Chapter 1: AE Ch 01
The first time Kacchan's quirk hit him, Izuku Midoriya was four years old and standing too close.
It happened at the park behind their apartment building, the one with the red slide and the sandbox that always had somebody's lost shovel buried in it. Katsuki Bakugo had gotten his quirk two days earlier, and he'd spent both of those days making sure every kid in the neighborhood knew about it. He'd shown the kids at preschool. He'd shown the lady at the convenience store, who had dropped a carton of eggs. He'd shown his own mother, who had shouted at him so loudly that people three floors down had heard every word, and he'd grinned through the whole thing like it was a parade in his honor.
Now he stood at the top of the red slide with his palms held out in front of him like a hero on a poster, and the other kids crowded at the bottom, and Izuku wriggled his way to the very front because he needed to see how it worked. He needed to know where the sweat came from. Whether it smelled like anything. Whether it hurt Kacchan's hands when it went off, and if it didn't, why not, and whether the inside of his palms looked different from everybody else's, and whether he could make it big or small on purpose, and whether—
"Watch this," Katsuki said, and the world turned white and loud.
Izuku didn't remember falling. He remembered sitting in the sand with his ears ringing, and he remembered a hot, sharp pain on his left forearm, like someone had pressed a spoon from the stove against it. When he looked down, a blister was rising there, round and shiny and about the size of a hundred-yen coin.
The other kids were cheering. Katsuki was grinning down from the top of the slide like he'd won something. Then somebody's mom was yelling, and Izuku's mom was running across the grass with her grocery bag bouncing against her hip and a daikon radish sticking out of the top of it, and Izuku started crying, mostly because her face looked so scared.
"It's okay," he kept saying into her shoulder while she pressed a napkin soaked in water bottle water against the burn. "It's okay, Mom. Did you see it? Did you see Kacchan's quirk? It went BOOM."
Inko Midoriya had seen it.
She did not think it was cool.
The next day Katsuki did it again, because four-year-olds don't learn lessons, they learn tricks, and blowing things up was the best trick anyone at the park had ever seen.
Izuku stood farther back this time. He had a bandage on his arm and a promise to his mother that he would stay "at least a whole slide away," which he measured very carefully by counting his steps from the ladder. It didn't matter. Katsuki had figured out that he could make the pops come out of both hands at once, and he was so excited about it that he jumped off the slide instead of sliding down it, and a stray spark from his left hand went wide and caught Izuku on the same arm, right below the bandage.
Izuku squeezed his eyes shut and waited for the blister.
It didn't come.
The skin turned pink and stung the way a sunburn stings, and he rubbed it through the whole walk home, and by dinner it had faded to nothing at all.
On the third day, Katsuki hit him on the back of the hand while showing off a trick where he snapped his fingers and made a spark jump out, and it stung for about a minute.
On the fourth day, a pop landed on his wrist, and Izuku didn't feel it.
He noticed he didn't feel it. That was the strange part. He looked down at his wrist, at the spot where Kacchan's spark had hit, and there was nothing there. No red. No sting. Katsuki was already yelling at somebody else, and the other kids were playing tag, and Izuku stood in the middle of the park turning his arm over and over in the afternoon light like it belonged to someone else.
That night Izuku sat on his bedroom floor with his crayons and the notebook his mom had bought him for practicing hiragana, and he drew four arms in a row.
The first arm had a big red circle on it.
The second had a smaller pink one.
The third had a dot.
The fourth had nothing.
He looked at the page for a long time, chewing the end of a green crayon until it went soft. Then he carried the notebook into the kitchen and held it up with both hands, the way kids on TV held up their report cards.
"Mom," he said. "I think I have a quirk."
Inko looked over from the stove. She looked at the picture, and then she looked at him, and then she turned off the burner under the miso soup without looking at it and crouched down and hugged him so fast that the notebook got crushed flat between them.
"Oh, sweetheart."
"It doesn't hurt anymore," Izuku told her shoulder. "Kacchan's quirk is really strong, and it doesn't hurt anymore."
"I know."
"So maybe mine is strong too."
Inko held him tighter.
"Maybe," she said.
She said it carefully. Izuku noticed. He always noticed when grown-ups said things carefully, the way they'd set down a full glass. But he was four, and four-year-olds are allowed to believe their mothers, so he did.
The quirk doctor's office was on the third floor of a clinic near the train station. It smelled like hand sanitizer and old magazines, and the plaque beside the door said UJIKO in gold letters that had started to flake at the corners.
The doctor himself was an old man with a shiny bald head and a white mustache so big it covered his whole mouth, so that when he talked, the mustache moved and nothing else did. He wore round glasses that made his eyes look small and far away. Izuku liked him right away, because the first thing he did was look at the crayon drawing, and he looked at it for a long time, as if it were a real medical document.
"Hm," the doctor said.
Izuku liked doctors who said hm. It meant something interesting was happening.
The doctor looked at Izuku's forearm, where the first blister had healed into a patch of shiny new skin. Then he looked at the drawing again. Then he pulled a little plastic device out of a drawer and pricked Izuku's fingertip with it, very quickly, before Izuku had time to decide whether to be scared.
A bead of blood welled up. The doctor watched it. He wrote something down. He did not say anything for an hour, during which time Izuku read two magazines about gardening, one about golf, and a pamphlet about quirk-related allergies that had a cartoon lizard on the front. Then the doctor came back and pricked the same fingertip again.
This time it barely bled.
"Hm," the doctor said again, and his mustache moved in a way Izuku thought might be a smile.
"Did my quirk do that?" Izuku asked.
"Possibly."
"What's possibly?"
"Possibly is what scientists say when they're very excited but don't want anyone to know." The doctor took out a small glass vial and drew a little blood from the crook of Izuku's elbow. Izuku watched the whole thing without blinking, which made the nurse laugh. "For the registry," the doctor said, and he wrote something on the vial's label. He tilted it away while he wrote. When Inko leaned forward to look, his thumb was already covering the words.
"What does it say?" she asked.
"The standard classification." He set the vial in a rack behind him. "Nothing unusual."
Then he folded his hands on his desk.
"Adaptive resistance," he said. "When his body is damaged, it learns from the damage, so the same thing does less harm the next time. Everyone's body does this to a small degree. Calluses. Tans. The body notices what hurts it and prepares. His simply does it much faster." A pause. "And possibly much further."
"Possibly," Inko repeated.
"Hard to say how far, at this age." The doctor turned to Izuku and smiled beneath the mustache. It was a nice enough smile. It stayed on his face a beat longer than smiles usually stayed. "It's a reactive quirk, Mrs. Midoriya. He can't do anything with it. Things can only be done to him. It would be useful, I suppose, if he wants to be a firefighter, or work around industrial chemicals, or in rescue."
Izuku had been swinging his legs off the edge of the exam table. He stopped.
"What about a hero?" he asked.
The doctor chuckled, not unkindly, and reached over and patted his knee.
"Heroes need something to hit with, young man."
That night Izuku watched the All Might video again.
Not the whole thing. Just the part near the beginning, where the building had already come down and the news helicopter was circling over the dust, and then out of the dust walked All Might with a person tucked under each arm and three more clinging to his back. He was laughing. There wasn't a scratch on him. The people he was carrying were crying and he was laughing, and somehow that made them stop crying, and the reporter's voice went high and strange and said, "Everything's going to be okay, because he is here."
Izuku watched it once. Then twice. By the seventh time, Inko had stopped folding laundry on the couch. By the eleventh, she was watching him instead of the screen.
He turned around in the computer chair.
"Mom," he said. "Can I still be a hero?"
Inko looked at him. Then her eyes went, just for a second, to the pink patch of new skin on his forearm. Then back to his face.
"You can be anything you want, sweetheart," she said.
Her voice did the thing it did when she wasn't sure.
Izuku turned back to the screen and watched All Might walk out of the rubble a twelfth time. He thought about the doctor's hand on his knee. Heroes need something to hit with. He thought about the blister, and the pink skin, and the minute of stinging, and the wrist that hadn't felt anything at all. He didn't say anything else that night, but something in his chest set like cement, and it never really came loose again.
The name came from Katsuki, like most things did back then.
Heroes at the big agencies practiced on training dummies, the heavy wooden kind bolted to steel posts that could take a thousand punches without falling over. Katsuki had seen one in a documentary about hero academies. A week after the doctor's visit, he stood on the edge of the sandbox and pointed at Izuku with one smoking hand.
"Deku," he announced. "That's your hero name. Like a dummy. The wooden kind. You just stand there and get hit." He grinned at the other kids. "That's all your quirk does."
The other kids laughed. The name stuck the way names stick when you're four, which is permanently and without anyone deciding it should.
Izuku didn't cry about it. He didn't tell his mom. He thought about it for a whole night, lying in bed staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling, and in the morning he came to a conclusion that he didn't share with anyone, because he suspected nobody would understand it.
Kacchan was right. That was what his quirk did.
So he'd have to get really, really good at it.
There was a patch of woods behind the neighborhood where the grown-ups didn't go, past the end of the road where the pavement turned into gravel, and Katsuki and his two shadows used it as their training ground. One of the shadows was a boy with leathery wings who liked climbing trees higher than anyone was supposed to. The other was a boy whose fingers stretched like taffy, who was bigger than both Izuku and Katsuki and mostly interested in finding beetles. Katsuki was the leader, because Katsuki was always the leader, and Izuku was the target.
He never said no. The other boys thought that was because he was a pushover.
It wasn't. It was because every hit taught his body something, and Izuku wanted to know what.
He kept a real notebook now, a thick one with All Might on the cover, and he wrote in it every night in careful, crooked kana, with drawings when he didn't know the right words yet.
Kacchan, small pops: nothing.
Kacchan, one hand, close: stings. Gone in 1 hour.
Kacchan, two hands: knocked down. Bruise on ribs. (Getting better?)
Kacchan, two hands, running start: knocked down. Hurts A LOT.
Kacchan, two hands, running start, next day: still hurts.
Kacchan, two hands, running start, day after sleeping 11 hours: knocked down but no bruise.
He underlined that last one three times. It happened that way every time, he realized, flipping back through the pages. Something new would hurt, and it would keep hurting all day, and it would keep hurting the next day if he hadn't slept much. Then he'd have a long sleep, a really long one, and the next time the same thing hit him, it would be different. Smaller. Like his body had been working on it in the dark while he wasn't paying attention.
It sets while I sleep, he wrote, and drew a little moon.
The other two boys got bored first. There's no fun in hitting a target that doesn't cry. By the time they were five and a half, the winged kid would perch in a tree and play games on his mother's old phone, and the stretchy-fingered kid would wander off to turn over logs, and it would just be Katsuki and Izuku in the clearing, Katsuki breathing hard with his palms smoking, and Izuku standing there, singed and dirty and upright.
Katsuki didn't get bored. He got angry. And then, because he was Katsuki, he got better.
Izuku saw it happen before Katsuki did. When a blast stopped knocking Izuku down, Katsuki didn't just fire it again. He fired it lower, at Izuku's legs, or higher, at his face, or from the side while he was still turning, and then the new angle would knock him down, and Izuku would write it in the notebook, and a week later it wouldn't, and Katsuki would find something else. He learned to make the pops tighter so they punched instead of spreading. He learned to fire twice in a row, bang-bang, so the second one hit before Izuku had finished feeling the first. He learned to move while he fired, sliding across the dirt with one hand behind him, and he kept practicing it long after Izuku had gone home, because Izuku found his scorch marks all over the clearing the next day, dozens of them, in lines.
Other kids their age were learning to make their quirks do tricks. Katsuki was learning to make his quirk solve a problem. The problem was Izuku.
"Why do you keep getting UP?" Katsuki yelled one afternoon, a few weeks after Izuku turned six.
He'd been practicing a new move all week. He planted both hands behind him, angled down, and fired, and the recoil launched him forward so fast he was a blur, and he fired again right in Izuku's face at the end of it. It worked. It worked so well that it threw Izuku backward into an oak tree hard enough to knock every bit of air out of his body, and for a few seconds the world went gray at the edges.
Izuku lay in the leaves and waited for his lungs to remember their job.
Then he rolled over, put his hands under him, and pushed himself up.
"Because it hurts less every time," he wheezed.
"That one didn't hurt less!" Katsuki's voice cracked. "I saw your face!"
"That one was new." Izuku wiped his nose on his sleeve. It came away a little red. "New stuff hurts. Old stuff doesn't. You got stronger, so it hurts again. That's how it works." He took a breath that didn't quite fill him up. "But next week it won't knock me into the tree."
Katsuki stared at him like he was speaking another language.
Next week, it didn't knock him into the tree. It knocked him down, and he slid in the dirt, and he got up faster than he had any right to.
Katsuki threw his hands in the air and screamed at the sky, and then he went home and invented something else.
There was a price, though, and Izuku learned it the way he learned everything else, by paying it.
After a big week, a new move from Katsuki, a new bruise that took three days to fade into nothing, he'd come home and fall asleep at the dinner table with his cheek next to his rice bowl. He'd sleep twelve hours. Fourteen, once. He'd wake up so hungry his hands shook, and he'd eat three bowls of rice and ask for a fourth, and Inko would stand at the counter watching him with her arms folded and a line between her eyebrows that hadn't been there a year ago.
She started making double portions of katsudon without being asked. She started packing two lunches, then three. She started asking questions.
"How much did Katsuki hit you today?"
Izuku considered this seriously over his fourth bowl. "A lot."
"How much is a lot?"
"Twenty-seven?" He frowned. "Maybe thirty. Some were small, so I didn't count them the same."
Inko put a hand over her face and stood like that for a while.
She took him back to the doctor with the mustache once, worried. The doctor listened to Izuku's heart through a cold stethoscope and weighed him and measured him and said his body was building something and needed fuel to do it. That was normal for a quirk like his. Growth required material. Nothing to worry about. Then, as he was writing out a note about vitamins, he asked a question in a very casual voice.
"Has his quirk started protecting him from any new kinds of damage lately?"
Izuku answered because he liked answering questions. "Kacchan's explosions. The big ones now too, mostly."
"Anything else? Cold? Electricity? Chemicals?"
"No."
"Heat that isn't from the explosions? A stove, perhaps? Hot water?"
"No." Izuku thought about it. "I touched the rice cooker once but it still hurt."
The doctor nodded. And then he wrote. He wrote for a long time. He filled most of a page, and then he turned the page and kept going, and Izuku watched the pen move and tried to read the words upside down and couldn't. When the doctor looked up and saw him watching, he smiled that same smile, the one that stayed too long.
"Why are you writing so much?" Izuku asked.
"Because you're unusual," the doctor said. "Unusual is wonderful. Unusual is my favorite thing."
Inko didn't take him back after that. She never explained why. Izuku asked her once, years later, and she thought about it for a long time and said, "He looked at you like you were the only thing in the room." And then she went back to cutting vegetables, harder than she needed to.
The carrying game started as a punishment.
That was what Katsuki called it, anyway. By the spring they were six, Izuku had gotten good enough at standing through blasts that the training sessions had started ending in stalemates, Katsuki breathing hard with blistered palms and Izuku swaying on his feet but not falling, and Katsuki hated stalemates more than he hated losing. So one afternoon, after an hour of explosions that had knocked Izuku down exactly zero times, Katsuki stomped across the clearing and pointed at an old pine at the far end of the woods, all the way past the creek.
"Carry me," he said.
Izuku blinked. "What?"
"To that tree. You lost."
"I didn't lose. I didn't fall down once."
"You didn't knock ME down either. So you lost." Katsuki crossed his arms. This logic was airtight to him. "Carry me to that tree, or you're a coward, and I'm telling everyone at school."
Izuku looked at the tree. It was a lot farther away than it looked. Then he looked at Katsuki, who was taller than him and heavier than him and radiating the smugness of a boy who had found a way to win.
He crouched.
Katsuki climbed onto his back.
Three steps, and Izuku's thighs were shaking. Five, and his knees started to bend on their own. Seven, and his legs gave up entirely, and they both went down in a heap in the dry leaves, and Katsuki rolled off laughing so hard he couldn't breathe.
"Again," Katsuki said, when he could talk.
Izuku got up. Again.
They did it every day that week, and the week after, and it stopped being a punishment somewhere in the second week without either of them noticing when. It became a thing they did. Katsuki made it a competition, timing him, shouting insults, adding rules. Izuku made it a measurement. He counted his steps every single time and wrote them down that night. Seven steps. Nine. Nine again. Fourteen. Twenty-two. By the end of the month he could carry Katsuki all the way to the creek, and Katsuki made the tree farther, and then he started filling his backpack with rocks.
And Izuku's legs hurt.
Not the way the explosions hurt. The explosions hurt on the outside, sharp and bright and gone. This was deep inside the muscle, a dull, grinding ache that came on after he got home and got worse all evening, until stairs felt impossible and sitting on the toilet was a whole project. One evening he couldn't get up the apartment stairs at all, and Inko had to half carry him, and she kept asking what happened, what did Katsuki do, and Izuku kept saying "Nothing, nothing, I did it," which was true and made her even more worried.
He slept thirteen hours that night.
When he woke up, his legs still hurt. But less. He went back to the woods after school, and Katsuki climbed onto his back with his rock-filled backpack, and Izuku stood up, and it was easier. Not easy. Easier. He made it thirty-one steps, which was eight more than his record. He got all the way to the tree and put his hand flat on the bark and stood there breathing.
"Kacchan," he said.
"What? Why'd you stop? Keep going to the rock."
"I think I figured something out."
Katsuki leaned over his shoulder, suspicious. "What?"
Izuku looked down at his own legs. They were shaking, but they were holding. "When I hurt myself," he said slowly, working it out as the words came, "my body learns that too. Not just when you hit me. When I do it."
Katsuki was quiet for a second.
"That's dumb," he said. "You can't hit yourself."
"I didn't hit myself. My muscles did. They pulled too hard and something tore, and then it came back more." Izuku's eyes were getting wide, the way they did when an idea got bigger than his head. "Kacchan, it's the same thing. It's the same thing twice. My legs got hit. By me."
That night he opened the notebook to a page near the back where he'd started keeping a list. At the top, in the biggest letters he could manage, it said RULES. He'd started it after the second doctor visit, because the doctor had written a whole page and a half about him, and Izuku figured he should know at least as much about himself as some old man with a mustache.
The list said:
It has to hit me first.
If it gets bigger it hurts again.
Eat a lot. Sleep a lot.
Once I learn it I keep it.
I don't get Kacchan's quirk, I just stop getting hurt by it. (I tried. My hands are just sweaty.)
If something hurts me too much the first time, there is no second time.
Number six was in Inko's handwriting. She'd found the list one night while tucking him in and sat on the edge of his bed and read it, and then she'd taken the pencil out of his hand and written that one herself, slowly, and handed the pencil back, and said, "Promise me you'll remember that one." He'd promised. He didn't fully understand it yet. He understood that she'd meant it more than anything she'd ever said to him.
Under number six, Izuku wrote:
My own muscles count. If I push until it tears, it comes back stronger. Also need food. Also need sleep. Also it hurts.
He looked at it for a long time. Then he added, very small:
Carrying Kacchan = training.
When Izuku turned six and a half, which he insisted was a real age, he watched a nature documentary about finches.
The finches lived on islands far out in the ocean, and some of them had big thick beaks, and some had thin pointed ones, and some had beaks curved like tiny can openers. The narrator explained, in a deep calm voice, that they hadn't always been different. Long ago, they'd been one kind of bird. But the islands had different seeds and different insects and different cactus flowers, and over a thousand generations, the birds on each island had changed shape to fit the food they could find. Nothing had decided it. Nothing had planned it. The birds had just kept surviving, and the surviving had made them into something new.
Izuku watched the whole thing twice. Then he went to his room and got out the notebook and opened it to the inside cover, where, back when he was four, he'd copied the doctor's words in shaky pencil.
ADAPTIVE RESISTANCE.
He looked at it for a long time.
Resistance meant standing still and taking it. Resistance was a wall. He thought about the wooden dummy on the steel post, a thousand punches and never going anywhere.
He drew a line through the words. Then another line. Then he pressed so hard he went through the paper.
Underneath, in careful letters, he wrote:
ADAPTIVE EVOLUTION.
Evolution meant going somewhere.
The fire happened the summer they were seven.
It was the end of August, the kind of heat that made the cicadas scream and turned the grass in the empty lot past the woods the color of straw. The lot had been meant to be an apartment building once, but the company had gone out of business, and now it was just a square of dry field with a chain-link fence falling over on two sides and old fence-post holes scattered through it like missing teeth.
Katsuki had been weird all week, and he wouldn't say why. He'd been running laps around the neighborhood in the middle of the afternoon, when it was so hot even the stray cats hid under cars. He came to the woods red-faced and soaked through, and when Izuku asked what he was training for, Katsuki said, "You'll see, nerd," and ran another lap instead of fighting.
He skipped the carrying game three days in a row. That was when Izuku knew something was really wrong.
On Saturday, Izuku saw.
Katsuki brought him to the empty lot instead of the clearing. The winged kid and the stretchy kid came along too, because Katsuki had told them something big was happening and they should bring snacks and watch. Katsuki walked out into the middle of the field and turned around twenty feet from Izuku, and his shirt was stuck to his back, and sweat was dripping off his fingertips in a steady patter onto the dry grass, and he was grinning. The old grin. The one from the top of the slide, three years ago.
"Today you go down, Deku," he said. "And you stay down."
He'd been building up sweat all week. His quirk made its explosions out of sweat, nitroglycerin that came out of his palms, and the more he sweated, the more there was to burn. He'd spent seven days sweating as much as a seven-year-old could sweat. Izuku understood that one second too late.
Katsuki brought his palms together in front of him.
The blast wasn't like the others. It wasn't a pop, or a bang, or a crack. It was a wall. It was a roar that took the ground out from under Izuku's feet and picked him up and threw him backward through the dry grass like a kicked can. The world went white, and then black, and then white again. When it came back, he was lying on his back staring up at a hot blue sky, and every part of him hurt in a way that was completely, entirely new, and his ears were ringing so loudly it sounded like screaming, and under the ringing he could hear Katsuki laughing. High and wild and triumphant.
Izuku lay there and thought, very clearly: that one's going to take a while.
Then he got up.
He got up slowly, one knee and then the other, and he swayed, and he stood. His shirt was scorched across the front. His eyebrows felt wrong. He was pretty sure his left ear was bleeding.
The laughing stopped.
Katsuki stood in the middle of the lot with his arms hanging at his sides and smoke curling up off both palms, looking at Izuku like he'd never seen him before in his life. His mouth was open. His hands were shaking. Izuku thought, for one strange second, that Katsuki looked scared, and he didn't understand why, because the blast had been amazing. It had been the biggest thing either of them had ever seen.
That was when they smelled the smoke that wasn't coming from Katsuki's hands.
The grass had caught.
Where the blast had torn across the lot, little lines of orange were crawling outward through the straw-colored field. They were small. They looked almost friendly, like birthday candles. Then a gust of hot wind came across the lot from the direction of the river, and the lines weren't small anymore.
The fire moved faster than Izuku had known fire could move. It didn't burn in one place and then spread. It ran. It ran along the ground like spilled water, and it climbed up the dry stalks, and it jumped in the wind, and in the time it took Izuku to take a breath, the whole middle of the lot was burning and a wall of gray smoke was rising out of it.
The winged kid shot straight up into the air, shrieking, and flapped for the nearest roof.
The stretchy kid ran. He was closest to the fire, and he ran the wrong way, deeper into the lot, because the smoke had come down between him and the road and he couldn't see. He made it six steps before his foot plunged into one of the old fence-post holes, and he went down hard, and the smoke rolled over the place where he fell, and he disappeared.
"HEY!" Katsuki was already running.
He ran straight at the smoke. He made it maybe ten steps in before the heat drove him back out, coughing so hard he doubled over, his eyes streaming. He wiped his face with his arm and tried again. The fire shoved him back again. Katsuki's body could handle his own explosions and the heat of his own sweat, because his quirk had built him for it. It could not handle this. Nobody's could.
Izuku walked past him into the fire.
He didn't decide to. That was the thing he'd remember later, and it would scare him a little every time he thought about it. He didn't stand at the edge and think about it, or weigh it, or feel brave. He heard the stretchy kid screaming somewhere in the smoke, and his feet were already moving.
It hurt. Of course it hurt. This wasn't Kacchan's heat, sharp and bright and over in a second. This was a different animal, wide and patient and hungry, heat that didn't stop, heat that wanted to stay. It pressed against his whole body at once. It got inside his clothes. But the part of him that had spent three years learning Kacchan's explosions recognized something in it, some edge or corner of it, the way you recognize a word in a language you're only starting to learn. It hurt less than it should have.
That was enough.
He counted his steps, because he always counted his steps.
The smoke made his eyes burn and his throat close up tight, so he dropped low where the air was cleaner, the way the fire safety video at school had said to, crawling on his hands and knees. Eight. Nine. His palms stung on the hot ground. Eleven. Twelve. His shoes felt soft and wrong on his feet, and the rubber smelled terrible. Fifteen. Sixteen. He couldn't see anything but gray and orange. He couldn't hear anything but the fire, which roared in a low steady way like the ocean.
Eighteen.
There. A hand, stretched way too long, eight or nine feet of rubbery finger reaching out of the smoke, flailing at nothing.
Izuku grabbed it and followed it back to the rest of the boy.
The stretchy kid was curled on his side with his foot still jammed in the hole up to his shin. He was screaming, or trying to, but mostly he was coughing, big wet gasping coughs that shook his whole body. Izuku got his arms under the kid's armpits and pulled. The foot didn't come. He pulled again, harder, and the kid shrieked, and the foot didn't come.
Izuku planted his feet.
He thought about the pine tree at the end of the woods, and Kacchan's backpack full of rocks, and thirty-one steps. He thought about his legs tearing and coming back more.
He pulled until something in his thighs went hot and wet and wrong, a pain from the inside that was nothing like the fire, and the foot came free all at once and they both went over backward into the burning grass.
The stretchy kid was bigger than him. A lot bigger. He was the biggest kid in their grade and he had been for two years. But Izuku had been carrying Katsuki Bakugo and a backpack full of river rocks through the woods every day since spring, and his legs knew this. His legs knew exactly this. He got the kid onto his back, piggyback style, the way he carried Kacchan, and he got one foot under himself and then the other, and he stood.
For one second, he thought his legs would give out. They shook so hard his teeth rattled.
They didn't give out.
He turned around and walked out the way he'd come, counting backward. Eighteen. He couldn't see. Fifteen. The kid on his back had stopped screaming and was just coughing, and his long fingers were wrapped around Izuku's neck, which made it hard to breathe, but breathing was hard anyway. Twelve. Something was wrong with his feet. Nine. Something was very wrong with his legs, the back of them, where the grass was burning up around his shins. Six. Three.
He came out of the smoke into air so clean and cool it felt like jumping into a pool.
The soles of his sneakers had melted to his socks. Blisters ran up both shins in shiny rows. The ends of his hair were crisped and curling, and when he touched them later they crumbled like dry leaves. He walked all the way to the sidewalk, past the fence, and bent his knees very slowly and set the stretchy kid down on the concrete, very carefully, the way you set down something that might break.
Then he sat down next to him, because his legs had decided they were done.
Katsuki was standing at the edge of the lot.
His hands were shaking. Not a little. His whole arms were shaking, all the way up to his shoulders. His face was wet, and his eyes were red, and Izuku didn't think all of it was from the smoke.
The sirens came a few minutes later.
There were a lot of grown-ups after that.
Firefighters, who put the lot out in about ten minutes with a truck that had a hose so big it took two people to hold it. A police officer with a notepad. The stretchy kid's mother, who came running up the street in her house slippers and hugged Izuku so hard that three of his blisters popped at once, and then hugged her son, and then hugged Izuku again, crying into his crispy hair. A paramedic who crouched down and looked at Izuku's legs, and then at his face, and then at his legs again, and asked him three separate times if he was sure it didn't hurt more than that.
"It hurts," Izuku told him honestly. "It's just not new anymore."
The paramedic did not know what to do with that. He wrapped Izuku's legs in wet gauze from ankle to knee and kept glancing at his face while he did it, like Izuku was a math problem that wouldn't come out right.
Everybody kept asking how the fire started.
The winged kid had come down off the roof and was standing behind his mother. He said he didn't know. The stretchy kid was lying on a stretcher with an oxygen mask on his face and his foot in a splint, and when the police officer asked him, he looked at Katsuki, and then away, and said he didn't see.
Izuku opened his mouth to say it was an accident. Just an accident. Sometimes grass catches in the summer. Everybody knew that. It was so hot, and so dry, and—
"It was me," Katsuki said.
Everyone turned.
Katsuki was standing a little apart from the others with his fists balled at his sides and his chin stuck out, the way he stood when a teacher yelled at him. Except nobody was yelling. Everybody had gone quiet. His hands had stopped shaking, but only because he was clenching them so hard his knuckles were white.
"Kacchan," Izuku started. "It was an accid—"
"Shut up, Deku."
Katsuki didn't look at him. He looked at the police officer, a tall woman with a tired face, and he didn't look away from her even when she crouched down to his level.
"It was my blast," Katsuki said. "I've been saving sweat all week. I wanted to make the biggest one I ever did, so I could knock him down and make him stay down. I did it. I made the fire." His voice wobbled on the last word, and he clamped his jaw shut and waited until it stopped. "It was me. Not him. Not anybody. Me."
The officer looked at him for a long time.
"Thank you for telling me," she said finally. "That was hard to say."
"It wasn't," Katsuki lied.
Mitsuki Bakugo arrived four minutes later. Izuku had heard her yell many times, from many floors away, but he had never heard her not yell. She walked up to her son and didn't say a word. She just put both her hands on either side of his face, and held it, and looked at him. Katsuki's chin started shaking. Then she pulled him in against her stomach, hard, and held on, and Katsuki, who never cried, who had once broken his wrist falling off a wall and only said a bad word, stood there in the middle of the sidewalk with his face buried in his mother's shirt and cried so hard his whole back shook.
Izuku looked away. It felt like something he shouldn't watch.
Izuku slept for nineteen hours.
When he woke up, it was dark outside his bedroom window, and his legs were wrapped in fresh gauze from ankle to knee, and his whole body felt heavy and hot and strange, like someone had filled it with warm sand. His stomach was so empty it hurt. His thighs throbbed with a deep, slow ache.
Katsuki Bakugo was sitting in the chair by his desk with his arms crossed and his feet propped up on the edge of Izuku's bed, like he'd been there a while.
Izuku blinked at him. "Did my mom let you in?"
"Your mom made me eat curry." Katsuki's voice was scratchy from all the coughing. "Two plates. She wouldn't let me say no." He scowled at the wall. "I'm grounded forever. The old hag took my phone and my game and my good shoes. I'm only allowed out to go to school and come here."
"Here?"
"She said I had to come say I was sorry." Katsuki's scowl deepened. "I'm not gonna."
"Oh." Izuku thought about that. "Sorry you're grounded."
"Don't say sorry, idiot. You don't get to say sorry, I'm the one who—" Katsuki stopped.
His jaw worked for a second. He looked at the gauze on Izuku's legs, at the shape of the blisters showing through where the fluid had soaked into the bandage. He looked for a long time. The room was quiet except for the refrigerator humming out in the kitchen and the sound of Inko washing dishes, much more slowly than she normally did, which meant she was listening.
"That was the biggest one I've ever done," Katsuki said.
"I know. It knocked me down."
"You got back up."
"It'll hurt less next time," Izuku said. He meant it as a comfort.
He was confused when Katsuki flinched.
"There's not gonna be a next time like that." Katsuki dropped his feet off the bed and sat forward, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor between his shoes. For a while he didn't say anything. Izuku waited. He'd gotten good at waiting, with Kacchan. Kacchan said the real things last, after all the yelling, and only if you didn't rush him.
"Kirino almost died," Katsuki said at last, to the floor. That was the stretchy kid's name. Izuku realized he'd never said it before. "If you weren't there. If you were a normal kid, he'd be dead. And you'd be dead too, if you were normal. Because you would've gone in anyway, because you're stupid."
"I'm not stupid."
"You're SO stupid." Katsuki's head came up, and his eyes were red again, but his voice was steady now. "So from now on, we train for real. Not the dummy stuff. Not those two losers watching and eating chips. Somewhere with no grass. Somewhere nothing can catch. You get tougher, then I get stronger, then you get tougher again. We keep doing it until nothing can burn you, and nothing can knock you down, and I can—" He stopped. Started again. "And I can blow up anything I want, and it doesn't matter. Got it?"
Izuku stared at him.
Something warm and huge was climbing up his throat, and he had to swallow twice before he could talk around it. "Kacchan," he said. "That's—"
"And nobody else hits you," Katsuki cut in. "Not those two. Not anybody at school. Not anybody. Just me."
"That's not really how training works."
"Just me, Deku."
Izuku laughed. It hurt his ribs, which made him laugh harder, which hurt more, until he was curled on his side on the bed with tears in his eyes, and Katsuki was scowling at him with his arms crossed. But the corner of Katsuki's mouth was doing something it didn't usually do.
"You're still calling me Deku?" Izuku asked, when he could breathe again.
Katsuki looked out the window. The streetlights were on. Somewhere down below, a car door slammed.
"Yeah," he said.
"The dummy?"
"No."
Izuku waited.
Katsuki's ears had gone red. He said the next part so quietly that Izuku almost missed it under the sound of the refrigerator.
"The kind that doesn't break."
Out in the kitchen, the water shut off. Nobody came to the door for a long time. When Inko finally did, she brought two bowls of rice and a whole plate of karaage, and she didn't say anything at all, except that she set Katsuki's bowl down first.
The local news ran the story on Monday.
It got thirty seconds, tucked between a traffic report and a story about a cat in Setagaya that had learned to ride the train by itself. A neighbor had filmed it on her phone from a second-floor balcony across the street: an empty field on fire, a wall of gray smoke rolling up into a hot blue sky, and then a small shape walking out of the smoke, bent almost double under the weight of a bigger kid on his back. The small shape didn't run. It walked, steady, one foot and then the other, all the way to the sidewalk. The caption said SEVEN-YEAR-OLD CARRIES CLASSMATE FROM BRUSH FIRE. The anchor smiled, called it heartwarming, and moved on to the cat.
Inko watched it with both hands over her mouth. She watched it again on the station's website that night, after Izuku was asleep, and then she closed the laptop and sat in the dark kitchen for a long time.
Across the city, in a large and quiet house behind a wooden gate, there was a hallway where the floorboards in front of one door were always a little dustier than the rest. The door stayed closed. Nobody in the house walked past it if they could avoid it, and the man who owned the house never walked past it at all.
In a study at the other end of that house, the man sat in front of a television with the sound turned down low.
He'd seen the clip by accident, on the late news, while waiting for the rankings segment. Now he had it on a loop. He watched it with his elbows on his knees and the fire in his beard burning low and steady. He didn't watch the flames. He had seen more fire than anyone alive, and flames were not interesting to him. He watched the boy.
He watched the feet. The weight on the back. The way the boy came through the worst of it, where the smoke was blackest and the grass was burning highest and a grown man would have stumbled. The way the boy didn't stumble. Not running. Not fleeing. Walking, like the fire was weather.
He rewound it. He watched it again. He paused on the frame where the boy came out of the smoke, and he looked at the blisters running up the small legs, and he looked at the face, soot-black and calm, and something moved behind his eyes that nobody in his house had seen there in a long, long time.
Then he picked up the phone and asked his office to find the child's quirk registry file.
Eight days later, somebody knocked on the Midoriyas' door.
Inko opened it with a dish towel still in her hands, and the first thing she felt was the heat.
It rolled into the apartment like she'd opened an oven. The man in the doorway was so big he had to duck to see inside. His shoulders filled the frame from edge to edge. Flames burned across his jaw and around his eyes and over the top of his head, and they did not flicker the way ordinary fire flickered, they poured, steady and endless. His face was set hard as stone underneath them. Inko had seen that face on billboards and cereal boxes and the evening news her whole adult life. She had never once seen it smile.
The Number Two Hero in Japan looked past her, down the short hallway, to where a small boy had come out of his bedroom in his All Might pajamas, with his legs still wrapped in gauze from ankle to knee and his eyes as big and round as plates.
"Midoriya Izuku," Endeavor said.
It wasn't a question. Izuku nodded anyway.
The man's eyes went down to the gauze. Then back up to the boy's face. The flames on his jaw burned a little higher.
"Your son walked through fire," Endeavor said to Inko, without looking at her. "I want to see what else he can walk through."