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Since he was a small child, Izuku Midoriya was fascinated by Quirks. Billions of people, all over the world, have these wondrous powers in countless variations. They can be used to create fire or alter biology or control gravity or countless other marvels. As soon as he could write, he started collecting notes on Quirks and trying to learn as much about these superpowers as he could.
What a cruel irony that was.
The Quirk identification doctor unnerved Izuku. There was something uncanny about him, something that his mom didn’t seem to notice, something that triggered a threat response in the little boy’s amygdala. Izuku could only think of this man as a zombie, hunting for replacement body parts as his own rotted away.
“There’s no hope for the boy.” The doctor declared. “He’s Quirkless. I would put him in the foster system if I were you.” Inko nodded solemnly and left, Izuku hurrying behind her, repeatedly looking back to make sure the doctor wasn’t following them to take their limbs.
That night, after Inko had sobbed and apologized and ordered a pair of shoes the color of spider lilies, after Hizashi had wordlessly packed a suitcase and booked a ticket to London, Izuku sat at his desk and found he couldn’t cry anymore. On the tear-stained last page of Hero Analysis for the Future #1, he wrote the last thing he ever learned about Quirks. All people are not created equal.
After that, school days started to stretch into infinity. He couldn’t study fast like the kids with memory Quirks, or get good test scores like the kids with cognition Quirks, or do well in gym class like the kids with physiology Quirks. Kacchan started calling him Deku. Like a dekunobo, a wooden doll, a fragile, worthless thing. Then Kacchan started hitting him. Then adding explosions. Then teaming up with other kids.
Inko stopped cooking food for him, then stopped treating his wounds, then started seeing a therapist. Izuku didn’t really feel motivated to do those things on his own, so he didn’t. That was probably when Izuku really felt himself start to fall out of his body. When he started to stare at the ceiling at night, bruises and burns preventing sleep, and imagining himself empty and hollow, weightless, floating. He started sneaking into the kitchen at night and trying to cut himself with knives. Though at first he was too weak to break skin, over time he managed to cut deep enough to draw blood. Never enough to make himself faint though, so Inko didn’t notice. Once he swallowed a bottle of Inko’s antidepressants and threw up over and over again for the next week. Inko pretended not to notice. He tried again a few months later, more pills this time, and Inko finally called the police. They screamed at him and tackled him to the pavement outside Inko’s apartment and clapped handcuffs around his arms that cut into his wrists deeper and more painfully then he had ever been able to himself. They stabbed him with a needle and strapped him into an ambulance as Inko watched. He felt weightless again.
He woke up to a dark room and a nurse instructing him to fill out several multi-page questionnaires with a safety pen. As he did, several security guards and nurses came. They smiled and laughed as they tore his clothes off, pausing to marvel at the primitive, Quirkless, scarred and malnourished body underneath, before forcing him into a hospital gown, stabbing him with more needles, and leaving him restrained and alone in the room again. He spent a few days there. Sometimes the lights were on. Sometimes the lights were off. Sometimes a nurse brought him plain rice and fed it to him. Sometimes a therapist came and gave him instructions on how to practice being accepting and grateful for his life. Sometimes he would start screaming for no reason. Sometimes he would beg for All Might to save him. Sometimes he would beg for Inko and Hizashi to save him.
Eventually, maybe a few hours later, maybe a week, they gave his clothes and shoes back and let him out into the hospital lobby. Inko came to pick him up a few hours later. She asked him how he was doing.
Izuku tried to think, and found that he couldn’t. His mind was paper-thin. A small smile appeared on his face.
“I’m okay.” He said. And he was Deku.
A few months later Deku was standing on a rooftop near Inko’s apartment. He couldn’t remember getting there. He looked up at the stars and imagined drifting out into space, leaving his devolved, Quirkless body and brain behind and being nothing at all. He walked down the stairs and went home.
In middle school Deku started looking at stuff on the internet more. News articles celebrating Quirklessness diagnoses reaching a record low. Statistics finding that 9% of Quirkless children lived to 18. Research papers postulating that the Quirkless were dying off due to being a previous stage of human evolution. Interviews with Rikiya Yotsubashi discussing the merits of meta-supremacy. A forum titled “Quirkism-affected People Mutual Aid.” He made an account for that one and wrote about his experiences being Quirkless. The moderators tracked his IP address and called the cops again, then banned him for traumadumping. The cops came and beat him again and took him to the psych ward again. He was kept longer this time.
After that, Deku started spending more nights on rooftops. Rooftops were places to escape from that. Where the cops and the bullies and the meta-supremacist gangs couldn’t hurt him. Where he could just gaze up at the night sky and feel the wind on his scars.
One night, Deku realized that tonight he wouldn’t be leaving by the stairs.
He took off his tattered backpack and his blood red shoes. Maybe a hero would find them sometime tomorrow. He swung one leg over the side of the roof. He looked up at the stars.
He really did want to be a hero. But he was so so tired, and the most heroic thing he could do was not bother anyone anymore.
Then, almost accidentally, he was falling.
Then he wasn’t falling and everything hurt. Everything hurt so so bad.
Slowly, everything faded to black.
The next morning, Eraserhead found a dead body in an alleyway. A minor, probably 14 at most. He climbed up to the roofs of the surrounding buildings and found a backpack and a pair of red shoes. The Quirkless suicide rate had been increasing recently. Just another statistic. Eraserhead left and didn’t look back.