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When her son was born into the world, Inko didn't think too much of it.
Of course, it was the happiest moment of her life. The tears flowed from her eyes like a broken faucet, drops soaking the hospital bedsheets as she gripped Hisashi's hand. The plain man winced under her vice grip but was happy all the same.
Her chest rose up and down, every cell in her body finally taking a breather as the pain was mostly gone. Her son had been finally removed from her and brought into the world. eighteen hours of labor she had been through, eighteen straight hours of agony and anxiety as she worried for the health of her son, praying he would come into this world healthy and happy. She focused on calming herself down now, making sure she took deep breaths through her mouth and slowly let them out through her nose.
As the nurses took her child to a table in the corner of the room, she leaned back into the sweat covered pillows and closed her eyes.
In...and out. In...and out. She repeated this mantra in her head, forcing her body into a state of calm.
Inko assumed that the birth of her son was like every other childbirth.
Until she realized that she couldn't hear the cries of her newborn.
Her eyes shot open, frantically turning her head to the corner where her son was being held. The nurses and doctors crowded around the table, speaking in frantic whispers. She caught glimpses of their expressions, stone cold Inko held her breath, her grip on Hisashi growing tighter as she prayed to every deity out in the world. Inko was not religious but if anything could help her newborn, she would do it a hundred times over if it meant her son would live past this moment.
The whispers of the hospital staff went quiet, the delivery room was consumed by an eerie silence that nobody wanted to break. Inko felt her heart fall, her entire body rocked by an ice-cold wave of...nothing.
A moment passes, and then another, before a cry parts the tension in the air.
The wail of the newborn raises the spirits of everyone in the room. Inko bursts into tears as her grip on her husband is released. The medical staff smile faintly under their blue surgical masks, getting back to the task at hand.
The obstetrician briefly glances back at the crying couple, her mouth open to say something, and returns to what she was doing. They were having an emotional moment right now; she would feel wrong interrupting it. They could always get the news later.
The news that when he had opened his mouth to take his first breath, he had breathed out a plume of stardust.
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Inko didn't think Izuku was an odd child.
Every child had their eccentricities, according to her favorite book 'Parenting 101 for Anxious Parents', and Izuku was no different.
She didn't think much of it when at the age of 4, one of his favorite activities was staring at nothing. He would sit on the couch with a wide smile on his face, just staring off into the distance with no particular object in mind.
She wouldn't be lying if she said that his eyes did unnerve her sometimes when he was staring.
He would lay back on the couch, letting himself sink into the cushions while he kicked his feet excitedly. He would giggle occasionally, whispering to people that weren't there. The entire time he was doing that, his eyes were...well, glowing.
Izuku was born with dark purple eyes, a purple so dark that it almost looked completely black. His irises constantly swirled and churned with color, new specks of color emerging and disappearing every day. Whenever he would sit and play his favorite game...they would glow and change faster. His eyes would morph and shift as they were displaying the emergence of the universe, brought about by a massive cataclysmic explosion at the dawn of time.
Inko ignored it half the time, writing it off as one of her child's...eccentric features.
His pediatrician noted that both of these were somewhat normal. His eyes were blamed on a mutation, the unique irises likely to somehow relate to his quirk that would manifest any day now. Regarding the game he loved, the doctor noted that Izuku had a very active imagination that was something expected for a child of his age. During their checkups Izuku would tell the doctor of all of the imaginary friends he played with.
He would spin these elaborate tales of meeting new people with interesting powers, claiming they were all like him. Inko found it charming that her son was so creative.
How wrong she had been.
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Izuku was four years old when he first realized that people treated him differently.
He held the back of his hand close to his chest, tears welling up in his eyes from the pain after Kacchan had smacked it away.
The boy sat in the bed of the creek, glaring holes into Izuku after he had been offered help.
"Why would I want help from you, Deku?" The blond spat out, his words like daggers in Izuku's heart.
"You're weird! You have weird eyes! You have a weird 'invisible' quirk! You have weird eyes, and you're always muttering to nobody!" Kacchan ranted, standing up and trying feebly to brush the water off of his soaked pants.
Izuku stumbled back, shocked from the harsh words. "B-but Kacchan, the doctor said my quirk just hasn't manifested yet-"
"No!" Kacchan shouted, his hands crackling with small explosions. "You're weak, that's why your quirk hasn't shown up!"
"Your quirk is probably just being weird. You definitely look the part." Kacchan snorted, climbing out of the riverbed and making his way back up the hill to his goons. The followers cheered him on, ignoring how hurt Izuku was.
The green haired boy held his hands to his chest, the tears welling up even more and threatening to spill over. He could feel his heart and body both ache now, an ebbing pain that wouldn't go away.
'Kacchan really doesn't like me anymore...he really thinks I'm weak. Maybe I am useless...' Izuku intoned, his entire body beginning to shake as he stood ankle-deep in the water. He looked up towards the top of the hill, knowing that if he turned his head down his tears would fall.
'He lies Izuku...' The voices whisper to him, dozens of voices calling out in his head. Different voices popped up, all giving their own support for him.
The thoughts warm his heart a little, but not enough. He watches his former friends walk away, leaving him with only the voices in his head. He didn't bother moving from the creek, his tear drops adding new ripples to the water.
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"Well, I would ask you what your ideal career choice would be, but we all know what you guys are going to say. You all want to be heroes!"
At the words from the teacher, the class erupts into chaos. All of the students start showing off their quirks, one student showcasing how long he can make his fingers and another being able to stretch his eyeballs out of his sockets. Many of the students had fairly useless, non-combative quirks. An explosion rings from the far right corner of the room, an ash blond teen standing on his desk with his chest out.
"Don't lump me in with these extras, teach!" Bakugo exclaimed, slamming his fist into his palm and letting off a small explosion. His smile was all teeth, a sign of aggression with no joy behind it. The class playfully their classmate back, some proclaiming that they could stand up to him. They all knew they couldn't if they wanted to, Bakugo was just on another level.
The teacher adjusts his glasses, looking down at one of the papers on top of his desk. "Hmm, you're applying for UA aren't you Bakugo? Well, good luck to you."
The students break out into murmurs, some expressing their opinions a little louder than others.
"Wow, only like 2 percent of applicants get into UA. They're super strict..."
With a shuffle of his papers, the teacher lets out a small sound of interest. Another paper moves into his hands, and he looks up to the class.
"Midoriya, you're applying to UA as well, I see."
The class goes silent, only some of the students daring to turn around and look to the student in the back of the class.
The green haired student is looking out of the window with his hand under his chin, a small smile on his face. His eyes shimmering as he looks at the slow-moving clouds. The sky is a pale blue color, only a few of the puffy white clouds drifting across it. Despite the absence of many clouds, whatever Izuku is looking at appears to be the most interesting thing in the world. The lonely boy giggles a little, causing something in Bakugo snap.
"Deku!" Bakugo instinctively goes to reprimand the student, but his body stops him.
A chill goes up his spine, as it now feels like a thousand eyes are now watching him. He feels like he has earned the ire of beings far from this realm, as if an entire pantheon of deities has now decided to turn their attention to one singular teenager in a backwater middle school. His body shakes under the pressure, feeling like he could fall to the ground right now and pass out. Izuku has turned his eyes to Bakugo, those deep eyes shimmer with knowledge and a hunger that Bakugo couldn't even begin to fathom. As he gets sucked into his eyes, Bakugo sees shapes that bend in ways that don't make sense, the non-Euclidean geometry that shift in the moving color of Izuku's eyes making Bakugo's stomach churn and his chest clench.
Whatever interest Izuku saw in Bakugo, it has ended, and he has now turned back to the window to continue cloud gazing.
Bakugo feels the pressure on his body release, and he quickly moves back to his seat.
It has been like this since they were four years old, and Bakugo refuses to interact with Deku anymore.
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"Anything of interest this year?" Kayama asks, sitting down on the stained couch of the teachers' lounge.
The woman spreads herself out like a cat, lounging in an oversized sweatshirt and baggy pants. She can afford to drop her eccentric and flirtatious hero persona while they are alone, allowing herself to relax and just be her. She rolls onto her stomach and stares up at the other occupant of the room.
The man peers through the greasy black hair that shrouds his face, his red irises looking down at the woman who is currently rolling on the couch like a cat trying to find a comfortable spot. He rubs his eyes, the dark bags under them being physical evidence of his mental state.
"A few, I suppose." The man grunts out, applications covering the table in front of him. He gave a disinterested answer, but Kayama could clearly see that his eyes were trained on one specific application.
The R-Rated hero pouts, letting herself roll off of the couch. She falls on her feet before making her way over to Aizawa, placing her hands on the table as she leans over it to get a good look at what he is so focused on.
She bats her eyelashes a few times as she scans the papers, finding the one her coworker is fixated on at the moment. "Izuku Midoriya...?" She mutters, leaning closer.
Aizawa sighes, and slides the paper over to her. "It's nothing concrete. Just a hunch."
She smiles as he gives it over, letting her eyes scan the application. Nothing too crazy on it, he has really good grades but nothing too wild. Almost everyone at UA has exceptional grades, and its harder to be even better than exceptional. She huffs as she can't find the point of his interest. Aizawa lets out a groan and points at the Quirk Registry form.
"His quirk is registered as...Cthonaut?" She tests out the word, finding it unfamiliar in her mouth. Aizawa nods, pulling a jelly pouch out of a bag as he tried to explain.
"It has no description under the quirk registry, and the only thing given is its name. Which means..."
"...it's classified by the government?" Kayama finishes, her eyebrows raising now. Her intrigue was evident on her face now, lips curling into a curious smile.
The underground hero nods, draining the red jelly pouch in one sip. He places his elbows on the table and places his head in his hands, fingers rubbing his temples as he tries to alleviate a growing headache.
"I tried to figure out what Cthonaut means, but it isn't a real word in any language I could find." He groans lightly, before continuing. "Chthonic is a word derived from Greek, meaning underworldly or kind of ritualistic, black magic kind of stuff. Like a Lovecraftian eldritch thing."
"And the -naut suffix...like the English word for astronaut?" Kayama asks, her own hand going to her chin. She scratches it lightly, her mind going back to her English lessons in high school.
"I thought the same, but that doesn't exactly make much sense, does it? A hell astronaut? Underworld explorer?" He groans again, dropping his hands and letting his forehead hit the table with a loud thud.
Kayama shrugs, stealing a jelly pouch from the bag next to him. "Guess we'll just have to wait for the exam to see!"
Aizawa let out another groan, his head still on the table.
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Izuku stood in the center of the crowd, applicants milling around him as they stood in front of the massive doors to the testing site.
If he was focused, he would feel the anxiety rolling off of the group in waves. The mass of teenagers were already sweating and the physical hadn't even started yet.
The green haired teen stared dreamily at the door, but his eyes were clearly not focused on it. His irises shimmer and blossomed with the light of dying stars and birthing universes.
"So Izuku, which ones are you going to summon for this one?" His own voice ripples in his mind, sounding gruff and calm. Izuku hums a little, before responding in his mind.
'I have a few picked out, don't worry! You'll get your turn another time Guardian!" He calls out to the voice in his head, the person responding with a disappointed sigh.
"You're a little too overkill for an exam of this magnitude. Don't want you to steal all of the points from the other applicants!" Izuku continued, the person grunting an affirmation.
Before Izuku could continue his conversation, he finally tuned back into the world around him and realized everybody was already gone. The doors were open, and he could faintly see the end of the pack already reaching the city.
"Whoops!" He called out happily, breaking into a sprint to catch up.
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Aizawa watched on the monitors, eyes scanning dozens of camera feeds for curly green hair.
It doesn't take long as he watches the boy trying to catch up, having gotten distracted while the exam started. He felt his hopes dwindle a little as he looked at the boy. They weren't high in the first place, but to have an examinee so distracted that they ignored the exam...?
The green haired boy gets to the edge of the city, standing directly in the middle of one of the main streets in the mock city. He looks around with wide, amazed eyes at all the students taking down robots with their quirks. The boy was muttering to himself now, and Aizawa briefly wished that the drone cameras set up around the city had audio.
The teacher sighs and marks a few notes down on Midoriya's sheet, only listing the negatives of his attention span. An unfocused hero was a dead one when it comes to field work, and Aizawa wouldn't send someone like him out unless he knew he was capable.
A flash of light draws his attention back up to the feed, the screen flashing purple for a moment.
Midoriya stood tall, his eyes shining a bright purple before going completely dark, a void consuming any color in his eyes. His hands go to grab his throat, almost scratching at it as his cheeks inflate as if he was holding his breath. The boy struggles for a moment as Aizawa briefly considers calling a medic, before opening his jaws and unleashing what was held inside.
From his mouth, Izuku begins vomiting up a bright purple, sparkling mist. It comes out of his mouth in multiple forms, parts of it a liquid, a portion coming out as gas, and some of it sparking like plasma. The substance pools on the ground, looking as if a piece of space had been brought onto earth and vomited out by a teenager.
The substance churns, spreading across the ground before it shoots up and forms three different circular objects. The dark substance churns before shining and swirling, opening into what appeared to be portals. Out stepped three individuals, and at this point Aizawa's headache came back in full force. It didn't take a genius to realize that all three of these individuals were Izuku.
From the left portal emerged an almost identical Izuku. He wore a bright smile on his face, with the same curly green hair. His eyes were deep sea-green color, a stark contrast to the stellar purple Aizawa had grown used to seeing. He had a few scars on his face and his arms, but he was roughly the same. This Izuku wore dark blue jeans, black converse, and a bright orange short sleeved shirt. On the center of his chest, the words 'Camp Half Blood' were emblazoned above the black symbol of a winged horse. This Izuku flipped a pen in his hand, seemingly whistling a little as he stepped onto the street.
The middle portal revealed another Izuku, this one looking fairly normal. He had green hair and eyes that matched, wearing fairly normal clothing for a teenager. He wore high-top shoes, dark blue jeans, and a plain black t-shirt. Over his shirt, he wore a bright green jacket, with two white lines circling around the right bicep, as well as a white line going up the side of his chest. Emblazoned right above his heart in white letters was the number 10, surrounded by a black circle. Aizawa noticed a large clunky device on his wrist, looking almost like a watch but too big to be practical. He walked out of the void with a bounce in his step and a smile on his face.
The last portal revealed a very different person, one almost impossibly different from the Izuku's present at the exam. He was garbed in all black tattered clothing, his main feature being long trench coat splattered with dark rust-colored stains that Aizawa hoped wasn't blood. Almost every inch of his skin was covered in clothing, a bandana pulled up over his nose leaving only his eyes uncovered. Underneath a black withered tricorn hat, his eyes were bright yellow with the pupils reduced to slits. His eyes flicked around the city, pupils dilating constantly as he looked at the robots.
Aizawa desperately wished that he hadn't applied for this job years ago.
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Izuku smiled at the people he had summoned. He had chosen these three because he was most familiar with them and knew they would take it seriously...but not go overboard.
'Really? You summon the blood-stained hunter but not me!?' The voice calls out in his mind again. Izuku ignores it with a playful smile.
"You guys ready? You know what to do, right?" Izuku asks, his purple eyes sparkling with glee.
The hunter lets out a grunt, not much for talking. The two cheerful Izuku's bump fists, having worked with each other before.
"Hey dude, been a while since we've fought together! Can't wait to see what crazy things you do here." The orange shirt Izuku lets out a laugh as he greets the other.
"Crazy? Have you seen yourself Mr. Demigod? I'm going to struggle to keep up with you!" The green shirted one calls out playfully, the two bantering now. The hunter stares at them blankly, before turning to the original Izuku with a confused expression.
"Do they always talk this much before a hunt?" The grim Izuku asks, his voice having a distinct British accent. Izuku Prime shrugs with a giggle.
"Oh, I'm crazy because I'm a demigod? I saw Alien X; you can't lie to me-" The demigod speaks before Izuku Prime chimes back in.
"Alright, alright! We can hang out later, exam first! We're already a little late!" Izuku laughs, having fun listening to his friends.
All three nod, serious expressions forming on their faces. The Izuku in the orange shirt steps up, flipping the pen one last time before he uncaps it. It unfolds itself in a quick burst, a sharp silver sword appearing in his hand. He does a little flourish with it, smiling happily as he bounces on his toes.
The one with the green jacket steps up, raising his arm up to his face. The device on his watch clicks as the center cylinder rises up. He grabs it and twists it a few times, humming as he decides what to do. With a smile, he slaps the cylinder down and transforms in a burst of green light. In his place, stands a massive red alien with four muscular arms.
The hunter lets out a feral growl, the rumble in his chest vibrating the area around him. At his feet, small skeletal hands emerge from a misty cloud that pools on the floor. The hands pull themselves up, revealing themselves as small little skeletons with each one wearing top hats. The hunter reaches down as the small skeletons pull a massive scythe from the mist, placing it in the hunter's hands.
The three summoned people look at each other and nod, before they sprint off in different directions to take on the robots in the city. Izuku Prime giggles happily as his eyes shine with ethereal light, seeing something that normal people could never.
He was always happy to hang out with his multiverse variants, especially if they got to play around like this.
Oh, how much fun they would have.