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Midoriya Izuku was the fear of being known, fully and completely, by a stranger.
He was the fear that someone knew what you'd done, the fear of someone you had never met, a total stranger, walking up to you on the street and saying,
"I know what you did."
He isn't sure if he's ever been human. He had always been strange, even before he was diagnosed as Quirkless. Had always known just a little too much, his eyes always just a bit too attentive to what was going on around him.
When he was three years old, he had waddled up to his mother. She had lifted him against her hip while she cooked, and they had existed like that for a while, at peace in the quiet house.
He doesn't remember this, and she has never mentioned it to him, but at that moment, he looked into his mother's eyes and said,
"Why did you crack grandpa's skull open, mama?"
(He had never met his grandpa, and he had never been brought up around him. All... evidence, was destroyed, by Inko's then-boyfriend, now-husband.)
Izuku has been obsessed with heroes since he was a baby. He would cheer for them, and demand for all of his items to be merch (particularly, All Might. Inko knows her husband would've had a thing or two to say about that, had he not disappeared after Izuku's birth.)
Heroes are all Izuku talks about, all he wants to play, and all he thinks about.
(She asks him if he wants to be a hero. He doesn't answer.)
When he's learning to write, all of it is about heroes. She buys him a notebook for it, and within days it's full of page after page of messy writing.
(She only reads some of it, and quickly diverts her gaze and closes the notebook. She prays that it's just the bad writing, or Izuku's over-active imagination, because even if some of this was true, there was no way for her son to know it.
She is just a little scared of Izuku, then.)
Midoriya Izuku was a predator, and heroes were his prey.
He walked from hero-fight to hero-fight, knowing where they were by just closing his eyes and focusing. There are a lot of things about him that are just a little bit odd, just a little bit off. This is just another one of them, just another habit the kids at school can tease him over.
He observed from the sidelines, rapidly muttering and writing line after line into his notebooks, keeping a few eyes on the fight.
All the heroes he analyzed felt Seen, when he was there. Felt like something was picking through their insides and analyzing whatever it found.
(The heroes didn't bring it up, because it was crazy. Of course they were being watched, there were hundreds of people there!
But if they did, they might've found out just how not-alone they were in this.)
When the fight was over, and the media descended upon the heroes, he snapped his notebook shut and moved towards the next fight he could already See happening.
(He didn't, strictly, have to go all of them. It was all part of His domain, the hero-fights in his city, and the notebooks would be filled regardless of what he did. But he still admired heroes, so he wanted to experience the fights first-hand.)
His room was full of notebooks; they were stacked on his desk and bookshelf, on the floor, under his bed, and under his pillow. His mother was concerned, Izuku knew, but he could not stop writing all that he Saw.
It was important to document, to preserve. He needed the physical copies to get his thoughts in order, to continue Seeing, to continue Knowing.
He needed knowledge, for as long as he could remember. Knowledge about everything and anything, but only heroes (their secrets, the things they wanted to keep hidden, to never see the light of daylight) truly satisfied that itch inside of him.
But eventually, that is not enough. Simply Knowing and feeding on their fear of feeling someone See them was not enough, the older he grew, and he had to resort to other methods.
Instead of going home after school, he walked to a train station and got on. He sat there, eyes closed and relaxed, thinking his plan over. If simply Knowing their secrets wasn't enough, he would make them know, too.
He got off at his station and walked to his destination. It was a crowded mall, filled to the brim and bursting with people. He looked around for a while, quickly clocking a shop that sold notebooks. He would have to stop by later.
For now, he still had to Eat.
(Aizawa hadn't thought much of the green-haired boy that walked up to him while he was doing some errands for Zashi. That is, until they made eye contact and he was glued to the spot.
"I'm sorry about Oboro."
Aizawa had buried thoughts of his old friend deep down, and tried to never look back. He didn't want to think about him, and didn't want to remember.
He didn't want anyone to know. He didn't want anyone to know about how it still made his chest squeeze in pain and threaten to make tears fall down.
He didn't want some stranger to look at him with eyes full of sympathy, and Know what he felt.
Aizawa Shouta fled.)
And so, it went. He found the heroes on their off-days, or struggled through the crowds after a hero fight and whispered their secret in their ear, in front of all the people and cameras and blood-thirsty vultures known as reporters, and left without looking back at their shocked, fearful faces.
He loved heroes. He was happy to learn anything about them, even the bad parts, even the nasty parts.
And where else could he learn more about them, than at UA?
(When Aizawa sees the boy from all those months ago in his class, sitting there innocently like nothing is wrong, he almost quits on the spot.)
Yes, Izuku is a predator, and the heroes his prey.
He wouldn't have it any other way.