Chapter Text
There is one simple, universal truth to the world – not all men are created equal.
This is a fact that Izuku Midoriya has been well acquainted with since he was four years old, when he was diagnosed as quirkless as though he had some terminal illness. He hadn’t understood at the very beginning, what being quirkless fully entailed. He knew, of course, that it meant he would never receive a cool power like Kacchan and the other children in his class, like his favorite hero All Might and all the other heroes he watched every single day. He had known it was a disappointing fact – he could feel the icky, crushing disappointment swirling in his stomach the moment the doctor had casually diagnosed him, as though crushing children’s hopes and dreams was just a regular part of his day. What he hadn’t known, at the time, was how bad being quirkless was.
He hadn’t fully understood, not while his mother had quietly thanked the doctor and ushered him back out of the office and towards the train station, all the while keeping a tighter hold on him than she ever had before. He hadn’t fully understood when he’d asked his mother to play his favorite All Might video on the computer. He hadn’t fully understood when the tears came, unbidden, as he clutched his most precious All Might figurine in his chubby, tiny fingers.
He had begun to understand, just a little, when he had asked his mother the only important question and she had responded with a flood of tears and a heartbroken apology.
He had really begun to understand when Kacchan had rejected him the next day at the park when Izuku had given him the news, when his loud friend had turned his back on him and called him useless for the very first time.
He had really understood when Kacchan and Tsubasa and the others had used their quirks to intentionally hurt him for the very first time and had left him splayed out on the hard ground, unable to move as his eyes blurred with confused, frustrated and unbearably sad tears.
Quirkless was bad; quirkless meant he was useless. It meant, as he had overheard one of his elementary school teacher’s say to another, unaware that Izuku had stuffed himself into one of the backpack cubbies to hide away from Kacchan and the other boys, that his body was evolutionarily inferior, one step behind everyone else in his class.
Izuku hadn’t believed that; or at least he had tried not to believe that. Sure, he had to go to a different pediatrician than any other child in his neighborhood, one who specialized in quirkless bodies and knew what medicines he couldn’t have and what clothing stores to recommend that sold extra-wide children’s shoes. And sure, everyone else had cool quirks that would be perfect for being heroes or would help them in other jobs, but it wasn’t like Izuku was completely deficient. He was just as smart as everyone else, always in the upper half of class rankings even after he’d missed a couple days of school in his third year of elementary because one of the other kids had accidentally tripped him down a flight of stairs. And while he wasn’t as big or as strong as other kids in his class, he was never really that far behind in physical tests. He was even a solid runner; Kacchan and his friends made sure to give him plenty of practice during lunch and after school.
No, Izuku might have understood that being quirkless was bad, but it didn’t make him completely useless. He could still reach his dreams, even if he had to work harder than everyone else in his class. He could still be a hero, even if no one else believed that. He may not have been born on the same level as everyone else, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t climb up.
He had spent all of his elementary school days thinking that, defiant to all the people who whispered or outright stated he could never be a hero, even if it was only in his mind. Then, in his first year of middle school, life had decided to knock him down yet another level.
Izuku had known about secondary sexes; his mother was a nurse after all, and she had always been clear and concise when it came to him understanding his body and health. But they had always been a distant thought in his early life; a part of him that would manifest when he was older, no more important than growing taller or getting a deeper voice. He had expected to be a beta – most of the population was, after all. Fifty-five percent of all female children and sixty percent of all male children presented as betas during puberty after all, and it was highly unlikely that Izuku, born from a beta father and an omega mother, would be part of the thirty-eight percent of male children who presented as alphas. He would have a perfectly average presentation, a fact that Izuku had hoped would curb some of the abnormality he had, being a quirkless child.
But Izuku hadn’t presented as a beta, despite all the statistics that said he should have. He hadn’t even been lucky enough to be one of the slightly rare although not unheard-of children who presented as an alpha despite not having an alpha parent – his grandfather on his father’s side was an alpha, after all, so it wouldn’t have been impossible. That would have been too easy – it would have granted him half a step up, at the very least. Although a lot of primary and secondary sexual discrimination had gone away with the arrival of quirks, some still remained and it was a known fact that heroism was an alpha-dominated field.
But Izuku didn’t present as an alpha – no, he didn’t have that easy of a life and the world simply wasn’t fair. Which is why, one fall day when he was just twelve years old, Izuku had woken up with a slight fever, a strange desire to bake cookies for his mother, and the even weirder desire to steal everything with her scent and hide it in his room.
He hadn’t known what it meant, not really. Sure, he knew his mother did those sorts of things but that was just his mother. It was just part of who she was, that she made sweets and handcrafted gifts for him and other important people in her life, that she sometimes felt the need to cocoon herself and Izuku in a warm, impossibly soft pile of blankets, pillows, and pieces of clothes that smelled like them. He had never really associated those actions with the fact that she was an omega – it wasn’t like he was around other children’s parents to know that other parents who weren’t omegas didn’t have the same instincts and he certainly didn’t know that nests weren’t a feature in everyone’s home. Kacchan, the only child Izuku had ever had sleepovers with, had had one in his home, after all, even though his had belonged to his father and not his mother. Or at least he had when they were super little, Izuku hadn’t stepped foot in the Bakugou house since he was five and Kacchan had finally put his foot down that he would not tolerate any more forced playdates with Izuku.
Izuku was used to these types of behaviors and he had always been told, by sweet neighbors and kind acquaintances that hadn’t minded that he was quirkless, that he took after his mother. So it made sense to him that he would want to show how much she meant to him by baking her cookies on a Sunday that she had to work and it made sense that he would want to curl up with her favorite sweater that smelled the most like her and the softest blanket he could find in the apartment and a few of the plushy toys he hadn’t quite gotten old enough to get rid of. And it wasn’t like Izuku was unaccustomed to feeling under the weather – between the mild injuries his classmates gave him and the weak immune system he had been saddled with, he was used to dealing with his body not feeling great often enough. He hadn’t thought anything of it, really.
It had been his mother who realized, when she had come home, slightly panicked, to the scent of burnt cookies in the oven and a feverish son curled up on the couch in a makeshift attempt at a nest. It had been she who had pulled the burnt cookies from the oven and tossed Izuku’s first ever omega present into the trash while the fire alarm screamed at her. It had been she who had picked him up – he had always been small for his age and even at twelve, his mother had been able to cradle him – and brought him into her fully constructed nest and surrounded him with his favorite plushies. It had been she who had called into his school the next day when his first pre-heat fever had really hit, and she who had carefully cut pain pills into halves and gave them to him when his stomach began hurting.
She had explained to him, once the fever broke at the end of the second day, that Izuku had experienced his first pre-heat and how that meant he was an omega. She’d explained it while she made an appointment with his pediatrician – she had been worried because Izuku was a little young for pre-heats and the first had hit him uncharacteristically hard. Izuku had still been a little achy and tired and he hadn’t really understood, yet, that his life had just gone through another upheaval.
He had missed one more day of school to go to his pediatrician. There, Izuku had only been more confused– apparently, only two percent of male children presented as omegas, two in one hundred of all boys. Rare enough that the doctor had questioned his mother quite carefully to ensure that Izuku had actually gone through a pre-heat and not just gotten the stomach bug that had started going around.
Once he had been fully convinced that Izuku’s mother had correctly diagnosed him, the doctor had subjected Izuku and his mother to a whirlwind of information – apparently, it wasn’t uncommon for quirkless people as well as those born with mutant quirks to experience the onset of puberty and secondary sex presentation early as their bodies hadn’t gone through a radical change at four, a fact that had appeased his mother. Apparently, too, it wasn’t uncommon for male children to have a particularly rough first year of pre-heats, although they supposedly would mellow out once they fell into a regular schedule of hitting roughly every three months. He would have them for three or four years as his body prepared itself for full-blown heats – four times a year, for nearly as many years Izuku would be subjected to stomach cramps, light fevers, and an increased desire to do activities the doctor had generally described as “homey.”
Izuku hadn’t liked that word, hadn’t liked the way the doctor said it. He had liked it even less when the doctor had begun explaining what else would happen to Izuku in the coming years. His scent would change, becoming gradually stronger and more “enticing” to alpha and beta presented children. He was likely not to get much taller – omegas apparently stopped gaining height around fourteen or fifteen, meaning Izuku would likely only have one more good growth spurt – but he would apparently “fill out more” which he had taken to mean look like his mother. He hadn’t minded that part too much – his mother was very pretty, after all – but not growing much more concerned him. It would be harder to be a hero, if he ended up petite like his mother.
He had been brave enough to voice that fear to the doctor – Dr. Masuda was a very kind man and he had been one of the few adults in Izuku’s life who never outright said he could never be a hero, unlike Dr. Tsubasa who Izuku hadn’t seen since his diagnosis – and he had been filled with dread the moment he saw Dr. Masuda’s face drop and felt his mother stiffen beside him.
Dr. Masuda had been very kind but very stern as he had explained that the likelihood of Izuku ever being a hero, as both quirkless and an omega, was less than zero. Izuku had already been given an insurmountable challenge, having been born without the quirk factor. Add in being an omega, the secondary sex that was the physically weakest of all three with the most docile of all instincts that dominated the childcare and nursing industries but made up less than ten percent of any intense, highly physical industry like hero-work or the police force, and being a pro hero was simply impossible. There were many other more suitable jobs, Dr. Masuda had claimed. Izuku was smart and kind. He would do great in the medical or education fields. With his interest in quirks and hero-work, it was perhaps even possible to get a job in hero support or as a quirk analyst. But a quirkless, omega hero was quite unheard of and absolutely impossible.
Izuku hadn’t been able to help himself – he had burst into inconsolable tears right in the office and, no matter the amount of stickers and candies Dr. Masuda had tried to give him, hadn’t been able to stop them throughout the rest of the appointment while his mother rubbed soothing circles onto his back and Dr. Masuda wrote a prescription for medicine that would curb the worst of his pre-heat symptoms and allow him to go to class and out in public without feeling entirely sick.
He had been calmer by the time they left the office and he was out of sight of Dr. Masuda, but he still sniffled all the way home, earning them a few concerned glances on the train and only fully calmed down when his mother had set a bowl of katsudon – a treat she had promised to make him after his appointment as Izuku hadn’t felt like eating much during his pre-heat.
His mother had been gentle, understanding and part of him had yearned to ask her the most important question again but he had held back. Dr. Masuda had been one of exactly two people who had never outright told Izuku he couldn’t be a hero and although his mother’s apology had been as clear as any actual ‘no’, Izuku hadn’t thought he would actually be able to handle an outright one from her.
Izuku hadn’t understood why being quirkless and omega was the death knell to his already battered dream – he hadn’t understood why being an omega made him so much weaker, the way Dr. Masuda had suggested. His mother was an omega and she was plenty strong – one of the strongest people Izuku knew of, besides All Might and some of his other favorite heroes – and he hadn’t understood why his sex would make him even more unsuited for hero work.
Sure, most of the heroes Izuku knew of were alphas, but that didn’t mean they all were. Some of them had to be omegas, like him, and he had resolved to find them all after he had been excused from his dinner and was granted computer time from his worried mother. It had taken him nearly an hour of scouring the internet to find anyone and Izuku had still gone to bed several hours later with only three names.
Recovery Girl, the Youthful Heroine whom Izuku had heard of but had never researched much because she wasn’t combat-orientated and only marginally a daylight hero, had been the very first omega to become a pro-hero, nearly thirty years before. Ragdoll, one of the Wild Wild Pussycats, was another but, according to the official hero websites as well as numerous fan sites, she used her quirk mainly for recovering people who had gotten lost in the forests or trapped during natural disasters. There hadn’t been a single video or account of her actually fighting, although there had been several of her using her quirk to support her teammates during the rare bouts of combat the Wild Wild Pussycats saw.
The third, Izuku wasn’t even sure actually was a pro-hero. He had found a single video of an old UA sports festival, nearly thirteen years ago, in which a thin dark-haired general studies student was awarded the first-place medal. There had been a single article accompanying it that had given Izuku the boy’s name – Shouta Aizawa – and a bit of his life story. The boy had caused a bit of a hubbub and controversy at the time – he had been one of only a few general studies students to ever successfully transfer to the hero course and, more importantly for Izuku, the only omega ever accepted into the UA hero track. From the way the article had phrased it, Izuku had expected to find a lot more articles and information about the teenager but there was nothing.
There hadn’t been anyone named Shouta Aizawa on any of the pro-hero lists and Izuku, barely a middle schooler, didn’t have the clearance to look at the UA graduate lists, so he had no idea if Shouta Aizawa had ever become a pro hero – he might have gone underground but for obvious reasons, Izuku had no way to track down the identities of underground heroes and only even really knew of one by name, a hero named Eraserhead who sometimes showed up on Izuku’s nighttime hero watch stream – or if he’d even finished the UA course.
Even without knowing anything about it, Izuku felt a strange kinship with this other boy – or man really, he had to be in his late twenties by now – the only omega who had ever made it into the UA hero course. He was proof, no matter how distant, that it had been done, it wasn’t impossible. If it had been done once, it could be done again. No matter how much work it would take, no matter how many people would tell him it was impossible, Izuku could do it.
He hadn’t fallen asleep well that night, still emotionally drained and more than a little sad, but there was hope still in his heart and a carefully printed out copy of the photo of Shouta Aizawa standing tall atop the first-place podium taped up above his bed, next to his favorite All Might poster. He would ask his mother if he could go to his favorite hero merchandise store after school. He needed to find some posters of the Wild Wild Pussycats and Recovery Girl to add to his walls alongside the others.
They were proof, too, that being an omega did not mean Izuku could not reach his dreams.
There had only been one omega to ever make their way into the UA hero course, only two who were listed as pro-heros. And there had never been a quirkless hero. Very poor odds and disheartening statistics, more proof that not everyone in the world was born equal.
But Izuku was a statistical anomaly, born into a superpowered world with absolutely nothing special about him, one of the twenty percent without extra abilities, and one of only two percent of male omegas. His very existence shattered most statistics.
What was one more, at the end of the day?