Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Two months after his fourth birthday, Izuku’s mother took him to the doctor, where they found out that he was quirkless. That he would never get any of the fantastic powers he’d dreamed up. His father left for America a week later, and his sweet, loving mother stopped caring at all. Sometimes she forgot about him, leaving him to make his own way to and from school or to scrounge up food. When he tried to get her attention, she would brush him off or snap at him to leave her alone. When she had a bad day she would yell at him and call him useless, or a waste of space. Every once in a while, when she was very, very mad, she would slap him and lock him in his room. 

As time passed, she forgot about him more and more. She would forget to buy enough groceries for him as well, and he would have to go get them from the store, using money taken from her purse. Occasionally there wouldn’t be enough money, or he’d get caught taking it, and he would have to go dumpster diving behind the grocery store to get food.

By his fifth birthday, he’d gotten quite good at taking care of himself, and getting what he needed for himself. He would get himself ready each morning by himself, make himself breakfast and pack his own lunch, and take the bus to school alone. At the end of the day he’d take the bus back by himself, patch up the injuries he’d gotten at school (some of the other kids had taken to pushing him around, and sometimes he’d wind up with bruises or scratches), and then walk to the library. Once there he’d do his homework all by himself, referencing books or using the computers where necessary, then he’d spend his time researching either on the computers or in the library books. While he’d only really researched heroes when he started, he’d started researching other things too, like ewing to patch up his own clothes, first aid to patch up his injuries, and cooking so he could feed himself. He’d also started reading ahead in school and researching further into the topics, because when he could learn at his own pace school was fascinating! 

He’d also picked up sign language from watching the classes at the library, and was teaching himself French and Spanish with classes online. He figured the sign language would be useful for when Kachan’s hearing eventually started to be affected by his quirk, though with how often he set off explosions near Izuku his hearing might fail first, and French and Spanish were just interesting.

His studying of languages had uncovered an interest in linguistics as well, and he’d started studying how to make his own language. Not a code, though he was studying that too (the prospect of coding things so that only you could read them was fascinating, and it sounded like it could be really useful for heroes!), but making a real language, with its own spelling system and grammar and everything. He hadn’t gotten to the point where he could actually write in his language, but when he did he was planning on practicing by writing his notes in the language. He’d already started practicing coding his notebooks, which had provided a really fun challenge at first but now required him to make ever more complex codes to remain as interesting.

He’d also found books on fixing things and on coding that he was working through, but he hadn’t gotten much past disassembling and reassembling the toaster, and he was still working on learning all the syntax used in coding. It could get really complicated, but he was getting the hang of it. It was like learning a whole bunch of languages.

When it was getting close to dinner time, Izuku would walk back home, make himself supper, and then head to either Takoba beach nearby to scavenge for things he could practice fixing, or to go dumpster diving. When he’d filled his small wagon full of broken things or enough food, he’d head home and carry all his things up to the roof of the apartment building. He’d set up a fort to spend his time in up there, and would work on his projects until the stars came out. Sometimes he’d stay out on the roof all night, falling asleep in the sleeping bag he’d found, fixed up, and washed. If he got really lucky, he’d see an underground hero patrolling. He’d learned to recognize the few underground heroes he saw, and had started tracking when their patrols were. He made sure to always code those notebooks, and he hid them really well. He didn’t want to risk villains finding out when the heroes were patrolling, after all. 

As he started spending more time on the roof at night, he started seeing more street fights, and had started analyzing those too (He’d wound up starting a new series of notebooks, rather than mixing it in with his hero analysis). He’d started trying to pinpoint weaknesses in the people fighting, and how to fix them. Part of that was studying various fighting styles and martial arts, which he found himself sort-of learning as he mimed the moves on the roof, shadow boxing to try and figure out how they would fit together. 

That was the pattern his days had fallen into since that doctor’s visit. Dawn to dusk, he took care of himself, and then did it all again the next day.

His pattern shifted slightly a week after his fifth birthday, when he was walking home from the beach later than normal. He’d gotten distracted searching the trash piles, and had wound up heading home as the sun was setting. 

He heard a scuffle coming from a shady alley, and a call for help. He dropped the handle of his wagon and ran to the alley, stopping at the edge and peeking around the corner. There was a man pinning a woman to the wall, and she was trying to get free. Izuku’s mind raced as he tried to figure out a way to help, and inspiration struck him at the sight of a pile of loose bricks on the ground. 

He picked up a brick and threw it with all his might at the man’s head. Carrying around the trash from the beach must have made him much stronger than he thought, because when the brick made contact with the man’s temple he dropped like a sack of rice. Izuku ran up to the woman and helped her to the entrance of the alley way. 

“Are you okay ma’am?” he asked.

“Thank you, thank you so much,” she gasped, crying slightly.

“You’re welcome!” He responded cheerfully. He noticed the scrapes on her arms then. “Oh! You’re hurt! Let me get my first aid kit!” He grabbed said first aid kit from his backpack and started treating her arms, while the woman called the police. While they were waiting for the police to come, he wound up tying up the villian with some rope he’d found at the beach. He’d been planning to use it in his fort, but he could always get more. Making sure the villain couldn’t attack them again if he woke up was more important. 

With the villain tied up and the police on their way (and an okay from the young woman), Izuku headed home, lest he be out any later. When he left, he took a brick with him, tucked into his backpack. Just in case he ran into any more trouble. 

Of everything that had happened, it was what the woman had said to him before he left that stuck with him the most.

“You saved me. You’re my hero, kid.” He rode the high of those words for days. Someone had called him a hero! Even though everyone said he couldn’t be a hero without a quirk, he had saved someone! He couldn’t wait to grow up so he could learn to be a real hero, and save more people. That meeting redoubled his drive to be a hero.

A couple of nights later, Izuku was watching the news when a special on vigilantes came on.

People who saved people, without actually being heroes. 

Izuku panicked, because wasn’t that what he’d done when he’d saved the young woman? He spent the whole night researching, eventually concluding that no, he wasn’t a vigilante. Technically. He didn’t have a quirk after all, and saving people using a quirk was a key part of the definition.

Thus sparked a truly terrible idea. He couldn’t legally be a vigilante, but there was nothing stopping him from acting like a vigilante, was there? No, there wasn’t. 

He could save people like a vigilante, and it would be great practice for when he needed to pass the UA entrance exams, too. He didn’t need to wait until he became a hero to save people!

But first, he needed a plan, and a disguise. If he was going to be saving people, then he might get mistaken for a vigilante, and he didn’t want to get in trouble.

The first step of his plan was to do more research into ways to save people without a quirk, including analyzing heroes, vigilantes, and even villains who hadn’t used a quirk, or who had quirks that didn’t work in some circumstances. 

The second step was learning to copy their skills, which led to the creation of his series of training notebooks. He wound up pulling skills from all over the place. Various fighting styles, ballet, street dancing, gymnastics, parkour, and support engineering. Especially support engineering. He’d already started building small things from spare parts he found, now he redoubled that effort, practicing building things that might eventually help him fight. He was very careful when learning parkour, but soon got the hang of running and jumping between buildings, and climbing walls quickly. He added a grappling tool of some sort to his list of things to make very quickly though, as climbing was inefficient, and a grappling tool would be much faster.

He also started running every morning, in an effort to get faster and stronger.

The third step was securing his weapons. He was working on support items, but he didn’t want to wait until he was finished them to start, so he needed another solution in the meantime. That solution became a backpack full of bricks. He also had some knives and had started practicing using a metal broomstick as a staff, but owing to his current lack of skill with both of those and his prior success with the bricks, the bricks were going to be his main weapon.

Step four was a costume. He wound up getting dark gray pants, a black shirt, a black hoodie with cat ears (he loved cats, so when he saw the sweater he had immediately known he needed it), black gloves, sturdy black boots, and black face masks. He used hot glue to add grips to his gloves, and permanent glow in the dark white paint markers to add a cat’s mouth, nose, and whiskers to each of his black masks. He’d also picked up a black backpack, because not only was his yellow one kind of distinctive and really easy to notice, but he didn’t want to have to unpack and repack it every time he went on patrol.

With his rudimentary skills, weapons, and costume sorted, he felt he was ready to go out on his first real patrol. He packed his bag full of bricks, a first aid kit, rope, zip ties, a map, water, snacks, sticky notes, two pens, and a spare knife, and added his main knives and a cell phone he’d fixed up to his pockets (he’d added snap buttons to his pockets to keep from losing his knives and phone), then he set out along his planned route.

He stumbled into bed just as the sun was rising, exhausted and sore, but immensely satisfied with himself. He couldn’t wait to go out again.

Chapter Text

As he got better at building support gear, he upgraded his vigilante costume. He had decided to completely overhaul it and the contents of his backpack once a year, but he would add something new or upgrade something he already had usually every month or so, once he’d had a chance to practice with it, starting once he’d been patrolling for about six months.

By the time he’d been patrolling for a year, he had gotten into the habit of carrying smoke bombs, flashbang grenades, net grenades, a collapsible staff that was also electric, a handful of electric knives, and he’d made himself a mask with a voice changer (which he wound up getting stuck as a high pitched, feminine voice for a while, leading people to assuming he was a girl when he went out on patrol. He didn’t really mind the misconception all that much, and it led people in the wrong direction, so he didn’t bother correcting it, and had adopted that voice as the default) and an air filter, and light up LEDs instead of glow in the dark paint. He managed to make it silence his mumbling and speaking too. He also switched from his previous costume to dark gray shorts and a matching cropped hoodie with a black paw decal on it over black leggings and a long sleeved shirt. He’d reinforced his backpack with metal, meaning that despite having gotten rid of the bricks and rocks he could still use it as a weapon, and added a utility belt to keep his weapons and tools close at hand.

That was around when the police first sent a hero to catch him. He managed to evade the hero with difficulty, and they eventually switched to a different hero trying to tail him. He managed to evade that hero too. As time went on, the police kept sending better and better heroes after him, and he got better and better at avoiding them. Having so many underground heroes tailing him gave him a lot of opportunities to study them too, which wound up improving his strategies for villain takedowns, and expanded his repertoire of underground hero analyses immensely.

He laughed himself silly when he found out the name they’d given him. Lucky Kitten.

As if he could ever be lucky.

All the same, it was a cute name, and he kind of liked it. It was the kind of name that would cheer people up, and it would make villains underestimate him, which was a good thing. With that in mind, he embraced the name as his own. He started signing off his calls to the police with the phrase ‘Stay lucky,’ and would sign his sticky notes with the name they’d given him.

His life soon fell into a pattern of avoiding all the bullies at school, avoiding his mother, working on his studies and projects, upgrading his gear, and then patrolling while avoiding heroes all night.

Over the next year, he was able to add a set of combat boots that would cushion his steps, enhance his running, and enable him to jump around like the old hero Gran Torino, a grappling hook, grenades that exploded into glitter, a quick drying glue, and paint, capsules that would disperse a thick mist, smoke, or a gas based on the hero Midnight’s quirk, and a visor with light up LED eyes that would mimic the movements of his actual eyes and would enhance his vision, giving him night and heat vision. He also added a white light up outline around the paw decal on his sweater, and switched the base layer of his costume from being leggings and a shirt to being a skin tight jumpsuit that was temperature regulating, stab proof, and fireproof, after a nasty run in with Endeavor, who lit him on fire.

Izuku was barely seven years old when he came home to an empty apartment and a note on the door. 

‘Izuku, I’m done. I’m moving to America to join your father. You’re on your own. You’ll need to be out of the apartment in three days.

- Midoriya Inko’

Well, at least she left a note. 

Izuku curled up on the floor and put his head between his knees, trying to quell his

rising panic and swallow back his tears. He had three days, and then he’d be out on the street, and he had nowhere to go. 

Eventually he managed to pull himself together enough to put together the barest semblance of a plan. His hero merch was worth a lot of money, so he could sell that, and hopefully the money from that would hold him over long enough to figure out a better plan. Maybe he could sell things from Takoba beach? He’d been fixing and building things for almost two years at that point, so that could work, he’d just have to find a place to sell them.

As for shelter, there was an abandoned apartment building near the beach that was in pretty good condition, he could probably stay there.

It took him two days to sell all of his things and pack up the rest, and then he headed to scout out the apartment building. The first couple of floors were already occupied, and most of them were a disaster anyways, but when he climbed up onto the roof from the next building over using his grappling hook, he found the upper floors empty and in surprisingly good condition. The staircase had collapsed midway up the building, so the top half was inaccessible unless you had a way of scaling the building to reach the roof. He wound up claiming the top floor as his own, and cleaning it up to make it safer and a nicer place to live. 

Over the next couple of months he scavenged the things he needed to make it a proper home, and set up a pulley system in an out-of-the-way elevator to get the heavier things, like furniture and his scavenged appliances, up to the top of the building. Once he’d fixed up the wiring to connect to the power grid and fixed some of the pipes, he even had electricity and running water.

Izuku was already well used to dumpster diving for food, and he eventually managed to get over his moral qualms enough to steal most of the other things he needed when he couldn’t quite scrape together enough cash to get them legally, or the shopkeepers refused to sell to him because he was quirkless.

When school let out for the year, he elected to switch to online schooling. His one year of elementary school had been miserable thus far, and the teachers had been sabotaging his grades. He figured he’d do better online, and he was right. With the freedom to study at his own pace, he was learning the material better and four times faster than the standard curriculum.

As he got better at fixing and selling things, he was able to afford to buy more expensive parts and equipment that he couldn’t scavenge, which greatly improved his vigilante gear. 

By eight years old, he had made himself hearing aids, which he’d sorely needed, and then built upon them more by making mechanical cat ears, which were worn over his actual ears and were attached to a headband, that could link to them and would both enhance and protect his hearing, and by building a comm set into them for when he was on patrol. He upgraded his mask as well, so that he could use voice commands to activate and deactivate the silence mode, rather than needing to rely on the buttons. He also made a mechanical tail to match the ears that would help him balance, and that could be electrified too. He added a gun to his gear that could fire bullets that would do all the same things as his grenades (though the nets weren’t quite as strong), plus his capsule and both normal and rubber bullets. He rarely used the gun, but having a ranged weapon proved incredibly useful. He’d also been able to get his hands on and imitate quirk cancelling handcuffs, which made apprehending villains so much easier. Probably his favourite item he’d made in that year was his gloves. They could be electrified, the palms could be heated up enough to melt metal, they had reinforcing in the knuckles, and they had retractable claws. He’d also upgraded the material of every item of his costume, so that the entire costume was fireproof, stab and slash proof, and bullet proof (getting shot hadn’t been fun. Bullet wounds suck).

By that point he’d started picking up a couple of other languages for fun, and was working on becoming fluent in two more languages of his own creation, with the intention of eventually having one for each set of his notebooks.

By the end of his fourth year as a not-really-a-vigilante, he’d added speakers to his cat ears that, in conjunction with his mask, would allow him to imitate Present Mic’s quirk, and had figured out how to imitate a telekinesis quirk. He’d tied the technology into his gloves, so that if he touched a small object with five fingers, he could direct it telekinetically with his fingers. He’d also added a touch pad to the back of each glove that could be used to control a mini computer attached to his tool belt, the screen of which he’d linked to his visor, which he’d added a zoom feature to. He’d also figured out a way to make earpieces, which he’d added to his cat ears, that would monitor his brain waves that he could use to control his ears and tail so he could move them at will. He was getting much better at hacking, and had started using it to do more investigative work, so he’d also started carrying an upgraded laptop in his small backpack, and he’d upgraded his cellphone as well.

He was nearly finished the junior high curriculum, which he was quite proud of, and had started considering taking highschool classes in advance to be over prepared to enter UA.

By that point, Izuku had successfully evaded just about all the underground heroes in Musutafu, and a significant number of twilight heroes as well. He was beginning to wonder if the police would eventually just call it quits and give up on catching him, but he seriously doubted it. 

He wondered who they’d send after him next.

He caught a movement a couple blocks away out of the corner of his eye, and he shot up to hide as soon as he registered what it was. 

Pro hero Eraserhead on patrol, in an area he never patrols in.

Fuck.

At least he probably has an answer as to which hero is going to be trying to tail him next. 

He left the area as quickly as he could, and as soon as he got home after patrol at sunrise he hacked the police database to confirm who was on his case currently. He was right, it was Eraserhead. His favourite hero, on par with All Might, and the only one who had topped him for capture stats in the past year.

He couldn’t help the surge of nerves as he thought about it. Eraserhead was talented . He may not be well known, because he avoids the public eye like the plague, but he was an amazing hero.

He switched his attention to reviewing the information the police had on him to calm down. It was always good for a laugh, and he sorely needed one right then. 

They thought he was in his mid twenties, which he thought was hilarious, they thought he was a girl, which he didn’t really care about, and they had a basic description of his costume. His height was mostly accurate, with them pinning him as about four feet tall and him being not quite that tall.

Their current guess as to what his quirk was was a copy quirk (not all that far off, considering he took inspiration from quirks to make some of his gear), but the list of quirks they’d theorized he’d copied previously was much more entertaining. The current list consisted of an electricity quirk, a telekinesis quirk, a camouflage quirk, an invisibility quirk, a light quirk, a noise quirk, a music quirk, a sleeping gas quirk, a mist quirk, a smoke quirk, a glue quirk, a glitter quirk, a paint quirk, a speed quirk, a jumping quirk, a heating quirk, a dexterity quirk, a strength quirk, a technology quirk, an intelligence quirk, a minor precognition quirk, and a cat based quirk. Considering he’d intentionally designed his ears, tail, and claws to mimic a cat mutation, he couldn’t blame them for the cat quirk theory.

They were missing most of his support items on the list of his theorized gear, but that wasn’t surprising. 

There was a note about him emailing the evidence he found while investigating to detective Tsukauchi (he was the only person who’d taken the evidence of quirkless trafficking rings seriously, and so had immediately become his favourite person on the police force), and how he’d been filling out the paperwork caused by his vigilantism as much as he could after Tsukauchi had complained about it over email. It was nice that his efforts to make Tsukauchi’s life easier (or at least lessen the extra work he causes) are appreciated.

The notes about him being frequently being compared to a demon and terrorizing villains by singing nursery rhymes or playing boss music made him cackle.

The best part of the file though was still the many, many fields that were filled in with question marks, ‘information unknown’, or just left blank.

They weren’t even a hundred percent sure when he’d started, though their guess wasn’t far off.

Eventually, after laughing about his police file for a couple of hours, he’d calmed down enough to head to bed for the few hours of sleep he’d get before hauling himself up again in the morning to work on his school work, projects, training, and gear.

Chapter Text

Eraserhead had been patrolling in the area for about five months, longer than any other hero on their case had lasted. He hadn’t even been trying to find Lucky Kitten, and when after two months he’d started letting him catch glimpses of him to see what he would do, he hadn’t tried to chase or follow him, only occasionally waving when he got close. The last month they’d patrolled around each other more or less normally, as if they were coworkers rather than a vigilante and the hero charged with bringing them in.

Tonight had been mostly the same, save that Eraserhead seemed more tired than normal. Izuku had been considering an idea for a couple of hours now, and had finally decided to try it. If it blew up in his face he could always run away, he’d gotten good at that over the years after all.

He jumped up onto the roof Eraserhead was resting on, and Eraserhead turned to look at him. He held out a disposable cup full of coffee.

“You seem like you need this” they teased playfully. Eraserhead seemed to light up.

“Is that coffee?”

“Yep! I wasn’t sure how you like it so I also have a bunch of packets of sugar and cream, if you want those too.” Eraser took the coffee gratefully, relishing his first sip.

“Thanks.”

“No problem, Eraserhead-san. I figured since you’ve done me the favour of not chasing me all the time, I could do you the favour of getting you coffee.” Eraserhead’s normally dead face twitched into the barest hint of a smile.

“Call me Eraser, Eraserhead is a bit long for casual conversation”

“You can call me Lucky then, Eraser-san.” Eraser nodded and took another sip of his coffee. Izuku stuck his hands in his pockets and wandered over to walk along the edge of the roof. He hadn’t been planning on sticking around even this long, but Eraser’s seeming disinterest in chasing him was putting him at ease.

“How did you know who I am?” Eraser asked. Izuku looked up at him, pausing as he thought about what to say. ‘You’re my favourite hero’? No, no way, that was way too embarrassing. He wound up shrugging.

“I know about a lot of underground heroes. I’ve done a lot of research into them over the years, and even though you may be relatively new, you’re still one of, if not the, best, so, y’know.” he was blushing furiously behind his mask, he hadn’t meant to say that much. At least Eraser seemed just as embarrassed, hiding his blush in his capture weapon. Izuku cleared his throat quickly.

“Well anyways, I should be off, lots of patrolling to do, villains to catch, people to save, all that. Stay lucky Eraser-san!” And then he jumped off the building backwards, using his grappling hook to swing away.

After that it became routine for the two of them to meet up for coffee and a snack on patrols, and chat about nothing in particular. Neither made any attempts to pry into the other’s life, and slowly Izuku began to relax.

A conversation that had set Izuku thinking happened about a month into their coffee visits.

“It occurs to me that I never actually asked your pronouns, Lucky. Mine are he/him.” Izuku paused, brain short circuiting. It wasn’t actually a hard question, but he stumbled over it nonetheless.

“Lucky?” Eraser asked after a moment of Lucky silently staring off into space. Izuku jerked back to attention

“Huh? Oh, my pronouns. I’ve- never actually thought about it.”

“You’ve never thought about it?” Eraser asked, not a hint of judgment in his tone.

“No. I mean, I know the pronouns I use in my civilian life, but they don’t really fit who I am as Lucky, y’know? I don’t mind any pronouns really, they all seem to fit, but I don’t actually know what I prefer.” Eraser hummed in response, and they sat in silence for a while as Izuku thought about what pronouns best fit who he was as Lucky.

“I think… Any pronouns, but mainly they/them,” they said eventually. “And I’m going to have to reevaluate which pronouns I use in my civilian life now too, because I’m not sure what’s actual preference and what’s me going along with societal expectations because it’s easier.” Eraser chuckled.

“Good luck with that, Lucky.”

When they’d next checked their police file, it had been altered to reflect their preferred pronouns as Lucky, which was incredibly touching, to their great surprise.

As for their civilian identity, they’d come to decide that they were most comfortable with He/They pronouns.

That conversation had also prompted them to consider the differences between Izuku and Lucky, and then to notice the differences between public-Izuku, who he’d eventually come to think of as ‘Deku’, and private-Izuku.

Lucky was sassy, courageous, and fearless. They were bright, cheerful, and mischievous, always ready with a joke or a smart quip.

Deku was a timid, scared boy, who tried his best to avoid attention. He was a target for bullying, and a cry baby who would freeze up under stress.

Izuku was who he was at his core. They were smart, snarky, sarcastic, and driven, always ready to do whatever they could to help. He didn’t like attention, and was clumsy and easily flustered in social situations.

One of their conversations eventually turned to support gear, when Eraser had complained to them about one of his coworkers, Powerloader, pestering him about upgrading his goggles.

“He’s right though.” Izuku said, to Eraser’s offended glare of betrayal. “You could add a feature that either sprays mist into your eyes or keeps the air inside your goggles moist, which would mean you wouldn’t have to blink as often, and it would probably help your dry eye. Or at the very least you could close the gaps in them, because honestly you’re just begging for someone to throw sand in your eyes right now.” Eraser looked at Izuku for a long moment. Izuku slurped at their drink (through a straw stuck under his mask), embarrassedly.

“I’ll consider it.” He turned back to look out over the city.

“Good, it’s a glaring weakness that’s bugged me for years.”

“Any other ‘glaring weaknesses’ I should be aware of?” Eraser asked, a touch sarcastically. Izuku sipped his tea again, side-eying Eraser.

“Your hair is a dead giveaway for when you’re using your quirk.” Eraser paused again.

“Any suggestions for fixing it?” he asked.

“A hair tie?” Izuku snarked back, grinning. Eraser snorted in amusement.

After that, Eraser had started showing up to patrol with his hair in a bun, and a couple weeks later he’d shown up with his goggles upgraded. When Izuku had pestered him about how his goggles worked, he had confirmed that he’d wound up following their suggestions, and asked if he had any more, at which point Izuku had gone on a rant about various features he could add, most of which they’d already put in their visor, that had rapidly devolved into mumbled speculation on possible upgrades to the systems in said visor. Eraser had dismissed his frantic apologies for the mumbling, saying it was interesting to listen to, and then asking follow up questions about some of the things they’d mumbled about. Izuku had been shocked, because no one cared enough to listen to his mumbling or pay attention to their rants. It had gone a long way towards him trusting Eraser, more than just to not arrest them.

After that, Eraser had started asking about suggestions for his various coworkers, which Izuku had gladly supplied, gradually letting more and more of their natural theorizing and questions slip in. Most of Izuku’s suggested changes would end up being at least partially implemented, which had led to them screaming into his pillow in glee repeatedly when he saw them, and Eraser would often bring answers to questions and the results of theories he’d posed to their meetings, which invariably flustered Izuku. Even when they had veered completely into quirk analysis territory, Eraser never pushed to know Izuku’s quirk. He only ever even asked once, and he’d dismissed the question almost immediately upon seeing how uncomfortable it made them.

The transition had been gradual, taking until well after Izuku’s tenth birthday, but slowly he transitioned from being Lucky during their conversations to being Izuku, at least mostly. He began to trust Eraser, and when he thought about it he found it terrifying. Everyone he’d cared for or trusted up to that point had either left him or turned on him, and he was terrified it would happen again.

Eraser would notice Lucky’s behaviour going back and forth, and it had taken him a while to figure out that it was Lucky getting comfortable, then catching themself relaxing and seizing up again. He never mentioned it, but he couldn’t help but feel a bit saddened each time Lucky jerked back.

More concerning than Lucky’s back and forth was the creeping, slowly growing suspicion that Lucky was much younger than they thought they were, but he was trying desperately to push that thought back. There was no way that Lucky was still a teenager, because then they’d have had to be ridiculously young when they started as a vigilante. No, no they were an adult, they had to be, because he didn’t want to consider the possibility that a child had become a vigilante.

Chapter Text

Izuku spent his tenth birthday picking through the trash on Takoba beach, not even realizing it was their birthday. He’d been scavenging here long enough that he’d made a sizable dent in some of the piles, though they only noticed because he spent so much time there.

He was pulling pieces out of a fancy fridge, when someone yelled behind them.

“So YOU’RE the one scavenging here!” He shrieked and whipped around, dropping the pieces he’d pulled out of the fridge.

“H-hello?!” He stammered, surprised and confused by the sight of a kid with bright pink dreadlocks and orange overalls, pointing a wrench at him.

“You’ve been taking parts from the beach that I need to make my babies!”

“B-babies?!?” The kid was his age! They were way too young to be making babies! Why would you even need pieces of broken trash to make babies?!

“My support items! I’m going to be a support inventor, and that means I need to practice, which I need materials for!” Izuku lit up.

“You make support items too?” The kid tilted their head at him.

“Too?” They brightened up suddenly. “You make support items? You have to tell me about the babies you’ve made!” That sparked a long conversation between the two about their inventions and the things they’d made. The kid eventually introduced herself as Hatsume Mei, future CEO of Hatsume enterprises, and said their pronouns were they/she. Izuku had introduced himself in turn, and given the pronouns he/they.

The two of them had started meeting at the beach regularly, and soon shifted to start hanging out in Hatsume’s garage. While Hatsume’s parents had originally been a bit nervous about Hatsume being friends with a kid she met at a garbage beach, they’d welcomed him gleefully when they realized he could lessen the number of explosions Hatsume made.

A funny side effect of them having bonded so quickly over support items was that it took ages for them to ask each other normal friend things, like their birthdays and favorite animals.

Hatsume had been thoroughly offended on Izuku’s behalf when she’d asked them how old they were and they’d realized he’d missed his tenth birthday by nearly three months. They’d wound up throwing him a party a week later as a belated birthday party, giving them a new tool kit as a gift. Izuku had used the party as an excuse to give Hatsume a gift they’d made her, a talking robotic parrot he’d been working on since finding out they were their favourite animal. She’d been so happy they’d nearly cried, and had nearly crushed him in a hug.

When, nearly six months after meeting them, she’d discovered Izuku was quirkless, their response had been to celebrate that he could test all their babies without worrying about a quirk interfering. That day Izuku had given them leave to call him by his given name, and had received permission to call them Mei in turn.

The two of them had taken to going to the park to test their inventions while everyone else was in school. (Mei was in online school too. Their parents had switched them online after a few too many complaints about them blowing up the classroom by experimenting at their desk.) That was how they wound up meeting the next member of their chaotic little group.

While Mei was busy setting up the trebuchet they were planning on testing, Izuku had been wandering around the play structure, having finished his part of the set up, and had found an utterly filthy child with gravity defying purple hair asleep in a tube. They’d panicked at first, worried he’d found a dead body, but had realized fairly quickly that the body in question was breathing.

He’d carefully shaken the child awake, and had been quick to retreat and try to reassure them when they’d panicked upon waking up. He understood why almost immediately upon seeing the muzzle locked tight around the child’s face, and the bruises and bleeding cuts covering their skin. They guessed the child probably had a vocal based quirk that was seen as dangerous or villainous, which was usually the reason discriminatory assholes would muzzle a child.

He put his hands up slowly and spoke softly.

“It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you.” The child whimpered quietly and tried to shift away from them.

“Would you like me to remove the muzzle?” The child hesitated, but after several long moments they nodded hesitantly and scooted closer, turning their head so Izuku could see the back. He swore seeing the two heavy duty padlocks locking it on. The one day he’d left his lock picks at home. The child cringed away slightly.

“Sorry, I’m not mad at you. I just left my lock picks at home, so I can’t get the locks off. I can probably cut through the straps with my knife though, if you’re comfortable with that?” Again, the child hesitated, but eventually nodded. Izuku had made sure to move very slowly, telegraphing every move they made while he pulled the knife from his boot and carefully cut through the muzzle’s leather straps, slowly pulling them away from where they’d cut into the kid’s face.

“There, all free.” They said once he’d finished, grinning. The child stared blankly at the muzzle for a moment, before grabbing it, hurling it as far as they could throw it, and then collapsing into Izuku’s chest, crying. Izuku rubbed their back gently, quietly reassuring them that it was okay and that they were safe.

When the child had calmed down some, Izuku asked them what their name was.

“Shinsou Hitoshi,” they eventually stuttered out, incredibly tense. Izuku nodded and gave them a gentle smile.

“It’s nice to meet you, Shinsou-kun. I’m Midoriya Izuku. If you don’t mind me asking, what are your pronouns? Mine are he/they.” Shinsou hesitated, but eventually answered.

“He/him.” Izuku nodded, smiling brightly. They gave Shinsou a brief once over.

“I have a first aid kit in my bag if you’d like some help with your injuries, and I have a spare sweater you can have too, if you’d like.” Shinsou nodded hesitantly. Izuku backed out of the tunnel, then headed back to where he and Mei had left their bags, Shinsou following behind. Mei looked up as they passed, but upon seeing how he cringed away from her gaze they waved and went back to checking over the trebuchet.

Izuku kept up a constant stream of chatter while they treated Shinsou’s various injuries, telling him about some of his and Mei’s projects, the stray cats that hung around the alleys near his and Mei’s homes, the cat cafe near the park, everything they could think of, and slowly Shinsou relaxed a bit. Mei came over when he was about halfway through, and joined in, telling somewhat embarrassing stories about Izuku. While Izuku was putting away their first aid kit, Mei invited Shinsou to watch them test their trebuchet. He nodded his agreement, though based on his expression it was more out of morbid curiosity as to what would happen than genuine interest in the invention.

The trebuchet was a resounding success, and they wound up excitedly planning ways to improve upon the design as they walked back to Mei’s house. They’d invited Shinsou back to join them for supper, and while Shinsou was clearly nervous about it, it was also clear he was way too hungry to refuse. Izuku and Mei kept up a steady stream of conversation between the two of them the whole way back and then all through the meal (which they ate in the garage, as Mei’s parents weren’t home to enforce eating at the table), hoping to help Shinsou relax a bit. Mei had fetched some of their comfy clothes for Shinsou to wear, and while he’d been embarrassed the two of them moving on from the offer immediately seemed to help, and he seemed to be getting more comfortable around them.

Once the meal was over however, the conversation began to drift off, and Mei went to work on one of her babies, leaving Shinsou and Izuku in relative privacy. Izuku shifted awkwardly, unsure how to bring up what he and Mei had been intentionally ignoring this whole time.

“Shinsou-kun- are, are you s-safe at home?” they eventually stuttered out. Shinsou froze. “I- I just, if you’re not, we could try and get help for you! If you don’t want to answer that’s fine, I just thought I’d offer-!” He cut himself off, swallowing the rest of the torrent of words to give Shinsou a chance to respond. Shinsou looked at his lap for several long moments, seeming to be wrestling with his words.

“I- It won't help. I’ve asked for help before, and they just sent me back, or to another foster home that was even worse. Th-thanks for- for offering though.” Izuku hesitated.

“I mean- I could just kidnap you?” Shinsou looked up suddenly, confused and a bit frightened.

“Th-that came out wrong! I meant that you could come and stay with me, but because that would legally be considered kidnapping I said that I could kidnap you…” the words continued to spill forth, rapidly devolving into an unintelligible stream of apologies and muttering, until he eventually just sat in embarrassed silence. Shinsou sat and stared for several long minutes.

“You- you would let me live with you?”

“Well yeah, if you’re not safe at home, and the authorities won’t help, I can at least offer you a safe place to stay.”

“You- what about your parents?” Izuku shifted uncomfortably.

“Left to America, they don’t have any part in my life. I- I’m technically homeless, but I do have a safe place to stay. It’s in an abandoned building, and it’s a couple of floors up and you’ll have to climb the fire escape, but it’s clean, and dry, and it’s fairly warm with enough space heaters going,” he rambled.

“But- what about my quirk?” Izuku looked up at Shinsou as he cut them off.

“What about it?”

“It- It’s Brainwashing. If you respond to a question I ask, I can make you do whatever I want.”

“Really?” Shinsou cringed slightly, “That’s so cool!” He straightened up, looking at Izuku in blank surprise. “That would be such a useful quirk in heroics, you could deescalate situations instantly, and you’d be amazing in hostage situations! I wonder if you could calm someone from a panic attack? It sounds more like hypnosis than brainwashing…” Shinsou continued to stare at them blankly as he slipped into a mutter storm about the possibilities of Shinsou’s quirk.

“You- you think I could be a hero?” Izuku broke off his muttering.

“Of course! You could be a great hero! Do you want to be?” Shinsou began to cry, and threw himself at Izuku again, hugging him tightly.

“Y-yeah, I do.” He managed to say eventually, wiping his eyes and sitting back. Izuku grinned.

“We can become heroes together then!”

“You want to be a hero too?”

“Yep! Have since I was little!” Shinsou studied Izuku’s bright smile for a moment, and gave him a slight smile of his own.

“I bet you’ll make a great hero, you’re already mine, after all.”

“Shinsou-kun!” Izuku cried, tearing up immediately. Shinsou laughed a bit.

“What’s your quirk anyways?” he asked, once Izuku had calmed down. Izuku’s smile faded, and he shifted backwards, curling in on himself.

“I um, I’m quirkless.” Shinsou blinked.

“Oh, okay.” There was a moment of tense, awkward silence before Izuku looked back up from his lap.

“You’re- okay with that?”

“I mean, sure. You’re okay with me having a villainous quirk, why wouldn’t I be okay with you being quirkless?” Izuku squawked.

“There’s no such thing as a villainous quirk! Any quirk can be used to do good, and any quirk can be used to do evil! Anyone who says differently is a quirksist asshole!” Shinsou smiled slightly. “You- you really don’t have a problem with me being quirkless?” Izuku asked, after a moment.

“Nope. And I bet you’re going to make some crazy waves when you become the first quirkless hero.” Izuku gaped at him as they processed what he’d said, then they were bawling again.

Mei came back over as Izuku was finally starting to dry his tears.

“What’s with the tears, Greenie?” they asked. Izuku gave her a watery grin.

“Me and Shinsou-kun are going to become heroes together!” Mei lit up.

“That means I have two people to make babies for!” They cheered.

“B-babies?!” Shinsou spluttered, and both Izuku and Mei burst into laughter.

Once they’d calmed down and explained the context to Shinsou, he’d told Izuku to call him by his given name, and Izuku had responded in kind.

Chapter Text

Izuku stumbled through the window, swearing, with a hand pressed to the bleeding wound in his side. They’d run into someone with a kind of knife quirk that had been able to cut through the material of their suit. Thankfully he preferred not to rely solely on his gear to keep him safe and had kept their skills up as if he wasn’t knife proof, or that fight could have gone very differently.

He swore again as he crashed into the table, but tried to keep the noise down as they navigated the dark room lest he wake up Hitoshi.

The light flicked on, revealing Hitoshi standing in the doorway with a kitchen knife.

“What the fuck, who are you?” he asked, pointing the knife at them. His form was, quite frankly, horrible, but Izuku wasn’t going to say that.

“Hitoshi! It’s okay, it’s just me! I can explain!” Izuku cried, pushing their visor up and their mask down. Hitoshi squinted at them.

“...Izuku?” Izuku took off his hood, smiling awkwardly.

“Heheh, yeah.”

“What the fuck. Are you bleeding?”

“Ah, yeah. I was just going to get the first aid kit from the bathroom.” Hitoshi levelled them with a flat look.

“I’ll go get it for you, and when we’re done patching you up, you are going to explain whatever the hell this is.” Izuku nodded sheepishly.

Once the cut in Izuku’s side was taken care of and their vigilante gear was all put away or in the wash, Hitoshi sat back down on the couch across from Izuku and stared at him. They took a deep breath.

“So, I’m a vigilante. I started going out on average four nights a week when I was a little over five years old, and have been doing it ever since. Given that I'm almost eleven now, it’s been about six years. That’s why I spend so much time training and practising self defence, and why I put so much effort into making my support gear. I started because I didn’t want to wait a decade to start learning to help people, and I thought it might be good practice for getting into UA.” Hitoshi was silent for a moment as he absorbed that.

“I mean, I kinda suspected there was something up with how good you are at hand to hand, but I guess I just thought there was no way someone as young as we are could be a vigilante.”

“Honestly I’m impressed I managed to hide it this long.” Something seemed to occur to Hitoshi then.

“Wait a minute, did you say you started when you were five?!”

“Heheh, yep! That I did.” Izuku smiled awkwardly.

“How?!”

“I mean, I started by throwing bricks at people, or hitting them with my backpack, which I’d filled with bricks. I practiced with weapons in my spare time and mixed them in as I got better.” Hitoshi just shook his head, seemingly in some combination of shock and awe.

“Only you, Izuku. Only you.” Izuku laughed.

“Do you have a vigilante name?”

“Oh yeah! The police gave me one once I’d been a vigilante for a while. I’m Lucky Kitten.” Hitoshi’s eyes widened.

“You’re Lucky Kitten?! That famous vigilante that’s been all over the news?!” Izuku blushed.

“Y-yep! That’s me!” Hitoshi laughed, seemingly having given up trying to make sense of what he’d just learned

“Damn. How have you managed to avoid getting caught this long?”

“I’m good at dodging heroes I guess? And Eraserhead-san hasn’t seemed to intent on actually catching me, which has made it a lot easier now. He’s almost friendly, actually. Well, not quite friendly, but we talk and get coffee on a regular basis, and he actually listens to my analysis.”

“Did you just say ‘Eraserhead’?”

“...yes?”

“Eraserhead is the one trying to catch you? And you’re ‘friendly’ with him?”

“Yep! Though again, friendly isn’t the best word for it. He doesn’t really seem to do ‘friendly’. He’s been on my case for the last two years, just about. Longer than any other hero actually, by a long shot.” Hitoshi dropped his face into his hands.

“You okay Hitoshi-kun?” He dragged in a long breath before lifting his head to look Izuku in the eye.

“I will forgive you for not telling me about this on two conditions.”

“Okay?” Izuku shifted nervously.

“The first is that you teach me to be a vigilante too. I want to help people too, and like you said, it could be good practice to get into UA.” Izuku pursed his lips.

“Alright, but I’m going to try and train you properly first, and you can’t go out until I say you’re ready, and not alone at first. It’s a miracle I survived long enough to learn, and I’m not going to let you get yourself killed on my watch.” Hitoshi nodded.

“Deal. My second condition is that you get me Eraserhead’s autograph.” Izuku laughed nervously.

“W-what?”

“You heard me. I want Eraserhead’s autograph.” He narrowed his eyes at them. “You’ve been ‘not quite friendly’ with my favourite hero for years and never told me. I don’t really care how you get it, but you’re getting that autograph.” Izuku laughed. He was kicking himself internally, because he really didn’t want to have to ask Eraser for an autograph. He knew if he said he wasn’t comfortable with it Hitoshi would drop it, but it was important to his friend and it really wasn’t that bad, just embarrassing, so he could at least try.

“Alright, I’ll see what I can do. Is there anything in particular you want me to get him to sign?” Hitoshi hesitated then, seeming almost embarrassed.

“I mean- I have this picture I drew of him- but really anything will work.” Izuku perked up.

“You drew a picture of him? Can I see it?” Hitoshi blushed.

“I- yeah okay, just don’t laugh.” Izuku nodded eagerly, making Hitoshi blush even deeper.

“I’ll go get it.” He came back a moment later and handed Izuku a piece of paper. Izuku gasped upon seeing the incredibly detailed and shockingly accurate drawing of Eraserhead, eyes glowing red through his goggles and capture weapon hovering around him. Izuku grinned, looking back up at Hitoshi.

“This is awesome, Hitoshi-kun! It looks just like him!” Hitoshi flushed even redder, making his cheeks the colour of a beet.

“Th-thanks.” Izuku nodded.

“So you want me to get him to sign this for you?”

“I- yeah, yeah if you can. Just- you can never tell him it was me, okay?” Izuku laughed.

“Alright, I won’t identify you when you inevitably meet him.”

“When I- What?!”

“You didn’t think I’d take you on patrol with me and not introduce you to Eraser, did you?” Izuku teased. Hitoshi made a strangled choking noise, and Izuku laughed.

They sat in amicable silence for a while while Hitoshi slowly regained his ability to speak, until something occurred to him.

“Have you told Mei?”

“Hmm? Oh, no, I haven’t.”

“Told me what?” Both Izuku and Hitoshi’s heads whipped around to the doorway into the apartment they’d been sitting in, where Mei was standing, having arrived while neither of them was paying attention. Izuku’s eyes widened.

“Oh, um, well, about that-”

“Izuku’s a vigilante.”

“Hitoshi-kun!” Izuku cried.

“What? I know you, you weren’t going to lie to them, were you?”

“Well, no, but-”

“Exactly.” Izuku pouted, but they both knew they weren’t really upset.

“Is that all?” They both turned back to Mei in shock.

“What? You’re not surprised?” Izuku asked.

“Not really, what else were you going to do with a fireproof, stab proof, bulletproof jumpsuit in your size, a collapsible electric staff, all those fancy bullets and grenades you have, and those really cool glove babies?” Izuku just sat there and opened and closed his mouth as Mei shrugged and dumped her armful of babies on the coffee table, resuming working on them. Hitoshi started to laugh, and eventually Izuku joined in.

“That being said, now that you’re actually open about it, I want in!” Izuku looked at them in shock.

“You want to be a vigilante too, Mei-chan?”

“No! I want to help you with your vigilante babies!” Izuku grinned widely.

“That sounds great, Mei-chan! I’d love your help! We’ll have to make some gear for Hitoshi-kun too, seeing as how he wants to join me.” Mei laughed and clapped her hands.

“That sounds great Izu!” Izuku grinned at them and Hitoshi.

“That’s settled then! I’ll start training Hitoshi-kun, and we’ll work together to upgrade my gear and design some for Hitoshi-kun!” Mei cheered and Hitoshi smirked at him.

Chapter Text

Izuku took a sip of his iced coffee, kicking his legs as he sat beside Eraserhead on the edge of the roof.

“Hey Eraser-san, can I ask you for a favour?”

“Sure kid, what do you need?”

“I’m not a kid!” Izuku protested, blushing. They cleared their throat. “Anyways, recently a friend of mine, or I guess kind of a brother? Either way, he found out about me being a vigilante.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Anyways, you’re his favourite hero, and he was really offended I hadn’t told him I knew you. One of his two conditions for forgiving me was that I try and get your autograph for him.”

“You- need my autograph?” Eraser was blushing almost as much as Izuku at that point.

“Yeah.” Izuku coughed embarrassedly. “He ah, drew this picture of you.” They pulled the picture out of their backpack and passed it to Eraser, who tried to hide his impressed but embarrassed grin in his scarf.

“Your friend is a good artist. Can I borrow one of your pens?” Izuku grinned and handed over one of their many pens. “How did your friend even figure out what I look like accurately enough to draw this?” Eraser asked as he signed the picture.

“I’m going to tell him you said that, and he’s going to die of happiness. I assume the same way I knew sort of what you looked like and some basics about how you fight before I met you.” Eraser looked at them curiously. “Dedication. You can find any answers you want if you’re dedicated enough to find them.” Eraser took a sip of his coffee as he passed back the picture, now signed, which Izuku stored securely in their backpack again.

“I thought you just ‘knew about a lot of underground heroes’?” Eraser teased. Izuku blushed and stammered, not having expected Eraser to remember what he’d said the first time they’d met, two years prior.

“Well, I do! I just, I was a bit embarrassed to admit to your face that you were also one of my favourite heroes.” Izuku very studiously did not look at Eraser, who had an embarrassed smile hidden in his scarf again.

“I was one of your favourite heroes?” He asked, curiously.

“I mean, at the time you were pretty high up,” Izuku looked down at their lap, twisting his fingers together. “At this point though, you’ve thoroughly usurped All Might’s place at the top of my personal list of heroes, rather than just being one of them.” Eraser’s smile grew into a grin.

“Glad to know you like me so much kid, I’m flattered.” Izuku hid his face in his hands and muttered something that came out sounding vaguely like ‘not a kid, ‘raser.’ Eraser chuckled, sounding embarrassed, taking another sip from his coffee.

“You said earlier that your friend had two conditions, what was the other one?”

“Oh, he wanted-” Izuku stopped, realizing that if he told Eraser that Hitoshi had asked him to teach him to be a vigilante, Eraser would know that he was the one to draw the picture and request an autograph as soon as he met him. “Actually, just a sec, I have to ask him if I can tell you.” Izuku said, pulling out his phone. Eraser raised an eyebrow.

“Shouldn’t he be asleep at this point?”

“Nah, it’s only two am. He’s worse of an insomniac than I am, and I can only sleep after working myself to complete exhaustion.” Eraser snorted.

---Green Bean---

‘Hey, Hitoshi-kun’

‘You awake?’

---Purple Tree---

‘Nope.’

‘I’m asleep.’

‘Completely dead to the world.’

---Green Bean---

‘Right, good to know.’

‘Eraser signed your picture’

‘He said that you’re a good artist’

---Purple Tree---

‘KSJSDKDSKSDKDSJKDJSDJSKSDWAHT’

---Green Bean---

‘Yep’

‘Anyways, he wants to know what your second condition for forgiving me was, but he will definitely figure out you’re the one who asked if I tell him and then introduce you.’

‘So I figured I’d ask.’

‘Also, I just admitted that he’s my favourite hero, having supplanted All Might, to his face, in case that makes it easier.’

---Purple Tree---

‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaa’

‘No’

‘Yes’

‘Fuck IDK’

‘Sure, go ahead ig’

‘Also great job on embarrassing yourself, that does make it easier’

---Green Bean---

‘:P’

‘You sure? I can’t exactly take it back once it’s said’

---Purple Tree---

‘Yeah, go ahead. Who knows, maybe he’ll offer to teach us both himself.’

---Green Bean---

‘Lmao, that’s never going to happen XD’

---Purple Tree---

‘I know, but just imagine if it did’

‘Two vigilantes, being taught by a pro hero’

---Green Bean---

‘IKR?’

‘Anyways, gtg’

---Purple Tree---

‘Talk to you later, Greenie’

Lucky looked up from their phone and stuffed it into one of their pockets suddenly, startling Shouta, not that he’d ever admit it.

“Okay, he said to go ahead. His second request was that I help him become a vigilante too,” they said. Shouta raised an eyebrow. Lucky had seen first hand how dangerous a vigilante’s life was, and during their talks about support gear they’d regaled him with the many truly horrifying incidents that had led to their gear being as protective as it was, and how even now it still sometimes failed them. It seemed very out of character for them to agree to bring someone else, especially someone they cared about, into that life.

“And you agreed to that?” Lucky shrugged helplessly.

“If I didn’t, he’d have become one on his own, like I did, and it’s a miracle I survived long enough to learn on the job the way I did. At least with me agreeing to teach him I can make sure he’s not copying my example and going out ridiculously unprepared.” That sounded more like them. Shouta shrugged in response, frowning slightly as he realized that Lucky had just implied they’d learned all their skills after becoming a vigilante, which was as alarming as it was impressive.

“Good point. What are you going to teach him?”

“Street fighting, how to use weapons, situational awareness, how to judge a situation, parkour, stealth, first aid, how to use whatever support gear he winds up using, that kind of thing. Plus I’ll probably throw in a lecture on the dangers of heroics and the gory and terrible things he’ll see, but he’s wanted to be a hero since he was tiny, same as me, so I doubt that’ll discourage him. He runs solely on caffeine and spite at this point, and a lecture on it being dangerous will not discourage him.” Shouta nodded, resisting the urge to chuckle at the thought of a kindred spirit, and being distracted from his approval of Lucky’s curriculum by one specific caveat they’d said.

“You want to be a hero?” Lucky froze.

“...yeah, I do.” Shouta nodded again in acknowledgement. It wasn’t really surprising that they would want to be a hero, most vigilantes did, at least at one point or another, but-

“Why not become one then?” Lucky looked down and kicked their feet.

“Can’t.” Shouta raised an eyebrow at them.

“Why not? You very clearly have the skills to be one.” Izuku grinned behind his mask, the light-up eyes on it shifting to have stars in them as they looked over at him. “I was actually going to suggest I could recommend you for the vigilante licensing process, which would get you an underground license and clear your record.” He resisted the urge to grin at the hope in the vigilante’s glowing eyes.

“You think so? You’d do that for me?”

“Of course. Kid, anyone who can’t see the potential you have as a hero is both blind and an idiot.” Lucky teared up with joy, beaming at him. Then their expression faltered slightly, the change showing on their mask. He frowned slightly in confusion.

“Even- Even if I don’t have- have a good quirk for heroics?” Shouta froze. ‘Ah. That explains a lot.’ Lucky recoiled into themself. He shook himself out of his shock to respond to the kid (He knew they weren’t a kid, hopefully, but they just seemed so young) who was clearly distressed.

“Of course kid, a quirk is just a tool, and it’s one that you can very clearly do without if you haven’t been using one to fight. Like I said before, you have the skills to be a hero. Hell, you’re a better hero than lots of pros, and that’s apparently without any sort of professional training.” Lucky burst into tears and hurtled forward to hug him.

“Thank you Eraser, thank you so much,” they sobbed, clinging tightly to Eraser.

“Of course, Problem Vigilante. I’m only telling you the truth,” he responded, gently rubbing their back. They giggled wetly, eventually calming enough to release him.

“You’re the first adult to ever believe in me, y’know? And the third person ever. Everyone else thought it was impossible.” Eraser reached out to pat Lucky’s head, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in his gut at the way Lucky had phrased that statement.

“The first ever? Really?”

“Yep. My parents both made it pretty clear that they didn’t think I could do anything, let alone become a hero. That was the popular opinion among my teachers and classmates too. I mostly stopped telling people after I transferred to online school in elementary, to be honest. Although, now that I think more about it, It was pretty fucked up of them to tell an elementary schooler that they’d be lucky to become anything, let alone a hero…” Shouta sat shocked by that admission as Lucky rambled, but he managed to shake himself out of it as their ramble devolved into a mutter storm about how fucked up their elementary teachers were.

“Well, I’m happy to tell you they were wrong, and if I thought you were willing to give me that much information I’d offer to set Nedzu on them for you. Or I could just get together a group of my more destructive coworkers and we can go burn down the school.” Lucky giggled, grinning. “I know for a fact that my husband will gladly help.” Lucky laughed outright, wrapping their arms around their stomach.

“Thanks Eraser,” they said, still snickering. ‘No honorific? I was beginning to think they’d never be comfortable enough to drop that. I’ll take that as an accomplishment.’

“No problem kid.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Y’know, I’ve been thinking of it for a while, and your comment about ‘learning on the job’ just solidified it, but you’re self taught, aren’t you?”

“Yep! Though I didn’t really learn all of it on the job, I spent some time studying and mimicking various fighting styles I’d seen people use in fights before I got the idea to be a vigilante, and I trained between patrols too, but yeah, I’m self taught. Mostly I learned from breaking down fights and studying various fighting styles from training videos and fights. I’ve been teaching the friend who wants to be a vigilante how to defend himself recently too, so I’ve gotten the chance to spar with him, sort of. Actually, now that I think about it, he’s going to complain about the unfairness of me constantly kicking his ass as soon as he connects that he’s been learning self defence from a vigilante.” They giggled, and Shouta snorted.

“Would you like professional training?” They shrugged.

“I mean, yeah, that would be great, but I’ve yet to find a self defence class that’s willing to teach people like me, so I make do.” Shouta shrugged, forcing his voice to remain nonchalant.

“I mean, I could train you.” Lucky dropped their iced coffee and had to lunge to catch it.

“You- You’d train me?”

“And your friend too, if he’d like. Assuming he has potential.” He could tell from their eyes that they were grinning ear to ear.

“We need to finish making his gear first, and get him into the habit of using code names when in costume, but I’m sure he’d love to. And- And I’d be honoured to be taught by you.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Are you busy tomorrow evening? I have the night off and I can get started training you then.”

“Yep! I actually train pretty much every night I don’t patrol, plus some on the days I do, and between that and the insomnia my nights are pretty much always free.”

“Good, I’ll see you here at our normal time then.” Lucky cheered, and Shouta chuckled. Lucky tilted their head at him.

“What’s funny?”

“Oh nothing, you just remind me of my husband when you get excited like that.” Lucky sputtered, laughing. Shouta grinned. “That or a bunny with the way you bounce around, which is a bit ironic considering your whole cat aesthetic.” Lucky snorted and burst out laughing, laughing even harder when something occurred to them.

“Oh, oh my god, the similarities are even stronger than I thought.”

“What similarities, Problem Vigilante?” Lucky wheezed, trying to stop laughing long enough to speak.

“Between you and my friend.” He raised an eyebrow at them. “You’re both always tired, you both have straight espresso for blood, you both love cats, you both have hair that at least occasionally defies gravity, you have nearly the exact same sense of humour, you both have non-physical quirks that would be perceived very similarly by the general public, I’d wager you’ve had very similar experiences growing up with regards to your quirks, you both constantly take naps in a yellow sleeping bag ever since I got him as an inside joke that is going to get me murdered as soon as he realizes, and you both compare me to a bunny when I get excited. He’s practically a mini you.” they said, counting the similarities off on their fingers. Shouta blinked in surprise.

“Huh. No kidding.” He filed away the information about the friend’s quirk just in case, briefly wondering if he should be surprised by the allusions to how the public had considered his quirk, before deciding that between that between how smart Lucky was and the fact they seemed to have faced their own share of quirk discrimination themself, it wasn’t actually that surprising. Something seemed to occur to them then.

“Oh my god, he was right.”

“Who was right?”

“My friend! He made a joke about you offering to train us or something when I was texting him, and we both dismissed it as something that would never happen, but then you did! He’s never going to believe he was right!” Shouta couldn’t help but chuckle as he patted Lucky on the head, once again foiled by the hood that kept him from ruffling their hair.

“He’s going to be insufferable after this,” they groaned. Shouta hid a grin in his capture weapon.

“What a pity.”

“It is!” they exclaimed, flopping back onto the roof dramatically. Shouta laughed watching them.

“If your friend is a mini me, you’re a mini Zashi.”

“‘Zashi’?”

“A nickname for my husband.” Lucky hummed, shifting in a way that he’d come to realize meant they were embarrassed, but in a good way. Suddenly, they shot bolt upright.

“Zashi as in Hizashi?” Shouta stilled in surprise, which they definitely caught and took as confirmation. “You’re married to Present Mic aren’t you? I was right!”

“How did you know that?” He questioned, honestly shocked.

“A couple of reasons. Every once in a while you show up with long blond hair on your costume, and Present Mic would have to have hair about that length in order to put his hair up like that. The same is true of him showing up occasionally with black hair around the right length on his costume, though that’s more common when he goes to events. You also show up with cat hair on your costume that looks very similar to cat hair that can be seen on Present Mic’s costume.

While he’s never definitively answered questions about his relationship status, only implying that he’d be too busy for a partner or wasn’t looking for one, when asked about what his ideal partner would be like, Present Mic described you practically to a tee, and his tone sounded as if he was making an inside joke. The common assumption is that the joke was that he was describing his polar opposite, but it also works if he was describing someone he was already in a relationship with. The way you describe your husband matches a more casual version of Present Mic, both in terms of personality and in the few details of his appearance you’ve told me.

You and Present Mic were also classmates at UA, which you’ve implied is how you and your husband met. You both also wear rings on necklaces hidden under your clothes, that look to match from what I’ve been able to see of them. Plus, when you talk about Present Mic your tone changes slightly. You sound more affectionate and less annoyed than you do when talking about anyone else, the exception being your husband, who you talk about similarly. The last thing would be that you called him ‘Zashi’, which is a relatively common nickname for Hizashi, and Present Mic’s civilian name is Yamada Hizashi.”

Shouta just blinked at them, and they seemed a bit sheepish. “If it makes you feel any better about it, I don’t think a villain could figure it out. I only started to suspect after getting to know you, and I’d wager you and him aren’t mutual friends with many villains.” Shouta shook his head, a bit overwhelmed.

“I’m shocked you managed to notice all that, let alone put it together.” Lucky shrugged, shifting in embarrassment.

“I have an eye for small details.”

“No kidding. That’s really impressive, kid.”

“Really?”

“Yep. I should throw you at the rest of my coworkers, both at UA and underground, and see what security risks you can point out. You’d be able to make some serious money from that kind of work, and it would help keep the rest of us safer.

“You- You think it’s a useful skill?”

“Sure. Someone figuring out something about an under can be disastrous, your ability to pick things like that out would help warn us of things we need to be careful about to keep those things quiet. And with your intelligence, we’d be hard pressed to find someone who can figure out things you don’t. There’s a reason so many people think you have an intelligence quirk.” They grinned widely again.

“Thanks Eraser, that means a lot to me.”

“Sure kid. Let me know if you’re ever interested in pursuing it as a career, even part time. I can get you in contact with people. Quirk analysis too actually. If you’re willing to share your analysis with the heroes and their teams they could seriously benefit from it.” Lucky seemed stunned.

“Everyone’s always told me my analysis was stalkerish and creepy, that it was as useless as I was,” they finally said, voice small. Shouta huffed to cover up the pang of sadness that filled him at that.

“I think we’ve already established my opinions on the worth of the opinions of all the people who’ve told you that. Neither you nor your analysis are useless. Hell, skills like yours put most professional analysts to shame, and that’s just from the things you’ve told me off hand, let alone your completed observations. If you’ve managed that without professional training, that’s even more impressive, and I’d really like to see what you could do with a competent teacher.”

“You think so?” Lucky seemed so hopeful, it was heartbreaking.

“Kid, I know so. You should reach out to my boss. As terrifying as the thought of the two of you together is, intelligence and skills like yours should be nurtured, and Nedzu’s probably the best person to teach you. Though, he probably won’t just teach you analysis, so be warned.” Lucky threw themself into his arms again, crying.

“I- if you think I should, I can reach out to him,” they stuttered out between tears.

“Yeah kid, I think you should. You’re crazy smart.” They gave him a teary grin.

“I- I’ll look into the analysis jobs you talked about too. They’d probably pay more than I make selling the stuff I fix anyways,” they joked, finally pulling back.

“You fix things?”

“Yeah. I fix up microwaves and phones and stuff I find on Takoba beach and then sell it at the pawn shops in the area. Or at least, the ones that don’t ask about quirks.”

“Takoba, that’s that trash beach, right?”

“That’s the one! And let me tell you, it’s a disaster. Plus, you can smell it from super far away, which sucks because I live right off the beach. I bet it would be super nice cleaned up though. Hey, there’s an idea…” they trailed off, staring into space.

Shouta went to take another sip of his coffee, only to find it empty. He sighed sadly, and Lucky looked up at him.

“Out of coffee,” he said by means of explanation. That seemed to break the spell that had been over them, and Lucky tapped their wrist in the pattern he’d come to recognize meant they were activating the time display in their visor.

“Oh shit, we’ve been sitting here for over an hour!” Shouta jolted and stood up, stretching in preparation for patrolling again, but he froze briefly at seeing Lucky pull down their mask to rest around their neck so they could chug the remainder of their iced coffee. They had darker skin, and he spotted a few freckles. Their face was round, with a softness clinging to their jaw and cheeks, almost like baby fat. He shook off his shock and the fuzzy feeling of warmth at finally seeing a glimpse of their face as they pulled their mask back into place and jumped up, bouncing from one foot to the other to warm up a bit.

“You ready to go, Eraser?” They asked, grinning.

“Let’s go, Problem Vigilante.” With that, they set off to continue their patrols.

Chapter Text

Izuku burst in the door just after sunrise, startling both Hitoshi and Mei as they sat at the table. Hitoshi was drinking his morning cup of life juice (straight espresso, of course), and Mei working on something that will hopefully not explode (that hope is in vain, Mei can make anything explode).

“Morning Izuku,” he called to Izuku, who had started running around the apartment half focused on getting out of his vigilante gear and half focused on whatever new idea had captivated them. That kind of thing seemed to happen a lot, with Izuku hyper focusing on a new idea and forgetting everything else. Izuku startled, whipping around. Evidently he had once again forgotten there were other people around. Sometimes Hitoshi wondered how long Izuku would have been able to keep him from finding out about his vigilantism, and then there were times like this where he wondered how they’d lasted more than a week.

“Oh, hey guys! Toshi-kun, you were right, Eraserhead offered to train both of us. I accepted and said you could join when your gear is done and you’re into the habit of using code names. On another note, I’ve had an amazing idea, I’ll tell you about it as soon as I can get out of my gear.”

They then ran out of the room, presumably to finish getting out of his gear. They must have been really distracted to call him by a nickname. It was rare enough for them to forget his obsessive politeness and skip the honorific, even more so for them to do anything more casual than that. The only reason he didn’t regularly use an honorific with Mei anymore was because they would get excited enough to forget so often that he’d given up on it.

Wait, did they just say Eraserhead offered to train them? Hitoshi choked on his coffee. He was still spluttering when Izuku came back.

“What’s your idea Izu?” Mei asked.

“We’re going to clean up Takoba beach!” Hitoshi choked on his coffee, again. Izuku patted him on the back as he continued his explanation.

“First we’re going to have to find an old truck to fix up, which I’m sure we can figure out between the two of us, Mei. Worst case scenario we redesign the engine or something. Anyways, then we need to learn to drive, so that we can use the fixed up truck to drive the trash to the dump.

At that point we can start sorting through the garbage, pulling out anything we think could be useful, disassembling it, and storing the pieces on one of the other floors for if we need it for projects later. We can also pick out anything I can fix and sell later and store it somewhere else. We should do the beach in sections to help keep it more manageable, and we’ll need to pick up more protective gear than what we currently have...”

“Zu, I think you skipped a step,” Hitoshi interrupted. Izuku looked at him blankly.

“Which one?”

“The one where you explain why we’re cleaning the beach.”

“Oh, right. Well, the beach is a disaster, right? And it sucks to live near? Well, it would be a lot nicer if it was clean! People could actually enjoy it again! And we can clean it up, so we might as well, right? That’s what heroes do, help people! In this case, we’re helping people by cleaning the beach! Plus, hauling all the trash will make us stronger, and will be good training!

If we clean the beach it will also be easier, safer, and faster for me and Mei to get pieces for our projects when we need them, and for me to find things I can fix to sell. I figure between the three of us we can probably finish it in about a year, if we really focus on it!”

“Sounds good enough to me, Greenie!” Mei chimed in enthusiastically. Hitoshi sighed, not able to really deny Izuku’s reasoning.

“Alright, fine, I’ll join in too. Now, did you say something about Eraserhead training us earlier?” Izuku brightened, suddenly remembering that entire thing that had apparently happened.

“Oh yeah! I’ll be starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to start as soon as me and Mei have your base gear finished, and you’ve got the code name thing down.” They then went on to continue talking about all his plans and everything that happened that night, the conversation lasting until the alarm in the kitchen went off to start breakfast (they’d started setting alarms for meals because Izuku and Mei would frequently get so sucked into projects they’d have forgotten to breathe if it wasn’t automatic, and Hitoshi himself would forget to eat too often to remind them reliably).

Izuku wound up sending Nedzu an email that afternoon, after having set up as many safeguards and levels of security as he could think of to try and keep Nedzu from tracking them down through it. In the email, he’d said that Eraser had suggested he connect with Nedzu, being of the opinion that Nedzu could teach them to properly harness their intelligence. Nedzu responded less than an hour later, and the two quickly came to an agreement where Nedzu would send him material and assignments to work at the beginning of each week, and they would go to UA in costume Tuesday and Thursday to learn from him directly. Nedzu wouldn’t attempt to uncover Lucky Kitten’s identity, and he would not reveal any details he may discover about Lucky to anyone.

Izuku wound up loving the challenges Nedzu set for him. Each one pushed his brain to the limits to figure out, and made them learn new skills to complete them. Nedzu had also told them to tell him about anything else they were interested in so that he could teach them about that too, and Izuku happily obliged. For just about the first time in his life, he was actually being challenged academically, and he loved it.

That evening he met Eraser on the roof to start training. The first thing Eraser did was ask him about his support gear, both what he had and what he was working on.

“I need to know so I know what to help you work on, aside from hand to hand. I’m also curious as to what all you have, because I’m assuming your support gear is the reason the list of quirks people have theorized you have is so long. I’m also curious as to what your quirk actually is, if it’s not anything on the list. I won’t push you if you don’t want to tell me though.” Lucky had laughed.

“You’re right about the support gear. The list really is a bit ridiculous.” Eraser raised an eyebrow at their comment about the list, getting the point when Lucky didn’t even mention his comment about their quirk.

“You’ve seen it?”

“Yep! I’ve been hacking into the police files to keep up on what you guys know about me for years.” They grinned at him. “The list of theorized quirks especially always makes me laugh. It’s always been a great way to cheer myself up after a bad day, honestly.”

“I probably shouldn’t be surprised that you’ve hacked into the police databases, honestly. Anyways, how did you manage to get that many theorized quirks?”

“The electricity quirk is the result of my electric gloves, knives, tail, and staff. The telekinesis quirk is the result of the telekinesis-imitation tech I designed and put in my gloves. The camouflage and invisibility quirks are people attributing my stealth to a quirk, which is a bit insulting honestly. I worked hard for that. The noise and light quirks are the result of my flash-bang, light, and noise grenades.

The sleeping gas, mist, smoke, glitter, paint, and glue quirks are the result of my exploding capsules, though I have grenades for some of those too, and I’ve turned most of the capsules into bullets. I also have net grenades, capsules, and bullets, but those have never been attributed to a quirk. I suspect the speed and jumping quirks are a result of my boots, which boost my speed and jumping.

I’m working on being able to skate on air with them, but I haven’t gotten that working quite yet. The dexterity, technology, intelligence, and precognition quirks are just abilities I’ve trained for, as is the strength one, though I am actually working on a means of enhancing my strength. The palms of my gloves heat up, which is where the heating quirk comes from, and the cat based quirk is the robotic ears and tail, and the retractable claws in my gloves.

The music quirk is from me playing boss music through the speakers in my ears while fighting, which I honestly just did because I was bored and it was fun. The ears can also project my voice and they enhance my hearing.

My visor has night vision, heat vision, and a zoom feature, and I’m working on x-ray vision and a way of seeing wifi and radio waves, because you never know when that could be useful, and it’d be cool. Also a way to scan someone for injuries, but that’s taking a bit longer.

I also have a grappling hook, and I recently added flaming knives to my arsenal. I have quirk cancelling handcuffs in my backpack, along with a laptop, which you already knew about, and I lined my backpack with enough metal to make it a possibly deadly weapon. Plus I have a mini super-computer linked to my visor and the touch pads on my gloves that I carry in my utility belt.

The other things I’ve been working on would be a jet pack, which at this point I’m really just trying to shrink enough to add to my backpack, and I um-” they faltered briefly in embarrassment but pushed through it, “I have an imitation of your capture weapon that I’ve finished, but I’m still working on learning to use it. That’s actually why I haven’t updated my gear as much since I met you. Between that and some of my projects giving me trouble, like adding electricity proofing to my costume, which is shockingly hard to make work with everything else, I haven’t been able to actually add or update things as often as I usually do.” Eraser blinked at them silently for a minute, trying to process that veritable flood of information.

“You really don’t cut corners when it comes to arming yourself, kid. How often do you normally add things to your arsenal?” Izuku shrugged.

“I usually add something new or improve something I already have every month or so? More frequently if one improvement can be applied to multiple pieces, like with the bullets, grenades, or capsules. Some of the improvements are more performance fixes than noticeable changes though, so it’s not usually obvious. Plus I train with the new item before I actually go out with it, and some projects take longer than others, so it’s not a super constant rate.”

“Kami kid, who makes your gear?”

“Oh, I do! It just being me working on them slows me down some, but I do my best! A friend of mine, not the one that wants to be a vigilante, found out the other day too though, and they wanted to help with my gear, so I’ll probably be able to update it more often now.” Eraser just looked at them for a moment.

“Kid, you are inhuman. You’re telling me you’ve been designing, building, and upgrading all your own support gear at a pace that would make most professional support engineers cry, all by yourself, while also making a living, keeping up with your training, and patrolling as a successful vigilante, all at once”

“...Yes?” Eraser shook his head incredulously.

“Right, for my own sanity, I’m going to just ignore that. You mentioned something about my capture weapon I think?” Izuku blushed, looking down at his feet.

“Y-yeah, I um, I managed to copy it a couple months back. I haven’t gotten good enough at using it to actually bring it on patrols yet though. It’s not exactly like yours, it wouldn’t fit very well with my outfit, but it’s pretty similar. It wraps tight around my arms and torso, beneath my hoodie, but it loosens with a gesture. I can use loops like you do but from around my waist instead, and the ends extend down and out my sleeves. I have to use a second piece of support gear to get the levitation, but that’s triggered by the same gesture as the scarf.”

“Ignoring how impressive it is that you’ve managed to do what no one else has been able to do yet and copy my capture weapon, if you want to bring it with you I can teach you how to use it.”

“Really?!”

“Of course, it would be illogical to leave you to figure out how to use it on your own when I can teach you. It’ll be different with your modifications, but I’m sure we can figure something out.”

“I’d love that!” Izuku beamed, bouncing from foot to foot, and Eraser hid a fond grin in his capture weapon.

“Anyways, let's get started, kid. I need to know exactly what to work on with you before I can plan for it, so I’d like you to run through some assessments for me.” With that, Izuku dove into the training with his usual degree of enthusiasm.

At the end of the night, Izuku gave Eraser his phone number (the vigilante one), in case he ever needed to contact them. Eraser had given them his in turn, with the offer to call him if they ever needed help with anything.

As they met up to train twice a week, Izuku came to find that Eraser’s training was much like Nedzu’s. It pushed him to his limits, in a way little else ever seemed to, and he loved every second of it. He improved in leaps and bounds each night they trained, and he never even tried to contain his glee over that fact.

They loved learning from Eraser. For all he was sarcastic and tired, he was a great teacher. He was blunt and logical in a way that just made sense, and he would tell them exactly what they were doing wrong, and how to fix it, or how to improve what was already good, and was always encouraging. The best part of training though was always the poorly hidden pride he could see in Eraser’s eyes.

They suspected Eraser was starting to figure out he was younger than they seemed, especially seeing as how they weren’t even protesting being called ‘kid’ anymore, but he’d come to trust him enough that he wasn’t too worried about it.

He started calling Eraser ‘EraserDad’ sometimes as a joke, and he told no one of how his stomach would fill with butterflies when Eraser started jokingly calling him ‘son’ (after first asking about their preference regarding gendered titles) in response. If he wondered sometimes what it would be like if Eraser really thought of them as a son, no one ever had to know.

Chapter Text

Apparently giving Izuku and Mei access to vehicles was a bad idea.

They wound up fixing up two old trucks, and Izuku started ‘upgrading’ a sports car just for fun. Hitoshi swore never to get into the sports car immediately upon finding out about it, and promptly swore off riding in any vehicle Izuku or Mei were driving after they raced around the neighbourhood in the trucks. Izuku and Mei thought it had been really fun, and Hitoshi was too busy throwing up at the side of the road to argue. No one should have ever let either of them learn to drive.

It took two months to get the trucks working, and then another four for them to be confident in their ability to drive without getting pulled over. Hitoshi wound up being the best driver of the three of them, he told them plainly it was because he was the only one out of the three of them that wasn’t batshit crazy, which they laughed at (plus he looked the oldest in case they ever did get pulled over), and so became the group’s designated driver for the back and forth between the beach and the dump.

It was two months after Izuku had started training when Izuku judged Hitoshi ready to train under Eraserhead, using the vigilante name Spite.

Thankfully, when he started Eraser only complimented his art, and then didn’t bring the picture thing up again. He’d have just about died of embarrassment if he had.

Hitoshi’s vigilante outfit had the same style of jumpsuit as Izuku had for a base layer, though his was a midnight purple with black sleeves instead, with baggy black pants and a harness over the top and knee high combat boots with the same features as Izuku’s fancy boots. He had a black hood as well, the removable cowl worn over the jumpsuit and under the harness.

Izuku had built him a mask that worked much like their own, though he’d opted to replace the white light up face with a yellow light up oni-style grin, and make the voice settings a bit easier to change with dials on the side. (Izuku had confirmed and re confirmed that he was okay wearing a mask, because he’d had bad experiences with things on his face. Getting to choose when the thing was on his face had made it almost comforting though, so they’d included a mask.) Rather than a visor, he had what were essentially wrap-around sunglasses held to his face by clips behind his ears. They didn’t have nearly as much tech in them as Lucky’s, owing to the lack of eyes and mini super-computer linked to them, but they still had the various means of vision enhancement.

He also had the same hearing enhancement Izuku had, though his was in the form of dark purple demon-style horns poking out the top of his hood rather than cat ears like Izuku’s. (He’d been called a demon so often throughout his life, he may as well own the label.)

He had gloves in the same purple as his jumpsuit with reinforced knuckles and grips on his fingers and palms. His pants and gloves were embellished with thin lines in a bright yellow, both for contrast and also because it was his favourite colour, though Izuku had added a way to change them to dark purple for stealth purposes.

They’d also given him escrima sticks and knives, both electric, and a small backpack and a utility belt with everything else he’d need or use in it. (They’d lined the backpack in metal, but, at his request, only enough to protect the contents, not enough to use as a weapon without serious effort. He would probably never use it that way, and he didn’t want to carry that extra weight around unnecessarily.)

His very favourite part of the outfit, however, was easily the scarf. Izuku had made him a copy of Eraser’s scarf, though he’d needed an extra piece of support gear based on Izuku’s telekinetic tech to make it hover, same as Izuku, as he didn’t have the same secondary levitation quirk that Eraser apparently did. Izuku had been teaching him the basics of how to use it for the past month, and Eraser had seemed impressed when he’d seen what he’d accomplished.

They’d decided that Hitoshi wouldn’t use his quirk as a vigilante, because that was the single most common reason for vigilantes having their identities uncovered: the police getting enough information on their quirk to search the quirk database for them.

Watching Izuku train with Eraser was deeply humbling, because it made it very, very clear that even when Izuku utterly kicked his ass, they’d been holding back. The shorter child was a menace. Regardless, he learned a lot, and he could actually see an improvement quite quickly. The best part was Eraser teaching him how to use his capture scarf, which he’d geeked out over almost as much as Izuku had.

Actually, scratch that, the best part was teaming up with Eraser to tease Izuku about how much sugar, cream, and other not-coffee substances they put in their coffee.

That was the general pattern their lives continued in for the next six months. Izuku and Hitoshi trained with Eraser twice a week, Izuku would go on patrol four days a week while Hitoshi trained at home on his own. During the day, he and Mei would work on their online school work while Izuku alternated Nedzu’s projects, going to UA twice a week for lessons, and working ahead on some of the high school curriculum. Izuku and Mei together would work on their support gear, Izuku would teach Hitoshi the things he was training him in, Izuku would work on various analyses and blueprints for support gear he eventually started using to replace selling repaired items as their source of income, under the name Ghost, and all three of them would work on cleaning the beach.

The only reason they managed to do as much as they did was Izuku’s diligent scheduling, and Hitoshi honestly wasn’t sure how Izuku managed his schedule. He suspected time travel, or some means of stretching time (considering Izuku’s brand of mad genius, he genuinely couldn’t rule it out completely).

For as painful and gross and horrible it had been to clean the beach, the sense of satisfaction when they could finally look out over the fully clean beach made it worth it. Especially considering they no longer had to smell the beach if they wanted to open a window. The mysteriously cleaned beach wound up making the news, but they decided as a group not to come forward about it, at least not yet, seeing as how Hitoshi was technically a runaway, and Izuku didn’t want to risk anyone finding out about their parents abandoning him, or about them being homeless. Mei just didn’t want to be known for anything but their support gear, and said that if she ever needed the boost to their popularity they could always leak it later, when it would be less detrimental to Izuku and Hitoshi.

That didn’t stop them from plastering pictures they’d taken of each other throughout the process on the walls in among the rest of the pictures they’d taken, of course.

With the beach finished though they now had an abundance of time that was now free. Mei dedicated most of it into making their babies, and Hitoshi redoubled his quirk training, while Izuku split their time between preparing for the UA entrance exams, because it was apparently never to early to start, which he’d reluctantly agreed with and joined in on, and expanding his litany of skills to include more investigation.

The latest thing he’d been looking into was an influx of new drugs into the markets. He was hoping to track down the source of it and head off the problem before it could get really bad.

Shortly after they’d finished the beach, they’d celebrated Hitoshi’s twelfth birthday with a picnic at said beach, and then fifteen days later had gone to a hero themed cafe to celebrate Izuku’s.

They’d brought Eraser a bunch of Present Mic themed cookies from the cafe with no explanation that evening. Izuku had told neither Hitoshi nor Mei who Eraser was married to, so they’d just had to take his word about it being funny.

Chapter Text

Lucky had been looking into dealings of Trigger for about four months when they discovered something much more alarming. The Yakuza group selling the Trigger, the Shie Hassaikai, were experimenting with ways of erasing quirks. They hadn’t gotten far yet, but they’d had just enough success with temporary results for them to know that they had the potential to be seriously bad news.

The Shie Hassaikai had buried the experiments seriously deep, and when they’d been researching for nearly five months without figuring out what exactly was going on or getting enough information for the police and heroes to act on, they realized they were going to have to break into the facilities themselves to find what they were looking for.

That realization prompted four months, with a short interlude to celebrate their and Hitoshi’s thirteenth birthdays enforced by Mei, where they snuck into and out of each of the Yakuza group’s hideouts one by one, gathering and organizing whatever information they could find. Eraser had been seriously concerned upon finding out about them breaking into Yakuza hideouts, but he couldn’t do much to stop them outside of arresting them, and they both knew at this point that he’d be unlikely to be able to do that successfully if he tried.

There were several near misses, but for the most part they were able to get in and out consistently without running into problems, and the few times they almost got caught they were able to play it off as gang or law enforcement activity.

They’d snuck into a little over seventy five percent of all the Shie Hassaikai’s bases when they finally figured out what was going on.

They heard a little girl crying as they were creeping around, heading for the labs, and their blood ran cold.

They followed the sound to see a small child, about four years old, with long white hair and limbs wrapped in bandages being brought to what was clearly supposed to be a nursery, but was the coldest, most impersonal feeling room they’d ever encountered. They waited for the caretaker to get sufficiently far away to attack the guards, taking them down quickly and silently before they could even realize what was happening. They swiped the keys from one of them and unlocked the door, scanning the room for the small child and spotting them curled up in their bed, wrapped in blankets. They let out a squeak and hid deeper in the pile of blankets upon seeing them.

He approached slowly, making sure their footsteps were audible. They crouched down a couple of feet from the quivering ball of blankets.

“I’m not going to hurt you, kitten,” they said softly. The child peeked out of the blankets slowly. “I’m here to help, if you’d like it.”

“H-help?” The child whispered, peeking a bit farther out of the blankets.

“Yep! If you’re not safe, or if there are people who are hurting or scaring you, I can take you away from here and keep you safe from them,” they made sure to keep their voice light and friendly, but still gentle, in the hopes of not scaring the child any more. The child’s tiny face poked out of the blankets entirely, and the wrappings loosened around them.

“You can take me away? You can keep me safe from Chisaki?”

“I can, and if you want me too I promise I will.” The child seemed to consider it for a moment.

“What if he tries to hurt you too?”

“If he tries I can protect myself, and I can protect you too, little kitten.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.” The child nodded, letting the blankets fall around them.

“What’s your name?” they asked. Lucky smiled.

“While I’m wearing my costume, my name is Lucky Kitten, but that’s kind of long, so you can call me Lucky. What’s your name?” the child nodded resolutely.

“E-Eri.” Lucky smiled a bit brighter at little Eri.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Eri-chan.” Eri seemed to be thinking something over.

“Are- are you a boy or a girl?” they blurted out after a moment.

“I’m actually neither, I’m something in between! When people talk about me, they use ‘they’ and ‘them’ instead of ‘he’ and ‘him’ or ‘she’ and ‘her’. I don’t mind if you use ‘he’ or ‘she’ though, if that’s easier for you. They don’t bother me.”

“There’s- something in between?”

“Yes there is. Are you something in between too?” Eri thought about it for a moment.

“I don’t know. Everyone has always said I was a girl.”

“That’s alright, you can take as long as you want to think about it, and even change your mind later if you’d like, and if you decide you’re still a girl when you’re done thinking about it that’s alright too! Would you be okay with me referring to you as a girl in the meantime, or would you like me to do something else?” Eri thought it over for another moment.

“You can call me a girl for now.”

“Sounds good Eri-chan!” Izuku said brightly. “Now, did you want me to take you out of here?” Eri nodded quickly.

“Can I bring my toys with me?”

“Sure, as long as they can fit in my backpack! If you have to leave something behind though, we can get you a new one once we’re out of here.” Eri nodded seriously.

“I’ll have to think about what to bring then.”

“That’s alright, as long as we can be out of here before someone comes looking for you again.”

“They’re all finished the experiments for today, so they won’t come looking for me until tomorrow.” She hesitated for a second. “Do you need to get anything?” Lucky paused, considering.

“I was hoping to get some things, yes, but I can always come back and get them some other time if you’d rather I stay with you.” Eri considered it carefully again.

“You can go get your things, as long as you promise to come back.” Lucky smiled at her gently.

“You sure, kitten?”

“Yes,” Eri responded, nodding resolutely.

“Alright then, I promise I’ll be back soon,” Lucky told her, standing up and moving back. Eri nodded and climbed out of bed to look over her toys, and Lucky left the room, sprinting to get to the labs as fast as possible. They rushed through gathering literally everything they could, which mostly consisted of taking pictures and video so as not to tip anyone off about them having been there. Not that that was going to matter much seeing as how they were planning to kidnap a child who was important enough to be kept under guard, but digital copies were sturdier and easier to transport anyways.

They got back to the room just as Eri was putting the last of the toys she was leaving behind away. Lucky approached slowly again, but Eri still jolted when she looked up at them. Lucky put their backpack down beside her and unzipped it.

“You can put your toys in here.” Eri nodded and began to carefully place the few stuffed animals and dolls she’d chosen into the bag. She wound up running out of room, and Lucky offered to tuck the last remaining toy, a stuffed rabbit, into their utility belt before she could panic.

“Alright, are you all ready to go?” Lucky asked her. Eri nodded. “Can I pick you up Eri-chan? It will be easier to get out of here if I can carry you, but I don’t have to if you don’t want me to.” Eri thought for a moment.

“You can pick me up,” she said, and Lucky carefully picked her up and positioned her on their chest.

“Alright, off we go then!” And with that, Lucky took off out of the building, avoiding as many people as they could with a child in their arms and throwing glue bombs at everyone else. They had to move faster and faster as more and more people heard the yelling and caught on to what was happening, and they were flat out sprinting by the time they were vaulting the exterior wall of the compound, having already hacked and disabled the defences on the way in.

They wound up getting home much, much later than they’d intended, having had to take so many detours and move so slowly to avoid being tailed or caught. Izuku spent the walk and train ride back telling Eri about Hitoshi and Mei and his home, and had spent a frankly embarrassing amount of time gushing to her about Eraserhead. Eri said she wanted to meet them, and declared that she wanted to stay with ‘Lucky-san,’ which had made them blush quite a bit to hear. When they got back, they were greeted in the living room by Hitoshi making breakfast.

“Hey Toshi! I brought home a new sister!” Izuku declared cheerily.

“Oh hey Zu, I was wondering when you’d get- wait what?” Hitoshi whipped around to see Izuku standing there with a small child balanced on his hip.

“This is Eri! She’s said she’s okay with being referred to as a girl while she thinks about her answer more.” Izuku’s tone completely betrayed the shit eating grin hidden beneath their mask. Hitoshi dropped his face into his hands.

“Only you Zu, only you.”

“Zu?” Eri asked, quiet voice betraying confusion.

“Oh! Remember how I said that when I’m in costume people call me Lucky Kitten?” Eri nodded. “Well, when I’m out of costume, my name is Midoriya Izuku, and people I’m close to, like Hitoshi and Mei, call me nicknames based off of that, like Zu or Izu. They also use ‘he’ and ‘him’ to talk about me too, in addition to ‘they’ and ‘them,’ because I feel closer to being a boy out of costume than I am in costume.” Eri nodded.

“Should I call you that then?”

“If you want to, sure!” She thought about it for a second.

“Can I call you Izu-nii? Because you called me your sister?” Izuku teared up behind the mask.

“I’d love that, Eri!” She nodded decisively. “Alright, can I put you down so I can get out of my costume, Eri?” She nodded hesitantly, and they put her down. They pulled off their hood and mask, and pushed up their visor, so that Eri would be able to see their face before he changed his outfit completely. They grinned at her brightly and put his backpack down beside her. “Why don’t you get your toys out of my backpack while I get changed, and then when I get back we can pick out which room we’ll decorate for you?”

“Okay,” Eri agreed, moving to start unpacking the bag, and Izuku passed her the bunny from their belt before hurrying off to get changed before she finished.

When they’d changed into comfy clothes and tied his hair (which was down past their shoulders now because he kept forgetting to cut it) back, he gave Eri a tour of the apartment he and Hitoshi used to house their living quarters (perks of having an entire floor of a building to yourself, you have way too much space) and she picked one of the rooms for herself. He then brought up a bunch of store catalogues on the computer and helped Eri pick out furniture and decorations for her new room, which they then sent Hitoshi and Mei to go get while Eri and Izuku had a nap on the couch, Eri having settled down on Izuku’s chest when he laid down.

Assembling the furniture was- an adventure, and painting the walls wound up with three teenagers covered in a great deal of pink paint. Mei and Hitoshi had also brought a bunch of new toys and books for Eri back with them, along with step stools and light switch covers to turn the switches to pull strings so Eri could reach things around the apartment on her own, which she played with while they set up her room.

Once she’d given her seal of approval to the room, they’d all eaten dinner, which was a repeat of her being absolutely mind blown by the flavours of the food and them being very grateful they’d made something relatively bland like the previous two meals had been, and then Izuku read her a story book and put her to bed, explaining to her before she fell asleep that he wouldn’t be there that night, but if she needed something she could go and ask Hitoshi, and he would help her with whatever she needed. He’d given her another promise that he’d come back before she’d settled down and fallen asleep for the night, Put Your Hands Up radio playing quietly in the background on Izuku’s Present Mic radio to keep the room from being too quiet and too like the Yakuza compound.

It was only then that he left for patrol, a bit late and more tired than usual, but otherwise continuing on as normal. They wouldn’t get the chance to look through the files he’d gotten from the Shie Hassaikai until the next night, which had ended up with him in their gym a couple apartments over trying to burn off the rage that screamed for him to hunt down all the monsters that had done that to her.

He’d sent the files to Sir. Nighteye, who they’d discovered was currently looking into the Yakuza, with a note saying the little girl was safe, and if he didn’t hunt the Shie Hassaikai down fast enough, they would.

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Sir. Nighteye had responded to Lucky's threat towards the Shie Hassaikai by officially including them on the team working on bringing them down, so as to ensure they wouldn’t decide he wasn’t moving fast enough. When he questioned them on why they were so serious about the matter, contrary to their usual happy-go-lucky demeanour, they’d merely responded that it was personal, and that they always took crimes against children seriously, and had let slip nothing more.

Either way, they were working on dealing with the Shie Hassaikai, which was really good because they had not taken their stealing of Eri well. They’d wound up dyeing Eri’s hair a pretty green and tying it up whenever they left the house to keep her from being recognized and attacked in the meantime, which had been a necessity because Overhaul was definitely looking for her. She’d been all for it upon realizing that she’d look even more like ‘Lucky-nii’ with green hair.

Izuku and Hitoshi had wound up filling the windows and balconies with potted plants upon finding out about how much Eri apparently loved flowers, and pancakes for breakfast became a weekly tradition upon Mei discovering her sweet tooth. They’d managed to deal with Izuku and Hitoshi needing to both leave to train with Eraser by having Mei babysit, and when she wasn’t available they’d switch off which of them had to stay home. Izuku told Eraser he’d recently acquired responsibility for caring for a little sister, hence they and Hitoshi occasionally needing to miss training or patrol.

It was made harder when, after over a year and a half of training with Lucky and Eraserhead, Spite was finally deemed ready to start patrolling, but they managed.

Izuku had also started multitasking his own high school work with tutoring Eri, after she had expressed interest in learning the things he was doing, and teaching her basic self defence while he was training Hitoshi. Hitoshi had suggested that maybe teaching a three year old how to take someone down might not be the best idea (because as it turned out she wasn’t quite four yet), but Izuku had countered that with there being a Yakuza after her, and that as she was physically capable of holding a knife and throwing a punch she may as well learn to do so properly. Hitoshi hadn’t had a good enough counter argument, so Eri was rapidly getting to the point where she could kill anyone that tried to kidnap or otherwise harm her. It was actually kind of terrifying, especially with how enthusiastic she was about it.

Izuku had been slowly trying to improve how she viewed her quirk, but it was slow going, and in the meantime he’d given her an emergency bracelet that would cancel her quirk for about ten minutes when she turned it on, before turning itself off again. They could have made her one that would keep it cancelled all the time, but again, he was trying to get her to the point she could learn to intentionally control and maybe even use it.

Eri wasn’t the only stray he wound up bringing home in those couple months though. On their way home from patrol one evening Izuku had heard a sound that he’d thought was a raccoon trapped in a dumpster, but upon lifting the lid he’d found instead a very scruffy, fluffy cat. It was a grey cat with black patches across its face, paws, and fluffy tail, which was hilarious because it looked pretty much exactly like a cat version of a raccoon. When Izuku gave the cat, whom they’d dubbed Trash Panda, after both the confusion and the cat’s markings, food, the cat had promptly decided she was coming home with him. He didn’t much feel like arguing with the cat, and so brought her home with them.

One bath (which was way easier than they thought it would be since she apparently loved water) later, and Trash Panda was happily munching on fish from the fridge before curling up in his bed. She didn’t have a collar, and had been dirty and matted enough that she was almost certainly a stray, so Izuku had no problems claiming Trash Panda as his. Hitoshi had teased them about bringing home strays in the middle of the night the next morning, but had raised no actual protests against Trash Panda’s addition to the household. Eri had been fascinated by the cat, and had seemed both confused and overjoyed when she liked her.

The three of them took Trash Panda to the vet, and then Eri spent the afternoon playing with her with all the cat toys they’d gotten while out and about. By the end of the day, it was very clear that Trash Panda, or just Panda according to Eri, had adopted Eri as her new kitten. Hitoshi had made a joke about cats apparently really liking Eri, using both Izuku’s and Panda’s immediate love for her as his evidence.

The theory seemed a bit more probable when, a little over a month after that, Eri had wound up finding a tiny black kitten with white patches on his paws and the tip of his tail in an old donut box at the park. Izuku and Eri had quickly agreed upon the name Donut, as Eri liked donuts and he had been found in a donut box. Hitoshi thought Izuku’s reason for naming the kitten Donut (the second reason) was not a good one, but Eri liked it, so Donut it was.

While Trash Panda was for the most part a gentle, affectionate (but very insistent) cat, Donut was a feisty ball of energy wrapped in soft black fur. Trash Panda adopted Donut as her second kitten (after Eri) pretty much immediately, and, much like Panda, Donut adored Eri more than he liked anyone else in the house.

When Eri’s fourth birthday came around that November, they celebrated with cake and a princess tea party themed birthday party, and all three members of the chaos trio showered her with gifts, and for the very first time Eri gave them the very smallest smile. They’d all thought it was the most beautiful smile ever.

The arrival of Eri’s birthday seemed to have reminded Izuku of the approach of the UA entrance exams, which were now less than two years away. Hitoshi still thought Izuku was over preparing, but joined in his preparations all the same, just in case.

Granted, most of those preparations consisted of gathering information on the entrance exams, which was nearly impossible to find. Once he’d managed to uncover that the exam would have them fighting robots, they expanded the training to include various means of dismantling robots, with and without support items.

They’d also been working on a fighting style that Eraserhead wouldn’t recognize, in case they wound up in his homeroom, or in a situation he might be watching them fight in. Meanwhile, Izuku worked on finding out any more information, like the rules or the layout of the physical exams. They’d also worked on studying for the written exams, which Mei had joined them for, and Izuku had been helping Mei practice for the support exam, which he also practiced for, on the chance he didn’t get into heroics.

The most important part of their preparations however, was working on tracking down Overhaul. They wouldn’t be able to have one of the trio stay with Eri during the school day, which meant they would need somewhere else for her to go during that time. She was old enough to be in school, which they were trying to prepare her for as best they could, but she wouldn’t be able to go until Overhaul and the Shie Hassaikai were taken care of, and it was proving difficult. Izuku had wound up looking into secure daycares that heroes used, in case Overhaul couldn’t be dealt with in time, and had been considering asking Nedzu about it.

In the meantime, they tried to keep her up to date on the kindergarten curriculum, and possibly overshot it by a bit in what they taught her.

They wound up routing out the rest of the Shie Hassaikai by June that year, by which point Izuku had also been able to convince Eri to start practising at least turning her quirk on and off at will, and using it on plants to practice control and use up a bit of her accumulated stores.

By September they’d managed to enrol Eri in a daycare that was actually associated with UA, though Izuku had had to pull some strings with Nedzu to get her in, and there wound up being some difficulties with her having started halfway through the year, but thanks to Izuku’s tutoring, which had definitely been above grade level, she was able to adjust to that aspect at least fairly quickly.

She had some struggles with the number of other kids, but thankfully between them having warned the teachers about her being heavily traumatized in advance and the class sizes being really small to start with, she eventually adjusted and came to love school.

Eri’s fifth birthday came soon after that, and they wound up having a proper birthday party with her new friends at a play centre to celebrate. Afterwards Hitoshi vehemently declared that he hated planning parties, but it was more than worth it to see the still rare smile on Eri’s face.

With Overhaul out of the picture, they’d offered Eri the option of stopping dyeing her hair, but she’d decided she liked having her hair be a bright colour. So rather than stop dyeing her hair completely, she’d elected to start dyeing it a new colour each time they dyed it. Apparently her classmates found her constantly changing hair colour really cool, and between that and her stories about their cats she was the most popular girl in the class. The whole trio was happy to see her happy and surrounded by friends.

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A year before the UA entrance exams, Izuku really kicked his preparations into gear. He tracked down and studied everything he could. Loopholes, blueprints, the lists of people who had passed previously. He wound up uncovering a list of point types, that he was pretty sure he was supposed to find based on the lack of difficulty he’d come to find characteristic of Nedzu’s security systems. The villain points were easy enough to guess about, as were the rescue points. There were also info gathering and infiltration points, and only the info gathering points had an explanation provided. The instructions said to put a specific mark at the top of your written test paper if you’d found the site with the information. Izuku drilled the symbol into his and Hitoshi’s heads, and had on a suspicion gone through everything else he’d found on the exam to find similar symbols, which they also practiced putting at the top of the page so they wouldn’t forget them.

The blueprints of the robots they studied to figure out how to break them the easiest, but Izuku also worked on determining the best way to hack the robots to turn them against their fellows. He’d wound up finding an open USB port beneath a panel (they’d have to tear off the panel to get to it, but that was irrelevant), and had wound up designing a device to plug into it that would do just that. He could also do the same from a modified flip phone, but it would be easier to just plug something in. They’d given each device a name and tracker linked to his phone as well, and would be able to control them remotely via said phone. They’d given Hitoshi some of the devices and a flip phone controller as well.

They carefully studied and memorized the blueprints of each of the battle arenas, finding where the robots entered the field It took actually hacking into UA proper’s files (not an easy thing to do, especially without getting caught) to find the blueprints of the storage areas, and doing so revealed the location of the command centres as well, which was a true gold mine.

And so, with a plan crafted, they practiced to implement it. Izuku and Mei spent hours every day designing, building, refining, and rebuilding support items that would help him and Hitoshi pass the exam, without getting them recognized by Eraserhead (who would definitely be proctoring the exam). Izuku and Hitoshi practiced with all of their new support items and carrying them around so that when they had to sneak them in they didn’t seem suspicious. They also practiced identifying and making improvised weapons, and carrying around supplies like duct tape they’d need to make them.

Izuku also had all three of them on full cram programs for the written exams, because they’d be damned before he let his friends fail their entrance exams on the written portion of all things. Both Mei and Hitoshi hated the mock interviews Izuku had them all do, but as usual, they couldn’t argue with his logic to their necessity.

For the first two months of their preparations, everything happened smoothly.

Then one day, Izuku came back from a trip to get groceries hours late, without groceries and covered in foul smelling sludge. He didn’t talk about what happened. In fact, they didn’t talk at all for days. Hitoshi and Mei managed to drag him to an underground clinic to get them checked over and to get the lingering sludge from his lungs, but aside from that Izuku resisted doing anything. He would give Eri a distant smile and pet the cats when they climbed in their lap, but next to nothing else. He wouldn’t even respond to Eraserhead’s texts, leaving Hitoshi to explain to the man what had happened. The first time he did anything was four days after the incident while Hitoshi was out, when he tore every sheet of analysis on All Might from his notebooks, ripped them to shreds, and lit them on fire, before finally breaking down and spending hours crying and screaming his lungs out on the kitchen floor, until he’d cried himself hoarse and just sat hunched over his knees, gasping for breath.

When he’d calmed down and gathered his energy, he climbed to the roof, and sat on the edge just looking over the ocean and breathing in the salty air. Eraser found them there hours later, once the sun had set.

It was a testament to how out of it he was that they didn’t notice Eraser until he’d landed on the roof and started moving towards them.

“Hey kid, what are you doing out here?” he asked, voice uncharacteristically soft, though still a bit gruff. Apparently that was an irremovable part of his voice. Izuku’s lips almost twitched in a smile at the thought.

“Watching the ocean,” they answered quietly. They hadn’t really been watching it. They’d barely noticed the sun setting hours ago.

“You think you could watch the ocean a bit further away from the ledge, kid?” Izuku hummed in response. He thought about moving, but his muscles didn’t respond, so they gave up. After a moment Eraser moved to sit down beside them, close enough to grab him if they pitched forwards, but far enough away to not risk making him uncomfortable. It was a position Izuku was familiar with, having had to either assume it himself or having seen Eraser assume it many times over the years. He couldn’t say it was unwarranted in this situation.

“What’s on your mind?” Izuku’s lips did twitch then, fondness for Eraser breaking through the heaviness of the nothing covering him just a little.

“A lot, and nothing at all,” They murmured.

“Oh yeah?” Izuku hummed. They wanted to respond, to elaborate, but their voice just- wouldn’t.

“Did something happen?” Eraser prompted gently. Izuku still couldn’t speak, but his hands rose to sign unbidden. The signs were slow, dragged out by their exhaustion, but they were comprehensible, which was the important part.

‘A lot, yeah. Someone I looked up to for a long time-’ Izuku paused in his signing for a moment. ‘There’s a reason people say to never meet your heroes, apparently. I found out what it was.’

“Want to tell me about it?” Eraser asked after a moment.

‘I was attacked by a villain.’ Izuku had to stop for a minute, breathing deep just to remind himself that he could, that he wasn’t drowning in grey sludge anymore. ‘They were made of grey sludge. I was unprepared, and distracted, and they caught me by surprise. I managed to stab out one of their eyes, but that- that didn’t stop them from trying to cram their way into my lungs. All Might appeared as I passed out from oxygen deprivation.’ They had to stop again, swallowing back a mix of grief and rage at the thought of All Might.

‘I woke up to All Might slapping me awake. He said something about almost losing me I think, and then having to go, but I don’t really remember. I- I do remember latching on to him. I was still shaking, I’d just almost drowned, I must have latched onto him for comfort or something. He was my favourite hero and gave me hope for a really long time, so it makes the most sense that that’s why I did it. I’m not sure though, it happened so fast- One second I was choking on sludge then the next I was being slapped awake by All Might- and then the next I was clinging to All Might’s leg as he tried to shake me off a hundred feet above the ground. I- I had to tell him that if I let go then I would die before he stopped trying to make me let go. He- he landed on a roof top-’ Izuku stopped again, wondering whether or not he should tell Eraser about All Might shrinking. Eraser stayed silent as Izuku thought, waiting for him to start again. Izuku snorted, and his voice returned as some part of the spell over him broke.

“Y’know what? He told a random middle schooler on top of a roof I know there were cameras on, and then didn’t even ask me not to tell anyone. He’s lucky I understand the need for discretion. After he landed on the rooftop, All Might shrunk. He just- poofed, and suddenly he was this hunched over stick of a man coughing blood all over the place. Once I’d gotten over my surprise, or at least some of it, he told me about how he got an injury in a battle years ago, and how it had put him in a state he should have retired from, but didn’t. Anyways, once he’d finished with his explanation,” Izuku struggled for a moment, throat starting to close up again. “I asked him a question: Can I become a hero like you without a quirk?” Izuku swallowed hard.

‘He said no. He said no, that it was too dangerous and that I’d be a liability, to be more realistic, then swelled back up and jumped away.’ Eraser swore violently.

“That complete idiot. He did what?” Eraser swore some more, almost making Izuku chuckle.

“Kid, he was dead wrong. Not having a quirk isn’t going to stop you from being a hero if you don’t let it. Plus, lots of heroes, especially underground heroes, fight essentially quirkless in some or all situations, myself included. There’s this person I know- they’re a vigilante, not a hero, at least not yet if I have anything to say about it, but they’re a better hero than plenty of actual heroes I know, and they do it all without using a quirk. They’re better at the hero thing than All Might too, if the number of protocol violations in that interaction is any indication.”

Izuku actually smiled, even chuckling at the comment about All Might, and turned to look at Eraserhead. They gave him a nod. Eraser hesitated before asking his next question.

“How did you get down from the roof?” Izuku’s smile faltered, and he turned back to looking out over the ocean again.

‘He told me to use the door, but it was locked, and no one answered by banging on it. I- I wound up staying up there for hours. I- I thought about taking the quick way down.’ Izuku took a deep breath. ‘I- The only thing that got me off that roof safely was seeing a charm my little sister had made for me on my belt. It- it reminded me that she was at home with my brother and our cats, waiting for me to get back with the groceries I’d lost when the villain attacked me. And- a teacher I’m- close to, as well, I had been supposed to meet him, but I was late for that. That’s what got me moving again, actually. The knowledge that I was late to meet him.’ Izuku looked down at his feet hanging so many stories above the ground. ‘I wound up jumping down to the fire escape, and climbing down that way.’

“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you found a safe way off that roof, kid. And I’m sure your siblings and cats are even more glad about it.” Izuku smiled, nodding slightly.

‘Me too. It’d be a shame if that finally did me in, after this many years of fighting the world itself for my right to live. Besides, I promised my brother we’d become heroes together, and I never break my promises.’ Izuku felt a bit more confident by the end of their little speech. Eraser gave them a small grin of his own.

“That’s the spirit kid.” Izuku stood up and stepped back onto the roof fully, turning to face him, with a grin that was spiteful and razor sharp.

“I’m going to make All Might eat his words. I was planning on going underground, only going to UA at all so that kids like me would know it was possible, but now? Fuck it, I’m going for the top. I’ve never cared about the rankings, but I want to see his face when I make number one.” Eraser smirked.

“I look forward to seeing you in my class then, kid. Make sure you get there.” Izuku nodded at him confidently.

“I won’t let you down, Eraserhead.”

“I have no doubt about that, little menace.”

Izuku was back on track the next day, even more motivated than before. He apologized to his little family for scaring them, then threw himself into preparing. He wasn’t just preparing for the exams though. He prepared for afterwards too. While before most of his support gear was meant for his vigilante gear, now that he was aiming for the top he’d need things flashy enough to get there. He was planning on putting as much of it as possible into his hero costume, bulking out his submission for his hero costume with pages and pages of diagrams and blueprints.

He’d eventually told Hitoshi and Mei what had happened in vague details, but had only told Eraser as Lucky that ‘he’d find out eventually.’ He’d had to hold both Hitoshi and Mei back from lighting the number one hero on fire, but had eventually managed to get them to channel their rage towards training instead.

By the time the entrance exams finally rolled around, all three of them were raring to go, and more than ready to prove themselves.

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