Equals - Quirkless!Izuku AU(On Hiatus/Inconsistent updates)

What Do You Regret?

Katsuki Bakugou was the name of a prodigy. It was as simple as that in everyone's minds, he was bound for the moon and rocketing towards his goals without looking back or stepping down. Born with a good quirk and good smarts to match. Born to be anything he wanted.

But to be brutally honest with himself, he felt the opposite way. he felt like nothing more than a Lucky Bashtard riding on other people's efforts. Born with something he didn't really deserve with everything coming too easy. Like someone gave him the cheat codes for the game of life. He dreaded finding the level he didn't have the answer for. The one where brash words and biting anger couldn't save him. however, he'd die before admitting that out loud.

In that very moment, he felt that sentence to be truer than anything.

He was suffocating in a body made of fluid. Too thin and slimy to crush him and at the same time too viscous to drown in. His lungs screamed and his hands were burning as his explosions boiled the villain responsible. Adrenaline and fear were the only things keeping him from passing out.

Another round of explosions. Another boiling burn to his hands. Another desperate cry for help guised as a threat to the villain that was killing him.

"YOU PICKED THE WRONG GUY TO MESS WITH!"

Somebody get me the hell outta this! I'm gonna die!

The villain shifted around him, pulling itself together and worming its way into his lungs, his nose, his eyes, his very veins. And his hands began to go numb. A tiny voice in the back of his mind whispered like leaves in wind.

,What do you regret?'

His mind groped to answer the question, only to be cut short as air burst into his lungs.

He coughed and spluttered as the villain reeled away in pain from whatever hero had finally decided to help him. He felt his body fall to something solid beneath where he had been floating in squeezing weightlessness just before. His lungs heaved in air and he could almost feel it flowing into his extremities, taking his hands from numb to on fire in mere seconds.

He felt himself dragged up and onto somebody's shoulders, smaller than he'd expected for a pro hero, but he wasn't gonna complain.

When his head wasn't so light anymore he cracked his eyes open, and despite the fire and smoke and burning in his hands, everything in him managed to turn to ice.

"d-deku?"

The boy carrying him didn't even blink, running like a gunshot with a look in his eyes like he had played this level a million times and this was where he would win.

And it would be an earned victory.

{}{}{}{}{}{}{}

According to the police report and what little Katsuki himself could remember, the events of the afternoon were as follows;

He had been walking to the arcade with two of his friends, and kicked a bottle full of something. 

The liquid had spilled out and come alive turning into a villain right before his eyes, before jumping at the chance to try and suffocate him, saying something about 'loving a skin-suite with some fire'. He shivered at that.

His quirk coupled with his fear caused him to resist, starting fires all over and creating a 'genuinely dangerous situation'. And adding that to the being held hostage part meant that none of the available heroes could do anything about it, other than call for backup and try their best to minimize the collateral damage.

It went on like that for long enough that he began to lose his struggle against the villain. He really started dying. Like, for real.

And then, according to bystanders, someone had run out of the crowd.