Chapter Text
Japan has a hazy and heavy air about it nowadays. Thick and soupy, drowning everyone in a blanket of sweat and misery. It weighs down even the mightiest among the people. Bringing everyone lower down on the totem pole to a level of depressing equality in the aspect of poor sweaty bodies and tired souls. The summer heat is as intolerable as it is oppressive.
Izuku feels it in his room, and despite all of his windows being open to let in any breeze, none come to alleviate the muggy air, like his misery doesn't beget action. If you weren't paying attention, you could confuse his tears for sweat. But he doesn't have the luxury of ignoring his own suffering, with how loud it blares in his head, and chokes him from the inside out with a lump in his throat.
His bed feels like a casket of dangerous thoughts, the sheets feeling like hands grasping him and dragging him towards a noose. A very real one at that, considering it would only take selling one of his many trinkets of hero worship to fund the rope. And that's if he doesn't settle for a bedsheet.
His eleventh birthday was just going to be like any other day. No reason to get his head up about it. Inko dipped out on him, and so he woke up to note telling him when her shift ended, and a list of chores to have done. She won't be back before one in the morning, he knows because she does this every time.
He hasn't done any of those chores, or gone to school. He'd just gone back to bed, his head full of a thick fog. Not really a bad kind of fog, the type that makes you mindless. More like the kind of fog that makes you floaty. Easy going and simple minded.
But he can't stay here, the walls are mocking him. His bed is beginning to hurt his back, and if he logs online he'll just rot there and do nothing for the day. Which isn't terrible, but then he's going to end up looking at statistics, or hero data, and be reminded of the very same truth he doesn't want to remember on the one day of the year he should be happy. Izuku wants this day to just be… ok. He won't dare hope for good, that would just be unrealistic.
Get up.
He doesn't want to, and yet he still does, because life isn’t fair. He's pulling on his pants and heading out soon enough.
The sun beams down with a heated sort of hate for the people under its rays. Objectively oppressive, with the humidity being a conspirator for its plan to make his walk as hot as possible. He's sweating by block two, and soaked in his own misery by the third. He stops by an alley, the same one he always does, and stares at the homeless man who always takes shelter behind the fourth dumpster back.
He must think no one notices, but Izuku does. He notices him every day. The same spot, the same clothes, and the same old cart he lugs around with all his worldly possessions. Just a pile of ripped clothes and a few bags of food. A poor man in an even poorer part of town.
His shoes are old, worn down. No tread, and there's a hole in the right one. Clean through the bottom. Izuku can see the blood stains from where his poor feet constantly rub through onto the concrete, with his socks thin and a wet rusty brown from the old and new blood. Broken down by years of walking from one terrible hovel to another.
He's a walking premonition of what Izuku can end up as.
It's a sad truth that not all men are born equal. In the old times that was about money, or race. Now it's quirks. He's not an idiot, everyone can use a computer. Go online right now, and look up the statistics on quirks in relation to job listings and hires. Specialized quirks, like a resistance to electricity for example, have very high job offerings. The golden tip of the pyramid. Below them are mental quirks, not really for any reason other than that they don't cut costs as efficiently. Yeah, you can run numbers in your head real fast, it doesn't mean much if you're a shelve stocker.
Below them are mutant quirks. Considered scary by some. Not useful by others; they get terrible jobs. Socially left out, and subject to discrimination of a degree so widespread there is no solving it, not in their lifetime at least. He would pity their status, but right underneath them, at the bottom, are the quirkless. A margin ever thinning, weighed down by genetic superiority of the entire populus.
History doesn't like losers. Quirks won the genetic race. People like Izuku got left behind, and it wasn't helped by their… less than charitable reaction. Repression, genetic testing, revulsion. For a while quirks were the number one most discriminated against feature for a human being to have. Entire genocides seeking to purify blood, not realizing that they were the ones on the other side of the cleansing. Once their population grew, and the quirkless shrank, they repaid the favor in full.
No one hires a null. No matter how high the education, or respectable their other jobs are. You can be a lawyer with a million dollar education, but if you rolled a blank on the genetic gamble, well, enjoy pushing your little cart of goods down the streets you call home. Right up until the day you die, and join the millions of other nulls in the hell your ancestors built.
Sitting behind a dumpster, with worn out shoes, and no hope, is his future. That's just how his world works. No amount of walking or running will change that.
He's not sad about it. He swears. This is just how it works. This is all it has ever been, the only way his life has ever been, and the only way it can end. Just a fact of life that he has to accept. Like how the sun is hot, and beams down without respite.
He keeps walking. No where to go, no one to head to, so he just picks a direction and goes. Eventually he'll hit a wall, or enough time will pass that he can pretend that today never happened.
The two current constants in his life are a lack of hope, and a slow yet steady walk towards the end of the day. Izuku hardly sees anything of note, not even the quirks surrounding him are enough to take him away from memories he'd much rather have long forgotten. Even as a car almost slams into him, as the breeze from the slipstream of the truck blows against his skin, he can't help but not care.
There are more pressing tortures for him to worry about.
He has to go back to school tomorrow. And Bakugou will find him, he always does. Always angry about his presence, but doing so little to keep him far enough to not do everything in his power to hurt him. He hates Izuku for everything he is, and especially for what he isn't. A malignant tumor of hate in Izuku's life, and like a tumor he's determined to kill Izuku. Maybe not physically, he's not dumb enough to ruin his life over a quirkless loser. Instead, perhaps without even really understanding what he's doing, he attacks his spirit.
A body can break down. Fail. Become useless. But, so long as spirit remains the man can stay alive in a sense. However, it is not Izuku's body that is being broken, it's only injured. His soul is being ground away. And the world is reveling in its destruction.
The world will find a way to take this tiny bit of peace he's found, and tear it apart, disassembling it to rebuild a new memory of disappointment.
So, as he continues walking, he has very little care for what goes on around him. There is no future, and amongst the ever shifting forms of strangers around him, there is no past. There is only his feet taking one step after another.
Hours can pass like minutes, while feeling like days. Especially when you have a broken watch. Only a slowly dwindling sun tells him the time, and just how long he's been walking.
The night life is a better form of living for him. Too dark for anyone to notice his big red quirkless only shoes. It helps that anyone out this late doesn't give a fuck about the people around them. Better for them to not bother asking about a kid walking around at night, they'd only end up sleeping less if they did worry about the why.
He ends his long dull walk the same place he always does. Right back at his apartment. He can't call it a home, not really, but he still lives there. So, he guesses it counts.
The door creaks, the same way it always does. It flares a small headache in his mind, and he relishes in the screeching's silence when he closes the door. Her shoes aren't here. Can't be too late in the night then.
His door has a hole in it, from years ago, idly he stares at it. Memory digging a hole in his minds eye. Slotting his fist inside it, he chuckles humorlessly, empty and hollow like the bottles in his mother's room she thinks she hides well. His hand doesn't even begin to fit. His father was always a big man, and big angry people don't mesh well with alcohol.
He has to lift the door for it to open properly, for the same reason there's a hole in it. He'd try and fix the broken frame, but after all these years there really isn't any point.
The darkness in his room grabs him like an bad ‘friend’. Mean and cruel, but comforting in how consistent it is. It leads him to his computer. A dingy nasty little thing, it bites him with a little shock as he powers it on.
He doesn't need to type anything, the same video always sits open on a tab he can't really bring himself to close. All Might's strong voice cuts through the air as his debut plays for him once more. A fairly weak serenade for his soul.
It just doesn't have the same kick it did when he was a little kid. Who knows why, but it just doesn't do it anymore. He doesn't feel better. He opens another tab, and then another. Video after video of the greatest man alive. Him flying through the air with a single bound, he can't do that. All Might lifting a car to help a wounded victim, can't do that either. All Might, in all of his glory, smiling to make a kid feel better during a visit to a cancer ridden kid. Can't even do that.
Sitting in a room. Watching someone else be happy. Fucking pathetic.
He doesn't move. Not a single part of him. Not even his eyes. They stay fixed on the middle of his screen. As if that miniscule pixel of color will somehow make him feel like anything but trash. His eyes trail down, the time stares back. Midnight. He has school in the morn- well, technically in only a few hours. He goes to close the tab, ignoring how that smile on screen makes his stomach churn.
But, something catches his eye, even as the blue light of the screen burns it.
It's funny how algorithms work, sometimes decades old videos surface as if time spit them back out at the wrong moment. Just a quirk of millions of videos, billions of hours of footage; all being filtered through the same digital machinations. Sometimes it just decides what you were looking for, even when you weren't looking at all.
This one little hiccup in digital space changes everything for him. And he wasn't even looking for it. He'd grown to accept dying a lost soul. But all it took was one title of a video from the early days of quirks for him to discover the oldest trade in human history. Warfighting.
He who dares, wins.
A silk british voice, and a quiet tune, he absentmindedly checks the description to see it's a song named ‘London Calling’. “On the 30th of April, 1980, six armed men stormed the Iranian embassy in London. Their demands were the freedom of terrorists that had been captured in the Khuzestan province of Iran. With 26 hostages, and a will to end however many it took for their demands to become real, a five day siege in the heart of London commenced.”
Okay, a history video. Simple enough. Why not? He'll watch it. Easy enough to forget the modern world in the old's reflection. Or for most people it would be. Izuku immediately figured that a Hero would have stopped the siege by day three. Two if it was All Might.
“With no plans to give into their demands, Britain refused both safe passage, and prolonged the negotiations while a plan was made. And in their growing anger of a lack of progress, the hostage takers made a mistake. After freeing five, a hostage was killed on the sixth day, and in doing so they had sealed their fate.”
This probably doesn't end well. A big building? No quirks to figure out where they are? Even Izuku knows with no training that's a bad day. He can hope that it ends well, but fate is never kind, maybe he should turn this off before he gets sad about something over a hundred-
“Operation Nimrod had been planned from the beginning, and now with the green light a group of the most elite special forces on the planet initiated their plan to enter the building. The plan was audacious, and involved only the utmost execution and courage. But the Special Air Service has a motto they live and die by. He who dares, wins”
On the screen he watches as men in full black climb to the windows of the building, stick a frame on, and blow them off their hinges. The large boom and ensuing dust forces him to think about just how strong that must have felt for them. Standing right next to it, it must've felt like God's own mighty breath blowing away a flea. Already, just in that alone, he sees a feat most even today wouldn't dare do. But the SAS does.
He stares as one of them is caught ablaze by their own gear, only for him to rip his mask off and jump inside. The fire had to burn him, and they threw something chemical for it to burn- tear gas? That guy's probably choking, and he still went in!? That's… seriously cool!
“In only 17 minutes all but one hostage was freed, and five of the six gunmen were killed by the SAS. The final was apprehended and imprisoned. The shots you hear now, are the ones that killed their leader.”
Only a few tiny bangs. That's all it took, and suddenly even through the screen it was like a weight had been lifted off of his soul. They'd done it. And faster than any Hero could. A flow of people rushed out of the building, and Izuku watched it all with a halted exhaling breath.
“Afterwards, the SAS detachment disappeared. They asked for no recognition, however with the entire operation broadcasted live, they were quite surprised to see that the entirety of Britain thought of them as nothing less than heroes.”
HEROES.
He'd been obsessed with heroes all his life. But they had been out of reach, gods on a mountain. But here was a group of men, quirkless like him, who stared at a hopeless situation and dared to try and win.
It would be an understatement to say that this changed his entire world. No, a more apt description would be that it took a sledgehammer to the foundations, with a grin like the devil, and a cocky laugh to boot.
Izuku didn't sleep that night. He didn't even go to school. For the next fifteen or so hours, he was enraptured in a world of the most courageous men he'd ever seen. Especially when he found out that normal everyday people fought, in wars long since over, and still ongoing to this day.
Obi-wan Nairobi. A single man who didn't stop until everyone was safe. Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon, laying their lives down to buy time for one pilot. Desmond Doss, who saved 75 men without ever touching a weapon. Audie Murphy, a simple man with an unbreakable resolve. Easy Company of the 101st in WW2. Mad Jack of the British army. The 75th ranger battalion going into hell for one woman. Heroes every single one of them.
His obsessive binging ended with a quote from the Marine Corps. He hadn't even known they'd existed until then. But he'd be damned if he ever forgot their PR.
No greater friend, no worse enemy.
It was right there and then, reading that quote that had led millions before him to the same conclusion, that Izuku realized something. That he didn't wish he could be a hero anymore, that goal was long dead, buried by a new one.
He wanted to be in the infantry.