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Izuku had never had much of a social life.
He was an outcast, the only kid his age without a quirk, without much of a future, without any support except for his mom.
That and about 750,000 people online.
Izuku hadn’t hung out with anyone at the mall, or gone to the cinema for a friend’s birthday, or received a worried call from his mom because he lost track of time having fun and stayed out too late, but that just meant he spent a lot of time in his room alone, scrolling a through anything online that grabbed his attention.
That had led to him commenting on and analysing everything to do with heroes he came across, which led to so many threads, and requests, and a reputation as The Analyst, Eri Akio.
Eventually, that reputation gave him enough confidence to start posting videos.
He never used his face, just a few doodles he had made of some random character he came up with when he was about 8 and was inexplicably attached to, and he put on a subtle voice modulator to hide his age but still sound pretty normal, but he started posting his analyses in video form, and was surprised by how many people actually watched.
He had been expecting a few people to maybe recognise his name from his previous posts and comments, and be curious enough to watch a video. Maybe accidentally make it onto somebody's recommended through the mysteries of The Algorithm.
He had not been expecting to gain nearly 20,000 views in a matter of months.
The topics he covered were random and his schedule was inconsistent. Sometimes he analysed movies, sometimes old theme parks, most often something to do with heroes, and he would sometimes post 3 10-minute videos in a week, disappear for a month, and then come back with a two and a half hour deep dive that had consumed him in his research.
He did not think being so all over the place would lead to anything like a large and stable audience, but here he was.
After a minor (read: major) crisis about suddenly being HeroTube famous at not even fourteen years old, he decided to just. Keep going.
He had been very careful with privacy, and managed not to have any kind of leak of information or invasion of privacy, and so he talked to his mom, told her exactly what was going on, and she had been a little sceptical, but ultimately been supportive, and even helped set up a saving account for him to put any money he made into (because he had, bafflingly, built up enough of a following to make money; actual, real money), and double checked with an acquaintance she happened to have who was involved in cyber security to make sure things would be safe.
He began getting messages from heroes and their agencies asking for him to analyse their performances, both publicly and privately, and offering to pay handsomely for it. He once again checked in with his mom, and decided to go ahead with some of the ones he was particularly excited about, sometimes refusing any offer of money on principal. Smaller heroes with less traditionally ‘heroic’ quirks sometimes struggled, and he wanted to help try and change that, even if all he could do was talk about them for a bit on the internet.
He sometimes had moments of intense imposter syndrome, where he felt like he was lying to everyone, that if they found out he was a quirkless teenager, not even in high school yet, they would immediately turn on him, tell him he was a fraud, that he should ‘stay in his lane’, even if his analysis and ideas were all his, even if being quirkless did not mean he was brainless.
He sometimes felt like he was struggling to stay afloat, that it could all come crashing down any moment, and had to step back for a moment and remind himself that he had managed to get this far basically on his own, so why couldn’t he keep going? Why should the fact that he was quirkless and a kid make a difference to things that had little to nothing to do with those facts? He had just as much right as anyone else to post stuff online, and it was always others approaching him, so really it was everyone else who could blame themselves if they ever felt the need to blame anyone for a perceived deception.
Also, he had to say it made him feel proud when professionals came to an untrained kid over others for analyses, and also it was sometimes a little bit funny when the very organisations and people who had been making his life hell since he was five came to the very type of person they looked down on and offered them a frankly ludicrous amount of money for him to make a fifteen minute video. Obviously he always negotiated a higher price in those cases and made sure to seem slightly less enthusiastic in the resulting video.
And so it came to be that at fourteen years old, by the time Midoriya Izuku met All Might and began his journey towards becoming the greatest hero he could be, he already had a steady income, and a growing viewer base of around 750,000 people regularly watching what was essentially his nerdy ramblings in video form.
Those two things had managed to remain remarkably separate, and Izuku was actually quite glad about that. He liked the anonymity of his online work, and the fact that it was something almost completely outside of his school life gave him some level of solace and separation.
Or that was the case, until one fateful heroics class, when his two worlds of heroics began to collide.
—
That day they were going to do a more theoretical Foundational Heroics class, and while normally those were less exciting, Izuku’s brain was buzzing in anticipation, because Aizawa-sensei had said that they would be focusing on general quirk analysis, and given the existence of his notebooks and also his entire secret career, it was fair to say that analysing quirks was more than just Izuku’s jam, it was his bread and butter.
He had managed to keep his anticipation largely contained, although judging by the way Kacchan kept glaring at him, only for Izuku to realise he was bouncing his leg or tapping or some other excited tic, and immediately stop and smile sheepishly back at a sneering Kacchan, before repeating the whole process approximately three minutes later, he wasn’t succeeding.
By the time class had started, Izuku had stopped trying so hard to hide his anticipation, and was sitting at attention in his seat, arranging and rearranging his stationary on his desk and resisting the urge to reach for the hero analysis notebooks he had stuffed in his bag. Just in case.
His excitement quickly turned to a sense of impending doom when after introducing the class (apparently it was the first of a new module, so there would be more like it, much to his delight and then, later, dread), he opened HeroTube and started playing a video.
One of his videos.
And an early one too, one where he was still figuring out how editing worked and thought he would only have 3 people and a rat watching.
It was one of his most generic analysis videos, and gave a very brief overview of how he went about deconstructing a quirk. He hadn’t gone too in-depth, because he had to keep some of his secrets, but it was one of his most generic videos, using a fake hero and quirk rather than anyone specific, just as a demonstration.
And then, once the video finished, not only did Aizawa-sensei say he had made a lesson plan around analysing non-existent heroes, but Todoroki not-so-quietly declared that he loved Eri Akio’s videos and had been watching them for years, and Izuku almost perished on the spot.
He had to try very hard not to start melting in a weird combination of pride, embarrassment and anxiety, and was about a second away from a breakdown for the rest of the class.
—
Things did not get better.
In fact they just got worse.
It wasn’t every lesson, but Aizawa-sensei kept bringing up his videos as examples of different ways of approaching analysis, and referencing work he had done for agencies and heroics operations at various points. He wasn’t the only one he mentioned, that would be ridiculous and frankly stupid on Aizawa’s part, and he definitely gave them enough academic papers and articles from research journals to give 90% of the class headaches and massive confusion, but since Eri Akio’s videos were made for a wider audience, and the person making them was himself a teenager (not that anyone in class knew that), they were easy to understand and sometimes explained concepts Izuku hadn’t even known had technical academic terms in much less complicated ways.
Izuku wondered if there were other teachers who used his HeroTube channel in their lessons and promptly stopped that train of thought. If he thought about that too hard he might actually want to disappear himself.
The worst thing though, was the fact that several of his classmates had become fans of his videos.
It was Todoroki who started it really, showing the rest of the class some of his favourites after classes had ended that first day, some part of him seemingly activated by a teacher acknowledging the channel’s existence and making the class aware of it all at once. He didn’t talk a huge amount, he never did, but he made a few soft comments here and there about how he found them comforting, and that they had helped him and inspired him when things had been tough.
Izuku was torn between feeling intense, forcefully repressed embarrassment and also bursting into tears, because he knew better than most of the class just how tough those times had been. A part of him wanted to tell him, let him know those were his videos and that they had helped him too, but it just felt way too awkward and kind of like it would come across as him seeking out compliments and too much like bragging.
Anyway, the less serious analysis videos had been brought out, including one about rabbits that he had made in a sleep-deprived haze and a joking analysis of All Might’s various smiles, and suddenly he had some new fans.
This in itself wasn’t unusual. He had had his ‘new subscriber’ notifications off for a while because so many new people followed him every day it would have bricked his phone, and his subscriber count was climbing steadily.
What was different was that he was hearing about it when he came down for breakfast the next morning, still groggy and definitely too sleepy to be dealing with how that made him feel.
—
Izuku was going to kill whoever was in charge of the heroics curriculum, because apparently they had decided it was a good idea to show his videos in every heroics class starting this year, in all the years and all the heroics-related classes, including support and management, and this had apparently lead to about half the school following him on at least one social media platform, not that anyone knew it was him they were following.
Actually, on second thought, it was probably Nedzu who had had the idea, and Izuku did not think he could actually kill the rodent, but he could certainly dream, and also possibly maim. Just a little.
He spent way more time than he had ever expected to trying not to outwardly react any time he heard his work being mentioned, and he had never been more glad that no-one ever really referred to him by his online name out loud, because the number of times he heard ‘Eri Akio’, if he had an automatic response to it he would have been found out by now.
Life, however, went on, regardless of how stressed Izuku was, and the craze simmered to just another conversation topic, and he got used to hearing his online name occasionally mentioned, and somebody using his videos as an academic reference.
At least Izuku was getting full marks in theoretical heroics now.
—
Kacchan was acting weird.
To be fair, their relationship and the way they acted towards each other could never have been called normal, and now with all of the secrets between them, the likelihood of things becoming normal were slim to none, but he had been getting weird looks all week, and Izuku was mildly concerned.
He had been staring during Foundational Heroics, and staring whenever they happened to be working on homework in the same room. He always had a pinched expression, like he was eating something new and wasn’t sure whether or not he liked it.
It seemed especially obvious whenever Eri Akio was brought up, and every time he noticed that dreaded expression, he felt the need to curl in on himself and disappear for a little bit just to avoid the fact that Kacchan maybe knew that instead of doing things like having friends or normal hobbies, he had decided to be a massive nerd in a very public way.
He had noticed a pattern of Kacchan looking especially constipated while his earlier videos were playing.
He had always used a voice modulator, but in his early videos it wasn’t great, and if you suspended your disbelief and also maybe were a little bit tired (or if you were his childhood friend), you could probably manage to vaguely recognise his voice out of a lineup.
Izuku had a sneaking suspicion that Kacchan was beginning to catch on.
It made Foundational Heroics even more tense for him, but in a way that felt more targeted. He didn’t really know what he could do about it, but he decided that he would just. Not say anything. If Kacchan asked, he would probably tell him, but if it didn’t come up then he definitely wasn’t going to go out of his way to mention it.
Honestly though, given their general progress with each other, the stress and nervousness about Kacchan finding out wasn’t really that serious, just the usual nerves of having a hobby that someone didn’t know about and might just find a little weird.
He decided that it would be fine, regardless of the outcome.
—
Izuku had a feeling one of the teachers might know.
There had been one too many slightly too specific questions in the class’ quizzes, and one or two comments on his videos and social media that felt oddly pointed, all form accounts with the same username, and at first he had been concerned about a stalker, but then one day he had looked at the username more closely and figured it out.
Nedzu.
Of course it was Nedzu. He should have known. If anyone was going to find out it would be him, even if they didn’t really interact all that much.
He decided to add a sort of coded message in his next video to test his theory. And by coded message, he meant he decided to make a video about Nedzu and then add the coded message there, just to be certain the principal would see it. It wasn’t his most subtle move, and he was a little worried about attracting the principal’s wrath with some of his postulations, but he was reaching the end of some kind of rope, and he needed to… vent? Confront someone about it? Tell the principal to his face that all this was stressing him out and to maybe tone it down? He didn’t know, but when he was called to the principal’s office only a few days after posting his Nedzu analysis, he figured his not-so-subtle plan had worked.
“I see we have managed to sniff each other out,” Nedzu began once Izuku had settled into an offered chair and accepted a steaming cup of green tea, “I would like to start by apologising for any undue stress the faculty may have caused by using your videos as lesson material. None of us were aware when we first started using them, and if we were we would have asked for your opinion before we did so.”
Izuku was surprised by the seriousness of the apology, and the fact that Nedzu had apologised at all, and quickly reassured him it wasn’t necessary, that it was fine really, and that he was honoured that teachers thought his videos were good enough to use in the first place, that it had just been unexpected and a little weird.
“Then I’m glad that we haven’t done anything too egregious, although I still felt the need to have a chat with you.”
Izuku stiffened in his seat. Nothing good had ever come of that phrase coming from a teacher before, and now he was worried that maybe he had broken some sort of rule with his work online, though he had pretty thoroughly checked every single contract he or his mom had signed for the school and everything had seemed good at the time. Maybe things had changed with the dorms?
“Your work online is rather impressive, and could be a real boon to your future career and work as a hero, both on and off the field. I wanted to offer you some more targeted tutoring in situational, quirk and other forms of analysis that are involved in the most effective execution of heroic duties, although if you would rather keep to simply posting your analyses online, I offer my help in managing and protecting your work while you are enrolled here.”
Izuku was frozen in shocked amazement.
“I’m sorry sir, I just want to be sure I’m not mishearing, but did you just offer me tutoring?”
“I did indeed,” Nedzu confirmed, smirking, and Izuku felt his jaw drop metaphorically to the floor, “and if you would like, we can even keep them private. If you accept, of course.”
Izuku was still processing, but he made a noise to show he had been listening, and then Nedzu kindly gave him a minute to have an internal meltdown over the fact that the Nedzu, famous for his intelligence and ability to read a situation and use it to his advantage, had seen enough potential in his silly little videos that he was offering him private tutoring.
How could he not say yes?
—
The new lessons were tough, and left him feeling mentally exhausted 80% of the time, but he was really enjoying them and learning a lot along the way.
Nedzu was an intense teacher, but he was also fair, and if Izuku was struggling with anything, even unrelated to the original extra lessons planned, he would take a step back and offer to help with whatever was causing the problem.
He had decided not to tell anyone exactly what he was doing, just saying he was doing some ‘remedial classes’, and even if his friends suspected he wasn’t telling the whole truth, they didn’t press, and just made sure to let him know they would be willing to help if he needed it. He had to admit, he had almost teared up at the end of that conversation. His friends were the best.
The unit about analysis in Foundational Heroics was over, and so the time he spent worrying about his secret being revealed decreased dramatically, although sometimes somebody (usually Todoroki) would bring up one of his new videos in conversation, or comment on how his upload schedule had had an uptick recently.
He was kind of tired, and was definitely one more regular time commitment away from overwhelming himself and risking burnout, but he felt… content. Happy, even. He felt like he was doing as much as he could to make sure his future was just what he wanted it to be, and he had several different paths he could take if one of them went wrong, and yet he also felt… safe. At least as safe as he could given how his life generally went. He felt safe in trying things and then realising he didn’t enjoy them, and also in trying and being bad at something.
Somehow, despite his worries, things seemed to be going well.
—
He took it all back.
His entire life was a mistake.
He had been especially tired lately, and while Nedzu and All Might and actually all his teachers had noticed and told him to take a break, he hadn't been able to, always feeling like he needed to be doing something, and while on some level he knew that was definitely not healthy, he couldn’t get himself to stop.
He had kept on making videos, and it was one of those that became his undoing.
He had started doing a series of videos on up-and-coming heroes, with a current focus on UA students. He had been covering all the years to try and avoid people figuring him out, and it had been working so far, but he guessed it was only a matter of time until his own hubris came back to bite him.
It was Todoroki’s video that caught him out.
He had thought he would be one of the safer classmates to cover, seeing as his dad was Endeavour, and as a result of that at least half of his quirk was at least partly out there in some form for people to analyse freely. He was probably the biggest Eri Akio fan in the class, so regardless it would be a bit of a risk, but Todoroki’s quirk was so interesting, and also he knew how much a video might mean to him.
So he made the video, and he posited some things he knew to be true as theory, and called it a day. He thought he had been subtle, that nothing had been too much of a logical leap, and he could continue as he had been, anxious but with the two parts of his life separate (except for Nedzu’s classes, but really, Izuku should have expected Nedzu to find out. It was his whole deal, after all).
As such, when he overslept just a little bit and was the last down to breakfast the day after he had uploaded the video analysing Todoroki’s quirk, he was not expecting to walk into a slightly nervous and tense conversation.
“I just think it's weird this person seems to know so much about you when you know almost nothing about them. It’s not cool dude,” that was Kirishima, and he sounded much more serious than he usually did, and as the kitchen finally came into view, he saw that about half the class was standing around the kitchen, Todoroki on a stool in the centre.
“Is this really something we should tell Sensei though?” and that was Jirou, twirling her erajack around one finger, which Izuku knew was a nervous habit, “I mean, it’s not like it would be easy to do anything about it. No-one has any clue who the guy is.”
“Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything,” and that was Yaoyorozu, and now Izuku was concerned, and decided he should stop lingering in the stairway and actually find out what was going on.
“Um,” Izuku moved into everyone else’s view, “what are we talking about?”
“Eri Akio made a video about Todoroki and he says it’s weirdly accurate. He doesn’t see that much of a problem, but some of the rest of us think it’s a little creepy,” Kirishima supplied.
Izuku felt nervous sweat begin to build at his hairline.
“O-oh. how. How bad is it?” he didn’t know if he wanted the answer.
“It’s not like he’s got every single fact of my life,” Todoroki answered, “it’s just that a few of his assumptions are very close to the truth, and it seemed like he didn’t really entertain some of the other explanations.”
Izuku felt the sweat begin to bead.
“I still think you should tell Aizawa-sensei or Nedzu-san,” said Yaoyorozu, and Izuku had the feeling that this conversation would keep going around and around and the accusations would get more and more serious until something else ended it.
He had a few moments to come to a decision. On the one hand, he liked how things had been so far, keeping his online and real life things separate, and avoiding the potentially weird and awkward social situations that would come from people discovering that his hobby was being used as their teaching material, and also that he had something approaching 800,000 followers on HeroTube. On the other hand, he really didn’t want his friends to be uncomfortable about some stranger online knowing things about them, and despite how anxiety-inducing the idea of being discovered was, at this point it was mostly just the general anxiety around revealing something new about oneself. It wasn’t nervousness born of fear, or of expecting bad reactions, or even someone feeling offended that they had been left out. He had become more comfortable with the idea of his online and real life worlds coming together, helped along by the acknowledgement and encouragement of both things by Nedzu and their lessons.
It only took a few moments to come to a decision, but really it wasn’t any kind of decision at all when it was about the comfort of his friends.
“Um. I uhhh…” Izuku interrupted what was becoming a slightly overenthusiastic lecture from Iida about online safety. The group looked at him, curious, and oh boy was it hot in here or was it just him?
“I uh. I don’t think you should worry too much about it because. I. Um,” he paused, feeling like every single set of eyes in the room was on him, and swallowing down the nervous lump in his throat, “because it’s um. Me.”
He waited for the reaction, but none came.
“What’s you?” Kaminaro looked confused, and now so was Izuku.
“Huh?”
“I don’t think it’s entirely clear what you mean?” Yaoyorozu offered gently.
“Oh,” Izuku’s gaze darted all around the room, not wanting to focus on anyone. He hadn’t expected no-one to get what he meant. He guessed that maybe his phrasing hadn’t been the best, but now he had to say it again, “I mean. You- you don’t have to worry. Because Eri Akio. That’s me.”
Silence.
A bead of sweat rolled down his temple.
Then an explosion of noise.
“Huh?”
“What?”
“Are you kidding?”
“No way. No FUCKING way.”
“Language!”
“Are you serious?”
“You’re Eri Akio?”
“Holy shit!”
“Language!”
Everyone was talking over each other, and Izuku tried to answer every question he heard but everything was just getting scrambled and overwhelming and he just needed a moment to gather his thoughts because as it was he was tripping over his words and managing to get nothing across.
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
Everyone shut the fuck up.
Ah yes, Kacchan. Izuku hadn’t noticed him sitting on the nearby couch, but he was definitely glad he was there now. Trust Kacchan to yell at opportune moments.
“Give him a fucking second. He can’t answer you all if you’re yelling like a bunch of dumbasses,” and with that, he turned back to… whatever he had been doing, seemingly unbothered by the revelation happening in the kitchen. Izuku thought maybe he had already figured it out. It wouldn’t be the first time he had managed to figure out a life-defining secret of his.
Everyone had quieted down, and while he was glad he wouldn't have to deal with all the noise, now he had to watch as his classmates almost vibrated with withheld energy, which was almost worse. He had never seen Todoroki trying to force down excited energy before, and he didn’t know how to feel about the fact that it was him who had managed to get that kind of reaction out of the usually fairly reserved boy.
“I’m guessing you guys have uhhh… questions?”
Kaminari raised his hand.
“Yes, Kaminari-kun?”
“So are you really Eri Akio?”
“Um. Yeah.”
Kaminari slumped back down into his stool, satisfied but apparently a little shell-shocked given the look on his face.
Uraraka raised her hand.
“Yes?”
“Why didn’t you tell us? I mean, it’s not like you had to but also we wouldn’t have judged you so I guess just. Why?”
That was one question Izuku had sort of been expecting, the few (million) times he pictured this conversation in his head, “I just. I’m so used to the whole Eri Akio thing being separate from my real life that it would have felt really weird? And then the teacher and the whole school started using my stuff for class and it felt even weirder, and the it just got to the point when it felt like more effort to tell people but clearly I wasn’t really being that careful about it because you all ended up realising something was going on anyway and just. It never came up?”
Uraraka blinked at the torrent of information, but then gathered herself to respond.
“Oh. Okay. I guess that makes sense?”
Izuku didn’t know what he had been expecting as a reaction, but he thought that at this point in his many musings it might have been something equally underwhelming.
After that, the rest of the questions felt easy, and he answered them as they came. As he talked more and more, he felt more and more comfortable with his two worlds meeting.
Eventually they were interrupted by the need to get to class, and with a final parting request not to spread this to any of the other classes, the day continued on surprisingly normally.
It eventually filtered to the rest of the class that hadn’t been in the kitchen during the initial revelation, and so instead of battle strategies, Foundational Heroics turned into another Q&A and series of requests for their own analysis videos. Even from All Might, who was teaching the class.
It was surprisingly nice.
He had always got feedback online, but despite the fact that logically he knew there were people behind the accounts, it was much harder to think of things that way when it was just likes and usernames. Having almost a whole classroom of people giving him their thoughts and feelings and excited ramblings was different. Good different, he decided, in a way which made what would normally have been usernames and profile pictures much more personal, and much more meaningful, especially since it was from his friends, from people who didn’t just know him as the analysis guy on HeroTube.
When he went to Nedzu’s class that evening, it was with the rest of his class knowing full well where he was going, and Nezu waiting with a knowing smile and a cup of steaming green tea.
Really, things had worked out quite well, considering they started because he was a lonely, quirkless nobody.