Chapter Text
There was a lovely little thrift store not far from their apartment.
Izuku and his mother frequented it for two reasons. One; that Midoriya Inko had an unrelenting appetite for the kinds of old soap shows and serials that had fallen off traditional streaming sites decades ago. And two; the shop owner had a massive and very careful sheepdog that would let a toddler-aged Izuku clamber all over it and practically disappear in its hair. Each visit was a delightful time for the both of them.
“How about this one Ms. Midoriya?” Mr. Ito had been pulling through his recent arrivals when they’d come in, and knew to keep an eye out for any interesting media finds.
“Hm?” Came a somewhat distracted hum of interest from the back. The old man leveraged the package of interest onto the edge of the table. Junk to some-most, honestly-but a treasure from the past for those with the interest. Time for the hook.
“Recently got it from an antique dealer friend of mine and he swears it still works with the new systems. Realllll old though.” Inko abandoned her slow search through the shelves and made her way over to the front desk.
“Antique? How old are we talking?”
“Pre-quirk.” She gasps, delighted, and three year old Izuku decides that’s exciting enough for him to stumble his way over too. He pulls himself away from the dog and then steadies himself against his mothers leg, gazing up to the edge of the counter.
“It’s an American detective show, I think. It's in English but it has pretty accurate subtitles. Friend described it as ‘chaotic and fun’, your type of thing.”
He slides it across the table and it looks like a whole milk crate of CDs rather than just a couple seasons. Inko makes another sound of pure joy.
“How many seasons?”
“Eight. And three movies.”
Inko plucks her little three year old off the carpet, and spins around gleefully with him held out in her arms as he giggles. Hooray for cheap stores and luck in her hobbies and old people too stubborn to throw things away.
“Izuku sweetie, mommy’s going to be having some long, late nights of tv.”
---------------------
It doesn’t amount to much, at first. She has almost a dozen shows she's also working through at the same time, but once she truly starts it, she’s hooked. Inko loves the first season so much that she stretches out the rest. They watch it, once weekly at a regular time, as if they’re seeing it as it airs. It's a good cheer-up show compared to some of her more dramatic favorites, perfect for the end of the week when both she and her toddler needed to decompress. Well mostly her.
Izuku just bounces along to the theme song and then runs off when he gets bored or can't understand the plot. Back to looking up more hero facts on their computer. He’s even teaching himself some basic reading through the captions on hero videos, could you believe that? It's an odd little habit but she brags to Mitsuki every chance she gets. Her friend’s own little tyrant won’t even sit still for hero videos like that, all screaming and acting it out and throwing couch cushions. God, they’ll be quite the duo when they grow up, she’s sure of it.
The show was a good distraction, when things were stressful at work, or when those thunderstorms rolled through that scared her son, or recently, how Izuku’s quirk would just refuse to come in yet.
------------------------
They find out why Izuku’s quirk still hasn’t appeared a couple months after he turns four.
Quirkless.
She hadn’t even considered it; hadn’t known a quirkless person since she was young and an older couple lived down the street.
Izuku hadn’t taken it well, and she knows in her heart that a lot of that’s her fault. It's just- hero work is so so dangerous. He’s shown her news stories with the statistics himself. Even if he had her or her ex-husband’s quirk she's not sure she’d be ok with it. So much death, so many injuries and career ending moments for people barely out of highschool. It's a rough way to live, a scary thing to aspire to.
She knows she could have been….gentler.
But it’s also better if this dream ends early. It should hurt him less later, if he realizes now that he can't be a hero.
----------------------
Izuku’s going to be the first quirkless hero.
He knows it, he’s sure of it. He’s already started planning. Exercise beyond what they do in PE and cool multi-use costumes like a lot of support heroes have; his notebooks are filling up more each day. It's a challenge, and even more so now that his mom’s not backing him up, but she will when she sees. When she knows he can do it.
And now, since Ms. Bakugou told Kacchan his diagnosis as soon as his mom told her, it looks like he has to re-prove himself to his friends. If they’ll let him get a word in edgewise.
“Oh come on, quirkless don't exist anymore! My mom told me. They're uhhhhh expired. WAIT NO. Extinct!” Tsubasa is flitting around, surprisingly graceful on his frankly oversized wings.
“Nu uh, my dad has one at his work. He’s some gross janitor.” Another boy sneers as he says it. Izuku feels the need to jump in, to ramble about how sanitization workers are the backbone of a functioning society and a dozen other things. But he can feel that probably won't help his case at this moment.
Kacchan is silent, and that's really worrying because they’re best friends and he’s been either ignoring Izuku or glaring at him weirdly since he got here. The others continue their debate, arguing whether Izuku is a really late bloomer or some weird non-quirked thing they can barely imagine, and his eyes lock with crimson ones again.
Kacchan is tilting his head, and looking at Izuku like he’s trying to figure out a problem. Like he's not really seeing Izuku, just something else in his place that he doesn’t understand. This is somehow the worst expression he's ever seen on the boy and he sees him in fits of rage and screaming twice weekly.
“Kacchan, what's wrong? Please just tell me, I promise I’m not any different!”
Silence. More staring.
He feels the need to justify himself, to give a reason for him being here. Why? Why does he need to, nothing’s changed since yesterday. Well one specific thing hadn’t. It was supposed to, and now it never would. He’s the same. Why can’t that be enough?
The other boys are watching them now, looking to Kacchan for judgment and direction, as always. Izuku, ever the crybaby, feels tears prick in his eyes.
“I’ll stay later, I’ll bring more snacks from my mom, I’ll-”
“What are you for?”
“Sorry?”
“I'm gonna be a hero.” He says it like its inevitable and they all know it is. Kacchan brings a fist up to his chest and it detonates. “The best hero. Tsubasa and the other losers could be sidekicks maybe. Or not and he can fly around and help the teachers get things off high shelves, cats out of trees, stupid shit like that. Everybody can do something, even if its mostly useless. But you can't do anything. What’s wrong with you? What are you for?”
He keeps following them for a while. Maybe a week. He’s quiet mostly, sometimes pleading, bringing snacks and gifts and even that nice All Might doll mom got him for his birthday. Nothing works.
The librarian at school called him ‘a drain on resources’ yesterday. Now he’s had to switch seats, sitting at a table by himself. “It's safer this way, you’ll just get damaged if you sit with the others.” It doesn’t feel safer, just lonely.
An older boy hurt him today, and the nurse wrapped his skinned knees with paper towels instead of bandages.
“His kind rarely even make it to highschool, forget college or a job.”
He hasn’t changed at all, but the world’s changed around him. Everyone but his mom, who just seems sadder, but she promises it's not his fault.
Then there’s the incident crossing the creek and he doesn’t think he can call anyone his friends anymore.
Kacchan hates him now. It's not clear why. For trying to help? For being alive maybe?
He’s been called it before, always in jest. But now it is what he is. Deku. Useless.
------------------------
He used to like school.
Now he’s too smart. Well they don’t say that, his mom says that with a smile on her face and wink. His teachers say he’s stupid. And a liar.
Because he wasn’t the right kind of smart, he didn't get it from some dumb quirk-related part of his genome, and it instead happened naturally the old fashioned way. He was smart, but his teachers were starting to tell him not to ‘obviously cheat’ on the homework they’d just started getting, and gave him books that were 95% picture and 5% word.
He was smart, he knew it, and he wasn’t allowed to be.
At the behest of some pamphlets his mother got, he joined a few ‘quirkless communities’ online. They’re mostly for older people, but those strangers online are about the only people who’ll talk to him normally now. They tell him stories, very few of which are actually happy.
The worst part is he’s getting used to it. He knows where Kacchan is likely to hit him and when, and how to pack enough gauze and burn cream into his school bag to last the week. He’s figuring out how to sabotage his work just enough so the teachers no longer raise eyebrows when he turns in his worksheets. He’s learning.
It's not very fun to be quirkless.
----------------------
The Show makes its return at the end of a very bad week. He’s 6 and fully settled into his life at the bottom of the food chain. Kacchan shoved him down the stairs yesterday. He doesn’t think the boy meant to break his arm, but he still did. There was a quick look of terror once it snapped and he realized, and Izuku’s mentally clinging onto that. That he didn’t mean it to be that bad. Yet.
He’s digging through their reserves of feel-good shows when he comes across the lime green box set. It was familiar, distantly, as all his mother’s favorites were. He’d seen bits and pieces, but it's only now, as he starts up the pilot himself that he actually grasps the concept of the show.
‘Psych’- not actually about psychology, well sort of, psychology was used, alongside other disciplines in a fantastic and haphazard way. ‘Detective show’ was also perhaps the wrong category for it. The chaotic duo in it certainly did solve crimes and arrest criminals, but in their own way. They weren’t stiff by-the-books investigators like plenty of others in the genre. The main ‘detective’ solved by instinct and being attentive, and noticing things about people and the world around him, then getting a bit creative with it. Also he was psychic. No. No he wasn’t, that was the catch and the title of the show.
He pretended he was psychic, used tales of ‘visions’ and speaking with the dead to cover up being observant and some genuine investigation. And it worked! He and his best friend save the day or catch the villain, just in the nick of time, with chaos and reading people and a bit of good memory. He’s just clever. All it takes is being clever.
Izuku could do that. The show rolls on and his pain fades away a little bit, and episode after episode, that thought stays in his mind. Izuku could do that.
---------------------
It’s fitting of course, that he only knows the lucky bit of info because of his love for heroes.
There was a PSA done recently by a retired pro in the hospital. It aired on late-night but he caught it anyway, calming down from a nightmare. ‘Bronze Falcon’ or something like that. She looked so bright and determined despite talking laboredly from her hospital bed. She said it was important so he listened. Of course, he’d listen intently to any pro.
It didn’t really apply to him to be honest, meant mostly for adults and older, the signs of things metastasizing, symptoms of cancer cells spreading across the body. ‘You’d better catch it, before it’s too late.’ Izuku listens, the PSA ends and he diligently checks himself in case some other unlucky odds have come up for him, and then resolves to tell his mother what he learned in the morning.
But there was also a link at the bottom of the screen, he remembered it. He wasn’t even tired yet, mostly anxious, so he followed the link and then a whole night of research spiraled out from there.
He wasn’t even thinking of it, honest, when he and his mother went to the bakery later that week. It was all his subconscious memory of that info binge. He saw the spots on the cashier woman’s hands, the shape of them, and heard her complain to her coworker about specific pains before serving them.
He just noticed it all, and connected the dots.
He puts down his scone, walks up to her, tugs at her apron and says in the high pitched ‘innocent voice’ he saves for authority figures:
“Ma’am, I don’t think you know this but you absolutely have melanoma and need to check with your doctor, because that's going to be metastasizing very quickly.”
The bakery goes silent.
“Also that guy in the back keeps sneaking the decorative cherries into his pockets.”
Inko frantically apologizes for the both of them, and they’re bustling out of the store within the same minute, not looking back.
Afterwards he thinks he understands the importance of discretion, as his mother very much impresses upon him. He blushes about it in retrospect, but he did need to tell her. It's a small and only somewhat embarrassing moment, and maybe in another world it would have stayed only that.
But the woman tracks them down the next week, halfway through the grocery store, shoving some pastries into Inko’s hands and thanking them over and over, saying Izuku had saved her life. They’d caught it in the nick of time. He privately thinks she would have eventually noticed on her own, or her doctor would have at her next checkup, but the fact still remains that Izuku saw it first.
“What an incredible quirk that is. Thank you again young man.”
She’s off before either of them can salvage up the tact to explain that she’s wrong.
The drive home is quiet, confused, and interspersed with subdued crunches of pastry.
“Izuku we can't just let people go around thinking you have a quirk.”
She talks about fairness, and how it's wrong to hide things; the lady might be mad at them when she finds out later, but Izuku tunes it out. His mind is elsewhere.
He thinks about chaos and attentiveness and knowing where and how to look. He thinks about a fake psychic from a show 200 years ago. He thinks about helping people.
“Mom, what if we did?”
----------------------
“Izuku! That would be fraud!!”
“I know! I know I know I know.” He does know. This is dangerous. “J-just hear me out.”
She pulls to the side of the road and he takes a deep breath.
There are pedestrians walking by, a dozen people, a dozen different stories. He has to try.
“The lady in pink, emitter quirk, likely through her hands. She’s wearing the latest edition of suppression gloves and she's pretty old so it must be really strong; she wants the best protection she can get. Scarring on her left ankle, and it looks like she can’t lean too heavily on it, probably a villain attack from the claw-like slashes. She has a fold-out cane but she’s not walking with it and it doesn't look too worn. It could help her move faster and not aggravate the injury but she’s not using it, too proud maybe? Still, she’s keeping it on her for emergencies.”
“Izuku.”
“Salaryman suit on the right, mid 20s maybe and he looks really stressed but not from work. He keeps checking his watch and pacing so he's probably waiting for somebody and they’re late. His shoes are all worn and the hem of his pants are fraying, but some petals fell out of his bag back there, they look like roses I think. He’s not well off, but he’s trying to look good for whoever they are.”
“Izuku, honey…”
“Teen girl with the striped shirt. Ankylosaurus-like mutation. When she gets older those plates on her lower tail might need to be sawed down so she can still sit regularly-supposedly the city’s got a fund for necessary mutation procedures like that. Doubtful she has any control over quirk expression, she nearly knocked down that guy with her tail back there. She got piercings through her horns somehow but they don’t look super professional, probably DIY. Pin on her jacket is a support group for extreme mutations, seems like she’d be an organizer for them.”
His mom is quiet for a moment.
“...Is any of that true?”
“Most of it- I think. Some of the emotional stuff was more iffy, I don't know how to tell all that quite yet. We could ask them?”
“We are not asking them!”
Silence falls in the car again and each pedestrian eventually continues on their way, out of Izuku’s sight and back to dozens of different lives.
“Mom. This is something I can do, and it's kinda good and I haven’t even started training yet.”
“Training? Training in what?”
“Observation.”
She looks at him through the mirror and sighs. She can guess the inspiration here.
“Izuku, that's a show. It’s not real life honey, that kind of thing wouldn't work here. It’s nice that the lady assumed, and it was nice to be treated…better. As we should be.. But people would never buy it. We just need to get used to the real world.”
Maybe it was wrong to guilt trip, but he’s also tired and hopeful and telling the truth.
“Mom, I hate going to school and having to be me. I can’t stand it.”
His principal screamed at him last week for getting hurt. For getting blood on his desk from a broken nose. Disciplinary action. None of the boys who hit him were ever called up to the office. No matter what happens, its only ever him. When Inko tries to hold them accountable, or make them do their jobs, they always punish him worse.
They can't move. Finances are too tight for that, and the only other school in walking distance looked even worse than the purgatory that was Aldera Elementary.
Neither of them can see the future, but it’s not exactly hard to guess.
“But imagine if you didn’t know me. Would that look like a quirk to you?”
———————
It starts with erasing any concrete proof that Izuku is quirkless.
Thankfully they didn't have too long a list to get that done. It’s entirely a paper trail, nothing even digital, just two packets of papers and an X Ray of his foot. Just three little inconsequential bits of file work. Inko’s a nurse, she knows far more than that is misplaced in an hour at a busy hospital like this.
She visits an old work colleague who transferred to the examinations wing, takes a quick restroom break, and is walking home five minutes later with all three items of interest snug within a cutesy cat-patterned folder.
They’re tossed into the fireplace and she’s onto the next hurdle.
Inko’s learned the legal routes his diagnosis and re-diagnosis follows, the physical signs people will look for, what they’d have to do eventually and what they could reasonably avoid. It was possible though, they could do it.
She could give her baby a life where he was loved by more people than just her, where his talents were genuinely appreciated. A life where he didn’t live as a punching bag and die as a statistic.
She wonders dazedly, if this is what it feels like to be a hero, saving someone from the jaws of sure death. She understands a bit of the appeal now.
---------------------
With their next steps, they find a bit of good news.
They don't have to lie to their friends! Not completely anyway.
The toe joint check has apparently never been a perfect indicator. It only accurately predicts a person will be quirkless about 97.2% of the time. That looks like a high number for sure, but there are plenty of people with quirks who still have it. Those 2.8% who slip through the cracks are almost always rectified within a few years once their quirk finally shows. Latent, or suppressed, or having odd requirements, or being subtle. That is a statistic they are happy to exploit.
It's that last one they’re aiming for, 'subtle', and hell they won't be lying. Izuku has been clever, able to notice things others don’t, and he sure had been getting better at it since the age of four.
To the family friends who knew about his scan already, he’d just be in the ‘surprise quirks’ category. For anyone beyond that who might go check, what scans? What X-rays? Their doctor just said Izuku was probably quirkless and they didn’t do any further tests.
The doctor they’d seen originally had left town suddenly last year for some reason, and thank god for small miracles, hadn’t filled out his contact information properly. No one at the hospital could get a hold of him.
Not to wish ill on a perfectly fine doctor, but she hoped he stayed gone.
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All that time, Izuku was put to work.
After school (not like he had anything better to do), and sometimes before. Learning and noticing and learning how to notice. Signs of diseases and medical emergencies, nervous ticks, when a car part or machinery looked like it might break, weather forecasts, bank notices, statistics of all sorts.
So many things were online these days. If you cared to look, there was a crash course for anything.
His best find was a podcast from about a century ago, made by a retired underground pro, before they even called it underground. Movement patterns, speech intonations, eye twitches. The best way to tell if someone was lying to you-outside of using a truth quirk. Some things were a bit dated but it was working.
After school sometimes he’d do people-watching now, sit on a bench at the mall and see what he could reasonably deduce about each person who walked by. Sometimes, when it wasn’t something bad, he stopped them and asked if he was right. More and more often, he was.
Every person who walked by carried a handful of clues to their life all over their body. He could read them now, and make use of them.
His favorite part of all of this was when it ran right against the line of hero analysis. Quirk suggestions were what he was best at in the end, naturally and happily. How someone could best utilize them in civilian or hero life, how to work around the drawbacks. Also, ways to take them down-he didn’t tell his mother about those ones, but he still wrote them.
He trained his reflexes, just a little bit, catching things over and over from different angles. People still threw things at him but now it was rare for them to actually hit. He skimmed school material months in advance, not fully studying it, but making sure he’d have just a slight leg up long before the class ever got there.
Kacchan shot him weird looks alongside his usual menace, but he was being so so careful about it. Gradual, as if he had always been doing this, as if it was always something he could do, and technically it was.
He thought of the not-detective, and tried to do a bit of acting himself, to be a bit more charismatic. He already smiled all the time, no matter his actual mood; this wasn’t so different from that. Teachers didn’t get too mad when he spoke in class these days, because it was always helpful and it was always concise and right.
He still rambles, mostly when writing or detailing quirks, but he could tone it down now when he needed to. For this somehow not-impossible future they’re striving for, and for mom.
He’s being so deeply cautious for mom, because if he fails then this all lands on her. She’ll go to jail or lose her job, probably both. She’ll have the extra social shaming of not only having a quirkless son, but one who’s a liar and a criminal as well.
But the temptation of ‘if this works’ is too good to pass up.
The aim was not quite precognition. That was too powerful and would draw too many eyes. He just gets flashes-not even true visions-little things that draw his eye and tell him something’s important, then maybe a few details about it. If this actually works, if he makes it through and into the system, they’d call it ‘Hints’.
They wanted so badly, the both of them, to make it a reference, but that was too risky. ‘Hints’ worked; not something as strong as psychic visions, just a few tips here and there. After all, hints could be wrong every once in a while, but boy was it helpful to have them.
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These days, most of Izuku’s ‘helpful’ moments are carefully planned in advance.
They do a bit of digging for dirt on their neighbors, nothing malicious of course, just to know a few things about them each. They build a schedule of sorts, of what they know. Three to four moments a week, that’s their goal.
“Sir remember, your daughter is visiting today, you should probably get some flowers!”
“Ma’am this may sound a little rude but I don’t think your husbands been turning in the rent like he’s supposed to…That new racetrack just opened downtown so.. you know…”
“Hey um, that electromagnetism quirk of yours is really really cool but I think you’ve been kinda bending all the street lights on this block towards your building. The community center on 5th does free night classes for quirk control if you’re interested?”
He has to be sure of his guesses first, and after the target has checked and verified his claim for themselves (sometimes angrily) it always comes back to one question.
“How did you know?”
He had to look confused every time. That was a big part of it, to not know where that knowledge came from. Or to assume that anyone else should notice as readily as he had.
It’d be insanely lucky to make one prediction like that and have it be right. But several in a row? Spread out over the neighborhood and parent groups, where people talked and said “Oh that quirkless boy helped you too?” “Quirkless? That can’t be, are they sure he’s quirkless?”
It has to be fast too. Manifestations at eight or older and newspapers start reporting on it, on ‘miracle’ quirk appearances, and they can’t have that. Inko cleaned up her trail but not that well. They have to do this subtle and quick and very very well.
People have to raise the question themselves.
After a year of their work, spread slowly and thoroughly throughout their little neighborhood, things finally line up. Acquaintances from Inko’s work tell her that her son can’t be quirkless. With what they've seen with their own eyes and heard from others, what he does can’t be anything but a quirk. One says she has a friend who works at the registry, they should try a re-evaluation.
———————
They’re close to it, close to the end. The diagnosis. The do or die moment. The two talk in hushed, low tones as Inko schedules the appointment. They’ve looked at the employee lists and when each testing official works; they need to make sure that Izuku isn’t evaluated by anyone who can actually sense quirks, or has a quirk that otherwise might be a problem. They need the path of least resistance that'll still look official.
They hedge their bets on a doctor who Izuku is certain only has a snake mutation quirk. They dip into registries and phone records to get the best glimpse of his life as they can. Izuku may need the ammunition. She clicks ‘submit’ on the forms.
“If it works… Do you think I could be a hero?”
He should have known better than to ask again. He knew from the moment he opened his mouth, from the moment she wouldn't meet his eyes. Her answer was the same as before. The reasoning was a bit different this time, but still the same end result.
“I’m sorry Izuku. You can’t be a hero, honey. There’s too much for us to lose now.”
There’s the same omission as last time; she doesn’t say directly that he’s incapable of it, but he knows she still thinks it. His quirkless self wouldn’t make it, no matter how clever he is. The silence says it all for her, and their dilemma just serves as a further excuse.
“You can be something else! Anything else, whatever you want. I promise.”
———————-
If it does somehow work, he should avoid personal statements about it. No “I have a quirk” and more “The doctors say I’m good at precognition and observation. Apparently I was just too unfocussed with it, but I could do it all along!” He can't say any outright falsehoods. After all, there are people out there with lie-detecting quirks, people who can look at you and pull out all your secrets. Their kind, and any trap like it, should be avoided at all costs.
She taught her boy to avoid admissions and to talk in circles and even how to fake a polygraph. (The show itself helped a bit with the last one.)
He can’t pretend to commune with the dead or any of the more extreme stuff the ‘not-detective’ and his friend can get away with. They kept it simple as they could, Izuku just noticed things.
Somehow that might be enough.
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God this wasn’t going to work, Inko was an idiot!
At best they’d both get shamed and ridiculed again. At worst the quirk registry might track down that little ‘paperwork discrepancy’ at the hospital. And then she’d be in jail with a felony quirk-fraud charge and no one to look after Izuku! Who likely would be exiled even more than before.
Life is not a comedy-drama Inko! Things don’t magically work out in the end!
As she contemplates how doomed they are, a man steps through into the waiting room. He wears a lab coat and there are blue scales wrapping around his cheeks-the doctor. He’s the one who’ll be administering the testing. It’s do or die time.
“The Midoriyas?”
“We’re here! We’re here.” She stands and takes Izuku by the hand, pulling him behind her. They’re both nervous wrecks and look it.
She begins her pre-planned spiel. “Well we didn't want to get our hopes up, but so many people recommended we do this and get a second opinion! A friend told me this branch of the registry was local and very well regarded, we just thought we’d give it a try!”
She goes on and on until they reach what looks to be a second waiting room and the doctor presses some empty paperwork into her hands.
“If you’ll just sit right here and fill that out Ms. Midoriya that’ll be perfect. Izuku and I will just go on ahead!”
“What! I um-pardon me, what do you mean by that?”
“Sorry, but you’ll have to wait out here. I know it’s a weird policy but we’ve had parents in the past try to cheat for their children!” He smiles sweetly at her. “Can’t have that happening.”
Shit.
——————-
It’s just the two of them now, the door swinging shut on this lonely back office; Izuku and the doctor who’ll decide his fate. The man is smiling, but it feels empty, sharp like a predator’s. Others must have tried this with him before, to fake their way through. He’s expecting the same from Izuku.
“So Midoriya, kiddo, how are you feeling?”
The best of lies have honesty at their core.
“To be honest…I don’t know if it is a quirk sir. People have been telling me it is, neighbors and people we meet. But I’m scared that we’ll go through all this and I’ll still turn out to be…I just don’t want to disappoint everyone.”
It garners him a slight look of sympathy.
“That’s very understandable son, but let’s give this a try. Your application focused on you being able to read people from a glance. Sometimes the environment, but mostly people right?”
He nods. The doctor directs him to a chair in the middle of the room and then speaks something quietly into the intercom.
“Alright! We’re going to do a few little tests here to see what we’re working with. I’m gonna have some people come in and you’ll tell me everything you can sense or see from them. Ok?”
He hears his mother’s voice in his head, all their hours practicing; what will give him the best chance. Stick with positive observations, Izuku. No letting people know if their husbands were cheating on them. He’d done that once in the middle of a farmer's market, and was right, for the record. But they wanted a simple, positive observation ability here.
A short, bespectacled man walks in, with fur all across his body and a short snout. He wears a tweed suit and there’s a line of striped quills down his back where the clothes split to allow for them. Honestly, he looks a bit exhausted.
“Alright kid, tell me everything you can see about this guy, it's alright if some of it is wrong-we’ve been informed that happens with your ‘ability’, we just want to see what you can do. No pressure!”
No pressure, right.
Here we go. His eyes roam the man, taking in several spots of interest as he stands there and fidgets.
“Mid forties with a physical porcupine mutation and a probable secondary aspect. Back seems to have an additional mass, and given that and the quill structure-they look like african porcupine quills to be specific- I’d imagine you can shoot them out. Regular porcupines can’t shoot them, they just stick very easily into something that contacts them. I can't tell from this far but yours probably have the same barbs. Largely plant-based diet, or at least that's what agrees with you the most. Poor eyesight-sorry-that might result from the quirk, I don't think porcupines have good eyesight-or it could just be natural!”
He takes in a gasp of air and looks to the doctor, seeing him writing on a board with his eyebrows slightly peaked. He hasn’t failed yet at least. Enough on the quirk, get to the person. He focuses on the suit, the trimmed claws, the way he stands.
“Left handed, that’s a bit rare. Posture points to likely back problems-again possible interference from the quirk here. Probably a cat or two given the fur on the ankles, sorry I can’t tell what kind. You don't tend to sleep well, it seems chronic rather than recent.” He recognizes the man from the employee listing for this building, though he can't be too obvious with it. “You're uh, local I think? Maybe you work here. You're an accountant, or some variety of desk job. You’ve been here a long time.”
He looks back at the doctor, still writing away on his board.
“Is that uh-is that good? Do you want me to do more?”
“That’s good for this one!” He looks to the porcupine-man. “Head out and send the next one in.”
Oh boy.
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There are five in total, two more employees of this place and two pulled off the street; one is a relative of the doctors, which he’d guessed correctly.
At some point, maybe after the second or third person, he starts loosening up. The test is actually pretty fun. At first he kept stopping himself, not sure if it was too rude to say something or if there were 'forbidden’ observations to make. It’s awkward, especially with the people he’s reading right there. But he does loosen up, and then he starts giving suggestions.
His mom’s not here to tell him to stop thinking like that, to tell him to focus on being nice rather than giving people advice they can actually use. This test may hold both their futures but it’s also what he loves to do. Plus, if this skill of his were a quirk, it would be instinctive like this. So he fully lets loose and the mutter-storm begins.
The doctor gets a smirk at some point, and starts leading him on questions, asking him if he can go more in-depth. Izuku is happy to oblige. He prefaces the more questionable stuff but he goes in for all of it, digs into every clue he has.
The doctor is full on grinning by the time he walks Izuku back to his mother, and despite his nerves and stress, he can read the man well enough to know he’s genuinely happy. Impressed even.
“Well looks like we’ve got a little precognitive on our hands! Well-not quite, we’re going to put it down as hyper-observance and a bit of increased intelligence, description-wise.” His mother looks to be in shock. “You don’t know how long its been since we’ve gotten a real success from a late bloomer.”
“So-so you mean he’s really…?”
“Yep! Little guy’s got a quirk, no way he could have done a quarter of that stuff without it.” He takes the paperwork from her and starts filing it back over at the desk. Izuku’s still kind of stunned but his mother takes his hands in a joy-fueled iron grip. “We’ll get this all filed in the next few days and then your new quirk status should be up and online.” He smiles warmly at Izuku over the computer.
“You gotta be clearer with the stuff you say little man! I can't imagine you were treated very nice, and hey you didn’t deserve that. We’re gonna get everything sorted out for you, don't worry.”
Izuku’s too caught up in the moment, of the paperwork getting passed back to his mother that said legally, yes, he had a quirk, to think about that comment. About anyone ‘deserving’ what was done to him.
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Izuku was 7, and the records agreed, he was psychic. Or close enough to it, at least.
It's not like the world instantaneously gets brighter and kinder the second they step out the building, but it does kind of feel that way to Inko. They wait with hope and fear in their hearts for about a week till all the paperwork finally goes through. Sending that quirk update file to Izuku’s school feels like glory and retribution.
Things change.
People at work talk about her son, not in hushed, pitying voices over the water cooler, but openly in the hall. “What a helpful young boy! What a lucky quirk.” Izuku starts to have light in his eyes again when he gets home from school. People are kinder to them in a dozen small different ways she hadn’t even registered the absence of before.
It takes a great weight off her shoulders and replaces it with a razor thin line around her neck and the neck of her son. They could still be found out, absolutely, and the fallout would ruin the both of them. But for now she can ignore the pressure at her throat. For now, she is happy, and her son is getting there, and no one in their right minds would connect their little family miracle to a 200 year old American cable show.