completely shattered and unless something is done soon, you're probably going to be experiencing chronic pain in it for the rest of your life."
"Shit," Torino whispered, and a vindictive part of Chiyo hoped he was realizing just how dangerous his blasé teaching style could be in the wrong moments. Which probably wasn't fair because he did try to keep his students safe. He just messed this one up on his own, and she was petty enough given prior experience to hold that against him.
"Exactly. You should never do what you did again, or you could run the risk of losing your arm entirely or dying due to internal bleeding. It's a miracle this isn't worse than it is."
Midoriya winced, and she was confident enough to say her warning would be taken with the proper amount of caution moving forward. "And the good news?"
"I have a friend who can fix this better than I can, and I intend to call him in. He can use his quirk to mend your bones, and I'll use mine to heal the rest of it." She offered him a bit of a reassuring smile. "At worst, you'll have a slight ache in that arm whenever the weather changes, but it shouldn't be as bad as it could be."
Chiyo couldn't overstate her point enough. Injuries like that could hurt him far more than just physically, and she was just as fond of him as Nezu was. He was the first quirkless student in the hero program, which meant he was also one of the few students who understood his limits compared to his classmates. That being said, he never let anyone assume that he was more fragile than any of his classmates because of those limitations. He, unlike many of those in his class, knew how to work around the limits he was working with, how to compensate for what the genetic lottery hadn't given him, and he figured out ways to exploit the limits of the people he was put up against.
He had beaten the odds so many times before, and Chiyo was willing to do a lot of things to make sure he could keep doing just that.
After sending off a message to Koyama Arinori to come immediately to UA and another to Nezu to let him through the front gate, she settled in comfortably to wait.
"You know," she ventured after a bit. "This almost reminds me of what you did in your first end of term exams."
Midoriya groaned, exactly as she'd been expecting. "Do you have to remind me?"
"You attacked every single one of the zero pointers in that field like you had a personal vendetta against them." She grinned. "You came away with electrical burns and grinning like an idiot. I kept you overnight because I had to make sure that level of electrocution hadn't caused you permanent brain damage."
"He did what now?" Torino asked, leaning closer and proving he was just as much of a gossip hound as he'd always been.
Chiyo felt the grin on her face widen. "This child threw himself into his end of term exams with a level of bullheadedness and sheer ferocity that sent four of his classmates transferring to Gen Ed."
Midoriya's head whipped around to stare at her. "I did not!"
She patted his uninjured hand. "They may not have admitted it around you or any of your classmates, but an old lady hears things when people think she's too old or too preoccupied to hear them." Her smile softened. "You were asleep by then, but several of your injured classmates were staring at you as if you had gone insane or had fundamentally broken everything they thought they knew about the world."
"It was probably the second one," he grumbled. "I was in class with them for a full semester and they still didn't think I was just as capable as the rest of them. They told me to do whatever I wanted in the exam, so I did."
Torino choked. "They just— Whatever you wanted?" He giggled. "Fuck, kid, I haven't known you for more than a week now and even I know that's a mistake!"
"And he's mellowed out over the years," Chiyo pointed out. "Imagine him at fifteen, when he was still desperate to prove himself to his classmates and the rest of the world. Imagine what it was like to see this tiny child break through every obstacle put in front of him, things that his classmates and even some of his teachers thought was impossible." She reached up to ruffle Midoriya's hair. "Imagine what it was like to stare at this kid and know he's a force of nature not because of a quirk but because of the lack of one."
"I take back what I said before," Torino muttered. "You're crazier than Toshinori ever was."
Midoriya just shrugged. With both shoulders and he didn't even wince. Chiyo made a mental note to talk to him about aggravating injuries and laughing off extreme levels of pain again. That was one lesson he still hadn't learned.
"I couldn't afford to stop," he explained. "No one was going to let me. The moment I expressed any strain from taking the hero course, I was going to be tossed out on my ear and people were going to use me as an example of why quirkless people can't be heroes."
"That's bullshit. Toshinori was born quirkless," Torino put in. "It didn't stop him."
The atmosphere shifted ever so slightly. Chiyo knew that there was something wrong with how it had shifted, but she couldn't put her finger on what that was.
"I didn't know that," Midoriya said softly. "No one knew that. All Might was seen as having one of the most powerful quirks of all, and no one could ignore that." There was an edge in his tone that was equal parts sad and angry. "I did my research though, and no one who was confirmed to be quirkless was allowed to train in heroics within the last 150 years. And when there were quirkless people in heroics, they were always overshadowed by quirked heroes."
Midoriya's undamaged hand curled into a fist on his knee and Chiyo wasn't sure how to diffuse the situation. It only seemed to be getting worse.
"I had people tell me to kill myself, though not always in so many words. I had classmates who refused to sit in any of the desks surrounding mine because they thought for some fucking reason that I was contagious or so desperate for a quirk that I would spontaneously develop the ability to steal theirs." He snorted derisively. "The origin of that particular fear was well demonstrated for me recently."
Torino winced and Chiyo couldn't help but sympathize. This was not part of the story she'd heard before, though she had never been quite as close to Midoriya as Nezu had been. Did Nezu know about this? The level of quirk discrimination described in so few words was staggering in a way she had never imagined.
When she had been growing up, the ratio of quirked to quirkless was about even. In retrospect, she knew that there were clear lines in the sand drawn even then, but because the numbers were so close, they were working at a bit of a stalemate. That's when a lot of legislation regarding public quirk use had entered the record, when the world was only just starting to pull away from compulsory enlistment for quirked individuals in their respective country's military.
She had never once considered what it might be like for a child to be born as part of the rapidly dwindling quirkless minority, not even when Midoriya was a student at UA. Nor had she considered that there might be a darker reason why the quirkless population had been diminishing over the years other than the rising birthrate of quirked individuals.
"My parents abandoned me at a group home after a quirk failed to manifest and the tests indicated that I would never receive one. I haven't seen or heard anything about them since I was five." Midoriya scrubbed at his eyes, but they were dry. "I knew exactly how much it would have meant to me if I'd had someone to look up to in heroics that was like me. It's one of the widest fields with the most diverse people, and still there was no one like me in it. Because people looked at someone who was quirkless and didn't see a person; they saw a victim."
"Kid..." Torino reached out toward him, his hand stopping short of touching him.
"All Might may have been born quirkless, but by the time anyone knew about him, he had a quirk. He wouldn't have looked any different to any other hero like that. And when he had people's attention, he didn't do anything with it. I respected him, but I probably would have been willing to die for him if he'd said even a kind word about the quirkless population." Midoriya sighed and tilted his head back until he was staring at the ceiling. "Without you telling me, I never would have guessed he grew up like me."
The room lapsed into an uncomfortable silence because Midoriya did have a point. If no one knew that someone was quirkless, it didn't matter what they did. Having gone into underground heroics, Midoriya used the lack of knowledge regarding his quirk to his advantage. And even if someone did realize that he was quirkless, the bias against him still worked in his favor because the person he was fighting would underestimate his ability. He had proven more than capable of beating people in the Sports Festivals while he was attending UA, but that wouldn't matter to the people on the streets who would hear 'quirkless' and think that he was too weak to accomplish anything.
"I take that to mean you have no intention of changing your quirk status?" Torino asked.
"Absolutely not." Midoriya sat up straighter and looked back at them. "This quirk, One for All, it's not going to be what I reach for first, even after I get a handle on it. All of my training was quirkless. That's what all the heroes I work with know to expect. If I suddenly show up with a quirk at 25, I'm not sure I want to know what they would think of that. At best, I think some of them would probably stop trying to convince me to go into another line of work, as if I suddenly have worth to them now. And I gave up on listening to anyone who decides my quirk or lack thereof is more important than my skill."
Torino nodded. "That makes a lot of sense."
"And even if it weren't for that, All for One got away, I was the last person standing on the scene with both him and All Might, and someone might come to the conclusion that I decided to work with him in exchange for a quirk."
Chiyo couldn't help the gasp that escaped her. It would have been completely the wrong conclusion, but no one would know that. What was more, people were still baying for blood over the death of All Might and having Midoriya as a convenient target in all of that would work against him. It wouldn't be hard to turn the court of public opinion against the quirkless underground hero who went into a battlefield against someone who can steal and give quirks and left it with a quirk.
"There's also the fact that All for One wants that quirk. It's got a history to it, and it starts with him and his brother."
Midoriya's head snapped around to look at Torino and Chiyo decided to glare at him a bit too.
"And you didn't think to mention this before now?" Midoriya demanded. "All Might sure didn't have time, and that seems like necessary information. I've been on jobs where people die because they didn't have all the information they needed."
Torino winced. "So have I, kid. It's just hard to think about how this wasn't as simple as Toshinori's transition. Nana and I, we were training with him for a while before she handed it over. Died shortly after fighting that monster, but they had a lot of conversations about what it would mean, what he wanted to do with that power, and so on. I know it's been passed on in the middle of battle before, but that didn't happen with Toshinori and Nana, or with Nana and her predecessor. With them, there was a little bit of time."
Chiyo jumped as her pager beeped. Glancing down, she saw the notification that Koyama had arrived. She sighed. "I'm sure you'll need to continue this conversation later, but in the interest of maintaining secrecy, it has to be suspended for now." She stood. "I'm going to go meet him and bring him here. Make sure you're onto safer topics when I get back."
She didn't bother to wait for their acknowledgements, leaving at a brisk pace few people realized she was capable of. Anyone who commented on it normally got their shins whacked with her cane.
Her mind drifted back to what Midoriya had said about growing up quirkless. Heroes were supposed to be a good influence on society, to set examples for people, but they were still heart-breakingly human and prone to mistakes of all kinds. All Might seemed larger than life, but maybe that was to make up for having to live smaller before. And he hadn't done or said anything about quirk discrimination when he'd had people's attention. Neither had she. Neither had any hero she could think of.
It made sense, in a way. Quirk discrimination was a splitting subject. There were people who honestly believed that some quirks were superior to others—to the natural extreme that someone without a quirk was the most inferior of all. Most people, unless they experienced discrimination, wouldn't even think about it in their lives. But that didn't make it right.
She may not have had a lot of people's attention, but she had the ears of a lot of influential people, and Nezu would have more.
Sending off a message to the principal to arrange a meeting for the next morning, she knew she couldn't let this continue now that she knew about it. Midoriya had sacrificed his ability to speak up about the issue for the safety of anonymity in underground heroics. She had the ability to speak up about this, so she would, and she would encourage others to do the same.