Worthless No More: A Quirkless Not Worthless AU

Chapter 3

Disclaimer: This has been inspired by Quirkless Unbound by Shadowhuntress and Zyla_SweetBean on Archive Of Our Own. I strongly recommend you read that before reading this. Some scenes and dialogue will be the same, but will take place mainly from OC's perspective. This is to answer the What If..? question: "What if Maddie and Tenko were childhood friends?" A few minor plot points will also be changed. MHA belongs to Kohei Horikoshi.

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Yagi visited a few more times during her stay in Tartarus, keeping her updated on Izuku's adoption. The boy still didn't trust him, not by a long shot. That was understandable. But it made the man especially sad and anxious. Maddie told him that he just had to be patient with him. The kid had been traumatized, abused. His distrust of adults wasn't just going to magically disappear overnight.

The updates also helped her with her own timeline. The timeline to enact her plan, that is. In the meantime, though, she got comfortable. Prison wasn't so bad. Granted, she didn't like being restrained most of the time, but she was released for meals and recreational activities. Recreational activities really only consisted of the prisoners running laps around the facility's gym, military-style. It was the only human contact she had outside of Yagi. She would rather have better company than convicted criminals, but it was fine. She was deemed dangerous, but not that dangerous. Besides, the staff didn't have to know that Quirk Suppressants had never worked on her.

There was one particular inmate that caught her eye, simply because she looked so out of place. Needless to say that she herself looked the most out of place here, but this woman's purple and magenta hair that was cut short and her closed-off expression separated her from everyone else in this dump. She seemed to have caught the woman's attention as well, made evident when she approached during their water break.

"You're kind of young, aren't you?" Maddie glanced up at the woman who now stood next to her, regarding her with a cocked eyebrow. The brunette swallowed the gulp she had taken from the water bottle she was holding. "Huh?" she responded eloquently.

"You're young. To be in a place like this." The woman took a swig from her own bottle. "Didn't know Tartarus decided to take up babysitting duty."

Maddie's own eyebrow twitched. "I'm twenty-two," she stated bluntly. The woman blinked at her, mildly shocked. She looked her up and down. "Oh, sorry," she said, rubbing the back of her neck. "You look a lot younger than that. Sixteen, at the very least."

Maddie sighed. "Yeah, I get that a lot." She eyed the woman. "Did you need something?"

"Ah, no, sorry." The woman apologized again, crossing her arms. "But still, twenty-two is still the youngest I've seen here. Must've done something pretty terrible to wind up in a place like this. 'Cause I know you're not here on vacation.

Maddie snorted. "Damn right." She gulped down some more water. "Tried to save a Quirkless kid."

The woman's brow shot up into her hairline. Clearly, that's not what she had expected at all. "Oh. I see." She didn't say anything more than that. Maddie tilted her head towards her. "Were you expecting something more extreme?"

The woman blinked. "No, no, I get it." Maddie must have displayed her confusion clearly on her face because the woman continued. "I never liked how the Quirkless were treated. Of course, the public's made to believe that it's all necessary." She glanced down at her right arm, one of her hands rubbing at it absentmindedly. "Just one of the many things I had to do to keep the status quo as the Hero Public Safety Commission's right-hand gun."

Now it was Maddie's turn to raise her eyebrows in surprise. "You worked for the Hero Public Safety Commission? Wow. That makes me curious." She didn't elaborate, but the woman knew what she was insinuating. She sighed heavily. "It's also one of the reasons why I killed the director."