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Ten months of training behind his mother’s back had more than paid off, Izuku decided, looking in the mirror the morning of the Entrance Exam. He pulled a jacket on over his muscle tank and nodded.
His mother never noticed the way he’d left twenty minutes earlier for school and if he’d spent those twenty minutes running with increasingly heavy ankle and then wrist weights on — well, she didn’t need to know. She didn’t need to know about all the exercises and stretches he’d learned on HeroTube and spent doing when she’d had him pent up in his room for his ‘safety’. He spent a lot time doing sit-ups and yoga, following self-defense videos to learn good stances for fighting and lifting weights he’d brought with his allowance and smuggled into the house when his mother was working or by hiding them under his school books.
When he got to a point where he wanted to start lifting things too heavy to possibly sneak into the apartment, that was when he resorted to breaking the lock his mother had on his window. She never suspected it. She truly believed he was an innocent, fragile baby. And then he would sneak out through the window and down the fire escape each night and go to the trash beach and drag things around or lift them.
Now he’d gone from physically... pitiful, to be honest, to the peak of fitness, according to the doctors that examined him at the clinic. His mother didn’t seem to really notice much. She cooed over him as she fed him a breakfast of fish and rice and said puberty was making him into a man. She truly was willfully blind, but that was fine. Izuku wanted her that way. He was lucky she was even letting him try for the exam at all.
And Izuku was excited.
He was going to UA grounds.
And Izuku was excited.
Be realistic, All Might had said. Well, Izuku was realistic. There was only one Heroics School in Japan that accepted Quirkless students, and it was UA. If Izuku wanted to be a hero, then UA was what Izuku had to achieve. Izuku had to prove he belonged with the best of the best. It was a lofty goal, and one Izuku wasn’t sure he could achieve. He asked for support on the forums as he rode the train, and the community provided, as they always did.
By the time Izuku’s train is arriving at the station, he’s still quite anxious, yes, but he remembers what he’s fighting for — This is for the him of the past, who would’ve given anything to see a hero like him. This is for all the times Kacchan and Tsubasa and Yagami and the others hurt and hurt and hurt him and said he couldn’t. He could! He would! This is for the real Izuku, who he shoves down deep every day, because truth be told... Izuku hates being told what to do, and he’s sick and tired of everyone telling him what he should do, what he can and can’t do, what he should and shouldn’t dream, how he shouldn’t even live!
Yeah, Izuku can ignore the anxiety when he thinks of everything he has to fight for. He nods his head in determination and heads for UA.
———
Izuku sprints for the gate as soon as Present Mic’s given the go ahead and he almost immediately runs headlong into a one-pointer. He has no weapon but his hands and his wits. That’s okay. Izuku’s good at thinking on the fly. Lips curling into a feral grin, Izuku leaps forward, arms curling around the robot’s ‘head’ in a mockery of a chokehold and pulling, while his legs press the robot into ground. Izuku can feel his palms catching on sharp machinery as he finally tears the head free.
That’s something he’ll take care of properly later. Right now, it’s not what matters.
He takes the longest and sharpest piece of scrap he can find — it’s maybe a foot long, a bit jagged in places but not too shabby he thinks. He holds it carefully between his teeth as he takes off again, reaching to tear off his right jacket sleeve, then his left. He knows by using them to protect his hands he’ll lose some of his grip, but blood’s going to impede his grip too. Better to prevent further injury.
There’s excessive fabric in the way, but there’s no time to deal with it — another one-pointer, Izuku takes the scrap in hand and doesn’t hesitate to leap at the robot the same way he’d leapt at the first. It’s an experiment of sorts. Do they learn? Does he need to keep twisting and turning or —
“Ah, you’re simple. It's to be expected, I guess,” he mumbles, as he tears his scrap free. It’s much easier now that he has a weapon, however rudimentary it may be. “It is an entrance exam, most of us would be untrained. Still, I had thought there might be more to this... Brute strength is not all that matters.”
“Shit!” A deep voice spits out and there’s the sound of a body colliding with something.
He shakes his head, gripping his blood saturated sleeves tighter as he immediately turns and sprints towards the cry. A tall, frail looking boy with bright pink hair clutches his head, down on the ground, as a two-pointer hovers over him — it’s clear the robot flung him into the wall. Izuku reacts on instinct, and leaps onto the back of the robot as he calls out to boy.
“Hey, Pink, can you still move?” Izuku shouts as he stabs at the two-pointer. It’s not like the one-pointer. It’s not something he can grapple. If he hadn’t thought to grab the scrap earlier, he’d be useless against this. “If you can, get somewhere safe! You have a head wound! You can’t fight anymore!”
Pink groans, attempts to push himself to a standing position and vomits before settling for crawling. Though it’s absolutely hypocritical, Izuku appreciates that he’s not the type that’s stubborn enough to argue that he can keep going. Izuku catches a good spot a second time and opens up a large enough spot that he can plunge his hand into the robot — he lets go of his left sleeve and plunges his left arm in and grabs anything he can to tear it up, and the bot drops like a marionette that’s had its strings cut, taking Izuku down with it —
He ends up smacking his nose — it’s not broken, but it’s bleeding sluggishly now — and biting his tongue in the drop — it wasn’t far but it sudden and he was neither expecting it nor able to do anything to catch himself with his arm buried in a robot. He spits the blood from his mouth and moves on, spotting Pink tucked hidden in a space small enough that Izuku’s confident he’s safe from the bots. He still pauses just long enough to make sure Pink is safe, which he confirms — though his eyes are a little more vacant than Izuku would like to see.
Izuku takes down a couple more one-pointers and pulls a girl with red hair out of the path of a reckless heroic Quirked kid just in time to keep her from getting beamed in the head with a massive rock. It takes every ounce of willpower he has to not mutter out loud, but god, sometimes he hates flashy Quirked bastards. Brute strength isn’t what makes a hero. It really, truly isn’t, and he doesn’t understand why a school like UA has such a blatantly biased exam like this, an exam that doesn’t even show off half of what matters.
And Izuku really thought there was more to this, something that you could find — but he’d failed to find it.
It really was just about brute strength.
But now wasn’t the time to be bitter that UA was probably like the rest. He’s got six points. He’s not getting in on six points. He has do better than this.
He dives after a one-pointer, stealing it from another examinee who honestly looked relieved to not have to deal with it, but he still felt a bit bad about the theft. He does the same with a three-pointer, and that one is much less appreciated — Izuku gets the feeling if the blonde he’d snatched it from wouldn’t be disqualified for fighting, he’d have a black eye right now.
But the pickings are slim at this point.
And Izuku wants this.
Izuku has a point to prove — most likely has more of a point to prove than anyone else here. He’s active on the forum; he knows how most of his community believes that hero society is hopeless and there’s no point. Sometimes Izuku wonders if it’s too far gone to save too. Few, if any, of Izuku’s people would be here.
So guilt will not serve him. Izuku can’t afford to fall into that trap, not when this test is clearly a simulation of Spotlight Heroics — (Remember that day, Deku? Mount Lady’s debut, take a swan dive and pray for a quirk in your next life, be realistic) — Izuku remembered. This test wasn’t meant for the types of heroes Izuku wanted to be.
But Izuku didn’t care about what was realistic anymore, did he? He made a promise, on that rooftop.
So he just had to keep — looking—!!
And then the grounds shook, and it was like nothing Izuku had felt before. Izuku had lived through earthquakes. He’d been on the scene of dozens of major villain attacks, had taken hundreds of Kacchan’s explosions to the face until he’d started needing a hearing aid in his left ear to match Kacchan’s own hearing aids. None of that compared to the way the zero-pointer shook the fake city, leaving Izuku feeling distinctly like prey as it toppled buildings.
It was instinct to start to run away, and as he runs, he’s got one eye out for more robots with points, but he’s also tracking the path the behemoth is taking and suddenly, suddenly he makes a connection he doesn’t like — The pink boy, would he even run, or is he too concussed to move? Because if Izuku’s right...
Then Pink is just sitting there, concussed out of his mind, right in the zero-pointer’s path, and it’s all Izuku’s fault, because he just left him there.
Izuku doesn’t hesitate. He whips around and sprints back towards where he left Pink Boy. The steps of the zero-pointer, the way other students push and shove if they pass by in their haste to get out of the way, the crumbling of a building behind him, only a block or two away — it all leaves him stumbling every few steps, but that’s fine.
He just needs to know.
Pink’s crawled half-way out of his hiding spot, but with all the noise and chaos and the concussion, he just looks lost and panicked — he keeps looking around as though he’s trying to figure out where to run to, but the more he turns his head, the sicker he looks.
Izuku puts his hands up, offers a big smile. “Can I get you out of here?”
“Please?” Pink holds out his hands, making grabbing motions and looking terribly fragile and small for someone so tall.
“You think you can stand for a second with some help?” Izuku asks, taking Pink’s hands in his. Pink let’s Izuku pull him into a standing position, and before he can even have a chance to feel off balance, Izuku’s swung him on to his shoulders in a firefighter’s carry. Compared to a lot of Izuku’s weight training, Pink is practically nothing, and he’s able to take off at a full speed sprint with him without too much effort. “Sorry for no warning, but we need to go... like yesterday!”
“Oh god,” Pink mumbles, and there’s the sound of retching. “Too fast.”
Fortunately, Izuku was already going to have to get rid of the jacket, anyway. He’d already destroyed it and removed the sleeves, after all.
“Sorry,” Izuku repeats, but he doesn’t stop or let up until they’re safe, until the zero-pointer stops then the timer buzzes perhaps ten seconds later.
He carefully lowers Pink Boy to the ground, lays him down so that he’s turned to the side if he vomits again, and then Izuku’s eagerly peeling off his bloodied, vomit covered jacket... if you could even call it a jacket at this point — it’s more of a vest now, honestly, and with the way Izuku had torn it so brutally during the exam, combined with how filthy it was, completely unsalvageable. He keeps a close eye on Pink until Recovery Girl heals him and Izuku knows he’ll be safe in her hands, and then she turns her complete attention to him.
Izuku receives a long-winded scolding about never fighting bare-handed again — “You heroic types are always so reckless with your bodies,” she clicks her tongue as she examines Izuku’s mangled hands. “If you’re going to save people with these hands, you need to take care of them. Treat them with care from now on, you foolish, reckless child.”
With that, she presses a kiss to Izuku’s forehead and a small bag of candy gummies that apparently will help with the tiredness into Izuku’s lap, and Izuku watches as his hands knit themselves back together, flesh and muscle reattaching itself. The slight ache in his tongue goes away and — there’s a burn on his right side that he’s been treating for days that was driving him mad, because his arm kept rubbing it open every so often, and now it’s just gone. He didn’t think she knew. He hoped she didn’t know.
He didn’t want her to know and just pretend she didn’t see. Like his mother.
Because for a moment, when she’d scolded him, sure, she was scolding him, but it actually felt well-meaning for once, and she’d called him a hero type without it being anything disparaging, and that was new to Izuku. Exhaustion is washing over him in a heavy wave, and there’s nothing left to do but force himself through it before his mother gets even more anxious than she surely already is —
Izuku can already picture the way she must be pacing and twisting her fingers together — if she had her way, he’d never leave the house again.
He was fragile, and the world was dangerous. That was the way it had been since he’d been diagnosed (like he was diseased) at the age of four, despite the fact that no one and nothing had changed but the way people reacted to the label they’d all placed on him. The label he’d never asked for. Quirkless. Fragile. Breakable, broken, worthless, useless — Izuku thinks of the way he’d took down the very first robot with nothing but his bare hands.
Fragile, huh...?
———
“Izuuu,” His mother wailed, throwing herself at him as soon as he opened the door to their apartment. “I was starting to think I was going to think I was going to have to chase you down or call the police! I called UA, and they said you’d left the grounds fifty minutes ago and it should only take forty minutes for you to get home from UA!”
His mother sobbed into his shoulder, fat tears soaking his tank top as she squeezed him tightly. “And that exam! Oh, I heard it’s so strenuous! I was so worried you’d get hurt! If they didn’t have that healing heroine, I don’t think I could have let you go!”
She pulls back, and though fat tears still run down her cheeks, she fixes him with a stern look. “Sometimes you make me think you want to give your mother a heart attack with this heroism dream of yours! You worry me sick sometimes, Izuku! You never seem to remember how fragile you are!”
His mother curls a hand around his wrist and drags him inside and hauls him over to the kitchen table. Izuku follows dutifully, dully, like his mother’s obedient porcelain doll. It’s a line that’s impossible to toe — he wants to follow his dream, but it would never be in line with the image of him she wants to uphold.
“Sit!” She commands, like he’s a dog, and Izuku obeys.
She grips his face in her hand, inspecting him for injuries. Her thumb smoothes over a small spot near the corner of his mouth.
“There’s blood,” she murmurs lowly. “Did you get hurt?”
Izuku’s quick to minimize, to lie. He’s careful not to wave his hands like he might normally — he’s going to have to slowly introduce her to the idea of him being a weird teenager obsessed with wearing fingerless gloves (and that’s the real reason he was ten minutes late coming home) to hide the scars that are shiny and bright and new on his palms — and to fight against his natural body language is harder than he thought it would be, but he manages it.
“Nothing major! Just a few bumps and bruises, mostly, but... um, you know me, Mom!” He pauses, rubs a little at one of his arms, tries to look sheepish. She looks like she’s buying it. “There was this kid, and he got in a little trouble and I had to help and when I did I startled him and we bumped heads and haha, it’s so embarrassing... I was trying to save him and he broke his nose on my face. Guess I missed a spot of blood.”
The story sounds stupid and far-fetched. Izuku doesn’t buy it at all, but his mother’s always been an easy sell because she has an image of Izuku in her head that she wants to see and as long as what Izuku says lines up even the smallest amount with that she’ll buy almost anything he says.
She sighs, shaking her head. “It doesn’t sound like you were careful at all during your exam, Izuku. Take a quick shower, then go to your room. We don’t want you getting into anymore danger before dinner. I’ll make you a snack while you shower. You have ten minutes; I’m starting the timer now.”
Izuku sighs and rushes to the bathroom. He feels like a doll on display. This isn’t what he wants from his life.
———
Izuku’s so nervous. He picks at the fraying on the tips of his fingerless gloves and tangles his fingers together. When his mother takes one of his hands to stop him from doing that, it only means he bring his free hand up to his mouth and begins chewing on his thumbnail absentmindedly until she swats his hand out of mouth and gives up on hold his hand, apparently deciding the finger twisting and glove picking is better than the chewing.
The letter with his test results should be arriving soon. He doesn’t — he doesn’t think he made it in, if he’s being honest, but he did score some points and he’s not entirely sure how well his fellow test takers did.
He runs his hands through his hair nervously. “I’m so scared, Mom; what if I didn’t get in? UA’s the only heroics school in Japan for Quirkless students...”
“I know you don’t want to hear it, but it’s probably be for the best, Izuku. Heroics is dangerous—”
“Real life is dangerous! You pretend like you don’t see me come home beat up by my classmates every day, but I know there’s no way you miss it when Katsuki fucking blew one of my ears up permanently, when you fill up that first aid kit four times a week! Why don’t you want me to be able to protect myself?” Izuku cuts her off with a shout, and oh, it’s the first time in years he’s raised his voice to his mother.
His mother immediately bursts into tears. “You’re Quirkless! You’re too fragile! You’d die, and leave me just like your father! Isn’t it bad enough your Quirklessness took him from me?”
Izuku recoils as though struck, and his mother Inko at least as the decency to look guilty as Izuku flees into his room. She tries to talk him into talking to her about what she just said, but all Izuku can hear is the resentment, the resentment, the resentment, that poured from that line —
took him from me, took him from me, took him from me
She’d rather have his father than him all along. He’d wondered, once or twice, but not dared to truly let himself explore that question, too afraid to find out the answer. Deep down, he’d always known the answer. Now he’d had it thrown in his face, dark and ugly and burning, a wound seared into his mind, words that he’d always remember —
Midoriya Inko had given him a lot of those. Every time Izuku brought up old words from the past she played it down — it suddenly never happened, or it wasn’t that bad, or she didn’t mean to hurt him.
He wondered if she even loved him at all, or if she just saw him as an object, a consolation prize.
Deep down he knew the answer to that, too.
———
His mother still brings him the letter when it arrives despite her complete lack of support. Izuku knows it’s done out of guilt, or perhaps a tactic to make him feel bad? Perhaps she just truly believes he’s failed, and she’s excited about that. Izuku doesn’t know which it is. He doesn’t meet her gaze when she offers it through the door, only opening the door just enough to take it and snatch it with shaking hands then slam it closed again.
He doesn’t want to see her right now.
If it was an option, he’s not sure he’d want to see her ever again.
That’s a blatant lie. She’s not the best mother. Not even a good mother, or a decent mother. But she’s his mother, and he still loves her despite her failings.
He spends several minutes sitting at his desk just staring at the envelope. It’s a nice envelope, clearly the expensive kind — and fuck, is he really analyzing an envelope to get out of opening a letter? This might be a new low, even for him. He chews nervously on his lip for a moment, picking at his gloves again.
What if he’s failed? What if All Might really was right?
Izuku shuddered violently at the thought. He tried to picture a future without heroics, but interestingly, that was easy — what he couldn’t picture was a future where he wasn’t saving people... and...
He wasn’t sure what the future held yet. He hadn’t opened his UA letter. The rest could wait.
Still, though he tells himself he isn’t nervous and he won’t give up on his dream of saving people no matter what the letter says, his hands still shake as he tears open the envelope.
And maybe it’s a bit petty when he throws the letter down in front of his mother and bites out, “You got what you wanted. I hope you’re happy. Are you going to at least let me go to UA’s General Education Department, or are you going to force me to take some second-rate school so you can make sure I don’t stare too close at the heroes?”
She lets him go to UA, but Izuku gets the feeling it’s more because he’s received a full-scholarship than anything else. Why would she pay to send him to an inferior option when UA is even paying for Izuku’s train fare ?
Plus Ultra.
———
Heroics may have been out of Izuku’s reach, and maybe no one was going to support his goals, he’d always been on his own his entire life. Having Inko confirm it stung, but it just meant now he knew for sure what he could, and couldn’t, count on.
He’d been finding new things, learning the type of hero he would have wanted to be if he’d became one and learning what kind of information he’d need to learn to become that kind of hero. He was going to become a vigilante.
Or, at least, play at being one.
After all, the HPSC had explicitly stated that vigilantism was using a quirk to stop villainy or crime. Thus, it was impossible for Izuku to be a vigilante, from a legal standpoint. It would only be in the public eye that he’d be considered one, and that would be good enough. From the public eye, if he was good and kind and saved lives, that was as good as a hero, and he would be happy with that.
Izuku knew his strengths, and he knew that if he wanted to start now, he needed to start as an informant type vigilante. He didn’t have any weapons. He didn’t have any gear, any plans, any training — nothing to make him useful. But from behind a computer and a phone screen he could learn safely how to do anything he wanted. And that was how he started small, learning about electromagnetic waves and support gear and how to make it, but he didn’t act.
He spent a long time before the thing that satisfied him most, weapons wise, was the idea of a Quirkless vigilante with Quirked out shoes.
He told his mom the next day his feet had gotten bigger, and they needed to order new shoes online. It was a lie, of course, but bigger meant more room for more things to cause problems for other people, and Izuku smiled at the thought.
Be realistic, All Might had said. Well, Izuku’s idea of realistic was putting tasers in his Quirkless brand shoes so he could kick criminals in the face, so he hoped All Might was proud of what he made, of the fire he’d fed, because the shoes (and the tasers) were only the start.