Chapter Text
Izuku’s favorite time of the day was 4 AM.
There was just something about that time of night… Morning? The world seems to slow down as everyone is at home, asleep in their beds. Stars shine brightly in the night sky, or as brightly as they can within the city. No one exists to torment or ridicule him. It was a safe time for him.
Granted this also meant that others had noticed this as a good time as well. Criminals and villains seemed to thrive at this time of night on the shadier sides of the city. 4 AM was the last hour of night patrols for heroes, this meant that a lot of times, heroes tended to slack off during this time, especially in the part of the city that most deemed villainous to begin with. No one cared about the people who were attacked or threatened at 4 AM because they must have deserved it, they shouldn’t have been out at that time, they were asking for it, or they, the victims, are villains or criminals. So, crime went left unchecked by the professionals.
Maybe that added on to why Izuku liked 4 AM. It was the only time of the day where he wasn’t a quirkless, helpless, unwanted waste of space. No. Instead 4 AM was the time he donned his all black gear, his two electric batons, and a couple of throwing knives and went out to save the people the heroes deemed unwanted just like him. Izuku, himself, became a hero to the downtrodden, down on their luck, and even the shadier individuals of Musutafu because to him, everyone deserves to be saved despite what the heroes say.
When Izuku was four, he and his best friend, Bakugou Katsuki, AKA Kacchan, were obsessed with heroes, especially the number one hero, All Might. They were so cool, always saving people and saving the day. Their quirks brought sparkles into the greenette’s eyes and their victories brought a feral smile across the blond’s. It was then and there, after watching their first All Might fight, that they decided to be a future hero duo together to save the day and to save the people. Nothing was going to stop them.
***
Kacchan got his quirk first. It was glycerin, just like his mom’s nothing more, nothing less. To say the blond was furious and heartbroken was an understatement. He couldn’t be a hero with that quirk. It does nothing to help others. He couldn’t take down a villain with his sweat. It was pointless. He wasn’t going to be a hero. Kacchan was devastated and refused to watch or listen about heroes.
Izuku was devastated for the blond. It was their dream. When he heard the ever feisty Kacchan breakdown about their lost dream, the greenette just held onto his best friend with his own tears streaming down his face.
“It’s okay, Kacchan. I’ll be a hero for both of us. I can do it. Don’t worry Kacchan,” and more spilled from his lips to try and reassure his friend.
Katsuki would never admit it, but the words did reassure him. At least one of them could still be a hero. Could still make their dream a reality. Then time passed. Izuku turned 5 with still no sign of his quirk. His mom took him to a specialist. There his heart shattered.
Quirkless.
No quirk.
He will never have a quirk.
This time it was the blond’s job to try and consol his friend. Izuku sat in silence with tears dripping from his soulless eyes. All their dreams meant nothing.
It took a long time to get Izuku to seem like his normal self with a lot of encouragement and love from Kacchan, Inko, Auntie, and Uncle. But after a few months, a sparkle was finally starting to appear in Izuku’s eyes once more. His love of quirks returned and he went back to analyzing any and every quirk and hero he saw. Because, Izuku decided, he would still be a hero, and if he wanted that to be a reality, he would need to learn all he could. When the blond learned his plans, Izuku could tell he was worried, but he still supported the greenette. Izuku tried to convince him to join him in his endeavors, but at this point, Kacchan had already accepted Aunite’s offer to work with her and his dad at their company, Bakugou Inc. Kacchan took up modeling the kids' clothes, and once the blond made a promise, he stuck to it. The blond helped him, though.
Izuku still watched every fight and interview with heroes, noting down important information, especially anything that could pertain to him one day. It was during an All Might interview when Izuku felt his heartbreak one more time.
Him and Kacchan were sitting in front of the TV bouncing in excitement. It was always a treat whenever the number one hero would grant an interview. They looked forward to his encouraging words and presence. Then in the middle of the interview, the fateful question was asked.
“So All Might, some viewers have been sending in questions, and we would like to know your answer.”
“Of course! Ask away,” the large man boomed through the TV.
“Many have been asking, is it possible for a quirkless individual or someone with a quirk that is not based in fighting, to be a hero?”
No one breathed in that small apartment the second the question was asked. This was it. This was Izuku’s time to rejoice that the number one hero believed in him even if no one outside his family did.
All Might froze on screen for a minute before answering.
“No, I cannot, with good conscience, say that those individuals could be heroes. It is too dangerous, and they would have no way of protecting themselves. They would just become burdens to their teams. Instead they should pick safer jobs such as a policeman, business man, doctor, or the like.”
Izuku froze. Kacchan yelled. Inko quickly turned off the TV, and looked to her son. The same look he had from learning he was quirkless was spread across his face. The devastation was the same. Izuku couldn’t become a hero. The number one said it himself.
Kacchan grabbed Izuku’s hand and yanked him to his feet. The greenette was so out of it that he just blindly followed his best friend to wherever he was leading him. He could vaguely hear the yelling emanating from the blond, but nothing registered for a while. Eventually when he came to, he realized they were in his room. Kacchan had wrapped him in a black blanket and was fuming to himself.
“Kacchan,” Izuku eeked out in a shattered voice.
The blond whipped his head up to look the greenette in the eyes.
“Screw him, Deku,” Kacchan proudly proclaimed. “His opinion doesn’t matter. If you want to truly be a hero, then this is your origin story. Don’t let that trash man sway your belief in yourself.”
Tears welled up quickly in Izuku’s eyes and spilled over as he launched himself at the blond.
“Kacchan!” He cried.
“Come on, Deku. Let’s trash all this man’s merch. He doesn’t deserve to be on your walls.”
Izuku was hesitant for a second. He had spent so much time and allowance on all of the merch, but when All Might’s words hit him again, he agreed with Kacchan. In seconds all the posters were ripped from his walls and all the figures and collector’s cards tossed without care into the garbage.
It was a few months after this instance that Izuku started to look up to other heroes. He started to notice the ones that had a great quirk for hero work, but largely fought quirkless. People like Bubble girl, Nighteye, Ms Joke, and more. There were so many that relied on their own fighting abilities and they won. When Izuku found Eraserhead, he was ecstatic. He ran over to the Bakugou household instantly just having to tell Kacchan right that moment.
“Kacchan!” he yelled as he threw open the front door. This was a common enough occurrence that no one in the house was fazed.
“He’s in his room, Izu-kun,” Mituski stated with a smile curving her lips.
“Thanks Auntie!” Izuku chirped as he bounded up the stairs.
“Kacchan!” Izuku looked around quickly as he threw open the blond’s bedroom door. Kacchan just looked at him from where he laid on his bed, a single eyebrow raised in question.
“Kacchan! I just found the most amazing hero! You would not believe it! I can’t tell what his quirk is or even if he was one. He fights quirkless, Kacchan! All he has is a support item, and he always wins! Kacchan, this is proof that I can be a hero too! Can you believe it! This is so cool! He is so cool!” Izuku rambled.
“...ku… ZUKU!” With that final name, the blond finally caught the greenette’s attention.
“You need to give me more about who the hell this hero is, you idiot.” Instead of being embarrassed, Izuku bounded over to Kacchan’s desk where his laptop sat and pulled it over to him on the bed.
“I found this video as I was searching herotube,” he started. “It’s very grainy and hard to see since it’s dark. I think he’s an underground hero. The comments say that his name is Eraserhead… maybe. There’s not a lot of information on him, but when I searched the name, a small article came up of a hero debuting a few years ago named Eraserhead and how he saved a small girl from being kidnapped. Nothing else really came up, but if he is underground, then that would make sense.” As he was rambling, he had pulled up the video.
In the grainy video, a man in all black with a white scarf around his neck battling against four villains could be seen. The man did not display any outward sign of a quirk as he fought. Instead he punched, kicked, pulled, pushed, and more to defeat the villains. In the end, the man stood victorious against four bigger opponents.
Izuku looked like he did when he first found All Might. Stars were lit up in his eyes and he was vibrating from his excitement. It was possible! His dream was possible!
Granted it was not smooth sailing, even after his dreams got back on track. In fact, it seemed like everything just got worse. The boys turned 7 and started their next year of school. It started off small. People sometimes acting like the greenette wasn’t there. People not hearing something he said. Sometimes he would come to school to find crude drawings sprawled across his desk for which he would get in trouble for. Bugs left in his shoe locker and his desk. He would trip when headed to the cafeteria, causing all of the lunch to spread across the floor while other kids trampled on it as they walked by. To top it off, most of this happened on the days that Kacchan was gone for modeling work.
Then it started to become more frequent and the other students became more outspoken. That’s when he first heard “quirkless” said in such a derogatory way that it sounded like a curse. That’s when his dream of being a hero was openly mocked and ridiculed because he was nothing more than “worthless, quirkless, scum.” People started to push him, and ‘accidentally’ use their quirks on him. They never got punished. In fact, it seemed like the teachers were always looking the other way. It started to happen even when the blond was near.
Kacchan would scream and yell in his defense, but in the end, he was always the one punished with detention or the like. Nothing could be done to help Izuku, no matter how hard the blond would try.
It was then that Kacchan had a plan. Izuku wanted to be a hero one day, right? Well that meant he was going to have to learn how to fight eventually.
“Hag! I want to learn how to fight!” the blond boldly pronounced to his mother one day after school. She looked on in shock and confusion.
“If I am going to be continuing modeling and making a name for myself, I should learn how to defend myself! There is a gym nearby with a trainer that could train me and Zuku.”
Mitsuki was hesitant. There was something more going on here, but she didn’t know what. It wasn’t until Izuku arrived at their home one day after they got back from a shoot with a black eye, that she finally agreed to let them learn self-defense.
So train, they did. From 7 to 12 they went to the gym after school everyday (Katsuki only going when he didn’t have a shoot or business trip with his family.) They were taught basic self-defense and many styles of martial arts. To Katsuki’s ire, this didn’t change what was happening at school. They couldn’t be the ones to throw the first punch because he just knew that no teacher would believe that they were protecting themselves, but Izuku only got beat up on the days that Katsuki wasn’t at school.
Each time the greenette showed up with new bruises and cuts, the blond would beg him to fight back. They were villains, they deserved it, but Izuku refused. Stating that they were just kids like them. It didn’t matter, as if he didn’t matter. Katsuki wasn’t sure what to do. All he could do was clean and bandage Izuku up and then send him back home to his mom.
Then middle school hit and everything fell apart. Kacchan was going to be homeschooled because the demand for Bakugou Inc. skyrocketed. He was gone more times than he was in school, and it just became easier for the family to teach him from their studio. This left Izuku by himself facing the masses at school. The bullying skyrocketed for him. Now that there wasn’t a perpetually angry blond at his side at all times, the other students took advantage of that. Izuku gained more scars in the first few months than he had the last few years. He was careful to never let Kacchan see or know, though. The blond was worried about him enough as is, he didn’t want to make that worse, so he lied. He said things were better. He hid his wounds and bruises. He became pretty proficient in using concealer to hide the ones that couldn’t be covered with clothes.
Then that truly fateful day happened. The Bakugou’s were gone for a month to do a shoot in Thailand. It was about a week since they left that it happened.
Izuku was strolling down the street not wanting to go home quite yet when he crossed a TV that was on display showing the news, in front of a little conbini. A villain attack. Izuku watched in horror and a villain was displayed on screen causing havoc in the shopping district across town. Someone was caught in the midst and for a moment Izuku was blissfully unaware of who it was. Then the camera zoomed in right as the sludge-like body revealed the face of the victim.
His mom.
His mom was caught!
Why was no one helping? Where were the heroes? What was happening? The news stated that the heroes on sight could only wait for someone with a better quirk to come along to help.
BULLSHIT!
Izuku could see multiple openings when someone could have ran in to save her.
When he could have ran in to save her.
But no one did anything! The heroes just watched as his mom suffocated! When a ‘suitable’ hero finally arrived and pulled his mom from the sludge, she was declared dead on sight.
It couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t. The news was lying. It was a dream. When he gets home, his mom will be at the stove making katsudon like she does every Monday evening. Yeah. That’s what was going to happen.
Izuku walked home in a daze. Nothing registering in his head. Before he knew it, he stood in the genkan of his home peeling off his shoes.
“I’m home!” he called, praying fervently for a response.
Nothing came.
Maybe she was just running late. Yeah. That’s what was happening.
Time passed and no one came. Then at 10 o’clock there was a knock on the door. When Izuku opened it a police officer stood there along with a smarmy looking woman with a briefcase.
“Midoriya Izuku?” the police officer asked. Izuku absentmindedly nodded in response.
“Your mother was caught in a villain attack earlier this afternoon. She did not make it. I am sorry for your loss,” the police officer started. Izuku checked out. He had disassociated before because of things at school, but it could never have been as bad as this. The police officer continued to talk and then the woman took over. He understood nothing.
Later when he came to, he was standing in the front room of the local orphanage with no idea why and how he got there.
He found out later that after figuring out who Inko was and that she had an underage son, they tried to contact family to take him in, but no one wanted him due to him being quirkless.
No one cared.
So he went into the system. They needed to find a foster home for him, but until then, the orphanage it was. It was hell on earth and nothing more. Take the treatment he received at school and magnify it by 8 and that was what it was like. A week later, he was transferred to a foster home, which was even worse (part of that was that it was on the other side of the prefecture away from where the Bakugou’s lived.) He wasn’t allowed a phone or any way to contact them.
He could only pray that when they got home and learned the news, they would find him.
Months passed and he got passed around the prefecture going from foster home to orphanage to home to orphanage. Each one worse than the last, as everyone hated and mistreated the quirkless kid.
He was never found.
It was at his fifth orphanage about half a year into this hell, that Izuku learned about the magic of 4 AM. On one of the worst nights, he left the place. He just wandered the city in a daze not really caring if anything happened to him.
Sometimes he hoped that something would.
Then, one night, he passed one alley that made him stop. He could hear a scuffle followed by a woman repeatedly saying “no” and “stop”. Izuku checked around him. There were supposed to be heroes nearby. He knew because he tracked patrol routes in his spare time, but no one was around. The lady’s voice became more frantic, and Izuku couldn’t leave her, but he had no way to call for the police. Before he knew it, he charged into the alley. There he saw the woman being pressed up against the wall struggling to get away from a large man who trapped her there. Without thinking, Izuku ran up, pulled back his fist, and punched with all that he had in him. Miraculously, it worked. The man didn’t notice him, and as such, Izuku’s punch knocked him unconscious, making the man fall to the ground in a heap.
Beside him, the woman slipped to the ground crying. He turned to her in a hurry, but then moved slowly with his hands held out to his side to appear non-threatening.
“Hey, it’s okay. You should get out of here. I don’t know when this guy’ll wake up. You’re okay, I promise.”
The woman sat there for a little longer before she looked him in the eye. She reached forward suddenly and held one of his hands in two of her own.
“Thank you!” she sobbed as she started to stand. “Thank you so much. You saved me. Thank you.” And with that, she left.
Izuku stood there in silence with his hand still held out in front of him. He…saved her? He saved someone. He… he was a hero for someone. A spark of happiness that he hadn’t felt in what seemed like years lit up in his heart. He was a hero. He had worth for something. In a daze, he returned back to his pallet on the floor of the orphanage. The next night, he headed out again. Then the next, and the next, and the next. This became his routine. He wasn’t able to help someone every night, but every so often, he was able, and those nights made the pain of his days worthwhile.
It was about a month and a new foster home later, that he realized that he needed to be able to do more. Luckily this foster home let him go to the local library where Izuku had access to the computers there. There he started to research. He looked up fights for the heroes that fought largely quirkless and took note of their form and fighting abilities. He also looked at quirked heroes, and tried to figure how he could adapt their moves. He looked up videos on parkour and pressure points. He learned where to hit to knock someone unconscious fast without causing permanent harm. He practiced the parkour he watched each night as he ran across roofs and jumped between buildings.
The more he improved, the more he was able to help the people he saw each night.
He started to look up videos on tech and support item creation, and one night he made himself his first support item. The batons that could turn electric when he releases the battery inside the chamber. His gloves protected him from the current, but he could use them to stun criminals and villains.
He started to build a name for himself. Each time he saved someone, he would calm them down and help them call the police to turn in the criminal. Then he would leave before the police got there. He knew that what he was doing wasn’t technically legal, but he didn’t care.
Apparently the people he saved started to refer to him as the Rabbit. He really didn’t understand why, to be honest. He never gave out his name and he always wore an entire black outfit with a beanie and mask, so no one really knew what he looked like. Talk about him started to appear on the news and floated around him whenever he went to whatever school he was at now.
The news always seemed confused that every few months he would change location. They speculated that he moved around to help other areas. Little did they know that it was just because he kept being shoved out of one orphanage or foster home, into the next.
Izuku really didn’t care about the recognition, to be honest. He was just happy to be a hero in his slightly less than legal way. It gave him purpose and worth to his life.
He was entering his third year of middle school, his 10 th foster home, this one located in the Musutafu area. Whenever he was in the area, there was one apartment building that he always loved to sit on top of, so there he was. No one ever came up here, especially not at 4 AM, so he had removed his black hoodie, beanie, and mask leaving him in just a tank top and joggers. His arms were exposed to the air and if anyone were around they would see that they were covered in just as many scars as they were tattoos. There was hardly a blank spot to see on them.
So there he sat. His legs dangling off the side of the building as he leaned back on his hands staring out at the city. He couldn’t help but wonder how Kacchan was doing. He typically didn’t let himself think about his first friend, but tonight he couldn’t help it. He had seen a billboard earlier that day where the other teen had modeled the latest for Bakugou Inc.
He let his mind wander for a while until he heard a soft pap of feet hitting the roof behind him. He went completely still, but did not change his posture one bit. He listened carefully as the feet moved closer to his back, and then he heard the soft fwip of fabric running through the air. With practiced ease, Izuku’s hand whipped out and grabbed the fabric before it could surround him. He used it to simultaneously pull himself up and yank the perpetrator towards himself as he raised a steel toed boot to slam into the stomach of the other person. It was only after he made contact that he noticed who it was, so, with terror in his voice, he exclaimed:
“Oh my gosh! Eraserhead! I just kicked Eraserhead! On my gosh, I am so sorry! Sorry! Sorry!” He kept repeating as he retreated quickly. He just hurt his favorite hero!