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Izuku is four years old when he is diagnosed quirkless. His mother receives an x-ray of his feet and the worst news of her life, Izuku receives the first in a long line of dismissive glances, and new shoes to better fit his (quirkless) feet.
The doctor is not technically wrong, in the same way that someone who says a sheathed knife is not sharp is not technically wrong.
Izuku’s father rages at the news- calls Izuku useless and his mother a failure- and leaves after Izuku bites him for hitting his mother. Izuku is quietly relieved- his father had rarely been around to begin with, and when he was he left bruises and the smell of smoke in his wake. Inko is devastated: she’d loved Hisashi more than anything.
Home is better, after he leaves. If Inko resents Izuku’s quirklessness for causing Hisashi to vanish she never shows it- though Izuku hears her sobbing down the phone after he’s supposed to be asleep, begging him to “come home, please” .
School is worse- in a quiet, sardonic part of his four-year-old mind, Izuku thinks his quirklessness didn’t change anything, just swapped the good and bad parts around. Then Kaachan says, “You’ll never be a hero without a quirk, Deku!” and Izuku changes his mind.
His teachers hate him at worst, look down on him at best. His and Kaachan’s friends become Kaachan’s friends, his grades plummet because “there’s no way a quirkless child could outperform a quirked one, he must be cheating”, he comes home with bruises and burns and reprimands from his teachers and doesn’t show any of them to his mother.
Izuku loves his mother with all his heart, but even at four years old he knows it’s his job to protect her- to be her hero.
Life enters a holding pattern for about seven years, until Inko slices open her hand cooking when Izuku opens the front door with a bang, a hole burned right through his top. Inko looks at her baby and bursts into tears. (Inko loves her son, Inko isn’t blind, Inko has no idea how to help him).
Izuku panics. His mother is bleeding (a lot! She is bleeding a lot) and crying? He doesn't know what to do. He’s holding his mother’s hand now, trying to remember what the first aid videos he’s watched online said to do, when internally he feels something click into place. A moment later the worst pain of his life washes over him, and Inko watches as her baby seems to fall apart- literally, his body blurring and cracks forming across his skin, before each jigsaw piece of him slots back together again and Izuku is gripping her hand like his life depends on it.
Inko rushes her baby to the hospital so fast she forgets to put her outdoor shoes on. They’re almost halfway there before she remembers to pull out a hanky to wrap her hand in- only to nearly go as catatonic as Izuku is.
Her hand is fine. Her hand is covered in blood, sure, but there’s no sign of any injury. In fact- Inko flexes her hand as much as possible with it still trapped in Izuku’s death grip- it feels better than before, the creaking and slight pain she’d felt ever since she (Hisashi) had broken her wrist by getting it caught (slamming it) in the door.
When they get to the hospital Inko is a stuttering mess, Izuku still frozen except when prodded to move. The nurse at the emergency room reception takes one look at Izuku’s shoes, another at the ‘Quirk: N/A’ on his is card, and informs Inko that there are people seriously hurt, and if she insists on being seen for Imaginary problems than she’ll just have to wait. Inko refrains from bursting into angry tears by dint of sheer dehydration, and drags Izuku to sit in the waiting room, next to a crying two year old who learned to float today and consequently broke her leg when she fell.
Izuku- his head hurting more than it ever has in his life, including the time Kaachan accidentally (purposefully) set off an explosion too close to his face and left him deaf in one ear for three days- reaches out to the little girl on autopilot. She goes quiet as her leg straightens out, before yawning and curling into her mother’s lap.
Izuku revels in the silence for a moment, even if his leg hurts as well as his head, now? before it all goes wrong. Suddenly, people are stampeding trying to get to him? His mother clutches him to her side as they are suddenly swarmed by people, their voices overlapping as they all try to talk to him.
“Hey, kid-“
“You healed that little girl, right?”
“Please, my baby, he’s sick-“
Izuku, overwhelmed, presses himself into his mother’s side as he tries desperately to sort through all the chaos and make it manageable, even as his headache seems to grow worse.
To Inko and Izuku the chaos seems to last hours as they cling to each other desperately. In reality the whole lasts less than a minute, before a doctor pushes their way through and uses their quirk- some kind of voice projection? Or attention attractor? Izuku isn’t sure, though part of him longs for his notebook to work it out- to quiet everyone down.
They look at Izuku, attention catching briefly on his bright red shoes- shoes Izuku is just now realising suddenly feel far too wide- before asking, “Now, one at a time, what happened here?”
“He healed my little girl!” Cries the woman sitting next to Izuku, still clutching the fast asleep child.
The doctor nods, looking to Inko then, “I assume this is the first time his quirk has manifested?” They ask Inko, who nods. “We thought- he was diagnosed as quirkless years ago. But an hour or so ago he healed my hand, and now this little girl.”
The doctor nods again, looking completely unsurprised. “It’s a good thing you came here then, healing quirks can have all kinds of side effects, we’ll need to get you and the girl checked out, as well as your son.”
The mother of the little girl looks frightened then, “Is my daughter going to be alright?” She asks.
“I’m sure she’ll be fine, it’s just better to be cautious in these cases.”
They turn to Inko. “You’d better come along, we don’t want the mob here getting riled up and going for you and your son again.”
Things progress quickly after that- actually, Izuku’s not sure he’s ever had a better hospital trip. When he mentions his headache they give him some pill immediately, and actually tell him to let them know if they aren’t enough,
He has his blood drawn, an ultrasound of where his appendix used to be, everything is going fine, until they lead him to the next room and his mother takes off his shoes- they slip off without even needing the laces undone- and the doctor tells him they need to x-ray his feet. Two things happen in quick succession: Izuku learns he has a fear of x-rays, and something in him clicks into place. The next moment, a wave of pain washes over him, worse than the last, and Izuku feels something pulse out of him even as his world goes dark.
To his mother and the doctor, Izuku suddenly leaps to his feet, looking panicked, before his whole body seems to split apart, hanging in the air like a thick mist, larger pieces still recognisable. Inko sees her son’s eye staring out a piece of his face, before he falls back together and every electronic device in the room goes dark. In the silence, the sound of Izuku’s body hitting the floor is audible. The doctor opens the door, but the corridor outside is dark. A few more moments pass before the lights flicker back on, and Inko screams. The floor underneath Izuku is slick with blood.
Izuku wakes in an unfamiliar bed, feeling like he’s been hit by six of Kaachan’s strongest explosions. Immediately his stomach begins to churn and he barely manages to roll to the side of his bed before his stomach attempts to exit his body via his mouth.
The gagging sounds startle his mother out of her doze- almost immediately she is rubbing Izuku’s back and calling for a doctor.
By the time they’ve rushed in Izuku is mostly done, and is instead hanging half his body off the bed, completely lacking the energy needed to pull himself back up. Fortunately, he doesn’t need to, as a pair of nurses manhandle him back into the bed.
“Izuku, honey, are you alright?” His mother demands, hands fluttering about him, unsure whether she can touch him without making things worse.
“Mom?” Izuku blinks blearily at her. “What happened? You were… bleeding? We’re in the hospital, are you okay?”
His mother bursts into tears, the heel of her palm swiping under her eyes, but she nods. “I’m okay sweetie. We’re here for you. You hurt yourself.”
Frowning, Izuku tries to make sense of his fuzzy memories. “Did I…” He almost doesn’t want to say it, afraid if he acknowledges it then this miracle will disappear on him. “Did I heal you?”
“You did a little more than that, young man.” A new voice cuts in, stirring vague memories in Izuku of being steered around the entire hospital as they ran test after test on him.
“How is that possible?” Izuku asks at last, “I’m quirkless.” There’s half a decade’s worth of pain in the word, Izuku braces himself subconsciously for the worst- for his mother and be to be thrown out of the hospital.
Instead the doctor just nods, holding up a set of papers. “That’s what this DNA sequencing and x-ray show, not to mention the appendix we removed when you were eight.”
Izuku frowns, even more confused now. “Then how-“
He’s cut off by the doctor continuing. “On the other hand, this set of bloods showed clear signs of the quirk gene,” They shake a different set of papers, “And this one shows another expression of the gene- not to mention I saw you grow a new toe joint with my own eyes after you fainted on us.”
Now that the doctor’s mentioned it, Izuku’s feet really ache- he suddenly feels a great deal of empathy for his mother.
Speaking of, Inko clears her throat. “What does that mean, Doctor?”
“Our current theory is this: Midoriya-kun’s quirk is rewriting his DNA on the fly to provide him with access to various quirks- how it’s doing that, and how it’s picking what quirk are unknown right now.”
Inko does her best to take that in stride, nodding. “Why did he collapse earlier, though?”
The Doctor shrugs- Inko wishes they’d been given a doctor with a better bedside manner, but frankly this is the best a hospital had treated Izuku in years- “At a guess? Pulling apart every cell in his body and rewriting it is a bit too taxing for him to do multiple times in quick succession.”
Izuku remembers the pain he’d felt before healing his mother, before passing out, and shudders. Then he shakes himself out of it. Who cares if his quirk hurts a bit- he has a quirk! A strong one! He can be a hero, just like All-Might!
His mother looks worried. “His quirk hurt him, though! He collapsed, he wasn’t moving, there was blood everywhere!”
Before Izuku can reassure her, the doctor notices and smiles at her. It’s not a pretty smile, but Izuku’s had a lot of practice reading people since he didn’t get his quirk: trying to work out if they were the kind of person who’d hurt him or not- he’s pretty sure this is the doctor’s version of a kind smile. “Don’t worry Midorya-san. In this case the fact that Midoriya-kun collapsed is actually a good thing. It means his quirk will cut him off before he is able to do too much damage to himself- despite how worrying what happened earlier was, he was actually perfectly fine physically- even the blood loss looked worse than it was, due to how spread out it was.”
Inko still looks worried, but less so now. The doctor just smiles wider. “In this case, I would recommend cautious experimentation with your quirk. It likely came in late as another safety measure, to prevent you from damaging yourself. Control will be key- you’ll be quite capable once you’re able to control it fully.”
Inside Izuku’s mind, soft laughter echoes for a moment.
Outside, he asks, “Can I go home, then?”
It takes nearly half a day- at least an hour of which Izuku spends convincing his mother that he is okay - but eventually Izuku is checked out of the hospital and sat at his desk in his room. In the flat beyond, Inko nervously dials a familiar number.
Izuku is unaware of that, however. Instead, he’s opening a new notebook, the first in a new series: “My Quirk Analysis”. He taps the first page; the doctor at the hospital had given him the forms to update his quirk registration mostly filled in, but the name for his quirk had been left blank. That was up to him.
He’s not sure- there’s still so much he doesn’t know about his quirk that he’s not sure what it should be called.
In the end, he settles on the simplest name he can think of. Multitool.
That done, he hands the papers to his mother, who’s hovering outside his room and tells him to go to sleep- and starts filling his notebook with everything he can think of about his new quirk. In the end it’s more questions than answers, but Izuku thinks he’s got enough to get started with what the doctor called “cautious experimentation” with his quirk.
First, of course, he has to figure out how to activate it. Both times he’d done it previously had been instinctive, panicked reactions. Izuku tries to remember the feeling, but most of what he gets is the overwhelming pain that followed.
He stares at his hands, then tries shooting them out in front of him, like he’d seen Kaachan do when activating his own quirk. Nothing. Maybe it’s emotion based? Izuku pulls out his phone and loads a video of a bunch of baby sloths that never fails to him overwhelm him with adorable-ness. Still nothing. Thinking back, he was pretty panicked both times he activated his quirk- maybe that’s the key? He successfully manages to work himself up thinking about going back to school Monday, but no new power springs into place.
Izuku thumps his head down onto his desk, closing his eyes as he tries to come up with an idea. Instead, he is greeted with the strong mental image of a closed hand. Mentally shrugging, Izuku reaches out, and the hand rotates, dropping what it was holding in into his waiting palm.
It hits, and Izuku feels the rapidly becoming familiar wave of pain wash over him. He’s not sure what the quirk he just got does, at first, then a drop off blood splashes onto the page of his notebook, and thoughts start to crowd his mind. Blood splatter indicates a drop of less than two inches indicating it is sourced from our face, likely the nose based on the smell of blood- conclusion: not fully recovered from earlier quirk use, further use of primary quirk likely to result in injury.
Izuku’s head starts to throb from having two trains of thought going at once: his own and this new one. He tries to think about what this new quirk is, but it just doesn’t stop rattling off deductions. Current quirk mental based: enhancement of natural ability to extrapolate based on evidence? Or limited postcognition triggered by finding clues? The light from under his door flickers briefly, Izuku barely has time to notice it before Change in light source-not caused by fluctuations in energy grid, too slow- not caused by damage to circuit- mother is outside the door- she is worried- she will check during the night- if she enters the room she will see the blood and insist on returning to the hospital- Izuku’s head is killing him, now, this quirk is damaging to use long term, unfamiliarity with quirk implies inability to shut it down- conclusion: quirk will remain on until enough damage is sustained to pass out- sound will alert mother who will insist on returning to the hospital, this wi-
Somehow Izuku wrenched control of his brain long enough to drop the quirk. He sat panting at his desk, blood dripping slowly from his nose onto his notebook, his head throbbing in time with his pulse and his feet aching.
After a few more drops of blood splashed down onto his notebook, Izuku gathers himself enough to grab some tissues. One hand holds a bunch to his face, while the other mops as much blood as he can manage off his notebook. Time passes. At last, Izuku picks up a pen, and starts a new page in his notebook.
“Quirk 3: Insight”.
In the end, Izuku barely manages to stagger over to his bed before he falls asleep, head pleasantly empty of thoughts- all of them tucked away in his notebook.
He doesn’t wake until late the next day; even then, it’s only because his mother brings him breakfast and a gift. Izuku, feeling half starved, inhales his breakfast before tearing open the envelope.
It’s a new Id-card. The same dorky picture as before, same birthday, address, everything. It shouldn’t mean anything: except at the bottom, in red, it reads “Quirk: Multitool”
Izuku bursts into tears. It’s a flimsy piece of plastic: it shouldn’t mean anything. Izuku has spent the last six years being reminded every day that it means everything.
In the end, Inko leaves Izuku in bed, he’s under strict instructions to rest this weekend- she offers to bring the computer in, but Izuku assures her he’s happy with his phone and notebooks. He is- especially since he falls asleep long before he can get bored of them.
Izuku drifts in and out all throughout Saturday and Sunday both. Normally he’d be upset at having missed the weekend, but he was just so tired- and besides, Izuku had a quirk, now, nothing could ruin his mood.
By Monday Izuku is well enough to go to school, though he is still a little tired. His mother tells him she let the school know he had a new quirk, and that they would assign him a quirk counsellor to help him get some control, so Izuku makes sure to bring his new notebook with him.
At school, things are seemingly unchanged, and yet completely different as well. His teachers still don’t seem to like him much- he’s only been at middle school for a semester but first impressions count, apparently, but when he gets his homework back it’s graded fairly, and when Kaachan corners him at his desk in between classes the teacher doesn’t intervene but she doesn’t punish Izuku for being disruptive either.
As for Kaachan- when things go wrong they go wrong fast. The blond boy is angry, palms popping in a way that makes Izuku want to curl up into a ball and go far away.
“So, Deku,” He hisses, “the hag says you have a quirk now. Well you might have fooled Auntie and the doctors but you haven’t fooled me. You’re still the same lying, useless wannabe you always were.”
“It’s not a lie, Kaachan.” Izuku says, voice quiet and small, “I got a quirk. The doctor says it probably wasn’t safe for me to use it earlier so it got blocked.”
Kaachan’s hands send curls of smoke off Izuku’s desk, as he demands, “Oh yeah? Then prove it.” He grins challengingly, as if he’d caught Izuku out.
Izuku gulps, but hesitantly he closes his eyes, and reaches for that closed hand. A brief flash of pain- he thinks it’s probably at the same as it was the first time he used his quirk- and he opens his eyes. The first thing he sees is Kaachan’s head falling off, followed by his arms and legs.
Izuku screams, Kaachan screams, the boys surrounding them scream. Izuku drops the quirk, still screaming. He doesn’t stop until Kaachan stands back up, seemingly fine, but backing away from Izuku.
“What the hell, Deku? You some kind of villain- only a villain would do that! You stay away from me or I’ll kill you.”
Izuku spends the next 50 minutes frozen in shock. Luckily, his teacher for the next period doesn’t care enough to remember that he finished the worksheet from the last lesson, so Izuku is free to sit and panic.
By the time the end of the day bell rings Izuku has spent most of the day expecting to be dragged into the principal’s office to be expelled and then arrested. Instead, he is completely ignored by the teachers, and his classmates give him a wide berth.
By the time he gets home, Izuku has silently promised himself and every deity he can think of that if he just doesn’t get sent to jail he’ll never use his quirk at Aldera again. It’s not that big of a sacrifice- he hurt Kaachan today, and Kaachan is going to be an amazing hero, so Izuku needs to get his quirk under control or he’ll just be acting like a villain.
Things at school settle eventually. Izuku’s grades shoot up, now that his teachers no longer mark him down due to being “too good for someone quirkless”. He doesn’t make friends- the other kids too used to hating him and too spooked by what he did to Kaachan, but they all too frightened to get close to him, too, so Izuku’s bruises fade until all that left are the occasional ones from people throwing things at him and then ducking away. And the ones from Kaachan, but that’s different: it’s Kaachan, they’re friends, he doesn’t mean to, he just gets upset easily.
Then, just when Izuku is getting used to good things, everything goes wrong. Because Hisashi comes home. It’s been seven years since Izuku saw him, two years since they last heard from him, and now he’s back. Oh, he’s still rarely home, but the smell of smoke lingers in the air, and bruises linger on his mother’s arms and Izuku’s chest.
Izuku will never forgive himself for not doing anything, for letting his mother brush him off with excuses about how she hurt herself, for believing (pretending) his father was only hurting him. He keeps believing it until he wakes up early one morning to the sound of breaking glass and steps out his room in time to see Hisashi backhand Inko.
He’s moving before he can think about it, dashing between his father and mother, arms spread wide. He sees sparks flicker at the back of his father’s throat and panics, grabs his quirk and less accepts the offered quirk than snatches it with both hands. Activating it in a flash. His eyes sting, but the fire in his father’s throat dies and Izuku nearly sobs with relief. He barely has time to try and puzzle out his new quirk- quirk cancellation?- before he is reminded that his father’s fire is not the only threat the man poses.
Hisashi grabs him by the throat and Izuku jerks back, trying to escape, or curl into a ball and disappear. Then, he nearly screams as pain washes over him. It feels like he just grabbed another quirk, but when he reaches for it he comes up empty.
Hisashi drops him, and hums. Then he turns to Inko. “Get this cleaned up- I’ll be back later.”
Inko and Izuku stay frozen until the door slams behind him, then Inko is reaching for Izuku, who is scrambling out of her reach. “I- I need to go.” Izuku gasps, before fleeing into his room, and curling up against the door. Inko doesn’t attempt to follow, and eventually Izuku uncurls and reaches for his quirk.
The hand feels shaky, and he doesn’t think he can handle a new quirk just yet, but it’s presence is enough to make him sob in relief. He’s not sure how his father knew to do that- Izuku normally only dropped quirks on purpose, or if he fell asleep, but he’d dropped them when startled (scared) by Kaachan enough times to be aware of the possibility.
His father shouldn’t be, though. Izuku hated to think it, but the only way he could have know is if Izuku or someone else who knew had told him- Izuku keeps his quirk analysis notebooks on him at all times. And the only person who knew that secret was Inko. Izuku isn’t angry with his mother (he’s hurt, he’s furious, why would she tell him, he trusted her) but it’s an upsetting thought.
Still, Izuku is a forgiving person, and he knows Inko loves Hisashi (he understands loving someone who hurts you, who hurts others) so by the time a few hours have passed- Izuku watching the offering hand swap out one mystery quirk for another over and over again- he’s calmed down enough to check his mother is alright without letting any resentment creep into his tone.
Inko has swept away the broken glass and is staring at the apartment door when Izuku walks back out.
Izuku shoved down the pain he feels at that, and goes over to check on Inko, who shakes herself out of her thoughts to gather Izuku close.
Hisashi comes back, eventually, and Izuku’s quirk refuses to cooperate, even as the man gets worse and worse. He tries, desperately, reaching for a hand that isn’t there, but his quirk is running scared, it seems.
Later, Izuku will consider it a blessing, because with Izuku seemingly quirkless again Hisashi seems to get bored with them again, and leaves for longer and longer periods until he stops coming back all together. Izuku and Inko’s lives return to their previous states, and if Izuku is quietly aware of the chain of unread messages Inko has sent to Hisashi, he says nothing. In turn, Inko says nothing when she sees Izuku quietly changing the locks to their apartment one day.
By the time his final year of middle school starts, Izuku has managed to work out a few things about his primary quirk.
- His quirk is at least a little bit sentient, protective, petty, and has a vicious sense of humour.
- He can switch quirks about twice an hour without passing out- the recovery period lengthens the closer he gets to that limit though. At three, he has maybe 5 seconds to use it before he’s out. (Mutation quirks count as double)
- He can only hold one quirk at once, trying to hold more just results in him dropping the current one.
- There’s no way to see what quirk he’s being offered before he accepts it, and he’s pretty sure he doesn’t have much, if any, say in what it is.
- When he grabs a quirk without already holding one, his body changes- his feet lose the extra joint. This makes him very glad he had his appendix out when he was ten- his feet ache all the time now. And while he was able to build spring loaded walls into his shoes to accommodate the changing sizes of his feet he's not sure how he'd build a spring loaded abdomen