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you’re only given one little spark of madness. you mustn’t lose it.
- robin williams
All stories have a beginning.
The problem was this: Izuku couldn’t tell what the beginning of his story was. It was a bland story, but a story nonetheless, but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out where it started. When it started. Maybe it started on the day he was born, but something about that rubbed him wrong - after all, he was a person whose opinions were shaped by those around him, and so his birthday had never seemed like anything special. Maybe his story started the day he met Kacchan, or the day his father left, or the day he limped home for the first time with bruises on his skin and tears in his eyes. There were so many things that he could choose from, an infinite number of beginnings to a story as plain and innocuous as Izuku himself, and any of those could reasonably be considered the start.
But, deep down, Izuku thinks that the beginning of his story was the day that he was diagnosed as Quirkless. That’s the day that he remembers the most. Because it changed the trajectory of his life, yes, but also because that’s the day he was labeled as a freak.
It was also the day that his world ended, so, as far as beginnings go, that’s as good as any.
—
On the day the world ends, the sun is shining.
The radio plays a happy song with lyrics that blur in Izuku’s ears, nothing but background noise compared to the sound of tires on the road and the loud rattle of the AC that his mother had never gotten around to getting fixed. Izuku hums as he walks his All Might figurine across his lap, thinking about what he wanted to do after they got finished with this doctor’s appointment. Maybe he could ask his mother to take him to the park, or maybe he could play with Kacchan - it’d been a while since they played together outside of daycare, and playing at daycare wasn’t really fun because everybody else wanted to play with Kacchan, too, which meant that he and Izuku never really got to play alone together.
“Are you feeling alright, Izuku?”
Looking up at the sound of his mother’s voice, Izuku realizes that she’s looking in the rearview mirror at him, a strange smile on her face. It was wide in a way that didn’t really match her eyes, like she didn’t actually want to smile but was doing it anyways, but it turns a bit more real when Izuku nods and smiles back at her. His mother’s eyes crinkle slightly at the corners before she goes back to looking at the road, and she says, “After this, I was thinking that maybe we could go out to eat.” She glances in the mirror again, asking, “What about that place that serves really good katsudon?”
“Okay,” Izuku says, as agreeable as always, then pauses as his mother’s words sink in and he realizes something important. “But I like your katsudon better!”
His mother laughs as she says, “I know, baby. But it takes a while to make, remember?”
Izuku starts to shake his head, then realizes that he does remember, and saying that he didn’t would be the same as lying. And he also remembers that katsudon took a bunch of pots and pans and stuff, and he wasn’t big enough to help wash them, which meant that his mother had to do it all by herself, so it would take a lot of time. And if it took a lot of time, that meant that there was less time for her to play with him, which meant that he would have to play alone, and he didn’t like playing alone.
… Plus, he supposes that their favorite shop did make katsudon almost as good as his mother did.
“Well, okay,” Izuku says. “I guess we can go to Granny’s place.”
That’s what they called the lady who ran the shop, since she was old, and also because Izuku and his mother went there so much that she knew their names and would come out to sit with them whenever they showed up. She tried to give them their food for free sometimes, but that never worked because Izuku’s mother would just give the money to the cashier instead, telling him with a wink to make sure that it got into Granny’s purse somehow. Kacchan was there with them once when that happened, and as they were walking back to the car he said that the cashier probably just kept the money for himself, and Izuku’s mother said that the cashier was Granny’s grandson, and so he couldn’t steal anything from his grandmother because that would be rude and immoral.
That’s not gonna stop him, Kacchan said, because he never liked being told that he was wrong. He’s still gonna steal it.
And Izuku’s mother smiled at him and said, Sometimes you just have to see the good in people, Katsuki, and Kacchan made a sound like he didn’t believe her, but he didn’t say anything after that.
“I’m sure she’ll be happy to see you,” Izuku’s mother says now, and Izuku looks up at her to find that the car is pulling into a parking lot. In front of them is a small building that he doesn’t recognize, and he frowns. When his mother said that he had a doctor’s appointment to go to, he thought she meant he was going to their regular doctor, the nice lady when smiled at him and let him take two lollipops instead of just one when he was finished. The car stops, and his mother looks back at him and says, “We’re here, Izuku.”
Izuku tightens his hold on his All Might figurine, suddenly feeling nervous. He’s never been to this doctor’s office before, so he doesn’t really know what’s going to happen. He hopes that he doesn’t have to get shots or anything - Kacchan was able to get shots without crying at all, but Izuku always cried when he got shots, even when he tried really hard not to.
“Izuku?”
He realizes that his mother is still looking at him, a worried expression on her face, and makes himself relax. Maybe his normal doctor just wasn’t open today. There was no reason to be scared and make his mother worry about him. He smiles at her and asks, “Yeah?”
His mother smiles back at him, but it's that strange one again, too tight on her lips. Her eyes are dark and shiny above it, her eyebrows furrowed, and Izuku feels nervous again even though he doesn’t want to, his stomach twisting the way it did when he felt like something bad was about to happen. Sometimes he was right, but sometimes he was wrong. He hopes that he’s wrong right now, that nothing is going to happen, that when he’s finished they can go to Granny’s shop and eat all the katsudon they wanted.
His mother asks, voice soft, “Ready to go inside, baby?”
And, staring back at her, Izuku nods.
He doesn’t think that he has any other choice.
That was the day the world ended. The day that his story began. The day that he learned that he couldn’t be like All Might, he couldn’t be like Kacchan, he couldn’t be a hero. He couldn’t do anything but stand on the sidelines and watched as everybody else lived out their dreams as his own lay shattered at his feet, broken and discarded and littered with footprints. He couldn’t be anything worth being. He couldn’t be anything.
The only thing he could be, with any certainty at all, was useless.
—
“Izuku.”
At his mother’s voice, Izuku glances up from his phone. His mother watches him from across the table, her eyes worried even as she smiles when he looks at her, and she says, "I got a call from your school today, sweetheart."
Izuku finishes chewing his mouthful of rice, swallows, and asks, "Did you?"
His mother sighs, "Izuku."
Izuku winces and puts his phone face-down on the table so that he doesn't get accused of not focusing on the conversation. Knowing exactly what his mother is talking about, he asks, "Well, what did you want me to do?"
"Izuku, please," his mother says, her eyebrows furrowing, and he looks away. He can't stand the way that she's looking at him, even though he knows that it's his fault. Especially since he knows that it's his fault. She's always so tired at the end of the day, and here he is, making it worse. "If things are getting bad enough that you're starting fights… if your grades are slipping…"
Low, under his breath, Izuku mutters, "I didn't start the fight."
"What?"
"Nothing," Izuku says, his grip tightening on his chopsticks until his fingers ache. "Sorry. I'm sorry, okay? I'm just…"
"I'm not angry at you," his mother says, which somehow makes him feel even worse. "I'm just worried, sweetie. This isn't like you. Did something happen?"
"No.”
He can feel his mother’s eyes on his face, studying it, and suddenly wishes that he had the foresight to cover up the bruises before she got home from work. She still would’ve known about the fight, but at least he would’ve been able to downplay the severity of it, to say that the school was just being its usual dramatic self and that, no, he wasn’t hurt, the fight wasn’t even that bad, he doesn’t even know why the school even called her about it. But now, with the evidence of what happened stark on his face, he can’t do any of that.
“Thanks for dinner,” Izuku says, standing up from the table. “Call me if you need anything.”
“Izuku -”
But he’s already gone, stalking into his room and shutting the door behind him. No sooner has he stepped inside is his phone buzzing against his palm, the screen lighting up with a notification of a message that just says, Wanna play?
Looking at it, Izuku snorts. He powers on his computer, then searches around for his headset. Pulling it on, he swipes the notification and pulls up the message screen, pressing the call button. It rings twice before connecting, and his friend’s voice crackles in his ears.
“What are we doing?” Izuku asks, sitting down in his chair. The wheels skid a bit on the hardwood floor, and he grabs the edge of his desk to pull himself forward, staring at the bright screen of his computer. In his dim room, the glow burns into his eyes, and a grin stretches across his face as he listens to his friend’s response. “Sounds great,” he says, right-clicking a file and scrolling through its contents. “Let’s get this game started, shall we?”
If you asked anybody, Midoriya Izuku was nothing special.
He was smart, sure, but he didn’t really do anything with that. He was quiet, a silent fixture in the back of the class, and he never talked to any of his classmates.
That is, unless he got into a fight.
Nobody really knew how the fights started, or who threw the first punch, but the blame somehow always managed to be pinned on Izuku. Somebody said something snippy, and if Izuku was in a bad enough mood, he would say something back. It would continue like that until it devolved into physical blows, at which point it would be broken up by a teacher and Izuku would be dragged to the principal’s office by his collar, and the principal would go through his spiel of how he never expected this behavior from Izuku. He was usually so calm, after all. The principal didn’t want to call his mother, that’s what he always said, but this kind of behavior had to be reported. The principal would say that he hoped this kind of situation never happened again, and Izuku would nod and agree and say that it wouldn’t, no sir, it would never happen again, but that was a lie, of course. It always managed to happen again, and the cycle repeated.
He was a loner by nature, dutifully doing all his work but never really doing much more than that, ignored except for the inevitable teasing that came from having no Quirk. He didn’t strive to be anything more than average, mediocre in his looks and his skills, watching the world pass by with those flat eyes of his. Those eyes. If you got looked at by him, those eyes bored into your head, your soul, as if he could read your mind at just a glance. He was difficult to be around, his voice quiet enough that you had to lean in to hear him, and he was… unsettling. Despite that, however, he was nothing special.
No, Midoriya Izuku was nothing special at all.
His life had long since fallen into a routine. He got the hint pretty early on that people didn’t want him around, and, after that, what was he supposed to do? He withdrew from his classmates, from his peers, and even from his own mother. He closed his door and dimmed his lights and turned on his computer, and he learned that, online, he could be anybody.
Online, he could be anything.
He met people, people like him, and he talked to them. Anonymous behind a screen, he could say whatever he wanted, and people had to trust that he being honest because it’s not as if they could prove otherwise.
But, somehow, for some strange reason, he found himself telling the exact truth.
Karma, he called himself, not quite stupid enough to use his real name. Quirkless. I’m nothing special.
He doesn’t know exactly when he met his first friend. He just remembers seeing them in his inbox, seeing a message that said, I’m like you, and feeling his heart jump into his throat. He accepted the friend request, and his online life exploded from there - he was introduced to the person’s friends, laughed and talked and played game after game after game with them, and, for the first time in a while, felt like he belonged.
I’m nothing special, he told people, but, when he was with his friends, he was something special. He was smart, they told him. He was good with computers. And, when they played their games, he was always the one with the best aim.
One day, he mentioned that he wanted to be a hero. That was a dream that died the day he was diagnosed as Quirkless, but there was a part of him that still ached the closer and closer he got to graduating middle school, the knowledge that he wouldn’t be able to get into Yuuei weighing heavy on his chest.
Why don’t you try?, one of his friends asked. Why don’t you prove everybody wrong?
I can’t, Izuku said. They don’t take people like me. I’m nothing special.
The chat slowed to a stop as Izuku’s first real friend started to type.
Don’t you hate them?
The message glows on Izuku’s screen, a scrawl of white text against a dark background, and Izuku stares at it until the words are burned into his eyes.
His friend asks, Don’t they make you sick ?
What?, Izuku asked.
Izuku could practically hear his friend’s voice as they typed, dark and bitter and boiling with barely-contained rage. This entire fucking society.
A society that breaks dreams. A society that shuns people. A society in which someone who was nothing special might as well be nothing at all.
Monsters, his friend said. They’re all villains, you know. It's just that they’re called something else. They’re called heroes, and they’re monsters, they’re the real villains, they would leave you to rot if they could and you know it. They’re monsters, all of them are monsters, and they want to make you into one, too.
Staring at his screen, Izuku felt something bloom to life in his chest.
I never expected thought that you would’ve wanted to be a hero, his friend said. I thought that you were like me.
I am, Izuku said. I am like you.
His friend typed for a long, long time. But, in the end, all they say is two simple words.
Prove it.
Izuku asked, What?
Just think of it as a game, his friend said. It's all just a game, Izuku.
Midoriya Izuku wasn’t good at a lot of things. He knew that. The entire world knew that. It's something he has no delusions about, a hard truth set down deep into his chest, carved into his bones and burning with every breath he took. He wasn’t good at talking in front of his class, or at cooking, or at being anything more than the mess that he was.
But he was great at playing games.
—
Don’t you hate them?
Izuku can’t get the words out of his head. They echo in his mind for days afterward, and it's as if they’ve changed the way he sees the world: when he watches All Might’s video, all he can think about is how many people must’ve been left behind. How many were left to rot.
Don’t they make you sick ?
Izuku watches the news and can only focus on the bad things. He can only see how many heroes didn’t actually seem like good people, how many of them were rude and had abrasive personalities, their hands rough as they handled civilians and their eyes cold when they looked at the camera. His friend sends him articles, detailing scandals and crimes and cover-ups, and Izuku reads them all. He reads them all, and he thinks.
Monsters, his friend’s voice whispers. They’re all villains, you know.
Because, really, what was a villain? What was a hero? What was the difference, in the end, other than the fact that one was loved and the other despised?
To learn how to be a hero… to let yourself become a monster…
I’m not going to apply to Yuuei, he types into the chat, and it feels like a death sentence.
But, somehow, it also feels like freedom.
There’s a certain kind of joy in giving up on your dreams. You carry the broken shards with you wherever you go, hoping that one day you’ll somehow have a chance to piece them back together again, and to let yourself give up means that you stop being cut by what could’ve been. You stop tormenting yourself, and you live.
Still, the first few days after making his decision to not apply, Izuku doesn’t get out of bed.
It feels pointless, to do anything ever again, and so he just tangles himself up in the sheets and blankets and tries his best to sleep. He doesn’t talk to his friends. He doesn’t talk to his mother. He doesn’t go to school. He doesn’t do anything. He just lays there and thinks about how different his life could’ve been if he just had a Quirk.
But there’s no point in dwelling on what-ifs, which is why, on the third day, Izuku turns on his phone and sees a message waiting for him.
Wanna play a game?
And Izuku has nothing to lose. He gave up on his dreams, and now he’s empty, and he doesn’t know where to go from there. He doesn’t know what path to take.
He says, Sure.
His friend sends him directions. Directions to a bar.
Izuku goes.
[Looking back, Izuku thinks that that’s where the real story started.]
Izuku learned a lot of things from Kacchan. He learned how to grin like he did, all sharp teeth shining in the sunlight, and he learned how to speak like he did, harsh phrases that grated on his tongue and cut into his mouth when he said them. He learned how to count, telling himself that he was just playing hide-and-seek as Kacchan prowled the playground in search of him, hands sparking and eyes narrowed and his voice brimming with an ugly kind of hate, a kind of hate that just grew more and more twisted as the years passed by. Izuku doesn’t know who taught Kacchan how to hate like that, how to view the world through such a warped lens that everything was labeled as a threat, as something to fight, but he would close his eyes and count the seconds - one, two, three - before he would be dragged out of wherever he’d been hiding, and then Kacchan would be there, yelling in his face and telling him to fuck off, to stop watching him, to just go away! because nobody wanted him there, and Izuku would stare up at him, at his face, and wonder whose words he was echoing.
Knowing that Kacchan was just behaving as he had been taught didn’t stop Izuku from hating him. That’s the most important thing that Izuku learned from Kacchan: how to hate. How to despise something with every fiber of your being, with every cell of your body, how to look at something - at someone - and feel nothing but revulsion.
That’s what he’s expecting to feel when he looks at Kacchan for the first time in months. For the first time in-person, at least: there are plenty of cameras at Yuuei, after all, and Izuku knows how to get into every one of them. But he doesn’t feel revulsion, or disgust, or any of that. He doesn’t feel hate. The only thing he feels is pity.
“Kacchan,” he says, taking a seat across from his former friend. “It's been a while.”
In a low voice, Kacchan asks, “What the fuck are you doing here?” There’s blood on his face, a cut across the bridge of his nose, and a steadily-darkening bruise trails up his cheekbone, twisting and winding beneath his skin. “You’re working with them?” Unable to point, he jerks his head in the direction of where Shigaraki and the others are standing, then scoffs, disgusted. “I should’ve known. I always knew you were a fucking psycho.”
“I see that you haven’t gotten any nicer,” Izuku observes. “What, you aren’t happy to be living out your dreams? Is it not as fun as you thought it would be?”
Kacchan rolls his eyes, sitting back in his chair. As well as he can, anyway, what with how his hands are restrained. He looks Izuku up and down, then asks, “Does your mommy know that her precious baby boy is a villain?”
“No,” Izuku says. “And we’re going to keep it that way.” He smiles and asks, “Aren’t we, Kacchan?”
“Are you trying to threaten me?” Kacchan asks, sounding surprised. He also sounds amused, like he’s just a second away from laughing. “Oh, please. You’re about as scary as a pile of dogshit, Deku. As helpless as a fuckin’ bunny rabbit. You don’t scare me.”
Watching him, Izuku tilts his head. “I’m not the helpless one, Kacchan,” he reminds him. “Not this time.”
“You sure?” Kacchan asks, grinning widely. He’s just like Izuku remembers him being, all bravado and in-your-face arrogance, but Izuku is better at reading people, now, and he smiles as he realizes just how much of that bold attitude was fake. Just how much of it was a façade of bravery, a front used to keep people away or keep people under his thumb. “Last time I saw you, you were a fucking wimp, and I bet you still are. I bet that’s all you’ll ever be. That’s why you’ve got me tied up, isn’t it? You know that I can still beat your ass. You know.” Izuku stares at him, silent, and Kacchan shakes his head in disgust. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he mutters. “You’re fucking pathetic.”
Izuku stares at him, then stares at him some more. Kacchan opens his mouth like he’s about to say something, closes it, opens it again and says, “Stop fucking staring at me, Deku. It’s -”
Abruptly, Izuku asks, “Are you sure you’re a hero?” and Kacchan stops talking, blinking at him. “Or have you just been told that you’re a hero enough times that you started to believe it?”
Kacchan glares at him. “The fuck are you talking about?”
Izuku hums, shrugs in a perfect display of bored nonchalance. Leaning his elbow on the armrest of his chair, resting his chin in his palm, he stares at Kacchan and says, “Maybe you’re a villain.”
“The fuck?”
“Ever thought about it?” Izuku asks. “About what it would be like to be a villain?”
“No,” Kacchan says. “I’m not you.”
“Are you sure?” And, at that, Izuku smiles at him, sympathetic and understanding and sickly sweet. “Two sides of the same coin, Kacchan. Maybe that’s what you’re scared of. Maybe you’re scared that you’ve always been a villain, just like me.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Kacchan asks, but he looks unnerved, no longer amused. No longer smiling. His eyes flit around the room, searching, before coming back to Izuku’s face. “Why are you even here, Deku? How do you know these guys? Does your mom know about this?”
“Speaking of mothers,” Izuku says. “How is Auntie Mitsuki doing?”
Kacchan bristles at that, mouth curling into a snarl as he growls, “Shut the fuck up and get out of my face.”
“Or?” Izuku asks. “What are you going to do, Kacchan? Yell at me?”
“I swear to fucking God -”
“I mean, it's not as if you can hurt me,” Izuku says, and smiles at him. “You’re all chained up, remember? Do you even know how helpless you are?”
“Shut up!” Kacchan snaps. “Just shut the fuck up, Deku. Either tell me why I’m here or shut your stupid fucking mouth, I don’t have time to listen to your bullshit!”
“You haven’t figured it out?”
Watching him warily, Kacchan asks, “Figured what out?”
“You’re here because I brought you here, Kacchan,” Izuku says. “And do you want to know why I brought you here?”
“Fuck, I don’t know,” Kacchan says. “Let me guess: some big bad guy told you to do it.”
Izuku blinks at him, then bursts out laughing. Kacchan jolts at the sound of it, eyes widening at his reaction, and Izuku laughs and laughs and laughs before saying, amused beyond belief, “Kacchan, I am the big bad guy.”
“What?”
“All of this -” Izuku sweeps his arm out “- is mine. I’m in charge.”
“Bullshit.”
“It does sound a bit too good to be true, doesn’t it?” Izuku concedes. “Anyway, the reason that you’re here is this: I’m going to turn you into a villain.”
Kacchan scoffs at that, dismissing and dismissive. “Yeah, right,” he says. “Good luck with that.”
Izuku shrugs. “If it happened to me, it can happen to anyone,” he says, and that’s the truth.
“You were weird from the start.”
“Maybe, but so were you.”
“Fuck off.”
“Let’s get back on track,” Izuku says. He straightens up in his chair, looks at Kacchan, and asks, “Why do you want to be a hero?”
“The fuck is this, an exam?”
Izuku asks, “Do you even want to be a hero?”
“You kidnapped me from my fucking camp so that you could ask me these bullshit questions?” Kacchan asks. “Get a life, Deku. Go steal candy from babies or whatever the fuck it is that wannabe villains do in their spare time.”
“Well, I personally like to spend my free time playing games,” Izuku says. “Wanna play one with me, Kacchan?”
“No.”
“Don’t be like that,” Izuku says. He grins widely, all sharp teeth, and thinks he sees Kacchan blanch. “You used to love hide-and-seek, right? We’d play it all the time, remember? Except, this time…” He tilts his head, studying the boy in front of him, and nods as he comes to a decision. “This time, I think that you should be the one who hides. Let’s see how long it takes for the heroes to find you, okay?”
And, with that, he stands up and looks over at Shigaraki. Seeing the person who he’d been talking to online for years had been a shock, but he thinks that he’s grown used to him now. He’s grown used to all of this. It's been long enough by now that he’s even come to accept the fact that this - him giving up on being a hero - had been Sensei’s goal all along. That he had been directing Shigaraki, telling him how to mold and shape Izuku into this role.
“Hey,” Izuku says. “Shigaraki.”
The villain breaks off the conversation he’d been having with Toga and glances over, eyes narrowed. He looks between Kacchan and Izuku, then raises an eyebrow in a silent question.
“The heroes will be here soon,” Izuku explains, and Kaachan makes a noise of protest from where he’s still chained to the chair. Izuku spares him a glance, gives him a cold smile, and looks back at Shigaraki. “He’s not being reasonable. He needs a little more convincing that he’s on the wrong side.”
Because if Izuku could be made aware of the flaws of hero society, it could happen to anyone. Some people just took more work than others, but Kacchan would come around eventually. They always did, in the end. Kacchan has always been strong, but he was misguided, and it was time that he used all that power for what was right.
Kacchan starts, “Deku -” and then falters, stopping as if he didn’t know where he was going with that sentence.
By the time the heroes came to get Kacchan, it would be too late. Because heroes can’t save everyone, after all. Some people just have to be left behind. Some people just have to rot before they can figure out who they’re really meant to be. Before they can find out who they are.
If you asked anybody, Midoriya Izuku was nothing special.
But some people knew better. And some people were on their way to learning.
Looking at Kacchan, Izuku meets his eyes and smiles. He sees his former best friend physically recoil, pulling back as far as he can as he stares at Izuku, who stares right back at him, amused.
“The game,” Izuku says, “starts now.”