Chapter Text
Two months after his fourth birthday, Izuku’s mother took him to the doctor, where they found out that he was quirkless. That he would never get any of the fantastic powers he’d dreamed up. His father left for America a week later, and his sweet, loving mother stopped caring at all. Sometimes she forgot about him, leaving him to make his own way to and from school or to scrounge up food. When he tried to get her attention, she would brush him off or snap at him to leave her alone. When she had a bad day she would yell at him and call him useless, or a waste of space. Every once in a while, when she was very, very mad, she would slap him and lock him in his room.
As time passed, she forgot about him more and more. She would forget to buy enough groceries for him as well, and he would have to go get them from the store, using money taken from her purse. Occasionally there wouldn’t be enough money, or he’d get caught taking it, and he would have to go dumpster diving behind the grocery store to get food.
By his fifth birthday, he’d gotten quite good at taking care of himself, and getting what he needed for himself. He would get himself ready each morning by himself, make himself breakfast and pack his own lunch, and take the bus to school alone. At the end of the day he’d take the bus back by himself, patch up the injuries he’d gotten at school (some of the other kids had taken to pushing him around, and sometimes he’d wind up with bruises or scratches), and then walk to the library. Once there he’d do his homework all by himself, referencing books or using the computers where necessary, then he’d spend his time researching either on the computers or in the library books. While he’d only really researched heroes when he started, he’d started researching other things too, like ewing to patch up his own clothes, first aid to patch up his injuries, and cooking so he could feed himself. He’d also started reading ahead in school and researching further into the topics, because when he could learn at his own pace school was fascinating!
He’d also picked up sign language from watching the classes at the library, and was teaching himself French and Spanish with classes online. He figured the sign language would be useful for when Kachan’s hearing eventually started to be affected by his quirk, though with how often he set off explosions near Izuku his hearing might fail first, and French and Spanish were just interesting.
His studying of languages had uncovered an interest in linguistics as well, and he’d started studying how to make his own language. Not a code, though he was studying that too (the prospect of coding things so that only you could read them was fascinating, and it sounded like it could be really useful for heroes!), but making a real language, with its own spelling system and grammar and everything. He hadn’t gotten to the point where he could actually write in his language, but when he did he was planning on practicing by writing his notes in the language. He’d already started practicing coding his notebooks, which had provided a really fun challenge at first but now required him to make ever more complex codes to remain as interesting.
He’d also found books on fixing things and on coding that he was working through, but he hadn’t gotten much past disassembling and reassembling the toaster, and he was still working on learning all the syntax used in coding. It could get really complicated, but he was getting the hang of it. It was like learning a whole bunch of languages.
When it was getting close to dinner time, Izuku would walk back home, make himself supper, and then head to either Takoba beach nearby to scavenge for things he could practice fixing, or to go dumpster diving. When he’d filled his small wagon full of broken things or enough food, he’d head home and carry all his things up to the roof of the apartment building. He’d set up a fort to spend his time in up there, and would work on his projects until the stars came out. Sometimes he’d stay out on the roof all night, falling asleep in the sleeping bag he’d found, fixed up, and washed. If he got really lucky, he’d see an underground hero patrolling. He’d learned to recognize the few underground heroes he saw, and had started tracking when their patrols were. He made sure to always code those notebooks, and he hid them really well. He didn’t want to risk villains finding out when the heroes were patrolling, after all.
As he started spending more time on the roof at night, he started seeing more street fights, and had started analyzing those too (He’d wound up starting a new series of notebooks, rather than mixing it in with his hero analysis). He’d started trying to pinpoint weaknesses in the people fighting, and how to fix them. Part of that was studying various fighting styles and martial arts, which he found himself sort-of learning as he mimed the moves on the roof, shadow boxing to try and figure out how they would fit together.
That was the pattern his days had fallen into since that doctor’s visit. Dawn to dusk, he took care of himself, and then did it all again the next day.
His pattern shifted slightly a week after his fifth birthday, when he was walking home from the beach later than normal. He’d gotten distracted searching the trash piles, and had wound up heading home as the sun was setting.
He heard a scuffle coming from a shady alley, and a call for help. He dropped the handle of his wagon and ran to the alley, stopping at the edge and peeking around the corner. There was a man pinning a woman to the wall, and she was trying to get free. Izuku’s mind raced as he tried to figure out a way to help, and inspiration struck him at the sight of a pile of loose bricks on the ground.
He picked up a brick and threw it with all his might at the man’s head. Carrying around the trash from the beach must have made him much stronger than he thought, because when the brick made contact with the man’s temple he dropped like a sack of rice. Izuku ran up to the woman and helped her to the entrance of the alley way.
“Are you okay ma’am?” he asked.
“Thank you, thank you so much,” she gasped, crying slightly.
“You’re welcome!” He responded cheerfully. He noticed the scrapes on her arms then. “Oh! You’re hurt! Let me get my first aid kit!” He grabbed said first aid kit from his backpack and started treating her arms, while the woman called the police. While they were waiting for the police to come, he wound up tying up the villian with some rope he’d found at the beach. He’d been planning to use it in his fort, but he could always get more. Making sure the villain couldn’t attack them again if he woke up was more important.
With the villain tied up and the police on their way (and an okay from the young woman), Izuku headed home, lest he be out any later. When he left, he took a brick with him, tucked into his backpack. Just in case he ran into any more trouble.
Of everything that had happened, it was what the woman had said to him before he left that stuck with him the most.
“You saved me. You’re my hero, kid.” He rode the high of those words for days. Someone had called him a hero! Even though everyone said he couldn’t be a hero without a quirk, he had saved someone! He couldn’t wait to grow up so he could learn to be a real hero, and save more people. That meeting redoubled his drive to be a hero.
A couple of nights later, Izuku was watching the news when a special on vigilantes came on.
People who saved people, without actually being heroes.
Izuku panicked, because wasn’t that what he’d done when he’d saved the young woman? He spent the whole night researching, eventually concluding that no, he wasn’t a vigilante. Technically. He didn’t have a quirk after all, and saving people using a quirk was a key part of the definition.
Thus sparked a truly terrible idea. He couldn’t legally be a vigilante, but there was nothing stopping him from acting like a vigilante, was there? No, there wasn’t.
He could save people like a vigilante, and it would be great practice for when he needed to pass the UA entrance exams, too. He didn’t need to wait until he became a hero to save people!
But first, he needed a plan, and a disguise. If he was going to be saving people, then he might get mistaken for a vigilante, and he didn’t want to get in trouble.
The first step of his plan was to do more research into ways to save people without a quirk, including analyzing heroes, vigilantes, and even villains who hadn’t used a quirk, or who had quirks that didn’t work in some circumstances.
The second step was learning to copy their skills, which led to the creation of his series of training notebooks. He wound up pulling skills from all over the place. Various fighting styles, ballet, street dancing, gymnastics, parkour, and support engineering. Especially support engineering. He’d already started building small things from spare parts he found, now he redoubled that effort, practicing building things that might eventually help him fight. He was very careful when learning parkour, but soon got the hang of running and jumping between buildings, and climbing walls quickly. He added a grappling tool of some sort to his list of things to make very quickly though, as climbing was inefficient, and a grappling tool would be much faster.
He also started running every morning, in an effort to get faster and stronger.
The third step was securing his weapons. He was working on support items, but he didn’t want to wait until he was finished them to start, so he needed another solution in the meantime. That solution became a backpack full of bricks. He also had some knives and had started practicing using a metal broomstick as a staff, but owing to his current lack of skill with both of those and his prior success with the bricks, the bricks were going to be his main weapon.
Step four was a costume. He wound up getting dark gray pants, a black shirt, a black hoodie with cat ears (he loved cats, so when he saw the sweater he had immediately known he needed it), black gloves, sturdy black boots, and black face masks. He used hot glue to add grips to his gloves, and permanent glow in the dark white paint markers to add a cat’s mouth, nose, and whiskers to each of his black masks. He’d also picked up a black backpack, because not only was his yellow one kind of distinctive and really easy to notice, but he didn’t want to have to unpack and repack it every time he went on patrol.
With his rudimentary skills, weapons, and costume sorted, he felt he was ready to go out on his first real patrol. He packed his bag full of bricks, a first aid kit, rope, zip ties, a map, water, snacks, sticky notes, two pens, and a spare knife, and added his main knives and a cell phone he’d fixed up to his pockets (he’d added snap buttons to his pockets to keep from losing his knives and phone), then he set out along his planned route.
He stumbled into bed just as the sun was rising, exhausted and sore, but immensely satisfied with himself. He couldn’t wait to go out again.