Chapter Text
Izuku is four when Kacchan gets his quirk. One moment they’re playing heroes and villains, and the next, Izuku is oohing and ahhing over the tiny sparks flying from Kacchan’s palms.
-
Izuku is five, and he still hasn’t gotten his quirk. Mama says that’s okay, that it’s normal for some kids to not get theirs for a year or two after their fourth birthday.
Kacchan is learning kanji a lot faster than Izuku because Kacchan is the best at everything!
Izuku wonders if he’ll ever get his quirk.
Mama says it’s okay if he doesn’t get one at all.
Kacchan says that would make him a Deku.
Mama says it’s okay, but Izuku thinks that maybe it’s not.
-
Izuku is five and a half when Mama takes him to see the quirk doctor for the first time.
Mama tells Izuku his name is Dr. Tsubasa, but Izuku isn’t sure he’ll be able to remember that for the whole appointment. One whole hour is a really long time!
He wonders what his quirk will be. Will he be able to pull things toward him like Mama? Or will he… actually, he doesn’t remember what Dad’s quirk is. He hasn’t seen him in a really long time!
But that’s okay because Mama tells him she loves him every morning before daycare, and every night before she tucks him into bed, and that’s more than enough love for Izuku.
The doctor man has a very funny mustache, and he chuckles when Izuku tells him so. He seems to know lots of really important stuff about quirks, so Izuku thinks he must be a very good doctor!
Izuku sits as still as he can while they take the special picture of his foot, but it’s very hard when he’s so excited and nervous at the same time.
Tsuba-san, as Izuku decided to call him when he has a hard time saying Tsubasa-san all at once, tells him that he does, in fact, have a quirk, saying something about Izuku’s toe bones that the small child doesn’t really understand, but Mama is nodding along, so Izuku nods, too.
Even though he’s curious, Izuku doesn’t really care what his quirk ends up being in the end.
He just wants his Kacchan to stop calling him Deku.
-
Izuku is almost six and thinks that maybe Kacchan is mad at him about something. He doesn’t know what he did wrong, but it must have been something really, really bad, because Kacchan keeps pushing him all the time.
He meets some friends that Kacchan made and one of them has the same name as Tsuba-san, which Izuku thinks is pretty cool! Izuku really liked Tsuba-san when he went to see him a couple months ago!
He tells the mini Tsubasa—Tsuba-kun—this, and Tsuba-kun asks him if he was the one who diagnosed Izuku quirkless.
Izuku just scrunches up his nose and says that he isn’t quirkless.
“What is your quirk, then?” Tsuba-kun asks, but he doesn’t believe it when Izuku tells him it’s still coming.
“He probably doesn’t actually have a quirk,” another kid mentions. “He’s just trying to hide that he’s really a quirkless Deku!”
“I’m not!” Izuku cries. “Tell them, Kacchan! Tell them I have a quirk!”
Kacchan looks carefully between Izuku’s teary face and his new friends. “They have a point, Deku. If you have a quirk, then where is it?”
“It’s coming!”
“Well,” Kacchan says, glancing nervously over at Izuku before pasting on a sneer to look at his friends, “if you really have a quirk, maybe we can find it.”
His hands light up with tiny, popping explosions, and the tears that stream down Izuku’s face are from fear for the first time in his entire life.
-
Izuku is six and a half when he goes home bloody for the first time. Mama just frowns at him, but she doesn’t say anything about it, so Izuku heads quietly toward the bathroom, shoulders curled inward and shoulders downturned, wondering when Mama stopped caring as much as she used to.
-
Izuku is seven when he gets his quirk.
Dad comes home for a visit for the first time in years, and Izuku is too busy furiously scribbling in his hero journals to notice.
“Hey, runt!” Dad says, cuffing him on the head and startling him out of his fanboy reverie. “Heard you’ been giving your mom trouble.” Then, under his breath: “I told her to get an abortion when she had the chance, damn woman.”
Izuku flushes in shame, turning his head back to his notebook, carefully scrawling hiragana into the margins of his notes on a newer hero named Eraserhead he had just found the old sports festival footage of.
He thinks his Dad is done with him, but then there are hands in his hair, dragging him off the couch as he yelps in surprise, and the older man is angrily muttering about noisy brats and stubborn women and a lot of words that Kacchan says that Izuku doesn’t like very much. It hurts so much and Izuku just wants it to be over, wants it to stop—
“Hisashi!” His mom sounds so scared, so upset, so confused. Izuku never wants to be the cause of anyone's pain, not if he's going to be a hero, so he struggles and squirms and twists his body until his joints ache from the strain. The hands gripping his hair tighten, scraping harshly against his sensitive scalp. He smells the smoke before he feels the pain in his arm.
Oh, Izuku thinks, that's right. Dad's—no, Hisashi's—quirk is Firebreath.
In an act of desperation, Izuku throws his hands out and wishes his dad would just let go—
And then the hands are gone from his hair, and Izuku watches as Hisashi clutches frantically at his throat, struggling to breathe.
His hands are still out, he notes numbly, and, out of some morbid curiosity, some part of his brain that knows what to do, he twists his wrists, and Hisashi gasps in pain, keening pathetically, as he slumps forward into the floor.
“What are you doing?” Mama screams, pulling at his hands so hard with her quirk that both his wrists are yanked from their sockets with a terrifying pop that has Izuku wailing loudly.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again, I promise, I’m sorry, Mama, I’m sorry—” he cries weakly, pulling his arms into his chest protectively.
“How could you do that to your own father, Izuku?” Mama whispers brokenly, and then her expression hardens, and she looks him over once more, cruelty in her gaze. “I would rather you had stayed quirkless; I’d rather have a useless son than a villain one.” Izuku flinches at that, curling inward more so than he already is. “You’re no son of mine. I couldn’t have possibly birthed something so vile.”
Mama does not help him with his hands.
-
Izuku is seven when he boards the bus set for the nearest Quirk Internment Camp, hands bound in front of his body snugly from elbow to fingertip.