Chapter Text
It’s been three hours and Midoriya Izuku is still not over the fact that he lied to All Might, Japan’s national treasure.
He’s so, so fucked.
He doesn’t even know how to correct this. What is he going to do? March up to All Might and go, “Sorry, I am fucking liar.” It’s what he should do, right? From the pure goodness out of his heart, Izuku knows that’s the right thing to do but—but he really doesn’t want to. It’s so embarrassing plus... it’s technically not really a lie, isn’t it? Izuku would know how to define a lie. Him, leaving details out and All Might making his own conclusions is definitely not a lie.
Izuku never told him that he was quirkless . Yagi Toshinori just made that assumption on his own.
(Which, like, is something he still doesn’t know how to take. Like, did everything about him seriously scream quirklessness ? Well, it would mean he did his job well, right? But also, what was it that ticked the other off? The self-esteem issues? The wording of the question? Or the utter lack of light and hope in Izuku’s eyes as they stood on that roof? Will he ever find out? Perhaps not…)
So, yes, he cannot be blamed for this mistake.
Still, he probably should have tried to correct the hero when the assumption became clear to him. It’s just, Izuku didn’t really realize the mistake until after the terrifying moment when he ran towards a villain to save Kacchan out of all people (like, for all the people in the world he could have potentially died for… and it’s just Bakugou Katsuki. Well.) and All Might came in, changed the goddamn weather and then saved everyone in that place effortlessly—which he now 100% knows is not effortlessly. And probably hurts a lot. Oh god, Yagi Toshinori is so amazing.
But yeah, after the whole inspiring speech of, “You can become a hero without a quirk!” Izuku just… didn’t have the heart to correct the number one hero. Because, sure, he had a quirk—but he lived his whole life up to till that point seen as quirkless. He learned in the most intimate way possible, what being quirkless in that society meant. Something he could perhaps have avoided—but didn’t. He chose that life.
(And it was a terrible life.)
And because he chose that terrible life, lived through it for like 14 years, he understood . He wasn’t quirkless—but to any quirkless kid, those words were a life-changer. They were a life-changer to him…
This was just a really nice way to say that he literally knelt down on the ground and cried rivers in front of the number one hero. Man, his tendency to embarrass himself in front of literally anyone has no end in sight.
Well, anyway, he was going to inherit One For All. Which is a lot on its own. A thing he needed to process for a while. It was going to take a while and a lot of training and he was probably going to have to call off his acting classes for a while—ah, right his acting classes. The sole reminder of his second issue.
His actual quirk.
Hoax.
It’s not like Izuku used Hoax for much anyway, so pretending that he didn’t have that quirk was going to be easy. Especially since Hoax operated better when people didn’t know he had it. Knowing about Hoax could render the quirk useless on some strong-willed people. Which was something Izuku certainly didn’t want to happen, considering he settled on getting bullied for being “quirkless” for over 10 years to avoid that. Yes, as far as he was concerned, Hoax shouldn’t be mentioned near anyone else.
That really only left him with One For All. Well, there was no telling how that one would go. OFA was almost surreal to him. A quirk that could be passed on? It almost seemed impossible, but so did quirks about 200 years ago. OFA was interesting and Izuku couldn’t wait to properly analyze it, once he had it. Perhaps he wouldn’t have a need to ever consider using Hoax again then.
(And maybe he should have realized right at that moment, that of course, it wouldn’t be that easy. When was it ever? )
It’s really past all the training that Izuku starts to understand just into what he’s getting himself.
But it’s when he breaks his arm trying to save Uraraka, that he understands for real.
OFA isn’t like Hoax. It can’t manipulate reality in the way Izuku’s original quirk does. It doesn’t rely on deceit.
But OFA is just like Hoax. Both are quirks that do not belong to the public, both are covered in a way that paints them dangerous—it makes him think. He’s got around 13 books of Hero Analysis. He’s studied enough quirks to understand, that there’s a lot of such quirks.
Bakugou’s is incredibly powerful.
But at power is also where it ends. It hurts and harms and what then? There are a lot of quirks like that. But then—OFA can be passed around. That’s unusual. Hoax could change the outcome of a lot of things as long one is a convincing actor. Eraserhead’s erasure is the nightmare of many quirk users come alive.
What makes quirk dangerous? Or interesting?
Or risky?
In a universe where Midoriya Izuku is born with a quirk that resolves around the lies and the truths of itself, he excitedly rushes to his childhood friend to explain the great news.
In said universe, almost ironically, he gets called a liar—and it breaks a part of him that shouldn’t have been broken.
But also, due to that, he decides to play along.
Because Midoriya Izuku is nothing but smart.
That’s why he understands the risks of letting a quirk like Hoax into the open. He understands that it’s better to stay quiet.
He sees heroes on TV and sometimes they shine, their quirks saving all. He finds videos on the internet and sometimes there’s only a glimpse of them before they fade into the dark—it makes him think and thinking is what Izuku does best.
He takes the label of the “quirkless liar” with a smile on his face. At six years, he tells himself to be careful (he catches the worry in his mother’s eyes and the scorn in his childhood friend’s red ones).
Quirks aren’t harmless.
(His ears ring for a long, long time.)
In the end, deceiving people is what he’s supposed to be good at. Perhaps those aren’t the qualities one would give a hero, but Izuku will make it work.
He has to.