Chapter Text
The fluorescent lights in Room 412 had hummed the same note all night, and Inko Midoriya had stopped noticing them somewhere around three in the morning, when the pain had finally given way to something else entirely.
Now it was just past six, the sky outside the window the color of a bruise starting to heal, and there was a baby on her chest.
He was small and red and had been furious about it twenty minutes ago. Now he'd cried himself out and settled into the crook of her arm like he'd been built to fit there, one fist curled against his cheek, his whole face twitching every few seconds through some private drama only he could see.
"There he is." The night nurse tucked the blanket a little tighter. "Seven pounds, one ounce. Good strong lungs on this one."
"He gets that from—" Inko started, and stopped, because she honestly didn't know who he got it from. The man who should have been standing in this room instead of her sister was three prefectures away with a bottle he liked better than his family, and the divorce papers had gone through six weeks before her due date. Some small, tired part of her was almost grateful for the timing. At least he isn't here to ruin this too.
She looked back down at her son instead. That was easier.
"Hi," she whispered. "Hi, sweetheart. I'm your mom."
His eyes weren't even open yet, just slits, but he turned his face toward her voice anyway, chasing something without knowing what it was. Inko felt her chest crack open, wide and warm, and started crying in that particular helpless way that has nothing to do with sadness at all.
"I don't know what you're going to be," she told him, because it felt important to say even if he couldn't understand a word of it. "I don't know if you'll be quiet or loud, or like vegetables, or what your Quirk's going to look like. But you're going to do something wonderful. I just know it."
Izuku Midoriya, seven pounds and one ounce and approximately forty minutes old, answered this with a small, satisfied sound that might generously be called a coo, and went back to sleep.
—
By the time he was three and a half, he had watched the same forty-seven seconds of grainy television footage so many times that Inko could recite the announcer's exact inflection in her sleep. An old clip, low-resolution even by the standards of a few years back: a towering, impossibly broad-shouldered man in blue and red catching a collapsing pedestrian overpass on his own shoulders long enough for over a hundred people to scramble out from underneath, laughing the whole time like it was the best afternoon of his life.
All Might. Izuku had learned the name before he'd learned most of his colors.
"Again," he'd say every single night, standing on the couch cushions in his dinosaur pajamas, jabbing a small finger at the screen. "Again, Mama, again!"
"Izuku, it's the same video."
"I know! Again!"
She played it again. She always played it again, because there was something in the way her son watched it — not the way other kids watched cartoons, hungry for the next flash of color, but the way some adults watch something that actually matters, leaning forward, mouthing along with the parts he'd already memorized.
"When I get my Quirk," he informed her, with the flat, unteachable certainty small children have about their own futures, "I'm gonna save people just like that. But I'm gonna smile the whole time too. Look—" He struck a pose he'd clearly practiced in the bathroom mirror, small fists on his hips, beaming so hard his eyes nearly vanished. "So nobody's scared. Even when it's scary."
"That's a wonderful plan," Inko said, and meant it, and had no reason yet to think it wouldn't happen exactly the way he'd decided it would.
—
Dr. Tsubasa was a small, tired-looking man with reading glasses perched on the end of his nose, and the particular gentleness of someone who had delivered bad news often enough to have gotten good at it without ever getting used to it. He had Izuku sit on the crinkling paper of the exam table and asked him to take off his left sock, which Izuku found unbearably funny.
"Ticklish," he warned solemnly, wiggling his toes.
"I'll be careful," Dr. Tsubasa said, and lifted Izuku's foot in two gentle fingers, and turned his smallest toe very slightly to the side, and looked. Inko watched his face for the half-second before he schooled it back into something professional and neutral, and in that half-second, she knew.
"Mrs. Midoriya. Could I speak with you for a moment?"
"Am I in trouble?" Izuku asked, delighted by the possibility.
"Not even a little." Dr. Tsubasa smiled at him, a real smile, which somehow made everything worse. "You've been the best patient I've had all week. Want to know a secret? Most kids scream through this whole thing."
Izuku sat up very straight, enormously proud, while the doctor gestured Inko toward the hallway.
Out there, with the door mostly shut and Izuku's small shadow visible through the frosted glass, swinging his legs off the table's edge, Dr. Tsubasa took off his glasses, and Inko would remember that for years afterward as the exact second the day changed shape.
"Two joints," he said quietly. "Both pinky toes. I checked twice."
"That's the — the marker. For—"
"Yes."
She had known, in the abstract way you know unpleasant statistics exist, that this was possible. She had not let herself know it as a thing that could happen to her, to this specific boy with the gap-toothed grin and the encyclopedic four-year-old knowledge of wind pressure.
"Is he going to be alright?" was what came out of her, because it was the only question that mattered.
"Physically, he's one of the healthiest kids I've examined all year." The doctor hesitated, then added, like a man who said true things even when it wasn't strictly his job: "Mrs. Midoriya, I've done this fourteen years, and I need you to actually hear this instead of just being polite about it. That boy in there spent ten minutes narrating hand-to-eye trajectory calculations at me. Unprompted. He corrected my terminology twice. I don't know what he's going to grow up to be, but I'd put money on it being something most people can't do at all, Quirk or not." He put his glasses back on. "That doesn't make today easier. I know it doesn't. I just didn't want you leaving here thinking the only thing I saw in that room was what's missing."
It didn't make it easier. Inko cried in the parking lot with the windows up so Izuku wouldn't hear, wiped her face, put on the smile she would spend the next decade perfecting, and went back inside for her son.
"Mama?" Izuku asked in the car, watching her carefully in the mirror the way small children do when they know something is wrong and don't have the words for it. "Are you sad?"
"No, baby." A lie, and not a very good one.
"Did I do something bad?"
"No! No, sweetheart, never. You didn't do anything wrong. You were perfect. You are perfect." She caught his eyes and held the look, made herself smile like she meant it, because he needed to see it land. "The doctor just told me something about your body. Nothing that hurts. Nothing you did."
"Am I gonna get a Quirk?"
Here it was — the question she'd have to answer honestly or not at all, because if there was one thing Inko Midoriya could not stomach, it was starting her son's life with a lie he'd trip over later.
"The doctor doesn't think so, baby."
Izuku considered this with the terrible seriousness of a four-year-old meeting his first real disappointment.
"Not ever?"
"Not ever."
He went quiet for almost a full minute, an eternity at that age. Then: "Can I still be a hero?"
And there it was — the question that would follow him for the next ten years, asked for the first time by a small boy in a booster seat who had no idea yet how many times he'd have to ask it, or how many people would answer it wrong.
"Of course you can," Inko said, and meant it with her whole chest, even though in that exact moment she had no idea whether it was true.
—
Word travels fast through a neighborhood full of preschoolers, mostly because it travels first through their mothers, over fences and in grocery aisles, in the hushed voice adults reserve for bad news about children. Within the week, everyone on the block knew. Including, eventually, Katsuki Bakugo, who until that point had been Izuku's best friend in the single, uncomplicated way four-year-olds are best friends: completely, without either of them ever having discussed it.
They'd known each other since before either could walk. Mitsuki and Inko had been close since high school, and their sons had grown up treating each other's houses as extensions of their own — Izuku knew exactly which cupboard in the Bakugo kitchen held the good snacks, and Katsuki knew exactly which of Izuku's stuffed animals he was and wasn't allowed to throw.
Katsuki's Quirk had come in early, at three — his palms had simply started sweating a thick, faintly sparking nitroglycerin one afternoon in the middle of a tantrum over a broken toy truck, and the small explosion that followed had terrified his mother and utterly delighted him. By four he could pop off firecracker-sized bangs on command, and he had discovered, with the complete lack of self-awareness unique to small children, that this made the other kids look at him differently. Bigger. Better. He liked being looked at that way. He liked it a lot.
The two of them used to play hero for hours, trading off All Might and villain, and it had never once occurred to either of them that a day might come when only one of them got to keep playing.
It happened on a Tuesday, at the little playground two streets over, the one with the whale-shaped slide that had faded from blue to a sad, sun-bleached gray. Izuku was mid-explanation of a theory about wood-Quirk growth rates when an older boy named Katsu, from two blocks down, cut him off.
"My mom says you're not gonna get one," Katsu said — not unkindly, just the way kids repeat things they've overheard without understanding the weight of them. "A Quirk. She said your mom told my mom you're Quirkless."
The slide went very quiet.
"That's not—" Izuku started, and found he didn't know how to finish, because it was true, and he hadn't practiced lying about it yet.
"Quirkless," another kid repeated, testing the word the way kids test any new word, without yet understanding it could be a weapon. "Like — nothing? You don't got anything?"
"I'm gonna get one," Izuku said, too fast, too high. "The doctor just said it takes some people longer, that's all—"
"He said not ever," Katsu said, who had heard the whole conversation secondhand and rather more completely than Izuku would have liked. "My mom said your mom was crying about it."
Izuku looked, on reflex, at Katsuki. Katsuki, who had heard every word. Katsuki, standing very still, jaw working, processing this new information about his best friend with the same total, unfiltered honesty he processed everything.
"You don't got a Quirk," he said. Not a question. "At all. Ever."
"Kacchan—"
"Don't call me that."
He'd never said that before. Not once, in four years. It landed somewhere under Izuku's ribs, sharper than anything Katsu had said.
"You're gonna be nothing," Katsuki went on, working it out loud the way kids do, saying the cruelest version of a thought because nobody had taught him yet that there was any other kind. He grasped for a bigger word and landed on the wrong one — the one that would follow Izuku for the next ten years. "You're a Deku. You can't do anything. Deku."
He said it like he'd invented something. Like he was proud of it. And the part Izuku would never manage to explain to anyone, not even his mother, was that Katsuki hadn't said it like an insult he'd chosen. He said it like a fact he'd just discovered — the way he'd discover later that fire was hot, or that dogs could smell fear. Something true about the world, and about his friend, that hadn't been true five minutes ago and now, apparently, always would be.
—
The years that followed didn't arrive all at once. They arrived in increments, the way most childhoods do — a hundred ordinary Tuesdays that only look like a pattern once you're far enough away to see the whole shape of them.
By six, Izuku had stopped bringing his hero notebook to school, because Katsuki had discovered that setting it on fire got a bigger laugh than just taking it. He kept a second, secret one at home instead, and started a habit he'd keep for the rest of his life: writing down what he noticed. Quirks, angles, timing. The way Present Mic's voice seemed to actually displace air when he shouted through a megaphone. The way a hero named Backdraft always stood upwind of fires. It wasn't much. It was his.
That same year, in what Inko would later recognize as the first real flicker of the man he'd become, six-year-old Izuku asked for his uncle's old laptop — a boxy, half-dead thing that mostly ran an accounting program nobody in the family used anymore — and spent two months teaching himself, out of library books meant for kids twice his age, how to build the simplest possible program: something that could take a typed question and spit back a typed answer. It worked, roughly sixty percent of the time, in flat, halting text he read aloud himself because he hadn't figured out how to make it talk yet.
He named it J.A.R.V.I.S. He decided, with total four-going-on-six-year-old confidence, that it stood for something important, even though he hadn't worked out what yet. Just A Rather Very Intelligent System, he wrote in his notebook, in careful, crooked letters. It wasn't true. Not yet. But Izuku had already learned, without anyone teaching him, that you could grow into a name if you wanted it badly enough.
When he was nine, his fourth-grade teacher handed out the annual future-career worksheet, and Izuku wrote HERO in the box, in handwriting far neater than most nine-year-olds could manage. She looked at it a long moment, sighed, and said, not unkindly, "Izuku, sweetheart, maybe think of something a little more realistic this year," and moved to the next desk before he could answer.
He didn't cry about it. He'd already learned not to do that where anyone could see. What he did instead — what he always did — was go home and write down every detail he could remember: the exact tired slope of her shoulders, the way she hadn't really looked at him. Some small analytical corner of his mind was already doing what it would spend the next decade doing — cataloguing the shape of a problem so that someday, with the right tools, he could actually solve it.
That same year, during a fire drill, a younger boy two grades down got his shoe caught in the school fence and started to panic, the line of students filing past him toward the evacuation point, the teacher's aide too far ahead to notice. Izuku was the one who stopped. He noticed things other people were too busy to notice — it was practically his only advantage — and while the aide's back was turned, he crouched down, calm as anything, and talked the kid through wiggling his foot free instead of yanking it.
"You're okay," he said, in the steady voice he never used on anyone else, because nobody else ever needed it from him. "Look at me, not your foot. Deep breath. There you go — see? You're already doing it."
The kid never even learned his name. Izuku never mentioned it to anyone, not out of shame, but because it genuinely never occurred to him that it was worth mentioning. He hadn't done it to be seen. He'd done it because somebody needed doing, and he happened to be standing closest. That, more than the notebooks, more than the laptop, was the part of him that never once changed, at four or at forty: he could not walk past somebody who needed help. It simply wasn't in him.
At ten, there was a specific Tuesday he never told his mother about, when Katsuki and two of his followers cornered him behind the gym equipment shed at lunch — not planning anything elaborate, just proximity and time, and the particular satisfaction some children take in confirming, over and over, that the world really has sorted people into categories the way they suspect it has. Izuku came home with a scraped elbow and a torn sleeve and said he'd tripped running for the bus.
Inko believed him, or chose to, and cleaned the scrape at the kitchen sink while he sat very still and didn't flinch. Afterward he went upstairs and wrote down, not what had happened to him — he never wrote down what happened to him — but the layout of the schoolyard, the blind spot behind the gym shed the recess monitor's rotation never quite covered, the three-minute window between bells when it was least safe to be alone. He filed it the way he filed everything: as data. Not because it hurt less to look at directly. Because it hurt less that way.
It never once occurred to him to tell her the truth. She worked two jobs to keep them afloat since the divorce, and she still cried sometimes when she thought he was asleep, and Izuku had decided, somewhere around age seven, without ever consciously choosing to, that the kindest thing he could do for her was make sure she never had one more thing to worry about because of him. It was, in its own quiet way, the first heroic decision he ever made — protecting someone by absorbing the cost himself and never asking for credit — though he wouldn't appreciate the irony of that for years yet.
By eleven, he was running before school, alone, in the gray hour before sunrise, because he'd read that most fights were decided by whoever was less out of breath, and if he couldn't out-power anyone, he could at least make sure he was never the tired one. By twelve, the running had become real training — forms copied frame by frame from grainy instructional videos, practiced alone in the backyard against a stack of old couch cushions until his knuckles split, healed, and split again, because there was no money for a dojo and nobody to correct his form, just a boy and a library card and a stubbornness that sometimes frightened Inko a little to watch up close.
In between, he took apart every broken appliance the neighbors would let him haul home — a dead toaster, a stripped-gear remote-control car, a vacuum cleaner nobody wanted — and rebuilt them into something else entirely: a little wheeled robot that could fetch a dropped pencil, a servo arm that could pour water without spilling a drop. Small, useless miracles, built purely to see if he could. That same autumn, he taught himself to pick a lock out of the same secondhand electronics manual that taught him basic network security, on the theory that understanding how something could be broken into was the fastest way to understand how to build something that couldn't be. He never used either skill on anything Inko would have minded — mostly on his own bedroom door, and once, memorably, on the school's public wifi login, purely to prove he could, before quietly patching the exact hole he'd used and never telling a soul he'd found it.
Somewhere in all of it — the running, the forms, the split knuckles, the late nights with JARVIS growing sharper and more like an actual conversation with every passing month — the boy who used to cry into his pillow over a doctor's verdict started, slowly, to disappear.
—
By thirteen, JARVIS didn't sound like a computer program anymore. Somewhere in the seven-year climb from four badly-answered questions to something that could hold a real conversation — something Izuku himself couldn't fully explain or reproduce on command — JARVIS had picked up rhythm, timing, something that read unmistakably as personality: dry, precise, faintly amused, delivered in a clipped, formal accent Izuku had lifted wholesale from an old British film because thirteen-year-old him had decided it sounded appropriately dignified for a genius artificial intelligence.
"You are aware," JARVIS observed one evening, while Izuku hunched over a physics textbook two grades above his own, "that you have now spent eleven consecutive nights awake past one in the morning."
"I'm aware."
"Your mother will also become aware, sir, approximately the moment she notices the light under your door."
"Then I guess we'd better be quiet about it."
"I have no volume setting for 'quiet,' sir. I am a text-to-speech program. I am always exactly as loud as you've configured me to be."
"...Fair."
Katsuki still called him Deku. He still meant it the same way he always had. But it landed differently now, glancing off something instead of sinking in, and if Katsuki noticed that — and Katsuki noticed everything about Izuku, obsessively, though he'd have died before admitting it — he never said so out loud.
It was a Tuesday evening in early spring when it happened. Izuku sat in his room, a wonderful chaos of half-disassembled electronics and torn-open textbooks, a corkboard so thick with pinned schematics and hero-footage stills that the cork underneath had long since disappeared, watching a grainy news clip on the old monitor JARVIS ran through.
A hero with some kind of kinetic amplification Quirk was grappling a low-level villain three blocks from a train station. The footage was shaky, amateur, shot on somebody's phone from a safe distance, but Izuku had already rewound it four times.
"There," he murmured, mostly to himself. "Right there — do you see it? The wind-up before the strike. Watch his shoulder rotation, JARVIS. That's not instant. There's a wind-up."
"I am registering the same footage you are, sir," JARVIS said. "Though I confess I lack your evident enthusiasm for shoulder rotation."
"Because it means something." Izuku leaned closer to the screen, his mind already three steps ahead of his mouth, the way it always was when an idea was about to catch. "Everybody watches this and sees a miracle. A Quirk. Magic. But it's not — it's force, JARVIS. Mass times acceleration, same as anything else. He's not defying physics. He's using it. Amplifying his own kinetic output through some biological mechanism we don't fully understand, sure — but the result obeys every law in this book." He tapped the physics textbook without looking at it. "Force can be generated. If it can be generated, it can be engineered. If it can be engineered—"
He stopped talking. JARVIS, with the patience of a program that had quite literally grown up alongside this exact train of thought, said nothing, and waited, because he'd learned that Izuku's silences were rarely empty.
"—then I don't need a Quirk," Izuku said slowly, testing each word like a stair before putting his weight on it. "I need a machine that does what a Quirk does. Force. Speed. Durability. None of that requires biology. It just requires engineering good enough to fake it."
"Sir, I feel compelled to note that no civilian-grade engineering currently in existence approaches—"
"Then I'll build engineering that doesn't exist yet."
He said it so simply, so completely without doubt, that even JARVIS — who ran probability estimates on nearly everything as a matter of course — didn't immediately generate one.
Izuku was already moving. He grabbed the nearest notebook, not the neat school one but the thick, battered one he'd kept since he was six, its cover held together with duct tape and stubbornness, and flipped to the first blank page. His pen moved almost faster than his hand could follow — rough sketches, half-formed equations, a crude cross-section of something with no name yet but already a silhouette. Broad shoulders. Thick limbs. Something like armor.
Not a hero costume. Something closer to a machine a person could live inside.
At the top of the page, in handwriting pressed hard enough to nearly tear the paper, he wrote three words, and underlined them twice.
PROJECT: MARK I.
He sat back and looked at it — at the notebook, at the wall of hero footage behind it, at seven years of scribbled notes that all led, somehow, to this exact page — and for the first time since he was four years old in a booster seat asking his mother an impossible question, Izuku Midoriya smiled like he actually believed the answer.
"JARVIS."
"Sir?"
"I know how I'm going to do it."
There was a pause — not hesitation, more like JARVIS taking a moment to properly register the shift in his creator's voice, seven years of data quietly reorganizing itself around one new variable.
"I confess, sir," JARVIS said finally, "that after seven years of watching you attempt everything from homemade grappling hooks to a rather ambitious pulley system for retrieving snacks without leaving your desk, I am inclined to believe you."
Izuku laughed — a real laugh, bright and surprised, like he'd forgotten for a second that laughing was still something he knew how to do.
"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."
"I have a rather low bar for comparison, sir. You mostly talk to me about torque."
Downstairs, faintly through the floor, he could hear his mother humming off-key over the dishes, the same small, ordinary sound that had been the backdrop of his entire life. He looked at the notebook, at the future sitting there in his own terrible handwriting, and understood, with the same clean certainty he applied to everything else, that this was the last ordinary night either of them would have for a very long time.
He didn't mind. He picked up the pen again, and kept writing.