Five Words

You Can Be A Hero

Six years of verbal and emotional, and even occasional physical abuse could easily break someone down, no matter how hard they tried to remain stood on their feet. Humans weren't impervious walls that were immune to anything that came their way, and no Quirk was strong enough to even claim that it was unbeatable. That wasn't the way that people were built. Even those who had the strongest wills, the strongest bodies, and the strongest minds, could be eroded away to leave a shell of a person. Every person had their weaknesses, their insecurities, their fears and Quirks all had limitations that simply couldn't be bypassed.

Izuku longed to have those limits though. He wanted to say that he had a weakness. He longed to have something that he could claim was the mountain that he just wasn't ever going to get across.

He wished... That he had anything, really.

That was the difference between those who were Quirkless and those who had Quirks in this world. Those who had powers had limits, mountains, entire continents that they had to topple and climb, to blast their way through and fight like hell to reach. They had hard lives ahead of them, filled with nothing but difficulty and hardship.

Quirkless people though? Like Izuku?

They didn't even get that.

No one who was born without any powers was going to be told that they had a hard life ahead of them. No one was going to tell them that they had mountains to climb over. No one was going to tell them that they had to split the seas in two. No one was going to tell them that they were going to reach the top.

To reach the top in the first place, you needed to have a chance at even getting to the base of the mountain.

No one was ever going to tell them that they could be a Hero.

If you wanted to even begin to have a chance, you needed a Quirk.

That was the difference between those who had powers, and those who didn't. Between those who weren't born equal, and those who were born on top.

Those who weren't born without Quirks had no life to look forward to. Not in a world where Quirks were the norm.

The ten year old boy sat alone, on the swings that were in the park that was near his school. He had found this place once when he was running from those in his class who were looking to try to harass him after classes were done. No one else seemed to even know that this place existed, which made it one of his favorite places to just be on his own.

No other students. No bullies. No odd looks. No one that Izuku would look at and envy their individuality with everything that he had. No Quirks. Here, he was just on his own, and could just think to himself. He could just be alone. And pretend that the world didn't have Quirks. That it didn't have Heroes. That he could just be rid of the soul crushing envy and sadness that living in this world gave him in the first place.

He'd wanted to be a Hero since he had the capacity to understand language. When he'd first seen All Might's original footage. How he'd come across it, he honestly didn't remember, though his mother claimed that the news had been rerunning clips of his during the number one Heroes tenth anniversary, and that he'd been hooked ever since. However it had happened, all he knew was that he wanted to be just like All Might. Someone who was so cool, so brave, and so dependable that just seeing the guy made the young child grin from ear to ear in absolute awe of his idol. He wanted to be that for someone else. He wanted to be a Hero, who saved people, and made them feel safe. He wanted to be someone that people looked up to, and were reassured by his mere existence. He wanted to be a Hero...

But he couldn't. Not without a Quirk.

Everyone around him said the same thing, every single day. There were no Quirkless Heroes. There weren't even any Quirkless Vigilantes that anyone was aware of. In this superhuman society, not being a superhuman just meant that you couldn't do anything that only superhumans could.