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A great many stories end in bloodshed.
Izuku knew, better than most, that some stories begin in blood, too. Izuku had learned from a very young age that blood was simply a part of his life, that pain was a companion, and the threat of death was a warm blanket to wrap him up at night. When they told him he wouldn’t be, couldn’t be, a hero, he looked them all dead in the eye and smiled with cracked, bloody teeth. When he was told, on countless occasions, to give up, to quit, to throw in the towel, Izuku instead worked harder. He beat his own knuckles into a concrete wall to toughen them. He smashed his shins on tree trunks to harden them.
Izuku did not take no for an answer.
At twenty-three, he’d become Japan’s first quirkless hero. He’d done it. He’d achieved his dream. Sadly, everyone else refused to accept the new status quo. Every hero he met spat at his feet (if only because spotting in his face was an arrestable offense). Every villain he met asked him why the hell he didn’t join them, and then tried to beat him to death just for siding with the heroes. Izuku didn’t have an easy life, but then again, his life had been a challenge right from the start. There was no unfamiliarity in how these grown-ass adults made the conscious decision to abuse him simply for trying to change the circumstances of his quirk status.
That all being said, Izuku was not prepared for eleven men to jump him one night on his evening patrol. Eleven . He could understand if some gang of villains got it in their heads they wanted to ruin his day, but this - this was both heroes and villains. They’d joined forced for a fucked up battle of the bands that Izuku wished and prayed wasn’t true.
Yet, here he stood, soaked in blood, with shattered knuckles and more broken bones than he could count because of the concussion brewing behind his eyes, and four dead bodies laying around him. That left seven bastards who wanted him dead. Izuku did not intend to die to some quirkist morons who couldn’t get with the times. He refused to allow them to see him weak.
Taking a deep breath of cold November air, he watched blood splattering out of his mouth with his fogged up breath. His vision was half blurred on his left side, either swollen or clogged with blood, he didn't know, or care. It still worked, which meant he could still see well enough to throw a punch, that’s all that mattered. Izuku rubbed the back of his right hand across his face and spat a mouthful of blood on the ground, along with a couple of his back teeth. Someone got a nasty punch on his jaw. Izuku had returned the favor, and he had brass knuckles hidden in his gloves. That asshole was currently laying at Izuku’s right, his neck twisted at an odd angle.
Four of the remaining men stood in front of him, while the other three found their way around his back. They surrounded him. But they didn’t know Izuku felt the safest when surrounded by enemies. This was the bread and butter that raised him, made him strong, made him defiant , made him heroic . At the end of the day, these childish men were nothing more than bullies who’d made a pitiful decision. Somehow, despite losing four, they were still smug.
Izuku put his fists up in front of his face, joints and muscles loose and ready to move after he recentered himself and cleared his airways. This was nothing.
This was absolutely nothing .
The apparent leader called out to him. “You’re still standing, Deku?”
Yeah, Izuku chose a slur for his hero name. But can you blame him? Izuku’s best friend gave him that name when they were six years old. Izuku had been called Deku all his life. Puppet, worthless tool. Izuku had proved them wrong, and he intended to keep doing that, every damn day of his life, unless this was to be his last day. Well, then, he should go out with a bang.
“Yeah. Still fucking standing.” Izuku rasped. “You think surrounding me will get me to give up? You think I’ll bend my knee just because you’ve got pretty little quirks?” Izuku coughed out a laugh. “You think I’m defenseless, don’t you?”
Villain lackey number 1 rolled his eyes and groaned at Izuku’s words. “Come on, you can’t keep this up. Just give in, and we’ll make it quick.”
“Damn.” Izuku wobbled, regained his balance, and laughed. “You think you’re so original, ganging up on me. Let me tell you something.” He wiped his face again. Izuku’s nose wouldn’t stop bleeding. “You grew up fed love on silver fucking spoons. I had to lick it off whatever knife I could find. I had to scrape it off the fists that cracked my ribs. I had to dig it out of the dirt when they tried to bury me alive at fifteen years old.” He kept laughing. “ You don’t scare me .”
“Who cares about your sob story? Who cares if we don’t scare you? You don’t have to be scared to be dead.” One of the low ranking hero lackeys chided him from behind.
Izuku shrugged. “Hmph…then I guess you missed the point of the story.” His eyes flicked up to the leader of the pack. Izuku stared him dead in the eyes and made a simple ‘come here’ gesture.
“Time to end this.”
Izuku couldn’t agree more.
The next several hours flew by in a blur. Izuku remembered it in flashes of red, the crack of bone against his ear, and the free flow of pain spiraling all over his body. Quirks flashed, flickered, and blinded him. One managed to stab him in the gut. Someone twisted his left leg so far Izuku swore it would be dead the next morning. He shoved the pain down into his gut, swallowed it back like vomit he refused to let out. He chewed it down like the worst dish at Thanksgiving dinner, the one your aunt always brings, no matter how many people hate it. Izuku’s hands were sore from punching, his gloves were currently so full of blood they kept trying to slip right off. But he never stopped. He didn’t stop fighting until his opponents did.
“This kid is fucking psychotic!” One of them shouted.
Another one stumbled back holding his ribs and gasping his words. “He’s not a hero, he’s a monster!”
“Fuck this.” The leader growled. “You’re going to die, one day soon, and when you do, no one will remember your name, Deku.”
“Then why can’t you get it out of your mouth?” Izuku garbled out, his voice a slurry of concussion, blood, and a smirk so big it unbalanced him.
The remaining three bastards ran off down the alley, fleeing for their lives and leaving only a trail of blood. Izuku heaved oxygen into his lungs. He was pretty sure one of them was punctured by a rib, if the wet crackle in his breath was anything to go by. He put one arm on the alley wall to keep himself upright. Consciousness was trying to leave him, and that wouldn’t do. Izuku grabbed his med kit from his bag. It split open, spilled all over the alley. Izuku cursed under his breath.
As he worked to pick everything up and sit on the ground, his comm crackled to life in his ear. It’d gone on the fritz when he walked into the alley. Probably a jammer. It was gone now. The leader probably had it.
“Deku! Deku! Report! Answer me!”
“Calm down, Mei. I’m still alive.” He glanced around and counted bodies. Eight. He’d killed eight of them. “Barely.”
“Oh thank the Gods. You sound like shit. I’m sending EMS your way, sit still.”
Izuku hissed as he wrapped his ribs with a tight bandage. He slapped a patch on the head wound causing his concussion; a smack off the brick wall behind him.
“Don’t worry about me. Send the coroner.”
“Coroner, for who?”
“The eight fuckers who tried to kill me.”
“What the hell happened?!”
“Just some bastards who thought the quirkless hero was also defenseless.”
“Izuku, stay fucking put. I have drones on the way-”
“There’s three left.”
“Wha-”
“I’ll be home by dawn, I always keep that promise, don’t I?”
“Y-yeah…you do.”
“See you soon.”
Izuku didn’t wait for Mei to answer. Instead, he took the comm out of his ear and crushed it in his hand. He knew Mei probably hid other trackers in his suit, but the police and Commission wouldn’t know about those trackers. Crushing his comm was telling her to keep her mouth shut, to wait until he got back, to let him handle this - on his own - without the higher ups knowing.
Because the truth was, Izuku didn’t plan to do this by the book.
For once, he planned to play the villain.
~
“If you’re just joining us, we’re standing at the scene of a horrific attack on the hero Deku, who fought valiantly against what police are claiming was eleven villains. We don’t know yet if he was alone or had help. Eight of those eleven are accounted for, and are being inspected by the local coroner as we speak. Unfortunately, there is no sign of the last three, or our number seven hero, Deku.”
~
Reporters flocked to the sight of the attack. Some framed Deku as the hero, who fought against an army that wanted him dead. Others painted a picture of a hero turned rogue who decimated people while everyone slept cozy in their beds. There was no in between. Izuku kept a secondary comm in his hero suit, one that only spat out police bands and news reports. They could claim just about anything they wanted. This was not their story to tell. But he wouldn’t stop them from telling it however they wanted while he sorted out the shit of this world and made sure it was cleaned up.
The blood trails split a few streets after the alley. Izuku decided to follow the biggest trail. The leader had been caught on the arm by Izuku’s knife. The damn thing was barely hanging on by the time Izuku had finished hacking at it. If he was right, none of those three remaining idiots would make it back to their homes, or agencies in the case of the heroes who turned tail.
Izuku coughed, sliding down another wall. He was in no condition to fight. Objectively, he knew that. But his brain refused to admit he couldn’t do this. If these heroes and villains were willing to kill a quirkless twenty-something, brand new hero, they would be willing to kill anyone. If these heroes could betray their own, they’d be willing to betray anyone. They didn’t deserve to be heroes. Still, he didn’t have all damn night to round them up.
~
“No, I don’t know where he went, the idiot crushed his comm!”
“That’s not good enough, Mei. I know you can track him another way.”
“Damnit, Eraserhead, let him do what he needs to do- ack, get off me!”
“If you don’t give me his location, I swear I will spill every secret I’ve kept for you two. I am not letting him die out there, alone, facing those bastards who have no qualms with killing him.”
“Fine. But you’re taking the blame when he comes back angry.”
“I can live with that, so long as he lives.”
~
Blood pooled under Izuku’s feet, spilling from a severed carotid artery in the leader’s neck. Lifeless eyes stared up at Izuku, judging him, taunting him. Do you think you deserve this? They said. Izuku spat on the face of the man who’d managed to smash his face against the wall. He crouched down and brushed the man’s hair back gently right after.
“My story will probably end in blood. I’m one of the rare ones; my story started there, and will likely end there, too. If you’d have listened to my story, you would have understood how this was going to end.”
Izuku stood up again, slowly. He was so tired. But he wasn’t done yet. This story wasn’t ending just yet. Izuku still had a job to do, people to protect from this corruption. The leader might have been a double digit ranked hero, but he was still a hero, and that simply wouldn’t do. Izuku had become a hero not just to protect people from villains, but to protect them from the people who were supposed to save them, the people who never protected him.
No hero had ever saved Izuku from the abuse he suffered all his life.
Izuku would be the hero for the kids like him, lost and afraid. He wanted them to know there was nothing to fear, because he was here.
He chuckled. “Ohhh, I became All Might in the end, huh?” He asked the sky. A trail of blood dribbled down his throat, tickling his skin on its way down. “Guess it’s good he’s already dead. It’s my turn to be there for all the people he failed to protect.”
~
Shouta burst through the barricade surrounding the crime scene where eight of Izuku’s attackers lay dead and rotting. Frankly, if you asked him, they deserved worse. The kid went easy on them. The kills were clean, broken necks, mostly, just like Shouta taught him. He would be proud but he was too worried right now. Izuku was out there, hunting down the last three fuckers that tried to kill him, and he was likely bleeding out and not giving a single fuck about his own life.
That was one of the only things Shouta had never been able to train out of him; his self-sacrificial nature. That was beaten into him at a young age. He was taught his life only had value if it was in service to someone else. Shouta wished like hell he could change it, prove Izuku wrong, but thus far he’d been unable to accomplish it.
He pushed his legs harder, hit a button on his goggles to get a UV vision field to track the blood trials. It split in three a few blocks after the alley. Where would he go? Which would he do first? The tracker wasn’t exactly following any of the paths, so should he go after the tracker, or after the blood trail?
Shouta rubbed at his eyes under his goggles, thinking it over. Izuku thought like a wild animal at the best of times. Right now, he was in survival mode. He was far from a cornered animal; he was hunting. As much as Shouta refused to admit it, Izuku had become a livestock dog, a protective beast that would lash out whenever he was given the chance, and the right thing to hook his teeth into.
“Don’t die on me now, kid.” Shouta grumbled. He slipped his goggles back down and ran down the left-most alley, chasing the smallest blood trail, where Izuku’s tracker was heading.
~
“We’re still out here at the crime scene, where Eraserhead, Deku’s hero mentor, has just disappeared. We suspect he may be trying to locate and rescue the young hero who is still missing. The last three attackers are also yet to be located, and police have taken to the streets to hunt them down, in hopes they won’t have the chance to hurt anyone else.”
~
Izuku wheezed heavily. His body had finally collapsed. The last three bastards were dead. The last one sat, twisted, against the alleyway wall across from him. Izuku had gone way too far. All of his limbs were snapped, his head almost backwards on his shoulders. Izuku had decapitated it internally. He had allowed himself to give into the rage he kept carefully hidden behind pleasantries and smiles. The burning venom that had ached in his chest since he was only a toddler and his life had changed for the worse.
“Damn, kid.”
Izuku’s head rolled to the side and dropped against his chest. Eraserhead was at his side in a second and pulled him upright again so he didn’t fall over.
“You really…you really lost it, huh?”
Izuku nodded drunkenly. He’d lost too much blood to keep his head on straight. There was a high chance he was currently bleeding out internally, too.
“You get ‘em all?” Again, a slow, loose nod. “Good. Let’s get you to medical.”
“Mmmm.” Izuku groaned, agreeing as best he could. “Mmmm in trouble, huh?”
Eraserhead laughed as he tucked Izuku’s arm over his shoulder and hauled them both to their feet. “Naa, I don’t think so. After all, it was self defense, right?” Izuku glanced at the last guy, a literal pretzel on the ground. “Okay, the last three weren’t, but you know, that’s not important. Nedzu will take care of this. We’ve got your back.”
Izuku smiled. He didn’t expect to have backup - ever. But it was nice to hear it from someone who cared about him, someone who’d shown time and time again that he wouldn’t fail Izuku, nor would he judge him solely on his quirk status. What a miserable shame it took this long to find someone like that.
“Thanks…Shou.”
“Come on, Kid. You still gotta walk out of that alley with your head up. Mei’s waiting back at the agency.”
“Mmm promised I’d be home…”
“By dawn, I know.”
The promise wasn’t just to Mei, after all, even if she was his hero partner. Eraserhead was his hero mentor, and the owner of the underground agency Izuku worked for; aka, his boss. As a boss, his rules were simple; don’t break the law if you can’t back up your reason for doing it, don’t fuck over your teammates, and get home by dawn, always. The last rule was more of a ‘come home safe’ rule, but they all took it a little more literally than it was first intended.
Eraserhead hauled them back down the maze of alleyways to the crime scene where it all began. Had it only been a few hours? Izuku’s whole night flew by. To his surprise, most of the police officers nodded or patted him on the shoulder as Eraserhead dragged him through. He got a few nasty looks from the heroes on standby, but Izuku ignored them.
Tonight, he lived. Izuku beat the damn odds, and every bastard who tried to destroy him, and lived to tell the damn tale.
“What a miracle! It seems Eraserhead himself has found his mentee and rescued him! Deku! Eraserhead! A moment of your time! Can you tell us what happened?!”
EMTs bolted across the street to assess Izuku’s wounds. At the same time, a reporter came up to the police tape and forced out her microphone, the cameraman right on her tail with a camera pointed at Izuku and the hero holding him up. Izuku shrugged to Eraser as the EMT’s started hooking him up to monitoring tools and patching his smaller wounds.
Eraserhead chuckled. “A gang of baddies thought they could get the upper hand on our newest hero, but Deku proved them wrong.”
“So, you didn’t rescue Deku?”
“Not at all. I just drug him home. He fought off all eleven of his attackers, alone.”
The reporter, the cameraman, and several of the onlookers all stopped and stared at Izuku. They didn’t fully believe Izuku had fought off eight villains all on his own, and they didn’t even know he’d hunted down the last three out of pure revenge and spite. Izuku had been a diversity hire, the Commission was trying to be ‘inclusive’. But no one, absolutely no one, expected him to be a good, or strong, hero. Not on his own, anyway. One more way he could prove them wrong.
“We-well, that’s quite the story. Do you have anything to say to all the villains who might try and come after you in the future, Deku?” The EMTs and Eraserhead were lifting him onto a gurney as the reporter asked him for input. Izuku was still fighting off a concussion, but Eraserhead was grinning at him, barely hiding it behind his capture scarf, so Izuku decided to answer.
“I’m here to protect people like me…who weren’t protected. I’m not the strongest, or the most powerful. But I am Intelligent, bullheaded, and stubborn to a fault. I have tasted my own blood more times than any of you ever will. So yeah, one day, you might win. You might get me.”
Izuku offered a lopsided grin. “ But not without making sacrifices. ”