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Since Izuku could remember, he had always seen them.
Sometimes they were scary, sometimes they were cute, and sometimes they were just really weird, but they would wander across the street, or through his room, or jump through trees, and he would always think it was weird that nobody else was watching them, because they were just so cool! Almost as cool as heroes!
He even made friends with some of them, though they were usually very surprised when he first tried talking to them, exchanging dango preferences with the fox with three tails that seemed to live in the local park, and polite conversation about the weather with the crow man that sometimes hung around the nearby temple. There was also the talking, fire-breathing chicken that gave him advice that he sometimes couldn’t help but equate to his dad, because of the fire and the dad-like wisdom.
Whenever he told Mom, she just smiled indulgently and told him not to forget time with his other friends.
Whenever he told his friends, they would just tell him to stop making things up, and sometimes Kacchan would even tell him they sounded stupid, but Izuku thought he was probably just jealous.
Izuku was always telling people about his funny friends, but even when he offered to introduce them, they said no, and he had the feeling nobody believed they were really his friends. He didn’t understand. Why would he talk to them or about them if they weren’t his friends?
He heard a lot of whispers from the grown-ups about ‘overactive imagination’ and ‘imaginary friends’, but decided that they must be mistaken, because his friends were not imaginary.
It wasn't until he started elementary school that he realised he was the only one who could see them, and some of these things began to make sense.
He began to be more aware of himself and his surroundings, and while he had always noticed that people tended to ignore and disregard the creatures he was so fascinated by, he hadn’t put together that it might be due to the fact that they couldn’t see them in the first place.
He had thought it was a quirk, his quirk, but he had done a lot of tests and scans that had all said he was quirkless, and even when he told the doctors they didn’t really believe him, so he remained legally, officially quirkless, but he didn’t stop seeing the creatures.
At some point when he was about five, he learned about youkai after he had described the crow man to his mom, and then he began calling them that in his head and his notebooks, though he made a point of learning the youkai’s names, if they had any, and offering them a nickname if they didn’t.
He stopped telling grown ups about his youkai friends as often as he used to, because he was getting sick of the looks and comments he always got when he knew his friends were real.
Eventually he stopped mentioning at all, and he kept his tales and thoughts and feeling confined to a special notebook, one he kept under his bed and that he only wrote in with his favourite special rainbow pens.
After all, heroes and quirks were cool, but the youkai were closer to him, and, he was realising, more important.
—
His human friends were different now that they thought he was quirkless.
Kacchan had always been loud and confident and brash, but it just seemed to get meaner over time. The fact that he got other kids to join in and follow him didn’t make things better, and so while Izuku was still hanging out with them and still played with Kacchan at one of their houses with their moms there at least once every other week, Izuku could tell things were changing.
He spent more and more time with the fox in the park, who he had learned was named Kumiko, who always wanted to play and climb trees, and with the crow man at the shrine, whose name was Kiji, who liked to hum and sing and sometimes play a slightly translucent shamisen.
His youkai friends taught him some of the things they knew from their world, and while a lot of the time it was really weird and he didn’t really understand, it meant that apparently youkai knew he was nice, and would sometimes even ask him for help!
Life at school was sometimes a bit lonely, and whenever he talked about becoming a hero, everyone would gently tell him that maybe he should think about something else, and sometimes he almost listened to them, just so he could stop having those conversations.
But then something like a tiny little cat-like youkai would come up to him and ask for help getting its sister out of a tree, and when he got her down and the two would be happily rubbing up against each other in relief, and he would feel like a hero, even though it was such a small thing.
—
When Izuku was approaching his ninth birthday, he came upon a sight he had never seen before.
Kumiko and Kiji were in the park, together, seemingly engrossed in conversation.
He hadn’t even known they knew each other.
He stood staring in surprise for a moment, before Kumiko twitched, noticing his arrival, and she bounded over to him, more excited than he had seen her since that one time somebody had left a bottle of sake and a frisbee behind after a picnic.
“Izu! Izu!” she bounced around him as Kiji walked over much more calmly, “we have a surprise for you! Come on!”
She began darting back and forth, tapping her front paws in excitement, and Kiji sighed in exasperation where he was now standing next to Izuku. He placed a rough, comforting hand on Izuku’s shoulder, and gently led him after Kumiko towards the exit of the park.
Izuku wasn’t worried. He had a feeling most adults would probably think a crow-man leading a child out of a park to somewhere unknown would be dodgy at best, but Izuku trusted Kiji and Kumiko. They had been teaching him little things here and there for years, including stranger danger, and neither were strangers. They were almost like cousins? Or an uncle and a cousin. Yeah, that fit.
He knew his mom might worry, but she was used to him being out late, thought he just liked being outside and told him to be back before dinner.
So he followed the youkais’ gentle guidance, and found himself heading in the familiar direction of Kiji’s shrine.
It was in a different park, not too far away, with a larger temple on its ground. Kiji’s shrine wasn’t part of that, in fact it was pretty hidden and overgrown, without many visitors. Kiji said that was why he liked it, that the lack of visitors didn’t bother him because it wasn’t his shrine, but Izuku secretly liked to think that he was glad that Izuku visited.
Kumiko jumped on top of the carved stone pillar that made up most of the shrine, tails waving impatiently and front paws still tapping, and Kiji stood straight, clearing his throat in preparation.
Izuku was a little nervous, because despite the youkais’ excitement, this felt very serious all of a sudden, so he subconsciously straightened to match Kiji, and clenched his fists to stop himself from fidgeting with them.
“Alright,” announced Kiji, “we have decided… to teach you our ways.”
“TADA!!!” Kumiko cheered, jumping on the spot and giggling happily, but Izuku just stood there blankly.
He had no idea what that meant.
“Um. That sound really cool but also… I have no idea what that means?”
“Ah,” Kiji looked a little embarrassed, and Kumiko froze where she was landing, nearly toppling off the pillar in surprise, before scrambling to right herself, “I suppose that was not very clear, was it?”
Izuku shook his head in agreement.
“Well,” Kiji began again, “we, what you humans call ‘youkai’, are not of the mortal world, not in the same way as you,” he gestured to Izuku, “and as such, we have different skills and abilities that most humans would never be capable of learning,” he paused a moment to gather his thoughts, “but since you can see and interact with us, and have been so kind despite how frightening and unusual we can be, we have decided to teach you some of our ways.”
“It means you’re one of us now!” Kumiko added, throwing herself at Izuku, twisting and shifting in the air into a young girl in a sakura pink kimono, before landing on him in a breath-stealing hug, tails still waving happily in the air.
“We know how much you want to be a hero,” Kiji continued, ignoring Kumiko’s antics, “and how much it hurts you not to have a human power. We thought maybe you would like something of ours, since to many of our kind, you are already something of a hero, having assisted us and shown us respect and kindness.”
Izuku was shocked silent, torn between surprise and tears, overwhelmed by the sincerity Kiji was displaying. He had always been quiet and stoic, gentle but cool, and so to have his struggling to word what he was getting the impression was a very serious and heartfelt offer, was… a lot.
“What,” Izuku cleared the lump out of his throat, “what does that mean, exactly? Do you mean, like, magic?”
“I suppose, in human terms, that would be correct, “although I imagine it differs greatly from you perception of the word. Our skills are a lot more… ambiguous. Open to interpretation. Any rules we have are more like guides, and those guides are flexible and fickle things,” his look softened to something Izuku thought was very close to paternal, “we know it will not be the same as a human power, but we wanted to give you a gift, and take our world with you into the future, whatever it may be.”
Izuku felt tears spill over, and then he was nodding vigorously, not wanting to speak and risk babbling nonsense, but still overwhelmed and giddy to accept. He launched himself at Kiji, Kumiko still hanging off him, pulling him into a hug. He felt the crow-man tense for a moment, before he awkwardly patted Izuku on the head, Kumiko chuckling at him from her position before climbing over onto him and breaking up the hug.
“Okay,” Izuku pulled himself together, “when can I start?”
—
Izuku had always wanted to be a hero. He still did, although he knew now that he was older, now that it was nearly time to start applying to high schools, that if he did become a hero, he wouldn’t be able to become a conventional one.
The skills he had learned from the youkai were useful but subtle, and prone to not working how you wanted when you sometimes needed them to.
He would ask the world for help, and sometimes it would give him exactly what he asked for, and sometimes what he didn’t, though it usually did end up helping. He could find his way in the darkest night, and ask the birds for information, he could whisper to the wind for slightly kinder skies, or talk to the plants to make them happy.
He couldn’t really share it or explain it to anyone, and he was probably never going to be very good at fighting villains or chasing down criminals, but he thought that, in his own way, he might be able to do just what some people needed. Bring light during gloomy days, spark birdsong in troubled times, make winds just a little less biting, and offer hope in the form of a flower.
It wasn’t much, but it had come from love and hard work, and it felt like he had earned it. His power, quiet but steady, and even if he didn’t go pro, he would use it where he could, to help those both seen and unseen.
It wasn’t the same as the lofty dreams of his childhood, but it was a happy dream nonetheless.
—
Then he met All Might, and everything changed.
It was another power he was earning, and while his first let him comfort the hurt, this one would help him vanquish the hurters. He would make it his own, in time, but for now he would push himself and train his body and just try to get a handle on what he knew was there.
He had spent less time with his youkai friends, though Kiji and Kumiko sometimes came to watch him clean the beach, yelling encouragement and occasionally teaching him something new to help him along.
Sometimes, he saw All Might freeze and turn to where they lingered, as if he had spotted them out of the corner of his eye, but then he would just look confused for a moment and move on.
Something was going on there, and the youkai only confirmed it.
Kumiko had asked, with all her usual lack of decorum, whether he was sure All Might was a human, and not a youkai, because she ‘got a vibe’ from him that only usually came from her kind, but then she would see him on TV and conclude ‘someone that famous couldn’t possibly be one of us. We’re far too unnoticeable for that,’ and the thing was, Izuku could sort of feel it too.
It felt too weird to ask the man outright. Izuku hadn’t ever really talked to anyone about the youkai, and he was too scared of his hero looking at him like he was crazy to even risk it, because if the reaction when he was little had sometimes been so harsh, he could only imagine that saying the same things now would have him shipped off for a psychiatric evaluation before he could yell ‘SMASH!’.
He left it alone, but the feelings and the looks were still there, nagging at the back of his mind, a constant question without an answer.
It wasn’t until Izuku received One For All that he got answers.
He had been expecting the rush, the adrenaline and the feeling of raw power flooding through him. He even, to some extent, expected the pain, because he knew he was barely ready as it was.
What he had not been expecting was the familiar echo of the world, and the singing of seven voices echoing through his mind, a comforting war cry of power and protection.
After the initial shock had worn off, and his shattered limbs were back to normal, he realised what that feeling was.
One For All was a youkai.