Work Text:
In another world, Izuku has no quirk.
In another world, he is shunned, isolated and rejected for being powerless, loses his best friend because he is weak, and has his dreams shattered before he is six years old.
In this world, Izuku has a quirk.
In this world, he is shunned, isolated and rejected for being (nearly) powerless, loses his best friend because he is weak, and has his dreams shattered before he is six years old.
In one world, he has nothing, and in this world he has nothing.
Except in this world, the nothing has a name, and isn’t nothing at all.
—
Midoriya Izuku: Quirk - The Void.
—
When it first manifested, Izuku didn’t realise it was his quirk, because one night his dreams simply contained nothing; not in the sense that he didn’t dream, or that he forgot them, but in the fact that he spent all night dreaming of an endless sea of blackness, of emptiness, and himself floating in the middle of it, a single point in a vast expanse of every colour and no colour all at once.
At five years old, it was the scariest dream he had ever had, and so when he woke up after what he swore was forever, he rushed to his mom, finding comfort in the close, warm darkness of her bedroom, and the knowledge that the dark had an end, had an off switch if only he wanted one.
The dreams kept on happening, and as they became more familiar they became less frightening, and eventually Izuku found them to be almost… cosy.
It wasn’t until he got bored in a dream that he realised it wasn’t a dream at all.
He was there once again, in the vast emptiness of his dreams, and this time it was annoying, because it had been exactly the same for weeks now, and he wanted something different. He decided he wanted to play heroes, and thought of his favourite All Might action figure, and then it was there, in his hands, and he giggled in delight, and thought about more of his toys; his endeavour, his Best Jeanist, his off-brand… someone who he wasn’t sure even really existed.
Izuku spent the rest of the night making stories in the nothing, and by the time he woke up, he was happier, excited, ready to go and tell Kacchan the tale he’d written and play it out with their other friends.
When Izuku woke up, he leapt out of bed, eager to find the toys he had been playing with in his dreams, but no matter how hard he searched, no matter how much he insisted to himself and his mom that everything had been where it was supposed to be, he couldn’t find them.
When he dreamed again that night, they were still there, but now they just made him sad, so he wished he had one of his plushies, and one of them appeared in his arms.
When he woke up, that was gone too.
When he told his mom that his dream ate his stuff, she didn’t believe him, but when things kept disappearing with no explanation, she thought that maybe there was something more to it.
By the time everyone realised what was going on, Izuku had lost: six hero action figures, three stuffed toys, nine chopsticks, two bowls, one blanket, one pillow, six notebooks and an uncountable number of pens.
He could never get them back.
—
Over the years, The Void became less empty, and more filled with Stuff.
He had quickly figured out that whatever he put there, he couldn’t take back out, and that eventually, if he forgot about something, it would disappear entirely.
At about age nine he figured out he could arrange his Void in pretty much any way he liked, and so he made a few small zones.
One was something like a playroom, containing all the toys, books and other things he put in there that he hadn’t really meant to; things from the early days when he didn’t really have control, and things he had found that he thought were cool.
Another was the trash zone, where he threw his rubbish, as well as any litter he found lying around. This was the zone he actively tried to forget about.
He had plans to add more zones eventually, but he was only nine, and his mom never let him get any furniture when it was just going to ‘disappear’, no matter how often he told her that it didn’t disappear, it just moved.
his friends might not get his quirk, and it might not be very good for being a hero if he couldn’t get anything back out of it, but he thought it was cool.
—
The Void had been quiet at first.
It was more a lack of things than anything else, and that included sound and light and smell and touch, but as more things got added, that began to change.
There were points of light and flashes of sounds, smells that seemed to be there one second but were gone the next, the sensation of wind brushing past.
Everyone called it The Void, but it wasn’t really, not anymore. Now it was a collection of the life of Midoriya Izuku, and it brimmed with evidence of life.
It didn’t just store tangible objects, after all, it stored whatever the user wanted.
—
Occasionally, something would appear in The Void without Izuku putting it there.
Sometimes, he didn’t really notice; it was close enough to something else already there that his eyes passed by it, or was buried in a pimple of other, more interesting things.
Sometimes, he did.
Mostly, it was just weird, suddenly finding something you had never come across in your life. A lot of the time it was random odd socks.
Very rarely, it was terrifying.
Izuku could remember every single time something appeared covered in blood, every time a knife would materialise, too sharp and too clean, every gun with a discharged bullet, and they had their own special place - somewhere he never touched.
He wished he could forget those things, make them disappear, but they were too etched into his mind to ever be truly gone.
Besides, if he ever could figure out how to get things back out of The Void, he should really give them to the police.
He didn’t want these surprises, but he couldn’t figure out how to stop them, and the idea that The Void wasn’t just his flicked him with both fear and excitement.
—
The screams had always been there.
Ever since he started dreaming, started visiting The Void, he had heard the screams.
They weren’t every time, but they were there often enough that they were a Thing, and not just an oddity, and Izuku hated them.
Most of them were just frustrated, the kind that he learned were because of school, or love, or just the overwhelming feeling that comes with life, and those were okay. They were surprising, and irritating, but they usually came and went quickly, didn’t linger.
Occasionally, though, a scream would rip through the void that chilled Izuku to the bone.
They were screams filled with anguish, with grief, with pain and rage and hopelessness. They encompassed the darkest, lowest depths of human emotion, and they always, without fail, made Izuku curl into a ball and try to block them out.
It never worked.
The Void carried sound differently to normal air. It didn’t travel through it; it became a part of it, seeping into every nook and cranny it could find, always loud, always clear, almost as if it was right next to you rather than at a distance. No matter how hard you might try, you would never truly escape the sounds of The Void.
They lingered on in his memory too, so raw and striking that they etched themselves into his mind. They weren’t like the objects; those he could move out of sight, secret away until they vanished, but the screams followed him into his daydreams and nightmares.
There was a zone he had made, a place where out of desperation, and through sheer force of will, he had managed to corral the worst of the screams, surrounded by soft things and happy memories to block them as much as possible. It was the darkest place in all The Void, and always filled with screams.
—
When Izuku met All Might and began training, he had less time to spend in The Void to keep it organised, and he let some things slip.
Many days he was so exhausted that he fell into a deep sleep, skipping the void and not dreaming at all, and between revising for tests and trying to build up enough muscle to be able to accept One For All, he simply couldn’t dedicate the mental or physical effort needed to clear up the stray things he found in The Void.
The screams were building up again, and they were giving him a headache.
His mom and All Might had both noticed that he was more irritable, and he kept waving off their concerns, thinking he would be able to get things sorted the next time he went to sleep, the the Void kept eluding him, only the screams from within it seeping through and into his mind.
He just wanted it to stop.
He just wanted some peace and quiet.
—
When Izuku began hearing the familiar, frustrated screams of his classmates in his dreams, after the USJ and the training camp and everything else after, Izuku decided enough was enough, and put up a sign in the dorms.
‘Please do not scream into The Void. The Void has a headache.
Thank you!
Midoriya.’