Chapter Text
Not all men were created equal.
Izuku knew this. How could he not? His entire existence proved that fact, his quirk and disability acting as concrete evidence in the matter.
What disability, you may ask? Well. He was born blind. His optic nerve was completely missing from his nervous system.
All he had known was darkness.
Only vaguely can Izuku remember his early childhood — sounds and voices dominating the memories of pitch-black darkness that embraced his visionless years. He wasn’t allowed to attend school due to his mother’s insistence and hyperactive worrying, and his father was overseas in the United States of America for work, unable to put in his own two cents.
His father had left when Izuku was three, leaving his son behind to pursue his dream job, persuaded to do so by Inko, who shooed him off with a smile on her face and a plan in her mind.
Izuku was alone.
He had no friends, and his neighbours — the Bakugou family — were rarely present, Inko’s hesitance getting in the way of him making the boy his age a true friend. It turned out to be a good call, however, when the boy — Katsuki Bakugou, he had later learned — immediately nicknamed him ‘Deku,’ meaning useless.
Izuku felt that he was right, for the longest time.
His mother cried in her room every night, the walls too thin to block out the sounds of her sobs while she believed Izuku to be sleeping soundly in his bed. His hearing was fine-tuned to hear even the smallest sounds, his body adapting to his blindness and giving him a slight edge in life, though it proved to be more bothersome than helpful as the years passed, as Inko’s nightly crying continued.
With every night of tears came a morning of detachment, cold stares, and ruthless protectiveness, Inko’s coddling suffocating Izuku as she whispered affirmations in his ear.
Through every sentence she spoke, Izuku heard the faint tones of love leaving his mother's words with every passing day.
The dynamic of the people around Izuku changed a couple of weeks after he turned four when his quirk had finally come in.
He remembers that day like it was only hours ago, savouring the short-lived excitement he had felt.
He’d blinked, and all of a sudden there had been outlines of objects all around, drawn in his line of sight with bright white lines, and the added whimsical movements of colour around his mother’s frame shocked him to his core. He looked around in awe, taking in his surroundings for the first time with comically wide eyes.
“Mama?” He whispered, looking directly at her body as he stared, slack-jawed, at the light-blue and lilac colours weaving around her body, accentuating her every move.
“Izuku? How did you know I was here?”
“I can see you!” He cried, wiggling with excitement as he stood. He looked down at his own hands and saw the outlines of his chubby, toddler-sized fingers.
“Mama, I can see you!”
Inko had immediately rushed him to a quirk specialist, where they ran a multitude of tests on the boy, even putting ‘weird stickers’ on his head, watching his brain activity as his quirk was in use — which turned out to be constant.
“Izuku, your quirk is a miracle! You were born without an optic nerve — the little ‘wire’ in your head connecting to your eyes that makes you see. Your quirk helps you see, but only to a certain extent. People have heat waves coming off of them, and while us normal people cannot see those without special glasses, your quirk displays them, which is how you knew where your mother was! And the outlines are the objects all around you to guide you where to walk.”
As Izuku nodded his head in excitement, the doctor turned to his mother, speaking quietly to not alert the toddler behind him. But Izuku heard everything, and couldn’t help but feel the excitement fall, a headache beginning to form as his brain finally caught up with the amount of quirk usage he’d just displayed. Izuku had a sinking feeling he wouldn’t be getting rid of this headache any time soon.
“Ma’am, your son’s quirk activation is one we doctors like to call ‘Circumstantial Quirk Manifestations’. If Izuku hadn’t been born blind, he would never have manifested this particular quirk. He might have not gotten one at all. But, he is incredibly lucky his body realised something was wrong, and his quirk ‘fixed’ the problem, so to speak. He’s lucky, and that’s really all there is to it.”
Inko nodded tensely, before holding out her hand to her son, gesturing for him to follow her. She thanked the doctor and left, practically dragging her toddler out the doors behind her, walking with purpose. Izuku watched the colours around her shift, turning from the previous light-blues and lilacs to bright orange, her dreams of having a strong, independent son crushed.
How was Izuku supposed to be independent, when he would be codependent on his quirk for the rest of his life?
Now, Izuku knows that the colours represented his mother’s emotions, and the splitting headache he got right afterward was an indication of his quirk's true abilities. For one — the colours that the doctor had insisted were temperature-based heat waves were not body temperatures, but visual indicators of emotions. They were — in technicality — auras.
He thought this part of his quirk was useful… only once he learnt what colours were. That took a while, considering he couldn’t actually see photos of the colours his quirk showed.
But he managed.
At that doctor's appointment, they had labelled his quirk as ‘Sight’, which was an incredibly vague overview of what he could actually do. Sure, it helped him see, but it did so much more as he got older. Especially since the doctor had described it as seeing outlines of everything — whereas he could see and read words and computer or phone screens as well. It was just a very complicated, colourless version of regular sight, with some added bonuses. He just explained everything as if it were outlines as he got older because it was easier to do so.
Though, he was thankful his mother let him go to an in-person school now. She was reluctant, her aura taking a purple hue as she walked him to his first day of elementary school, the now five-year-old skipping in excitement next to her as he held her hand, completely oblivious to his mother’s anxiety.
“Class, this is Izuku Midoriya! He’s joining our class from now on, and I want you all to make him feel welcome!”
As the class chorused their greetings, the teacher spoke once more.
“Now, Midoriya here was born blind, but his quirk helps him see, isn’t that cool? I want you all to be extra careful around him, as we don’t want him to be hurt due to his disability, do we?” She asked, looking at Izuku with a smile evident in her tone, though her aura was a blue-tinted green.
She was patronising him, in front of everyone.
Because of her words, the bullying started fairly quickly, the process sped up by none other than Katsuki Bakugou, his explosive neighbour.
“That’s Deku! I live next door to that useless idiot. His mum doesn’t even let him play outside, probably because he’s so dumb!”
Izuku was isolated at school from day one, and it only got worse as the years went on.
The cruel nickname followed him everywhere. He couldn’t escape it in elementary school, or even middle school, his new teachers latching onto the nickname like a moth to flame every year.
With the bullying at school, he didn’t have much time to think about his home life, and he was always brutally reminded of his mother’s coddling as soon as the holidays started.
How he had constantly forgotten about her abuse, he would never know.
“Izuku! I don’t want you going out for a walk, what if you don’t see something and get hurt?” She’d fret, hugging the boy to her chest too tight.
“Mum, I walk to school every day, and you know that’s not how my quirk works! I’ll be fine!”
“Oh, so now I’m a bad mother for caring about you? Fine! Go on that fucking walk, see if I care!”
Izuku winced as she slammed the door in his face, Izuku barely able to mutter; “That’s not what I said…” As he watched her walk down the hallway and up the stairs, her aura hidden through the outline of the wall.
He hated it when his mother cursed at him. It made him feel impossibly small, weak, and every time she cursed his name he reverted back into his younger self, his emotions taking a nose-dive into the pits of depression and anger he had experienced at only ten years old.
He’d been given his first red spider lily that year. It had messed up his view of the world completely, his usual, cheery exterior vanishing without a trace, never to be seen again as he was isolated even further from his peers, a cold — masked — expression permanently etched onto his face.
He hadn’t truly smiled since. Only in private, when his father managed to call.
Over the years, he’d used his continued isolation to his advantage, making the best out of a bad situation, using the time to really harness his quirk.
Everyday objects and people took on more details, and they were beginning to be outlined with slight amounts of colour as well as the white frames he had become accustomed to.
He discovered that the colours of an aura could be multiple colours at once, though he’d come to note that the colours displayed tended to deepen or brighten with the type of emotion that overpowered a person almost completely — one an individual was unable to ignore, regardless of their outward expressions. If he really wanted to know how a person was feeling rather than the vague overview his quirk automatically displayed, he’d have to focus rather hard and put up with a migraine afterward.
It took time, but he managed to do it with ease by the time he was twelve. It was natural now. He didn’t have to focus at all to see a person’s exact emotions, many of which tended to be a complicated mix of many.
There was more to his quirk, however, that barely anyone knew about. Izuku refused to tell everyone — aside from his dad — what his quirk was capable of. It pays to be underestimated, sometimes.
He could see completely through a person now. Though, he was still working on focusing his quirk to see bones and muscle — it would be useful for both finding injuries as well as profiling someone to see if they were lying to him.
Behavioural pattern analysis became his best friend and most intriguing hobby, the outlines of bodies accurately showing a person's posture, and their auras showing their anxiety or other emotions made it almost impossible to lie to the teenager.
Almost.
Although, the most useful thing he found he could do was that if he focused hard enough, he could see straight through walls. Any solid objects could be seen through, the white outlines turning grey and showing him the basic overview of everything behind the walls he peered through.
Annoyingly, discovering this particular fact had brought about his worst drawback– sensory overloads.
Experiencing this for the first time was an absolute nightmare. He couldn’t focus. Everything was too loud and too quiet, everything hurt to touch and he was losing his ability to breathe as a splitting migraine dominated his body, severing his mind into two as he stumbled down the sidewalk, mistaken for a drunk.
He had thrown up from quirk-induced migraines multiple times, and as horrible as those were, he’d prefer it over the Hell that was an overloaded, sensory panic attack.
One day, as he lay in bed fighting off a migraine and listening to his favourite music, his mother
walked into his room, choosing to stand in the doorway as he slowly took out his earphones.
“Mum? Are you—”
“Your eyes aren’t the same colour anymore,” She whispered sadly, cutting him off.
“I…”
“They used to be a beautiful emerald green. But now I can hardly see any of that. Most of it’s been replaced by this ugly gold. Your quirk made your eyes ugly, Izuku,” She whispered, spitting the words of his quirk like it left a bad taste in her mouth, walking out the door.
Izuku was left on his bed, shocked, confused, and a little bit insulted.
While his mother may have lost a lot of her love for the blind boy, his father surely hadn’t.
He called whenever he could find the time — even if that was only a few minutes long — talking with his son animatedly about anything and everything.
When his father found out about Izuku’s hatred of his own quirk — and in turn, himself — he told the boy something he would never forget.
“Your quirk is beautiful. It’s incredibly useful and can be used in so many different ways . You’re unique, and worth everything to me — with or without your vision quirk.”
Izuku didn’t understand just how heavy his father's words were at ten years old, but at the young age of thirteen, he started to understand far too deeply, his life lacking any nice words or encouragement from the people around him.
He held those words deep in his heart, and he would do so forever.
He hadn’t been able to shake off the bullying, and his mother was only getting worse.
He researched her behaviour towards him on his eleventh birthday after a heavy argument that left him confused and angry, venting to multiple online forums about her actions, and everything and everyone told him two things.
She was abusive, and a helicopter parent all at once.
The two statements that described his mother — an abusive, helicopter parent — typically contradict each other, but they made perfect sense to Izuku, so he wasn’t surprised. Her emotions would flip if Izuku so much as breathed in the wrong way, her coddling turning into bright red anger as she grew frustrated with the boy, unable to manipulate him like she used to.
He’d grown a backbone, knowing that talking back to his mother would be the only way to get some form of privacy, as she would quit in angered defeat and leave him alone instead of keeping him in her line of sight the entire time. There was no other way to go about it — unless he wanted to be even more miserable than he was now.
It also proved to be useful while dealing with bullies. Most of his classmates saw his detached, cold expression and stayed far away from him, choosing to merely put red spider lilies on his desk instead of throwing punches. It also meant his anxious stutter that followed him through his earlier years of school faded away, which was something Izuku was grateful for.
Of course, Katsuki Bakugou was the exception to the rule, the explosive teenager leaving many burns and bruises on the blind boy he hated for no apparent reason. They stopped soon enough, however, but not before he had scarred the blind teenager badly. Izuku couldn’t see it, but he could feel the healed burn on his elbow, and how the skin stretched around the joint.
Izuku didn’t bother hiding those from his mother anymore. She never did anything to help him anyway, often smirking at the newly formed bruises as they showed. All she did to ‘help’ him was replace the medical supplies stashed in the bathroom once a week.
Izuku kept it all a secret from his father, not wanting the man to get involved at all. He already had a lot on his plate with work and sending Izuku money, so the boy thought there was no point in needlessly worrying his father about the abuse he faced both at school and at home.
He was fourteen now. He only had another year until he could move out for good after applying for emancipation, and leave Inko in the past — where she belonged.
But for now, he would have to wait it out, keep his head low, and act as unsuspicious as possible.
Leaving the house at midnight and walking around in the dark was Izuku’s only way of feeling free, from both his mother and his quirk. During the busy hours of the day, his quirk almost always overwhelmed him, the sheer amount of lines and colours confusing the teenager as he tried to make it to school on time.
At night, he was able to see clearly, only passing around two people throughout the many hours he spent in the dark nearly every night. He started to love heights, his quirk not registering the small shapes of things below him, only giving him the barest details so that he wouldn’t accidentally fall off of the rooftops he frequented.
Although it was weird, Izuku knew his quirk was trying to keep him safe. It alerted him to emotional changes almost instantly , as well as brightening the areas where sharper objects would be, for example.
He smiled to himself.
His dad was right, his quirk was beautiful, useful, and unique, and everything else he had told Izuku it was.