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He spends his start among the stars.
He floats and wanders through constellations and nebulae, brushes past planets and dances with moons. He cradles newborn stars in his hands like flowers, and sits with dying galaxies in their final flashing moments. He prods new solar systems into orbit and helps asteroids find their course, and flies with the others like him through emptiness, letting the dark matter be his blanket.
He’s drawn to a barred spiral galaxy, one with hundreds of billions of stars, some almost as old as the universe, and some home to young life. He is drawn to one arm, to one constellation, one solar system, and finds himself watching one planet, teeming with all kinds of life and growing before his very eyes.
He is drawn to one ocean, one archipelago, one country, closer than he’s ever been before, to a city and to a woman, young and glowing with happiness. She is with a man, but he doesn’t really care about him, is only drawn to the life he can feel from her, her joy and promise and potential.
He reaches out one invisible, endless hand to her, to feel her spark, to feel her life, pulled in, and lets his own being settle into her.
Then everything is warm, everything is dark, and he falls down, down, down, from his cradle in the stars to the blanketing cool of earth.
—
Midoriya Izuku is born with stars in his eyes.
They are bright and green and sparkling, deep like the ocean and bright like the sun, and every doctor or nurse who sees them tells Inko how beautiful they are, how special.
In this world, eyes like his mean power.
They don’t know what it is yet, don’t know that those eyes contain the universe, but they know they aren’t like his parents’, and that they wouldn’t be like that if they weren’t a quirk. The doctors tell Inko to keep an eye on things, tell them if anything unusual happens, and send the new mother and new life on their way, home to a father who’s barely ever there.
As Izuku grows up, his eyes never lose their vastness.
He dreams of the night sky and the worlds he hasn’t seen, spends his nights among the darkness, exploring different suns, and wakes up with the feeling that something is missing, that no matter how home he feels, he doesn't truly belong. Like he should be out there, above the sky, could reach out and hold the stars if only he stretched far enough.
The doctors say his eyes are his quirk, but no-one knows anything else. No-one knows what they do, no-one knows how they’re different, other than the fact that they seem to be too different to be a quirk of genetics.
When he is five years old, his classmates turn on him, start to call him quirkless, not let him play their games, and he suddenly hates his eyes, hates that they have taken away the power he might have had and only given him something ‘pretty’ and ‘unique’ and ‘weird’. His mom tells him that it’s not his fault, and cries while she holds him, and he watches in the mirror as his tears make his eyes sparkle more intensely, his pain only making them more beautiful.
He grows his hair to hide his eyes, tries to make friends again, but he’s always rejected, always alone, nobody truly with him except his mom, and drifts through the world, fuelled by fanatical optimism and a dream that seems too far out of reach.
He escapes in his dreams to the greater universe, dreams of helping the stars find their home, the planets find their moons, and of things so vast that his own troubles seem small.
Sometimes, he feels like he’s being pulled into his body, and sometimes he feels like he's being pulled into space, and some nights the pull is so strong he feels like he’s being stretched and squeezed beyond what he thought was possible.
Whenever he wakes up he feels both too small and too big for his own skin, infinitely infinitesimal, everything and nothing all at once.
He spends years like this, growing up and dreaming of the universe, until he’s fourteen years old, and everything changes.
He nearly dies, he meets his hero, and he gains a power he never knew he could have. His world expands like it never has before, and his eyes spark fully to life for the first time since he grew out his bangs.
Training is hard, but the night sky soothes his aches and his anxieties, and All Might guides him to hard-earned power, and after ten months of back-breaking work, Izuku gains One For All, and his future opens up before him.
—
The UA entrance exam is not going well.
He was late to start, late to every robot he found, every opportunity for points, and if he didn’t get his act together in the next two minutes, he was going to fail before he even started, and All Might would be disappointed, which was so much worse than the former.
When he hears a cry of pain, and sees the towering mass of the zero-pointer, his body moves before he can think and finally something snaps into place.
He feels electricity shudder through his body, lighting up every nerve with searing heat, and as he pushes himself up, up, up into the air, power in his legs and in the air, and he throws his fist forward, he yells.
“SMAAASH!”
As the power flows and clicks into place, green lighting arcs along his arms.
Stars burst from his body.
His fist makes contact with the robot, and light explodes outwards, streaking like comets and stretching like nebulae, a tiny universe spreading out around him.
The robot is blown back, burnt streaks and starbursts over its surface, and as it falls, so does Izuku, tumbling past tiny stars and cosmic gas, dust and rubble that have become planets in the burst of his new power.
He doesn’t see this, but from the outside, a girl emerging from under the rubble sees a boy with eyes bright like suns, and galaxies at his fingertips, and feels a pull like gravity.
Izuku feels every star, every speck, and looks at and feels them in awe, letting them skim along his now bare arms, and feeling them help him, gather around him, slow his fall, and feels the weightlessness from his dreams gather at his feet, guiding his now bruised and battered body to touch gently down on the rough ground.
As he lays there, face to the sky, watching the twinkling lights of his new abilities flicker out around him, he breathes in, and tastes the infinite possibilities laid out before him.
He spends his nights among the stars of the universe.
He’ll spend his life among the stars of people.