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Izuku may be foolish and unrealistic and stubborn, but despite what his teachers say he isn't stupid. He knows that he isn't. He wouldn't be able to trick his teachers into thinking that he's more stupid than Kacchan otherwise, carefully maintaining an academic ranking in between positions three and eight for their yeargroup, so that the most favoured students will always remain above him and the faculty have no reason to punish him for cheating. Or no extra reason, at least, and Izuku doesn't have to entirely throw aside his chances of getting into whatever the best school is that will accept a Quirkless person.
And so, when he hears that Miruko is going to be spending two weeks in Musutafu, he knows exactly what he has to do.
See, Laces like Izuku aren't accepted in most businesses. It's a bitter fucking irony to swallow that even the Quirkless fighting dojos don't actually accept Quirkless people. Or none of the ones in the entirety of Musutafu, at least.
(There are many problems to living in Musutafu. There's the fact that with two parents, one abroad and one working part-time currently, and the legal requirement to disclose the Quirk status of all members of a household, they don't have enough money to live anywhere nicer than the edge of the red light district, where the community is tight and crime is rife and opportunities... opportunities, actually good ones, are rare. Beyond it.
But Musutafu, as a wider place, is difficult, to say the least. There's an incredibly low concentration of Laces here, it's not like some of the areas of Tokyo, or lots of the rural towns and villages. No, Musutafu is too big and too small all at once.
Izuku has grown up very aware that he is not welcome in his own home; he hasn't been since he was four years old, and he never will be. Izuku would be lying to say he is okay with that.)
This lack of available training has, to say the least, limited his options in hero preparation pretty severely. The only chain of standard gyms that accepts Quirkless people operates purely across the city, in two locations where Izuku physically and financially cannot afford to go.
So he turns to the streets.
He runs and he climbs and he does stretches whilst a free app reads from his textbooks and gives him adverts every five minutes, but that's okay because he has to turn the double-page anyway. He carries the food shopping of his neighbours, getting snacks and hundred-yen coins pressed into his hands for the kindness. He uses stacks of books as weights to do lunges and squats, piecing together workout routines from MeTube videos and articles he reads online.
Izuku works hard, but can never quite work hard enough, he knows. People like Kacchan are leaps and bounds and entire Quirks ahead of him. People like Kacchan will never think Izuku is enough. And there are a lot more people like Kacchan than there are people like Izuku, and the ones with all of the power are certainly of the former, never the latter. He knows. It's scarred upon his skin, his soul, his psyche. A dozen people, more, who Izuku will never know the name of have attacked him in the street merely for recognising his shoes or his name or his face (they know that he is just another Quirkless freak-bastard-fuckup, they know that he deserves to hurt-), and he has never been safe in school, not since they still had sandboxes to play in.
And so Izuku tries, he genuinely gets better, growing stronger and faster and more flexible over time, but he knows that doing this alone isn't enough.
Deku will never be enough.
His options for help (his chances to grow beyond being a useless burden-), however, are limited. He does what he can by himself, he develops his analysis skills, grows slowly stronger and more flexible, he stubbornly refuses to give up, but it is still limited.
(Izuku promised himself a three-strike system. He has asked two heroes already if they will train him, and been told no both times, even though he managed to track the underground hero Trapler for three nights until the man would talk to him.
Miruko is his last chance.
He won't give up on becoming a hero, after that, because he knows deep in his bones that no other option will ever truly fulfill him he knows it with a certainty as solid as the walls of a coffin closing in around him ever-tighter ever-closer but he also knows that as a Lace, there is only so much he can ever expect from other people. Perhaps Izuku really is unrealistic for still wanting to be a hero so utterly and irrevocably, but he can be realistic about the means of getting there.)
He leaves home in the late evening, jogging for a while until he's far enough away from home that he's less likely to be recognised, and walks the rest of the way to where he's expecting Miruko to turn up. Izuku has a good basis for it. He already has piles upon piles of patrol route predictions and information for everywhere within about an hour of where he lives, and he found out through forum posts that he then reported because it's dangerous information that Apple-Sweet hasn't been seen in about a week. Logically speaking, Miruko will likely be covering another hero's patrol routes, albeit an underground one in this case.
And now, today, the third day that he has come out in hopes of finding her, he finally gets lucky.
Miruko stares at him, not sneering but almost scowling. She isn't even winded, despite having just fought three villains, beaten every single one into the ground. Izuku, having watched the whole thing, is struggling to breathe, because that was so, so cool-
"Yo, kid, scram. It ain't the safest place 'round here." The words aren't unkind, but they're still sharp, insistent. Izuku refuses to quail under the weight of them or her heavy gaze,
"I'm here for a reason. Miruko-san, I figured out where you were patrolling, and I wanted to ask you a question."
"Oh? Not too bad," she comments, enough for there to be a thrill of hope through Izuku's chest, slightly dampened when she shakes her head, the movement too gentle to even really sway her hair,
"But scram, still. A question ain't worth being here, particularly at this time of night."
"Miruko-san, I live close enough to here that I know all of the local shops and three different people's flats I could go to. I'm as safe as any civilian could be right now."
Her head tilts then, the tiniest shift that is almost hidden by how one of her ears swivels, falling back slightly. Her eyes are bright, sharp. And she might be the Rabbit Hero, but Izuku spends an aborted breath feeling very much like prey, watched too-closely by a predator.
But that's the point, isn't it? Miruko, despite people's expectations, despite the Quirkist comments she has faced, the discrimination, has bared her teeth and proven them all wrong.
That's what Izuku wants.
"I'm going to be a hero, no matter what it takes," he says, before she can try once again to make him leave, because he knows that honesty is the only way to go with a heroine like her,
"But I think if I trained under you, even if only for a few months or years, I would be the best possible version of myself as a hero. I could help more people." Her silence, her stillness, is disconcerting. She is listening. But Izuku has no clue at all what she's thinking, if he seems stupid or not to her, if she recognises his shoes with their grey laces, if she can see his weaknesses in every crack in his facade. It makes his voice tremble when he finishes up with his question:
"So- So would you train me, please?"
He barely breathes in the long, aching moments where he gets no response, where those red eyes bore into him. It is only the inherent kindness to them, the shifting, tumbling light, that stops him from truly panicking.
(Her eyes are a different red to Kacchan's, or to Tsukaku-sensei's. And Izuku doesn't just mean the shade of it. No, there is something to the depths of her gaze, a lack of hatred or annoyance, that is soothing, and new. She is more like Mitsuki-baa, perhaps, than Kacchan. Either way, she is at least genuinely thinking about it, about him.
Izuku takes some sort of comfort from that.)
"You've got balls, kid, I'll give you that," she finally comments, seemingly half-amused.
"Ah-" He tries to beat down how that catches him off-guard, but he can't help the flustered way his face heats up.
He expects Miruko to look down on him then, to see him for the child he is and sneer, turn away. Yet she doesn't.
No, Miruko laughs, and not cruelly either.
She laughs, with genuine mirth and warmth in her voice, rich, deep in how it echoes through the alley, arcing backwards into the amusement, hair sweeping through the air, a silver-tinged scythe wide enough to cut down an entire tree.
Miruko is a truly terrifying, brilliant, overwhelming figure of a hero. Izuku craves to learn from her, to have any idea of how to move like she does, the grace, the speed with which she identifies weak points, the easiness with which she aims and moves and strikes. The brutal strength of her every hit.
He wants to be able to save people like she does. He doesn't want or need to be a carbon copy, he never could be because at the end of the day her senses and strength are always going to be heightened by her Quirk, but that doesn't mean that Izuku can't be good enough to help others.
Izuku just wants to be a hero.
Finally, she responds, leaning forwards a little, gaze weighted but not dragging,
"The answer isn't yes. But, kid, it isn't a no either." Oh. Oh, okay. Izuku tries not to let his hopes rise too far, not wanting the bubble of it burst, because surely it really is only a bubble, destined to fall apart at a mere touch.
Miruko steps closer, flexing her knees slightly to put them at a slightly more similar height, making herself seem less intimidating, and surely that's intentional because she smiles, too, only a little bit too broad and toothy to be soft,
"I have three days off at the end of this, not my fucking choice but whatever. I was going to head back up country for them, but I could stay around here easy enough, I reckon. You're going to find me again on Saturday. I'll be in disguise, in the Setagawa area, and I'll hang around all day every day except if I get dragged to some meetings or some shit. Don't even fucking thinking about calling out my hero name, got it? Go for something else." Well, that should be doable, Izuku thinks, still too caught up in his bright-shattering awe,
"I- Okay, thank you. Really, genuinely, thank you."
"Don't thank me, kid, just make it worth my time."
Izuku lets himself straighten up again, then, nodding with held-back shoulders and a set jaw. Miruko is giving him a chance.
He won't waste it, he promises himself.
Before Izuku can figure out what else to say, how else to generally respond to this (he's admittedly preoccupied by the tremble of his fingers, the double-thump pounding of his heartbeat, the almost-panic overwhelmed by an absolute hope-), she is nodding, one ear swivelling, the other still facing right at Izuku. The blatant continued attention is genuinely appreciated, for all that he doesn't acknowledge it consciously.
But after another few moments of listening around them, and of scrutinising him, Miruko half-grins, teasing,
"Now, where do you live? I'm walking you home, no matter how many people you reckon you know. Stupid kit." Somehow that, the being called stupid, doesn't sting like it normally would, and Izuku doesn't know whether it's because of the half-soft tone, or the addition of 'kit' (and isn't that what a baby rabbit is called? he thinks it is anyway-), or maybe even because of how she is trying to make sure he's safe without being patronising at all, but he still can't help but smile.
She didn't say no. He hasn't had to make his third strike yet. And not only that, but he really does have a genuine chance to prove himself to her, to prove that he is capable and worthy of trying to become the sort of hero he so desperately craves to be.
Yet again, Izuku is incredibly glad that he's currently on holiday, because it is all that gives him the time and energy (and safety, in all truth-) to be looking for Miruko like he has been.
Take today for an example. He's perched himself up on a rooftop, near the main plaza of the area that Miruko mentioned, because there are lots of cafes and shops here, and because he can judge that, generally speaking, her attention span is probably too short for a lot of things to be interesting to her, particularly on a day off where she would rather be working.
Still, Izuku isn't surprised at all by the lack of rabbit ears in the general area.
Every so often, mostly when he gets too many glances in a row, or when he just gets too chilly and achy, he gets up and goes for a walk-stroke-parkour lap of some of the other areas he thinks might be interesting, lingering in a few spots for a while, just long enough to get a good idea of the people there, the potential of Miruko included.
And it's from one of these perches, now on a fire escape, staring out over the second plaza he had identified as a likely location, that he notices a long white ponytail. There's no ears, but that was fully expected. They're likely tucked beneath the somewhat oversized cap, and he actually thinks that he can see a hint of pink in amongst the hair, maybe. Or he's wrong.
But the movement and stature are right, too, and the baggy clothing can only make her physique subtle to some degree. Still, it's amazing how much not being in her uniform with her ears out makes people not recognise her. To be fair, if Izuku wasn't actively looking for her, he might not either.
The point, however, is that he does. He sees her. Which means that he is so, so close to completing her test, a thought both terrifying and absolutely enthralling.
He needs to call out to her, to get her attention, but he knows that he can't use her heroine name, and he doesn't know her actual name, nor does he want to make some sort of pun off of her Quirk because that's both too likely to expose her or to annoy her, the thoughts spiralling in his mind as he scrambles down from the fire escape, legs half-numb, because he needs to-
"Ko-san!"
She whips around, long ponytail flaring out, and Izuku can't help but start running towards her, utterly delighted. He really, actually found her! Caught up to her!
"Kiddo, hey," she grins, eyes flashing with something bright-soft and pleased, maybe even proud, and it sends a shudder of warmth up Izuku's spine so strong that he surely visibly shivers with it.
"Hi, Ko-san. Is- Is that name okay?" He can't help the thread of uncertainty to his voice, for all that it is eased slightly by how she is still grinning, something softer yet again softening the edges of her jaw, the lines around her eyes,
"Kid, I'd have told you if not, and, like, I appreciate your consideration or whatever, but have a bit of bolshiness about it, yeh?"
"I-" he falters, but draws a deep breath,
"Okay. Got it. Bolshiness."
"So, what do you call me?" It's a challenge and a tease and an inside joke of sorts, all at once, a fact that gives him the confidence to grin right back at her, surely just as toothy-sharp,
"Ko-san."
"That's it, kit."
He grins, then, and reaches forward to tap her on the shoulder,
"Just in case it didn't count yet, Ko-san."
There's a glint to her eyes then, something fierce and bright and, yet again, full of something that Izuku can only think of as pride,
"Test passed, kit."
And when she reaches out, movement fairly quick but telegraphed, to ruffle his hair, Izuku can only pause for a blink before leaning into the gentle affection, grinning so fiercely that his cheeks hurt and he can barely see her for the crinkling of his eyes. He did it.
They spent a quarter-hour in an intensive sparring session this morning, after a few hours of more gentle stretches, kata, and general exercise, a practice patrol of sorts. And now they're both sprawled on the floor, half-sitting against the wall, having cooled-down slightly and drinking down great big gulps of their drinks.
This is only the fourth time Izuku has had such a strenuous, Heroics-focused day. Miruko made him wait until he was at a certain point of self-defence, with a dash of more offensive martial arts, before actually letting him have a true spar at all. It's taken over a month to get to this point, but that's okay.
Izuku has been able to feel the progress he has made, day by day, week by week, and that's enough for him to not mind how slow it feels. It's something that he was never able to achieve by himself, no matter how many tutorial videos he watched. And he just appreciates the effort she has gone to.
Right now, however, Miruko is drinking carrot juice, and Izuku can't help but stare, just a little. It seems a little... on the nose.
She notices his attention, because of course she does, and only winks at him. Izuku can't help the tiny laugh that bubbles up his throat, glad when it just makes her smile too. He has found himself genuinely really enjoying her company, getting along well with her, and finding her easy to both learn from and generally spend time with.
(It's a bit of a relief, in all truth. Izuku is used to people rejecting him, is used to being called annoying and weak and creepy, but Miruko doesn't seem to find any of those to be the case.
No, she listens to every word of his mumbling, occasionally just asking him to speak up or talk more about something that he mentions, but otherwise leaving him to it. It's both an encouragement and a permission, both of which he appreciates, incredibly so. It's more than anyone other than his mother has offered, since he was too young to really remember, and it's been a long time since she has truly had the time to listen to him for hours, something that is neither of their fault yet true all the same.
It's not like during train rides or breaks in between spars or when he's going through more basic exercises. Not like how Miruko pushes him, never unkind but somehow always knowing that his reluctance is born from a lack of confidence rather than anything else, never too far but always just enough to prompt him, to let him know that she is truly interested.)
"Want some, kit? I've got a whole 'nother carton or three tucked away." He takes a half-breath to mull that over slightly, before shrugging slightly,
"I- Uhm, I might like to try it?"
"Sure, kiddo. And, oi, you don't have to like it just cause I do," she tacks on, and whilst she rolls her eyes, it's a fond thing that doesn't bother Izuku at all.
So he accepts a carton that she throws the entire two-foot between them, and surprises himself by not actually minding the taste at all. Which, well, maybe should have been more obvious because he likes normal carrots, but still. He drinks the entire carton.
Their training days pass like this for weeks, and then months. It's an easy, comfortable thing, in all truth, or so Izuku finds, content in Miruko's presence, and growing to trust her on a deeper, more personal level. His Ko-san is everything he could have hoped for in a mentor, and more.
Izuku is still a Lace. Nothing is going to fix that (perhaps, one day, he will decide that it never needed to be fixed, even if his life would truly have been easier, that it's okay-), it never will, but he can be a hero regardless. He can learn to fight. He can become strong, and flexible, and capable, something beyond useless.
He learns under Miruko, and he is bold and brave and bright with it, becoming ever-more confident until he can grin, teeth bared and eyes gleaming, as he flips forward, or darts in close to kick someone's legs out from beneath them, or when he hangs back, something of his own rather than Miruko's, to pick apart a Quirk and fighting style, more quickly every time he does so, and a plan comes to mind.
Miruko has taught him her fighting, her confidence, but she has also allowed Izuku to be himself, to keep his own skills, his own inclinations. It's something he isn't sure he might have otherwise had.
(He would have torn himself apart, cracked parts of him down the marrow and warped his mind, his muscles, his mentality, until he barely recognised himself at all, so long as he was still able to be a hero. If he could help others, he would give every piece of himself other than that very same desire. Whatever sacrifices he had to make would be worth it, he knows.
But now he doesn't have to, he is able to be himself and Miruko's student and a Lace and a potential hero all in one, and he couldn't be more grateful for it.)
And so Izuku spends his days training, and tries not to be too flattered that Miruko ends up literally changing her entire patrol schedule and areas to keep her closer to Musutafu, so that she can actually come and train him in person three times a week, every week.
(More than once, of course, she has been injured, sometimes literally stuck in hospital.
On those occasions, Izuku will visit as soon as he knows where she is and when he can turn up, sitting at her bedside with a just-bought carton of carrot juice, and his most recent notebook laid across his lap. She will listen to him, one foot thumping rhythmically against the mattress or the footboard, and quite often by the time Izuku falls asleep, or he has to leave, or Miruko falls asleep, she is less foot-thumpy and more calm. More settled.
It's a reassurance for them both, to know that she is okay, and for her to have company. If she is more awake and alert, more antsy with the hospital setting, then sometimes she'll push his analysis, asking questions and getting him to think of more and more things, more possibilities, more weaknesses, more strategies.)
He does some level of exercise by himself on other days, keeping up his proper parkour, rather than the vague bouncing-around that Miruko often does. He literally doesn't, and never will, have the legs that she does.
But he doesn't need that. Miruko hasn't been teaching him just for Izuku to become her little mimic, nothing more than a poor, Quirkless excuse of a parody. No, he will be his own hero.
Izuku will just also adore his mentor for every moment and drop of sweat and thought that she puts into looking after him. Into helping him become a hero. Teasing her for loving carrot juice so much (and getting him hooked on it too-) goes hand in hand with sparring against her, a knee aimed for her guts and her elbow coming for his face.
With his Ko-san at his side, Izuku is going to become a hero worthy of both himself and of her faith in him.