Chapter Text
Izuku leaned back in his chair. He stretched his arms above his head and looked down at the notebook in front of him. He’d started his notes on the villain attack this morning during roll call and had just finished them now as the teacher was making announcements.
There were plenty of advantages to everyone thinking he was quirkless and one of them was that teachers had a tendency to ignore him.
Speaking of that, the teacher was talking about something, high schools? Maybe? Something like that.
Izuku wasn’t too concerned. It was the beginning of his last year of middle school, and he already knew with absolute certainty where he would go for high school.
He caught the word hero from the teacher, and the classroom erupted around him with cheers and students ignoring the rule of no quirk usage in class.
Izuku wondered if he would ever get in trouble for using his quirk in school. Was it even possible?
It was actually a sort of a mutation quirk since it also gave him the extra toe joint. So they couldn’t fault him for always using it.
Well, there was the mind control part, but that was also something he couldn’t stop, no matter how much he wanted to.
Izuku heard Bakugou whining loudly about something, Izuku wasn’t that concerned. Bakugou made dramatic speeches all the time. At this point, Izuku could just replace anything he said with; ‘I am the best, and no one else is as good as me,’ and he didn’t need to worry about missing anything.
Izuku went back to looking over his notebook, checking for errors before closing the book up again, just in time to look up and see the entire class staring at him, then bursting into laughter.
Oh yeah, there was probably a reason you should pay attention in class.
“Huh? Midoriya? No way!”
“You can’t get into the hero course just by studying!”
Oh, so the teacher had probably told them that he was planning on going to UA.
If Izuku had really been quirkless, he probably would have defended himself. Maybe would have been nervous and tried to explain how the UA rules actually did allow quirkless students.
But he'd known that he had a quirk for his entire life, that was something he knew for certain. But he'd also learned it would be impossible to convince someone else of that fact. So Izuku had stopped bothering. He no longer cared about explaining himself. The only thing that mattered was what Izuku did. Justifying his decisions to other people wasn't worth his breath.
His quirk might have had no use whatsoever. But it had given him armor against the taunts of his classmates.
So, instead of panicking, Izuku blinked lazily at the class.
“Oh, okay.” He said, then looked back down at his notebook.
He would be a hero regardless of whether his classmates thought it was possible. There was no point to defending himself.
Izuku saw a familiar hand about to hit his desk. He grabbed his notebook and lifted it over his head.
Bakugou’s snarling face was inches away from Izuku’s nose. He waited for Bakugou to start shouting before dropping his notebook onto the ground behind him. The noise rendered inaudible by Bakugou’s shouting. Better let the pages get crumpled from the landing than charred by Bakugou’s explosions.
“Teach, Bakugou is breaking the no quirks in the classroom rule.” Izuku leaned back and tilted his head to the side to make eye contact with the teacher. Izuku was an unrepentant snitch regarding shit that Bakugou tried to pull on him since he was ‘quirkless.’ The teachers never did anything, but he could at least try.
Said boy seemed even angrier than before, somehow. And he launched himself at Izuku using his explosions.
Rather than try to meet him head-on, Izuku grabbed Bakugou’s arm and sent him tumbling past Izuku’s desk towards the back of the classroom.
His own explosions sent him over the desk and the one behind it, and then almost into the back wall of the classroom. Bakugou barely stopped himself from colliding headfirst with the blackboard.
There was a fair amount of snickering at Bakugou’s somehow even more angry expression. He might be the most popular in the class, but he was still an ass.
Izuku watched him for a moment before flicking his eyes back to the teacher, trying to convey ‘Okay, I did my part, now you deal with him’ with just his facial expression.
Figuring Bakugou wouldn’t try anything else, Izuku reached behind him to pick up his dropped notebook. He opened to the first page and the two columns of tally marks under the title. He added a mark to his column as the teacher made Bakugou sit back down in his desk.
Seventy-two Bakugou, ninety-three Izuku. Sweet, his lead was increasing again.
Bakugou probably still thought that he won more, since he only counted fights with no teachers around and ones where Izuku didn’t use his “Useless cowardly Deku tricks.” But Izuku counted them.
He knew that in real hero fights there would be no rules to follow and that any trick Izuku pulled would be just as effective for catching villains as Bakugou’s raw strength.
The side of Izuku’s mouth twitched upwards. He hadn’t even needed to stand up this time.
At the end of the school day Izuku slipped out of the classroom, days when he put a tally mark on his side were days when Bakugou would try to get Izuku after class.
It had been, what? Ten years since Bakugou had first come into his quirk. At this point, Izuku was probably more in tune with the other boy's habits than his own.
Izuku moved through the corridors of the school, taking a circuitous route to an exit he knew Bakugou wouldn't send a lackey to play look-out for Izuku.
After he opened the door, he paused to look both ways. No one.
Sweet.
He closed the door behind him before sprinting toward the wall surrounding the school.
He reached it going full speed, a speed which he turned into upward momentum with a trick he’d learned from a parkour class.
He balanced on the top of the wall for a moment before letting himself drop to the ground, bending his knees till they almost touched the ground on impact.
He straightened, but started to tip backwards due to the weight of his backpack. He pinwheeled his arms to stay upright, then sent them straight out forward after overbalancing.
Nailed it.
When he stood back up, he was greeted with the sight of a person staring at him.
Izuku froze.
The person had purple hair and eyes, and was staring with a sort of tired surprise that reminded Izuku of himself after seeing Bakugou do something exceptionally stupid too early in the morning.
“Hi.”
The purple haired person just kept staring at him.
“Don’t tell anyone from this school I did that. They told me to stop finding alternate exits after the roof incident.”
A purple eyebrow was raised. Purple eyebrows, huh. That meant the purple hair wasn’t dyed, probably a part of a quirk.
Izuku wanted to ask about what kind of quirk would give a person just purple hair and no other physical changes but decided against it.
There was awkward silence for a few moments.
“Bye.” Izuku said before turning on his heel and walking in the direction opposite the purple haired person. That was a good name, alliteration was always nice in names.
It was around five minutes later when Izuku realized he was walking in the opposite direction of his house.
Oh. Well, he could just figure out a route from where he was.
He wandered until he found buildings that looked familiar, then started in the direction he thought home to be.
Thinking back to the purple haired person, he couldn’t help but wonder what that interaction would have been like if he’d really been quirkless.
That was something he wondered often.
What if he’d been born quirkless?
It couldn’t have been all that different. Izuku's quirk was about as close to quirkless as you could get without actually being it.
So close, actually, that every single person Izuku knew was absolutely certain that he didn’t have a quirk.
His mom, his doctor, his classmates, and every other person he interacted with.
And sure, if he were quirkless that wouldn’t be a problem, they would be right, and he could deal with that.
But.
He had a quirk.
The most useless one he’d heard of.
It convinced everyone he didn’t have a quirk.
Well sure, there were the few places it came in handy, made him more confident. Having a secret that no one knew, even one he didn’t want to keep, made him feel comfortable. Knowledge is power, and he had knowledge—and therefore power—that no one else would ever have.
But what if he’d been born with a powerful quirk? Something like Bakugou’s, one that would springboard him to the starting line of becoming a hero.
That was useless to think about though, he’d been born the way he’d been born. And now he was going to work harder than anyone else to become the best hero he could. Useless quirk or not, he would do it.
The thought brought a wild smile to his face. He skipped forward a few paces, jumping up and slapping a sign telling him to watch his head. He hit the ground lightly and continued through the arch of the dark underpass the sign had been warning him about.
Izuku was most of the way through the underpass when he heard the noise of liquid moving behind him, and he half turned to see what it was.
His breath froze in his throat when he saw it. The thick green sludge was coming out of a grate on the ground. It formed into a single huge mass with a pair of bulging eyes and a huge wide-open mouth.
Izuku knew what this was.
A villain attack.