Chapter Text
The rain over Musutafu that night was the patient kind — not a storm, just a long gray sigh the sky seemed to have been holding in for weeks. It beaded on the windows of the maternity ward on the fourth floor of Tsunoda General and turned the streetlights below into smears of amber, and it was still falling, soft and steady, at 11:47 p.m. when Inko Midoriya stopped screaming and started crying instead, because someone had finally put her son into her arms.
"There he is," said Nurse Ito, wiping her hands on a towel that had seen better decades. "There's our boy. Good and loud, too — didn't even wait to be smacked before he started hollering."
"He's got excellent lung capacity," Dr. Tsunoda agreed, peering over his glasses with the particular fondness of a man who had delivered half the children in this district and never once gotten tired of the moment right after. He was an older man, silver at the temples, hands steady even at one in the morning. "Healthy color. Strong grip — look at that, he's already got your finger, Inko."
He did. Tiny and furious-looking, red-faced from the effort of being born, Izuku Midoriya had wrapped one impossibly small fist around his mother's index finger like he intended never to let go of it again. And then, as if a switch had been thrown somewhere behind those scrunched-up eyes, he stopped crying. He blinked up at her — dark eyes, not yet the green they'd settle into — and made a small, questioning sound low in his throat, and then he cooed, actually cooed, a soft bubbling laugh-not-laugh that had no business coming from something four minutes old.
Inko laughed and cried at the same time, which she would later realize was going to become something of a habit where this child was concerned.
"Hello," she whispered, so quietly it was really only for him. "Hello, hello, hello. Look at you." She traced one finger along the impossibly soft curve of his cheek, and he turned toward the touch the way flowers turn toward light, and something in her chest that had been clenched tight for nine months — through the fights, through the divorce papers, through the nights she'd fallen asleep on the couch because the apartment felt too big and too quiet for a woman about to have a baby alone — something in her finally, finally loosened.
The chair beside her bed was empty. It had been empty the whole eleven hours. She noticed it, the way you notice a missing tooth with your tongue, an absence you can't stop checking on even though checking never changes anything. Hisashi wasn't coming. He hadn't come to the last three appointments either. There had been a time, right after the wedding, when she'd thought his easy laugh and his big promises meant something — and there had been a much longer time, after, when she'd learned that a man could love his liquor a great deal more than he loved keeping his word, and that no amount of hoping changed a bottle back into a person.
The divorce had gone through eight months ago. It remained one of the very few decisions in her life she had never once regretted.
"You don't need him," she told the baby, and it came out steadier than she expected. "It's just going to be you and me, sweetheart. And I promise you — I promise you right now — that's going to be enough."
Izuku, for his part, seemed entirely unbothered by any of this. He yawned an enormous yawn for someone so small, waved one fist in the air like he was already conducting an orchestra, and went back to staring up at his mother with the frank, unblinking fascination that newborns reserve for the one face in the world they've decided, correctly, matters most.
"He's a keeper, this one," Nurse Ito said, tucking the blanket a little tighter. "You can already tell. Some babies come out red and furious at the whole business of being born. This one just looks — I don't know. Delighted."
Dr. Tsunoda made a note on his chart, glanced once more at mother and son bathed in the flat fluorescent light, and allowed himself the small unprofessional luxury of a genuine smile. "Delighted," he repeated. "That's a good word for it. Whatever this one grows up to be, Inko, something tells me he's going to surprise us all."
He had no idea, of course, exactly how right he was.
Four days later they let her take him home, wrapped in a yellow blanket that Inko had knitted herself during the long, lonely evenings of her third trimester, and the rain had finally stopped, and the whole world smelled like it had just been rinsed clean.
Two years slid by in the specific, exhausting blur that seems to happen to every parent of a first child — a blur made of formula and fevers and one truly unforgettable incident involving a jar of pureed carrots and the living room wall — and somewhere in the middle of it, on an ordinary Tuesday evening with the rice cooker steaming on the counter and a basket of unfolded laundry accusing her from the corner of the room, Inko Midoriya's entire life quietly reorganized itself around a fourteen-inch television screen.
She hadn't meant for him to see it. The evening news had rolled into one of those human-interest retrospectives — five years since a hero calling himself All Might had made his public debut, and wasn't it remarkable, the anchor was saying, how far he'd come — and she'd had it on for background noise while she scrubbed a pot, not paying much attention until she realized the room had gone very quiet, and quiet, where a two-and-a-half-year-old was concerned, generally meant trouble.
Izuku was standing three inches from the screen. He'd abandoned his blocks entirely. His mouth hung open in an unselfconscious little "o," and on the screen, grainy old footage showed a colossal golden-haired man in blue standing atop a collapsed building, one enormous fist raised to the sky, more than a hundred rescued citizens cheering below him, and he was smiling — not a grim, dutiful smile, but an actual, delighted, ear-splitting grin, like saving a hundred lives was the single most fun thing a person could possibly do with an afternoon.
"Mama," Izuku breathed, without turning around. "Mama, look. Look, look, look."
"I see him, sweetheart." She set down the pot and came to crouch beside him, resting her chin on his small shoulder.
"He's smiling." Izuku turned to look at her then, eyes enormous, as if this were the single most important fact ever discovered by science. "Everyone's — everyone's scared, and the building's all broken, and he's — he's smiling, Mama. Why's he smiling?"
Inko considered this with the seriousness the question deserved. "I think," she said slowly, "he's smiling because he wants everyone else to feel less scared. Like — if he's smiling, maybe it means everything's going to be okay. Heroes do that sometimes. It's part of the job."
Izuku turned back to the screen, where the footage looped back to the beginning — the man landing, the dust settling, that same enormous grin breaking across his face like sunrise. His small hands curled into fists at his sides, an expression of fierce, wobbly determination crossing his face that looked deeply strange on someone who still occasionally needed help with his shoes.
"I wanna do that," he announced. "I wanna save everybody. And I wanna smile like that too. So they're not scared."
"Is that so."
"Uh-huh." He nodded so hard his whole body swayed. "I'm gonna be a hero, Mama. A real one. And I'm gonna smile the whole time so nobody's scared, even when it's scary for me too."
Inko pulled him into her lap, pressed a kiss to the crown of his messy green hair, and did not say any of the things that flickered through her mind in that moment — that heroism was a demanding and dangerous business, that Quirks hadn't even manifested in him yet so there was no way of knowing what he might be capable of, that the vast majority of two-year-olds who declared themselves future heroes went on to become accountants and bus drivers and perfectly happy ordinary people. She said none of it. She only held him, and let him watch the golden man smile through the wreckage four more times before bed, and told herself that whatever he ended up being, she would be proud of him, because he already had the biggest heart she'd ever seen in someone so small.
The park two streets over had a slide shaped like an elephant's trunk and a sandbox that never quite dried out, and it was there, on a bright Sunday morning when Izuku was three and a bit, that Katsuki Bakugo decided, with the complete and unshakable authority of a small child, exactly how their game was going to go.
"I'm the hero," Katsuki announced, standing on top of the low concrete wall that separated the sandbox from the grass, hands on his hips, chin jutted forward. "The best hero. Number one. You gotta be the villain."
"Okay!" Izuku said instantly, already scrambling to find a suitably villainous stick.
"You gotta lose, though. 'Cause I'm gonna beat you, 'cause I'm the strongest."
"Okay!"
Their mothers sat on the bench nearby with paper cups of vending-machine coffee, half-watching, half-absorbed in their own conversation. Mitsuki Bakugo had a laugh that could probably be heard from orbit, and she used it freely and often, and right now she was using it at something Inko had said about a stain that would not come out of one of Izuku's shirts no matter what she tried.
"You're too soft with him," Mitsuki said, not unkindly, watching her son bellow something about "DYNAMITE PUNCH" and launch himself off the concrete wall at an unresisting Izuku, who obligingly toppled over into the grass with theatrical groans of defeat. "Katsuki, don't actually hit him — Izuku, sweetheart, are you all right?"
"I'm dead!" Izuku called cheerfully from the grass, arms and legs splayed out. "The villain is dead! The hero won!"
"You're not dead, you're supposed to get back up eventually," Katsuki informed him, standing over him with his small fists still raised. "That's how it works. The hero always wins but the villain doesn't die for real, 'cause heroes don't kill people, my dad said."
"Oh." Izuku sat up, considering this new information with real interest. "Even really bad villains?"
"Even really bad ones. 'Cause that's the rule." Katsuki plopped down in the grass beside him, some of his bravado deflating now that the audience of mothers had gone back to their coffee. "When I get my Quirk I'm gonna be way stronger than everybody. Stronger than All Might, probably."
"Whoa." Izuku's eyes went round. "You think you'll be stronger than All Might?"
"Obviously." Katsuki said this the way other children might state that the sky was blue. "I'm gonna have the best Quirk in Japan. Maybe the world."
"That's so cool, Kacchan." There was no envy in it at all, not even a shadow of it — just pure, uncomplicated delight at the idea that his best friend might grow up to be the strongest person alive. "I bet you will. And I'll help! I'll take notes on all your moves so you know which ones work best, and I'll — I'll cheer really loud, and —"
"You're weird," Katsuki said, but he was almost smiling when he said it, and he let Izuku lean against his shoulder while they watched clouds drift over the elephant slide, two small boys who did not yet know that in less than a year, one single doctor's appointment was going to reach into their friendship and rearrange it into something neither of them would recognize.
The Quirk assessment was scheduled for a Thursday in late spring, at the Tsunoda Family Clinic, the same modest brick building where Dr. Tsunoda had delivered both boys within six weeks of each other four years earlier. It was, by unspoken tradition among the neighborhood mothers, something you got through together — and so Inko and Mitsuki sat in the same waiting room, on the same slightly-too-firm vinyl chairs, while their sons kicked their feet against the chair legs and argued in fierce whispers about who was going first.
"I wanna go first," Katsuki said.
"You can go first, Kacchan! I don't mind."
"I know I can. I wasn't asking."
The nurse called his name a few minutes later, and Mitsuki hauled herself up with her coffee, ruffling her son's hair as they disappeared down the hallway. Izuku swung his feet and hummed to himself and drew little stick-figure heroes on the back of his hand with a pen he'd found in his mother's purse, and Inko watched him do it and felt, without being able to say exactly why, the particular anxious flutter that mothers develop and never quite lose.
It was perhaps eleven minutes later — Izuku had counted, out loud, proudly, all the way to two hundred and something before losing his place — when the exam room door banged open and Katsuki came barreling out ahead of his mother, both palms crackling and popping with small, furious orange sparks, like a sparkler that hadn't quite figured out its own rhythm yet.
"LOOK!" he was shouting, loud enough that a nurse at the front desk actually flinched. "LOOK AT THIS! I'VE GOT ONE! I'VE GOT THE BEST QUIRK, I TOLD YOU, I TOLD YOU I WOULD—"
"Katsuki, honey, don't point that at the — Katsuki—" Mitsuki was laughing despite herself, trying and failing to look stern, one hand hovering protectively near a wastebasket that had already caught a small singe mark. "It's called Explosion, apparently. Sweats nitroglycerin, if you can believe that. Doctor says with training he could probably level a city block someday."
"A CITY BLOCK," Katsuki repeated, delighted beyond words, holding his sparking palms up to Izuku's face like they were the single greatest gift ever bestowed on a four-year-old. "See?! SEE?! I told you!"
"That's amazing, Kacchan!" And it was — Izuku's whole face had lit up, unguarded and thrilled, no trace of anything but pure joy for his friend. "Sweat that explodes? That's — that's incredible, that's such a good Quirk, you could — you could do so much with that, you could —"
"Midoriya, Izuku?" the nurse called.
"That's me!" He hopped up, still practically vibrating with secondhand excitement. "Wish me luck, Kacchan!"
"You don't need luck," Katsuki said, still staring at his own hands. "Everybody gets a Quirk. It's not luck, it's just biology, my dad said."
Inko took her son's hand and led him back through the same door Katsuki had just come bursting out of, and if she felt a small, private twist of unease at those words — everybody gets a Quirk, it's just biology — she did not let it show on her face.
Dr. Tsunoda was waiting with the particular gentleness he reserved for this exact appointment, out of all the appointments he ran in a given week. He'd done this hundreds of times. Most of it was routine — a Quirk announced itself in some small physical way by this age, if it hadn't already, and the exam was mostly a formality, a chance to catalog and measure something that had usually already made itself obvious at home in the form of a very surprised parent and a scorched pot holder or a suddenly levitating toy.
"Hello, Izuku. Climb up on the table for me, would you?"
"Hi, Dr. Tsunoda!" Izuku scrambled up, swinging his legs, entirely unbothered. "Did you know Kacchan's Quirk makes his sweat explode? He's gonna level a whole city block someday, his mom said!"
"Is that so." Dr. Tsunoda smiled, checking his ears, his eyes, his reflexes with the small rubber hammer that Izuku always found enormously funny. "And what do you think your Quirk is going to be?"
"I dunno yet!" Izuku said cheerfully. "But I hope it's a good one. I wanna be a hero. Like All Might. I wanna save people and smile the whole time so they're not scared."
Something in the doctor's chest gave a small, involuntary ache, the kind that comes from liking a patient rather more than professional distance strictly recommends. "That's a fine ambition," he said, and meant it. "All right. Let's have a look at your feet for me."
This was the part of the exam that mattered, in cases where nothing had yet announced itself — and nothing had, with Izuku. No sparks, no strange textures to his skin, no unusual strength when he gripped things, none of the hundred small tells that parents so often reported once you asked the right questions. Dr. Tsunoda held Izuku's small foot in his palm, gently manipulated the smallest toe, and felt the familiar geography of it settle under his fingers — and something in his expression, very briefly, before he caught it, went still.
Two joints. Not three.
He'd examined that toe a thousand times. He knew the difference between his own fingers now the way a musician knows an off note before they can even say which one it is.
"Inko," he said quietly, not looking up yet, "has he ever done anything — even something small — that struck you as unusual? Strength, speed, anything about his body that seemed to not quite match a normal four-year-old?"
Inko's hands had gone very still in her lap. "No," she said. "Nothing. He's — he's just Izuku."
Dr. Tsunoda set the small foot down gently, straightened, and took off his glasses to clean them on his coat, a habit he fell into whenever he needed a few extra seconds to arrange his words properly. Izuku watched him with the frank curiosity of a child who had not yet learned to be afraid of adult silences.
"Izuku," he said, crouching now so they were eye level, "I want to explain something to you, and I want you to know that whatever I tell you doesn't change one single thing about how wonderful you are. Do you understand?"
"...Okay," Izuku said, more solemn now, picking up on the shift in the room the way children always do, half a beat before they understand the reason for it.
"Most people have two joints in their smallest toe, right here." He touched his own foot through his shoe, demonstrating. "It's a very old evolutionary marker — from a long time ago, before anyone in the world had a Quirk at all. But most people born after Quirks appeared have three joints instead of two, because their bodies developed the extra flexibility a Quirk needs in order to work properly. It's one of the very first signs we look for."
Izuku looked down at his own small foot, wiggling his toes experimentally, not yet understanding but sensing, with the animal instinct of small children, that something important and unwelcome was coming.
"You have two joints, Izuku," Dr. Tsunoda said, as gently as four words could possibly be arranged. "That means you don't have a Quirk. It means you're Quirkless."
The word sat in the room like something dropped from a height.
"...I don't got one?" Izuku's voice had gone very small. "Not — not even a little one? Like — like maybe it's just late?"
"I'm afraid it doesn't work that way, sweetheart. I'm so sorry." And Dr. Tsunoda, who had delivered this particular piece of news perhaps thirty times in his career, found himself having to look away for a moment, because something about this specific child — the earnestness of him, the sheer undiluted hope that had been sitting in that small face not ninety seconds earlier — made this one land harder than most.
Inko made a sound she hadn't meant to make, something between a gasp and a sob, and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth.
"But," she managed, "but he's so — Doctor, he's the smartest little boy, he reads everything, he remembers everything, surely that counts for—"
"It absolutely does count for something," Dr. Tsunoda said, and this time there was real conviction in it, enough that both Midoriyas looked up at him. "In fact — Inko, I ran the standard developmental screening on him while I had him on the table, mostly out of routine. His scores are extraordinary. I don't say that lightly. Whatever else today has taken from him, it hasn't touched his mind, and his mind, from what I can measure, is remarkable. I'd estimate he's operating well above two hundred on a standard intelligence scale, possibly higher — that's not something I say about one child in a thousand."
It was, in its own quiet clinical way, the truth, and it was meant as comfort, but Izuku — small, four years old, sitting on an exam table with his hope draining visibly out through the soles of his sneakers — did not hear "two hundred" and feel comforted. He heard only the first part. He heard Quirkless, and the word sat inside his small chest like a stone dropped into a pond, sending ripples out toward every future he'd imagined for himself.
"But I wanna be a hero," he whispered, and his eyes were filling now, that terrible clear brimming of a child trying very hard not to cry and losing. "I wanna save people. Like All Might. Can I still — can I still be a hero if I don't got a Quirk?"
Neither adult in the room answered him right away, and that silence, more than anything either of them could have said, was the first true heartbreak of Izuku Midoriya's life.
Mitsuki and Katsuki were waiting in the small parking lot out front when they emerged, Katsuki still setting off tiny celebratory sparks between his palms every few seconds like he couldn't quite believe his own good fortune.
"Took you guys forever," Katsuki said. "What'd you get? Betcha it's not as good as mine."
Izuku didn't answer. He was staring very hard at a crack in the pavement, his hand gripped tight in his mother's, his eyes red-rimmed and swollen in a way that made Mitsuki's easy grin falter.
"Izuku?" Katsuki tried again, some genuine confusion creeping into his four-year-old bravado. "What'd you get? C'mon, tell me."
"He's Quirkless, sweetheart," Inko said quietly, because someone had to say it and she couldn't stand the idea of Izuku having to be the one, not today, not on top of everything else. "He doesn't have a Quirk."
Katsuki's face did something complicated. There was a flicker of something almost like sympathy in it — gone almost as fast as it appeared, chased off by the sheer novelty of the concept, four years old and encountering for the first time the idea that the world's rules might not apply evenly to everyone he knew.
"Quirkless?" he repeated, like the word tasted strange in his mouth. "That's not — everybody's got a Quirk. My dad said. Everybody."
"I guess I don't," Izuku said, so quietly it was barely audible.
"Huh." Katsuki looked at him for a long moment, small fists still faintly smoking, some new and unfamiliar arithmetic visibly turning over behind his eyes — an arithmetic that had, until nine minutes ago, always placed the two of them on roughly equal footing, running the same races, climbing the same trees, playing hero and villain as interchangeable roles either of them might someday actually grow into. "Well." He said it slowly, testing the shape of the thought as he spoke it. "Guess that means I'm gonna be the hero for real, then. Since you can't."
It wasn't cruelty, not yet — not the deliberate, honed cruelty that would come later. It was only a four-year-old rearranging his understanding of the world according to brand-new information, the way children do, blunt and thoughtless rather than malicious. But Izuku heard it the way a much older person might have heard something far crueler, because it was the very first time anyone had ever told him, out loud, that his dream now belonged to someone else by default.
He didn't argue. He didn't cry, not right there in the parking lot in front of Kacchan. He just nodded, small and quiet, and let his mother lead him to the car, and it was only once the door was shut and the engine was running and Musutafu was sliding by grey and rain-damp outside the window that he finally let the tears come, silent and steady, staring straight ahead.
That night, after a dinner neither of them managed to eat much of, Izuku asked, in a very small voice, if they could watch the All Might video again.
Inko's first instinct was to say no — some protective maternal reflex that flinched away from the idea of pouring salt directly into a wound less than twelve hours old — but something in his face stopped her. He wasn't asking to torture himself. He was asking the way a person reaches for a familiar object in the dark, something solid to hold onto.
So they sat together on the couch, the same worn cushions, the same grainy footage looping on the little television — the collapsed building, the hundred rescued citizens, the enormous golden man raising his fist to a smiling sky — and partway through the second loop, Izuku spoke, so quietly she almost missed it under the sound of the television.
"Mama? Can I still be a hero like him? Even though I don't got a Quirk?"
And Inko Midoriya, who had spent her entire pregnancy promising a version of herself that whatever happened, she would always know exactly the right thing to say to her son — found that she had absolutely nothing. No answer that wasn't a lie. No comfort that didn't feel, in that moment, like a betrayal of the honesty she owed him.
"I'm so sorry, Izuku," she whispered instead, and the tears came before she could stop them, hot and immediate, and she pulled him into her lap the way she had the very first day she'd carried him home from the hospital, wrapped in a yellow blanket she'd knitted herself. "I'm so sorry, baby. I don't know. I wish I could tell you yes. I wish I could tell you it doesn't matter, but I don't want to lie to you, and I don't know, and I'm so, so sorry."
Izuku didn't say anything for a long moment. On the screen, All Might smiled through the wreckage, over and over, endlessly, obliviously cheerful.
"It's okay, Mama," he said finally, and it was the first time in his short life he'd said something that wasn't quite true in order to make someone else feel better — a small, unconscious rehearsal, though neither of them could have known it then, for a kindness that would one day become the very core of who he was. "Don't cry. I'll — I'll figure something out. I'm real smart, right? Dr. Tsunoda said so. So I'll just — I'll figure it out."
He fell asleep against her shoulder before the video finished its third loop, damp lashes still stuck together, one small fist curled loosely against her collarbone the exact same way it had curled around her finger on the night he was born. Inko sat very still so as not to wake him, and watched the golden man's grainy, endlessly repeating smile, and made herself a second promise to go along with the first one.
Whatever it takes, she thought. Whatever this world decides to throw at him — I will never, ever stop believing in you, Izuku. Not for one single day.
The years that followed did not go easy on that promise, though they never quite managed to break it either.
At five, on his first day of primary school, a boy named Katsuo Fujimoto asked the whole classroom, with the particular gleeful cruelty that seven-year-olds reserve for anyone different, whether it was true that "the Midoriya kid" didn't have a Quirk at all — and when Izuku, red-faced but resolute, confirmed it, the laughter that went around the room was the kind that leaves a mark long after the sound fades. He'd gone home that day and told his mother, with wobbling determination, that it was fine, that he didn't need everyone to like him, only that someday he'd prove them wrong — and Inko had hugged him and said nothing about how her heart had cracked a little further at the sheer effort it took a five-year-old to sound brave.
At eight, his teacher — a tired, unkind man named Mr. Kaneshiro who had clearly stopped enjoying his job sometime around the Heisei era — handed back an essay Izuku had written about wanting to attend U.A. High School one day, and read aloud, in front of the entire class, "Some dreams simply aren't realistic for everyone, Midoriya. I'd encourage you to consider a career path better suited to your — circumstances," and the class had laughed, and Izuku had sat very still with his ears burning, and gone home to fill an entire fresh notebook with hero analysis that night instead of crying about it, because by then he had already discovered that the only thing worse than being laughed at was letting anyone see that it worked.
At eleven, in a school hallway that smelled permanently of old paper and floor wax, Katsuki Bakugo — no longer the small boy who'd said guess that means I'm gonna be the hero with something like reluctant sympathy, but someone harder now, sharpened by six years of being told by every adult in his life that he was destined for greatness — had shoved Izuku against a bank of lockers hard enough to rattle them, surrounded by a knot of boys who found this endlessly entertaining, and said, loud enough for the whole hall to hear: "You're worthless, Deku. You know that, right? You've got nothing. No Quirk, no chance, nothing. Quit acting like you're gonna be anything. You're worthless."
It was the first time anyone had used that particular word on him, and it was the first time — though far from the last — that it came from the mouth of the boy who used to let him lean against his shoulder under the elephant slide and cheer for his explosions like they were the greatest thing in the world. Izuku had picked himself up off the lockers, said nothing, and walked the rest of the way to class with his chin up and his eyes stinging, and that evening he'd written in his newest notebook, in handwriting gone slightly unsteady: Not worthless. Just not finished yet.
He never showed that page to anyone. He kept the notebook anyway.
By thirteen, going on fourteen, there were over sixty of those notebooks stacked in his bedroom closet — analyses of every hero he could find footage of, their Quirks, their combat styles, their weaknesses, their strengths, pages and pages of a boy's entire heart poured into the study of a profession every single authority figure in his life had told him, in one way or another, that he could never actually join. His IQ, tested formally once more at eleven out of pure bureaucratic requirement, had come back even higher than Dr. Tsunoda's early estimate — comfortably past two hundred, high enough that the school counselor had made vague, uncomfortable noises about "specialized programs" that never actually materialized into anything, because no specialized program in Japan existed for a Quirkless genius who only wanted to save people.
He was bullied. Consistently, casually, by classmates who'd long since stopped needing a reason and by at least two teachers who found it easier to let it happen than to intervene. He ate lunch alone more often than not. He came home some days with grass stains on his knees from being knocked down and said nothing about it, because he'd learned, by nine or ten, that telling his mother only made her cry, and he had promised himself, quietly, privately, the same year he'd promised her he'd figure it out, that he would rather carry every bit of this alone than watch her carry it too.
But none of it broke him. That was the part that would have confused Mr. Kaneshiro and Katsuki Bakugo and every other person who'd ever looked at Izuku Midoriya and seen only a target, if any of them had bothered to look closely enough to notice it: the boy still smiled. Not the brittle, performative smile of someone pretending everything was fine, but something quieter and more stubborn than that — the same smile, in miniature, that a golden-haired hero once wore standing on a collapsed building with a hundred people cheering below him. He still stopped to help kids smaller than him who'd dropped their books in the hall. He still gave half his lunch away without being asked, on the rare occasions someone forgot theirs. He still filled notebook after notebook with the belief, however unreasonable, however unsupported by two joints instead of three, that heroism was a thing you could earn through effort and heart even when the world had already decided you weren't allowed to try.
The evening before his fourteenth birthday, Inko found him sitting cross-legged on his bedroom floor surrounded by notebooks, the window cracked open to let in the cool spring air, writing by the light of a small desk lamp long after he should have been asleep.
"You should be resting," she said gently, leaning in the doorway. "Big day tomorrow. Fourteen."
"Just finishing this page." He didn't look up, pen moving in quick, precise strokes. "I found some new footage of Kamui Woods today. His branch-restraint technique has this half-second delay right after activation — I think it's because of how the wood has to actually grow rather than just extend, so there's this little window where—" He caught himself, laughed a little, sheepish. "Sorry. You don't need the whole lecture."
"I don't mind the lecture," Inko said, and meant it, crossing the room to sit beside him on the floor the way she had a hundred times before. "You still love this. After everything."
"I still love this." He set the pen down and looked at her, and there was something in his face at fourteen — nearly fourteen — that had not been there at four, something forged rather than simply grown: a kind of quiet, unshakable resolve that no locker-slam or teacher's sneer had managed to dislodge in a full decade of trying. "I know what everybody says, Mom. I know what I am, on paper. But I still think — I still believe there's a way. I don't know what it looks like yet. But I'm not gonna stop looking for it."
Inko reached over and smoothed his messy hair back from his forehead, the same gesture she'd used the night he was born, the night he'd first watched All Might smile through the wreckage, the night she'd made him a promise she'd somehow, against every reasonable expectation, managed to keep for ten straight years.
"Then I'll keep believing it with you," she said. "For as long as it takes."
Outside his window, Musutafu settled into its familiar nighttime hum — trains running somewhere in the distance, the distant thrum of the city that never quite went fully quiet — utterly unaware that in less than twenty-four hours, on an ordinary walk to school on an ordinary Tuesday morning, the fourteen-year-old boy currently falling asleep over his sixty-third notebook was about to have the single strangest, most world-altering week of his entire life begin with the sight of a giant woman defeating a villain in a single kick.
He had no way of knowing it yet. He only knew, as his eyes finally slipped shut, notebook still open on his chest, that tomorrow he'd get to see real heroes in action again, and that was more than enough to smile about.