Chapter Text
To be completely, utterly normal in a world of superpowers was a fate that most of the quirked population viewed as a fate worse than death. Be it originated in the feeling of superiority when placed next to individuals who, by comparison, were technically 'unevolved' humans, or be it in fear after seeing the worldwide harassment of the quirkless, the fact remained that a significant number of people despised the idea of being "normal".
And yet that same "Normal" was at once a tiny proportion of the population.
20% was a massive misnomer; the aging population that made the majority of the quirkless meant that this value, several years old by now, had been exponentially shrinking. In just half a decade, it had fallen to a mere 15%, and showed no sign of stopping.
Of course, this only exacerbated the abuse and torment those without quirk's received.
Governments were not willing to put resources into helping these individuals, nor providing protection laws, since in a few short years, there would be so few quirkless people left. It would be a waste, they said in meetings whenever it was brought up, to provide for so few for such a short period of time. There were other things that demanded their attention.
This was the philosophy on which a group of people was completely and utterly abandoned by the world.
Those without a quirk were barely citizens. By default, most workplaces would reject any applications for work or internship from someone who left their quirk as N/A, quirkless, or even blank. The ingrained sense of superiority that had been seeded so many years ago had now flowered into an ugly, twisted blossom. Even good people, kind and caring, would look on the quirkless as less than themselves, because they were, weren't they? They had no power to support them, and as they were less evolved, they must be less intelligent, less strong, more primal, surely?
There was no one left to argue.
For the quirkless, the world was a dystopia. Cold, unforgiving, dangerous, cruel. Many fought. Many died. Many took their own lives, unable to cope with the crippling knowledge that the world had left them behind to rot in the shadow of civilisation that the rest of the world refused to see.
In the world's eyes, being quirkless was a curse, an inescapable prison from which the only release was death.
And yet this child, this child so normal that everything he saw only matched his perception, was the one to break the rules.
~
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~
Midoriya Izuku woke up with a yawn, arms stretching upwards to catch the rays of the morning sun. The old-style alarm clock by his bed was ringing. Loudly. Urgh.
He dropped one floppy arm onto the clock itself, and with fumbling movements rotated the clock to face towards him.
Seven AM. Double Urgh.
Mondays were the worst.
He sat up in bed, absently rubbing the sleep from his eyes as the world around him slowly resolved into focus. The All might plastered walls gained detail before finally reaching full resolution. Izuku let his eyes rest blankly on the walls, or memorabilia thereon, before stretching once more and pulling his duvet off himself, and carefully placing his feet on beam that ran through his bedroom. He wobbled a little, arms flailing about the place before finally gaining balance enough to tiptoe over his chest of draws and effortfully extract his, admittedly crumpled, schoolclothes.
One day his mother would actually explain how to walk over the floor without breaking through it. Adults were weird with knowledge like that.
Getting changed while balanced on a 30cm wide beam of wood was a challenge, to say the least, but Izuku had a lot of experience with doing it; over a decade in fact. This had been his room for as long as he could remember, and in that time, he had fallen through the almost translucent film that his mother walked over with no issues whatsoever. Really, Izuku wished she'd explain how, if only for saving the bills that so often came from a carpenter, who only came to put another incredibly weak and brittle film over the hole that his foot had made.
There seemed to be a lot of things that were just a little bit off in general, to be honest.
Food had always been challenging, as apparently, Izuku was categorically allergic or unable to digest most foods unless it was Organic, Grown Responsibly, Natrual etc. etc. One time, very long ago when the Midoriya's had gone on their first and only restaurant trip, Izuku had been served at looked, felt, smelt and tasted like charred dirt, and out of a fear of being impolite, he ate it.
Never again. The stain on the carseat still hadn't washed off fully.
Also architecture. For a civilisation that had existed for multiple millennia, they sure as hell didn't know how to make structures out of stable materials. After the seventeenth time Izuku had fallen through the floor of a multiple story building, he personally declared his disinclination to ever step in one again, something that was backed up fully by Inko, who had personally witnessed her child falling through from the ceiling above right into her lap when at the hospital for a possible concussion
Mildly traumatising.
Still, life went on for the Midoryia family. They navigated the problems that reared their heads with the expertise gained only through years of experience and painful trial and error.
Life was decent for Izuku, all things considered.
----
Bakugo Katsuki was scared of Deku. Genuinely, truly scared. He had tried facing his fears, tried beating the quirkless little shit down so he wouldn't threaten him anymore, so he'd go away, but it never worked. Izuku followed him, a sense of wrongwrongwrongwrong surrounding him.
Something was... was off about Deku. There had always been something off, but he'd never been able to say what. When Deku had first been revealed as (Useless, worthless) quirkless, Bakugo thought he finally had the answer. But... But something was still so wrong!
Deku was untouchable. He walked funny, stepping in random places, jumping over gaps that weren't there. Sometimes he walked over a hole as if it was solid ground.
Deku looked at things strangely. Sometimes, he would stare at something really hard, not taking his eyes off of it for a moment. Other times, he stared through people as if they weren't there. Someone standing in front of him might be ignored as if they were invisible and intangible to the boy.
Deku shrugged off his explosions as if they weren't there. He didn't flinch when a small grenade's worth of an explosion hit his back. He merely turned and smiled, greeting him with a customary "Hello Kacchan!"
Bakugo remembered when one of people in the year above them with a strength quirk attempted to slam Deku into a locker. He remembered how Deku had grabbed the other boy and pushed him backwards through a wall. The other boy left the school the next day.
Deku didn't care that he was quirkless. He never responded to any insults hurled at him. He only smiled, chirped "Okay Kacchan!" and moved on.
Deku treated the world as a game. In the time before Deku was quirkless, he watched the news as if it was a TV show, often not noticing the casualties. When he asked Deku about this, he turned and smiled at Bakugo as if it was the simplest thing in the world. "But Kacchan, they're only acting!"
Deku didn't see the casualties on the screen as people. He saw them as characters, as pawns merely for entertainment.
Bakugo had long wished to be a hero. His single minded drive had pushed him to exceed his boundaries again and again, and yet the thought of facing Deku scared him to the core.
Because Deku was a villain in the making. That much was clear. He was obviously insane, strong, and sadistic, taking pleasure in the pain of others, and it was
Bakugo's job to take this villain down.
But it would be easy because Midoryia was quirkless. He had to be quirkless.
The alternative was too terrifying for Bakugo to accept.
----
Midoryia sighed. It had been one of Those Days again, where Kacchan had been being a bully. Honestly, though, it was strange how angry he got whenever he did... anything, actually. It didn't used to be like that, Izuku was sure. There had been a time where they watched Heroes together, and for the life of him, he can't think of what went wrong to make their dynamic change.
Although today had been a rather interesting day; Midoryia had been outed by his teacher (boo!) that he wanted to go to UA, the premier training site for future heroes. Kacchan, also intending to go there, had... not taken it well.
Kacchan wasn't... well... he wasn't a bully by Izuku's definition. He never hit the him, per se, only flicked his hands in Izuku's general direction then looked even more angry when Izuku didn't react. Maybe he needed to go back to pretending to flinch at the motions.
Kacchan had been training acting out his quirk 'explosion' for a long time, and the rest of the students were equally good at responding to his gestures. Really, it was fantastically impressive how the entire class flinched in unison when Kacchan clapped his hands in a certain way, even those who weren't looking at him. Maybe Kacchan was irritated he didn't do that, but- well, no one told him that he needed to flinch, did they? And by the time he had realised that others did, well he had already trained himself out of the flinch response that came from having someone's hand directed close to his face. When he tried to react, he always did it an embarrassingly long time afterwards, and then Kacchan called him out for faking flinching and-
Suffice to say, trying to work around the demands of Kacchan in regards to his 'quirk' had been an uphill battle that Izuku had lost. And for the life of him, he couldn't bring himself to try for the whatever-it-was time to get Kacchan to back down a little.
He was brought out of his reverie by the sound of a manhole opening up.
---
Things Yagi Toshinori, aka All Might did not expect to see today:
- A Schoolboy half submerged in the sludge villain he had been tracking.
- Said schoolboy not looking in the least bothered by massive pile of sludge beyond bemused confusion.
- The sludge villain apparently trying to get away from the schoolboy and... failing.
- Said schoolboy turning to him, in his All Might form, and asking him to call the police
. . .
Him. All Might.
Call the police.
. . .
Add one thing All Might did not expect to happen in his life.
- To not be recognised in his buff form.
The boy was called Midoryia. He certainly didn't recognise him as All Might, but was a fan fanatic, bubbling with praise about his idol hero, as if he wasn't standing right in front of him. He kept on glancing down at the floor where the sludge villain had been, but after his rather trivial capture of the sludge villain, immobilised as he was - by Midoryia...? - there was nothing visible there. Still, he kept on throwing that one place odd looks, even between the endless streams of hype for himself.
It felt really weird, if he was perfectly honest.
Still, Yagi had reached his time limit, and needed to get to a police station to drop off the villain, now trapped handily in a bottle, so he took his leave of the oblivious boy and prepared to launch off.
He jumped.
A n d s t a y e d .
A Massive explosion blasted out around him as the energy from One for All that would have shot him into the air was released entirely as a shockwave that shattered the ground around him, caving in the walls of the houses around them.
And the boy was perfectly fine. Not a hair out of place.
What.
"Do you think I'll be a good hero?" His voice was chirpy, his eyes were shining, he was the picture of innocence.
He was also floating.
Standing about a foot above the epicentre of the crater of Yagi's attempted jump, with a single hand placed on Yagi's arm, completely and totally ignorant of the devastation that had occurred around him.
"W-what's your quirk?" Yagi's voice was shaking. No-one, not even All for One, had been able to take a blast without flinching, in the slightest.
"Oh?" Midoryia seemed rather disappointed at the question. "I'm quirkless."
No you're not, Yagi wanted to scream. Look around, can you not see what's gone on here?
But the strain of OFA was getting worse by the second, and so he rushed things.