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Izuku wasn’t usually like this.
He was a pitiful kind of person, meek and shy. He didn’t do a single thing to fight back. He lived a life of mundane impossibility. But something had changed.
His oldest friend... rival? Bully? Enemy? Had stared him in the face, looked him right in the eyes, and told him to die. His idol, his hero , had crushed his dreams into dust. All with a smile.
Izuku used to love smiles.
He had returned home after everything and scrubbed his skin raw, remembering the taste of sewage and slime burning down his throat. He’d washed black and green gunk from his hair. He’d thrown away his contacts with abhorrence. And finally, when he’d felt clean at last, he’d fallen into bed.
When he woke in the morning it was to All Might’s face. Usually, this would fill him with hope and pep, but today he just felt empty.
It was a deep, echoing kind of nothing, rooted into his soul, which made it impossible to muster a smile, fake or otherwise. He spent the next hour ridding his room of its brightness. Somehow afterwards, it didn’t really get better. The smile was seared into his mind, taunting and hypocritical.
Be realistic.
It said.
Izuku wanted to scream, clutching his head and banging it into his knees. His room still shone with heroes. They all were smiling.
What’s realistic for a Quirkless person? He wondered. Nobody would hire him, so he couldn’t work. Even if he could, once he lived on his own, he wouldn’t be able to afford the price hike on basic necessities.
In this society, the only thing that’s realistic for someone like me, is to die.
He realized, practically choking with laughter. He fell, sprawling, back into his bed. For once, he thought of nothing.
He didn’t strategize about the best routes to avoid notice once school started on Monday. He didn’t rationalize Kacchan’s most recent outburst. He didn’t pull out the hidden drawer of his desk to delve into his stash of carefully procured make-up. He just lay there, utterly exhausted, blinking at his ceiling.
For a while— he wasn’t sure how long—that’s all he did. Then, he managed to catch sight of his notebooks. Sitting there, innocently, he could almost forget the pain they caused. All those hours, that effort, wasted .
Something clicked into place when he looked at them then, like a missing piece of a puzzle. His emotions decided it was time to return as he hefted himself to his feet, sauntering up to them. Frustration, sadness, and anger all flared up in him, and he contemplated setting his entire house on fire.
He’d only ever wished for one thing, and everyone told him it was wrong. He’d only ever lived and strived to be a hero, to save people...people like him .
At first, yes , it’d been a simple, childish desire. He’d just thought being like All Might would be cool. Then it’d gotten more personal. He’d wanted more than anything to fight with Kacchan, to smile with him each day and stand by his side forever.
When that dream had shattered, he’d desperately maintained what was left. It became warped somehow, something twisted and impossible and wrong. Something he clung to in order to keep his sanity and purpose. He’d needed a reason to smile.
Somewhere along the line, he’d become isolated and lonely, so he’d treasured the dream, obsessed over it until it became a wish. Every time he saw a hero smile, he thought about standing in their place, offering a hand to some lost child.
He never allowed himself to imagine that child as himself. He knew he wouldn’t be saved. And so, he dreamed.
Upon suffering this realization, Izuku raked his notebooks off the shelf, tearing out page after page. Paper crumped around him in great heaps, flashing cramped writing segments and quarter-costumes.
Die, die, die, die, die.
Looped inside his brain as he ripped and tore. He panted breathlessly at the end, collapsing amidst his life’s work . A lump formed in his throat and he curled into himself, sobbing pathetically amidst the mess.
What should I do now?
He wondered, but no answer came. He had no dream or purpose. He had no proof left that he’d even lived at all. He was nothing.
His gaze went suddenly to one of the many discarded pages, locking onto the image of Bakugou Katsuki. It should’ve been impossible, but the design was still intact, settled atop chunks of Fatgum and Hawks.
Izuku drew his brows together, confused about how he felt, looking at the boy now. In the past, he might’ve felt admiration or longing, maybe even sadness, but he didn’t. As he peered into the blood red eyes of his childhood friend, he only felt a simmering kind of rage.
Kacchan had said so many things to him over the years, belittled and berated him. But Izuku had never expected those words to spring from his former friend’s mouth.
Why don’t you jump off a roof and hope for a Quirk in your next life?
He’d heard similar many times of course, being who he was, but never from Kacchan . And he thought, before All Might and the Sludge Villain, he might’ve forgiven the blonde. Before he’d sobbed in a nest of his broken dreams. But he couldn’t anymore.
He’d saved Kacchan. He’d proven both him and All Might wrong. He’d won without any power and moved when nobody else would. It wasn’t heroic necessarily, since he’d done it impulsively and selfishly, but it was real evidence he wasn’t useless.
And so, Izuku was angry .
His insides boiled and bubbled with it, and he couldn’t help the sudden visceral response it caused, something almost instinctual in nature.
He sprung from his place and strode out the door, not even caring one bit that he was still in pajamas as he barreled down the street. He headed straight for his destination, hopping fences and glaring at cars.
When he got what he needed, he took the same way back, finally gasping in a great lungful of breath as he settled into the chair of his noteless desk.
He didn’t know why or where it came form, but he’d gotten the urge to paint. And recklessly, he had indulged in it. Before this thrilling kind of emotion sizzled out, he used it, splashing the canvas with fervor.
At first it was an indecipherable work, blobs of color eating away at the white. But eventually, his idea took shape, his experience with drawing blossoming the product into something more discernible. Until, by the time stars had hung themselves in the sky and the moon showed its face, it was complete.
The painting was mostly red and green, carefully highlighted with accents of orange and blue. He’d layered rather well for an amateur, he believed, bringing the foreground into focus with some clever composition.
It was a self-portrait of sorts. Izuku had never drawn himself, so it wasn’t as detailed as some of his blueprints, but anyone who knew him would recognize it immediately. He’d painted himself laying in a bed of flowers, their thin red petals licking delicately over his porcelain skin. His hair was brushed with gel and his closed eyelids decorated with black liner. Though he never liked them, he wore a suit, adorned with a burgundy tie. What would draw in his audience most of all however, was that he was dead.
The tie was a noose around his neck, pulled taut enough to leech flush into his collarbone. And the flowers, they were higanbana [1] . He’d seen them in many places before, his locker, his school desk, the mailbox, so he knew he’d gotten them right. Though he’d never actually seen how they grew. So, it was a depiction of exactly what everyone expected from him. And, in one last spark of defiance, he flipped the canvas over, scribbling a name into its back.
‘ Ghost ’ He called it, because that’s all anyone ever saw when they looked at him. The following day, before anyone else had even set foot in school, he hung it in the hallway. It was suspended just an inch over the doorframe, where everyone would see it. And for the first time in years, watching the way the students did double takes, subsequently unable to look him in the eye, Izuku felt proud.