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“Can you be honest with me for once?” Izuku is sitting across from his teacher in an otherwise empty classroom, his feet not quite hitting the ground as he hunches in even farther on himself at the question.
“I’m not lying,” he says to the floor, tears pricking in his eyes. He does not want to cry though, not here, not now. Crying now will only make his teacher even more angry, even more convinced that Izuku is lying. So he strangles on the lump in his throat and refuses to let the tears fall.
“So you mean to tell me that you managed to get a perfect score on this test without cheating?” Tanaka-sensei says.
Izuku does not trust himself to speak without bursting into tears, so he nods his head fiercely, never shifting his gaze from the floor. There is a heavy sigh from his teacher and Izuku tenses, heart rate picking up.
“I know you may think that by lying to me you won’t get in trouble, Midoriya. But it’s only making your situation worse for you.
“Now, tell me, who did you use to cheat off of?”
“I didn’t cheat.” Izuku whispers.
“Enough with the lying Midoriya! I know people like you aren’t as intelligent as the rest of us! And I can tell you don’t pay attention in class! So I know you could not have received a perfect score on this test! So who did you cheat off of?” Izuku keeps quiet even as Tanaka-sensei’s words cut him to the quick.
After several beats of silence, his teacher lets out another heavy sigh and says, “If you won’t tell me who you cheated off of I’ll be forced to give you a zero for the whole test.”
Izuku could hear his heart pounding in his ears, drowning out all other noises. His mind scrambled to come up with something that would satisfy his teacher, but it was like trying to grab onto water, his thought just kept slipping out of his head.
“Fine, you get a zero then.” Tanaka-sensei bites out, and Izuku knows he has been dismissed. He gets up from the chair and grabs his stuff as if he is in a trance. He is aware that he is moving, aware that his body is performing actions. But he does not feel any of them. It is as if a layer of cotton is wrapped around his brain.
He manages to make it outside like that. Putting one foot in front of the other because somewhere deep down he knows that it is what he is supposed to do. But as soon as he makes it outside his school gates, the dam holding everything back shatters.
Izuku has no idea what he is going to do. He has never gotten such a bad grade before. He wonders if his mom will believe him when he tells her or if she will take his teacher’s side, arguing that his quirklessness makes him stupider than everyone else, that he must have glanced at another student’s paper as they were handing it in and subconsciously put down their answers., that he’s nothing more than a stupid, useless deku.
Izuku is not entirely sure how he makes it home, but by the time he reaches the front door, he has dried his tears and done his best to conceal the burn on his arm Kacchan gave him that morning. And he has resolved to keep the incident from her for as long as he can, he does not want to be a burden, does not want to add more to her already overfull plate. He pastes on the brightest smile he can muster and lies straight through his teeth for the rest of the weekend.
Learning has always been Izuku’s one sure refuge in a world that seems determined to beat him down at every turn. For as long as he can remember, Izuku has always loved uncovering the details of the world, and he won’t let school take that away from him.
So Izuku comes up with a strategy: he’s going to study harder than ever before, and he’s going to know the correct answer to every possible question his teachers could ever ask. He’s going to keep learning (about heroes especially). But he won’t let suspicion of cheating mar his record. He won’t ever stand out in so obvious a way again. Quirkless children can’t stand out. Izuku plans to fly under the radar. Being noticed has never done him any favors, and his teachers clearly won’t appreciate it if he shines too bright.
Izuku starts to get questions wrong on purpose. It’s not enough that his grades drop too much, and not enough that his mother becomes overly worried. After all, it’s perfectly understandable that the academics of middle school would present a challenge. Any reasonable parent would understand.
It quickly becomes a game. Izuku aims to still get stellar grades – after all, he’ll have to have a good record to become a hero. It just has to be believable. He’s just not quite the top of the class anymore: that accomplishment goes to Kacchan, who wastes no time crowing about his accomplishment.
Izuku deliberately misses the third question of every quiz for a while to see if anyone will notice. No one does. He drops down to third place in the class – a respectable position – and maintains it with mathematical precision. “Forget” to carry the one here, mistranslate a word of English there, and he keeps his grades exactly where he wants them to be: decent, but ultimately unremarkable.
Izuku keeps up this strategy once he gets to UA. He couldn’t bear it if Mr. Aizawa expelled him for suspiciously high grades – what would All Might say? There’s no way his academics will get in the way of him becoming a hero.
He hovers around fourth place in the class by midterms – certainly a believable place. He came dangerously close to beating out Kacchan if his calculations were correct, but manages to finagle a believable mistake on his oral English exam.
“Oh no Mr. Yamada, did I mix up the prepositions again? I really thought I had them this time!”
Yamada assures him that he’ll get it soon, not knowing that Izuku has been near fluent in English for years. How else was he supposed to watch All Might’s news coverage from his time in America?
A week after the midterm class rankings come out Mr. Aizawa calls him into his office. He drops a thick folder onto his desk with a thump.
“Midoriya, you’re here. Sit down.” He doesn’t seem angry, but teachers don’t always look mad at the beginning of trouble. Sometimes they lure you in with false niceties before springing their trap. Izuku didn’t think that Mr. Aizawa would be the type, but he doesn’t see why else he would be here.
Mr. Aizawa opens the folder as Izuku gingerly takes a seat. He pulls out papers one by one and lays them neatly out on the desk. Izuku leans forward.
“Why would – do you keep photocopies of everyone’s work?” says Izuku, flabbergasted.
“Of course. How else would I track your progress?” He pauses for a moment to look at Izuku with a level gaze. “Do you know why you’re here?”
“I didn’t cheat!” Izuku blurts out before he can stop himself, and then curses himself for his stupidity. He feels his heart start to race. He can’t believe he’s back here again. Same song, different verse.
Aizawa doesn’t give him much time to hyperventilate.“I didn’t think you did,” he says, and plucks a paper from the tabletop. It’s his math test from last week. He taps at a red circle on the first page with a long finger. “I watched you teach this concept to Kaminari for an hour and a half three days before the test. You understand it better than anyone in the class. But this answer is wrong.”
Izuku’s mouth goes dry as he frantically tries to keep up. That was almost a compliment, he’d swear it, but he has to be mistaken. That’s not how this works. That’s not how it’s ever worked.
But it’s never been Aizawa-sensei on the other side of the desk, either, and he’s smarter than Izuku’s old teachers could ever hope to be.
Izuku forces back a sharp whine at the realization. Aizawa is a different player altogether from his old teachers, which means it’s possible the entire game is different now, and he’s been playing it wrong for months.
How many mistakes has he made without knowing it? How close is he to losing it all?
His hands tremble, and Izuku shoves them between his knees as subtly as he can. He can’t afford to let Aizawa see them right now, not when he still doesn’t know how precarious his current position is. Nerves are so easily taken as an admission of guilt, after all, and that’s the last thing Izuku needs.
Aizawa is still watching him, unreadable even as Izuku feels like he’s being peeled back layer by layer, and even though there wasn’t a question, Izuku knows Aizawa is waiting for some sort of response.
"I'm sorry," he tries, torn between searching Aizawa's expression for any clue about how to behave and avoiding his gaze entirely, "I must have missed something small. You know how it is."
The smile he puts on then is more a grimace than anything, and there's still no clear reaction from Aizawa. There's a tilt of the head, a narrowing of the eyes, a long hum. But Izuku doesn't know what any of it means .
"That's what I thought too, the first few times. But it kept happening, and something didn't add up." Aizawa pulls out a few more papers and lays them side by side on his desk. "So I took the liberty of going back over your work for the year. Notice anything?"
Izuku looks at the papers, an assortment of worksheets and essays and tests. On a usual day, he can pick apart patterns in seconds, chase down implications like a hound on the scent. But today he is too shaken to find that state of mind. All he sees are his mistakes, intentional though they may be, and all he remembers is the last time he was in a room like this.
His answers hadn't really mattered then. Do they matter now?
He shakes his head, eyes fixed on the table, and in his lap his hands wind more tightly together.
"Do you know how likely it is, Midoriya, for a student like you to get a perfect score on an assignment?"
Izuku screws his eyes shut and braces. Shakes his head even though he knows where this is going. Knows what Aizawa is going to say next.
"Almost guaranteed."
Izuku's breath leaves him in a rush of air, and his head snaps up fast enough to hurt. Aizawa meets his eyes, steady, and he doesn't take it back.
"You're fourth in the class, Midoriya. And not once this year have you turned in an assignment that's gotten full marks. That doesn't happen." Aizawa narrows his eyes, "I want to know why expecting even one perfect score seems to surprise you, Midoriya."
Izuku objects without thinking. Because Aizawa can't really be asking that, can he?
"But sir, I'm quirkless."
It takes Aizawa's calm mask breaking into something truly baffled for Izuku's mind to catch up to what he just said. Because… that isn't true anymore, is it?
...Well, as All Might would say, "Fuck."
He hurriedly stumbles into explaining, trying to protect the secret he had been charged with. He didn’t want to let down his mentor, didn’t want to experience the same disappointment from him that everyone else had shown Izuku.
“I - I mean, I was quirkless for most of my childhood, being a late bloomer and all, I - I was quirkless but I am not now, no I am not now.”
His heart rate was so elevated it was not helpful at all in relaxing enough to lie convincingly. He wondered if Aizawa-sensei could hear it, racing like a stampeding horse.
“No, you definitely mean what you said the first time. Explain.”
His teacher’s voice didn’t really give him a lot of clues as to what he was thinking, but Izuku went cold nonetheless. He couldn’t let All Might down, he just couldn’t!
“No, I just still forget sometimes, I forget that I am not, not anymore…” he trailed off, not entirely certain how to get himself out of this hole he had dug that was steadily growing deeper.
“Even if I take that at face value for the moment, what does being quirkless have to do with getting no perfect scores? You should be aceing at least some of the assignments, yet you have none. With a precision that looks planned. ”
How on earth was Izuku supposed to explain that one . Everyone knew that quirkless was supposed to mean worthless and stupid. No one had ever questioned this before. No one. But now someone had, and it felt like the world was dropping out from underneath him.
“But… but everyone knows…” he trailed off, unable to continue.
“I am going to take a stab in the dark here, and suppose that you experienced much discrimination for your supposedly quirkless status, and don’t think we won’t touch back on that, I definitely will come back to it, but for now we will focus on this. The world expects those who are quirkless to be less than in more ways than just lacking a quirk. In fact many quirkless are bullied so badly they end up taking their own lives.”
At that moment the world finished its drop, and the breath exploded out of Izuku.
He knew.
Izuku didn’t know how to handle this knowledge. No one had ever known or cared before. And Aizawa-sensei was here doing both? Tears slipped quietly out of the corners of his eyes as he stared in shock at the ground in front of him. What in the world was he supposed to do now that someone knew and cared? Unprecedented.
“I…” he tried to speak again, but succeeded no more than the time before.
He chanced a glance up at his teacher only to be surprised again at the softness and empathy in that face. Maybe, just maybe things would turn out okay from this conversation. There were secrets that had to be kept, but maybe some could be told for once.
After all the man in front of him had shown more caring, even before this moment, than others had in the past. Izuku had always felt it was because Izuku was valuable for his quirk but maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe Aizawa simply cared .
“Well… they all say that quirkless people will never live a life worth living anyways. So it doesn’t matter if they die. Nothing you do to them matters. They can die and it’ll be the only worthwhile thing they’ve done.”
Aizawa’s face pinches. “Who’s “they”, Midoriya?” He asks, voice gentle like the promise of dreams.
Izuku stares at his shoes. They’re red, just like the blood that appears from getting shoved to the ground. Red, like the shininess of a fresh, stinging burn. Red, like a spider-lily calling on his desk.
“Who wasn’t?” He whispers dully. If it gets any louder, Izuku is going to fall apart.
“What did they do?”
Izuku hides his face into his hands. “Does it matter? I- I don’t wanna talk about it. It doesn’t matter. I didn’t die.”
“But that’s not why it doesn’t matter,” Aizawa counters. “It matters because it happened. Even if it didn’t affect you, which I highly doubt, it matters. Nothing like that should happen to anyone, because no one deserves treatment like that.”
“But...” Izuku can’t explain it. It’s a conviction that runs through his bones, telling him that there’s something wrong with him, that makes it so that he deserves it all. It lives in his chest, his only constant companion but never a friend.
“Do you think other quirkless people deserve it? Do you think they don’t deserve success? To be happy?” Aizawa’s finger draws circles through his papers, cutting through mistake after deliberate mistake.
Izuku can’t say anything. His heart is in his throat, his tears a waterfall for missing childhood innocence and the pain of lost hope.
“Then why,” and oh, Aizawa’s voice grows dangerously soft, “don’t you?”
His thoughts can’t stop buzzing around in his head, shaken loose by the crumbling of his beliefs.
“You deserve happiness, Midoriya. You deserve a place where you feel comfortable and safe. You deserve friends who look out for you. And if you ever feel like you don’t, or you don’t think you have that, my door is always open. Any teacher’s door is open. People care about you, Midoriya.”
Izuku feels the world stop spinning. He folds his hands in his lap, but he can’t meet his teacher’s eye. “But it’s only because I got a quirk that I’m here now.” He replies woodenly. This is a thought he takes to bed every night, and one that rises every day with the sun.
“I only got in because I saved Uraraka from the zero-pointer. Before that, I had zero points. None. Even with my quirk. If I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything against the robot. So there’s no way I would've gotten into UA. Everything I have now, it’s because I have a quirk.”
The words leave a bitter aftertaste. He can’t stomach thinking about the timeline where All Might hadn’t taken him in. Where he’s left a worthless, useless, unwanted deku. It leaves him terrified, because Izuku loves his mom’s cooking, but with his fragile heart, he thinks he would’ve become another statistic. A stain on the pavement. An unvisited grave.
Izuku is not sure when he started crying, but it is too late to stop now. He bows his head in an attempt to keep his teacher from seeing the tears even though he knows the shaking of his shoulders will give him away immediately.
He is spiralling and he knows it, even though he has no way of pulling himself out. Nothing to anchor himself on. His breaths are coming in shorter and shorter gasps now, and no matter how he tries he cannot seem to get enough air. There is a rushing in his ears and his vision is going grey around the edges. Distantly Izuku realizes he is having a panic attack and he wonders if this will be the thing Aizawa uses to expel him.
Then there is a hand on Izuku’s shoulder and Aizawa is saying, “I need you to breathe with me, Midoriya. Can you do that for me? Just match my breaths.” As he brings one of Izuku’s hands up to his chest.
Aizawa takes an exaggerated breath in and Izuku does his best to copy it. His breath shudders as they breath out, but Aizawa keeps the pace going, taking big exaggerated breaths as Izuku slowly starts matching him.
“Can you look at me Midoriya?” Aizawa asks after a few beats of solid breathing. Izuku shakes his head fiercely, scattering a few teardrops from his lashes as he withdraws his hand from his teacher’s chest. Aizawa lets him take his hand back, but he keeps his one hand on Izuku’s shoulder.
“Kid, please,” Aizawa says, and Izuku cannot refuse the almost desperate note he thinks he might be hearing in his teacher’s voice. So he looks up and meets Aizawa’s concerned gaze from where he is kneeling on the floor in front of him.
“You might have gotten into the hero course here at UA because of your quirk, yes. I won’t deny that. But kid, you’ve stayed because of your heart, because of who you are as a person. You’re where you are today because you are a true hero Midoriya, and it is amazing to me that no one managed to beat it out of you before you got here.” Izuku is crying again, but these tears feel different, they feel lighter than the ones before.
“I want you to become the best hero you can be, and I’ll do everything i can to get you there, but you have to stop handicapping yourself in the classroom. Okay?” Aizawa asks.
Izuku gives him the brightest smile he can as he nods his head, tears still streaming down his face, “Yes sensei!”
“Good kid,” Aizawa says, his face softening slightly. Without thinking, Izuku throws himself forward and wraps his arms around his teacher. For a brief moment after, Izuku freezes as he wonders if he just ruined everything, but then Aizawa is returning his hug.
“You’re gonna be an amazing hero kid, I can guarantee it.” Aizawa whispers to him and Izuku clings to him just a little tighter.