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For as long as Izuku could remember, he had made friends everywhere he went.
They were all special, and very few of them looked anything like him, but they were nice, and they were usually quite lonely, and so he would often play with them, talk to them, sometimes even bring them home, and they helped make his days more fun and their days less lonely, and that made him feel like a hero.
He found it weird that no-one else made friends like he did, that so many of the things he made friends with seemed so surprised that he was speaking to them, because even if they weren’t people in the same way the kids ion his class were, they were still people in a way; they had thoughts and feelings and stories to tell, and needed company just as much as anyone else.
He especially didn’t understand why no-one seemed to listen to them. So many of them had so many interesting stories to tell, and although some made him sad, they always left him in awe of the things that could happen in the world, and at the many things he might one day get to do or see.
There wasn’t any real pattern to where he found new friends, but sometimes he noticed more of them around temples and churches; a fox sitting on a torii gate, a white wisp floating along a temple path, an old man taking shelter under an awning. It meant that he found himself drifting towards those places more and more often, just to seek out friends new and old.
His human friends weren’t being very nice to him at the moment, but he was sure that would change when he got his quirk!
—
Izuku didn’t get his quirk, and if the doctor was right, he would never be getting one.
His human friends were still being mean, but at least he still had his other friends.
—
There were a couple of friends Izuku saw more often than the others.
There was the tiny fox from near the temple who called himself Nori, for some reason, and then there was the old man with no eyes next to the abandoned konbini whose name was just ‘Oji-san’, and also the turtle with a very long neck that lived in the pond at the park that was slightly further away from his house than the usual one who didn’t really have a name, but did respond to ‘Turtle-san’.
The rest of them tended to come and go, but those three stayed, and in exchange for spending time with them and listening to their stories, he told them his own about school and heroes and his mom, and they listened. He wasn’t quite sure that they understood that Kacchan actually was his friend, but at least they didn’t really tell him that. He could just tell, because sometimes adults were weird like that.
Nori liked to give him advice on how to beat people up when they were hurting you, even if it involved teeth and claws and things Izuku didn’t have, and while Izuku appreciated it, he didn’t really think that beating people up was what heroes did, so he just nodded along or wrote things down in one of his notebooks, and then didn’t use anything he said.
The old man liked to tell him about the ‘follies of youth’, whatever that meant, and told him that he shouldn’t care what other children said about him, because they didn’t really know him, but he didn’t really understand what it was like when you were the only one without a quirk, because he proudly said that he was 253 years old, and that ‘ack in my day, we didn’t have all these fancy quirk things. We all much more normal, like you Izuku-kun’. Izuku thought that it might be nice to be normal.
Mr. Turtle often told him things he really didn’t understand using big words he didn’t know yet, and when he asked his mom about them later, she just looked at him like he had grown a second head, before either telling him what things meant or telling him that it was something for when he was a bit older. Sometimes he didn’t even get when she explained, but he still liked listening to the old turtle talk; his voice was smooth and deep, like a gentle river pool on a warm summer’s day.
By the time Izuku was nearly seven years old, he had four best friends; Nori, Oji-san, Mr. Turtle and Kacchan, even if Kacchan didn’t really play with him any more.
—
It wasn’t until Izuku had only just turned nine when he finally realised that no-one else knew his friends existed.
There had been clues, of course, but he had just been too young to really pick up on them.
There were the sad, almost pitying looks his mom gave him when he brought up his friends, the way she never looked at them directly when they were in the house, and her being surprised when all of the snacks she gave them were gone. There was also the fact that the other kids in his class never asked to play with them, even though they were super cool (especially Nori), but at some point Izuku just figured it was because they were hanging out with him, and that no-one wanted to put up with him to get to know the people who were with him.
It wasn’t until Izuku watched as a cat with only one eye in the centre of its forehead did a complex and probably physically impossible dance routine right in front of his mom on the kitchen counter, and she didn’t even glance over in acknowledgement that he thought something might be weird, and then suddenly all the comments adults had made about ‘imaginary friends’ over the years made a lot more sense.
That only left the question of why he was the only one who could see them, and, he guessed, what his friends actually were.
—
The second question was actually easier to answer, because he could actually ask those it concerned.
“I’m a fox, silly!”
“Why I’m an old man, young lad. What else would I be?”
“I am a turtle.”
Well. Initial result not very promising.
Izuku decided to try again.
“I’m your friend!”
“I used to be a shop owner.”
“I am an old turtle.”
Izuku was beginning to think he might actually have some kind of problem, but decided to try one more time, and finally got an answer.
“I’m a fox spirit! Why else would I be able to talk to you when I don’t have human vocal cords ya silly!”
“I’m a ghost, I think. I was born, and then I kept existing.”
“I believe that technically I would be considered a Youkai, although some might call me a minor deity.”
He had an answer, but now the problem was whether they were telling the truth, or whether they were just his imagination telling him what he wanted to hear.
His doubts about their existence were dashed when Nori managed to knock a pot of paint over and onto Kacchan during art, and the teacher blamed Izuku.
—
The first question was much harder to answer.
Izuku had told many adults about his strange friends all throughout school, and every single one had dismissed them as an overactive imagination and lack of ‘real’ friends.
He had tried to tell a doctor once he realised only he could see them, but he had taken one look at his previous quirk files and teachers’ reports and said it wasn’t.
Izuku didn’t know why he could see things that others couldn’t, but really, at the end of the day, it didn’t matter. He knew what he could see, he knew who his friends were, and he could do things for them that no-one else could.
It made him feel like a little bit more of a hero than anything else in his life, and that was enough for him.
—
Izuku’s friends were unusual.
One was a fox with a penchant for mischief, one was a long-dead man who clung to his shop, and one was a turtle who spoke mostly in metaphor.
None of them were human.
Izuku thought this made them much more awesome.