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In the end, they took down the Shie Hassaikai. Eri is safe. So is Midoriya, so is Tamaki, so is Nejire and so are all the others who came to the raid. They’re injured, but it’s nothing a quick hospital visit can’t fix.
Mirio lost his quirk.
Sir Nighteye is dead.
“That’s all for now, Togata,” says Detective Tsukauchi as he clicks his pen and puts his notebook into an inside pocket of his coat. “Rest up, then. I wish you a speedy recovery.”
Mirio nods to him, then watches as he leaves. He’s not sick, not really, but he’s grieving and down a quirk, so maybe that’s some sort of equivalent his fractured thoughts can’t yet make sense of.
He lost his quirk.
Sir Nighteye is dead.
Mirio sits on a hospital bed with his legs dangling over the edge, bare feet touching the ground. He tries and fails to phase his toes through the floor. He keeps hoping, faintly, half-hearted, that his quirk will come back.
Because he knows that Sir won’t, so it’s all he can do to focus on something, anything else, just so he won’t fall apart with too many people watching.
Not that there’s anyone here right now.
He doesn’t even know why he’s still here. He’s relatively unharmed, and he can walk on his own, unlike Fatgum, who he’s been informed is just down the hall from him. He can walk right out of this hospital at any moment, but there are still too many people in the building who will just turn him around and send him right back here. You’re still healing, they’ll say. You’re fragile now, is what they’ll imply.
He lost his quirk.
He’s quirkless.
The door edges ajar, only noticeable because of the stillness of the room, and he finds his attention drawn to it. Once it’s all the way open, he sees Midoriya standing in the doorway, hand against the frame.
“Hey, Midoriya,” he greets, bringing up his trademark smile. It feels fake. He hopes it doesn’t look that way.
Midoriya frowns slightly, but he gives a small smile in return. “Hey,” he replies.
Shuffling a little towards the foot of the bed, Mirio pats the sheets beside him. “You want to come and sit down?”
Midoriya nods, closing the door carefully behind him. He hesitates a moment before sitting. “So,” he starts. “How are… how are you doing?”
“I’m as okay as I can be, I think,” he says, but it comes out hollow. “Just gotta get used to a few things, huh?”
Midoriya hunches his shoulders for a few seconds, then lets out a long breath. He doesn’t quite turn enough to give Mirio a look, but he gets it across all the same. A not-look that says he doesn’t believe Mirio’s words. It says that he’s waiting for the whole truth, but that he’ll be content with just a part of it, if Mirio’s not ready to share.
It’s a cutting sort of silence. It’s a masterpiece, if Mirio had to put it into a single word.
It does its job.
“I always wanted to be a hero, but—but I guess I can’t, now.” He laughs, but it falls far too short of its goal. “I’m quirkless,” he says, quieter than he can ever remember being. “I put so much time and—and effort into training a quirk I don’t even have anymore, so what can—what good am I without it?”
It’s a harsh truth, but it’s only a product of the society they live in. The quirkless are a dwindling percentage of the population, gradually fading into oblivion as hero numbers rise ever higher. Mirio’s only met one quirkless person, and only in passing, as his senpai in middle school. She transferred out a few months into the school year, so he never got to speak with her. Not that he was particularly seeking to do so at the time.
Their society is quirk-oriented, maybe overly so, but the specifics of it do nothing to hide the fact that they were all subtly pushed towards jobs and high schools suited to their quirks. Mirio knows this because he was also pushed towards a job and a high school suited to his quirk. That job wasn’t heroics, but he made it to heroics anyway. Despite people telling him his quirk wasn’t suited for it, he made it all the way to UA.
But he doesn’t have a quirk anymore. He doesn’t have a quirk, so where could he hope to fit now?
Something flashes in Midoriya’s eyes. It’s short, sharp, and if he blinked in the moment it was there he’d have missed it completely, but it shoots right through to his heart. His heart which, recently torn and hastily patched, suddenly stops falling apart.
Midoriya launches to his feet, almost tripping over in his haste to plant himself firmly in front of Mirio’s face. His gaze is frantic, teeth gritted in something between a smile and the start of an anger Mirio hadn’t thought he was capable of. Scarred hands find his shoulders and grip tight. Mirio can’t look away, because he’s pinned down with that stare and for the first time in his life, he finds himself unable to sink through the floor.
“So what?” Midoriya says, though it’s more of a hiss than anything else. “You—you’re Lemillion, quirk or no. You got into UA, you’re still a hero, you—” He seems to struggle to piece together his thoughts, but Mirio barely registers the pause through the sheer force of his conviction. “You can’t just give up,” Midoriya eventually settles on.
There’s a long moment where Mirio simply sits, waits, and digests. He could be… a quirkless hero. Midoriya didn’t say it outright, but the suggestion is still there. It’s… well, it’s a lot to take in. There’s never been a quirkless hero before, at least not one he’s heard of, but Midoriya’s eyes meeting his tell him that he believes that can be changed. He wants to tell Midoriya a million things, but none of them can fill the space quite right.
“Why?” is all Mirio manages to say. It’s barely even a whisper.
Before him, Midoriya kneels. It’s a slow movement, every minuscule twitch performed with a calculation Mirio can’t help but find mesmerising. In all the time Midoriya takes to reach the floor, he never stops staring at him.
A thud, muffled and quiet to begin with, echoes in a silence like he’s never heard before.
“Because I—” Midoriya finally breaks eye contact, and Mirio can feel a weight lifted suddenly off his shoulders that has nothing to do with the fact that Midoriya’s hands are loosening their grip. Out of the corner of his eye, Midoriya glances up, then back down. “Because I did,” he says.
And just like that, Mirio knows what he’s trying to say.
His mouth opens without his permission. “So—wait, so you—I mean…” He trails off.
“But I have a quirk now, right?” Midoriya says, picking Mirio’s jumbled thoughts up off the floor. Mirio just nods.
Midoriya stands, then walks back over to sit beside him again. His hand lingers a little on the frame, grip tighter than it needs to be, but it loosens quickly and he shuffles closer to Mirio. Mirio, in turn, shifts a little.
“I was quirkless all the way through middle school.”
Mirio blinks.
Oh.
He wants to kick himself. It makes sense—too much sense, in fact. The abysmal quirk control, the skittish personality everywhere except in the field; the tiny, barely noticeable reaction of guilt-ridden hope when he heard about the Shie Hassaikai’s plans for a quirkless world. Midoriya grew up at the very bottom of the pecking order, yet here he is now, launched to the top by a quirk he never thought he’d get.
“It… it could have been better,” Midoriya is saying, “but it still wasn’t great. I’ve, uh, got my old classmates to thank for my spatial awareness, so I guess it’s not all bad. When we were applying for high schools, Kacchan—um, that is, Bakugou—he was going to get into UA.” A wry chuckle. “Of course he was. He did. His quirk’s amazing, his drive is unparalleled, of course he’d get into the country’s top hero school. Only problem was, I wanted to get in too.” His voice softens. “Not a mark on his record after all that time. I didn’t want to report it after I heard UA had a zero tolerance bullying policy that it actually enforced. It wasn’t for me to deny him that chance.”
Mirio can hardly breathe.
“And one day, a few months into our third year—I nearly gave up for good.”
What Midoriya is saying isn’t just bad, it’s downright tragic. Did his senpai live like this, he wonders? Did she spend her days living on the outskirts of life, with too little power to do anything about it? Did she duck her head when people passed her in the halls? Did she accept defeat early on, or was she battered into the ground until she had no choice?
How much longer would it have taken for Midoriya to lose the light in his eyes entirely? How close had he been to that point, only to get a quirk after all?
Why had nothing been done about it?
“So what I’m trying to say,” Midoriya says, “is that I’ve been there. Where—where you are now. I’ve been powerless, quirkless, useless, worthless—I’ve been less than everyone else for most of my life, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.” He looks fiercely at the door, shoulders stiff. “I’ve been a Deku almost all my life, and it’s—hard. To see you facing what I faced back then.”
There’s one thing in that speech that Mirio chooses to focus on.
Deku. A Deku. Like he’s a thing. Something less than human.
He thought it odd that Midoriya’s hero name would be something like that. It seems so insulting, but Midoriya wears it with pride that speaks of something more. Now he knows that it’s exactly what he thought it was, that it is an insult, that it carries such weight that Midoriya would go so far as to actively fight its meaning and turn it around, a clearer picture starts to form in his mind.
“Mirio?” Midoriya looks over at him, and he becomes sharply aware that he’s spent an awful lot of time saying nothing. “I’m sorry if I said something wrong, I should’ve just—”
“Midoriya,” he says, voice firm. “It’s alright.” He cracks a small smile that is returned twice as bright and ten times more relieved.
“Sorry,” Midoriya says again. “I tend to ramble. It’s just—you’re not useless. You’re about as far from useless as anyone could get, and I really… look up to you. You’re already on the level of a fully fledged pro, so you—you can—you can still be a hero, you could never not be a hero, and if—” He cuts himself off, and doesn’t elaborate.
“…If what?” Mirio prompts.
Midoriya fidgets for a second, hands picking at the hem of his shirt. “If there had been a quirkless hero, then maybe I could have proved everyone wrong,” he whispers, like he’s afraid of being heard. “If I could have been that for all the other quirkless kids still out there, I would. I got the easy way out, and nothing can really change that, so I guess I can’t be their hero, not anymore. But if—if anyone can do it, if there’s anyone who can be that hope for the quirkless boy I was, then it’s you.” Those eyes are back, the ones that stare straight into his soul and force him to face what’s in his path. “If anyone can be the hero I needed, it’s you. It’s Lemillion.”
As soon as Chisaki’s quirk-erasing bullet hit him, Mirio was prepared to say goodbye to his hero career before it even started. He was prepared to call it quits, with only one in a million people saved, though he won’t ever regret saving Eri. All the other heroes told him that that was it. No quirk, no hero. That’s just how it works.
Midoriya has probably been told that very same thing thousands of times over, and here he is. He, like Mirio, was brushed off before he could prove himself. But unlike Mirio, he was also actively pushed down. The strength to stand fast, the courage that must have required—Mirio can’t help but envy it all, right down to Midoriya’s still intact quirk. Because unlike Midoriya, Mirio will never get another quirk. He had his shot and he threw it away, because that was what a hero would do.
It’s guilt that rises next because despite how yes, Midoriya did get a quirk, he spent his whole life up until that point, if not believing then knowing, deep down, it would likely never happen. He was called useless, worthless, Deku, all for something he couldn’t change.
But if there had been someone, a hero, to show him that he could do it despite all the odds, the road might have been just a little kinder to him.
Mirio smiles, and this time it’s real. Midoriya has told him what he needed to hear, and told himself along the way. Mirio’s road lies obstructed for now, but just as soon as he examines his new terrain, he can do it.
He can do it.
He’s scared. He’s never been more scared in his life. But he knows he can do it, and so does Midoriya, and if Sir were still here he’d know it too. So he will.
“Thank you, Midoriya,” he says. “I hope I can make you proud.”
Midoriya smiles.