Chapter Text
The sound of cheers and clapping filled out the air, as the crowd thickened and drew closer to the source of their excitement.
An underscore of voices pleaded for the crowd to stand back, but their shouts were drowned by the thinning space between each person in the crowd.
Izuku narrowly avoided getting stepped through and he glimpsed a yellow tape up front through the legs of several people.
It was probably the only thing managing to do the job of the voices and blocking off the square from the gazing crowd.
“You have no chance against my chivalrous spirit, villain!”
A sudden piece of rubble came flying overhead and crashed through a nearby tree, causing several shrieks.
Some guy in a suit next to Izuku turned pale. He muttered something about ‘missing the train’ and hurriedly disappeared out of view.
The hole he left behind in the mass of people exposed a thin walk that trailed up to the front.
Izuku snaked his way through that trail between stomping legs and flailing elbows, some of which hit him and made his vision blur or body parts flicker.
He stumbled for a moment, which resulted in even more hits and flickering, but Izuku grit his teeth and powered through it.
A yellow blur in his otherwise messy vision indicated he had made it to the front and an enourmous ‘ boom’ welcomed him.
As the picture turned clearer, a smile split across Izuku’s face.
He ran up to the front of the yellow tape, stretched taut across the street, and joined in the crowd’s cheering.
It was a fight between two people, taking up most of the park area.
One of the people threw a heavy punch and knocked the other back several feet, then looked to the crowd and gave a peace sign - he was probably the hero.
“Fear not, brave watchers!” the hero shouted.
Next to Izuku, a man with blue uniform sighed and motioned for the crowd to stand back, though Izuku didn’t pay much attention to that and kept his gaze forward.
The hero was tall and built like a brick. He looked funny, with his red hair formed into a spike that made Izuku giggled.
A shout came from the villain, something that Izuku couldn’t hear, but he could feel the anger in their voice.
He saw a grey mass form in their hand, before they swiped at the distracted hero.
The hero whipped his head back and barely caught a knife made of stone with his bare hands.
As the fight continued, Izuku noticed the hero was drawing away from the crowd for some reason.
Which wasn’t very nice, since that only made it harder for Izuku to see.
Izuku gave the yellow tape in front him a moment of consideration - there probably was a reason the blue uniform people had put it up - before he shrugged and passed through it.
He broke into a sprint and ran towards the two fighting figures.
After he had caught up, Izuku perched himself on a nearby stonestep and watched with stars in his eyes, as the two traded blows.
He saw a snarl built on the villain’s face, created by each outlash at the hero that barely left a scratch behind.
“Piss off!” They snarled, while gasping for breath.
In a particularly vicious strike at the hero’s neck, their stone weapon crumbled.
“You will face the consequences of your actions justly, villain!” The hero roared.
A glimpse of something different flitted across their face, before the hero slammed his fist into it and they collapsed on the ground.
Izuku clapped like he had seen the spectators do and even the lack of acknowledgement from the hero couldn’t wipe away his smile.
In the days since Izuku had left, his own curiosity had taken charge and been his only guide.
(It was a few days ago, right?)
A left turn here, a right turn there and a sprint towards that big shiny thing in the distance.
It wasn’t before the sun began to set and shadows grew long that Izuku had realised he had no idea where he was anymore.
The first few streets had been familiar, a warm comfort in their reassurance that Izuku could still turn around and go back to Mom if he wanted.
But a few too many turns and the world laid out before him was new. The road behind Izuku was as unfamiliar and inviting as the one in front of him.
So he kept walking.
It wasn’t like there were a whole lot of other things for him to do.
Hero watching was fun though.
Among the constantly changing scenery, Izuku could always know what to expect from a hero fight and it had quickly risen to become his new favorite thing.
Fights were flashy and cool, with the added bonus of Izuku’s quirk giving him an easy front seat - given he could first make it through the crowd.
He didn’t really like flickering in that space between the spectators, but surely there weren’t always going to be that many people.
The people never acknowledged him either, but someone would have to soon.
Sitting from his current front seat, Izuku swung his legs back and forth and watched as the fight wrapped up.
The hero fished out a pair of cuffs from his pocket and roughly attached it to the villain.
He pulled them up by the arms and began dragging their limp body away, while talking into a phone with the other hand.
Izuku didn’t bother following - the stuff after fighting was always the boring part.
He watched, until the pair disappeared out of the park and he was left alone on the small stone perch.
For a moment Izuku sat in uninterrupted silence, before deciding that was boring.
Silence in general was boring.
(It was easy to forget that he had barely spoken himself, since stepping out of that door)
As Izuku hopped off the perch, his eye caught on something on the ground and his brows knitted together.
He moved closer and tilted his head in interest - it was a small bag filled with white powder that the villain had probably dropped during the fight.
“What’s that?” He asked no one in particular.
“That.” A sudden voice spoke out from somewhere very close.
Izuku yelped loudly, stumbling back and nearly missing the next thing that was said.
“ Pronoun. Used to identify a specific person or thing observed or heard by the speaker.”
Was someone talking to him?
Izuku whipped his head around for the source, before realising that the voice was coming from his pocket.
It was dry, robotic, leaving an unnatural pause between words and he had heard it before.
With heart crawling up his throat, Izuku felt around in his pocket.
"Example: that's his wife over there.”
He pulled out the phone and was greeted with a white page filling out the entire screen.
There was a large bar at the top and black scribbles going all the way down below.
The scribbles looked almost a little bit like art - if it wasn’t for the fact that Izuku vaguely knew they served a purpose. He knew it was ‘letters’ and that those letters formed words that adults could use to silently talk with each other.
Writing seemed to be a way of talking without needing to be heard - and while Izuku knew how to spell maybe a handful of words, that paled in comparison to the paintings which the phone could create from its vocabulary.
Actually, maybe letters really were a bit like art.
A small bubble of airy warmth spread up in Izuku, as he looked down at the first friend to speak to him in recent memory.
The fact that it was an inanimate object had little importance to Izuku - it talked and made art and that was really cool.
(Maybe it would answer him)
Izuku considered for a moment, then let his eyes wander around the park in search of something fun to share.
The lucky winner ended up being the large stone basin centered in the park square. Occasionally jets of water splashes were thrown into the air, creating a beautiful water show that was very nice - but Izuku failed to see the point if he couldn’t play around in it.
He pointed towards the basin. “What’s that weird bubbly thing?”
The white page changed. “Article available: ‘ What is this weird bubble thing that suddenly appeared? How do I get rid of it?’”
Izuku blinked. “Wha-”
“Press page or confirm for auto translation.”
A moment of silence was left behind as Izuku waited for more to be said. Nothing came and Izuku’s smile thinned into a frown.
The small bubble of warmth inside him popped like a balloon, before it could really spread.
Behind it, it left an empty pit in his stomach and a stark clarity.
The phone seemed like it could answer his questions, but something told Izuku - maybe the stretching silence brought on from when it cut off his voice - that it couldn’t talk with him.
Izuku wasn’t sure how, but he knew.
Though that was okay, because it could answer questions and he had a lot of questions .
His mouth twitched, lips curling upwards until it settled into a smile - His phone better be prepared.
Audio Transcript:
Search history of [ 01010101 01110011 01100101 01110010 ]
Starting: Today
Search:
[So I wanna see this museum, but I don't know where it is. It has like a big white roof and a lotta heroes inside]
[I wanna know where it is. Can you help me?]
Pretty please]
Your search matched no current documents.
Suggestions:
- Make sure all words are spelled correct
- Try different keywords
- Try more general keywords
- Try fewer keywords
[What’s a keywords?]
Keyword: Noun. A word or concept of great significance.
[Okay... It’s a big museum and it’s white on the roof and it has heroes]
[Can you please tell me where it is?]
Your search matched no current documents.
Expand to see further suggestions and definitions.
[Hero. Museum. Where.]
[Please]
Entering Application: Mustafa on foot - the Map for your convenience.
Creating Search: Hero Museum.
Search Result: 20
Begin route: [Kamino Fallen Heroes Memorial] ?
[Accept]
You have arrived at your destination.
[It’s so quiet here. I don’t like this place...]
Music video available: The Red Hour - I don’t like this place.
Begin autoplay?
[What’s autoplay?]
Autoplay: Noun. A functionality that causes a video, audio file, etc. to play automatically, without action from a user.
Izuku rested heavy against the flat polished stone behind him and wrinkled his nose at the screen.
“You’re weird.”
A moment passed, then a new notification - he had recently learned that was the word for the green box - popped up and took over the previous message.
The text written across the screen still looked like scribbles to Izuku’s eye, but the monotone voice made sure he could understand the string of letters and sometimes give meaning to the constant stream of new vocabulary that far exceeded his own.
Each question was a little chip in the wall that stood between Izuku and understanding the device in his hands or the world that it offered.
Izuku had far to go, but a small smile crept onto Izuku’s face, now he could more or less recognise the new word it presented.
He wasn’t sure, but he had an idea what the definition might mean.
Begin autoplay ?
[Accept]
Continue route to: [Hero Museum]
Current searches left : 12
Izuku was starting to think that maybe night time wasn’t all that scary.
He had expected it to be - everyone knew that night time meant monsters and villains coming out to steal your quirk and make you sad.
The only way to keep your quirk safe was by going to bed at ‘good night-time' and never talk to strangers - Mom had told him, so it had to be true.
Time around night was scary and dark and full of quirk stealing monsters. That was a fact.
Except he hadn’t seen anything like that at all.
Despite keeping a really good eye out, Izuku had yet to find any sort of boogeymen or monsters lurking around the darkness - just some people peacefully sleeping in street corners or the occasional angry shout of someone walking funny.
Izuku was starting to wonder if Mom had just wanted to keep a piece of the night to herself.
The night was dark, but was also quiet and had a soft atmosphere that eased the tension in Izuku’s shoulders.
Maybe quiet wasn’t that bad either.
The middle of the day should be a nice time, but instead the world was loud and filled with masses of people who never blinked twice before stepping through Izuku.
At that time of day the big streets were buzzing with chatter and a single wrong step could sweep Izuku into a rushing flow of commuters.
It would drag him under waves made of static and drown out his thoughts for what felt like forever.
The few times Izuku had been caught in one of the floods, he had fled his way into back alleys as soon as he clawed his way to shore.
Blindly stumbling, he had hidden himself behind trash containers or empty shells of apartments, as his body stitched itself back together.
He was better at avoiding the floods now.
Maybe that’s why he had started preferring the night time and quieter streets. They were nice in comparison.
Izuku leaned back against the wall behind him and rummaged his pocket for his phone with a familiarity that felt close to routine.
The screen lit up his face and he mindlessly tapped around on the home page in search of something interesting.
There were several colorful boxes that he had yet to explore - it was only now while the rain poured down outside that Izuku had decided to sit down and figure out what the boxes did.
He pressed in a box that contained a smaller grey box with a lense.
The box zoomed out to fill the entire screen and Izuku stared slack jawed in a moment of silence.
Reflected back to him were familiar features and a face that he hadn’t been able to see since the day his quirk came in.
Izuku’s own face looked back at him and the image blinked dumbly in unison.
His hair still had the same unruly curls sticking out in every direction and the same freckles dusted across his cheeks, maybe a few more than he last remembered.
Izuku looked mostly the same, if it wasn’t for one feature that made him almost unrecognisable.
His eyes had nothing inside of them.
Instead in their place, there were two voids made of grey color that fussed at the edges and bleed into the skin around his eye lids.
Wait- Izuku leaned closer to his screen.
His reflection blinked back at him and Izuku tried to keep his eyes as open as possible, even though looking into himself left a swirling sense of vertigo.
They weren’t actually grey. Or rather, they weren’t just grey.
The slightest static could be seen as he blinked and it reminded him of a television screen. A bit like when a big storm had hit back at home and the screen had flickered with black and white noise.
A thought gripped him - Izuku scotted over to a nearby metal bar laying on the ground and swiped his arm through it.
He quickly lifted it up and watched the arm closely, as he felt the tell-tale numbness muffling his veins.
For barely a moment, his arm was a flickering silhouette of static - less a shape and more the suggestion of form.
Within the next moment, the flickers knitted lines around the edges and filled out the inside, turning it solid and normal.
The numbness was as good as gone and Izuku flexed his hand experimentally without issue.
He repeated the experiment a few times more, watching enraptured as the temporary static matched exactly the void in his eyes.
Izuku wasn’t sure what to do with that knowledge.
...What was he? What had his quirk done to him?
Izuku didn’t have an answer to that.
Continue route to: [Hero Museum]
Current searches left : 6
Izuku was attempting to look through the cracked window of a beatdown shop, somewhere he couldn’t quite remember what was called and in the middle of the night, when a man came storming out from a side alley. He had purple-blue crystals growing down his arm and enough muscles to stop a moving car.
Izuku took several steps back, as the man glared daggers back at the alley, and a few more when his voice dripped venom. “If I ever see your piss-ass face again I will skin you and sell it to the landlord- Don’t goddamn try me!”
Other shouts came from the alley, but Izuku couldn’t hear it over the barking laughter that spilled from the man.
He threw up a middle finger, then shouted something very weird and stormed off.
Izuku didn’t quite have the bravery to look for who the man had been talking with - they were probably scary and loud too - but his mind latched onto the weird word the man had spoken.
And when faced with the strange and unfamiliar with no need to poke at it any further and much more reason to just continue on with his day, Izuku did the only thing he could think of.
[What does motherf**ker mean?]
REDACTED DUE TO VULGAR LANGUAGE
[Please tell me what mortherf**ker mean]
REDACTED DUE TO VULGAR LANGUAGE
Profanity filter is permanently enabled until further update.
[What’s Vulgar?]
Vulgar: Adjective. Making explicit and offensive reference to s** or bodily functions; coarse and rude.
[What’s s** ?]
SITES UNAVAILABLE DUE TO UNDERAGE
Would you rather read: [Top 10 Best Clutch/Winning Moves from All Might in History] ?
[Accept]
If anyone were to stop and see the boy, they would wonder why he was wearing a warm looking hoodie on a summer day.
They would also wonder which security guard had allowed a kid into the museum on their own, when he barely looked old enough for elementary school.
The sun baked in from the large glass windows, and the small groups of people milling around the exhibitions seemed to have regretted not going for a swim instead.
Meanwhile the boy looked like he couldn’t be any less bothered.
He ran between the different sections of the museum, aww-ing and squealing at any little thing that grabbed his attention and with absolutely no hint of adult supervision.
Sometimes he would stop to stare at the printed wall text next to the exhibitions for minutes on end, though he clearly wasn’t taking a single word in.
Other times, the duller sections of the museum like rundowns of Pre-quirk society or The American Quirk Agreement of 2092 were practically skipped through, as they failed to keep his attention over the more child friendly galleries or footprints on the floor that he excitedly followed.
He struggled to peer into the higher cabinets and nearly cried when he couldn’t make a drawing for the open billboard - but otherwise he seemed to have the time of his life.
At the open entrance room of the museum stood a large marble statue in the center.
It reached nearly to the ceiling and could be seen from several of the floors, where the stairs led down to the shops and exit.
After a few hours of exploring, Izuku found himself there at the bottom.
The statue had two tufts of hair and a smile that radiated warmth despite the fact that it was carved in stone.
All Might stood in the center of a museum filled with heroic history and he felt larger than anything Izuku had ever seen before.
Izuku craned his neck up to where he could almost get a glimpse of the hero’s face.
Clasping his hands together, Izuku closed his eyes and made a wish.
Izuku put his heart into the wish and as much sincerity as he could muster, because All Might had said he always listened to honesty.
A single ping went off in his pocket as a text was sent, but it went without his notice.
On his way out, Izuku passed through a shop funneled with shelves and long rows of colourful hero memorabilia.
He spotted a small plush that was squished into a corner shelf and leaned against some books.
It was slightly muted under a thin layer of dust and had probably been misplaced.
Izuku padded over to the shelf and found himself luckily able to reach it if he stood on toes.
It was an All Might plush - a little chibi version of the greatest hero, which was a fact that Izuku had just decided.
A big grin adorned its face with comically large eyebrows and a bright colored suit that made Izuku smile.
He lined his hands up on each side of the plush and took a deep breath.
On the count of three, he smacked his hands together in the hope of catching the plush like you would a particularly troublesome bug.
He hoped to find soft material, but was instead rewarded with a resounding clap, as his efforts passed through the plush and only met skin.
“Awwww.” Izuku pouted and felt a swirl of disappointment rise up in him.
He pulled out his phone instead and a flash went off as he took a picture of the plush.
The memory was added to his gallery - alongside the steadily growing collection of visual souvenirs from the places Izuku had been since home.
A neon green sign lighting up the sidewalk on a rainy night.
The dusty gravestone of someone who died nearly a hundred years ago.
The redhead hero standing tall with arms crossed.
A street dog with black spots, three eyes, and a pup’s head peeking out from behind.
Long row of hero statues, all with their fist raised to the sky.
Izuku scrolled through the memories with a smile - Mom would love to see these once he got back home.
Hopefully All Might really liked his wish and would say hi to her for him.
Izuku really hoped he heard.
[Text message sent - Audio translation]
To: [Hall of Heroes: Security - emergency contact]
From: [01010101 01110011 01100101 01110010]
Hey All Might.
I wish that my quirk turns off.
I don’t know how, but Mom was sad. Can you help me?
Please. I promise to be very good and give her lotsa hugs.
My phone taught me a really cool word, so I’m gonna use it. Because you’re really cool.
It’s like a goodbye- I think… my phone uses weird words, but I think it’s a cool word.
I wish I could read the stuff written on the walls here… there’s so many words.
Mom would read them to me if she was here, because she’s really smart. Like super smart.
I miss her.
She said that when you feel heavy inside and you’re thinking of someone, it’s because you miss them. I miss her… I doubly miss her.
Wait- I was gonna say goodbye.
I’m gonna say goodbye now. The cool goodbye word.
Can you tell Mom I came and wished to you?
Sincerely *****
A thought had been sitting in the back of Izuku’s mind since his visit to the museum - maybe even before that.
The heavy sound of rain outside promised a slow, boring day, so Izuku nuzzled further into a little corner and decided he might as well make the best of it.
He pulled out his phone and asked. “I want to read. How do I read?”
The familiar white page appeared and a simple answer was spoken back to him. "Article available: ‘How to teach your child to read.’ Press page or confirm for auto translation.”
Izuku let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.
That actually sounded like what he was looking for and not some strange, off-kilter site that would be shortly followed by a redacted message blaring across his screen.
“What’s confirm?”
“Confirm. Verb. To establish the truth or correctness of something previously believed or suspected to be the case.”
That was… a lot of words. Izuku wasn’t really surprised since that sounded more like the cryptic messages he had grown used to.
Izuku narrowed his eyes and willed his brain to figure out the puzzle.
He had heard the word ‘correct’ in that sentence. And correct was good, so that had to mean the sentence was good... probably.
Izuku nodded to himself, feeling proud to have figured out yet another mystery and he repeated the old question.
The phone spoke back to him and asked again for his ‘confirm’.
“...Yes.” Izuku started hesitantly, then nodded with more confidence. “Yes.”
Izuku settled, leaning back on his arms with his legs stretched out on the floor of the small abandoned building he had found.
He laid his phone next to him and let his wander over the cracks in the ceiling, as the air was filled with a mellow stream of talking.
The sound of the rain outside played as an underscore and quickly made Izuku’s eyelids grow heavy.
“There are five vowels in the alphabet: a, e, i, o, u; the rest of the letters are called consonants…”
Some of the stuff were things that Izuku recognised, while some of them he didn’t, and others he wasn’t quite sure if he should recognise but just got confused by the explanation.
He occasionally threw in a question or two, but otherwise listened.
Izuku had done a lot of that lately, just listening. If anything he was probably the best in the world now at listening - he was a professional listener (another word he had recently learned).
So he was gonna be great at the words.
He had to be.
A moment of silence passed before Izuku realized he had forgotten to listen for the last couple of minutes.
As he turned his head over to the phone, the voice flickered and began to speak again.
“There are five vowels in the alphabet: a, e, i, o, u…”
Izuku blinked as he recognised the explanation, like a repetition in a melody where the voice was the singer. Was it going way back to the start again?
“the rest of the letters are called consonants…”
Oh, it was going back. Izuku realised with a sinking feeling that this was going to be a very long day.
“Okay, Izuku.” He mumbled. “Be smart. Adults do this all the time, you can do this. You’re a mini-adult. You’re the adult.”
Izuku resolutely fixed his gaze on the phone and kept it there - even as he began to lose track of time and the rain outside pettered off. His legs felt heavy and the robotic voice echoed in his skull, but Izuku wasn't going to let go once he had a project.
Once the first page was done Izuku went to the next - and when that site was done he found a new one.
Sometimes the words would turn muddy or Izuku’s mind would wander, but the lesson would never continue without his attention.
So slowly, but surely he was able to grasp onto little pieces of knowledge, one bit at a time.
He could do this.